The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  Fuentes explained that in this position, Kagan could not support her weight, but rather was wedged in between Stewart’s pelvis and Hyde’s legs, with one of Kagan’s arms hanging limply at her side.

  Fuentes noted Kagan’s movement in this position was the result of Hyde thrusting, and when Stewart no longer held her, Kagan slid off the couch.

  She hit her face on the couch, taking no defensive action. Fuentes pointed out that when Kagan raised her head, it flopped back down, indicating that she could not sustain movement.

  Fuentes opined that Kagan’s “rag doll” movements—limp limbs and flaccid muscles—objectively signaled her unconsciousness.

  When Kagan was moved into position to orally copulate with Stewart, who was standing with his pants down trying to guide Kagan’s mouth onto his erect penis, she fell onto his penis, provoking a gag reflex. Kagan moved her arm to her face, which Fuentes explained represented purposeful action accompanying the natural gag reflex to a noxious stimulus.

  Fuentes said that Kagan’s condition prevented her from understanding verbal communication.

  Following a pause in the recording, the videotape resumed with Kagan on the pool table and Kent Nixon penetrating Kagan’s vagina with his hand, and then Stewart penetrating her vaginally with his penis before ejaculating on her stomach.

  Fuentes pointed out that while Stewart was on top of Kagan, she remained passive and unresponsive, lowering her hand toward her pubis in a similar way to her earlier gag reflex, but that she was unable to sustain the movement because of the level of her intoxication.

  Fuentes said that Kagan’s lack of movement for over two minutes despite the penetration demonstrated Kagan’s “significant level of sedation and intoxication.”

  The next scene depicted Nixon penetrating Kagan’s vagina with a pool cue. Fuentes explained that although this constituted significant stimulation, Kagan’s only reaction was to flex her right leg slightly, further demonstrating her severe intoxication.

  Fuentes also noted that Kagan registered no response when the boys penetrated her with their fingers. When Stewart pinched her nipples, she reacted by moving both arms toward her chest, in response to a noxious stimulus.

  At this point in the videotape, Hyde vaginally penetrated her with the pool cue.

  Fuentes described how Kagan made a “nonpurposeful” roll when penetrated, which he described as merely a physical response to the thrust of the pool cue.

  Kagan was then repositioned facedown on the pool table and Hyde used the pool cue to penetrate her anus.

  After another gap in the videotape, the recording resumed with Kagan being slapped hard on the buttocks. Stewart then used the pool cue to penetrate Kagan again, this time vaginally.

  Toward the end of the videotape, Fuentes drew attention to what he believed was Kagan’s incontinence on the pool table.

  Fuentes concluded, “It is obvious to anybody that she is not aware of her environment here. You don’t have to be an expert to understand that when a person appears to be asleep or sedated so significantly that he or she looks like they are behaviorally asleep, they are not responsive to their environment, and they don’t know what’s going on around them. It’s not rocket science.”

  DEFENSE:

  Dr. Harold Fisker, a certified neurologist, described Kagan’s movements in the videotape as responsive, demonstrating conscious, learned behavior.

  Fisker explained that there are five different levels of consciousness, ranging from alert, which Fisker described as normal, to comatose, at the other end of the spectrum, which he described as totally unresponsive.

  Based on his observations, Fisker described Kagan’s level of consciousness on the videotape as “obtundation,” which means a person retains the ability to function, albeit with impairment.

  Fisker explained that if one asks an obtunded person a question, such as a math equation, a delay may occur, but with the proper stimulation, the person can respond appropriately.

  According to Fisker, an obtunded person maintains conscious control of their movement and discernment. Fisker explained that an obtunded person would have the ability to refuse to consent to the activities depicted in the videotape.

  Explaining oral copulation as a learned behavior, Fisker concluded that the video segments of Kagan orally copulating with Stewart demonstrated conscious thought and purposeful movement.

  Similarly, Fisker explained that relaxing the sphincter muscle is also a learned response, so that when Hyde entered Kagan’s anus with the pool cue, he could do so only because Kagan consciously relaxed her sphincter muscle, allowing for vaginal and anal penetration.

