Shades of Eva (38 page)

Mitchell’s disgust lay, in part, with his
father, who was late coming home that night, whom Mitchell had been
waiting to play with when he was attacked.

Mitchell had disgust for his attacker, too;
and rightly so. He said that if he could find him, he would be in
for a “world of pain”—his words.

Mitchell also had disgust for an uncle, the
uncle who took custody of him after his mother died, the uncle whom
he said housed him, an uncle who was content, Mitchell said, to
have ignored the incident.

This uncle never tried to get Mitchell
counseling for the obvious trauma he had endured. This was disgust
appropriately centered. This uncle’s silence spoke loudly, as
silence often does. To Mitchell, it was a blaming, accusatory
silence. Mitchell’s rape was the event that spawned his mother’s
death, so went the logic of this silent uncle.

I pointed out the most obvious of the many
hundreds of reasons why that logic was so ridiculous—that Mitchell
was only five-years-old and in no way responsible for that rape, or
anything that followed in its wake. He was only just a boy.

And then Mitchell expressed disgust when
considering his mother’s rape. He was disgusted with her attacker,
if not more disgusted with him than he was his own rapist. His
mother had been victimized in her own bedroom, Mitchell believed. A
toolshed is one place, he said, his head hanging in a mixture of
sadness and despairing rage: but to be attacked in your own
bedroom, now that’s another matter!

It’s not an uncommon sentiment to minimize
one’s own suffering in this way, by focusing on the suffering of
others. Victims of rape often minimize the brutality of their own
experience by magnifying the brutality suffered in others. As I
said, it’s one way to cope with an almost unmanageable memory.

This was all shades of Eva again, I thought.
She claimed to have been raped in her bedroom, too. I had to take a
snapshot of those similarities and then burn it quickly. This
wasn’t Eva’s story.

He was disgusted with his mother’s family
for not believing her when she finally declared the rape. He
thought they might have disbelieved her because she didn’t declare
the rape right away. She protected her rapist, he told me, because
most likely he’d threatened her!

“Or her child,” I added. Her attacker likely
threatened her (or her family) if she didn’t keep the dirty little
secret between the two of them. Attackers often do this in an
attempt to control their victim and preserve their anonymity. This
was more shades of Eva, and another Polaroid burning! Eva’s family
didn’t believe her, either. And like Mitchell’s mother, Eva didn’t
accuse her attacker until after her baby was born, and only then
after he was taken.

Mitchell was disgusted with police, too, for
failing to find her rapist, and for failing to prosecute anyone for
her suffering. Again, a mental picture burned! Police never found
Eva’s assailant, either.

Mitchell finally accepted the term I used.
He used the right word once it was out there, despite the disgust
it invoked. And after hearing and seeing that disgust, and a good
portion of the other fiery emotions the word rape invokes, after
seeing the tears that remembering incites, it was readily apparent
to us both exactly why it was so hard for Mitchell to sever the tie
of perennial mourning that seemed to bind him to his mother. She
had become a central figure in his story, and his allowing her to
pass away would be the final chapter in his novel, a disloyalty of
homicidal proportion, a chapter he wasn’t ready or willing to
write—and for good reason. He shouldn’t. He had hardly begun to
mourn her loss, even though she’d died a quarter century ago—and
her rapist, sadly, was still roaming the planet.

There was every reason to believe that these
acts (the rape, the lobotomy, the subsequent separation of his
parents, and yes, his mother’s death) were the obstacles he’d been
avoiding for many years—those grief hurdles, if you will, still
waiting for him, still nagging at for attention at every turn.
Waiting they would remain, nagging like a back-talking choir, a
parish of vengeful malcontents, until Mitchell could decide to
confront them.

The question was not, what are you running
from, Mitchell? Those things were obvious. The question was: why
have you stopped running? And further to the point, why have you
returned home?

Unfinished business and an exorcism of
demons were his answers, but if I was looking at what I suspected I
was looking at, a not-so-little disorder called Rape Trauma
Syndrome, unfinished business and an exorcism were downright
alarming reasons to have returned.

