How can you say those words? I can’t say them and I can’t say anything else. I don’t know why the world didn’t stop right then. I don’t know how the sun can still rise and the earth can still turn. I think everyone should have stopped everything because I was fifty-two and this happened to me. I think every person should have been in mourning. I think no one should work or spend money or love anyone ever again. I say my bad pheromones or karma brought the rapist to me. I blame me no matter what it takes, no matter how abstract or abstruse I need to be. I say, I didn’t. I didn’t wear a short skirt, I didn’t drink a lot even though it was alcohol and I rarely drink, I didn’t drink it with a man, I sat alone and read a book, I didn’t go somewhere I shouldn’t have been, I didn’t flirt, I didn’t. It was still daylight. They took my body from me and used it. They came inside me. My muscles were completely relaxed, there was no resistance. Once you’re put under you can’t stop the surgeon. You don’t remember the surgery. But afterward the body is cut. After this there was blood and scratches that were more like deep clawing and a huge bruise on the left breast near the aureole with white skin in the middle as if it had been sucked and chewed. I then had seventy-two hours to get a blood test and a urine test to nail down the presence of the drug but I didn’t know and seventy-two hours wasn’t enough time, I couldn’t say for sure, I couldn’t place the bartender in the bedroom at all but I know he did it but how do I know that? Now there is scarring where the scratches were. But I had decided: no more rape, no matter what the cost no more rape. I was old and tired and I was taking myself out of the rape pool. My immorality was evident: pick someone else. I can’t have this happen to me.
(3)
When I was young I had optimism in the face of everything. Boys threw a Christmas tree at me and my head bled. I liked to take long, solitary walks, so they hurt me. But I still would go wherever I wanted and do whatever I wanted. I can’t understand how she, that bright girl, became me, dull and tired and sick of life.
I wanted to go to Mississippi for civil rights work. I wanted to make abortion legal, segregation illegal, and stop the War. Those were my dreams, plus a book, that I would write a book. It glimmered in my mind. I wanted to make life better. My mother once said that I was lucky that the sixties happened because, she said, the others are just following leaders but you would have been this way even if you were alone. I didn’t sing Christmas carols in public school. I didn’t comply with the atom bomb scares. You couldn’t make me if I didn’t believe in it.
I had girlfriends I loved. Madeleine and I made love and drew with pastels. She was so beautiful and so smart. I loved Rebecca and Jackie. I never could know enough people because each one was another world, a whole vision of something, a center of a universe. I wanted to touch everything and do everything. This was my optimism. It’s in the body. It’s a form of energy that demands connection. It’s an affirmation of pure faith that this day and the next one would be miracles. It’s a refusal to be afraid of life. Girls aren’t supposed to have it—nerve or courage or adventure or curiosity or direct contact. The girl touches life, it goes through her, you can’t separate her from it, she insists on everything out of her reach, she makes the world bigger for herself, maybe it’s even greed, I’m not sure.
I could never get enough of anything I wanted. I thought moderation was a form of stupidity. I don’t think that now but I have the habit of too much of everything and I can’t change it. I want to spend all the money and read all the books and stay in all the hotels and go everywhere and eat everything and cry real hard and long and I don’t want to be touched, not by girl or boy, male or female, man or woman, friend or foe.
I get infatuated but I’m leaving that behind, infatuation won’t outlast death. I love Paul but I’m too sad. He’s more sad. I’ve hurt him too much. I want women. I have a flat-out appetite now. But I’m not touching anyone. Everyone’s cruel. Everyone lies. Fucks and lies. Touching is even harder than talking and I’m buried alive. Silence is on top of me, covering me, keeping me under. Rape is on my skin and inside me.
I can’t do this. I can’t be this person who was raped. I can’t.
(4)
And then there is that I know too much. It makes it harder. I know a lot about rape. I study it. I read about it. I think about it. I listen to rape victims. I engage with prosecutors and lawyers and legislators. I write about it. I was raped. I remember being raped. I can’t count how many times or think now about in which circumstances. I say that we’re fighting back. I give speeches and say women and girls are being raped and we need to do this and this and this. I’m an expert. I know hundreds if not thousands of raped women. I know about every kind of rape. I know everything but this drug rape is new. Young women, I thought. This happens to young women. The date-rape drug, you hear. Yes, these girls were out and about and someone slipped them the date-rape drug. They say it’s worse but what can they know? There’s no better or worse. There can’t be. But they’re right. It’s worse.