  Fisker also explained that when the “liquid escaped” from Kagan’s body, Kagan’s movement of her leg away from the liquid indicated voluntary control.

  Similarly, Fisker inferred that the liquid stopped escaping when Kagan chose to stop it.

  Fisker stated that unless a person overrides the naturally contracted sphincter muscle, it would be impossible to insert a pool cue into a person’s anus without causing injury.

  Fisker stated that the absence of injury to Kagan’s anal canal supported the conclusion that when Hyde inserted the stick into Kagan’s anus, she was cooperative and aware of what was happening.

  Dr. Ralph Hoffer, a colleague of Fisker’s, offered another theory, stating that Kagan’s obviously diminished consciousness might have been self-induced because of her post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Kagan has low self-esteem and she’s morally conflicted, which can cause acute situational distress.

  Hyde, Stewart, and Nixon, he stated, could not be guilty of rape by intoxication if Kagan had voluntarily willed herself into a coma.

  I SHUT THE file, closed my eyes, and sat there for a long time, thinking about what I’d read. How much were Fisker and Hoffer being paid by my dad to come up with this defense? (Quite a bit, as it turned out.)

  I remembered what I’d seen on the video camera, and hearing Kevin as he tries to get a blow job, saying to Gabe, who’s having sex with Tove from behind, “Yes! Right there! Right there! Keep her with the fucking lips. You’re making her eat my fucking dick off, dude. Come on! Fuck that shit!”

  A close-up of Gabe’s face and chest as he says to Kevin, “Let’s switch up now.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, let’s sit her down.”

  I remembered Gabe grabbing Tove’s hair to keep her head from wobbling. He lets go, and her head snaps back, and then she falls face-first onto the couch.

  “You done?” says Kent.

  Gabe asks, “Do you want me to take your spot now?”

  After the couch scene, Tove’s on the pool table, her head lying on the hard edge, her eyes closed.

  She looks asleep while Kevin fucks her. The roving camera shows no facial expression, and her arms flop.

  Kevin comes on her stomach, and then wipes his penis with her bra and tosses it to the floor.

  Gripping my head in my hands, trying to shake the images and not wanting to remember the pool cue, I didn’t hear someone come into the office.

  “Even,” the voice said. “Even, are you okay?”

  I turned in my chair to see Gabe holding a bottle of Coors loosely in his fingertips.

  An awful silence, and then he said, “You look really pale.” He smiled.

  “Oh, sure,” I heard myself say. “I’m fine.”

  He tipped the bottle and took a long, gurgling pull. Done, he said, “What’s that?” gesturing with his empty bottle toward the file.

  “Nothing,” I said, but he was already moving toward it.

  “Were you reading this?” he asked, scanning the content.

  I explained that I’d glanced at it.

  An ominous silence descended.

  Then he shut the file and said, “I remember it different.”

  Too stunned to ask what he remembered, I said nothing, but he continued, “She got on the pool table by herself, and her eyes were open at times. Sh
e had to know.”

  “Gabe,” I said, “this is bad.”

  “I know,” he said. “I regret what happened, the whole thing, believe me. We were all so fucked up. It just got out of control.” He paused, and then he added, “I’m the one that stopped it, when I saw her peeing on the pool table.”

  My heart thumped wildly. “You want a medal?” I said.

  To my surprise, he laughed.

  “Is it because you hate Mom,” I said, “and resent having to take care of her, especially right after the divorce and when I moved out?”

  “You think I hate Mom?”

  I waited.

  “I don’t hate Mom, Even. I don’t hate women, if that’s what you think. I don’t think about it that much.”

  After a pause, he continued, “If you’re going to go that route, I’d say it’s more about Dad—about wanting to punish him, some sort of crazy, destructive thing.”

  “What happened with that babysitter?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That time, in the bathroom, when you came out with him, something happened.”

