Any Man

by Amber Tamblyn

  Do you know how many backlogged rape kits are just sitting on police-station shelves in America, waiting to be tested? Rape kits filled with evidence? Ten thousand kits in Cleveland. Four thousand in Ohio. Four thousand in Illinois. Eleven thousand in Detroit alone. Twenty thousand in the state of Texas. Over seventy thousand in total, that we know of. Only six states have laws requiring agencies to send in these kits to crime labs to be tested. Six. States. So why should victims come forward, when they see statistics like this? When they see they aren’t a priority? When they see that finding and prosecuting a sexual predator is not on any law-enforcement officer’s to-do list?

  This is why I speak, ladies and gentlemen. Why I fight. Why the work we do here matters.

  We have something very special for you today. It fills me with a lot of hope and joy and, of course, anxiety. We have a very special guest with us on the program today: Jamar Sands. His name might sound familiar to you. Jamar, if you recall, was also a victim of Maude almost a decade ago. He and I have become acquaintances over the years, but this will be our first time speaking together publicly. It’s important for both of us to keep this story alive. As long as that woman is out there, we will not give up.

  So stick around, we’ll be right back after this break.

  Two

  NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT THE BEGINNING. THEY want to hear about the middle or the end. And while I can’t tell you what the end looks like just yet, I can tell you about the middle.

  My sister, Jen, was pounding on the window, screaming my name. Jamar, open the fucking door, she said. I couldn’t open the door because I couldn’t stand up. One of the many bummers of living in a smaller town is that everyone knows everyone, so of course the chick I bought razors from at the grocery store was Courtney, who had been roommates with Jen at the College of Saint Rose. Open the fucking door now or I’ll break the Goddamn glass, she yelled.

  Let me back up for a second. To the beginning of the middle. I feel like I can’t justify the end of the middle, and certainly not the beginning of the end, unless I tell you about the beginning of the middle first.

  It had been exactly two weeks since the police had come and gone. The FBI dude had come and gone. My family had come, and I’d wished they’d gone. I was sitting alone in my kitchen with a peeled orange on my plate. Eat, dude. Eat. But this orange, this orange looked different than other oranges. Than other foods entirely. All the white strands hung off it, like the pubic hairs of an albino or something. An albino woman. Woman. The word tasted abandoned. And the texture of that orange, when I touched it, was so . . . human and rough. It’s what I imagined we feel like, right beneath our skin. Rough. Not soft at all. Everything right beneath the skin has such a soft name, you know? Gland. Fat. Nerve. Soft tissues. But I’ll bet the underneath isn’t all that soft. Like, not just bones but also cartilage and muscle and tendon. We’re not soft inside. I think people confuse the interior body’s sliminess for softness.

  My palms were sweating. I couldn’t really feel my feet. That fucking orange, man. Just sitting there, in front of me, exposed, skinless. I could feel its exposedness, its pulpy insides. It would be so easy to touch it. I could stick my thumbs in through its stomach and rip it wide open if I wanted to. So I did. The sound of it coming apart, of its pieces separating, like a sheet of paper ripping or a heavy exhalation, was enough to make me sick. All its scattered pieces of peel, ripped from its body on the plate. I remember all my scattered clothes ripped from my body on the floor. She moved on me, that bitch. The memory was so strong. I just passed out right there. I just passed out right there onto the floor.

  For weeks, I couldn’t eat anything with a peel. I told no one about this. People eating bananas in public made me nauseous. Pretty soon, anything at all that needed to be peeled was just sickening. Tamales, shrimp, garbanzo beans, some types of lettuce. The minute I thought about having to remove some kind of layer, some kind of skin off a food, I was done. I was in a public restroom gagging, or in my car trying to calm the hell down.

