I Will Find You (5 page)

“Now, I can kill you,” he says, still calm, like he’s saying he can get me a cup of coffee. “But I won’t kill you if you do what I say.”

My breath stops. Wait.
Kill me?

The world shrinks into the small, still space behind the scrim. Nothing else exists.

How did this happen? One minute I was running toward a college theater, thinking about how I would fake my way
through the interview, get to the pool, and then figure out something for dinner. The ordinary middle of an ordinary day of my ordinary life.

I catch a flash of steel when he moves his hand. An image appears, unbidden: my mother cutting fabric on our dining room table, pins held between her lips, her long, black-handled utility scissors crinkling the tissue-paper patterns of dresses.

His hand still covers my mouth. I nod: Yes. I will do what he tells me.

He takes his hand from my mouth. I do not say anything as he starts fumbling with the buttons on my blouse.

I shake. I try to stop it, but I can’t.

This is it. My rape. I knew it was coming. Every woman knows it, anticipates it, fears it, yet also doesn’t believe it will happen to her. And now here it is. My turn
.

My stomach drops, but I do not let myself cry. The effort burns my throat.

I think of something that might stop him. “I’m having my period,” I say. I try to sound apologetic.

“Be quiet.”

He tears at the last button on my blouse, and as he pulls it off I see drops of blood dotting the front.

My mind takes a few seconds to catch up to this new piece of information.

My blood?

I put my hand to my neck, where the dagger was. Sticky.

I look at my hand. A bright red smear.

Yes. My blood
.

I look down and see more blood on my skirt. My new linen skirt, bought to celebrate the new job. Bought to look professional.

As though it recognizes itself, the blood in my veins springs to action. I feel it pounding upward, squeezing through my carotid artery, pushing into my head. My body is electrical wire, the current switched on.

Then, just as suddenly, it turns off.

I slip away from my body, like Peter Pan’s shadow, into the fly space above the stage. My fear has vanished. I look down at the stage. I see myself. I look small, standing there in my bra. I look scared.

From the moment we humans are shocked with the terrible knowledge of our own mortality, we wonder and fear:
How will I die? When will I die?

A guy smoking a Kool just delivered my answer.

Now
.

Now is when it happens to me
.

I don’t find it strange that there are two of me. On the stage, I feel his hands on my body. I feel the blade next to my neck, then next to my chest. I feel the rough concrete wall scrape at the skin on my back.

From up above, I watch all of this with a soothing detachment. I know it’s me down there, but I feel like I’m watching someone else. A girl in a play. For her, I feel … I guess the word is “concern.” And pity.

Down on the stage, my blouse is on the ground. My skirt lies in a puddle at my feet. He fumbles with his zipper, still trying to hold the scissors at my neck. He tells me to take off my shoes and everything else.

It occurs to me—probably not then, probably later—that rape is a clumsy business. It’s nothing like the movie versions. The clothes come right off in the movies, usually ripped dramatically. Nothing gets stuck. The rapist knows what he’s doing and works with efficiency. He never has trouble maintaining an erection. As for the victim, she either fights back and escapes—after kneeing the rapist in the groin, of course—or she dies in horrifying violence that will be avenged by the hero.

I, on the other hand, almost topple over while I unbuckle my shoes. My underwear binds my ankles. The rapist still can’t get his zipper down.

Up above, I decide he really is not the right person for the role of rapist. Not at all. He’s too young, too skinny, barely taller than me. His mesh tank top is the kind favored by men who spend a lot of time in the gym, but he has no muscles to show off, no pecs rippling under the shiny mesh. No, he isn’t right for the role. Not scary enough. He will be something of a disappointment to the audience.

The rapist finally gets his zipper to work and sheds his pants, revealing gray boxers. I wonder idly from above:
Are they gray because he never washes them, or is that their original color? I hope, for the girl’s sake, it’s the latter
.

He shoves me against the concrete wall and tries to push his penis into me, standing up. But he’s not tall enough, and his
penis isn’t hard enough. He turns me around and tries again from the back. The concrete feels cold on my cheek.

When standing doesn’t work, he pushes me down to my hands and knees, kneels behind me. He forces a finger into my vagina, as if trying to locate it, and then presses his semisoft penis into me and starts thrusting. Fast. Faster. He’s pumping away so fast I think it will end quickly, but after a couple of minutes he gets tired, or bored, turns me over onto my back on the stage floor, and pushes his penis into me again, from the front.

He moves with mechanical disinterest, not speaking, not looking down at me. Above, watching, I wonder if he even feels excited. As he continues to thrust, grunting, a small cross hanging from his neck dangles in my face. Lying under him, I fix my eyes on it as it swings, back and forth, a hypnotist’s charm.