  “You think,” he said, “that because I was forced to suck some babysitter’s cock, that’s what makes me a monster? Is that what you tell yourself?”

  I had trouble looking at him. “I’m trying to understand,” I said. “What’d she ever do to you to deserve that?”

  “You act like you know her,” he said

  I didn’t answer.

  “Would it make you feel better,” he asked, “if I told you that it’s not really about her, and it never was?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t really understand it,” he said, “but it’s like I was showing off for them—for Kent and Kevin—and they were showing off for me, and it got super-crazy, like some tribal, weird thing that got out of control, but I didn’t mean to hurt her, or anyone. I don’t know.” His voice got quiet. “Believe me, I’m sorry. It just got out of hand. I’m really sorry for what this has done to everyone. All of the money Dad has to shell out for my defense. Everything.”

  “Are you sorry for what you did?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  The fact that he’d opened up to me was more than I’d expected. In the past, I’d concealed certain feelings and concerns from him—judgments—based on a dynamic between us that seemed natural and important to maintain. I hadn’t wanted him to believe that I was ashamed of him. I’d wanted to keep him positioned above me, as the older brother, where he belonged. Now I couldn’t anymore.

  He noticed something of this revelation in my face, because he said, “All I want—all I’ve ever wanted—is to be a good person,” and when I didn’t respond, he sat on the floor and his hands went to his face.

  I left the room, wondering how much of his tears came from self-pity. Like our mom, he could be hugely dramatic. I no longer trusted him. But that didn’t mean I didn’t love him.

  24.

  THE HOLIDAYS PASSED in a blur, and then a few weekends after New Year’s, Mike and I went to a party at a junior’s house while her parents vacationed in Costa Rica. A Christian who was on the dance team, Kathleen Duren was blond, tan, skinny, with near-perfect tennis ball–sized breasts, and everyone thought she was hot. She also had a manic neediness and seemed to be constantly performing—her walk, talk, eye rolls. She made me nervous. After he graduated, Mike ended up dating Kathleen for about six months of torment and confusion, until she broke his heart. I Googled her out of curiosity the other day: She calls herself a performance artist and poetess and posts titillating naked selfies—glitter and letters from the alphabet and paper money stuck on her body—on her blog, called Women Objects along with simplistic, feminist-minded poetry (“she loves her cum and draws pictures on the mirror with it”), all in the name of art and feminism. Within a few minutes, I understood that what she really desires is art’s perverted cousin, attention.

  THAT NIGHT AT Kathleen’s party, her friend shouted at me over the music and noise, telling me, between hits on a joint, about how she became a vegetarian: “It started after I saw Babe. I love that movie. ‘That’ll do, pig,’ the guy says. ‘That’ll do.’ Oh, my god! Forget it! I can’t eat pig after that.”

  She took a long inhale from her joint—her eyes widening—and then passed it to me. After her exhale, she continued, “Then I started thinking about how things that I ate had eyeballs and hearts, and parents and faces and souls, and I got really freaked out.”

  I don’t remember her name. Tall, blond, skinny, and also a member of the dance team. Though technically not as hot as Kathleen (slight buck teeth), she had an earnestness that appealed to me.

  I hadn’t been with a girl in a long time and was ready to try, seeking the pleasure and distraction of an inconsequential hookup.

  Though I ate meat, I nodded in solidarity, taking shallow, superficial hits from her joint to be polite.

  Someone tapped my back.

  I tried to ignore it but then the tapping became a far more forceful hand on my shoulder.

  The media had begun feeding on the case—calling the Ks and Gabe the Hyde Three—and I became paranoid that someone might ask me about it. So far, besides the occasional stares, I’d been left alone.

  Annoyed at the interruption, and worried that it might be someone confronting me, I turned, surprised to see Sara’s pot-dealing boyfriend, Joe, wearing his cowboy hat, his face a mess: black eyes, bandaged nose, split bottom lip with a track of black stitches poking out like insect legs.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “What happened?”

