Know My Name

by Chanel Miller

  Always she, always she. I never heard the voice asking why he pulled over, why he believed I’d get in, what he might do if I did. How much was I expected to take, to absorb and ignore, while they yelled and clicked their tongues so freely, with no fear of being confronted. Was I stubborn for wanting to walk, was I asking too much? The thick tire was now pockmarked with thumbtacks and nails. I felt the tire becoming misshapen, lopsided, deflating. It would not function like this.

  One balmy night, I was far from my home, at a coffee shop on Thayer Street. When I was ready to go, I sat on a bench outside, waiting for my Lyft. An old man sat down beside me. He turned and said, Would you like a slice of bell pepper? He had glasses, a soft cotton shirt with a little notepad in his pocket, looked content and restful. He had a small knife in one hand, a sliver of green bell pepper in the other, a handkerchief in his lap where he had set the rest of the vegetable. I stared at the slice. What if he’s poisoned the seeds? What if he’s a pervert and rubbed his penis on the bell pepper and wants to watch me eat it? What if he slits me with his pocketknife? The little old man patiently held the bell pepper out to me. And that’s when I thought, I’m losing it. There is a kind man wearing a fedora on a warm evening eating a bell pepper on a bench. You are allowed to be cautious but you don’t always have to be afraid. Give yourself permission to enjoy this small vegetable. I took it, eating it in one piece, thanking him.

  Every night, when the light disappeared in the sky, when the bells of the sherbet man’s cart rolled away, and Elvis curled into a perfect circle, I could not fall asleep. I would lie starfish-limbed atop the blankets. It’s too hot to sleep, I told Lucas in a tiny green text bubble. The next day a package appeared at my door; he had ordered me a nice fan, not the cheap propeller kind in a wire cage, but the kind with timed settings and glowing buttons, with a note that said, From your number one fan. But heat was not responsible for my peeled open eyes. What kept me awake was the knowing that soon Brock would be studying my face for the first time. In court, I’d be forced to forfeit my anonymity and all the protection that came with it. I wanted to remain unrecognizable to him. I wanted to sit behind a screen, to wear sunglasses, wondered if I should cut my hair, place a bag on my head. The day I’d show up in court would be the day I surrendered my safety.

  On a Friday night in college, graduation a few weeks away, I was walking to a friend’s house when two police cars tore past me. I thought nothing of it. It was common to hear sirens in Isla Vista: it was a town on the ocean bluffs inhabited solely by eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds, every street lined with shabby wooden houses, bikes abandoned on lawns, overcrowded balconies, orchids growing out of recycled Franzia boxes. On sunny days you’d see beautiful girls in swimsuits holding large rafts over their heads, like ants beneath a crumb, walking down the street to the water. Guys biked with surfboards tucked under one arm, their wetsuits peeled halfway off like a banana. Isla Vista was a network of couches to sleep on, a friend a block away in any direction. A wild, sunny village we called home.

  But by the time I reached her apartment, the sirens had stacked, blossomed, erupted. When I walked in the door, all five of my friends were quiet, listening. We received an email from UCSB Emergency:

  Shots fired in IV 2 detained, investigation ongoing,

  That was it. A single line that dropped off with a comma. Texts began circulating; maybe it was gang related, a robbery, a drug deal gone wrong, a drive-by, no a shootout, a bomb, firecrackers, drunk driver. He was Persian, no Asian? It was two guys, one guy, in a car, a black one. Someone may have died, one person, possibly three, maybe none and this was all a sick prank.

