The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  From the windows in the apartment I share with My Boyfriend I can see a brick wall, so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Between our windows and the brick wall, there is a shaft of light, a small alleyway that leads out to the street. There is only one window in our apartment that looks out toward that light, in a little alcove where we’ve put an armchair, a lamp, and an ashtray. On the days when I do not take classes or teach, this is where I work, my annotated copy of a postmodern Irish novel, or a stack of student papers, or poems from workshop spread out on my lap. My Boyfriend walks to work in the morning, and at noon he comes home for lunch, though we only lie down in bed together and nap. At night, I write poems while he paints, or replants his aquarium, or designs at his desk. If he reads one of my poems, he says things like, The image at the end reminds me of what Blavatsky says about the finite’s relationship to the infinite. And then he goes to pull a book off the shelf and shows me an illustration and then we are having a conversation about that.

  At night, I stay up long after he has fallen asleep beside me in the bed, his arm draped over my waist, listening to the voices coming through our window from the alleyway, the men and women, all drunk, stumbling out of the bar downstairs. Now a woman yells, You’re an asshole, a fucking asshole! Her voice growing hoarse with the force of every syllable. I remember that hoarseness, how it scratches from my throat into my chest, into my fingers and toes. I remember how The Man I Used to Live With stands above me, his red face contorted, the veins full to bursting in his forehead. He’s squeezing my face in his hand. Now the woman cries softly in the alleyway. The man calls her baby. Baby, he says. C’mon, baby. From this bed, where I am almost sleeping, it makes a kind of sense: this is why I could not love him the way he wanted to be loved.

  My sisters and I spend the holiday together, like usual: all of us on Christmas Eve at Mom’s house, all of us on Christmas Day at Dad’s. Mom’s house—the house she shared with my father, the house she got in the divorce—feels dark and empty this year, even with all of us here: all of the doorways closed or covered with blankets, the heat vents in my old bedroom closed, the floral-print couch pulled into the dining room off the kitchen. My sisters and I exchange questioning looks. It doesn’t usually look this way, I whisper to My Boyfriend as we sit down. I’m happy, Mom tells us over dinner—a pot each of chowder and chili—happier than I’ve ever been. She’s sewing more than ever. She’s taken a part-time job. She’s dating someone from church. My Boyfriend asks to see something she’s working on and she shoots him down with a look. Don’t expect me to get attached to you, she tells him, as my sisters and I file off to bed. I’ve learned nothing is permanent.

  Dad greets us at the door in a new sweater: pine-tree green. Fern-shoot green. A smile stretching from ear to ear. His New Wife emerges from the kitchen to hug us all, even My Boyfriend, though this is the first time they’ve met. In the Victorian house they’ve bought together, glass beads hang on strings from every window, casting prisms around the rooms. Dad insists we sit on the new gray corduroy couch: me, each of my two sisters, My Boyfriend. His New Wife pours glasses of wine. My grandmother arrives and we all sit down to dinner: spaghetti and meatballs, a loaf of crusty French bread, a salad of spring greens. This is not what I would consider holiday food, my grandmother says, in her way. She turns to My Boyfriend. Now tell me: What kind of man are you?

  Four years after the kidnapping I learn I’ve been accepted into a prestigious writing program in Texas for a PhD. My Boyfriend and I trade in both of our crappy cars for one that can pull all of our belongings in a U-Haul trailer. My Boyfriend finds work quickly in our new city. He drives the new car to work each day while I catch a ride to campus. In the evenings, my classmates invite us out to dinner, where we talk about semiotics or the ubiquity of ampersands in workshop lately, or the landscape as form in avant-garde poetics. At these dinners, My Boyfriend talks to the spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends of my classmates about more interesting things. They plan to make a band together called The Significant Others. None of us know how to play instruments. YET! As a present for his birthday, I arrange a behind-the-scenes tour at the downtown aquarium, where a short executive with shaved hands leads us through the rooms and rooms of filtration systems and lets us peer into the tops of giant glass tanks. In the pump room for a 150,000-gallon aquarium in the restaurant, the short executive with shaved hands introduces us to a scuba diver, who is preparing to jump in. It happens sometimes, the short executive says. Let’s say a couple is dining at the restaurant. He wants to propose. For a nominal fee, the scuba diver will jump in and hold up a sign: WILL YOU MARRY ME? The scuba diver nods, shows us the sign. The executive asks if we want to go down to the restaurant and see. I think, Is it us? Is he proposing to me? My Boyfriend holds open the door of the pump room, follows me down the stairs. The short executive with shaved hands leads us down into the dining room, where a man is already kneeling in front of a table. The woman is crying, nodding. People in the restaurant are clapping. My Boyfriend claps; he’s watching the man stand up. He looks at me. He takes my hand.

  He asks for nothing in return.

  Five years after the kidnapping, a friend from my writing program throws me a birthday party at her house. I buy a dress to celebrate all the things that are suddenly going so well. There is music and food and it seems like hundreds of people. All of my new friends are there, and My Boyfriend’s friends from work. At midnight, my friend brings a cake out with twenty-seven lit candles and everyone sings, just to me. It makes me so happy I could nearly explode. They ask me to toast. I say something a little silly, a little drunk, about how I am feeling so very grateful.

