by TJ Price
In last month’s column, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in the past. I would advise reading the prior segment first before reading this one, and the one which is to follow, in four weeks’ time. (I apologize for the falsehood in the first post that this would be the conclusion; the story rather took on a life of its own and went to some surprising places.) To those of you who have followed along thus far, thank you. For those of you who have read the thing in various states of its composition—and, in some cases, urged me to press through to the end—thank you isn’t enough.
Please be advised that—in this second instalment, as in the first—there will be a number of sensitive topics involved, including mentions of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, threats of physical violence, and general injustice.
3.
I hadn’t made up my mind about the play yet, or what I was going to do there, or how I was going to talk to Iris about what happened with Ricky. That night completely blotted out any other thought in my life for weeks on end. I was distracted, quick to anger, unhappy. I posted increasingly dire lyrics from bands I loved on my LiveJournal. My online musings had lapsed from using self-harm as a metaphor to pondering its actuality. (This was a lie: I’d already experimented with inflicting physical pain on myself to dull the pain of emotions, and it hadn’t worked.)
Despite this, a friend of mine—and another RA in the building—noticed I had been acting strangely. I’d even skipped some classes, and some meetings of the student actors’ guild, and she’d become a little concerned. Amanda ran into me after I’d left the cafeteria one day, and walked alongside me as we returned to the dorm. She invited me up to her room, to talk about what was on my mind, which I accepted, but without actual plans to divulge what had happened to me. I was a guy, I thought. What had happened was my fault, because I hadn’t been clear enough in my intentions. Whether I knew it or not, I had internalized all of my guilt and shame (and anger) about the encounter, and turned it all on myself. The depression I felt wasn’t related to that, though, I said. It was related more to how I felt about another guy in my immediate social circle, Colin, who was a year older than me and permanently affixed to his high school girlfriend, who was also a member of our social circle.
I wanted to be Colin’s brother, I think. I had attached to him in an unhealthy fashion, and I think he’d started to notice. Worse, his girlfriend had too. Worse still, I had convinced myself I was in love with his girlfriend, because of the feelings I had for Colin, and that confused things even further. This is what came out, when I started talking to Amanda. She was a patient listener, and knew just when to insert the right questions. She was also an actress, and a damn good one, though she had no need to lie to me. When I got to the part about the play, and what a difficult time I was having trying to decide whether or not to drop out, I hesitated.
You can tell me anything, Amanda said, supportively. I won’t tell anyone.
I hesitated still, snagged on the possibility of hope. Maybe she wouldn’t judge me. Or maybe she would, and then at least I’d know whether or not my self-judgment was correct. Either way, it seemed clear.
I took a deep breath, and related the whole story, right up to and beyond Napoleon, to moonfall, and to my escape, even to the awkward daily evasions I had to enact every day to make sure I didn’t accidentally run into Ricky down the length of our hallway.
When I finished, I looked up, terrified, shaking, crying. I was halfway in the future already, imagining Amanda laughing, telling me it was no big deal, that happened all the time, I should just get over it—but her face told an entirely different story. It was a strange mixture of sadness and total rage, though I didn’t see the sadness until much later, through the filter of memory.
She told me then that it was absolutely wrong of him to do what he’d done, and something loosened inside of me, and then I really cried, and then I blacked out, and then I came to, and Amanda was holding me, and my head was pounding. It’s unacceptable behavior, she was saying, and furthermore, RAs are not allowed to have any kind of relations with their residents. Full stop, she told me, firmly. I needed to go the campus police station, she said. I needed to make a report.
I was shocked. A report? I needed to involve the police? But Amanda was adamant. She’d even walk down with me, if I needed that, and I said I did, and then we were walking, across the quad, past the lone preacher with the bullhorn and the sign that said GOD HATES FAGS and his wet, shiny coat glistening like a membrane, covered in mucus; past the skinny pines and down the needle-covered hill to the tiny little police office and its blue-plastic light posted above the doorway whose bulb had long since died.
And so, I reported Ricky to the campus police. After my halting account of the incident (and multiple attempts at clarification, having been prompted by the officers’ questions) I was given a business card with a name and an organization on it. Something about rape support. Something about sexual assault victims. I thanked all concerned rather numbly. I didn’t know when to leave. Was I supposed to just slot back into my life as if nothing had happened? Something had happened. No one told me, however, what would happen. My statement was “on file,” they said. They would get back to me, they said.
I don’t think anyone ever once said they were sorry. I don’t even think anyone asked me if I wanted a glass of water.
I didn’t have to wait very long, or else time has become squishy in the years between then and now. My infatuation with Colin continued, and finally hit a peak. At the time, I was moving toward finals, and I had papers to write, and classes I’d missed, and all sorts of grades that had plummeted. I was desperate to catch up, both in my core curriculum classes (most of which had, lamentably, fallen to the wayside) and in my theatre studies. I was also overcommitted to extracurricular activities and had far exceeded my bandwidth in every direction.
