Denial

by Jessica Stern

  The struggle in the Kindertotenlieder is with natural evil—the evil caused by chance or by an act of God, such as bad weather or disease; whereas my struggle is with moral evil—the evil caused by men, acting with malevolent intent. But I begin to wonder—can we really distinguish these two forms of evil so cleanly—the moral evil of malicious intent with the natural evil of a storm or disease? Was Brian Beat partly the victim of a storm or a disease?

  I did not seek to hear this music—but the musical depiction of denial, followed by the struggle to sustain hope despite the recognition that evil exists, helped me begin to read.

  Brian Beat was convicted of three of the forty-four rapes that the police now believe he was guilty of, and was sent to prison for eighteen years.

  I read the statements of a girl who identified Beat as her rapist. (I am not allowed to quote from the redacted statement.) It is June 1972. There were five girls in the house, four of them in a second-floor bedroom. Suddenly a man appeared in the bedroom. The girls had not heard his footsteps on the stairs. They described him as five-ten, about 155 pounds, very slender.

  He came into the room holding a gun in his left hand. He told them to be quiet, and insisted that they not look at him. He reached up and pulled the light cord to shut the light off. Then he put a mask on. He pointed to one of the girls and commanded that she follow him. He warned the other girls that if they spoke or did anything, he would kill the girl he was pulling into the next room, gun drawn. He commanded her to take off her pants and to lie down. Then he spread some jelly on her vagina. He told her he was putting the gun near the pillow. After he raped her, he got up and apologized. He told her his gun was really a cap pistol. She described him as gentle, and said she felt sorry for him, even though she had been afraid he would kill her.

  These were early days in the rapist’s career, two years before he found my sister and me. He hadn’t perfected his technique. He did not forbid his victim to speak. He applied that lubricant to his victim’s vagina, a thought that nauseates me. But there are similarities. The small pistol with the white handle. His informing the victim after the rape that the gun was just a cap gun. His apologizing. The way he evoked sympathy: I felt sorry for him, too.

  The music periodically penetrates my terror with sound. Eventually the father accepts that his children are dead. There is evil in this world, but there is still a God. This father has found a way to recover his faith. Will I, too, recover my faith, even after reading the words of these violated children? The song cycle ends in D major, in a mood of acceptance and transcendence. Will I, like Rückert and Mahler, experience moments of transcendence? Maybe, but not yet.

  Now I have brought the files home, back to where I live. I race through them, as if trying to avoid being contaminated. Something has been unblocked. A geyser of fear. As I sit down to read the rest of the files, I am overcome with an embarrassing feeling of terror.

  I need to buy some things in preparation for a trip. Sunblock and insect repellent. But I’m afraid to go out on the street. I step out the front door. There is a hum of excitement. Why are these people so unafraid? I feel the warm air on my naked arms. I walk into Harvard Square. It is summer, and the streets are filled with happy people. They are celebrating something. They are celebrating the warmth of the night. I do not like this happy night buzz; it terrifies me. I have the distinct impression that certain people—predators—can read the vulnerability on my face. If I were a young woman, I would be in danger now. Predators would smell my fear.

  I return to my apartment. I am not going to fall apart. It is warm, I know that, but I put on more clothing to cover all my flesh. I sit down again to read.

  Once Beat was admitted to Bridgewater State, he was evaluated to determine whether he was a sexually dangerous person. I find a letter with the results of this evaluation.

  Dear Sir:

  At your request, I examined Brian X. Beat, N-21668, at the Mass Correctional Inst at Norfolk, on April 12, 1974. The purpose of the examination was for psychiatric evaluation to see if he may be a sexually dangerous person under Section 6, Chapter 123-A, G.L.

  The inmate was informed of the nature and purpose of the examination and was also informed that the examination was not privileged. The inmate is a 27-year-old single man, sentenced on October 10th, 1973, by the Barnstable Superior Court, to 12–20 years for armed assault and 12–20 years concurrent for Rape.

