Denial

by Jessica Stern

  I do not write out a series of questions, as I have often done in preparing to interview terrorists. I do not think about whether I will need to have a rifle, or perhaps a sword, or perhaps a posse. I always went unarmed to my interviews with terrorists. I always thought my very vulnerability was my best protection. But somehow, though I don’t really think about it, I have an idea that this is different.

  I do not plan that the interview will take place in a restaurant. I do not plan that it will be at Friendly’s, an obvious choice. I do not think about how I will skewer him, not with a Friendly’s butter knife, but by looking him straight in the eye.

  If I make him see that I am not just his object, but also a subject, there will be an explosion in his brain. An electric signal will cascade: he will realize that he wronged the universe, and his brain will explode. Also his penis will fall off. I will leave him there, his brain on his plate. He will remain sitting upright, but the waitresses will realize that he’s dead because the top of his head will have flopped neatly off and there will be wires sticking out. Broken phone wires, thick and tangled but cut through all the way, looking as though they’d been cut with shears rather than the power of thought. I will avoid stepping on his shriveled penis as I walk out the door. I will leave it there for the rats. I will not apologize to Friendly’s for the mess: I cannot help it that electricity comes out of your body when you really look at someone. I may be a victim, but I’m a world-class perpetrator, too.

  These not-plans, which I am describing to you now, take place in another dimension, a place I prefer not to dwell.

  Although I am curious about what Lt. Macone is finding out, I don’t drive out to the police station in Concord, the town where I was raped, the town where my parents still live, a twenty-minute drive from where my son and I live now. There is no point: I know I will get lost.

  I e-mail Lt. Macone to tell him that I saw in the file that we had informed the police that I had received an obscene phone call shortly after the rape. But I don’t remember the call, or much else that occurred during that period. Soon, however, Lt. Macone has more news.

  Jessica,

  Just now answered the phone from Natick PD. They found their file from their incidents!! It apparently has volumes of info. The detective is making me a complete copy of the file and I will head to Natick as soon as she calls back that it is done. I hope it is today. Let me know when you want to come here to begin reading what I have found. I feel confident we are getting close. I will work around your schedule.

  Paul

  He will work around my schedule. He’s gotten the message, apparently, that I am busy. It’s not as if this investigation is my whole life.

  Because I work on terrorism, I have good contacts in the FBI. After September 11, a number of agents who had worked on “ordinary” crime were recruited to work on counterterrorism cases, and a series of them have come to visit me over the years for what amounts to terrorism lessons.

  I’ve never taken a fee for this work, although I’ve devoted many hours to it. The most intense period was in January–February 2002, when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted by terrorists in Pakistan. I didn’t mean to, but I all but ceased doing my own work during this period. I became obsessed with helping to save Daniel Pearl, as absurd as that might sound. I called all my contacts in Pakistan. It seemed to me very important to be in touch with the terrorists themselves, not just with Pakistani government officials or the Oxbridge-educated elite that Americans typically talk to in Pakistan. I had done the same sort of “stupid” things Pearl had done—meeting alone with terrorists, and admitting, when asked, that I was a Jew. But I had been lucky. My last trip to Pakistan to talk to members of bin Laden’s International Islamic Front was in August 2001, and I survived, despite sharing Pearl’s naïveté, as the media described it at the time. Pearl did his work after September 11, when the attitude toward Americans had shifted dramatically.

  I identified with Pearl, of course. But there was more than that: I understand now that I was feeling, for the first time, the fear that I had not perceived when I had met with the same terrorist groups that Pearl met with. At the time of Pearl’s abduction it didn’t feel like fear, exactly. It felt like a premonition of evil.

  Nine days after he was abducted, Daniel Pearl’s captors slit his throat and beheaded him. I can almost feel that knife. A month later a film was released, showing the terrorists’ horrific crime. The film was disseminated widely to recruit others to the terrorist cause. Despite the ultimate failure of our efforts to discover the captors in time to save Pearl’s life, I received a letter of commendation from the director of the FBI for the futile help I provided during those weeks.

