The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Praise for The Other Side

  “In this brilliant memoir, Lacy M. Johnson offers us a guide to the impossible—how to reconstruct a past when the past itself is shattered, each memory broken into pieces, left rattling around inside us. Sometimes flashes of poetry are all that we can find in the wreckage; sometimes these flashes are all that can possibly save us, brought together for brief, burning instants, and then let go. The Other Side bristles with life and energy and to read it is to be transformed.”

  —NICK FLYNN, author of

  Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

  “Lacy M. Johnson’s powerfully moving and brilliantly structured memoir, The Other Side, asks, ‘How is it possible to reclaim the body after devastating violence?’ Her intense desire and demand for a life lived in the body is triumphant. Johnson’s strength not only to free her physical self but also to move through years of incapacitating fear by writing this book, is breathtaking: ‘I lift the chain from my neck, over my head, let it rattle to the floor.’”

  —KELLE GROOM, author of

  I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl

  Copyright © 2014 Lacy M. Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon

  and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Lacy M., 1978-

  The other side : a memoir / Lacy M. Johnson.

  pages cm

  eBook ISBN 978-1-935639-84-8

  1. Johnson, Lacy M., 1978- 2. Rape victims—United States—Biography. 3. Kidnapping victims—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  HV6561.J65 2014

  362.883092—dc23

  [B]

  2014006794

  First U.S. edition 2014

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  Excerpt of four lines from “Mystic” from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. © 1960, 65, 71, 81 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  www.tinhouse.com

  The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,

  The children leap in their cots.

  The sun blooms, it is a geranium.

  The heart has not stopped.

  Sylvia Plath, “Mystic”

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Notes

  Thank You

  [one]

  I CRASH THROUGH the screen door, arms flailing like two loose propellers, stumbling like a woman on fire: hair and clothes ablaze. Or I do not stumble. I make no noise at all as I open the door with one hand, holding a two-by-four above my head with the other. My feet and legs carry me forward, the rest of my body still, like a statue. Like a ninja. A cartoon.

  In the small gravel lot behind the fourplex, I find my car covered by a beige tarp—the elastic cinched between the bumper and the wheels. I wrestle it off and climb inside, coax my key into the ignition. The lizard key chain shakes like an actual trapped animal in my hand, ready to shed its tail and flee. Take a breath, I say. You’re not dead yet.

  Inching away from the building, I see the front screen door slapping in the wind against the outer wall. It’s too late to get out and close it. The tires spray gravel around the building’s unlit side and toward the street, where the streetlights strobe on and on and on along the deserted boulevard stretching between the highway and downtown, where the boys down Jäger shots, the girls down Jäger shots, all of them dry humping at the bar or on the dance floor or in line for the bathroom.

  I’ll never be one of them again.

  I cross the boulevard by stomping the gas pedal to the floor, fingers ratcheted blue-knuckle tight around the wheel, leaning so far forward my breath fogs the windshield from the inside: proof I’m still alive. Or my breath does not make fog. Does not leave my body, even. Not one nerve-taut muscle gives way as my headlights illuminate the narrow street, the empty parking stalls, the low beige brick buildings.

  When I realize I am not being followed I begin to cry and laugh and scream. Like bubbles. Like a peal. The rearview mirror shows my mascara running. Maybe I should apply a coat of lipstick? A patch of blood spreads where I have bitten my lower lip, the taste of a penny stolen from the kitchen jar.

  I park the car in front of the police station and run through the dark with my shoes in my hands, cross the cold tile floor—a checkerboard—and pound on the glass separating me from the two female dispatchers, a steel U-bolt still dangling from my wrist. Under the fluorescent lights, their skin flickers black and blue. They lean back in their chairs, hands folded over their soft round bellies, each pair of legs coming together like a V. Their black sweaters. Their blue polyester pants. Their faces turn toward me, their eyebrows raised in disbelief. The clock’s arms both point to eleven. They’re black. They’re blue.

  The stationmaster calls a detective out to meet me in the lobby. Tall and wide-shouldered, with brown hair and eyes, The Detective looks vaguely like my uncle: both have kind faces. But The Detective does not smile, does not give me a lung-crushing hug. He leads me into his office with his hand on his gun. Or it is not his office, but an office that is used by him tonight. There is a black rotary telephone with a black spiral cord pushed to the corner of a desk. The wood veneer comes up at the corners, exposing a layer of particleboard underneath. He shuffles in the drawer for a small pad of paper.

  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.

  The form itself is simple: my name, the police records I am requesting, the case number, the dollar amount I am willing to pay for copying fees. These fees can be waived if the request in some way serves the public interest. I was the victim in this case, I write on the form. I can think of no way in which this serves the public interest, but I would like to see the files anyway.

  A sergeant in the Public Relations Unit responds to my request within the week. After thirteen years the case remains open and The Sergeant needs to consult with the city legal advisor prior to making a decision, Since, you know, it involves a serious active case. Three weeks later, after speaking with the law department as well as the lead investigator, The Sergeant sends me a PDF file along with a polite offer of further assistance.

  At first I decide I won’t open it while I’m at home—not while there is laundry to be washed and folded, not while there is food to be cooked, and children to be bathed and fed. I’ll wait until my trip to upstate New York in early summer. But then I spend whole mornings distracted by possibilities. Is the cat alive or dead? After two days, when my children are at school an
d My Husband is out of town, I open the file, thinking I’ll look only a little bit. Just a little. Just a peek.

  The evidence file contains eighty-five pages of police reports, including an inventory of items collected from the crime scene: chain, brown envelope with handwritten notes, two leather belts tied together, and film neg[atives]. It does not describe whether there are images on those negatives. It does not describe the results of any laboratory tests, or the e-mails or correspondence I sent to or received from The Suspect, though they are mentioned. There are no facsimiles or transcripts of conversations I had with prosecutors or the police. The file does not contain copies of warrants, though it lists the complete set of charges filed on my behalf.

  The first half of the document reports the same events during the same time period on the same day, each report from the perspective of a different officer, each report in part relating the story I told to one officer or another. The writers do not reflect. They do not sympathize. They express no pity or outrage or disgust. Each report simply records my story, and yet it is not my story, though it is the same version of the story I would tell. Almost word for word. Like something I memorized long ago and can still perform by heart.

  And yet, as I read the evidence file, I see things I don’t remember. Like how, according to the police reports, it was The Female Officer, not The Detective, who came out to meet me at the station, and The Female Officer also drove me to the apartment I’d escaped, and then to the hospital, and then back to the station. But in my memory, this role is so clearly played by The Detective, the man who looks vaguely like my uncle.

  I try to remember my two palms pressed against the glass where the dispatchers sat, the locked beige door to my left. I remember it opening, and I try to see The Female Officer’s face instead of The Detective’s face. I try to remember her dark-blue uniform, every corner pressed and in its place, the black belt with its gold buckle, the gold buttons, every hair on her head tied back into a neat bun. I can see the long hallway behind her. I can see the little notebook. And the office. And the black telephone. The carpet in the hallway is beige, darker in the middle than where it meets the walls at the edges. But when I try to see The Female Officer instead of The Detective the whole image starts to collapse, and then there is neither a female officer nor a male detective opening the locked beige door. There is no opening the door.