by Steve Toltz
Eventually three detectives sidled in. One was nearly bald, his remaining hair slicked back with gel. He gave me a glass of water. I washed my face with it. One with shaggy eyebrows took a seat opposite me while the third man leaned against the wall. I angled myself to keep all three in view. They made sidelong glances at my emergency survival kit, which they’d brought back with them into the room, at the preposterous number of pills, the enema kits, etc. Their faces were calm, even apologetic. I felt their sympathy and waited as it crossed the border into pity. This new interrogation technique—good cop, better cop, best cop—thoroughly confounded me and I was reminded of my time in the garment business in India, of the genuine hospitality of con artists. Yet when they spoke, it was clear they were all blazing against me.
—Why do you go to brothels?
—For non-reproductive sex.
—Can’t you get a woman without paying for it?
—Not on short notice.
At that moment my phone beeped. I took it out of my pocket and saw two text messages from Liam. One said: Deny. The other: This could only happen to you. That familiar phrase friends and family had been amusedly plying me with for years now carried with it a force of intense dread; already surfeited with bad luck, I found myself bracing for an additional slice.
The balding detective slid across the table a photo of Jin, not an old photo but one taken earlier that evening. I recognized the negligee. Well, who wouldn’t look sad and fragile in that lighting?
—You probably can’t even have sex.
—Is that a question? I asked.
—No, said the detective with shaggy eyebrows. This is: You got a limp dick?
—Could you have fucked this woman? asked the third man. Or any woman?
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have to admit I’ve never understood the whole idea of masculinity. OK, guys competing and tackling and one-upping each other when vying for a particular woman or women is evolutionarily understandable, but men trying to outdo each other in pubs or street fights or locker rooms with nary a breast in sight is something I’ve always found weird and somewhat suspicious—admit it, it’s super-gay—yet here I was, these fuckers clearly trying to goad me, and maybe because the neurosurgeon’s warning that sexual intercourse might not be possible had made me disproportionately proud of my tenuous boudoir success, the overly macho posturing by the pantomime squad got the better of me. I thrust my finger at the photo of Jin, forgetting that a gentleman never tells.
—Yes, actually. I did fuck her. Twice.
—Are you sure?
—Yes I’m sure.
There was now a long pause and a frightening businesslike demeanor settled on all three faces at once.
—Aldo Benjamin, the detective said, you are under arrest on the charge of rape.
Wait, what? Rape?
Your Honor, I know what you’re thinking. Who in the history of rape has paid two hundred dollars for it? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know what you’re thinking: Aldo, you went to a legal establishment and procured the professional services of a sex worker, so how in the hell was this rape? Here’s how. Jin had been trafficked.
Yes, trafficked!
The madam was charged with one count of possessing a slave and of using the slave. Jin had been kept in debt bondage in the room at the end of the corridor, the padlocked and windowless room, where she lived out the horrors of sexual servitude. That sinister padlocked room!
Due to the ballooning sex industry in the Asia-Pacific region, the burgeoning sex market in Australia, and the increasing incidence of sex slavery, a human rights group had lobbied for a new law, enacted just thirty days previous; it was modeled after a Swedish law in which clients are liable to criminal prosecution. It was just my fucking luck to be saddled with the ignominy of being the very first case.
—Haven’t you heard about this law? Liam asked me afterward. It was in all the papers.
—It’s two thousand and something! I shouted, weeping. Who reads the papers?
XXX
The manslaughter trial’s start date was still pending, but the rape trial was fast-tracked. They wouldn’t combine them to reduce travel time. The judge (for the rape trial) looked like one of those old Eastern Bloc corrupt officials who used to commit suicide during press conferences. On Liam’s advice, I used a manual wheelchair so as not to let them see me “coast in on that electric number as if on a golden hovercraft while their own seats just sit there.” It was sage advice. Unlike the nice folks of my present jury, that jury already seemed alert for any scrap of evidence in my demeanor that showed me as a bad person; a mean-hearted cripple was almost as good to them as a black racist.