He stops, abruptly, and looks me in the eye.

“Are you married?”

I hesitate.

Is this a test? What answer does he want?

Then I realize he must have seen my wedding ring.

“Yes,” I say. Nothing more.

“Have you ever had a black man before?”

Now what should I say? Does he care?

“No.” A lie. I had two black boyfriends in college.

“I bet you’ve always wanted to,” he says. He leans close, his breath hot with the smell of cigarettes and alcohol. This time, I know what he wants me to answer.

“Yes,” I say.

He stands and pulls me up by my hair, then pushes me to my knees.

“I got to get off,” he says, and presses my face to his groin, still holding my hair.

“Suck on it,” he says.

His penis has gone soft again. I look at it, nestled like a small bird in the coarse black hair. I close my eyes and take it in my mouth. Smell and taste hit me at once. Urine. Sweat. Something musky and rank. I gag and try to cover the gag.

Up above, watching, I wait for the girl on the stage to bite the penis. That’s what they do in movies. They bite it. They hit the guy in the balls. They scream. They scratch. They escape.

The girl onstage does not bite. She sucks. He stays soft.

“Harder,” he says.

She sucks harder. She can’t breathe. She keeps going.

Up above, I observe: This is pathetic. Pathetic rapist. Pathetic blow job. If the girl were better at it, this would be over. She can’t even make a rapist come.

He grabs me by the hair and pulls me away from his penis. “Lie down,” he says. I do, lying on a strip of red carpet embedded with the grime of years of entrances and exits.

Time passes and stops at the same time. I do everything the rapist tells me to do. I suck. I lie down. I turn over. He directs me in an automated, perfunctory Kama Sutra.

I understand that the only way this will end is for him to come, so I try to excite him. I move my hips, I thrust back, I
kneel in submission. I make noises of pleasure.
Oooohh. Mmmmm
. I kiss him back.

“Do you like this?” he asks. Three, four times he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

Nothing I do matters. Even as he moves me around, muttering, “I got to get off,” he seems oddly bored by what he is doing.

He loses his soft erection and turns me over yet again, pulls my bottom up and jabs a finger in.

“Have you ever been fucked in the ass?” he asks.

He doesn’t wait for an answer. This excites him. His penis hard, he sodomizes me, pushing in fast and without warning.

The pain stuns me. It burns. I fight for air. My face, rubbing into the dirty backstage carpet, is wet and raw. I have held back my tears, but now I choke on them.

“Does your husband do this?” he asks.

I close my eyes and try to breathe.

“Does it feel good?”

He coos the words into my ear. He’s hurting me; he has to know he’s hurting me. Dirt and carpet fibers catch in my throat. I hold my breath and try to give in to the pain, to make it go away.

“Does it feel good?” he asks again.

“Yes.”

“Does your husband do this to you?”

Then it hits me.

This is a prison rape
.

Of course. He’s been in prison, and now he’s doing to me what someone did to him. He’s claiming me as his property.

Then: A noise from downstairs. A bang, like a door closing.

Bang:
Someone is here
. Bang:
I will be rescued
. Bang:
No. He’ll panic and stab me
.

He stops, puts his hand over my mouth, and grabs the weapon, pulling out but still hovering over me.

“Be quiet, now. Be quiet.” I nod and he takes his hand away. We freeze in place.

Silence.

Silence.

Nothing.

No one is coming. I won’t be rescued. He will kill me
.

He pushes me to the floor again, and keeps going, posing me like a doll: on my back, on my hands and knees, on my stomach. Then he put his penis in my mouth again, hovering above my face as I lie there. I gag, bile rising in a bitter gush into my throat. I can’t breathe. The penis falls away from my mouth.

He slaps my face. “Bitch.”

Then he caresses the spot where he slapped. Gentle.

“You’re my bitch,” he says. “You do what I tell you.”

He moves down my body and burrows his face between my legs. He licks.

Above, I observe: This is weird. Rapists don’t do this. Do they?

He licks more.

Up above, I decide he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. I want to shout down at him:
God! Have you ever done this before?

He stops. “I know you liked that,” he says, pride in his voice, as he climbs on top of me again.

How long has it been? I have no idea. The theater feels like a sealed tomb, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, soundproof and windowless, with a trapped heart beating inside. I am alone. Utterly alone.

I watch from above. How will it end?

I try something: “I think the people I was supposed to meet will come back,” I say. “They might catch us. We should get out of here.”

He looks at me, thinking about it. Then he nods and reaches for his pants. I crawl across the dirty carpet for my skirt. We dress in a hurry.