It was only a matter of time before something gave. Is it any use asking the camel which one was the straw that caused its fatal injury? All I remember is the darkness of my shared dorm room (my roommate out late for a vocal lesson or some such) with the windows both flung wide open and the chill of Northern spring invading the room. I’d swallowed the majority of a bottle of Tylenol, and arranged the rest of the jaunty little pills into a dramatic message (H E L P) on the carpet.
When I woke up, I was puking, and someone was pounding on the door. I got up, shaking, my stomach twisting in revulsion, and pressed my eye to the peephole. I was startled to see Colin, glancing this way and that, biting at his lip. I let him in, but cautioned him I was in bad shape, and he said he knew. When I let him in, he stood backlit by the hallway lights, just a shapeless silhouette of a man staring at me, eyelessly. I apologized for the puke. He saw the pill-font message.
Come on, he said, simply. Let’s go for a drive.
And so we went. He drove one of those sporty little things that was so popular in the early 2000s, a Jetta or something. Nothing fancy. He put on a CD, I think it was Barenaked Ladies, Born on a Pirate Ship. He knew I liked that—or maybe I just liked it because he did. Nothing felt real. We drove around a dark cove, mostly in silence. The road just kept going. We were pretty far away from the school when he bluntly asked me if I was in love with him, and I said I didn’t know how to answer that, and he said he was going to marry his girlfriend someday and he didn’t like me … like that … and I said that was OK, I was too drained to say anything else.
We ended up at his house, in a town nearby. His parents weren’t home, but we didn’t go inside. He sat in the car with me, there in the driveway, and then I told him everything. He didn’t have exactly the same reaction as Amanda, but it was similar. He was also a decent actor—nowhere near as strong as Amanda, but at least he was cast in enough parts. His face whitened by degrees, and I watched his hand grip the steering wheel tighter as I came to the story’s conclusion. I apologized constantly, trying to explain to him that I wanted to be him, not be with him. He didn’t understand, but he said he did, which I appreciated.
Then his phone rang. We were cool kids back then, on the first wave of cellular technology, and whereas I had a Nokia with only a polyphonic ringtone (“Hava Nagila”), he had a sleek, slim Motorola Razr. It was his girlfriend, and she wanted to know where we were, and if I was OK, and what was going on. It turned out that we’d forgotten to clean up the puke, and the H E L P, and so my roommate had become understandably distraught and called Colin’s girlfriend. Colin stepped out of the car to continue his conversation with her in private. I stared at my fingers, at the lights on the dash, on the glowing dashboard. Anything other than his figure, jacklit by the spearing headlights, whiter still than he was at my story.
Moments later, he got back in the car. We have to go back to the dorms, he said. Something’s happened, he said. He wouldn’t tell me anything else. No one had told him anything else, either, but it was important.
I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay in that comfortable, dim cocoon with Colin forever. I had so much more I wanted to tell him, to let spill out of me—not just about him, or how I felt about him, or even Ricky and the police report. I wanted to talk for longer than I had breath, until I gasped for more oxygen to infuse sound into my words. I didn’t even know what I’d talk about, I was only aware of the all-consuming need to do so.
When we got back to the dorm, we were greeted in the lobby by a clutch of our friends, including Amanda, who had been roused from her sleep. There was a tang of alarm in the air, but I felt dopey and punch-drunk, probably from the drugs in my system and whatever neurochemicals had been released in Colin’s driveway. Then my roommate, Eddie, stepped forward, and told the story.
That morning, Eddie had gotten up before me, as was normal, though he’d found a piece of paper slid beneath our door. I’d made no secret of how depressed, stressed, and generally unwell I was, and this was the reason he’d hidden the message from me, as he explained. He didn’t want to “add to my plate.” He’d taken it with him when he left, and dropped it in an empty planter outside the building that morning, thinking that was enough to dispose of it. Having heard the story I’d related to Colin through his girlfriend, he realized there was more import to the message than he’d originally realized.
But what did it say that was so bad? I asked.
Grimly, they showed me. Eddie had torn it in two, and so it had been clumsily taped back together. It read:
shut your mouth right now
or i will cut your body into pieces
and bury them in the desert
It felt loony to me. I think I laughed, too dizzy and tired to really understand what had happened, but they, sleuth-like, had taken the note down to the RA’s lounge, where each RA was mandated to sign in and sign out of a log whenever they were charged to monitor the front door. That was why Amanda had been brought into it—only RAs had access to this binder.
It still didn’t dawn on me, however, until they showed me the binder, and pointed at the handwriting on both the threat as well as in the log.
It was a clumsy scrawl; an unmistakable match for Ricky.
4.
Looking back on it all, it seems so histrionic. The size of it changes in the rearview mirror. At the time, it felt gross; enormous.
One day, coming down the hall in a halo of anxiety that I might see him, I noticed that only a shred of double-sided mounting foam remained on his door where his whiteboard had been affixed. It seemed that either Ricky had left the dorms early, or had been asked to leave. I had no way of knowing, as the gears of jurisprudence—no matter the size of the cosm—move torturously slowly, and their turning is often occulted from view. It was a small blessing, given the scant number of days left in the year, but I’d take it. I was ready to be gone from the vivarium of college life, even if it meant I had spend the summer months living in the basement of my parents’ house. But before I could finish packing up my belongings, I got a call from the person who was supposed to be representing my interests. I remember nothing about her, other than she was assigned to me over the phone. I never saw her in person, never met her. To this day, she is a disembodied voice on the telephone. Pleasant, mind you, but completely abstracted from physical reality.
