Denial (22 page)

“Do you know how they selected kids?”

He isn't sure, he says, but then offers an idea. “Pedophiles go after victims who have just suffered a major trauma. The priest comes in to help the family, and then abuses a child. They also go after families with a lot of faith—faith itself can be a kind of weakness in their eyes. They exploit individuals who have suffered severe trauma or who have strong faith,” he summarizes.

“My drinking started with Father Billing,” he says, turning to a new topic. “Alcohol was a big part of this. The first time he gave me a drink in his car. It was sweet, Kahlúa…which helped immensely. It made the moment tolerable.

“These are holy men. I started to think it was my job to help these priests, who had God's job to do. I can't even say that I was surprised when the second priest seemed to pick up where Father Billing left off. In the Catholic world, there is a lot of mystery, a lot of mysticism. I thought it was just my role to help them, to serve them.

“There was terrible collateral damage from all this,” Skip adds. “The main collateral damage is that I drank, and I hurt my children deeply. But I also started seeing shadows of people who weren't there. And smelling things.”

What kind of shadows?

“I don't know,” he says. “A hooded figure.”

A flashback, I think to myself.

“Is it a shadow of a priest?”

“It was always dark…. I think it was a priest. There was a hood or a hat…. It was like a poster for
The Exorcist
—a priest walking through the fog.”

“Did the priest ever talk to you?”

“No.”

“What did you smell?”

“Sometimes I would smell cigarettes.”

“Did Father Billing smoke?”

“Yes. Sometimes I would smell liquor—Southern Comfort. At first I thought I had drunk Southern Comfort at my home, that I was remembering something that happened at my parents' house. But my parents didn't drink Southern Comfort; Father Billing did, and I would smell it on his breath. He also got me to drink it, to make me more relaxed during the sex act.

“I know I'm under stress when I see the shadows. These shadows come to me when I feel unbearable anxiety.”

“What are you anxious about?” I ask.

“I am most anxious when there are stories in the paper, and people refuting the story of sexual abuse in the church. I am anxious about people knowing what happened to me. People thinking I was gay. Sometimes I don't know—would it be a bad thing to be gay? I feel terrible shame.

“So my children had a drunk for a father. The shame is huge.”

I take this in, what it must feel like to recognize the harm we do to our children as a result of all the ways we strive to avoid feeling our own pain. I am distracted by a recurrent thought. I worry that if I don't feel the pain of my mother's death and the terror of rape, I will harm my son, Evan, in some way, perhaps by overprotecting him. But I need to stay in the room. I will feel about this later.

“The collateral damage, it goes on and on…. I taught my twin girls pro wrestling techniques. I wanted them to be able to protect themselves. I thought it was a good thing to teach them this. I realized, much later, what I was doing—teaching them to defend themselves from potential pedophiles and rapists.” Just as my father, I believe, was training us to survive a war.

“When does it end—this collateral damage? It gets passed on and on, from one abused child to the next,” he says.

 

This is my hypothesis. Terrorizing others—including by raping them—is a way to reassert one's manhood in the face of extreme humiliation. Feeling terrorized is humiliating. Having been raped is humiliating. To be treated “like a woman” is humiliating. Thus, the lament of one of the victims of sexual torture at Abu Ghraib, “They were treating us like women.”
¹
Rape is a perfect way to discharge one's shame. But like fear, shame is contagious. The shame and fear of the rapist now infect the victim, who, depending on his psychological and moral resilience, may discharge his fear and shame into a new victim, not necessarily through rape. I do not mean to assert that all terrorizers have been humiliated, or that all people who are severely shamed will ultimately terrorize others. My hypothesis is that shame is an important risk factor for savagery.

 

“I often feel like nobody,” Skip says. “I ask myself: Why would you want to talk to me? Why would anyone want to talk to me? It comes on me suddenly, this feeling that I'm not anything…a person who has spent a lot of time in bed, who doesn't want to be anything.”

I know what he is talking about, and this time, I tell him that. For years, I could not understand why anyone took me seriously. I could not understand how I managed to get into MIT or Harvard, why anyone would offer me a postdoctoral fellowship or a job. I could not understand why people kept turning to me after September 11. I didn't see myself as a person who couldn't get out of bed, but as a salesgirl in a coffee shop—the job I had as a teenager who was afraid to apply to college. My identity was stuck there for years.

“Inside me, there is the person who wants to be dead,” he
says. “I can't advocate for myself. I can advocate very strongly for others, but not for myself. When I realized that my work might prevent additional suicides, I began advocating strongly for victims of clergy abuse, but it's much harder for me to do this for myself. Sometimes I'm not even sure that I exist. Is this really me—this person whom people want to consult about clergy sexual abuse? Or am I really the person who can't get out of bed? I've gotten better—I spend more of my time living in the present. But it takes a lot of effort to stay in the present—a lot of yoga and meditation.”