  There was a video going around, someone said it was a guy, the guy, so we huddled around the phone, and there he was, sitting in the driver’s seat, face saturated in orange from the setting sun. Hi, Elliot Rodger here . . . I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there. . . . I take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. . . . Panic erupted, one of us screamed to turn it off, one was convulsively crying on the floor, jerking as if her stomach were being yanked by a string. He was still speaking, contaminating our air. I shook my head, refusing to hear it. He is coming to Isla Vista to kill girls, we are girls in Isla Vista, but we can’t be who he is talking about. You denied me a happy life and in turn I will deny all of you life, it’s only fair. I hate all of you. We denied you a happy life? Hate fucking who? I was livid. I grabbed the phone, walked out of the room, set it on the bathroom counter, and walked out, firmly closing the bathroom door behind me. I felt I had trapped him in there, the video still playing, him speaking into the darkness to no one.

  The next email told us to remain indoors. We bolted the locks, closed the blinds, get away from the window. Our phones kept chiming. Claire’s housemate had been shot. Nothing pieced together.

  At three in the morning, we stared at the news on TV, heard mass murder. The word seven was displayed in tall, white letters at the bottom of the screen. It seemed wrong to group the dead. It was not seven; it was one and one and one and one and one and one and one. Each an entire life, each with a name.

  The morning light never came, the air unmoving and still. On days like these the fog slipped in from the ocean, erasing the water, the shore, engulfing our little houses. We blinked, exhausted, wondering if it was safe to leave. We kneeled on the couches and carefully parted the blinds. I received a call from an eleven-digit phone number. It was my mom, calling from Beijing, on a trip to visit family. She’d seen the news, I just wanted to hear your voice. Our phones shook with calls from family members waking up to the news and we retreated into corners, I’m here, I love you too, we don’t know, grandma’s calling. Rumors circulated there’d be copycat crimes, some men glorifying Elliot’s actions, hailing him as their leader, the supreme gentleman.

  When we finally stepped outside, it was eerily quiet. On the street people traveled in tight groups, divided into herds and packs. The atmosphere was hushed, no one strolling, longboarding, no thumping music leaking from houses. The press conference was scheduled for 4:00 P.M. Before it began, we separated to privately unravel in our showers, to put on clean clothes. We regrouped inside the apartment, our safe house, refusing to be alone.

  Elliot had lived in a brown apartment building, a block away from Sweet Alley, where I’d frequently buy bags of sour watermelon candies for long nights at the library. On Friday evening, he killed three people in his apartment, two Chinese roommates and their visiting friend; 142 stab wounds in total, bloodstains in the hallway, bodies dragged and covered in towels. He carried his knives and handguns into his black BMW, drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house, knocking hard on the door. When no one answered, he shot three women outside, two bled to death in the grass. He sped off, fired through the glass window of Isla Vista Deli, one male slid to the floor dead inside. He crashed his car on Del Playa, the main street, the nose of his car crunching in, before pressing his gun to his temple. Police found him with his head blown out, blood painting the curb. The ambulances were backlogged, students kneeled beside bleeding students. Bullet casings littered the street alongside sprinkled glass, large shards of window. The police found 548 rounds of unspent ammunition inside his car that he never had time to use. Six classmates had been stolen from us, Elliot the seventh. I do not include the victims’ names here, for names are sacred, and I do not want them identified solely by what he did to them.

  A month after my assault, I stepped out of work, unable to focus. I walked down the carpeted hallway, unlocking the supply closet to crouch behind the routers and chairs with broken wheels. I called the detective. I was just wondering, I said. I know this sounds strange, but do you think Brock would ever hurt me? I clarified. I went to a school where a guy got really angry, there was a shooting. I didn’t know how to ask my question, he didn’t know how to answer it. There’s no way of kn
owing, the detective said. But hopefully not and we are working hard to get ahold on things.

  Right, of course, I thought. I felt crazy. What was I looking to hear. You’re safe forever. I didn’t bring it up again. But it was a strange feeling having never met the man I was now up against. I had no idea who he was or what he was capable of.

  I never forgot one of the opening lines of Elliot’s 137-page manifesto: This is a story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be . . . . This tragedy did not have to happen . . . but humanity forced my hand. His cruelty had a narrative arc. He spoke like he had never wanted to do what he did, he was pushed to. And it was women who had made him suffer, who left him no choice but to execute his Day of Retribution. In his video, he’d said, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires all because girls have never been attracted to me. His hostility was born of entitlement, self-pity.