  The police version of the present offense as given in the record states that four women were sitting in a 2-bedroom apartment at 1:30 AM on June 20, 1972. A man appeared wielding a small pistol. He immediately put out the light and proceeded to put on a mask after asking questions to four of the girls in the one bedroom. He pointed a gun at [blacked out], told her to go upstairs with him, told the others if they called for help someone would get hurt. He then had sex relations with [blacked out] under threat of harm. She stated that he was very gentle and hurt her in no way. They then returned downstairs and he left. He was then identified by the witnesses as the person who had committed the B & E and the rape.

  There is no evidence of mental disease. He was found guilty of this one offense, which he is now serving, but the circumstances do not point to marked aggressive behavior. It is therefore my opinion that he is not a sexually dangerous person. He does have other charges pending on sex offenses and if he should be found guilty on these charges, he should be re-evaluated taking the nature of those offenses into account.

  Sincerely yours,

  Carl Henks, M.D.

  I read this letter, and I have to get up. I wash the dishes. I had soaked some dried lima beans overnight, and their skins have become loose and wrinkled, like tiny wrinkled foreskins. It seems to me these skins need to be removed. I gently peel the skin from every bean—a job I would normally find painstaking and annoying. I am satisfied by the clean white interiors; smooth, vulnerable, harmless.

  It occurs to me that I would like to take a baseball bat to this man, this so-called psychiatrist, Dr. Henks.

  “He then had sex relations with [blacked out] under threat of harm. She stated that he was very gentle and hurt her in no way.”

  “Sex relations,” he writes! As if it were an unremarkable occurrence that a masked man with a gun would have “sex relations” with a girl.

  Can a trained psychiatrist really assume that a rapist with a gun in his hand could have “sex relations” with a girl under threat of harm and still “hurt her in no way”? How can he repeat the petrified girl’s use of the word gentle? What does the doctor mean when he says the rapist “hurt” her in no way? Does he conclude that, because Beat did not tear his victim’s eyes out, did not bloody her limbs or break her bones, that he did not hurt her? As I write these words I imagine this doctor’s penis wilting and shrinking in terror, as small as a bean, and there is some satisfaction in this cruel thought. But wilting is not enough: I want to bloody him. In my mind’s eye I swing a bat right at this doctor’s learned head, smashing his skull, the skull that contained his bad, addled brain, a brain capable of judging a convicted rapist as a not sexually dangerous person. I also take the bat to the part of him that had sex relations. I am a good girl, of course, so the doctor would not expect me to harm him.

  But now that I’ve written these words, I retreat in horror at my own violence. I like to think of myself as civilized. I am seeking transcendence, not violence.

  But there is a perpetrator inside me. I feel a kind of adrenaline at the thought of harming this man. Even as I’m ashamed of this ugly side of myself, I remain angry enough with this so-called doctor that I will leave these words here on this page. I will display my shameful thoughts to ward off future rapists and their protectors, to make clear how women may ultimately see them, to make these men cross their legs with a premonition of fear.

  I read the letter again, finding myself a bit confused. On the one hand, the doctor appears to believe that a rape occurred. “He was found guilty of this one offense, which he is now serving.” T
he doctor does not appear to question the guilty verdict. He just doesn’t find rape at gunpoint to be an example of “marked aggressive behavior.” And he finds it possible to describe a convicted rapist—whose guilt he appears not to question—as “not a sexually dangerous person.” What is the matter with this guy? Now I wonder, would he expose his daughter to this “gentle” gun-wielding rapist? If so, would he ensure that his daughter was armed? What about his wife? Now my thoughts run embarrassingly back in the direction of violence. I would like to shoot the two of them, both the learned doctor and the “gentle” rapist displaying “no evidence of mental disease.” But the rapist is now dead, and the good doctor is probably dead, too.

  What sort of person fantasizes about shooting doctors, or lopping off their private parts?

