by Steve Toltz
—There are two types of prisoners. Bears that hibernated too long and landlocked children with a sea wind of their own. Jesus. What’s going on there? Your spasticity could thresh corn. You’re in for how long? When I get out I’m subletting a schoolgirl’s virginity for the summer. Don’t breathe so much. The air in prison is hallucinogenic. You do know I overpowered the inmate that had been paid to protect me and pocketed the money, so Mimi is fucking Morrell to pay me to protect myself. You know that, right? You know that when I was in Eastern Europe with Mimi, during the last fake exorcism I felt a demon pass out of her body and enter mine. I never told anyone that before.
During this strange disconnected monologue, I realized, in a sort of dawning horror, he wore his own knocked-out teeth in a necklace. I had the bizarre sensation that if I dared to turn around and look, the images his mind conjured would be projected onto the cell walls behind me. He rolled his eyes as if in reference to the drudgery of terrorizing me, then abruptly looted his own shelves and piled books in my lap. Thomas Merton. Angelus Silesius. Simone Weil. Meister Eckhart. Emanuel Swedenborg.
—Read them! An indestructible glut of revelations that I wrote in past lives, he said, making a hand motion as if to caress his aura, and it being that religiousness is always the first resort of the criminally insane (along with public masturbation and matricide), I took them in the spirit they were given and even began to feel easier in his company. As if reacting to my unexpected calm, Elliot punched me in the side of the head, lifted me from my chair, and pinioned me to the wall with his big, heavy face pressed up against mine.
—Do you know about the tribe of Benjamin in the Bible?
—No.
—With God’s blessing and with impunity they raped the virgins of the town of Shiloh.
—Oh.
—Have you been beaten with your own wheelchair yet?
—Elliot. Please.
—Are you HIV negative?
A thoughtful silence seemed the most appropriate response to that loaded question.
—You thought the worst was behind you.
His tongued flicked out and ran over his lower lip. I thought: De-escalate! De-escalate! I was frozen with fear. And here’s where language fails me. Or where I fail language. One of the men pushed his grubby trigger fingers into my mouth then hurled me onto the floor. Fists and shoes came flying at my face and body. I tell you, these substance-abusing hypermasculine narcissistic and avoidant personalities with elevated scores on both the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory and the Abuse-Perpetration Inventory were really letting me have it. One stooped down and picked me up by my armpits then threw me facedown onto the cold steel bed and—here goes nothing—raped me.
Yes, Your Honor, I am going to talk about this.
I guess they’d had the empathy likewise fucked out of them at the onset of incarceration or were disinhibited out of fear of Elliot—either way, adjust your antennae to receive my maximum horror, random citizens who have nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning, while I recount a memory engraved by meathooks:
Hard hands on my shoulders. A foot on my neck. I felt them tugging my pants off. I said, Be careful, fellas. Raping me is a slippery slope to raping me again. I didn’t really say that. I’m stalling. In truth—I groveled, flailed, begged, sobbed. I felt abnormal discomfort, as if a distant body part were being removed. Then I felt horrific pain. A running of the bulls, a goring, a harrowing series of thrusts. This is it, I thought. I am being raped. This will be forever in my bio. The single possible consoling thought, that so many had gone through it, was not consoling at all. Every second snuck up on me. My head collided with the brick wall and blood dripped into my eyes and still, I thought, a billion people are worse off than me right now. Then I thought: Turning dead is not the same as dying and the darkest darkness is also blinding and the saddest truth on earth is you only get conclusive evidence of the existence of your soul as it evacuates. My focus shifted from the chalk-white wall to a quarter-window’s view of barbed wire, looming and fanged. If only this were a dramatic reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment and any moment the lead researcher was going to call it off.
Elliot put his frightless eyes near mine and gave an equine snort. I thought: If only I could pull off a classic thrust behind the collarbone to the ascending aorta or smash his ribs causing fractured bone fragments to lacerate the bladder and intestines so digestive juices and feces will pour like the Ganges into his peritoneal cavity, but I had no weapons; I was overpowered. A second rapist joined in. I wanted to vaporize or disintegrate, like in my old fantasy, and liquefy in my sleep or be a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye cruising through space and time before disappearing in a violent white flash. I was a well filled with blood. I was all chasm. I was broken in two, in four, in eight. I was torn asunder. I was wolfed down. I was dividing into an embryo and being born again. Again! This time into who? Who knows? This was a psychiatric emergency. I sank and didn’t resurface. Good-bye, self, we’ll meet back and reintegrate later. An inmate, I noticed, was filming this on a camera phone. So that’s out there somewhere. A stream of my blood soaked the mattress where my head lay. I thought of Natasha Hunt. Of Jin. Of the Red Army sweeping into Germany in ’45. I thought: Violated is the absolutely right synonym for rape. And: If I could get my hands on those husbands and fathers in certain cultures (Is-cough-lamic) who stone the raped for promiscuity. Or maybe I thought these things after. At the time I was swept away in the countervailing horrors and geysers of rage as, I imagined, blood-borne pathogens moved through my mucus membranes. Let’s face it. From year dot to right this minute the mindblowing rate of forced intercourse is the biggest thorn in the side of every single floated theory of basic human goodness.