Liam chaperoned me through the process.
—Try not to look postcoital.
—What are these cameras?
—All criminal trials are live-streamed now.
—Who’s watching?
—Depends on the level of public interest. This one being a test case, a lot of eyes are on it.
And eyes there were. An open courtroom is the best place for a reunion. Anybody who knows you shows up, anybody you owe thousands of dollars to, or who wants to show their support, but the kind of support that will spice up their own anecdoteless lives, that will give them some kind of majestic travesty of justice to talk about on the way home.
The prosecutor told the court that Jin—her real name, incidentally; she didn’t even get a fantasy hooker one—was promised work as a nanny, then when she arrived in Australia, her passport was taken and she was told she had a forty-five-thousand-dollar debt that she would need to repay by sleeping with seven hundred men, often unprotected, sometimes fifteen to twenty a day, sixteen hours a day before being taken back to a locked room to sleep. I bit my lip, thinking of my own role in this horror story. It was easy to find the Korean madam and her husband disgusting, but after the prosecutor gave a general overview—twenty million slaves in the world now, 60 percent of them in the Asia-Pacific region, a thirty-two-billion-dollar industry—he said, Aldo Benjamin is a human rights abuser. He wondered aloud what made me evil. I wondered the same thing. This is a test case, he said, and it is up to you to send a message to others. As in all rape cases, the prosecutor went on to say, a rape kit was used that scraped the vagina for semen, and while the defense will assert that of the four traces of semen found, either inside Jin or in the discarded condoms discovered at the scene, none were the defendant’s, it was common, the prosecutor took great pains to point out, for men with spinal cord injuries to experience a retrograde ejaculation whereupon the semen returns into the bladder. That didn’t seem worth objecting to.
My character witnesses, Mimi and Stella and Liam and Morrell, took the stand and all said more or less the same thing, that I was kind and gentle and nonviolent, always helping people with their problems and offering insightful advice. To tell you the truth, I thought I sounded insufferable. The last witness was Gretel (Saffron) who told how I was sweet and tender and had fast become one of her favorite clients. I was grateful, but the obliterating gaze of juror number 7 during her testimony—as if he couldn’t believe he’d schlepped all the way over for this—put me in a black mood. Interestingly, I felt the jury hardened their hearts every time I winced in pain, my spasms all-damning witnesses for the prosecution. If ever there was a trial in which the entire jury wanted to rise in unison and break into a run, this would be it.
When it was my turn to testify, I had to position myself beside the witness stand; there was no ramp. I considered making a point of the lack of wheelchair access, but I didn’t think it would do me any good.
—Did you think that Jin looked unhappy? asked the prosecutor.
—Everybody looks unhappy to me.
—Did she look frightened?
—Yes, I admitted, but I thought she was frightened of me, and I discounted that fear because I did not consider myself frightening; in fact, no one in my entire life has ever feared incurring my wrath, in particular my sexual wr
ath, although, OK, like any man, from time to time I’ve stared at a woman on the street so brazenly she would cross her arms to obscure her cleavage or sling her arm around her boyfriend to send me a clear message, but that’s par for the course, and in this case, Jin’s fears were unfounded, and in addition I remember thinking how enjoyable was the prospect of watching her fear dissipate when she clocked my gentle, tender, and generous nature.
—Did you think she looked sad?
—Yes, I did, but I thought her sadness was for me, because I’m an irredeemably pathetic figure, not because she was a slave, a fact of which I was entirely ignorant.
The judge asked if I had anything further to add.
This was my moment. I looked over the courtroom at the pop-eyed, incensed, and vaguely inquisitive faces of friends and enemies and began by calling for a minute’s silence for my victim—who can refuse a minute’s silence in our society?—but that was just to buy myself time, being distracted as I was by the jarring realization that this scene had a striking resemblance to one of my actual nightmares, although even my subconscious hadn’t the temerity to go so far as to render me paralyzed at a rape trial.
