by Rufi Thorpe
“Michael,” the woman detective said, “I’m Detective Carmine and this is Detective Brown.”
Even their names sounded made up.
“We were hoping you could tell us a little bit about what happened on the evening of Tuesday the seventh.”
“Was that the night I got beat up?”
She nodded.
“Well, I was working, and then I got off work and I was in the parking lot.”
“Going to your car?” the male detective asked.
“No, I don’t have a car, I was just lighting a cigarette and I was about to walk home, when I saw a group of guys, and they called me over.”
“Did you recognize any of them?” Detective Carmine asked. Her teeth were way too white. It was the little details that people forgot about, and it was forgivable on TV, but for someone to be trying to get away with it in real life was absurd. No detective would ever have teeth that white.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Not sure if you recognized them?”
“I just—I’m coming to this place in my life where I’m not sure I believe in punishment.”
The two detectives exchanged a look.
“I can’t talk about this right now,” I said.
“We just need you to tell us as much as you can,” Detective Carmine said in a soothing voice. “Unfortunately, when you were admitted they were under the impression that you had been in a car accident and so no one preserved your clothes for evidence, so we have no fibers, no hairs, no actual physical evidence of any kind. Do you have any idea why someone would want to hurt you?”
“Well, because I’m gay,” I said. “Which would make it a hate crime. Which is, can you see why I am hesitant to just accuse people of a hate crime?”
“That’s something for their lawyers to worry about,” Detective Brown said.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want those boys to be punished. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe they were bad. I was disgusted by them. The look on their faces, the way they had laughed at me as they did it. But I was confused about whether or not to say Jason was among them. And it didn’t seem fair to name the others if I was going to refuse to name him. I remembered the nurse saying that my medical expenses would be covered so long as I cooperated with the police investigation, and I thought: They are trying to extort me!
“I just need to think about it a little bit more,” I said. “Would that be all right?”
“In an investigation like this,” Detective Carmine said, “it can muddy the waters. You don’t want a defense attorney saying, look, he wasn’t even sure he knew who attacked him, how can you know it was my client? If you won’t cooperate with the investigation, then I’m going to be honest with you, it will be dropped. Most likely it will be dropped.”
“Drop it, then,” I said. I don’t know why I was so angry, but I was furious. I felt that these detectives were questioning me in the wrong way, and I badly wanted them to behave differently. I wanted someone to say how sorry they were that this had happened to me, to ask me how I was doing, to make sure I knew what was real and what wasn’t, to listen to my thoughts and feelings and fears without rushing me or telling me I was wrong. You weren’t supposed to threaten a victim that unless he talked, he’d owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. They were threatening me, even in the way they stood there. Wasn’t I the victim? Weren’t you supposed to at least be nice to the victim?
I thought about Bunny that day at the wonderful house on Oak Street. “I don’t want to be good anymore,” she had said. “I think it’s a rigged game.”
“How about this, we’ll go downstairs, we’ll get a coffee, we’ll come back up. Would that work for you?” Detective Carmine said, and Detective Brown rolled his eyes as hard as any teen girl ever has.
“Maybe we should come back some other time and we can bring a social worker,” Detective Brown said softly to Carmine. “ ’Cause we still need to get out to Santa Monica to talk to that witness. I’m just saying, there’s gonna be traffic.”
“We’ll be right back,” Detective Carmine said. “We’re just going to get a coffee, you can think about that night, and when your head is clear we’ll be back and maybe you can give us some idea of what happened. Because this isn’t right. You don’t need to worry about punishment, you don’t need to worry about hate crimes, or what their lawyer is going to say or do or how they will be sentenced. All you have to do is tell us what you remember, okay? Nothing about that could be wrong. Okay?”
I nodded, and they left, and I waited and waited for them to come back but they never did.
* * *
—
I was moved to a regular room later that day, and they also removed my catheter. “Some blood in your urine is par for the course at this point,” the nurse said. “Just let us know if you see big chunks.”
After that, I peed with my eyes closed, terrified of seeing anything even remotely like that.
When they made me get up and walk for the first time, I understood how bad it was. My abdomen was so full of fluid that I felt like I was wearing a fat suit. My feet and ankles were swollen to the size of pug dogs, and when I stood, it felt like my ankle skin was going to snap and water would just gush out of me. I had thought I was dying so many times during my hallucinations, but nothing was as horrifying as understanding that now I would be living, and that it would hurt this badly. It wasn’t even really the pain, it was the shame of it, the humiliation of the flesh, the sense that my body was disgusting.
Other than that, I liked my new room, which I shared with a darling old chap named Scottie. Scottie was there for pneumonia, but he was getting better now, and he let me put on The Golden Girls and laughed at some of the jokes. We both got excited when they brought pudding. I have always loved, and felt a deep affinity for, the elderly. People always go on about babies, but if I were to give birth to something, I would want it to be an eighty-year-old woman who loved to play bridge.