So because the semester is coming to an end, and because you’re going to be out of state, her tinny voice said into my ear, your part of the trial will have to be conducted over the phone.
No one had mentioned a trial to me, I said, confused.
In fact, it’d been at least a week since I’d heard anything from anyone; my friends murmured support, but music majors side-eyed me and whispered to one another like snotty high-schoolers if I came too close in passing. It was then that I found out—from this woman’s voice, this woman I’d never met, whose reality (in today’s world) I might even question!—I found out there would be someone from one of my acting classes—another musical theatre major—who would be testifying on behalf of Ricky. I didn’t know this person that well, but they had taken it upon themselves to tell Ricky about the time I’d written a ten-minute script for class, a scene in which a man and another man engage in a fraught, melodramatic dialogue; there was, of course, a great deal of underlying sexual tension. It may not have been the best-written thing I’ve ever produced, but in spite of this, it apparently implied that I was not only looking for what happened to me that night, that I was eagerly seeking it out, and for whatever reason, in the wake of that decision, had decided to try to malign Ricky. I was being painted as someone who was—in the claimant’s words—“testing the waters,” not someone who had been assaulted, as I claimed.
There was also, the woman’s voice continued, the matter of my LiveJournal. I’d been nakedly open about my feelings in this forum, one of the most popular websites available at the the time for aspiring writers and artists of all sorts. Sometimes I’d post on my LiveJournal three, four times a day—sometimes it was just a selection of lyrics, sometimes it was raw fury, sometimes it was some kind of sophomoric explosion of self-loathing and shame. I hadn’t written about Ricky too much, and even when I had, I’d cloaked it in what I thought was relatively cryptic allusions.
When I said as much, defensively, she told me she was not concerned about them bringing it up during the proceedings, during my part of the trial. I felt a little relief, as if I’d slipped through some kind of loophole, when I hadn’t done anything wrong. That’s the nature of shame: it bullies you into believing the worst of yourself. Anything I wrote on the LiveJournal, she said, was inadmissible.
Unfortunately, she was wrong, or at least, mistaken. Maybe inadmissible only referred to the defendant’s argument, or something. Maybe because it was online, and public for anyone to read, it could be leveraged against me. Either way, when the day came for the trial, I was pacing back and forth in my parents’ basement. I’d had to take the day off from my part-time catering job, and was instructed to wait for the phone to ring from between the hours of ten in the morning to two in the afternoon.
That was an interminable morning. Around one-thirty, the phone finally rang. As they set up the conference call on the other end, I realized I was on speaker, and imagined myself in a tiny box, my voice, tremulous and uncertain, being piped out through crackle and hiss. I had to turn the volume on the phone all the way to MAX to hear them correctly. I imagined the room, too, but couldn’t get a clear fix on it—was it a stately, wood-paneled court? Was it some dingy arbitration room with a drop ceiling, with bored bureaucrats shuffling their scuffed cordovan loafers against the low-pile carpet? Was Ricky there? Did he hear the sound of my voice and twitch with loathing, maybe smirk with condescension? Maybe the whole thing was happening on a stage, and every disembodied voice was an actor, lying to me. It was all a setup to make me believe that justice had been done, while meanwhile Ricky got to slip out of some loophole, the committee members all shrugging and quoting some obscure subsection or clause about “testing the waters.”
All I knew was gray silence, the clammy chill of the unfinished basement, and the humming of distance in the wires. I paced as they asked their questions. They had me say yes or no to most, which confused me, and which felt arbitrary, irrelevant. They read out a section of my LiveJournal, in which I had written a lousy poem about craving touch (who doesn’t crave what they can’t have), and asked me if my intention that night was to be touched, yes or no. I was hamstrung on this, as I was so many other questions: if I said yes, it seemed consensual. If I said no, I was lying. If I hesitated any longer than a few seconds in answering, guilt rushed in to fill where my voice had absented; longer than that, and a bored-sounding voice would ask me if I needed them to repeat the question.
They asked about the scene I’d written, too, even included some of the dialogue. I remember being absurdly angry that no one wanted to comment on the quality of the writing. How drearily they quoted the lines I’d written—deliberately detached and uninflected, accountants rattling off itemizations on the receipt of my guilt. It didn’t even occur to me that I wasn’t the one on trial, that I hadn’t been accused of anything, until far too late in the proceedings. I think I was on the phone for about a half-hour before the dried, desiccated voices on the other end thanked me for my participation and dismissed me with a click and a hush. I stood there, holding the phone until the burring whine of the dial tone erupted, at MAX volume, and startled me out of my stupor.
When I handed the phone back to my mother, she looked at me strangely and said, well, that was fast.
I said, yep. Guess so.
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