Denial

by Jessica Stern

  Jack is particularly well suited for the job at the Plough and Stars. To begin with, he’s Irish American. He has “good court vision,” one of the bar’s owners told me. He might be joking with several customers at once, while simultaneously twinkling a lupine eye toward a regular just pulling up a chair. Jack is a graduate student during the day and a bartender by night. Jen suggested that I hire him as my research assistant. He’s smart and a good worker, she told me, and he’s involved in terrorism studies. Could I have him e-mail you? she wanted to know. I said yes.

  When I told Jen the subject of this book, she told me that she and Jack had just had a conversation about Jack’s father, who was in the marines, and had come back from Vietnam with what Jack suspected was post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His father had died at age forty-eight, when Jack was twenty.

  “Jen and I had this conversation about my father,” Jack told me later. “I don’t normally present myself as the son of a PTSD case. My father’s been dead for so long. It’s not something that I think about that much,” he said. “And anyway, it never occurred to me it would be relevant. I thought I was taking a job to help you with your work on terrorism.”

  Of course I would have to check out why Jack would think his father had PTSD just because he had been in Vietnam.

  “What makes you think your dad had PTSD?” I ask him.

  “My dad was stationed in Da Nang when he wasn’t out on patrol. Da Nang was constantly being attacked. The U.S. forces would shut down their outgoing artillery when the base came under attack, so that the attackers wouldn’t find the rocket launchers. When the constant noise of the outgoing artillery stopped, it meant you were under attack. When my father returned from Vietnam, he would sometimes bolt if he heard silence. If he woke up to silence in the middle of the night, he would scatter for his gun. The only way he could sleep is if he put the radio on static. He would tune the radio to static and crank it all the way up. If my mom tried to turn the static down, he would wake up in a panic. My mom tried to wean him off the static sound. She turned the radio down little by little.”

  Jack’s father had PTSD.

  His father would fall asleep on the couch on Saturday afternoons, Jack tells me. Sometimes he would wake up confused and in a rage. “We never knew when, but when it happened, it was really alarming,” Jack explains. “It was years before we were old enough to understand what was happening with him.

  “It’s not representative of his behavior—much of the time he was a fun, wonderful father, but you never knew when he’d come into the room and demand ridiculous things of us. He would shout at us. We were afraid of him. Really afraid. He would have random checks. We got hit hard when we had it coming. He threw me through the closet door once. After that I made sure I didn’t misbehave again,” Jack says.

  Jack was reluctant to tell me that his father beat him. But once he got going, it was hard for him to stop.

  “He was scary. All my friends were afraid of him. All my cousins. But the upside is that he trusted us. When we lived on Staten Island, we could do whatever we wanted. We were encouraged to go wander around in Manhattan. We did all this crazy stuff. He would say, you better learn how to survive in the Bronx. Take your skateboard over there! We could go over to Alphabet City [a part of the East Village in Manhattan that was dangerous in the 1980s, when Jack was growing up]. I always remember feeling more street-smart than all my friends. All the other kids had to be home by ten. We could stay out as late as we wanted to. But the next morning, we had better be ready and in shape to do whatever he wanted us to do that day. He would come in our room at five thirty in the morning, shout ‘Reveille! Reveille! Reveille! Feet on the floor!’ Sometimes he would run us. My brother and me. Sometimes he’d have us help him fix our latest broken-down car. ‘Shine the goddamn flashlight where I’m working!’ he would scream. And we had better jump to do what we were told.”

  Was Jack’s father training him to survive some kind of war? I need to know. It all sounds eerily familiar.

  “Run us? What do you mean by ‘run us’?” I ask.

  “Make us run. He would run right behind us. I was strong and sort of submissive. But my older brother was a little bit less athletic, and he didn’t want to run. He would be crying. My father would run right behind my brother. He would be behind him and kick him if he slacked off. We didn’t run very far, a three-mile loop. But my dad would try to run us fast. He was a marathoner. He ran the NYC marathon when he was forty-six. He ran a lot of 10-mile road races.”

