Know My Name

by Chanel Miller

  The ten of us gathered in the cramped greenroom, looking like a ward of mental patients; muttering to ourselves, talking to the walls, huddled in the corners passionately whispering. We heard people filling the venue, the room humming. The time had finally come. Vince, the emcee, stepped through the door, the point of no return.

  Every time someone went out onto the stage, the door closing behind them, we listened in quiet anticipation, knowing the exact moments the muffled laughter would rumble through the walls. Each person returned relieved, their shoulders relaxed, half laughing, as we greeted them with high fives.

  I began to notice that each person who stepped onstage had been greeted by the giddy screams and barks of friends. Lucas was only going to be at the later show. Who would be calling my name? I had nobody. It was that feeling again, sitting alone on the stand. Who was that girl they put last? She was so depressing.

  But then I saw the guy’s face from that day on the bridge, looking at me dumbfounded. Wait, you? I saw the defense attorney, raising his eyebrows, jotting down my words. I saw the reporters looking bored in the courtroom. I saw the light filtering through the feathers of down blankets, all the hours spent beneath them, days so lonely I thought I could dissolve into nothing. I remembered the pain, acute in my chest.

  Then I saw myself in the shower, my routine taped to the glass, memorizing my lines, animated speaking them. How hungry I’d been to get here. I could hear the final bits of the set before me. Applause. I heard my name announced and stepped out.

  It was completely dark, the lights blaringly bright, and the smattering of applause trickled into silence. I looked out into the audience, a mass of black. In the quiet, my mind became clear. I was alone again in front of a microphone, but this time I spoke, and they listened, no objections. As I began talking, I heard my voice leading hundreds of people exactly where I wanted to take them, and all at once they erupted into laughter. My mind went briefly blank. I fought to remain deadpan, while I was smiling like a child inside. I had to wait for the noise to die down, but I was in no rush. I felt whole, standing on my own. It was like holding the room in my hands, I could turn and lift and drop them. For the next ten minutes, you are going to listen to me, and we are all going to be happy.

  After the show, everyone dispersed into the audience to be congratulated by friends. I hesitated a moment in the back room, drinking water. Just go, I told myself. Tentatively I drifted out.

  For many months I’d been greeted by professionals who spoke to me in quiet voices, with sympathetic eyes. People were always passing me tissues, patting me gently like I could easily break. Now as I moved through the crowd, I watched people’s faces light up. I quickly became the Katniss Everdeen of the partners, swarmed by women and hailed as a leader. This time I was not pitied, but revered. Wow, you were wow, someone said. I am wow, I repeated in my head.

  After the second show, I ran out to meet Lucas. He picked me up, turning me in circles. I didn’t even recognize you, he said. I felt I’d been born anew, the timid self shed, the transformation witnessed by hundreds. I heard someone ask Lucas, You’re her boyfriend?

  My therapist once told me to hold your wounded self. When I finally left the crowd, I thought of her, felt she must be proud of me.

  The next day when I woke, Lucas was already in class. The afternoon light was muted. As I lay in bed, it slowly dawned on me that I had no more comedy meetings, no rehearsals, no mantra to put on loop in my head. Auditions for the next show wouldn’t be until spring. The whole thing felt like a dream. The previous night had been a seven-course dinner, and now I was staring at a blank plate, licking the crumbs. All at once the sadness hit me, like a well had been opened in my chest. I remembered my reality, the one I was never going to escape, and dropped back into sleep.

  I opened my eyes hours later to Lucas sitting on the bed, holding my shoulders, shaking me gently. His eyes were radiant. Everybody is talking about you, he said. Do you know how many people came up to me on campus today? Look, look at these emails. I don’t even know these people! Look what they said. But I saw him register there was something deeply wrong, my eyes red, my mind having already been dragged under, and just as quickly he was pulling me into his chest, stroking my hair, rocking me, in an attempt to bring me back again.

  The next day, I called my mom, no speaking, only crying, and she began telling me stories: When she was little and the Cultural Revolution began, libraries were closed, pages ripped from books and used as toilet paper. She would find individual pages, construct her own stories. She had watched her mom deliver babies in rural China, saw the young mothers who didn’t make it. In university, she’d studied literature, became editor in chief of the campus magazine. She told me about her first job as a bartender in America, learning her first swear words, while locals called her Suzie Wong, a fictional character. How she met my dad at a New Year’s party, they kissed at midnight, got married. How he taught her to drive. How they raised two daughters in a pink home with two Border collies. What may seem ordinary to me was never lost on her. There were a million ways things could have gone differently, but somehow she had made it here, the very fact of my existence some kind of miracle. When she was young, inventing stories, she never imagined a life full of swimming pools, daughters drinking iced coffee, California coastlines full of wild poppies.

  When I listened to her, I understood: You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do. I had to believe her, because she was living proof. Then she said, Good and bad things come from the universe holding hands. Wait for the good to come.