  I needed to fix this problem I was having with food, I told myself. It dawned on me that I could just stop eating those things. I completely had the right to do that, without questioning myself or losing my shit every time my mom offered me some sad-ass scalped avocado. I could just say no. “The mind is the master and the body is the servant.” That’s kettlebells 101. So I made the conscious decision to discipline my eating in the way I discipline my training. Mind over matter. Once I gave myself that permission, the nausea, the anxiety—the anger over feeling out of control—just went away. Everything was so much clearer. My protein shakes didn’t really need to have banana in them, or any fruit, for that matter. Pretty much every fruit has a peel on it of some kind. And almond milk had to go, because almonds also have a kind of skin. And of course, by this same logic, things like spinach had to go. Spinach is from a flowering plant, and that’s just—that’s a lot of different kinds of skins, when you think about it. Petals. Leaves. All of that had to go. Plus, I’d read somewhere that scientists had recently figured out how to transform spinach into human heart tissue, tissue capable of beating. I wasn’t going to eat that. No fucking way was I going to eat that. I started investigating other plants as well, other types of greens. Kale, for example. Once I started doing my research, I couldn’t believe what I found. Kale is actually part of the cabbage family, and cabbage sprouts these beautiful yellow and white flowers, and cabbage leaves protect their inflorescence like—you guessed it—like a kind of skin. So kale was out. Cabbage was definitely out. Parsley, romaine, red leaf, mustard greens, arugula, endive, chard. All of it. Anything leafed. How could anyone in their right mind eat something that once had leaves, I thought. Leaves are part of a vascular system that nourishes a plant or flower, either by sheltering its insides or by absorbing sunlight and oxygen and stuff. Skin. Everywhere I looked, I saw skin.

  What edible substance didn’t have a skin, I wondered. It goes without saying that all meats and fish were completely out. Nuts were out. Corn had husks. Peas had pods. Cheese had rinds. Oysters had shells. Skimmed milk sounds like skinned.

  The next few months were filled with a fresh happiness and sense of purpose, the kind I’d never felt before. By cleaning out my body, I was cleaning out the trauma I’d experienced. All thoughts of what happened to me had been replaced with a newfound understanding of the world and my place in it. I couldn’t believe the shit I’d been putting into my body. The cruelty. Everyone was so happy with how quickly I had bounced back, even though they didn’t really know why or how. They never asked. But if they had, I would’ve said: “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” I returned to kettlebell training and maintained my healthy way of eating. I made some exceptions for things like condiments. Mustard was actually a fantastic food for me to eat. Yes, a mustard plant has leaves and flowers, but the seed itself doesn’t need to be peeled, you see? So that was totally fine. Now ketchup, on the other hand—ketchup comes from tomatoes, and tomatoes most definitely have a skin on them. So I allowed myself some small exceptions. For lunch I could have as many tablespoons of mustard as I wanted, but I could only have one teaspoon of ketchup per day. And cottage cheese was all right to eat, believe it or not, though I kept my portions very small just in case. Just in case some newfound information about rennet or curds was discovered. Cactus was a good one, too. Cactus have flowers, but no leaves. So you see, I made some exceptions here and there. I wasn’t totally rigid. And bread was safe, although I didn’t want to eat too much of it. A typical lunch would look like this: half a cup of cottage cheese, half a slice of bread, three tablespoons of mustard, and one teaspoon of ketchup, which I put directly into my mouth only after the SaS foods had been swallowed, so as not to contaminate them with the ketchup. SaS foods are what I called Skinless and Safe foods. Just a quick way for me to identify them.

  I began to see a major change in my body. In a good way, I thought. I was losing all my body fat and becoming toned
. I used to be ripped, but I didn’t want to be ripped anymore. I wanted to be toned. I wanted to be lean and strong.

  My sister grew extremely suspicious. She would leave work early and come surprise me at my apartment with my favorite takeout. What used to be my favorite takeout. But my sister knows I’ve always hated surprises. I would tell her I already ate. I’m worried about you, she’d say. She handed me a pamphlet she’d picked up. Some therapy group for guys in town. Specializing in trauma and PTSD. I thanked her and said I would check it out. I was never going to do that. No fucking way, man. And looking back, knowing my sis, she knew I wasn’t going to, either. So she kept an eye on me. Checked in daily.