—Shut your mouth, bitch.
—Consider this a warning.
A warning? Jesus.
It was over. Elliot declared with a smile that reporting the attacks would result in castration involving bolt cutters, then he winched me up and put a glass shiv to my eyeball and—I’m just giving you the facts, these are the facts—made me perform oral sex on both rapists, at the end of which one of them urinated into my mouth.
Earthlings. Blech.
It would be fine with me, Your Honor, if the ladies and gentlemen of the jury would like a moment to call their loved ones.
In that case, I will continue.
Some weeks, or perhaps months later, I woke with my stomach horribly distended and stabbing abdominal pains. I was drenched in sweat with a pounding headache, my face burning and a tingling on my tongue.
—As my daddy always says, looks like your shit just became manure, son, said Patrick.
Guards came in pairs like feuding siblings.
—What’s wrong with you?
—I’m fine. Please just nip down to the apothecary and fetch me some milk of the poppy.
The guards ferried me out to the nearest hospital, where I was diagnosed as having had a transient ischemic attack—a mini-stroke—precipitated by, the doctor said in an annoyed voice, as if I were the only one who’d turned up to his seminar, a high-blood-pressure spike symptomatic of autonomic dysreflexia that was in turn brought on by fecal impactions.
And that’s not all! The distension of the abdominal area was unrelated to the stroke, and so they forced me to have barium studies of the upper gastrointestinal tract which revealed a relatively rare spinal complication called superior mesenteric artery syndrome, a compression of the duodenum. This they treated immediately with nasogastric intubation, and when that failed, I was rushed into surgery for a fucking duodenojejunostomy, performed laparoscopically. You know the drill. Unfortunately recovery time was quick, so I was to be back in prison in four days, except that results from my MRI showed a small neurofibroma tumor near the spine.
—What’s amazing, said the doctor with naked excitement, is that had you not had your car accident, this tumor might have remained undetected and grown to a size that would have compressed your spinal cor
d.
—Amazing, I said.
I was wheeled through metal doors with yellow radiation-warning signs, the kind fastened to the top and sides of nuclear-warhead carrying cases in espionage thrillers, into a cavernous room where I was laid sideways on a table and my head molded to a blue semi-inflatable pillow where I had a constant view of the worried-looking cartoon fetus with the uneducated or oblivious mother in an IF YOU’RE PREGNANT TELL THE RADIOLOGIST sign, who I heavily identified with (the fetus, not the mother). There was a lot of fiddling, lowering and raising of the platform, signifying ample room for human error; a rotating computer screen’s red eye that looked to have achieved intelligence but was keeping mum about it made a sluggish orbit around my body while emitting a low-resolution horror-movie hum. It was called a Gamma Knife. The aim was to fuck up my DNA to make the cancer cells unable to divide while avoiding collateral damage of healthy tissue. Basically, it was six million concentrated volts as invisible as God himself.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, during the months that followed I was transferred from prison to hospital and hospital to prison on a seemingly continuous loop. From the suffocation of solitary confinement to the suffocation of the MRI machine. Inedible prison food to inedible hospital food. Fear of the shiv to fear of the scalpel. I was in prison to be wrecked, in hospital to be salvaged. I often found myself in a hospital elevator with another prisoner who was handcuffed and couldn’t cover his mouth when he coughed, or in waiting areas with poor suckers who sat with the placidity of cows or tottered and staggered along the corridors clutching those big white CT-scan envelopes, or in radiotherapy which carried the fear of impending nausea (emetophobia) that was followed by actual nausea from the radiation (no doubt exacerbated by the nurse/doctor treacly chitchat), after which I would then be taken back to prison for the malevolent zeal of sexual violence. No, I will never understand the allure of raping me, other than to fill personal quotas, yet at least once every couple of months, Elliot or one of his men with their nautical faces and neck tattoos lurched out of shadows to drag me into designated nooks and supervision blindspots for protracted attacks, with their all too human casual brutality and zero incidence of erectile dysfunction, impeccably choreographed with the movements of the guards. Or else coming into my cell at all hours. My whole dumb life I always hated being woken, but to be jerked from a horrific nightmare to an even more horrific reality was categorically hellish. My single consoling thought was maybe radiation was transmitted, maybe I was literally radioactive and toxic. I’d think: My superpower is that I AM POISON.
