The Other Side (2 page)

Tell me everything
, he says.
Start at the beginning
. He does not mean the playground at the preschool with the rainbow bridge. Or the kitten tongue like sandpaper on my cheek. Or the potpourri simmering in the tiny Crock-Pot on the counter next to the jar of pennies in the kitchen. Though any of these could have been a beginning to the story I tell him. I want to see it, the little notepad, but he leaves the room to
make some calls
. No, I can't call my family. No, not any of my friends. Nothing to do but to look at my feet, which are suddenly very very absurd. Someone should cover them with shoes and socks.

He returns to lead me down a dark hallway, where every office is a room with a closed door, through the kitchen, where coffee brews and burns, out a heavy steel door to a parking lot, an unmarked car. A detective's car. He gestures, as if to say,
After you
.

While waiting in the unmarked car on an unlit street in the dark shadow of an oak tree I realize that real cops are not at all like movie cops. Real cops are slow and fat. Their bellies, in various states of roundness, hang over their waistbands, cinched tight with braided leather belts. They do not converge on buildings with sirens blaring. They do not flash their lights or stand behind the open doors of their squad cars and aim their guns at criminals. These cops, my cops, do not wear uniforms. From the car, where I am sitting alone in the shadow of an oak tree, they look like fat men who have happened to meet on the street, who are walking together around the side of the fourplex toward the gravel parking lot, where they will find a discarded car tarp, a screen door flapping open, all the lights but one turned off.

Just inside the door, they will find a dog collar, construction supplies, and a soundproof room. I have told them what to expect. Meanwhile, waiting alone in the car under the dark shadow of an oak tree I start seeing things: no shadow is just a shadow of an oak tree. I press the heels of
my palms hard into my eye sockets, sink lower into the seat. My thoughts grow smaller and race in circles. The adrenaline shakes become convulsions become seizures, become shock. When The Detective returns, he finds me knotted into thirds on the floorboard: hardly like a woman at all.

At the hospital, The Detective leads me through a set of automatic sliding glass doors, not the main ones that lead to the emergency room, but another set, down the way a bit, special for people like me. He leads me down a fluorescent-lit hallway, directly to an exam room where the overhead lights are turned out. A female officer meets me there, and a social worker, who looks like she might be somebody's grandmother. The Female Officer and The Social Worker team up with a nurse; The Detective disappears without a word. The Female Officer, The Social Worker, and The Nurse ask me to take off my clothes. They unscrew the U-bolt from my wrist. The Female Officer puts these things into a Ziploc bag named
EVIDENCE
.

Nice to meet you, Evidence
.

The Female Officer takes pictures of my wrists and ankles. She speaks in two-syllable sentences:
Oh, dear. Rape kit
.

The Social Worker wants to hold my hand.
No thank you, ma'am
. She is, after all, not my grandmother. Her skin is loose and clammy. She asks what kind of poetry I write as
The Nurse rips out fingerfuls of my pubic hair, spreads my legs and digs inside me with a long, stiff Q-tip. Another Q-tip in my mouth for saliva. She scrapes under my fingernails with a wooden skewer and puts the scum in a plastic vial.

The Social Worker invites me to stay at her house. Or it is not her house, exactly, but a half house for half women like me.

After the exam, The Social Worker gives me a green sweat suit in a brown paper bag. I'm supposed to dress in the bathroom. The clothes are entirely too large: a too-large hunter-green sweatshirt, a pair of too-large hunter-green sweatpants, a pair of too-large beige underwear. Like my mother wears.

The Female Officer doesn't acknowledge that I look ridiculous emerging from the bathroom. She doesn't acknowledge me at all. I know to follow her out the door, to the parking lot, her squad car. I know to hang my head; it's the price for a ticket to the station.

Morning
.

The phone call wakes my parents out of bed. Mom answers, her voice is thick, confused. She says nothing for a long time. In the background, Dad gets dressed. Yesterday's change jingles in his pockets. His voice buckles:
Say we're on the way
.