I began by saying how in the crystal-clear hierarchy of the child/adult universe, anyone from the age of zero to about fourteen feels vulnerable to indiscriminate and unjust punishment, but once you’ve been an adult a decade or two, you no longer feel the “type” to get punished, in the same way as the chronically healthy don’t feel the “type” to get multiple sclerosis—murder raps and degenerative diseases fit exactly nobody’s self-image, and anyway, the fact that I was on trial was bizarre when one took into consideration the fact that it’d been thirty years since I intentionally broke the law: I photocopied money. I was twelve years old and it was before the ready availability of colored toner—I used crayons.
The jurors looked none too impressed by my opening remarks. I continued.
As to the particulars of this case, I explained, I felt conflicted. On the one hand the charge was absurd. And on the other hand it was perfectly reasonable. A young or middle-aged woman should have the right, not to sell her body, but to lease it on an hourly basis if she finds the rate acceptable, yet I believed it was clearly the brothel owner’s responsibility to ensure the legality of these women. Who was I, border protection? What was I supposed to do, ask for her passport?
The jurors’ deliberations were happening in real time on their indignant faces, as, I note, yours are also, ladies and gentlemen. Yet as now I must continue, so I did then.
I said that they, the jury, might be against prostitution in principle but under the law of our land prostitution in Australia in the early twenty-first century was legal and it was therefore not reasonable to expect a customer paying for lawful services to single-handedly regulate an industry or to do the job that a competent monitoring body should be doing. Where prostitution is legal, the burden should not be on the client, in the same way that when you purchase a car or flat-screen television—I regretted the analogy right at the beginning of the sentence—one has to trust the shopkeeper’s honesty. If you don’t like this idea, then criminalize prostitution, for it is simply unreasonable for the consumer to have to make that kind of split-second assessment. I was essentially arguing for a legislative change, rather than the specifics of my own case. A brothel client is, at worst, a predator who pays good money for his prey’s time, and who often falls inappropriately in love with his prey, I said, adding that of course I did not set out to break the law that did not in fact exist thirty days earlier, then I segued to the real reason that it was me specifically on the stand and not one of many thousands of other brothel-frequenting men across the country. Because bad luck is my pathology, I explained. Nothing ever fell into my lap other than cups of boiling tea. Me, who contracted septicemia from a nipple ring, hepatitis B from a tattooist’s needle, who thrice yearly bites down on tinfoil embedded in kebabs and reconstituted melted blocks of chocolate, who has never ducked under a barbed-wire fence without getting snagged or had a haircut that the hairdresser hasn’t had to personally apologize for. Not to mention who was unjustly accused of rape at seventeen while still a virgin, and is now on trial for raping a woman who, at the time, I was naively proud to have penetrated. All my life I’ve felt, I went on to say, as if I were in a boxing ring with my hands taped to my sides. Every punch is a free punch for my opponents. Raising or lowering my guard seems to make no sort of difference to my fortunes. The human I most relate to in all of history is Tsutomu Yamaguchi, I said, the poor sucker who was in Hiroshima on business when the atomic bomb fell and who returned to Nagasaki just in time for the second . . .
I couldn’t finish the thought. I had drifted off. Then it was all over, and over quickly. I heard the dreaded verdict: guilty. The judge’s voice like a stalled train jolting to life. I was sentenced to two years. I scanned the faces of the jury for an embarrassed smile.
—Aldo, in your top pocket! Mimi called out. In the pocket she had placed, that morning, two pills in case of the worst news. I took them immediately, thinking they were cyanide.
—Valium! she said.
—One day you will come out with a great gray Merlin of a beard and amazing abs, Stella called out.
—Or else in a box with shoelace marks still visible on your throat where they cut you down, Liam added.
—A miscarriage of poetic justice! Morrell shouted.
Stella raced over and wrapped her arms around me. I was taken away after that, wheeled out of the courtroom through a door to my other worst nightmare: prison.