The drugs erase the mind. The drugs shut down the brain. The drugs put you into the equivalent of a coma. The drugs are cheap and easy to get. Rohypnol or roofies as the scum calls them. They’re supposed to be used in hospitals. They have no taste and no color. They work. They put you out. You can’t remember once you’re out or even when you’re conscious but gibbering and out of control. There’s GHB—Gamma hydroxybutyric acid, a little salty so it’s used in sweet drinks, like liqueurs and champagne, and Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer used for elephants. This isn’t an aspirin in your drink. It’s not like getting drunk. It’s not like getting high. This is so easy for the boy. This is so simple for the boy. This is foolproof rape. The gang who can’t shoot straight can do this kind of rape. You can do this hundreds of times with virtually no chance of getting caught. I think how easy this evil is to do.
I think about what marks women are, what suckers, but I wasn’t suckered, I wasn’t. I didn’t do anything to make this happen. I was there, okay. I was a woman alone in a hotel, okay. So if I had been somewhere else this wouldn’t have happened or if I had been with someone this would not have happened. How can I stay away from everywhere? Maybe I could go to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia and get them to build a wall around me. Maybe I should wear a chastity belt. I don’t know what to do.
I can’t sleep. How can I close my eyes? I have had this argument with God. Why, I ask, did you make it so that we had to sleep? How could you build it in that we would have to be so vulnerable, find somewhere dark and sheltered to sleep, not be able to protect ourselves? I don’t think I will ever sleep again. When I do I have nightmares. My worst dream always is about my ex-husband. He is very friendly and I try to be friendly because I don’t want him to hurt me and in every agonizing minute I’m smiling and being nice and I’m so afraid that he will turn on me. It can happen in a split second. I can’t stand the nightmares. I feel as if I’ve lived through whatever I was dreaming. I feel as if I have a life that takes over when I sleep, a life of fear and terror, and I have a life when I’m awake, and both are poisoned now by this. I wake up exhausted and either sweating or ice cold.
I remember the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.
(5)
I beat my dog. When I was married I beat my dog. She was a beauty and she was my heart and soul. He wanted the big dog. He got her but she was too small and sensitive for him. Big dogs, guns. It’s a cliché, I guess, but that’s what he wanted, big dogs and guns. I don’t know why I hit her. It made me want to die. It’s not as simple as he hit me, I hit her. Sometimes I was afraid, the way women are with children, if the kid does this, he will hit me so I have to stop the kid no matter how. It presents itself as an emergency when everything is overwhelming, when there’s nowhere to turn. The awful thing is that the dog will keep loving you. It’s so awful. She’ll keep her faith in you. She’ll be happy to see you. Her tail will wag. It doesn’t matter what you did. It’s so unbearable to see her eyes. I can’t think of anything I don’t deserv
e, any punishment, but the worst is her, I couldn’t undo it, I can’t undo it. At night I see her, I see her eyes, and her fragile, delicate skeleton curled in a half circle with her long-nosed head on her front paws. People don’t know how delicate big dogs can be. I loved her so much. I was cruel in desperation but it doesn’t matter why, it really doesn’t. Don’t feel desperate around animals or children, no one has the right. Don’t hurt them. Zero tolerance. Zero tolerance for me. It can’t be bad enough, whatever happened to me. How could anyone be so stupid and so mean?
I can’t bear it. I can’t. I can’t bear it. I thought I could walk away from anything. I thought I had a real cold heart. I wanted one. It takes a cold heart to survive. Survival’s the trap. One wants to live.
If you want to kill yourself, though, you have to strike while the iron is hot. Every delay leads back to life. Every minute of hesitation pulls you back. Nostalgia pulls you back. You just want to see the cats one more time pulls you back. You want to hear Paul’s voice on the phone just one last time. Any remnant of interest in anything pulls you back. You have to be in the kind of pain that keeps you from feeling anything else. If you want to leave a note it pulls you back. This is a note. The problem is that once I stop writing the new rape is all I have, all I know. I can’t be in a room by myself, I can’t read a book or even anything, like watching television or going to a movie, without the presence of the new rape in me, filling everything, spreading, polluting, poisoning.
What will happen to the girls with this new rape, if they have to bear it? How can they coexist with it? How can anyone promise them anything if they have to bear this and any ordinary moment of life can become this? I was reading a book. French Literary Fascism.
(6)
I love a man. Paul. This is not easy for me. He’s on the rapist side. He comes from there. That’s his place of origin. He’s gendered and so am I. I don’t want to be but I am and he is too.
I think about Paul. I worry about him. I like to see him. I think his jokes are funny. I like his stories. I like to touch him. I like talking to him. Sometimes I light up when I see him. Usually I do.
This time I asked him to look at the marks on me, the appalling scratches, the bruise on my left breast. He said that what was there could not be there. The scratches were not made by nails attacking my skin or anything like that. He didn’t know what it was but it wasn’t that. The bruise couldn’t be what I thought. I remember hoping he was right. I remember wanting to believe what he was making himself believe. He wanted to console me and he tried. He listened. He’d nod his head. I thought about every piece of furniture—had it scratched me? I thought about every single place my left breast might have bumped into—did the bruise come from a wall or a door or a person I had bumped into? No, these were human-inflicted marks.
