The Other Side (24 page)

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.