I ask him whether he goes into altered states. I ask him for myself. I have read that other people experience the kind of altered states that I do. But it's another matter to hear about it from a live person. I want to hear what it
feels
like.

“The most annoying dissociative state that I experience is when I feel very sleepy. It is not really safe for me to drive. Have you ever felt that one?” I ask him.

“The sleepy one. Yes. It feels like eyelids half closed, feet in mud, slow motion. My brain is in a total fog. In this state I feel completely unsafe.

“Sometimes,” he adds, “I become a prisoner of detail. I see too much, hear too much, it is painful. Hypervigilance. Like a cocaine high. The mind is hyperfocused, heightened awareness. I have an ability to scan quickly…. I feel super-smart. I seem to be able to problem-solve a lot quicker. If someone is looking for something, I can find things…. I could do a jigsaw puzzle ten times faster in that state. It is almost as though I have hyper-vision. It is not a state I mind being in. I can sense the feeling in a room. I can sense the mood of a crowd. If there is aggression in a crowd, I can tell just by scanning the place and stepping inside. I have a feeling. It's as if a veil were lifted—you can feel people's feelings. I can sense when there is sexuality in the air. I can be incredibly attracted to it, or I want to run….

“I can use these states to my benefit,” he concludes.

I know what he is talking about. There is a state where I feel smarter than normal. That often happens when I feel endangered, or I fear that someone I love is in danger. I agree that this state is not entirely unpleasant, and it is extremely useful when someone's life is in danger. It is also useful for highly stressful work. But the stress is addictive. I believe that this “high,” as Skip puts it, is what makes some people stay in dangerous jobs.

When I am truly in danger, my reaction time is very fast. I notice everything around me, and think and act quickly. If I feel agitated but there is no physical danger, my mind will sometimes focus on unimportant details. And I, too, feel unsafe when I'm in the sleepy state that Skip describes.

I want to learn more about these states. Soldiers, I'm told, suffer from them as well.

I ask Skip what has helped him the most. “Meditation,” he said. “Also yoga. Anything that keeps me in the present.”

I
decide that I want to read what the other girls in the neighboring towns had said about their rapist, to see for myself how similar their stories were to mine.

The town counsel in Concord gave the police department permission to release redacted material from the files of rapes that involved a similar MO to mine. These rapes occurred between 1970 and 1973, in Concord and nearby towns.

I walk over to my trash can, the one with the elephants. I see a packet of files, held together with one of those jaunty-looking paper clips, yellow with red stripes.

I look inside one of the files. I see the girls' careful penmanship. They were writing for the police.

I realize, once again, that I can't read the files at home. I ask Chet to take the trash can and put it in the trunk of my car. I will
take the trash can to another state and read the contents there. Chet often lifts heavy things for me when I'm traveling. The trash can is not heavy. But, anyway.

I wonder aloud, Would it make sense to transfer the files to a bag that is easier to transport? Perhaps this one here, a small black bag on which is written “TrueValue Hardware”?

“Let's leave them in the wastebasket,” Chet responds. I do not ask him why. I think to myself, Perhaps he thinks the files are safer in the trash can. Perhaps he thinks that I am safer with the files in the trash.

I take the trash can from the trunk of the car into the cabin where I'm staying. I pull out a few pages. I begin to read. I see the words
bed
and
tall lean man with a gun pointed at me
.

I stand up. I am cold. Maybe I should make a fire. Once my kindling is crackling, I add a small log, bark side down. The bark ignites.

I sit down to read a page. I see the words
grayish black pistol
, and
he said don't scream
, and
do as you're told and you won't get hurt
.

I decide to make a pot of tea. I fill the pot and straighten up my desk. By the time the water boils, my fire has gone out. I insert fresh kindling. I push some logs around.

Once again I sit down to read the file, with a cup of tea warming my hand. I read a few more sentences.

I see the words
bend my knees wide open
and
unzippered
.

I get up. I am not upset. I just can't sit still.

Finally I decide to bring the trash can somewhere else. I take it to a nearby library, where there are people, and I have reason to hope I will be less likely to feel spooked.

I find that I must think carefully about where to put the trash can. I do not want it in my line of sight, nor do I want it behind my back. I find a spot just outside my line of vision, on a forward
diagonal to my left, on a black leather chair. I am not a superstitious person. I feel embarrassed, even in front of myself, that all this seems to be necessary.

