Excerpts of After Silence

• Chapter One: The Bird
• Chapter Twelve: A New World
• Chapter Thirteen: Blackberries

 

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Chapter One: The Bird

The rapist was wearing slippers. This, the police said, suggested he had planned his attack. The slippers were enormous and my description of them was all the police had to go on. It wasn't enough. He attacked from behind and from the first instant had the advantage--stealth and surprise. His right arm held my neck in a stranglehold and I could not extricate myself. The fingers of his other hand dug into eyes. After he had me immobilized, only my feet kicking out wildly, he hesitated for an instant. It came to me then that my mouth was still free. Words. I still had words. I spoke words as he began to push me toward the bedroom. Words that tried to reason where there was no reason. I was struggling against the movement forward with all my strength and speaking the words. His fingers slipped from my eyes briefly and I saw his foot, a dirty, worn slipper. To this day the sight of a dirty slipper makes me gag.

He threw me on the bed face down, his knee in the middle of my back. He pressed down with his full and great weight so that I thought he might snap my spine in two, like a twig. At this point I became intensely focused on him and a strange calmness suddenly displaced my terror. He grabbed my arms and bound them together behind me with duct tape. Then he jerked my head up by grabbing a handful of hair and spun the tape around my head, over my eyes. "Don't do this," I said. "Shut up, you bitch, or I'll break your arms." He pulled my bound hands upward toward my head to demonstrate, but I felt no pain. Then he threw me over on my back, and sitting on my hips, tore open my shirt, jerked my bra up around my neck, unzipped my jeans, and pulled them down as far as he could without shifting his position. He then had to stand beside the bed to get them all the way off, fighting against my shoes, flats that fit snugly. Then he yanked off my underpants. At that moment, time disappeared into a continuous present. . . .

. . . .During the attack my terror seemed to implode and compress until it was like a hard dry seed. Once I was free of this devouring fear, a cold, even calculating awareness took its place, illuminating everything all at once and destroying all capacity for emotion. I agree with Livingstone that this anesthesia is merciful, although I do not share his teleological explanation. God aside, this "singular" insensibility has survival value, because feeling nothing liberates some aspect of mind that under normal conditions is crowded with bodily sensations and the constant ebb and flow of emotions--a mob of small wishes and desires generated by the body and an odd assortment of thoughts that are both nagging and petty. All this was chaff torn from the grain and cast into the whirlwind.

I was focused only on him, focused microscopically. He was my world. He defined the parameters of the world, shrunken and hateful as it was. He was the creator of this world, occupied now by both of us. He decided what was and wasn't possible. His world was, by my former measures, insane. A universe of ferocity that was sustained by fear and pain. I had no emotional reaction to this universe and observed it with the detachment of a yogi.

In this detachment, a state I reached the moment I knew I could not physically escape, I experienced his rage as if it were a separate entity, a shadow self to his physical being. I understood that this entity was hungry and that it was feasting on something from me--my terror, my physical and psychic pain. It got energy from me and in the initial moments of the attack, when my terror was uncontrollable, it had gained strength. I sensed the rapist wanted me to beg and plead, humiliate myself so he could feed this furious entity that was tormenting him in its hunger. I withdrew all reaction, although this act was involuntary.

I understood that this might increase his brutality, but my emotional detachment was so great, and my physical senses so dulled, that it no longer mattered. I was fully conscious, but I had no emotions at all. I believe now that his cat-and-mouse game and his destruction of my possessions were attempts to re-create the energy exchange of the initial attack. I greeted these replays with indifference, as I did all the other demands he made. I went through the motions, but nothing more.

The awareness that accompanied what Livingstone called a sort of dreaminess was perfectly faceted and unclouded. The experience of this awareness was itself a kind of death. My life did not flash before me. I did not see my mother's face. I knew the words to prayers, but they meant nothing and I did not use them. Words had no referents and no beauty of their own. Memories were drained of meaning, because the person who had them no longer existed. Faith was a distraction. Nothing I had known or felt before the attack seemed the least bit useful.

It was been difficult over the years to rid myself of the experience of this irrelevancy--concepts, emotions, prayers, faith, love, words. All illusions. There was, in the end, only a focus on living one more second within the logic of each moment that was all moments. There was nothing enlightening about this reduction. It seemed I was far less than I had ever imagined--no more than flesh that would do anything to preserve itself in the form to which it had become accustomed.