  As winter approached, I was grateful for dark red and yellow leaves plastered over wet, gray stones, for the rugby players who ate my tortilla soup, for the students who invited me to coffee. I joined the Storytellers club, went to drag shows, and chocolate-themed parties. I occupied myself writing stories, printing them on campus. Sometimes I went to class with Lucas and spent the hour drawing. But I could never lose the feeling that this was not my real life, that reality awaited me back in the courthouse. Mentally I always felt isolated, I just got to choose my surroundings.

  Alaleh called, said the trial wouldn’t be happening until sometime next year. Tiffany called me crying, I can’t do it. I’d been assaulted during the winter quarter of her junior year. The trial would likely be in the spring of her senior year. Every quarter she had a heavier workload she couldn’t afford to adjust if she wanted to graduate on time. The damage was unremitting.

  One night, I’d gone alone to a Storytellers event, where a woman named Elizabeth spoke about a small team called Rise, a civil rights nonprofit, that was drafting the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, which included free forensic medical examinations and preservation of rape kits. I felt my heart sputtering, my skin clamming up. Afterward I approached her, my words tripping over themselves, the rape kits, so invasive, you wait for so long, the injustices. I talked nonstop like a faucet had opened, it was the first time I’d wanted to discuss any of it. She was receptive, excited. You know so much about this. I lied and said I used to work as an advocate, and excused myself. I was too nervous to get in touch with her again, worried I’d out myself, but for the first time I felt a new kind of hope.

  Throughout the legal process, I felt like I was always trying to keep up, to not mess up, learn court jargon, pay attention, follow the rules. I wanted to fit in and prove I could do whatever was expected of me. It had never occurred to me that the system itself could be wrong, could be changed or improved. Victims could ask for more. We could be treated better. Which meant my onerous experiences were not useless, they were illuminating. Being inside the system would give me insight; the more I encountered issues, the more I’d be able to see what needed to be fixed. I could convert my pain into ideas, could begin brainstorming alternate futures for vi
ctims.

  I was walking on campus when I saw the statistic on the front page of a newspaper: one in four women, one in five? I don’t remember, it was just too many, too many women on campus had been sexually assaulted. But what got me was the graphic, rows of woman symbols, the kind you see on bathroom signs, across the entire page, all gray, with one in five inked red.

  I saw these red figures breathing, a little hallucination. My whole life had warped below the weight of the assault, and if you took that damage and multiplied it by each red figure, the magnitude was staggering. Where were they? I looked around campus, girls walking with earmuffs, black leggings, teal backpacks. If our bodies were literally painted red, we’d have red bodies all over this quad. I wanted to shake the paper in people’s faces. This was not normal. It was an epidemic, a crisis. How could you see this headline and keep walking? We’d deadened to the severity, too familiar a story. But this story was not old to me yet.

  A word came to my mind, another. I remember, after learning of the third suicide at school, people shook their heads in resignation, I can’t believe there’s been another. The shock had dimmed. No longer a bang, but an ache. If kids getting killed by trains became normalized, anything could.

  This was no longer a fight against my rapist, it was a fight to be humanized. I had to hold on to my story, figure out how to make myself heard. If I didn’t break out, I’d become a statistic. Another red figure in a grid.

  * * *

  • • •

  Our trip to Indonesia was approaching. It was December in Philadelphia, the cold air nibbling the rims of my ears while we walked, when Lucas brought up scuba diving. I don’t know how to scuba dive, I said. Neither do I, he said. We will soon.

  A week later I found myself standing at the edge of an indoor pool with a heavy tank on my back, murky goggles suctioned to my face, the air baked with the smell of chlorine. The number one rule of scuba diving was to breathe continuously. This sounded intuitive, but I remembered panic attacks where I felt I was sucking air through tangled straws, times breathing did not feel so simple. Always remember to breathe.

  Before resurfacing, a diver must stop twenty feet below the surface for three minutes, in what’s called a safety stop, to let your body decompress. Ascending too rapidly could cause bubbles to form in your blood, and I imagine a sort of painful champagne running through your veins, making you sick. After surfacing, you must wait forty-eight hours before flying, as the drop in air pressure could make your blood frothy enough to be fatal.

  These rules were fascinating to me; the body dictating what you must do. I had fallen into the habit of neglecting my body, often forgetting to feed it, and when I was assaulted I refused even to look at it. Now my body was saying, you have to listen to me. You have to respect my needs. We have to work together or you will end up hurt.

  The instructor showed us the octopus, a backup regulator on each pack that a diver’s partner can breathe through in case of emergency. The instructor pointed to me. Pretend you are out of air and signal to Lucas. I nodded, and Lucas and I submerged. I sliced my hand back and forth across my throat, signaling, I’m out, no more. I removed my regulator and tapped my fingers to my mouth, showing I needed his air. In two wide strokes of his arms, he was next to me, offering the octopus attached to his pack, and I brought it to my mouth, my lungs expanding in relief as I inhaled. Simulation complete. We sat at the bottom of the pool, breathing from one metal lung. Suddenly my eyes were hot, blurred with a lining of tears. This, I thought, is what the past months had felt like.

  It was early January when we arrived on a peanut-shaped island of Gili Trawangan in Indonesia. We sat floating on a long wooden boat, the sun licking our necks, smearing sunscreen on our cheeks. I stood up and strapped the belt of weights around my waist, perched on the edge of the boat, and threw my legs up into the air, tumbling backward into the ocean. Lucas dropped in beside me.