I have read about triggers—the sounds or smells or sights that can suddenly catapult us back to the moment when we faced a violent death; the way the sound of a backfiring car can bring a grown man to the ground. But it is hard to understand how this works. The soldier knows that cars will backfire. Can't he learn to ignore the sound? Can't he use his rational mind to overcome his response to that sound? And can't I, similarly, knowing that these files pertain to a dead man, treat them like ordinary paper?

Finally, sitting in the library, I am able to read through the files. I am not allowed to quote from the redacted reports, but here is a summary.

The rape at Concord Academy occurred at 11:30
PM
on April 29, 1971. A tall, lean man walked into a student's room, wielding a gun. She was sitting on her bed, doing her homework. He pointed a gun at her. She observed that his eyes were a clear whitish blue. She described the gun as a gray-black pistol with a white handle. He told her to do what she was told and she wouldn't get hurt. He asked her how old she was, and whether the girl in the next room was pretty. He told her to put on a skirt and to dance for him. After that he directed her to the bed, where he made her bend her knees wide open and began touching her “lower parts” with his hands. He put down his gun on the condition that she wouldn't scream. He also put two rocks down by the gun. He pulled out a gray tube. He rubbed a salve on her “lower parts” and said it would make it slipperier. He tried to have intercourse with her but did not succeed. He asked her to go into the neighboring girl's room and wake her neighbor up, and to make sure the second girl wouldn't scream. The first girl reports that she opened the door and called softly to the girl in
the neighboring room, telling her to be quiet, promising that the man with the gun would not hurt her. The second girl screamed in fright. The first girl reports that she muffled the mouth of the second girl to keep her quiet. The second girl calmed down. Then the man raped the second girl. The first girl reports that she heard the second girl's cry of pain. As he left, he told the two girls not to call the police. He also told them it was a cap gun.

 

I know these files cannot hurt me, but I feel them to be dangerous. As I read, I sense my body slowing down, as if I were dying. How could it be that this man managed to terrify a girl to the point that she was willing to “muffle” another girl's mouth? How could it be that the second girl calmed down, with the weight of the first girl's palm on her mouth? I want to scream.

I want to be precise here. I know I am not dying, or at least if I am dying, it is only in the sense that every second we live we are one second closer to death. But the weight of the words drags me down until I feel myself bent down like a little old lady in a fairy tale.

I get up, of course. I get up again and again; I cannot sit this through.

This is the part where my breath gets caught—the way the first girl talked the second into complying.

Why did she tell the other girl to be quiet?

Why did she promise the second girl that she would not be hurt?

Why, when the second girl didn't obey the command to be quiet, did the first girl muffle the second girl's mouth?

This is how the Nazis got the Jewish elders to arrange the orderly deportation from the ghettos to the death camps, how they got the Kapos to do their dirty work. Scared them half to death, but then let them live. In the moment a person is broken
by terror, she is more easily seduced into “muffling” others. You will move up in the world if you only follow orders, if you sell out your sister, if you muzzle her.

Again and again, my mind gets snagged on “muffled.” What does it mean? A muffled scream; a light snuffed out. To muffle means to suppress, repress; to smother, squash, or kill. This is what most rape victims do, they muffle themselves. I think again of the Muselmänner, the “walking corpses” in the concentration camps, who lost the will to live. They were not sent to the gas chambers, but they died, nonetheless, from terror, usually within days of arriving at the camps.
²

Their light was muffled. You could see them, but they would not see you, Primo Levi tells us. They did not bother to avoid blows or to seek food, he says. The other prisoners could easily identify these condemned men as “Muselmänner,” or “the drowned.” The other prisoners steered clear of them, as if their suicidal despair were contagious.

This is what muffled means to me. Muffled is the way I let go, let myself down into my own nonbeing, when I thought the rapist was about to kill my sister and me; or perhaps my sister or me. I want to emit the terror that was muffled back then. I want to bellow like a creature facing slaughter, on behalf of my sister and me and on behalf of these two girls, the one attempting to stifle the other and the one struck dumb by the other girl's palm.

I consider walking out of my cabin and into the woods and screaming as loud as I can. This time I will not be muffled: I will lacerate the ear of God. I will wail wildly: How could you let this happen? I will scream so loud that the molecular structure of the air will change. You have not heard of this happening, you will say. But just wait and see. I will roar argon into chlorine, xenon into fluorine, all the noble gases into reactive ones. My lament will terrify even the stars.

I see, in my mind's eye, the tremor of the stars as my dirge reverberates into space. I will shout out the sound that has been building in all of Brian Beat's victims for decades.