  He is conducting this interview with inmate Beat under strange circumstances. He wants the inmate to talk, but he must report what the inmate says; and the law requires that he inform the inmate of the risks to himself. This is exactly what I have done, countless times, with terrorists. I want them to talk to me about their violent crimes, but I write about them; and ethics requires that I inform them of the risks to themselves.

  I return to my lima beans. I pull a barely used cookbook off the shelf, an old Fanny Farmer. I find a recipe for baked lima beans. I boil the beans and drain them. I parboil a head of garlic to make it easy to remove the skin; my taste is a bit more robust than Ms. Farmer’s. I put the skinless beans and the skinless garlic in a pan in a hot oven and leave them there to roast while I type up my thoughts. I think of removing the skin from my rapist’s penis, to reveal a trembling sea slug; a man petrified of me, petrified of what I might do next. Perhaps this garlic will cure me.

  I have just read this passage out loud to my sister. My sister knows that I’m doing this work, of course. But I don’t send her too much of it to read, as I’m afraid to retraumatize her. But this rage, that seems okay to share.

  “Your imagination is too vivid,” she tells me. She fears my readers will conclude that I am mad, harboring such violent fantasies. Here is my answer. Any person who has experienced acts of extreme violence will have such fantasies, though they might forget them. I took sexual violence into my body, and it became a part of me. It is better to know one’s shadow side than to pretend it doesn’t exist. Fantasizing is very different from acting.

  Unbelievably, a second doctor concurred with these findings. Although Brian Beat was convicted of rape, this doctor altered the crime to “attempted rape,” confirming that Brian Beat was not a “sexually dangerous person.”

  chapter eight

  The End of Denial

  John Henry was living with Brian Beat on the Cape on the day that the police arrested him for rape. At the time, John told the police that Brian Beat was innocent. Now he isn’t so sure.

  John is the last member of Brian Beat’s circle of three closest friends. Abby, Brian Beat’s high school girlfriend, told me about John, but she thought he was dead. I don’t know why she thought that.

  The police told me they thought John was alive. He had been a witness to a murder several years ago, in Worcester. But they didn’t know where he was living. Jack, my research assistant, was the one who managed to find him. It turns out that John often lives in the woods in a tent, but he was staying at his sister’s house at the time we found him. We started sending John letters, both by mail and by fax, but it took him some time to respond. It seems that he wanted to research me first. When we find him, he will tell me that he took my books on terrorism out of the library, and is now reading the second one.

  Chet drives me, as usual; and as usual, by the time we arrive, I am so sleepy I can barely focus. I am tired of this sleepiness, tired of imposing on Chet in this way. He is tired of it, too, he confesses.

  John lives in a one-room house at the end of a dead-end road on the edge of the lake. A summer retreat. Out the window I notice that there is very little here now that summer is past. An emptiness. Today it is bleak, with the cold white light of the late fall reflecting off the lake, and a bitter wind.

  We pull up next to a pickup in John’s driveway. He hears us arrive. Not a lot of visitors at this time of year. We see him come out to the front of the house to greet us, a thin man with weathered skin, in a heavy jacket. He is followed by a half-blind dog, so arthritic she can barely walk. The dog barks hoarsely. She means to protect her master, but she can barely summon the energy. I find myself slightly alarmed by the dog’s unfriendly bark, while simultaneously distressed by her weakened state. “Don’t worry,” he says. “She’ll settle down. After she gets used to you.”

  He offers me a rough, red hand. I am surprised. For some reason I expect him to feel that I might contaminate him. He is not like Abby or Simon. He seems self-contained, even refined. A refined recluse. We are here on a Sunday because John works as a landscape contractor the rest of the week. He urges me to sit next to the wood-burning stove. He’s concerned that I might be cold. He offers Chet a chair nearby. The dog whimpers as she settles herself at John’s feet. Life is pain, I think to myself.

  I ask John how he first met Brian Beat.

  “We went to school together at St. Louis. Starting in 1955. I was in the third grade.”