“Get your purse,” he says.

I give him all my money: a couple of twenties and some singles. He grabs the wallet from my hands and shakes the coins out, pocketing the quarters and dimes and pennies.

When he has everything, he puts the dagger-scissors up to my back and pushes the point in just enough so I can feel it.

“OK,” he says. “We’re going to go outside now. I told you I wouldn’t kill you, but if you do anything stupid when we get out, I will kill you.”

He leads me out a backstage door and down a staircase, holding my arm, the point of the scissors pressing into my back.

Then he opens a door and we are outside. My brain registers the change in one-word thoughts:
Bright. Sun. Air
.

Then:
DAVE
.

In the sun, I see a tattoo on his right arm:
“DAVE,”
carved into his dark skin in crude capital letters. It looks like someone etched it with a sharpened ballpoint pen.
Or scissors,
I think, feeling the point in my back.

I glance at him and look away. Now I know his face and his name, or maybe his prison boyfriend’s name. Did he notice that I saw it?

“Where’s your car?” he asks.

My tiny flame of hope sputters and dies. I’m outside, but I’m not free. And now I know too much for him to let me go. Now he’ll take me somewhere in my car and kill me. I hesitate.

“It’s in the lot over there,” I say. Then I add: “Right next to the attendant’s booth.”

This is not true, but I continue the lie. “We can’t go there. We don’t want to get caught.”

He thinks for a second, then turns me so I’m facing him. He licks his finger and rubs at the blood on my neck. He smooths my hair.

“Now, don’t you go to the cops,” he says. “If you go to the cops, I’ll have to go to prison.”

“I won’t go to the cops. I promise.”

“If I have to go to prison, I’ll miss you,” he says, almost cooing. “And when I get out, I will find you.”

He kisses me on the lips and walks away.

I wobble toward my car, holding my torn blouse closed with one hand, the straps on my shoes flapping with each step.

The midsummer evening feels like afternoon, bright and hot, the burned smell of asphalt rising in the still air. The paths through the campus are empty. Everyone has gone home, which is where I’m supposed to be by now. I hear traffic a block away, the hum of the last gasp of rush hour, people thinking about dinner and wondering what’s on TV tonight.

When I get to the parking lot, I see someone in the booth. A man in a uniform. I stumble across the tarmac toward him. He will make me safe.

When he slides the window open, I stand there, mute. My throat clamps shut again. He notices my ripped blouse.

I blurt out, “I was just raped.”

It’s the first time I say the words, and it sounds wrong. Too flat. Too direct. I feel like a fake, a feeling that will return again and again in the days and weeks to come. Why am I not crying
or wailing like a real victim? Why do I sound so emotionless? After stating just the fact, I am unable to say anything else.

The man in the booth doesn’t know what to say, either. He falters for a few seconds, staring at me, and then opens the door and points to his stool. “Sit here.” He looks like someone’s grandfather. I feel bad for him, having to deal with this. I sit on his stool, shaking, while he talks into a walkie-talkie. “I have a rape victim here,” he says, and then he steps outside of the booth to wait, leaving me alone for the first time that night.

Seconds later, a guy in a red pickup pulls up and shouts into the window, “Which way did he go?” I point toward Euclid Avenue and the guy speeds off, and before I can figure out how he knew about the rape, a cop car pulls up, and I’m out of the booth and in the front seat.

The cop does not want the story. He wants a description: What was his race? What did he look like? How tall was he? What was his weight?

“Black,” I say. “But I’m not sure how tall he was. I’m not sure about his weight, either. It’s hard to estimate.”

The cop tries to help: “Was he taller than you, or shorter? Heavier?”

“A little taller than me. He was pretty thin, so I’m not sure if he was heavier.”

“How much do you weigh?”

I pause. “About one thirty,” I say, automatically shaving off the traditional five pounds. This will worry me quite a bit later on. Will someone discover I lied about my weight, and so must be lying about everything else, too?

After more back-and-forth, we arrive at a description: Wiry build, maybe a hundred forty pounds. Slightly taller than me. I’m five-six, so maybe five-seven or five-eight.

“What about his color,” the cop says. “Was he dark or light-skinned?” Again I hesitate. I’ve never described the gradations of African-American skin color; I don’t know the benchmarks.

“I guess he was light,” I say. “Maybe he was medium. I don’t know.”

I try to make up for my indecisiveness by offering something better: “He had a tattoo. A name tattooed on his right bicep. ‘DAVE.’ It was all in capital letters, and messy, like it was made with a pen or a knife.” The cop nods with approval. I have a moment where I feel like what I always tried to be as a child: I’m a good girl.