  “Then my father had a problem at work. He got demoted. Right after that he got sick. It was clear he was suffering psychologically. He had all this fear. He got cancer. When I’d stay with him in the hospital, he would wake up in the middle of the night and start mumbling incoherently. He would be very afraid, and I wasn’t sure why. ‘I’ve told you too much,’ he’d repeat several times, and then fall back into his morphine-induced sleep. But he didn’t really tell me anything. A month later he was dead.”

  I see that Jack is reflecting.

  “But I think the bigger part of his trauma is that my father was beaten by his father. My father would talk about it sometimes, as if to say, ‘You got it easy compared with what I went through with my old man.’ My cousins told us that my grandfather beat my uncle so bad he got brain damage. And my grandfather’s father beat his kids. The family myth is that our great-grandfather beat his son to death. That’s a secret scandal, a family secret. No one was ever prosecuted. That was what you did. You discipline your kids. It’s an Irish thing. My uncles that are still alive have started talking to me about it.”

  An Irish thing? I think to myself. By now, I am surprised that it took so long before Jack came to understand the truth of why he was so driven in this work. He finally got it, he tells me. “It was about my dad. Plus, my girlfriend in college. She was gang-raped,” he tells me.

  “What do you mean, gang-raped?” I gasp. I am not sure I want to hear this. A sleepiness washes over me. I consider leaving this part of Jack’s story out. It’s too much for me and too much for the reader. But it’s an important part of Jack’s life so I’ve left it here.

  I notice a flutter of pain on Jack’s right cheek. But he continues his story and I don’t stop him.

  “We were in college. She was at a party. She drank too much. She was really drunk. Some boys took her into a room and took turns with her. After that we had a really hard time. I was only eighteen. I hadn’t had a lot of sexual experience. After that I was scared for her to go to parties. Scared for her to drink. Scared to tell her not to drink because I didn’t want to be paternalistic. And so on. Later she told me she’d been abused as a child. Her stepfather used to walk around at night naked with a gun in his hand.”

  “Where was her mother?” I want to know.

  “She says her mother didn’t know. Her mother was in denial,” he says. I see from the look on his face that Jack is suddenly aware of what he’s been telling me.

  “I didn’t want to tell you any of this,” he adds, apologetically. “Sometimes the job became traumatizing for me, but I was afraid to tell you.” He sighs.

  I feel my shoulders tensing. I was afraid of this. I want to know, but also don’t want to know.

  “What do you mean? Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

  “I didn’t want to express any vulnerability to you. If I told you the work was traumatizing, I knew you wouldn’t let me do it. You might push me away. I felt I had to do the work without flinching. I figured I just had to tough it out. Interesting jobs are going to be tough,” he concludes.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “You should have told me.”

  Jack has a girlfriend from Turkey that he’s been living with for five years. He is planning to marry her.

  “I didn’t want to tell my girlfriend about what I’ve been doing for you,” he says. “It seemed to me it was unprofessional to talk about it. And I didn’t want to bring it home. She comes from a world where rape is still t
he victim’s fault. It would annoy me if she blamed you. When I finally told her about this project, she reacted strongly. She started crying. It made me worry that she would tell me that she was raped, too. I didn’t want to hear that. This is awful, but I didn’t want to know. It would just wear me out. I was fully prepared to let her act as though she had gotten over it. Women who say they got raped can get killed in Turkey. Honor killing. Or forced into marriage to their rapist. So no one talks about sexual violence there. She had never heard about rape or sexual violence, except in an abstract way.”

  A grandiose thought comes to me: This is why I have to write this book, to speak out for those who cannot speak. I push the thought away.

  “So I had these experiences that made me understand what you had been through. And also, I knew how to interpret the way you might be acting.”

  I’m stunned.