What was left behind, and what still remains, is the memory of this encounter with my reduction. It sits in the center of my being like a glacier. Pieces may break off and fall into the sea, but the glacier with its yawning crevasses is bound to the shore. What I know is the shape of that shore, a cold and wordless place that is forever strange and inhospitable. A part of me is bound to it for the rest of my life.

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Chapter Twelve: A New World

A week later we were sitting on a love seat in the office of a psychiatrist whose specialty was couples counseling. His office was beige and Danish modern, well-appointed with boxes of Kleenex on end tables on either side of the couch. The complaint on which we had finally settled and which we presented calmly to the doctor, whom I shall call Dr. Blanchard, was that we were having trouble "communicating," a euphemism that he accepted with a slow blink, one of his more animated expressions.

We visited Dr. Blanchard once a week for ten weeks. Over these weeks he said almost nothing that could pass for a suggestion. We had the slow blinks, occasionally punctuated by an "Uh-huh" or a nod, and the inevitable questions that followed my long-winded and Steve's more succinct descriptions of our latest argument: "And how did that make you feel?" He took no notes, expressed no opinions. With one exception, neither Steve nor I remember anything he said. But that exception fascinates us both when we look back at it. We still cannot decide whether it was an example of gross insensitivity or a stroke of professional genius.

In our first session, Dr. Blanchard asked us each to say something about our backgrounds. Steve later told me that I concluded my remarks by mentioning that four and half years earlier I had been raped in my own home. I provided no details and observed only that "they never caught the guy."

"Was it," Dr. Blanchard asked, " a particularly bad rape?" I responded instantly and without any emotion. "The guy was there for a number of hours. I wasn't cut up, if that's what you mean."

Dr. Blanchard nodded his head, and the session went on without any further reference to the rape. It was Steve who drew my attention to Dr. Blanchard's' question afterward. As odd as it seems now, I had nearly forgotten it.

"I think that question about rape was strange, " Steve said as we were walking back to the car.

"What question?" I replied, thinking only that Steve was looking for an excuse to get out of therapy. Steve repeated Dr. Blanchard's question.

"Oh, that," I said, as if I had noticed it. "What does he know? I should have said, 'Oh no, it was one of those gentle, make-you-feel-good rapes.'"

"Do you think we need to find someone else?" Steve said.

"No," I said. "My rape is not the problem here."

*  *  *

Although I pretended not to be bothered by Dr. Blanchard's remark, it set me on slow burn. I projected my anger away from Steve onto Dr. Blanchard in what I now regard as a case of transference that belongs in the psychiatric Guinness Book of World Records. I belittled Dr. Blanchard behind his back and treated the sessions like business meetings. I never once reached for a Kleenex and never expressed a feeling. He was an insensitive dolt, but I believed that he might have some tips for Steve, who was, as far as I was concerned, the designated patient.

In hindsight I can see why I could not react to Dr. Blanchard's question. It seemed to discount rape by implying that some rapes were not all that bad. On the one hand, I wanted to dismiss my experience. On the other, I wanted to claim its brutality. But to do that would force me to claim as well the consequences of that brutality. Between these opposing needs--to deny and to affirm--I felt trapped and hopeless. Each session with Dr. Blanchard left me more and more depressed. My answer to Dr. Blanchard's question downplayed my actual experience--because I wasn't stabbed, I seemed to be suggesting that the rape was no big deal. At the same time, I hinted that it was a very big deal ("The guy was there for a number of hours").

If Dr. Blanchard intended to force me to face my own denial, he deserves more credit than I gave him. All I know is that I interpreted his question then as another example of the insensitivity that isolates and humiliates women who have been raped.

One night ten weeks after we started seeing him, I found myself sitting in a bathtub with a razor blade in my hand. I was crying uncontrollably. It was time to put my hero out of her misery. Her wounds, I felt, were mortal.

Steve, frantic on the other side of the locked door, told me he was calling Dr. Blanchard's emergency number. A few minutes later he returned demanding that I open the door.

"I just called Dr. Blanchard," Steve yelled.

I stopped crying. I felt for Steve in that moment. I knew he loved me and that he was hurting.

"What did he say?" I asked. I got out of the tub. And opened the door. "I'm sorry," I said when I looked into his eyes. "I don't know what is happening to me."

"I know," Steve said, wrapping me in a towel.

"What did Dr. Blanchard say?"

"I told him you were threatening to kill yourself. That you were hysterical. He thought maybe I should come in to see him and asked me how I felt about what was going on."