Lethality assessments are commonly
used with persons who hint at, or otherwise threaten, suicide. We
ask pointed questions about specifics: How, what, and when? And
Where? The more specific the answers to those questions, the more
lethal—or serious—we take the threat of suicide.

The same can be utilized with those who seem
to be threatening the life or safety of someone else. So I asked
him to clarify, once again, how he thought this exorcism would
unfold, and when, and where and with whom.

He answered me, however, with a question of
his own. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Now, that could be
a vague answer, but then again, it could also be a very pointed
one.

Silently, I shrieked. I did have a sibling;
I had a brother. And he’d been accused of exactly what Mitchell’s
mother was accusing a certain someone of. Another Polaroid
burned!

How much we reveal to our clients is a
choice we have to make every day in counseling. In this case,
Mitchell was dealing with a missing brother, and per chance, my
brother was missing, as well. So I told him yes, that I did have a
brother, and explained that my brother entered the Army in 1953 and
went AWOL a year later. I told him he hadn’t been seen or heard
from in 40 years.

“You haven’t seen him in forty years?”
Mitchell asked, as if he couldn’t believe what I’d just told him.
“He never contacted you?”

“That’s right,” I said. “My brother has been
adrift for nearly four decades. It seems we have something in
common.”

Mitchell sat back and seemed to smile,
though I doubt, looking back, it was happiness he was feeling.
“Yes,” he said, nodding uncomfortably. “Forty years ago my mother
accused a man of rape and I lost a brother, and forty years ago
your brother fled his country! What town did you say you came
from?”

It was a sickening, concerning question, a
40-year-old question that left a prescient knot in the pit of my
stomach, a painful knot similar to the constricting pain of that
ligature around my heart. It was, in essence, a question similar to
the one I’d been asking myself for many years. Was it by chance
Fred who raped Eva, and subsequently killed her baby? And others.
Was Eva correct? Were her words more than allegations? Was it the
truth, and the fear of suffering the consequences of that truth,
the tick that drove my brother away?

Mitchell still hadn’t answered my question
as to how he was going to exorcize his demons, or where, or when.
Yet the answer seemed obvious to me at some gut level: he couldn’t
answer those questions because he didn’t know where his mother’s
rapist was.

So I tried one last time to ascertain,
hypothetically, just how lethal Mitchell’s return was going to be.
“If this man was sitting here in this office,” I began, leaning
forward, fingers interlocked, my eyes locked tightly onto
Mitchell’s. “If he was right here where I am, right now, what would
be your response to him?”

“If he were sitting right there where you
are,” Mitchell said, a stoic, diligent gleam that I’d call a wicked
determination apparent in his eyes, “If he was sitting right there,
I’d be talking to a dead man.”

That was pretty specific.

I had mentioned Rape Trauma
Syndrome
(or RTS). RTS is similar in presentation to PTSD—Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder. With RTS there are flashbacks, recurring
nightmares, panic attacks. Often there are delusional symptoms like
belief that you are being stalked. These delusions can get quite
elaborate, such as when the stalker becomes an older brother, for
instance—a brother who is trying to kill you.

Like PTSD, one may have hallucinations with
RTS, which sometimes take the form of revenge fantasies like the
one Mitchell had described. He said his brother was to return to
kill him. The primary difference is that the inciting trauma is
rape, and sometimes serial rape.

There are several coping strategies victims
of RTS may experience. These strategies typically occur outside of
conscious thought, and sometimes in a sequence. Minimization of the
event is one level. As I’ve said, they might downplay the rape,
excuse it, or refer to it as something less dramatic, by some other
name. They may fixate on the pain of someone else, for instance, a
mother’s trauma. They might do this because focusing on someone
else’s pain often diminishes their own.

Dramatization is a second way of coping.
Sometimes victims can’t stop talking about their trauma, can’t stop
dramatizing the event. What I’ve found in practice, particularly
with younger persons, is that they are often punished for
revisiting the event. Family and friends either don’t want to hear
it, don’t believe it, or for some reason, won’t.