The Detective follows me in the unmarked car to my new apartment. He offers to come inside, to stand guard at the door, but I don't want him to see that I have no furniture, no food in the fridge, nothing in the pantry, or the linen closet, or on the walls. I ask him to wait outside. I call my boss at the literary magazine where I am an intern and leave a message on the office voice mail:
Hi there. I was kidnapped and raped last night. I won't be coming in today
. I call My Good Friend's cell phone. I call My Older Sister's cell phone.

While I'm in the shower, the apartment phone rings and callers leave messages on the machine: My Good Friend will stay with her boyfriend; she's delaying her move-in date. Of course she hates to do this, but she's just too scared to live here, with me, right now.
You should find somewhere to go
, she says. My Handsome Friend's message says he heard the news from My Good Friend. He's leaving town and doesn't think it's safe to tell me where to find him. The message My Older Sister leaves says she wants me to come stay at her place, which sounds better than sleeping alone in this apartment on the floor.

I pull back the curtains and see my parents standing in the parking lot talking to The Detective. Dad shakes The Detective's outstretched hand. Mom covers her chest with her arms, one hand over her mouth, a large beige purse hanging from her shoulder. She's brought me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a snack-size bag of Cool Ranch
Doritos. I'm not hungry, but the thought of wasting her effort makes my stomach turn.

I nibble the chips in the backseat of their car while they take me to buy a cell phone. They want to do something, to take action. With the fluorescent lights of the store, all the papers I must fill out and sign, and the windows wide open behind us, I feel dizzy enough to fall.

Driving to My Older Sister's apartment, I watch the road extending behind me in the rearview mirror and try not to fall asleep. The apartment parking lot becomes boulevard, becomes deserted intersection, becomes on-ramp, and interstate. The clusters of redbrick buildings give way to strip malls, to warehouses and truck stops, to
XXX
bookstores, to cultivated pastures growing in every direction: wheat-stalk brown, tree-bark brown, and corn-silk green.

My Older Sister meets me in the parking lot with tears in her eyes. Her hug is both desperate and safe. As she carries my bag up the stairs she says,
You look like shit
. Under any other circumstances, I'd tell her to fuck off. Today it's a comfort. I do look exactly as I feel.

She isn't able to get off work tonight, so she shows me how to use the cable remote, loads her handgun, puts it in my hand. It's heavier than I would have imagined. She'll work late tonight, but if I need anything, her next-door
neighbor, The Sheriff,
knows what happened
. He might come by to check on me.
Please try not to shoot him
.

The whole time she's gone, I watch the closed-circuit channel showing the front gate of her apartment complex. I sit in the dark with the gun in my hand and watch cars drive through the gate. I don't know what I'm watching for, but I keep watching. A gray conversion van looks suspicious. Lights turn in the parking lot, crossing the face of the building. I peer through a crack in the blinds.

I don't eat. I don't sleep.

Even after My Older Sister comes home, offers me a beer, falls asleep with her arm around my body in the bed, I fix my eyes on the dark and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

[two]

SCHRÖDINGER'S FAMOUS THOUGHT
experiment instructs us to imagine that a cat is trapped in a steel chamber along with a tiny bit of radioactive substance—so tiny that there is equal probability that one atom of the substance will or will not decay in the course of an hour. If one of the atoms of this substance happens to decay, a device inside the chamber will shatter a small flask of hydrocyanic acid, killing the cat. If it does not decay, the cat survives. It is impossible to know, with certainty, whether the cat is alive or dead at any given moment without looking inside the steel chamber, since there is equal probability of either outcome. And because both outcomes exist in equal probability, this creates a paradox: the cat is both alive
and
dead to the universe outside the chamber. These two outcomes continue to coexist only until someone opens the chamber and looks inside, causing those two possible outcomes to collapse and become one.