  As everyone raises their glasses, My Boyfriend interrupts, insisting he also has something to say. He says, I love you. I want to spend my life with you, and pulls a velvet box from his pocket. I am completely surprised, completely not expecting it, struck completely mute. I am crying, covering my mouth with my hand. I take him in my arms and say Yes yes yes.

  In the photos of our wedding, we both look radiant and happy. We gather at the park with our family and the friends we have made in this city. My parents stand beside me, Dad with His New Wife, Mom with the man she has married only weeks ago. Beside My Husband stand his father and sister and godparents and aunts. The vows we exchange are simple.

  I promise to treat you as my equal in all things.

  [ten]

  IN A VARIATION of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, we are instructed to imagine the steel chamber from the perspective of the cat. Except the cat has been replaced by a person, and the poison gas and radioactive trigger have been replaced with another life-terminating device—an assault rifle, let’s say. Every ten seconds, the weapon is either deployed, killing the person, or it makes an audible click and the person survives. Outside the chamber, those two outcomes—death and survival, the bullet wound and the sound of the empty chamber—exist in equal probability, creating a paradox as in the original experiment. Inside the chamber, the person might have been killed or not killed—click—but because the mind is bound to follow whatever path does not lead to death, and because it isn’t possible to experience having been killed, the person’s only possible experience is of having survived the experiment, regardless of the odds.

  Every few months, or years, or days, or some random and indeterminate amount of time, I enter his name into a search engine. I look for any news: an address, a phone number, a blog post, any indication of whether he is in this country or out of it, whether he is trying to find me or is content to let me go. At first I collected the information in a real, tangible manila file I kept in a drawer of my desk. Now it’s in a folder of bookmarks on my computer.

  I can open the folder and see that the first story about the kidnapping runs in the local city paper on July 7, 2000: two days after I escape. In the upper-left corner, there is a tiny, low-resolution photo of the accused. Unattractive, unassuming, he does not, even now, look to me like a rapist. But there, ab
ove the photo, the headline reads: GRAD STUDENT SOUGHT IN RAPE. The article, written by a female journalist on the local city paper’s staff, gets the facts only slightly wrong. She writes that the victim found her car outside covered by a tarp with the keys still inside. The keys were not in the car, but on a table in the apartment. I remember this because I spotted the key chain, a lizard, which My Good Friend had made for me a few nights earlier, stringing green and white plastic beads onto a length of clear plastic twine.

  For years I imagine the female journalist as elderly, as a sort of female journalist archetype, so hardened by the decades spent covering petty or disturbing small-town crimes that she can’t be bothered to get the facts exactly right. But when I enter her name into a search engine, I discover that she is not an elderly journalist, but a woman roughly my age, who had only recently graduated when she wrote the article. For some reason, this allows me to forgive her for the factual inaccuracies. I bookmark her website and add it to the folder on my computer.

  An article appearing in the Tuesday, July 11, 2000, issue of the same local city paper warns readers that the search for the man accused of abducting and sexually assaulting his former girlfriend has become an international pursuit. The article describes how, after tracking his credit card activity, detectives learned that The Suspect purchased an airline ticket to Mexico, and then another one to Venezuela, where he stayed for a time at a resort on the coast. He’s a very intelligent individual who’s scaring me, says a captain on the local police force. A professor from the Spanish department describes The Suspect as erratic and disorganized as a scholar, but affable, . . . a gifted, erratic dilettante. The professor asks not to be named. I read the article from the safety of the home I share with My Husband and our children, wondering why this professor could have possibly thought he, of all people, was at risk.

  Subsequent articles describe slim chances of extradition: under a provision of the recently revised Venezuelan constitution The Suspect’s dual citizenship with Venezuela and the United States protects him from extradition. It’s not clear, the captain says, when or whether The Suspect can be returned. The authority of the United States government to extradite in this case depends on interpretations of citizenship based on the laws of Venezuela, matters that can easily end up in foreign courts. It’s a very difficult and complicated area of law.

  One article in the university student paper describes the process of sending the warrants to Venezuela: Interpol notifies the Venezuelan government that one of its citizens is wanted on felony charges in the United States, but officials there may or may not arrest him and transport him to the US embassy. Even though a treaty has existed between the United States and Venezuela since 1922, the article explains, the new constitution under Chávez makes things a little more complicated.

  The article in the university student paper is written by a woman I will meet one night, after I have returned to my new apartment, after I have started taking medication, and have found a job at the university press, and have started fucking the man who will become My First Husband. My Good Friend and I have gone out drinking. We’re settling into a booth when she points to a woman across the bar. The friend of a friend of a friend. The woman sees us both, comes over to our table, sits down. Maybe she introduces herself as a journalist before putting her hand on my hand. I’ve been writing about what happened to you, she says in a near whisper, her tongue piercing clicking against the back of her teeth. Don’t worry—click—your story’s safe with me.