  Jen was my older sister by almost six years, and she had always been super-independent. She was the cool punk-rock girl in school who all my friends drooled over. She had thick black curly hair and green eyes. Green eyes came from my mom’s side of the family, the hair from my dad’s. Because we’re mixed—Haitian on my father’s and Irish on my mother’s—Jen had this look about her that some dicks would call “exotic.” I fucking hated that, growing up. When guys called her that. Call my sister “exotic” again, motherfucker, I’ll break your mouth. Jen could hold her own, though, she didn’t need me to be some thickheaded little bro jock for her. I tried, but it was always the other way around. Jen was always the one looking out for me. Always.

  I gave in to Jen’s surprise takeout dinners after I ran out of excuses and was afraid she’d tell Mom or something. But not without self-imposed consequences. After she’d leave, I’d get an overwhelming sense of dread. A sick feeling in my entire body. It was like I had poisoned it by eating all that trash. I knew I had to get it out of me, but I hated throwing up. I really hated that. So I went into the bathroom and got a razor out. I was sweating and couldn’t see very well. I made a small cut in my stomach. Just a small one. The second I saw blood come out, I became calm. I could feel the poison coming out of me. I could almost feel it leaving me. I cried. It was the first time I’d felt relief in a long time. This became the perfect solution to my dinners with my sister. It also allowed me to start eating with friends again. To start going out again. I could eat SaS as I normally did, but if I was forced to eat a non-SaS food, like if someone ordered something for the table or whatever and I didn’t want things to be awkward, I could have a couple of bites of that non-SaS food and just release the poison from my stomach later. These weren’t deep cuts I was making in my stomach. They were just small ones. Enough to let the contamination out but not to, like, send me to the hospital or anything. My favorite Dwayne Johnson quote about training is, “It’s you versus you.” Meaning, you’re the only thing standing in your own way. You’re the only thing you’re up against. So I got even stricter with my SaS diet when I wasn’t out with friends or family—when I didn’t have to put on a show for them. I cut out cottage cheese and a few other SaS items I used to be allowed to eat. I drank tons of water. More than I’d ever drank before. Water was very safe.

  I felt that if I didn’t keep the poison out of me, she could appear. If I stopped caring about my health and what I put into my body, she could appear. If I ate too much, she could appear. If I stopped working out, she could appear. If I had less than the required amount of water per day, she could appear. She could appear. She could appear. She would appear.

  Then one day, she appeared.

  I hadn’t eaten in two days. Only water and mustard. I was doing great, I thought. Me versus me, and I was winning. In the mornings I would get up and do one hundred crunches, no matter how much a fresh, open cut on my stomach hurt. In the mirror, the little scars swam across my ribs, and my ribs swam across whatever was left underneath, and I felt safe. I was disappearing here in this world, which in some way meant I was reappearing somewhere else. I was whole somewhere else. I was free somewhere else. That thought was comforting. The parallel me had never been raped. Had never been touched. Had never been so obscenely violated. The parallel me had no restrictions. Still enjoyed sunlight. The parallel me had a future that couldn’t be darkened by his past.

  I went to my computer to do some work. I opened my old OkCupid account, and looked at the list of screen names and saw hers there, offline. This is something I did once in a while—checked in to see if she was, you know, around. I never told anyone, though. I’d go online and just . . . stare. Stare at that screen name. Maude. Maude. It was always offline, but there she was, regardless. There she was, so close, as if on the other side of a door, waiting for me.

  She never knocked that night we met. She had told me in our chat that she would be there at midnight on the dot, and to just open the door at exactly 12 a.m. Leave all your lights off, she said. Let’s play.

  The apartment-building light was bright behind her when I opened the door.

  There was a silhouette of a mask. A wolf mask.

  She was carrying a plastic bag. I thought I could see her nails.

  They were either nails or bones.

  She came in faster than a wind and shut the door behind her.