  Like most people who have served in government, I have acquired a number of letters like this one, commemorating my service. I put these letters, and the other mementos I received, in a box. Then the box disappeared. I think it is somewhere in the basement of the house I once shared with my ex-husband.

  But I have kept this letter from the FBI director. I never worked for the FBI, so that makes it more valuable. More like a stamp of approval from a higher power. More like a stamp telling me, “You’re okay” that this mysterious shame I feel, especially in the police station, is unwarranted, at least in the eyes of the FBI, at least for now.

  One day it came into my head to ask one of the agents I knew to talk to Lt. Macone. It took some weeks for me to broach the topic. It was as if there were two persons living in my body—one, a tough, seemingly fearless person who traveled around the world talking to terrorists and whose knowledge turned out to be of interest to people fighting crime; and the other, a shame-filled victim. I had more or less left that victim and her unattractive, girlie feelings behind. I didn’t think about her.

  Victims—I somehow “knew” this to be a fact—are ineffectual, weak, and dishonest persons who drag society, or anyway their families, or anyway their fathers, down. I understood that terror and despair were contagious emotions, and that to indulge oneself in the feeling of terror was antisocial and possibly even immoral. I found a way to slice off the side of my self that felt endangered, and endangering, by the shameful feelings I could not stop myself from experiencing.

  After the rape, according to a police officer’s notes taken down on the back of his crime report, I reported that I had a “skill” in becoming “stern and hard” as a response to terror. I don’t recall saying this to the police. But I do know that I understood, long before the rape, that to become stern and hard was a more “manly” approach to fear and despair, that it demonstrated a kind of good breeding, a kind of moral fiber. I wonder now why the officer took note of my words. Was he surprised to hear a terrorized fifteen-year-old girl speaking this way? And yet he does not seem to have asked me how I acquired this skill, or to what end.

  Becoming stern and hard is so inbred in me that a more natural, “girlie” reaction to pain or fear takes an act of will. My sister, who was petrified to be alone for many years after the rape, was deeply ashamed of her fear. She, too, had taken in the notion that feeling afraid was somehow unseemly in our family. She explained to me later how she tried to finagle visits or phone calls with friends at times when she might otherwise be alone with the silence of an empty house. But she took great pains to disguise these efforts.

  Talking to my contacts in the FBI about my rape—especially now that I was no longer able to speak about the crime as if it had happened to someone I didn’t know—would bring back to life a shameful side of myself that I had tried to deaden, that I had pronounced not me. I’m not just talking about the different roles one plays in life—parent, spouse, professional—and the way different parts of one’s character emerge in these different roles. I am talking about a part of the self that is almost wholly other, a victimized and now despised Siamese twin that survived despite my effort to extrude it.

  Finding a way to be both persons was a terrifying prospect. It took all the willpower I could summon. I
t was worse than jumping into the sea. I might be overwhelmed by sensation with a million little jellyfish gluing to my skin. I might drown, or drown others, out of fear.

  Somehow I managed to request the FBI’s help. “I was raped once, a long time ago,” I tell one of my FBI contacts. I’ll call her Mary Jane. I chose a woman to divulge my secret to. A woman who carries a concealed gun on her person. She once mentioned the gun in passing, and for some reason the image of a gun stayed in my mind. Mary Jane is a tough, no-nonsense sort of person, the sort of person you would want on your team if you were involved in a dangerous mission, not the sort who would look you in the eye and offer empty platitudes, which only make the victim feel worse.

  “The police have reopened the case,” I tell her. “It looks like the perpetrator might have been a serial rapist. I was hoping that the police could bounce some ideas off someone in your office.”