You expect the brutality to start right away but they’re careful not to violate your rights all at once. The bailiff led me gently into the back of a windowless, wheelchair-accessible van with five other prisoners: two armed-robbers; a granny murderer; a taxi driver who’d raped six of his passengers over a long weekend and had been sentenced, in his words, to “four years with no vaginal scent”; and another man who’d been convicted of raping his wife, and who, the taxi driver said, “was so pussy-whipped, he couldn’t even rape outside of marriage.” This was already unbearable.
After a half-hour drive, the van halted and the door opened onto an abandoned-looking prison courtyard reminiscent of a library on Sunday. There I was given green overalls and blankets and sheets but no pillowcase. Voices were chanting, “Spoiled meat! Spoiled meat!” I wheeled myself down a corridor into my semi-dark cell where there was a metal bed and a seatless steel toilet and a cellmate who sat nursing more than a few animal fears. That was a good sign. He was afraid of me. His name was Patrick and he told me he was in for recruiting a child to carry out a criminal act; it sounded like there was a good story behind that, but he wouldn’t elaborate.
—Can we still vote? There’s an election coming up.
Patrick didn’t know.
—Hey, I called out, does anyone know if we can still vote? For some reason, that was very important to me at the time.
—No, the answer came back from another cell. I was devastated. We were voiceless again, like children.
Other than being free from the omnipresence of advertisers for the first time since infanthood, this next phase of my life was to be principally about violence. Random. Indiscriminate. Institutional. Sexual. Being disabled, the third-highest risk category after gay and transgendered, I’d always feared I would fall victim to the single most underreported crime in all three of our societies: hospital, regular, prison. Now it turned out that my old terror of random violence was dwarfed by my fear of systemic violence. Sure, nobody was going to mistake my body for a garden of earthly delights, but that didn’t make me unrape-able. And worse luck—I’d be at crotch height to everybody.
XXXI
Your Honor, in the miasma of sweaty feet, shit-smelling soap, and masses of uncircumcised penises fermenting in unwashed underpants, I got into countless he said/he said arguments, had my pain medication stolen, was rocketed down corridors with another paraplegic named Ted by old-time-y white su
premacists on gladiatorial afternoons, was gnashed on by the serial rapist Paul “Episiotomy” Williams, discovered I am genuinely claustrophobic and somewhat agoraphobic, a crowded prison being the worst of both hells, and was allowed—no, encouraged—to soil myself by guards who also, I noted, loved confiscating hearing aids from older inmates. And I was the beneficiary of endless lessons: A kind smile does not mitigate but aggravates violence; the enemy of my enemy is still my goddamn enemy; cruel and unusual punishments are seldom unusual . . .
The most important lesson, however: In lockup, you don’t go once more into the fray, the fray comes to you. Case in point. A bald man mouth-breathing at the door of our cell.
—Who are you?
—The skin is the largest organ in the body.
—Uh-oh.
In a flash, a group of about seven adult children of absent fathers crowded the cell, the hefty, blank-eyed types of criminals who make their victims dig their own graves, either to intensify the horror or for simple practical reasons. They wheeled me out of my cell and down the corridor and through a set of doors—unlocked by a winking guard—and into H division. Fuck me with a hadron collider. I knew exactly where we were going. When we got there, Elliot clambered down from his bunk and held his hands out as if warming them against a fire.
This is not how Elliot looked in Mimi’s photographs. He was bigger, more muscular, and now with a broken nose, missing teeth, scarified cheeks, jittery left eyelid, and veins pulsing in his temples. He was the whole package.
—What happened, Vesuvius? All plugged up? You bodiless snake. Welcome to the caves. Morrell has been fucking her for months and what have you done to stop him?
It was weird to hear that familiar voice pouring out of that toothless face.
—How the fuck do you know that?
—How do you think, genius?
It only now occurred to me there was nothing supernatural in his omniscience.
—You’ve got someone there, someone in the residence pretending to be an artist. Elliot lowered his head and peered up at me with a sick smile.