  I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. In Elliot’s world, the unspoken law was that women owed him sex, we existed only to receive him. Those were the rules, that was our purpose. Sex was his right and our responsibility. The punishment in his world for breaking his laws, for rejecting sex, was death. When headlines first broke after the assault, Brock’s smiling photo accompanied every article. Unfair that he is publicly shamed while she gets to hide, commenters said. Why would I want to humiliate him, when I’d seen what it could lead to?

  As the months passed, I grew wary. He was out of school, I was out of work; we had both been untethered from society, aimlessly drifting. All those empty days. You change, you forget to eat, you don’t know how to sleep, you drift far from yourself. What if in the time I was growing depressed, he was growing resentful? I asked if he was seeing a therapist and nobody could tell me. College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure, Elliot said. In those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness, it’s not fair. . . . . You forced me to suffer all my life, now I will make you all suffer. Everyone needed someone to blame. He and I were both in some kind of pain, but what type of violence could his pain ignite? I could not live with myself if he hurt anybody. I contemplated it obsessively. What if he was angry at Stanford and wreaked havoc on campus. What if he really did believe his life was over and committed suicide. You deserve to be annihilated and I will give that to you. You never showed me any mercy so I will show you none. Whatever he did, I would feel responsible, although I knew it was out of my control.

  I wanted accountability and punishment, but I also hoped he was getting better. I didn’t fight to end him, I fought to convert him to my side. I wanted him to understand, to acknowledge the harm his actions had caused and reform himself. If he truly believed his future was ruined and he had nothing to lose, the possibilities were terrifying.

  The scenarios multiplied in my head. I’d lodged wooden planks in my windows to seal them tight. I checked the backyard, looked for feet beneath shrubs. I hated how close I was to Ohio, he could come find me, could take the train. I turned off location tracking, deleted social media. I looked up gun laws. Elliot had legally purchased three semiautomatic handguns, fully loaded magazines, as easily as one buys grapefruit. I was losing my mind. What if the hearing was a trap. I imagined shootouts outside the courthouse, chaos erupting, ducking behind car doors, splintered windows, bailiffs sprinting, blood pouring out of bodies. I did not know whether this was reasonable or insane, just knew that insane things were possible. In my yellow room, I’d lie still so I could hear everything, my bulb always burning. I soaked myself in light. Sleep was no longer rest, but vulnerability. At six in the morning the solid black masses of trees finally split into individual leaves, and I’d feel relief. The light washed my thoughts away and I could be unconscious for a while.

  I could barely wake up for class, after sleeping only one to two hours. I never made time to pack lunch, and unwilling to spend money on campus I starved myself for eight hours until I got home in the evening. At art galleries I filled napkins with free grapes and hummus-smeared chips. I was always exhausted, increasingly unhealthy. I wanted my mom’s cooking. Wanted Lucas to hold me sleeping.

  I taped the note from the fan above my bed, like a flimsy dream catcher. I taped a picture of my parents, young and holding hands in front of a blue wall of fish at an aquarium. A picture of my naked baby sister and me, side by side on a bedsheet patterned with tiny geese. They were my little protectors hovering above me at night.

  It was on one of these nights, after hours of lying still, that I tossed off my blankets and picked up a pencil. I drew the two bicycles that had found me, bringing them to life, spoke by spoke. I had learned their names in the police report:

  Carl-Fredrik Arndt

  Peter Lars Jonsson

  I drew smooth handlebars, tiny pedals, lumpy asymmetrical wheels. I stuck it to the wall above my pillow, pressing it flat. An omen of protection. Send help. I rolled back into the sheets and took a breath. If they were out there I could rest. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

  The night before my final critique, I stacked my prints; a pile representing hours of trying and retrying and finally succeeding. I made thank-you cards for my professor and my TA. I set three alarms. I laid out my favorite red dress. I got into bed and wished to sleep this one night. Six hours passed. Sleep never came, so I decided to simply stay awake until I’d have to leave at eight o’clock. Instead my mind slipped away at seven in the morning, and I was so heavy in my stupor I didn’t even hear the alarms. When I woke up, it was one o’clock in the afternoon.