  Mary Jane arranges for Lt. Macone to speak to an agent whose expertise is in violent crime. A serial rapist like this almost invariably kills someone eventually, the agent tells Lt. Macone. Lt. Macone shares this information with me by phone.

  I decide I will feel about that later.

  I am glad that Lt. Macone is working on solving this crime, but there are long periods when I need to be in the present, doing my “real” work. My life is busy. Almost immediately after we had a child, my marriage fell apart; or perhaps more accurately, the fissures that had been there from the very beginning became more obvious. With the birth of our child, I no longer felt able to work all the time or to comply with the “rational” way my husband chose to live. I discovered that I wanted to be outrageously inefficient—to chat about silly things with the neighbors, to bake cakes (despite the proximity of excellent bakeries), to read poems (despite their irrelevance to my work). I wanted to play the piano, even though it’s far too late for me to become a professional musician.

  I have been a single mother now for nearly two years. As my son gets older, I take more and more pleasure from raising him. But I find it harder, not easier, to raise him alone; and much of my psychic energy goes toward my son. My ex-husband consoles himself with the thought that I have lost interest in men, that I am focused exclusively on raising our child. My days are consumed with teaching, writing letters of recommendation, correcting page proofs, baking muffins.

  Then I get an e-mail from Lt. Macone with the heading “almost done.” I open it instantly, but don’t find the time to answer. The subject, as usual, makes me sleepy and dull. Paul tells me he is 99 percent sure he has the crime figured out. “Please don’t feel you have to pursue the details of the investigation unless you want to,” he says.

  I wonder whether I ought to tell Paul that I want to pursue the details with him as soon as I find the time. But somehow, the message I intend to send him doesn’t get sent.

  And then I got an e-mail with the heading “Done.”

  I am caught between two magnetic forces. Curiosity, on the one hand, and a sleepy feeling on the other. Paul has collected enough information that my curiosity wins out over my fear. The fear I don’t feel. I don’t tell Sara what I’m up to, or anyway, not in detail. Telling her would make it real.

  I am not afraid. Nonetheless, I cannot drive out to the police station. I know that I will be too sleepy to focus, that I will get lost.

  But there is a way I might be able to get out there. I have a new boyfriend. He is from Concord, too, and he knows Paul Macone well. I’ve known Chet for nearly thirty-five years, from around the time I was raped, but in an entirely different context. He was a family friend, ten years older than I, not someone I would ever even think about, you know, in that way. I thought of him, I would later confess to him, as a piece of furniture in the background of our family. An innocent observer, unlikely to be able to comprehend the complex dramas unfolding before him in our living room, and unlikely ever to have any interest in me. There was so much secret pain and fear in our family at that time, which we tried, all of us, to keep hidden from ourselves and especially the outside world. Every time I discover that people outside our family recognized some of what was going on, I am surprised. I thought the adults at least were able to “pass.”

  I had seen him five years earlier, on the shuttle back from Washington, where we had both been traveling for work. He is on the board of Oxfam and had been attending a meeting. I had been teaching at CIA University.

  Seeing this person I’ve known since childhood, I am aware of how surprising my life path has been. This always happens to me when I see people I knew in childhood: I feel like a fraud. How could I have become this person that people consider to be an expert? Chet was a liberal congressman from our very liberal town. He is now doing what a liberal should do—serving on the board of a humanitarian organization—while I have been lecturing to spies.

  Our plane was delayed. It was hot on the tarmac. We took off our jackets. I took off my shoes. This seemed permissible; Chet is a family friend. He asked about my family. I was surprised to discover that he saw through our pretenses. He’d noticed more than you would expect of an armchair, even one that had been in the family for many years.

  We were sitting in the first row of coach. The wall separating coach from first class was covered with a new-looking rug. I wanted to sink my bare feet into the rug, but I hesitated. I was afraid to put my feet out there for us both to see, but I wanted to. I thought to myself that my feet must be sweaty. It would be wrong to put my sweaty feet on that rug. Wrong. Next I worried that the rug was dirty from other passengers’ sweat, that the dirt would contaminate my feet. Dirty.