  He gave me a grimacing grin that looked like it hurt. “Fuck if I know,” he said. He had to lean forward and talk in my ear because of the noise, his boozy nicotine breath tickling my skin.

  “Minding my own business,” he said, “walking to my car in the 7-Eleven parking lot, and I got jumped. A big motherfucker. Starts pounding me into the street, right next to my car. Kicked my stomach, bruised my ribs.”

  He paused, leaned back, and gave me a strange, knowing stare. Then he came forward to my ear and said, “I said to him, ‘Take my money,’ and I tried to give him my wallet, ‘Take my watch,’ but he didn’t want that. He just wanted to fuck me up.

  “After he beat the shit out of me—I’m not kidding, man, he beat the shit out of me, pounded me into the ground—the dude spits in my face and says, ‘That’s what you get, rat.’ Dude called me a rat. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a rat.”

  I glanced back, worried that the vegetarian, pot-smoking blond might be listening, but she had already struck up a conversation with someone else. I watched her for a second as she leaned forward and laughed, touching the other guy’s arm, and then I turned back to Joe.

  “Jesus,” I said, “I’m sorry,” and I was, knowing that he possibly got the beating meant for me.

  But he couldn’t hear me, and took my elbow, guiding me to an alcove near the dining room that was less noisy.

  I repeated my apology.

  He gave me his hurt-looking grimace-smile and said, “Yeah, man, it was bad.” A brief pause, and then he said, “I’ve got to get out of here. I’m going to leave soon.” Dead serious, he gripped my forearm. For a confused second, I didn’t understand, thinking that he was making way too big a deal out of leaving the party. But then he said, “I’ve got a cousin and some family in Canada, and a friend in Mexico also says that I can crash with him. I’m not sure where I’m going. But I’m leaving. It’s bad, bad. They’re coming after me. Got pulled over the other day for going sixteen miles per hour in a fifteen-mile-per-hour zone, and the police officer hands me a ticket, says that I was going thirty-five, and he says to me, ‘Be careful, the law doesn’t look kindly on heroin dealers.’”

  He let out a long, distressed sigh. “You and me both know,” he said, “that I deal weed, maybe a few pills. I’ve got to pay the bills like everyone else.”

  A small group of people were sitting in a circle on the tile floor doi
ng whip-its in the kitchen, and one of them shrieked with laughter. We waited for the noise to die down.

  “But I’ve never sold heroin or crystal meth or crack,” he continued. “I won’t touch that stuff, won’t sell it. God, no. Call it principles, I don’t give a fuck. A little cocaine, some speed, maybe once or twice and then I stopped, but I never sold that other shit, ever, and I won’t. But this cop’s letting me know that he doesn’t care. They can nail me for anything, and I’ve got priors, for loosey-goosey stuff, a shoplifting, a public intoxication from riding my bike fucked up on the boardwalk.”

  “They can’t do that,” I said stupidly.

  To my surprise, he took my hands in his own. “I can’t go to jail,” he said. “You need to do something for me.”

  I felt sick and rather hot—and weird, to be holding hands with him. “What?” I asked.

  “Sara,” he said, looking at me, his voice firm. He clutched my hands tight and pulled. “Don’t let them fuck with her. Don’t let them hurt her.”

  In a stupor, I nodded.

  He released my hands and let out a bark-like laugh. “Fucking A,” he said. “Fucking A! Everything’s going to be all right!”

  “Did she tell you?” I asked.

  Immediately, his disposition changed, as if I’d slapped him. He stared at me, incredulous.

  “Do you know what happened?” I persisted. “Did she tell you?” In my defense, I hadn’t told anyone besides Mike about the video camera and was anxious to have a shared moment. Besides, I was pretty sure Joe already knew.

  He took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair. It frightened me to see that his hand trembled. “Shut up,” he said quietly. “Don’t be a dumb shit.” He shook his head. “You fucking dumb ass,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He nodded, still chagrined, and put his hat back on. He could barely look at me. “How’re you going to help her,” he said, “if you can’t keep your fucking mouth shut?”