  “What do you mean, the way I might be acting?” I ask. This is not where I expected this conversation to go.

  “I understood when you were in the zone. I had seen it happen to my father a lot.”

  “‘In the zone?’ What do you mean by ‘in the zone’?” I ask.

  “You just get different. You seem cold, officious. I’ve seen it happen lots of times,” he says.

  I feel my toes curl up in my shoes.

  “I first noticed when we went to see Stevie at Global Gas in Milbridge. I had wanted to drive you, but you went with Chet. When you called, you were all business. Normally you’re very friendly. We talk. And then it’s like a different Jessica shows up. You’re all business, like you have tunnel vision. You look different. Your brow goes down a little bit.”

  He’s smiling. A semi-smile. He’s embarrassed.

  “You were in the zone that time with Stevie,” he repeats. “You were a little impatient. You didn’t even notice that I was there, and I was feeling you didn’t notice Chet was there. So you were functional at one thing. Just one thing.”

  “Did I ever hurt your feelings when I was like that?” I ask.

  “No,” he says.

  Of course I want to hear whatever it is he has to say. But I also want to float out of the room, away from the intimacy of this embarrassing moment. I touch my clothes, making sure they are straight, making sure they are still there.

  “No,” he says again.

  “Why not?” I ask, bluntly as usual.

  “Because my dad was like that. I knew you were in the zone. I saw my dad in the zone so many times. You never knew who would come home from work. It could be the tough marine. Or was it the sweet guy who would read Robert Frost poems to you. When you have a dad like that, you learn how to read people’s moods really quickly. You read their body language.”

  Again, I straighten my clothes, hoping he won’t notice.

  He continues. “I understand what you’re doing when you interview terrorists, when you interviewed the people in this book,” he continues. “You were reading these people. You are good at reading people. You know how to sense danger quickly.”

  How does he know this?

  “I wasn’t offended when I saw you in the zone. I found it endearing,” he concludes. That word.

  Jack has told me a number of times that he finds my various incapacities—my inability to maintain control of documents connected with researching this book, my tendency to get lost when I’m agitated—“endearing.”

  “I think people perceive you as tough. You’ve had this career, working for the National Security Council, working on terrorism. The things you’ve done seem very serious. People probably think you’re an all-business type. I think the way you seem so tough has worked to your advantage. When you’re in the zone, people are impressed by you, but they’re also afraid of you. You don’t seem approachable.”

  He sees that I am puzzled.

  “Remember that guy in New York?” he says, referring to a decorated military officer who had wanted to talk to me after a speech I gave, a speech that had made me nervous, and presumably put me in the zone.

  “He was a captain in the army!” Jack reminds me. “But I think he may have been afraid of you. He had been stationed in Afghanistan for a year and a half. But he was nervous about talking to you! He came up to me because he wanted to talk to you. He knew I had accompanied you. You didn’t seem approachable.”

  He tells me that if I want to see how I come across when I’m in the zone, I should look at two different talks I gave, which were both filmed. “In the first one, you’re laughing and joking with the audience. You look relaxed. In the second one, you look stern and very serious,” he says. “That’s what you look like when you’re in the zone.”

  I have no desire to see myself in the zone. I don’t know why. I don’t look. Even after he reminds me to, a few weeks later.

  “I had been working on this project for a year and a half, but I hadn’t really thought about the connection to my own experience. But then I talked to Jen again. She was sitting at the bar. I told her, it’s strange I’m doing this job for Jessica and I had this experience myself. And she was like, you have to tell Jessica this. I told Jen, My job is strictly to get the information that Jessica needs. She told me, If you don’t tell her, I’m going to.”

  “Why was she so insistent that you tell me?” I ask.

  “She thought it was our fate to work together. She thinks that way.”

  We are both slightly embarrassed by this sort of talk, the idea that fate could play a role in our work. But Jen is an artist, so it’s okay.