But what if my scream isn't loud enough? What if the stars don't tremble? Even worse, what if they do?

I could go out in the woods and scream, but I'm too inhibited. It seems that I muffle myself. Or maybe I'm afraid to wake the dead. If I truly rage, if I truly grieve, Brian Beat would surely hear me, dead though he is. He might come back and get me. I am afraid that if I scream too loud, this time he will kill me.

Is this the reason I lost my capacity to feel afraid? I was too afraid, perhaps. Irrationally afraid. Once it starts, it might not stop.

I get up again and again. And yet I feel a kind of duty to read the raped girls' words, so I read the second girl's story, too.

She was asleep when the girl in the neighboring room came in, followed by a man with a gun. The first girl told her, she said, not to scream and to do everything the man said, and then promised her that she wouldn't get hurt. It was because she trusted her neighbor, she said, that she complied. Then the man with the gun commanded her to dance. He spread the salve on her. When he entered her, he admonished her to loosen up, she was too tense. He had clear blue eyes, she wrote, and was tall and thin.

There it is again; the first girl muffled the second one. Even so, the second girl trusted the first girl. Be quiet, the first girl said, so that we can both survive.

I've been quiet, too, for the same reason. I've been quiet for years.

The Muselmänner disintegrated into a state that “signaled the approach of definitive indifference,” after which there was no turning back.
³
Physical death was imminent, but the Nazis did not kill these victims with gas. They killed them with terror.

But I'm not quiet anymore. No longer a Muselmann. What my
life tells me is that it is possible to survive, outwardly, while remaining blanked inside. To be a Muselmann only inside.

And now I wonder: Which girl suffered more—the girl who was penetrated, or the girl who wasn't? The girl whose cries were muffled, or the girl who has to live with the knowledge that she muffled her sister as a service to their torturer? The Jews who were killed, or the Jews who survived as a result of their work for the Nazis?

There are more files of similar rapes, the others at other private girls' schools in the Boston area. I read these files as quickly as I can. The rapist described in these cases is always slender and tall. Most of the victims described his eyes as “startling bright blue,” “whitish blue,” or “clear blue.” He always asks his victims' age and where they are from. He always threatens to kill them. He always commands that they look away, but only dons a homemade mask during the act of rape. He does not seem to be deterred by the presence of potential witnesses: he often entered dorms or homes that were filled with people. There is almost always more than one victim, usually two; and in many cases, only one of the victims is penetrated. He seems to take his time. He likes to have an audience. He is particular about his victims' positions. In some cases, the victims notice a white handle or white grips on a gray-black gun. In other cases they describe the gun as grayish black. In almost every case, when the rapist is done, he admits that the “pistol” they observed was a cap gun. Some of the victims observed acne scars on his neck and face. He is usually described as having a “Boston accent,” or “local accent.”

His technique changes over time. In the beginning, he carried a tube of jelly, which he spread on the victim's vagina. He also carried stones in his pocket, and laid them out on the bed or nearby on the floor, as if reenacting some kind of ritual. Sometimes, early on, he wore a wig or gloves, but later he did not. He
claimed to be from different places, often the state his victim was from, and he used different names.

 

It is a bleak and cold January day. My son is with his father, and Chet is away. I have been writing all day. My neighbor, Pebble Gifford, has invited me to her house for dinner, where there will be other neighbors. I have written too long into the afternoon, trying to take advantage of the silence in the apartment. It is hard to transition from the dead Brian Beat to the living world, but I take a walk and a bath and I find a way back.

It is a convivial Cambridge party. Most of the attendees are a generation older than I. They are sophisticated—well traveled and well read. Many of them have known each other for decades. They have worked on failed campaigns together. They've seen one another through triumphs and then a slowing down. It is a group to which I don't belong.

But I feel welcome. I also feel safe.

Two of us are outsiders in this group—Joe Finder, a successful writer of thrillers, and myself. At one point, our hostess asks the two of us to tell the group what we are presently writing.

I have told very few people the subject of this work. Not that it's a secret—it just feels odd to talk about it. I propose to Joe, the famous writer, that he go first.

But he, the famous writer, wants to give the floor to me.

It's not that I'm afraid. Of course not. What is the point of writing a book if I can't reveal its subject, even to a friendly audience?

I tell myself I have no colleagues here, that I have nothing to lose, that it's good practice to talk about the subject of this work.

“I am writing about my own rapist,” I blurt out, perhaps a bit too quickly, perhaps a bit too quietly.

I sense confusion. There is a silence, but also a rustling, as people shift their bodies. They are uncomfortable with what they couldn't quite hear. Maybe they are trying to get a grip on the meaning of the words they heard.