I began to be afraid of being released. As much as I had been unwilling, or even weirdly unable, to report Jason, I could not imagine continuing to live in the same house as him. I even felt like I remembered a conversation with Aunt Deedee in which she said I would have to move out, but I could not tell if that had been a dream or not. I wasn’t sure when anyone had said they would visit me again either, but I knew it had been at least forty-eight hours since I had seen my mother or Aunt Deedee. Everything before that was in a kind of timeless miasma. I wasn’t even sure when Bunny was coming back. For the first time, I wondered where my cell phone was, but there was no one to ask.
Ann Marie did not come to my new room, and I began to accept that Bunny was right, and that she was dead. For some reason the physicality of death, the mortification of the flesh, was very real to me, and whenever I would think of her I would viscerally imagine her corpse, and I often could not make these fantasies end and would find myself hyperventilating and nauseated. Ann Marie was dead, and Bunny had killed her. That was a fact.
But Ann Marie’s corpse also felt like some kind of puzzle I was trying to solve. What did the inside of a person have to do with the outside? And were we all the same inside? Were our interior psychic organs all identical in the same way we each possessed a stomach and a heart and a spleen? Psychology seemed to be predicated on this assumption, that the psychology of one person would be comparable to the psychology of another. But what if it wasn’t? What if there were no organs of the mind at all? And what if, in our rush to think of the inside of a person as a corollary to the body, we misnamed ourselves? And what if in that misnaming, we turned ourselves into something unspoken and unspeakable?
All the things you couldn’t say! It seemed to me there were so many. And how were you supposed to get anything sorted if you couldn’t talk about it? Wasn’t language our best hope and our last stop before murder?
Bunny came sometime that night. I didn’t know the time, but it was definitely dark outside my window and Scottie was asleep and snoring sweetly.
“You look so much better!” Bunny cooed as she sat down, scooting the chair up closer to my bed.
“Oh, thank you, darling,” I said. “Being beaten almost to death does wonders for the skin.” I fanned my face so she could examine my pores.
“Oh, oh, oh, you are back! You are fucking back!” she cried, a little too loudly.
“Don’t wake Scottie,” I said, “he’s had a very long day. First, a Golden Girls marathon, and then a Designing Women marathon. We are exhausted, honey.”
“Has the hospital made you gayer?” Bunny asked.
“Perhaps! Perhaps! Maybe I’m just less inhibited because of the vvvvunderful drrrrugssss.”
“Whatever it is, I like it.”
“They say I could be released as soon as Thursday,” I said.
“That’s great.”
“But I can’t go home. Where the fuck am I gonna go?”
“Why can’t you go home?”
“Ugh, because Jason.”
“The farting?”
“No. He’s much more hostile these days.”
“He is?”
And suddenly I was crying. I covered my eyes with my hands, trying to wipe away the tears, but I could tell I was not going to recover and this was going to become a serious crying jag. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“Oh, Mikey,” Bunny said, and climbed up into my bed. I had to scoot over painfully to make room for her, but her body was so big and warm and safe.
“Tell Auntie Bunny,” she said, and kissed my ear, my cheek, my hair.
“Well, you know how it happened?” I asked.
“No, I mean, I know you were beat up, but when I asked you before you said you couldn’t remember it.”
“Oh, I can remember it,” I said.
“Who was it?” Bunny asked, her voice so cold and serious I worried she would go out and murder whoever I said.
“Ann Marie’s boyfriend, Tyler, and Jonah Anderson, and Riley Masterson, do you know him?”
She nodded. She knew them all.
“And then, well, I think Jason was there.”
“You think?”
“I don’t have a clear visual memory of his face, only his voice and his laugh, and he only came halfway through and by then I was really out of it. But they were debating whether or not to pee on me, and—”
“To pee on you?” Her voice was rippling with hate.
“They didn’t, though,” I said. “They decided not to.” I tried to rearrange my hands on my stomach in a way that was more comfortable for my IV, and I felt like a prim old woman.
“Who else?” she asked.
“Bunny, you can’t tell anyone,” I said. “You can’t go out and beat them up. You have to promise. I’m telling this only to you. This information exists only within the sacred oasis of our friendship. I didn’t even tell the cops.”
“Why on earth would you not tell the police?”
I sighed. “I probably will if they ever come back; I just hadn’t decided what to tell them about Jason. I can’t—I can’t guarantee he was there. I can’t promise that my brain, during the horror of it all, didn’t just insert him.”
“So tell them that—tell them you’re not sure, but you think you remember him.”
I don’t know why that wasn’t the answer I wanted. “I don’t like police,” I said. “I don’t like lawyers and courtrooms. I don’t want those boys to go to prison! Prison would be the worst thing in the world for them. But if they never get caught and it’s this horrible guilty secret they have for their whole lives that just, like, festers—I mean, I can just see that being better.”