  There was no buzz of panic, only a deep welling of sadness. The critique was almost over. I had missed my classmates’ presentations, the finale of the entire summer. Still I called a Lyft, pulling on my red dress. In the car I picked the crust out of my eyes and thought about everything in the world that was worse than missing an art critique. This was so small. But I was sad because it was so small, and I couldn’t even do it. I would apologize to my professor, make sure he knew my absence was not born of disrespect.

  When I walked in, the last person was presenting. Everyone looked at me. I didn’t have an explanation and I didn’t pretend to. I took a seat in the back, wanting to be invisible. I did not feel it was worth presenting. Yet my professor gestured that I should, welcomingly. I began one by one pinning them up, my back to the room, as people sat in silence. It is no matter, I told myself, Soon none of this will matter. I turned around to face them and introduced each piece.

  I was met with quiet. Then the professor spoke, a warm smile beneath his large mustache, and said they were wonderful. Classmates pointed out my drawing of a two-headed rooster. They complimented my imagination, the sinister, the whimsical. They asked me about where I got my ideas, what kind of techniques I’d used, admired the coloring. I sat and marveled too, as they were commenting, and I must have looked tired, but I was beaming. Seeing all of my pieces up, side by side, the beautiful and bizarre things I’d created despite all of the struggling in the hours in between.

  After class I bought a fresh roll of tape. I stood on a chair, hanging them all up in my room, even though I’d be moving out soon. I made a gallery, just for myself. I had gone from a clueless river weeper to a prolific printmaker. This was my evidence that while my mind had been shriveling in anxiety, my heart had been busy, thankful to have been given a chance. I saw the part of me that insisted on surviving.

  To celebrate, a friend I’d made in class invited me to a block party where there’d be snow cones and dancing. I arrived early. Eventually my friend appeared with another girl, a sculptor, and they both blinked a little slowly, having had some whiskey. I treated myself to a vodka pineapple, watching kids catch lightning bugs and drink cream sodas out of red vine straws. We hopped around the makeshift mosh pit; I tied the sleeves of my jacket around my head like floppy bunny ears. A few guys came over in a musty cologne cloud of oakmoss and burnt logs. They asked if
we were art students. I wondered if he knew because of the clothing tied to my head. Just for the summer, I said. Are you from here? he asked. No, California, I said, how about you? But his friends were already moving on, calling his name and wildly gesturing they wanted to go. He looked at them and turned back to me, leaned in with a serious look, If I stay here, will you have sex with me later? There was no segue. We’d gone from small talk smaller than a peanut to this blunt question. No, I said, unblinking. Without a word he trotted away to his friends as I stood there, my sleeves dangling from my head. The three of us were left bristling. His friends had asked them the same question. Was that real? Why would he say that? His friend asked you that too? The one with the gelled hair?

  We called it a night, heading back to my friend’s apartment, craving buttered toast and cold water. As we walked we exchanged stories of ludicrous encounters with guys, the things they would say and do. One time this guy at a coffee shop, one time my friend’s brother, one time my philosophy professor, one time . . .

  Where are you ladies going? A black Mustang was rumbling at the stoplight with three heavyset guys inside, snug in their seats. Do you want to come to the club? The club! I felt dehydrated, vodka and tiny pineapples streaming through me, my mind filled with stories of one times, and suddenly I was delusional over how much I was expected to tolerate. The street was mostly empty, we were blocks away from the bars, nothing but houses with black windows and dormant Greyhound buses. I walked into the middle of the empty street, clenched my fists, threw back my head, and started screaming.