Dramatization usually turns to suppression.
This sudden denial of the rape is fraught with its own perils, not
the least of which begins the inevitable spiral into psychosomatic
symptoms, which may include depression, anorexia, substance abuse,
or self-injury, just to name a few.

A fourth level of coping is flight. Victims
often flee their families and their hometowns. Mitchell certainly
did that. He turned the railway into a nexus of paths leaving River
Bluff in all directions.

There’s a small segment of rape trauma
survivors who do return home, but they seldom enter therapy. They
return because they’ve reached a point where denial, suppression,
dramatization, minimization, and flight have run their courses. If
they are prone to self-injury, the self-abuse is no longer
sufficient to stem the rising tide of pain brewing inside of them.
These survivors eventually reach one of two points: suicide or
outright revenge, i.e., murder.

The former is self-explanatory, and keep in
mind I’m only talking about a small percentage of trauma survivors.
By in large, things rarely traverse to the point at which I was
considering in listening to Mitchell talk. This small percentage
sometimes reach a point where they turn all of that inward
aggression outward, and it usually happens all at once, as if in an
instant, something snaps. They become sober. They quit cutting
themselves. They quit fighting. They focus almost obsessively on
something outside of themselves—like a dead mother, and her
tragedy—or that of a missing brother’s.

The reason for returning home—that so-called
unfinished business—may not be entirely clear to them, and thus
explains why there is seldom a clear answer to questions of
lethality. Deep down, they’ll often tell you (and usually after the
fact) that they returned home to do something about it; they just
weren’t entirely sure what that something was. They aren’t sure
because they have never seen their shadow self. It’s this shadow
self, this repressed creature who’s capable of doing that which
they feel needs doing that they really don’t recognize.

Thus was my fear that day. It was also my
intuition. Mitchell’s presence signified something darker than a
need to try and heal, or to try and grieve. His presence in my
office signaled one of those two lethal reactions to grief. He was
either on the verge of suicide, or the creature inside of him was
about to be released.

Don’t ask me how I knew it, or even why. I
could reduce it to my counselor instinct, but it was more than
that. I knew someone was going to die. It’s the feeling you get
when you walk down the street and make eye contact with a man who
you know, intuitively, is a sociopath. Your hair stands up. Your
spine tingles, and you hear the faint echo of what sounds like a
distant scream.

I had those sensations sitting there
listening to Mitchell tell that old, sad story of his. You can’t
say how you know, but follow that person for a day and you’re going
to see animals killed, men shot, or buildings burned. You just know
it and you don’t know why.

Lastly, I turned my attention
to
Mitchell’s substance abuse. Typically, substance abuse and
addiction follow trauma. In Mitchell’s case, they seemed to go hand
in hand, and they seemed to have sprung from the same year—from
that same place, even. He said he had his first drink in the very
same toolshed in which he was raped.

When a person drinks for as long as Mitchell
had, quitting cold turkey can kill you, and the withdrawal symptoms
can drive you crazy. In Mitchell’s case, he stated he was abusing
the sedative-hypnotic whiskey at the age of five with his father’s
guidance.

This was terribly abusive, and I wasn’t
talking about Mitchell’s abuse of alcohol. I was talking about his
father’s abuse of him. I wanted Mitchell to call that abuse by its
right name, too, and he did. Handing a five-year-old boy a glass of
whiskey was abuse, and there was no other word for it. Teaching a
child that young to drink is almost as bad as a woman drinking with
her child in utero. There is a small difference, however; a fetus
can’t throw the stuff up, and a little boy can. Fetuses have to
swim in their own vomit. Little boys don’t.

The point is, children as young as five have
remarkably creative imaginations. This almost goes without saying,
but adding a hypnotic like whiskey to an otherwise active
imagination can trigger some very, very bazaar reaction formations.
For example, Mitchell’s congregation of voices begins to take on a
more realistic form. With an only child, in particular, the fantasy
life is often exaggerated to compensate for a lack of siblings (or
friends), or for unstable family relationships.