  He speaks slowly, carefully, trying to get this right.

  “I first met him on the playground at St. Louis. I was eight years old. Maybe nine. He was bigger than everyone else. He was choosing people for his team. I remember that he was smiling. He had a nice smile. You want to be on my side, he said. But then he suddenly punched me so hard I lost my breath…. He was still smiling. I don’t think he meant to hurt me. I was stronger than he was, so it was strange that he did this.

  “My sister Cathy knows a lot more about his family. My sister lived with Brian’s birth mother from the time she was eleven. His birth mother was my sister’s foster mother. You should talk to Cathy,” he offers.

  I ignore this reference to Cathy. I worry that he will want us to leave before I learn what I need to know. “But you became friends,” I ask, “despite his having punched you like that?” I can see that John is a loner. “I wouldn’t say I was friends with him back then,” he says. “I don’t know why he punched me. It is still a mystery to me. Most of the time he was nice. Ninety-nine percent of the people who knew him would probably say he was nice. But I sometimes saw a side of him that wasn’t nice at all.

  “I was with his pack briefly and then decided I didn’t like what was going on. There was an apple tree near our school. He would try to get us to throw apples at the school and at other kids. He’d be smiling all the time, even when he was doing something like that. I got tired of it. Brian was always doing things that would make you mad.

  “I spent more time with Brian later. I became homeless when I was sixteen years old. That’s when we started hanging around together as a group—Simon Brown, Brian Beat, and me. That’s when we started getting more into drugs.”

  A memory from my own teenage years intrudes into his story. I was sixteen, the year after I was raped. I was gathering my books for school. I was planning to ride my bike. I was late, half rushing and half dawdling, the way kids do. Rushing, but also curious about what the house would feel like empty of kids. No one knew I was home. I could hear my stepmother in the kitchen. I heard the crash of pots being put away with an efficient hand. An angry hand. She was telling my father that she was fed up with me. She had had it up to here. I was fed up with me, too. Too many mothers. I knew I was difficult, but I couldn’t seem to help it. I ran away. I spent the night in a graveyard in Concord center. I’m not sure why I wanted to sleep among the dead. This wasn’t the only time I ran away, but it was the only time I slept in a graveyard. Those grave markers built into a hill. I can still feel the old gray stone, worn thin by the wind. The smell was bracingly cold: the scent of cold, gray facts. The fact was, she did not like me. The fact was, I was difficult. The fact is, you are always alone when you die. But there was that other scent, to
o—the scent of grass that tufted behind those thin gray grave markers, some of them from before the Revolutionary War. Somehow, the knowledge that people have been dying and living for hundreds of years was a comfort.

  Now, the sound of John’s voice brings me back into the room. “My stepfather was an alcoholic, and he would come after us kids when he got mad. My mom and my real dad split up when I was five. Then my mom married my stepdad. He was going to shoot my mom and my two sisters and me…. My parents were having money problems and fighting and my stepfather had us all sitting on the couch and said he was going to kill us and he had his shotgun. He was holding the gun. Running around screaming at my sisters and me with his gun in his hands. He said he was going to kill us, but I wasn’t going to let him. I was strong. Stronger than him. I grabbed that shotgun out of his hand. I went after him with a baseball bat. I threw the gun into the middle of the millpond. When the police came, they found the gun there, in the pond.

  “That’s when he kicked me out. He kicked all of us out of the house, including my mom.” I catch my breath. I try to push down whatever chemical is rising in my veins, but it is hard. Like trying to will mercury in a thermometer not to go up when the temperature is rising.

  John’s narrative comes to me as a shock, though I don’t know why it should. The children in Brian Beat’s circle were all seriously abused in some way. But I have lost my tolerance for their pain.

  He continues.

  “I’d been watching my stepfather beat my mom since I was eight years old. He would get into these heated arguments with my mom, under the influence of alcohol. If I started telling you the grisly details—”

  He pauses.