  I slowly released air from my buoyancy control device, deflating my jetpack, gently slipping below the surface. My ears were popping as I descended, a sharp pulse in my eardrums, my goggles tightening. I told myself to be patient letting my body adjust, as I sunk lower and lower.

  All became quiet. I opened my eyes and was hovering inside a room of luminescent blue, as if the sun had sat inside the ocean like a tea bag, diluting the water with soft light. I could no longer hear my thoughts, could only hear the sound of my breathing, like a calm wind filling my whole head. The giving, the taking, the coming, the going; my breath smoothing, as I floated in blue laced with golden light.

  The fish appeared like confetti, pouring around me, darting freely. There were massive stones, glowing spaghetti anemone. Long, slender bodies of white-tipped sharks slunk close to the sand. The reeds swayed, long and lazy. I made way for a potato-shaped fish with large green lips, bumbling by in a hurry like he was late to a job interview. Tink tink tink. The instructor was tapping his oxygen tank with a metal stick to point out an eel wiggling its head, like it was in an argument and couldn’t believe what you just said. Tink tink tink. A crab was combing his mustache. Tink tink tink. A little sleepy-eyed fish was munching on a spongy algae cake. I watched all of these creatures going about their daily lives, completely unaware of my existence. What a relief to feel so small, to go unnoticed in this wordless world.

  Down here there was no snow, no hallways, no buildings, no cement, no shoes, no paperwork, no emails. No ringing, shouting, clicking of pens, beeping of machines. It all meant nothing. The whole world was muted, noise forgotten, save for the sound of my breathing. I felt I had melted into the water, nothing but a beating heart with two eyes.

  I imagined the defense attorney bobbing in the water in his suit, glasses dripping, with a sunburned forehead, his tie undulating like seaweed, one polished shoe drifting slowly to the bottom. He’d be kicking wildly, while I stayed safe below, moving through constellations of pink and yellow fish, in silence. You cannot touch me.

  I swam deeper. If a stressful thought emerged, I let it out with a long exhale, letting the fish gobble it up, released and dissolved. I was seventy feet down, the depth of six pools, one hour gliding by, then two. I left the pain, the kind that blinded me, that had me dreaming of sinking into nothingness, the kind that made me want to disappear. How could you want to leave the world if this is the world. All this beauty and strangeness. I felt it had been holding a secret, that just below the surface there were neon mountains, clams the size of bathtubs. All I had to do was equip myself to go deeper, to push past the initial pains, to teach myself to breathe.

  When it’s winter in one place it is summer in another. When I return to Palo Alto, to the pallid walls of courtrooms and legal documents and media headlines, hearing the echoes of heels on tiles, I would also hear the tink tink tink. I would remember that this world also exists, and that I can exist in it. This world is just as real as that one.

  7.

  I STARED THROUGH my oval window at the yellow carpeted hills of California, spotted with dark shrubs. I wished the plane was like a bus so I could miss my stop, could fall asleep and wake up in Honolulu. As we landed I watched the dotted trails of cars along the highway grow larger, the gray bay water expanding out below us, plane belly skimming the surface, until everything became detailed and loud and crisp, and I was small again.

  I had arrived to fight the hardest battle of my life, but nobody in Palo Alto knew I was home. I pushed open my parents’ door with a bump of my shoulder, my suitcase teetering over the door ledge, wheels slowing on the carpet, hanging my oatmeal sweater on a plastic hanger in the closet, placing my toothbrush in a ceramic boat.

  I had yet to be told what day I would testify. I emailed my new advocate, Myers, whom I had never met. She wrote, Jury selection will occur next week, starting 3/14 and likely ending by 3/16. There is the possibility that you will need to testify the 17th or the 18th, but most likely it will be the 21st or the 22nd. How does one plan f
or this? Alaleh told me it would take as long as it needed to take, three weeks or more. How should I ration out my energy, how much was I expected to endure, what if I couldn’t last? I felt I shouldn’t be in the courthouse too long, the same way you shouldn’t be in a garage with exhaust, brain cells being killed off.

  Tiffany’s winter-quarter finals would start the day jury selection began. After her last test, she would pack a small duffel and drive through the dark hills to spend her senior year spring break in court. Lucas would fly in the day before his testimony. After testifying, they would leave to begin their final spring quarter before graduation. I would stay behind awaiting the verdict.

  Two weeks before trial there’s something called a trial readiness conference; a meeting between judge, prosecutor, and defense to ensure they are ready. While this is happening, the victim is off somewhere, lying on her bed, peeling string cheese into limp shreds. No readiness conference exists for her; the witnesses do not gather into a room for a pep talk, putting hands into a pile, to yell out a team cheer. I was not allowed to attend other witnesses’ testimonies, which meant that for the next few weeks I’d spend most days waiting aimlessly at home. I would later learn eighteen people testified, but I had no idea most of them existed. We were like horses, lined up in separate stalls with our blinders on, unaware of those in our periphery. When you heard the bang, felt the smack, you ran for your life.