The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

Other times it takes only one glass of wine and I’m spilling the beans to near strangers. Or it doesn’t take wine. Maybe it’s ten in the morning. A new friend tells me a secret. I tell mine. It’s usually the same reaction: first there’s shock, a hand over the mouth or to the chest, always I’m so sorry.

  I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m sorry I keep telling this story.

  Here is the shortest version: for five hours on July 5, 2000, I was held prisoner in a soundproof room in a basement apartment rented for the sole purpose of raping and killing me.

  I could also say I lived with my kidnapper for two and a half years, and during all the time we lived together he didn’t call it rape but fucking. When I finally moved out, he thought it would take only a few days of good, hard fucking to convince me to come home. If I refused, he planned to shoot me in the cunt and then the head.

  His words, not mine.

  I’m afraid the story isn’t finished happening.

  Sometimes I think there is no entirely true story I could tell. Because there are some things I just don’t know, and other things I just can’t say. Which is not a failure of memory but of language.

  If people ask what my book is about I do not say it is about the time I was kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with. That level of honesty borders on rude. It is against the rules of polite society to admit having been raped to a near stranger. I change the subject. I point to the sky and say, Oh look, a flock of turtles! Or I ask the near stranger whether he thinks the housing market has finally turned around. Should I buy stock now or wait until closer to retirement? This is usually enough to get him off the scent.

  To my acquaintances I say I’m writing about violence and memory and the body. Or I say it’s about violence and desire. I say I’m writing about a traumatic event in my past. Most people understand this as code for Think long and hard before asking more questions about this. Together we observe half a moment of silence before my acquaintance cocks his head back the slightest bit and opens his mouth to say, Ah . . . I see.

  In the story I have, I am always escaping, always moving from one place to another, or standing still where there is nothing to do with my hands, and everywhere, in all of it, the walls are high, covered in thick blue Styrofoam, the ceiling out of reach. I might turn the corner and stumble into terror or love or loss. The story does have seasons. There’s the breeze of hands up Sunday’s dress, the bruise, the blue skirt I left. There’s the lure of infinite sleep. A sea route. A route down the river. The story I have is a map for this place, which has no actual location, no axes of orientation. In which direction do I travel today? Away and back. Away and back. Over and over. Am I not endlessly circling? Have I not been here before? This temple. This harbor. There is no outside, no inside. Am I not close to the center? Here is the forest. The fog. The last leaf slipping, the rub of my thumb and finger. And, like that: it’s gone.

  I admit to My Husband that I’m afraid to post a schedule of my upcoming readings on my website. He sighs, closes his laptop, and turns to me. What do you think is going to happen? he asks. I think he’s going to show up and shoot me with a gun, I say. He sighs harder.

  It’s not the only outcome I imagine. Sometimes I imagine he is dead. Or he is still alive, barely eking out a living in Venezuela. He loves another woman, I imagine. Or he has murdered her. Or he is not in Venezuela, but is lying low in the States, waiting for me to show him where to find me. And when he does, I imagine the ways I will struggle, how I will open the door to run. I imagine what I would give him in exchange for the lives of My Husband and our children.

  There is nothing I would not give him.

  The story becomes the mind’s protection. The story becomes the mind’s defense. An apology. A collection of excuses. A set of forgivable lies. As when my children come to me for affection and I give them something to eat. Or a fresh shirt. Or I busy myself with sweeping the floor and making the beds. I don’t have time for this, I say.

  But I do have time. There’s nothing stopping me. Not really.

  To My Husband I say, I’m too far gone. I don’t know how to love. We might be standing on opposite sides of the island in the kitchen. I might be pouring him a glass of wine or stirring a vegetable stew. I’m trapped on the other side of a wide, dark chasm, I say. I might break down in tears. He holds out his arms, but I cover my face, look down, turn away.

  In this story, I’m always turning away.

  My daughter asks what I do while she’s at school all day and I tell her anything but the truth. I’m working. I’m reading. I’m teaching, I say. But the truth is: sometimes I put my head against the table or the desk or the cool edge of the toilet. I puke, or scream, or pull my hair out in handfuls, and I weep. The blood rises to my face until it feels like his hand is here, right here, squeezing, squeezing. He is spitting into my face, kneeling on my chest, heavy as a pile of stones. He will kill me for this, I think.

  But I don’t stop writing. I cover the screen and type without looking at the words. I crawl into my bed and pull the covers up over my body, over the computer, up over my head. This cave of making. It’s the last place he’d think to look.

  By the time I pick my children up from school, I’ve cleaned the streaked mascara off my face and reapplied my lipstick. At home, I play with my son on the floor. I make dinner. Or if I do not make dinner, we order pizza and the four of us eat in the living room watching an animated movie. We take walks and work in the yard on the weekends. From the outside it all appears very normal.