  But I wanted very, very much to sink my feet into that rug. What you might call desire, in this case, wins out over what seems like shame and could be fear, but only in terms of my actions, the movement of my feet. I cannot resist checking in on shame and fear, the way your tongue compulsively flicks across your teeth when you’ve just been to the dentist. Are these really my teeth? Yes, they are. Am I still ashamed and worried? Yes, I am.

  I can still call back the feeling of luxurious repose when I allowed myself to sink back in my seat, my feet at last where I want them to be, at rest.

  Chet drove me home when the plane landed. But we were both married, and anyway, family friends. Neither of us expected our marriages to end. In my case, the more painful I found it to be married to my economist husband, the more determined I was to hold the marriage together. My husband was smart and funny and reliable, and our lives worked. It was true that he didn’t seem to like me very much, and he certainly did not approve of me, but I had an idea that his disapproval would make me better and stronger. Perhaps surprisingly, when we finally had a child, I decided to leave that easy life in the belief that my child and I would be happier alone. Two years later, a mutual friend will introduce me to Chet, not realizing that we already knew each other from long ago.

  Chet and I have a lot of fun together. He persuades me to do things I haven’t done in years. We take Evan on trips for the weekend, just for fun. We take long walks. We go cross-country skiing. We attend concerts together. We are utterly, deliciously, irrationally inefficient.

  I put up all kinds of roadblocks. I tell him about all my demons. From the very beginning, I let my craziness show, thinking that maybe it will drive him away. It doesn’t. He’s heard about me from all sides in any case, having known my family for years, from the time he was in high school. Eventually, despite my uncertainties, we become intimate friends.

  It was Chet’s idea to ask the Concord police for the entire file related to my rape, and he is encouraging me with this project. He has an idea that I won’t be able to be intimate with a man unless I confront these demons, all the demons related to my relationships with men.

  Still, can I really tell him that I cannot drive out to the police station, even though he knows that I’ve driven out to Concord hundreds of times? Remarkably, he takes my driving problem in stride. He does not balk. He says he will drive me, even though he has to leave wor
k in the middle of the day.

  He comes to my small apartment, and we have lunch.

  No, I am not afraid to learn about my rapist, I tell Chet. Of course not. It’s just that I get lost. I tell Chet that I need a chauffeur, not a therapist.

  I take some care in preparing lunch for the two of us. I serve a salad of frisée, baby beets, and hazelnuts, and smoked salmon dressed with chervil.

  He breaks off a piece of fatty fish with his fingers. I watch as he puts the fish in his mouth. He breaks off another piece, seemingly unaware that I am observing him. His hand looks meaty and raw to me now, with penislike fingers.

  He stands up and walks toward the sink. I watch him touch the faucet with the same meaty hand. He fills the kettle. Then he takes the same hand, unwashed, and turns the burner on for tea. I see, in my mind’s eye, the smear of fish oil he has left behind on the faucet. I see, in my mind’s eye, a slick track of penis prints, glistening on the stove. I imagine the smell. The smell of fish oil, so much like the smell of semen.

  “Wash your filthy hands,” I tell my new boyfriend.

  It is obvious to me now that we cannot continue this relationship. I tell him that, too.

  I am not obsessively clean, as anyone who knows me would readily confirm. But this person is too crude, too disrespectful; too unaware of the tacky slick of semen he has left behind.

  “You are not in control of yourself. You grab things, and you emit too much,” I say. Why did I ever imagine I could be in relationship with this man? With any man? With any person?

  I am vaguely aware I might be saying things that would seem odd to an outsider, things that I might later regret. But in this moment, it doesn’t matter. This is an emergency. All that matters now is getting this penis-fingered person out of my apartment and out of my life.

  He mumbles something about my arrogance, about the possibility that I am using him.