“They deserve to be punished,” Bunny said.
“But prison isn’t punishment,” I said. “Look, the first weekend my mom was out of prison, you know what she did?”
“What?”
“She picked up me and Gabby and she took us to Target and she had us shove gift cards to Outback Steakhouse down my little sister’s panties and then took us out to lunch there and explained how she needed us to help her panhandle for twenty bucks so she could buy some heroin to hide inside the ad card of a magazine, then seal it up in mailing plastic, and return-to-sender to a friend of hers on the inside.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s like this whole scam—they don’t search prison mail if it’s from a corporate business, right? Like one of those magazines that is sealed in plastic? So her friend had given her a magazine addressed to her in the prison—look, none of this matters, suffice it to say that we spent the first weekend back with our mother on, like, a criminal scavenger hunt.”
“I don’t understand how this connects,” Bunny said, nuzzling her head into the crook of my neck.
“Prison will not make them better people. Prison will make them worse people. No one should go to prison unless you just need them to never be with regular people again. Like, whoops, you’re a terrible person, never coming back here, buh-bye. For everyone else, all prison does is make things worse.”
“Okay,” Bunny said.
“Okay?”
“I just, I see what you mean,” she said.
“And maybe justice needs to be made manifest on earth, I can see the human impulse to try to make the world look like it should, where bad people are punished and good people succeed, but, like, sometimes it seems very weird and childish to me.”
“I don’t see how it’s childish.”
“I just mean, what you remember and what I remember—they will never be the same. Trying to re-create what happened and arrive at a definitive assignation of fault is so simplistic and idealistic that it seems like playing pretend. Like, sure, this person is ‘guilty.’ This person is ‘innocent.’ Isn’t it weird?”
“What about DNA evidence, video cam footage. I mean, maybe our ways of knowing are imperfect, but if you add together everything we do know, you can arrive at something pretty close. I mean really pretty close.”
“I get it, I do,” I said, “I just—I just have no feeling for it. I’m not necessarily arguing it can’t be done, I just personally, as a victim—it will do nothing for me and how I recover from this to see those boys charged and then a trial and all of that.”
“What do you think would help you?”
“Well.” I licked my lips. I really didn’t know. “I mean, first of all, I would love to never see any of them again so long as I live.”
“That’s why you should have them arrested!”
“But that’s the other thing, Bunny, who do you think everyone is going to hate? Them for attacking me, or me for jeopardizing their ‘bright futures’?”
“No one is going to hate you, Michael,” she said.
“Well,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.”
* * *
—
When Detectives Brown and Carmine returned the following day, they were very obviously real detectives. I was in the middle of eating an impossibly delicious salad. Really it was just iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing, but the cold, sweet way the leaves hissed open between my molars was so life-giving I felt I would never want to eat anything else ever again. Scottie had been released earlier that morning and I was a little sad. His daughter, a fat, jolly woman, had come to get him, and Scottie had introduced us and had his wheelchair pushed up close to my bed so that he could “get a look at” me.
“You are a brave young man,” he said to me. “You are considerate and kind and strong and brave and I just marvel that I’ve had a chance to meet you.”
I had never had anyone say words quite like that to me, and it was surprisingly painful. My eyes stung. I wondered if he would feel that way if he knew I was gay.
“I w
ish my grandson would grow up to be a young man like you. He’s only four now, but I hope someday he will be like you.” He reached up his gentle hand to pat my bed.
“Scottie, thank you—for being a friend!”
And then we both burst into song: “Traveled down a road and back again! Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidante! Thank you for being a friend!”
I could remember being eight years old, during the worst of it between my mother and father. I always thought of those years as the “Yellow Apartment Years” because we had moved into this extremely depressing complex that was painted a violent shade of marigold. And The Golden Girls would come on, two back-to-back episodes, on the Lifetime network, right when I got off school. Gabby and I would eat tortillas I microwaved with ketchup and Kraft Singles inside, and watch The Golden Girls, arguing about who was our favorite. She loved Blanche, but I loved Sophia. For her meanness. She didn’t seem to need any of the others. She was complete in herself.
“Do you think you could tell us any more about that night?” Detective Carmine asked.
“Right,” I said, snapping back into the present. And then I told them. It would have taken too much strange effort to refuse to tell them. And I did not wish to owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills in case I couldn’t get into Medi-Cal. That wasn’t justice, not justice for me. I did not, however, mention that I thought I had heard Jason’s voice. I had decided that his voice had been a hallucination, something I made up, possibly even after the fact.
“But,” I said, “I don’t want to press charges.”
“That’s something that happens on TV,” Detective Brown said. “You don’t press charges, the DA does, and it all depends on whether there is sufficient evidence to prosecute.”