  My girlfriend asks how this book is going and I say, I’m sooooo ready to be done. It’s not fun to write this, you know. She picks at the tip of her straw, or fingers the arch of her eyebrow, and tells me that my children will someday feel lucky to have this book. We might be sitting on her porch or at a picnic table in the park or the only outside table at a restaurant. I say, This will be the last version of the story I ever tell. I know how ridiculous this sounds. How foolish. How naive. Because the truth is: I’m afraid of what will happen when it’s done. I’m trapped, I say. A prison I’ve built with this story. I don’t know how to escape it, I say.

  But I do know.

  The story is a trap, a puzzle, a paradox.

  Ending it creates a door.

  [thirteen]

  MY BODY IS cold and naked and shaking as he tightens the nuts on the thick steel U-bolts anchoring my arms to the chair. The whole time he’s tying my ankle to a four-by-four with a thick leather belt, he’s talking about his assault rifle in the hallway, about dynamite in the walls, and how he’ll blow up the building if the police come. He doesn’t notice that I’m flexing every muscle in my leg to give myself wiggle room inside his leather belt.

  Once I’m secured, he goes into the other room and brings back a camera. See? I’ll be watching you, even if you can’t see me, even if I’m not in the room.

  He puts a choke-chain collar around my neck—the kind you might use to train an unruly dog—and hooks the free end to the back of the chair.

  He turns up the radio, calls it white noise, his mouth close to my ear. He explains this term, as if he’s just invented it. As if he’s the first person who thought of saying it.

  He stands in front of me, between the chair and the mattress, tucking in his shirt, zipping up his pants, tying back his hair with a black rubber band. He puts his hands on his hips, pausing to take it all in.

  I can’t cover myself, or hide, or turn away.

  Blood drips between my legs and into the bucket underneath my seat.

  He laughs a little.

  He says, if only I hadn’t treated him so cruelly.

  He says he’s going out to get a drink at the bar, so that people can see him out and about, so he can establish an alibi. A story, he explains, about where he was, what he was doing when I died. The next time I see you, he says, I’ll shoot you in the cunt and then the head.

  He asks if I will love him forever.

  He puts a pair of noise-canceling headphones ove
r my ears. He puts the duct-taped glasses back on my face.

  I hear the blood in my veins, the faintest murmur of sound from the radio. I see the black back of the glasses, a sliver of his shadow out the edges.

  He kisses me sloppily, his hand fondling my naked breast, pinching my nipple, then drifting down across my stomach to ruffle the upper line of my pubic hair.

  He clears his throat, and closes himself behind the door.

  I bend my head to look—how much blood?—and the headphones slide down my face and into my lap. My body is shaking so hard; it’s hard to catch my breath.

  The assault rifle leans against the wall in the hallway: I remember how he kept it in one corner of his closet, under the striped sweaters, the cotton briefs, those stupid Hawaiian shirts, always unbuttoned and hanging over one shoulder, his pants pulled to his knees, his fingers moistened with spit.

  I shake the thought out of my head; the glasses go bouncing to the floor. The room comes slowly into focus. He’ll come rushing back in at any moment. He’ll shoot me in the cunt and then in the face, or the ear, or underneath my chin, my hair spattered across the soundproofed ceiling, the carpet, the door.

  I wring my arm to see how the thick steel U-bolt around my wrist attaches to the chair: a two-inch galvanized fencing staple hammered deep into the wood.

  I look around the room for the camera. I don’t see one mounted anywhere. Not on the floor. Or by the door. Not on the back of the chair. The radio blares a song I know: White noise, he said. White of forgetfulness. White of safety.

  I lean my head back against the chair and look at the ceiling, how the thick blue Styrofoam will look when the police find the crime scene. They’ll load the pieces of my dead body into a black bag, haul it down the hallway, through the living room, and out to the parking lot, where newscasters with solemn faces will report the story. The bullets that entered my body. Our two names linked this way forever in the headlines.

  But that story is not my story, I tell myself as I wiggle and twist and pull my foot out of the loose leather belt binding my leg to the chair. I lift it onto the seat and underneath my body.

  Holding my breath, I pull my arm upward while I push against the seat with my foot. It hurts, this pulling: steel against skin against bone. My arm could break. The possibility of that makes me certain it won’t.

  I take a breath, pull my arm upward, upward, upward. The skin on my wrist blooms like a flower.

  I feel the breath burning in my chest, the pressure of the leather against my ankle, the muscles in my foot on the seat lifting me upward, upward, upward.

  I feel my elbow pushing down against the wood, my fingernails scratching tracks through the wood.

  I feel the steel like a hinge against the arm I rock back and forth, the steel I pull left and right.

  I feel the arm; I pull and force it upward, upward, always upward.

  I feel the arm I tear unbolted.

  I unscrew the nuts bolting my other arm to the chair. My fingers do not fumble, not once. The movements of my body are intentional and deliberate and precise.

  I untie the rope around my other leg.

  I unhook the chain around my neck from the chair.

  I stand up straight and tall.

  I wipe the blood spilling from my body with a tissue I drop beside the mattress before crossing the room to where my clothes lie in a neatly folded pile. I dress fast, stepping back toward the chair, where I pry the loosest two-by-four from the seat.