Then we are at the emergency room, where a dozen people slump in rows of plastic chairs, waiting for someone to see them. The room is dim. A TV hung on the wall plays without sound.

The cop rushes me through the waiting room like a celebrity he has to protect from overzealous fans. If I had a coat, he probably would drape it over my head. He tells me the Cleveland police will come to talk to me. He tells me I did a good job with the description. Then he leaves.

Inside the ER, the intake nurse puts me in a private room, one with a door instead of curtains. With brisk efficiency, she hands me a paper gown and asks for my clothes, then stuffs them into a bag to give to the police. Evidence, she tells me.
She brings me a cup of water. She takes down all my information, my history. She asks me who she should call to come to the hospital for me. Am I married? I give her my husband’s phone number at work. She tells me the doctor will be there soon, but first the police need to talk to me. A hospital social worker will come by, too. Do I want someone from the Rape Crisis Center to come? Yes. Please. Then she leaves.

I am alone.

A clock on the wall ticks the seconds. It’s past 6:30. I thought it would be later. Time, after disappearing in that theater, returns to me. It lasted an hour. DAVE trapped me and raped me for an hour.

Outside the room, a gurney rolls past, clacking. Someone moans, then moans louder. Two people rush past my door. I hear the word “gunshot.”

I am alone.

I am afraid.

The air conditioner vent above me blasts refrigerated air into the room. I sit on the exam table in the paper gown, wishing the nurse had given me a blanket. I think again of the other girls, the ones who did not make it to the ER, lying cold in a wooded area off a highway—it always seemed to be just off the highway—under a layer of dirt and brush, waiting for someone to stumble over them.

After a while, I lie back on the table, the paper crinkling under my body, my hands cradling my head. In the silent, chilled room, naked under the gown, I feel like a forgotten corpse, awaiting my own autopsy.

My hand goes to my neck, where he cut me. It’s stopped bleeding. I can feel now that the cut is small, a couple of inches long, maybe three. It is not deep. It is nothing much. I worry about this:
Maybe I don’t look hurt. Maybe the cut is so minimal, the doctor will not believe me. The cops won’t believe me
.

I start crying. I want the wound to be bigger. I want it deeper. I want it to hurt. I want them to gasp when they see it, the doctors and cops, I want them to ask me how I managed to survive. I want them to tell me they are calling in the top plastic surgeon to stitch it up, so I will not have a scar.

I want this written on my body. Tattooed on my body.

I stop crying and drift, lying on the table. Then they come in, one by one. First the hospital social worker. Then a Cleveland policeman in uniform. Then another nurse. Then the Rape Crisis Center volunteer.

They ask me what happened. The rape crisis volunteer holds my hand while I talk. One by one, I tell them. But what I tell is not my story, it is a list: He did this, then he did that. He was wearing this. He looked like this. He said this. I was scared. I cried. I did what he told me to do.

I do not tell them that I left my body.

They nod, write it all down. “Then what happened?” they all ask. I continue the list.

I know I should be sobbing, shaking, screaming, not reciting a list in a monotone. When I get to the part about the anal rape, the cop goes still. He looks away from me.

With each interview, I leave out the most important fact of all: It was my fault. My own, stupid, gullible, naïve fault. I
was late. I walked into that empty theater. I ignored my own warning light. I practically invited DAVE to rape me.

The cops give me their cards. The Rape Crisis Center volunteer gives me a card with phone numbers to call the next day. Then they leave me alone in the room again. Time passes.

The nurse returns with the doctor, a resident who looks like she might be on her twenty-sixth hour of duty, rushing from patient to patient. She gets right to business, her jaws working hard on a wad of bubble gum while she reads my chart. When she bends toward me to look at the cut on my neck, her breath smells like cotton candy.

I note that she does not gasp at the cut. She cleans it with something that smells like alcohol, then asks me if I am OK with her examining me. She says she needs to prepare a rape kit to give to the police—she has a legal protocol to follow.

The stirrups are cold. When I shiver, she warns me that the metal speculum might be cold, too. She inserts it and swabs and scrapes inside me, handing each instrument and swab to the nurse, explaining to me every step of the procedure as she works. She tells me she’s combing my public hair for his hair, swabbing for semen, looking for signs of trauma, gathering evidence of the rape in the folds and secretions inside me. She swabs inside my anus.

“Basically, your body is the main piece of evidence here,” she says as she works, chewing her gum.

My other self, hovering above, looks down at me, lying on the table with my feet in stirrups, my hands cradling my head.

Still too calm, I think.