Here’s where it gets strange.
One night, the silence thickening around me, I lay on the floor of my tiny cell, regretting the past, hating the present, dreading the future, thinking that since I suffered the hell of anticipating a rapist unbuttoning his pants or a doctor tapping a syringe, and since it was invariably followed by an IV hookup or an actual rape, this meant I had pre-traumatic stress disorder, then trauma, then post-traumatic stress disorder, often simultaneously. Then I thought: If thinking is only a poor form of dreaming, and dreaming a poor form of pure being, and pure being a poor form of nonexistence, then nonexistence is a poor form of never-having-existed-at-all. Frankly, I was pissed off that to vanish and dissolve by an act of will, to liquefy in my sleep and disintegrate body and soul, to be uncreated and unborn—decreated—like Simone Weil writes about, was beyond my ability. All the time, inmates’ voices from adjoining cells filled my own:
—Who took my lucky shiv?
—She was raped and murdered? That’s mission creep.
—Guard! I shouted. Ever consider soundproofing these walls? You can do it with egg cartons!
I worked out in the exercise room at every available opportunity. Free weights. Dumbbells. Focused on my upper body. In the showers I avoided victim-precipitated homicide as best I could. At mealtimes I feigned uncorked aggression. When asked, I gave friendly psychological consultations to my fellow inmates. Listen, there’s a time to plant a seed of evil and a time to harvest! That sounds fine, just keep your revenge fantasies modest! Why not shit into your hands and throw it at the guards? Etc.
The hospital. The violence. The painful gastroesophageal reflux. It was piling in from all sides, like a peak-hour crush. In one multifariously horrific month: the manslaughter conviction for killing the boy with the brick wall added six months to my sentence, I had my last dose of radiotherapy, was forced to swallow punitive mouthfuls of brackish-tasting semen, endured the use of my anus as a purse in which to hide drugs during a cell search, and contracted a pressure sore on my coccyx. I was in and out of the visiting room in a blur. When I informed Mimi how truly psychotic and evil Elliot really was, that only triggered a spiky exchange during which in a cold, implacable voice she accused me of smearing his good character out of jealousy. Help me, I cried to Liam. Some penises are like silos! Others barely a phallus! How superior Liam felt in his uniform and how inferior he appeared. No touching! the guard shouted when I reached for Stella’s hand. OK, but can we spoon? I asked. It was hard not to touch her in her low-cut blouse—she smelled like soap from our old house. Then I was visited by Morrell, his face slack and tired. Mimi did it, he said. Did what? I asked. Morrell’s exhibition had been deliberately burnt down an hour before opening night. Classic Mimi, I thought. After losing his paintings he’d tried to return to his old job at Zetland High, but the substitute who’d replaced him had already been replaced by a full-time teacher, he whined.
Then that afternoon, or perhaps it was another, I was assaulted by a man eating a sandwich—this was a working lunch!—and I said aloud, Oh Lord, they know not what they do, but they sure as shit enjoy doing it!
—I forgive you, I said to my assailant. (My theory was any old fool could forgive after a period of contemplation and a wound-healing passage of time, but instantaneous forgiveness would Blow. Their. Minds.)
In response he came in with a tea kettle—and not to make me a cuppa. That’s why lying there burnt and blistering on the floor of my cell, patting down the actual bottom of the abyss, facedown in a pool of tears and succumbing to the kind of fit of irresistible laughter that can take one to the ER, I prayed.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is not just that whenever I pray I feel like I’m waving to someone across the street with the sun in my eyes, or feel the same way as when I can’t catch a bartender’s eye on a Friday night, but I fear that praying risks interrupting God when he’s fine-tuning a tsunami or manually conjoining twins. What makes it weirder is the fact that I’m agnostic. Of course I wasn’t born that way. In my preteen years I worshipped Apollo, but was later shamed into dropping him because everyone else was into Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed or Krishna, and Apollo was simply not contemporary enough. Imagine my disappointment to learn that Apollo was deity non grata! But still I had a hunger for God that developed into a steady appetite; I nibbled the edges of his magnificent being, I found him bitter, I spat him out. There was a part of me that missed Him, of course, that missed the God who loves each of us like a carnival barker loves his most hideous attraction, but I couldn’t find my way back, and what’s more, whenever I told someone I was an atheist they’d say, don’t you believe in anything? As if any nonsense would do. As if faith itself is the virtue, and what you believe is inconsequential. So I moved from atheism to agnosticism. As I matured, I came to the conclusion that believing in God was a mostly harmless foible, like when you know someone who is meaner than necessary to his pets—not exactly a reason to end a friendship, but a clear warning sign of hazardous character faults. Anyhow, there I was on the cold concrete floor, praying with the fervor of a man masturbating on the eve of his castration.