  I hold the board above my head, ready to bash his skull loose as I twist the doorknob. It’s unlocked.

  My legs carry me into the dark hallway, through the dark living room, toward the windows, the blinds pulled closed. Even in the shadows I spot my keys on a table, the green and white beads of the lizard key ring, tossed into a pile of empty shopping bags, empty cardboard cups, empty boxes of screws and nails.

  I lift the chain from my neck, over my head, let it rattle to the floor.

  In the pulse of silence that follows, a story begins unfolding. Where it may take me, whether it will end here, I don’t know. I don’t need to. Because in this moment, when I’m alone in the darkness, all I am and was and ever will be is gathered up inside me. And every last bit of it urges me on.

  And on.

  And on.

  I reach for the door. It’s here. It’s opening.

  notes

  from one

  Page 13: The clock’s arms both point to eleven. According to police reports, I actually entered the station at 10:06 PM. At 10:40 PM, The Female Officer transported me to the apartment building, where she observed a white car tarp lying in the gravel parking lot in front of the apartment. The Female Officer noticed that the door was open. She approached the apartment, knocked on the screen door, and announced herself as a police officer. She could hear music but no one would come to her call. Two other officers secured the area while The Female Officer transported me to the hospital for a sexual assault exam. When the search warrant was issued at 3:22 AM, detectives entered the building and began cataloging the evidence. The following morning, they applied for an arrest warrant on the charges of kidnapping, felonious restraint, forcible rape, and forcible sodomy.

  from two

  Page 23: Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. I admit that my account here is a dramatic oversimplification. As Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, assistant editor at Tin House, has pointed out to me, a more accurate description of the paradox would involve saying that the equations we use to calculate the behavior of quantum particles suggest that the single atom of radioactive substance in this experiment enters a state of quantum superposition; that is, the psi function of the entire system contains in it an atom that both has and has not decayed, and poison that is and isn’t released, and a cat that is and isn’t dead. Schrödinger’s point here is to illustrate that atomic indeterminacy doesn’t translate particularly well to the macroscopic world. Unlike the atom, which can, at least theoretically, exist in a “blurred model” of reality, the cat can’t be both alive and dead, because the act of observation forces the cat into one state or the other: the cat can be only either living or dead. See “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124, no. 5 (1980): 323–338. John D. Trimmer, translator.

  Page 25: Like something I memorized long ago. On the one hand, neuroscientists say that traumatic memories degrade at the same rate as other kinds of memories. One study on memory stability asked participants to describe the memory of hearing about the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and also to describe a memory from the day before the attack. Years later researchers asked again: tell us about the day before the attack, tell us about the attack. Both sets of memories showed the same degree of narrative drift.

  On the other hand, psychologists say traumatic memories don’t change. Even from the moment of the trauma, the mind engages mechanisms of avoidance and denial in order to isolate and quarantine the memory of trauma. The result of this is that the traumatic memory withdraws from conscious recollection and migrates to the memory of the lived body, where it might reemerge, perfectly preserved, at any time.

  Page 27: My Handsome Friend. After reading about my friend’s fear in the police reports, I write to him to apologize. I never knew that had happened to you, and I’m so so so sorry. Sorry doesn’t cover it actually. My friend writes back, offers an apology of his own, admitting maybe he wasn’t really there for me in the ways I needed him. The thought that keeps me going when I remember all of that, he writes, is that you and I both have families . . . and we are both leading fuller, happier lives than that a-hole ever even dreamed of . . .

  from three

  Page 37: It all starts like this. See Charles M. Anderson’s “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages That Heal” in Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice, Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy, editors, for a discussion of the ways in which subjec
tivity is created, positioned, and controlled by our participation in the story networks and discourses of the other. Although, as Jacques Lacan has suggested, this participation gives us access to discursive and narrative meaning, it’s not without cost: “Self and all that murky term might or might not mean, is compromised, some have said, to the point of disappearance. To participate in the discourse of the other is necessarily to suffer the loss of self and to be, in a very real sense, written over or spoken out of existence” (Anderson 60).

  Page 43: This is what he wants. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex:

  We have seen that in a majority of women a passive sexuality has also developed since childhood: woman likes to be embraced, caressed, and especially after puberty she wants to be flesh in a man’s arms; the role of subject is normally assigned to him; she knows that; she has been told repeatedly “a man has no need of being good-looking”; she is not supposed to look for the inert qualities of an object in him, but for strength and virile power.

  Page 43: The body remembers. See Sabine C. Koch et al., eds., Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Practices” in The Logic of Practice.

  Page 48: He calls me Puta! Chingada! Octavio Paz, writing in The Labyrinth of Solitude about gender coding in Mexico, defines this term, chingar, which means to injure, to lacerate, to violate; Paz writes:

  The verb is masculine, active, cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains. And it provokes a bitter, resentful satisfaction. The person who suffers this action is passive, inert and open, in contrast to the active, aggressive and closed person who inflicts it. The chingón is the macho, the male; he rips open the chingada, the female, who is pure passivity, defenseless against the exterior world (77).