I asked Paul if he thought the body knew even if the mind didn’t. He said he didn’t know, which was fair enough. He never said anything villainous or stupid like, well, you were out during it so how bad could it have been, which isn’t so much beside the point as the direct opposite of the point. That was the essence of the violation. I was a dead body. Someone had fucked me dead.
I had understated the internal pain. Not wanting to exaggerate it, wanting to be absolutely fair to the maybe rapist, I had just said I had felt internal pain, not how bad it was or how unwelcome or how inexplicable. I said the awful scratches were scratches, not how deep and long and bloody they were. I didn’t want the only person who believed me not to believe me so I held back my horror as best I could. I had to be reasonable, not hysterical or insane. I couldn’t afford to make a mistake. I couldn’t risk too much emotion.
I was also completely numb. I tried to remember my priorities and my routines but I didn’t care. Everything was an act to get through a minute and then another minute and the one following right after that. Life goes on, Paul said, and I nodded concurrence. But it would be better if it didn’t, if everything stopped. As long as I was numb I could get by. Once I knew it had happened the numbness was replaced by hell, a constant emotional disorder, a continuing reconstruction of events with my inner eye acting as a microscope going back over and over it without respite or relief. I just want to sleep. (…)
(8)
(…)
My ex-husband launders money. He’s been charged with malicious wounding, causing grievous bodily harm, burglary, theft, fraud, embezzlement, attempted murder and manslaughter. I got him young and he practiced on me. He’s in with the Russian gangs and he’s as brutal as anyone they produce. They weren’t girls or women he was charged with hurting—that’s all free, a bonus you get if you are both violent and vile enough. No one’s going to step between him and a woman he’s beating up on. He’s never been convicted of any of the things he’s been charged with, he’s free as a bird, a flying dinosaur, a raptor with wings. I’m not reckless, I’m saying this now because I just don’t want to die, even by my own hand, without anyone knowing this. This is my note in a bottle. I was his beginning. You can see his heel marks on my face but especially on my breasts with their odd scars. He was a virgin. What did I do? How did I do it, create the monster. Any fear I have is fear of him, transmuted and transformed. When I have flashbacks I’m a prisoner of his brutality. It happens again and I can’t by an act of will stop it. I see it, I see him, and I’m paralyzed with fear and I can’t stop it. Intrusive thoughts is one euphemism for being pursued by harsh, indelible memory.
And now I have the equal and opposite problem: I’m pursued by absence, not even forgetfulness, no repressed memory because there is no memory at all. It happened to me, but what and by whom and how many, were there two as I thought? The boy. I came awake for maybe two minutes, he was in the room already, he was delivering the food, I got up from the bed and he had a look of horror on his face, a look I’ve never seen before, and I keep thinking that it was as if I arose from the dead, he expected me to be out cold but somehow I roused, I was nearly out again when he closed the door behind him and I couldn’t get up to lock it but they have pass keys anyway, which is how he got in in the first place. When the boy grows up will he say he raped a girl when he was a kid or he saw a rape when he was a kid? That’s what my ex-husband says but it’s not true. I was his first. I couldn’t imagine being fifty-two back then. I remember turning twenty-five and thinking I can keep doing this day by day for the next twenty-five years, I just have to put one foot in front of the other, try to stay out of his way. I thought, I can do this. A year later I was on the streets running, hiding, moving, in a cold sweat, then I got a way of leaving for good and I did. Even gone, I kept in hiding, because he could find anyone, he had a predator’s special instincts.
I feel culpable because he’s still a monster and there’s a trail of violent crime. I think I should have stopped him, it was my special responsibility. I think that since he hurt me beyond my own understanding I should have shot him dead. I think that would have been honorable.
I wish someone would help me out. Isn’t there women’s secret police who could find him? Isn’t there a secret world of women assassins or fighters or revengers? I’m pathetic. I can’t do it myself. I call that pathetic. I’m treated like the world’s hardest bitch but I can’t finish off that particular beast even though my name is written all over him, he’s mine to kill. I can do me easier than him, even at fifty-two. I call that pathetic.
I wonder if the beauty I saw in him had any truth to it. It’s not there now but way back was it really there or did I fill in the blanks, make him up, imagine him? I hope it was really there. I want to think that what I saw in him was true.
I would like him to be dead because then I might be able to stop suffering. I’d like that before I die. I’ve been very selfish. People think too well of me. They don’t see the trembling piece of shit I am.
Last Days at Hot Slit Page 30