I said,
• • •
God grant me the serenity to de-escalate my fears before they turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, the courage to downgrade my premonitions to fears, and the wisdom to know the difference. God, I went on, other than racial persecution, hunger and slut shaming, the
re is no torment that I am unaccustomed to. Why did paralysis and rape have to be my sentimental education? I know we often forget that “human rights” is a thing we totally made up, but it still burns when your own are violated. Kudos for leveling the killing field, God, but have You too forgotten our safe word? Did You hear me when I withdrew consent? Exactly whose revenge fantasy am I living? Why has life always seemed like a pretrial hearing? Why were my rock bottoms so near the top? For a while—I’ll admit—I was secretly flattered by my absurd dilemmas, as if being bested by You meant there was something inside me worth annihilating, but do You know what paralysis does to a person’s inferiority complex?
• • •
I am asking You directly in my sick voice: Did I not honor my mother and father? All children play dead! Boys especially like to feign death to scare their mothers. Is it because I practised the black magic of withholding love? Did I not visit Leila enough in her ridiculous see-through apartment all lit up like Gatsby’s, where I’d have to endure watching her eating partially de-fatted pork fatty tissue right out of a can of potted meat? Was I wrong to laugh when her liposuction sutures caught on the zipper of her velvet trackpants? Was it bad to get annoyed when she checked out labels on the back of strangers’ shirts? Was it dishonorable to tell her that complaining about rising crime levels was a pleasure she wouldn’t have forgone in exchange for a safer community? I know she sacrificed a lot for me—but did she? Wasn’t her sacrifice really for her, so she could experience motherhood?
• • •
Why was I red-flagged? Were You annoyed I’d been God-proofed by Leila’s piety and therefore never really believed in You? Is it my fault I found Your expectation for us to buy You sight unseen unreasonable and in Your “holy” book I hated the prodigal son with a passion?
• • •
Or was it a sexual transgression? Are You that kind of God after all? Is it because when I was a teenager all I wanted was to move to a town so sleazy that when you walked down the street every man would be stepping out of a shadowed doorway, doing up his fly; because I wanted to be a sex addict, even though I might as well have been addicted to gold ingots? Is it my treatment of women? Who did I personally subjugate? The men that women are afraid of—I am too! I’d stand up to the abusers, but frankly, they’re in women’s homes and they won’t let me in. Was it because I found the battle of the sexes utterly tiresome? (They make a pregnancy pact. We make a vasectomy pact. They make virginity pledges. We order porn.) So what if I want to consummate everyone’s marriage? What man doesn’t? I was OK that nobody ever considered me forbidden fruit, yet it’s true when I smiled at a woman in a bar I often felt like Goebbels putting ampules of cyanide in his children’s mouths. I get it: women are punished for their bodies (men are punished for being a dime a dozen), but did I personally silence, or oppress? I realize being too shy for catcalling does not let me off the hook. And true, until too recently I thought teenage runaways were hot: like everyone of my gender, I’ve been deep-pornofried—but I swear eroticised violence was never my thing. And I admit it’s been over a decade since my last age-appropriate sexual fantasy. And one night in Dubai, when I was as poor as a dust-bowl farmer and schmoozing potential investors, a group of venture capitalists came into my hotel room with a young woman and said, I hope you don’t have a fear of flying; we chartered a vagina, a six-seater. And I didn’t get up and leave. I stayed, oh God, I stayed. If Kant was right and history is the narrative of men’s moral progress, then my personal history has not yet begun—granted—but let me stress: no to harassment, no to battery, yes to objectification, no to subordination (I have consensually bound but not gagged), no to drugging (but yes to hypnotising), and no to rape. Because while clinical frustration makes tyrants rageful and tantrums violent, my record is clean. Anyway, I am the amateur. You the pro. You disciplined my sister, and good.