For a moment, we stared at each other. Dr. Blanchard wanted to see Steve, not me? Then we started to laugh. Laughter shook us as we each imitated Dr. Blanchard's slow blinks, repeating "And how does that make you feel?" over and over again in as many variations of tone and emphasis as we could invent.

After we'd exhausted ourselves, we sat on the bed holding hands while I called Dr. Blanchard back.

"I'd like a referral, " I said. "I think I need to see someone who has treated rape victims." Dr. Blanchard had a name handy--a woman he'd known in medical school, a "specialist." Perhaps he'd been expecting my call. Then again, maybe not.

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Chapter Thirteen: Blackberries

I believed when I started this book that the idea that rape is about power and control, not sex, was well-established. I thought it was clear, not only to me, but to my circle of friends and acquaintances and their circles of friends and acquaintances and so on. In other words, to everybody. This was one blackberry patch I would not have to tangle myself up in--because in the decades since Victoria's rape I believed it had been completely eradicated. Thus, it was both a bafflement and an irritation to encounter what appeared to be thriving shoots among the lilies.

I have a friend who is skilled at hunting mushrooms. One summer I visited her in Canada's province of Quebec and for a week I accompanied her on daily mushrooming jaunts. It was the season for Hypomyces lactiflourum, a bright orange, parasitic earth tongue that grows over the gills and caps of several species of milk mushrooms and that tastes like a cross between almonds and sea scallops. There were other tasty varieties of boletes and chanterelles growing in the woods, but the Hypomyces were the real prize. At first I was useless. I couldn't find a single mushroom. But after I'd eaten the Hypomyces (sautéed in butter and onions), I began to find them with nearly the same skill as my friend. "Once you taste them," she said, "it's strange, but you seem to develop an affinity of some kind. You begin to see them everywhere."

As I was writing this book, I began to see the idea of sex everywhere when it came to rape. I worried about myself as I clipped items from the newspaper or jotted down remarks that came my way. Still, I recorded what I thought I was finding. . . .

. . . Somewhere out there in the backlash is a Jurassic Park keeping alive things we'd rather not think about.

I read accounts of cases such as this one from 1996 with confusion: A Wisconsin judge sentenced a Southeast Asian immigrant found guilty of four counts of sexual assault for repeatedly molesting two young girls to twenty-four years' probation (as opposed to the eighty-year prison sentence he could have gotten) so he would have the opportunity to continue English lessons to help him assimilate better into American culture. And what was I to think of the case of the Tennessee judge who in 1995 released a rape suspect who claimed he heard voices telling him to rape? "The suspect doesn't need a guardian," said the judge, "he needs a girlfriend."

And while I'm on the subject of girlfriends, what about Admiral Richard Macke, who was forced to resign from the navy in 1995 for telling reporters that the three American service men who raped a twelve-year-old Japanese girl in Okinawa (seriously straining U.S.-Japanese relations) could have avoided the problem by hiring a prostitute? "I've said several times, for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl." But this "gaffe" (as it was referred to in both the New York Times and Washington Post) was just the latest in a series of incidents that suggest that the navy has made little headway in changing its attitude and behavior toward women since the Tailhook scandal in 1991, when scores of women were assaulted at a convention of naval aviators.

In the month that Macke was forced to resign, the movie Seven, with a rape-torture scene one Entertainment Weekly film reviewer remarked was "too horrible to describe," was number one at the box office. Showgirls, Leaving Las Vegas, and Strange Days, three films also released in 1995, have brutal rape scenes that only partially hide good old-fashioned sexploitation behind the aesthetic of new cinematic realism. (According to statistics compiled by New York-based Women's Action Alliance in 1993, one out of eight Hollywood movies depicts "a rape theme.")

And last but not least there are the implications of the remark made by the San Diego detective that some officers in the department thought of rape as "assault with a friendly weapon." They got half of it right at least. If two adult males had been raped instead of two females, I doubt these police officers would have employed this expression to describe the crime. Rape is "friendly," it would seem, only when female sex organs are involved.

Watching a movie rape scene does not, in my case, induce flashbacks or send me gagging to the theater bathroom. None I have seen come close to the horror of the real thing, and at least you can always cover your eyes in a movie. Rather scenes suggesting that rape is a "sexual act" remind me that, as a rape survivor, I may always have to carry a portion of blame for another's crime. Even if it is generally accepted that a woman who is raped wasn't "asking for it," how do others know that she didn't really like what she got?

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