  “I have a confession,” he says, smiling shyly.

  How can he feel shy with me after all we’ve been through together? He has seen a part of me that I would have taken great pains to hide, had I known what I was revealing.

  “I listened to the tape you gave me, the tape of you and your sister talking to the police after the rape. I couldn’t stop. You sound young and you sound so bold and brave. You’re laughing. You’re not cowering in the corner. It’s heartbreaking. It was traumatizing for me to listen to it. Because you’re a kid. It’s no longer easy to see you as a statistic when listening to that tape. It’s over an hour long. No one was with you. Your parents weren’t with you. What were you doing there alone, talking to the police without your parents? Describing the gun. Why was no one there with you? It felt voyeuristic, listening to the tape, but I had to listen. I felt dirty. Disgusted.”

  I don’t mind that he listened to the tape. I’m relieved. What I do mind is this zone thing. No one has ever seen that before. At least, they’ve never told me that they did.

  A few days later I, too, try to listen to that tape. I am in the car. At first all I hear is the sound of static. Jack had the tape remastered to enhance the sound, but a loud background buzz remains. Then I hear the sound of papers rustling, and the voices of two police officers. I recognize their accent and intonation—a style of speech that my sister and I used to call a Concord accent, which sounded so strange to us when we first moved away from New York. Then I hear a girl’s voice. Is that my voice? Maybe it’s my sister’s. I feel uncertain. I stop the tape.

  I need to pay attention to the road. I can’t make out that girl’s words in any case. A staticky buzz, the sound of artillery, supersedes her voice. No point listening. Plus, there is a thought, or maybe a sensation, pressing in against my head. A kind of aura. It’s not real, of course. But it feels as real as the kaleidoscope pattern that blurs your mind when a migraine aura strikes. The feeling that my head might crack open like the shell of an egg, and I would fall in. An empty white eggshell. I can almost hear the cracking sound. I do not want to hear any sounds. I drive to my destination in silence and forget about the stupid tape. Until now.

  “For me,” Jack says, and pauses.

  “You don’t need to know this.” He pauses again.

  I hear a truck’s brakes screech on Charles Street, a block away from my kitchen, where Jack and I are sitting, talking about him and about this work for the first time. I wait for him to tell me more
about how hard this project has been for him. I feel a wave of heat rising up to my cheeks.

  But actually he wants to tell me something else, something unrelated to the emotional difficulties of investigating a child rapist.

  “Here I am, this night-school student in a prestigious university. I’m hired to work on terrorism,” he begins.

  My pulse returns to normal.

  “But then a few months later you ask me to help you with this really personal thing. It’s not mundane,” he says, somewhat breathlessly, like the student that he is.

  Well, that is true, I suppose. Not mundane.

  “A lot of people live pretty mundane lives,” he says. “Most grad students are intimidated by their professors. Most of them hate their jobs. They’re afraid of their professors! But the protocol between us isn’t really well established. I don’t know how I’m supposed to relate to you because I know it’s so difficult for you. There is professional distance, but there isn’t. Maybe you maintain the distance more preciously because of trauma.”

  What distance? I wonder. I am not aware of deliberately maintaining distance, preciously or otherwise. He has seen a side of me that I would much prefer to keep hidden. But I can’t, it seems. At least not from him.

  But then I realize that the cold persona I slip into, the one he says might help me in my career, might actually frighten Jack a bit, even though he knows all about what he calls the zone, even though he knows me so well.

  “There is a kind of embedded anxiety in this job,” he continues. “I would sometimes find information that was difficult for you to hear. I was really conscious of how I put things. A lot of these characters would say sexist humiliating things. Stevie, for example. He called Abby a pig. She was a pig that Brian Beat liked to fuck, he said. I think I left that out when I told you about Abby. I didn’t know what to do—I didn’t want to be patronizing. I didn’t want to be paternalistic. But I wanted to protect you from hearing that.