  We were in the darkness from the moment she entered.

  She put her finger against my mouth. No talking.

  We didn’t speak. I had been told not to speak.

  We ate in silence.

  She opened a bottle of liquor in silence.

  She placed my hand on the stereo in silence.

  We danced to classic rock in silence.

  She took me to the bathroom.

  She drew a bath.

  She washed me.

  She put my hand on her thigh.

  She bit me.

  In the dark.

  The silence.

  Her mouth was the softest I’d ever felt. But her face, her face felt like some kind of coarse crust. Like bridge iron. Like it had a thick coat on it. A second skin.

  Skin.

  Can we turn on the lights? I want to see you.

  You don’t want to see me, Wolf, you want to feel me.

  You want to feel me, don’t you.

  Her voice wasn’t even in the room.

  Her voice was coming from inside me.

  Her hands held my wrists down. She started to hum. The world vibrated. Her hands were strong and cold and they held me against the couch with ease.

  Just let me, Wolf. Let me do it.

  No, hang on, I want the lights on. Please don’t.

  But she kept going.

  And I let her.

  I let her.

  My sister, Jen, was pounding on the window, screaming my name. Jamar, open the fucking door, she said. I couldn’t open the fucking door because I couldn’t stand up. I had opened my stomach with a razor blade from as far around my back to the front of my body as I could possibly reach and cut. I had peeled myself open. Like an orange. Not deep, but deep enough to get the poison out. To get her voice out.

  Just hours before, I had read that she raped another man. His name was Sebastian.

  There were no details, but I didn’t need the details. I knew whatever she had done, she had done it dreadfully. I imagined the worst. She stuck objects inside him and made him guess. She poured animal urine in his mouth and made him guess. She wouldn’t let him look at her. She laughed and called him a crybaby. She grunted as she came, like some dying pig. She left, as if she’d only come by to borrow some salt. As if she hadn’t just taken his life away and left him barely lived.

  I was ready to die as my sister’s fist came smashing through the glass.

  Three

  CALLER, YOU’RE ON THE AIR, THIS IS DONALD ELLIS.”

  “Hi Donald, name’s Nathan, calling from Oklahoma. Nathan without a last name, if that’s okay.”

  “Hey Nathan thanks for calling in. What’s your question?”

  “It’s not a question, really. I just want to thank you and that fellow, Jamar, you just had on the program. It gave me hope. Hearing him talk about his recovery, about how his sister found him there like that, ya know? Almost dead like that on his couch, split open?
I mean, praise be. But the part after, where she got him to the hospital in time and saved his life, and how she got him to go to that therapy place where he befriended that other guy—the guy named after a fruit?—it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing to have a happy ending like that. It’s a beautiful thing. Brought tears to my eyes. And it is a choice, you know? Living. Like that young man said. Just like dying can be a choice. And I really could relate to that thing he said about living with the anger and all that. That it’s okay to not accept what happened, to find no resolve but still live a parallel happy life. A life adjacent to the things you cannot forgive. I really liked that. That spoke to me.”

  “Indeed, Nathan, it is a choice. Indeed. Thank you for calling us today.

  “Go ahead next caller, you’re live on The Ellis Show.”

  “Nancy calling from San Francisco, California.”

  “Hi Nancy! How’s the fog treating you today?”

  “Colder than a witch’s tit, as they say, Don! Colder than a witch’s tit.”

  “Ha!”

  “Anyway, listen . . . Wow, Donald, I can’t believe I’m actually on the air with you right now! I’m a big fan and have been listening to your show for five years now, and though I’ve never called, I just had to call today to tell you how wonderful this interview was. Wow. How powerful. I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in horrible traffic when Mr. Sands talked about his wedding and Mr. O’Sullivan being his best man. I mean . . . I was sitting there in traffic and I was . . . and the sun was going down like it always does here beyond the bridge, and I just burst into tears, you know? It got me thinking, Mr. Ellis. It got me thinking really hard.”