  According to a resume he has posted on a website for freelance translators, in the years between 2000 and 2007 he works a variety of editing, translating, and interpreting jobs, sometimes for large, international corporations. He spends time as an interpreter for the Venezuelan lower courts. He translates a Motorola cell phone instruction manual and its product description from English into Spanish. He edits several titles on conflict management for the University for Peace.

  During those same years I marry. I divorce. I marry again. I change addresses at least once every year. I give birth to a child. Less and less frequently I e-mail The Detective to ask about the case. Any changes? Any news?

  One Halloween, seven years after the kidnapping, an e-mail from him appears in my inbox. He has just been released from jail in Venezuela after a failed extradition attempt and wants me to finally and officially drop the charges in the United States. I hope you’ll consider my plea, he writes. And I would like to hear back from you even if it’s just to say that you’re sorry. Even if you decide not to respond to this message, I wish you all the best.

  I close my laptop screen and draw the blinds. I lock all the doors and turn off the television. I pull my daughter out of bed and call her father in a cold sweat. We’re hiding on the floor in the kitchen when he finally bursts through the front door, dressed as Clark Kent for a Halloween office party, his tie loosened and pulled to the side, his shirt half unbuttoned, the blue fabric of his Superman t-shirt visible underneath. I call The Detective, who now works as a lead investigator for the county’s prosecuting attorney. He wants me to respond to the e-mail, to try to bait him, to lure him back to the United States one last time.

  That night we trick-or-treat like regular people. In the photo, I’m dressed as a sheriff, looking like I’ve seen a ghost. Or I am a sheriff-ghost. We walk up and down the streets of our suburban neighborhood. My daughter keeps pulling her hand from my hand. I am holding her too tight, picking her up too often, trying too hard to rush her back home. All the while I’m looking and looking and looking over my shoulder.

  In the morning I write to The Detective to tell him I can’t do it. I can’t set the trap. I can’t be the bait. I have too much to lose. I remove my profile from all the social networking sites. I call all of my former employers and ask them to pull my bio down from their websites. It’s the only thing I can think to do.

  But somehow he’s the one who disappears. Maybe he’s been murdered or has changed his name. I can see that his ex-wife and half brothers are “friends” on Facebook, a fact that makes me both worry and hope. Maybe one of them knows where he is, whether he is still living, but I can’t bring myself to write to them.

  Each morning I look in the backseat of the car before I pull out of my driveway. I search the rearview mirror while driving my children to school. I scan the parking lot before unbuckling them from their seats.

  Back home, I sit at my desk and watch for him out my window. I do not leave the house after dark. I turn the lights off at bedtime and lie awake in fear that he will come into my house and kill me while I am sleeping.

  If I sleep, he brings a gun into my dreams.

  I used to have this wooden comb he bought for me on a beach in Mexico. A few yards up the beach, lobsters smoked over half-drum grills. The old woman came to our blanket, putting beautiful carved things in my hands: a horse, a bracelet, the comb. After I’d used it on my hair every night for years and years, the handle snapped off. And then I kept it in a drawer until I caught my daughter running it through her hair and finally threw it away.

  I still have coins from Belgium and Hungary and Spain. I think I have a few Danish kroner tucked into a book somewhere. I kept the watercolor paintings we bought from a street artist in Prague—they hang in the only hallway of my house—and a stein I stole from a Biergarten in Germany. I never wear the beautiful silk shawl from Spain, though I’ve kept it. I kept no fewer than thirty postcards I never wrote on or sent.

  I left behind the two skirts he bought for me in a market in Amsterdam. But I kept a strand of glass beads he bought from the same market, the same day, each orb an imperfect apology for the bruise on my face. An accident, he insisted. Or maybe he admitted he did not love me. Afterward, we slid into a series of low-slung booths to order hash from a menu and sink into a wordless haze, which sent us toward the narrow red-lit streets, toward those women who stand and kneel and bend to press against the glass. I envied them that glass, the explicit transaction, the lock on the door. What
was the word there for silence? Something about an attic room. A flowering tree: how the blossoms open and are lost instantly.

  In the transcript of the Venezuelan extradition trial, he testifies that he was arrested only by chance, for having mistakenly associated with a member of a drug cartel, that only after questioning him about his associate—whom he barely knows—did the police conduct a background search on him and find the charges: kidnapping, rape, forcible sodomy, felonious restraint. After he admits that the Interpol case exists, he explains to the court that they must understand that this is a ridiculous farce initiated by a bunch of hillbillies. He explains how it looks in the United States for an older man to be with a beautiful young girl, and to be Latin on top of that, in a place where to be Latin is to be black.

  After he explains that he lived with this young girl for years until she abruptly cut him off, he admits he did follow her, he did take over the use of her car, he did bring her against her will to an apartment where he asked her to apologize. I was affected. I wanted explanations. He tells the court that, after the girl finally did apologize, We cried together and had consensual relations, as couples do.

  He had to leave to run some errands, he tells the court, and admits tying the girl’s hands to the chair. When he returned, twenty minutes later, the police were already there. At that point he fled and decided to return to his own country, where he’s been living ever since, working at his job, paying his taxes like a good citizen.