Man Hunt (30 page)

Josie didn't have time to prepare herself. Before she knew it Charles had her on the bed and was pulling off her clothes and then his.

Her heart sped up. Her nerves threatened to boil over. She wasn't ready for this. Not again. She would go crazy. She'd die.

When he started, she forced herself to smile at him, and the only solace was that he neither saw nor cared. Soon his head was pulsing like an oil rig over her shoulder and she didn't need to pretend anymore.

It was only the second act of intercourse in her life, it was with the same man, and it was worse than the first time because while the first time had created all the flashbacks that had tortured her for six years, this second time included them.

At one point she mistook the past for the present and thought she was reliving the rape of six years before. Perhaps she was. She kept imagining that backhand across her face and the sweat dripping off his nose and the look of anger, of hatred in his eyes. He hadn't called her a whore, but it had been in his eyes.

And wasn't that what she was doing now? Forget handjobs and gropings. She was laid flat on her back in a dirty bed like a common, cheap prostitute. Her legs were spread. Her panties were on the floor beside her. And she was taking his payment simply so she could survive.

How did she survive? She didn't know. Time passed, she supposed. She only prayed that it would be over soon, over soon, over soon. She tried to think of other things like Water Torture and Lavatory and Thumbscrews and Confessions and Emotional Marker Implementations and the leather straps hanging from the center of every training room. But always that backhand from the past and his selfish grunting of the present interrupted her. Bearing it wasn't just difficult or impossible. It was incomprehensible.

Every moment that he continued took another little piece of Josie away and left a smaller, lighter, lesser thing behind. She had no concept of time, but when he finally fell, full-weighted and panting, on top of her, it did feel much shorter than six years before.

An hour,
she remembered telling Monica. Had that really been just yesterday? God, she had still been human then. She'd still be alive.

This time he hadn't even broken a sweat. Still, suffering the deed had been infinitely worse.

He rolled off of her and Josie quickly excused herself and went to the bathroom across the hall. Charles could have cared less what she did. He was barely able to wave her an 'ok' as she left.

Safe in the seclusion behind the closed bathroom door, she was finally able to drop her façade completely. She turned on the shower and stepped in, already naked. She didn't care about the freezing water. Anything was better than having the stink of Charles on her.

She pulled the curtain as closed as it would go, found a dirty bar of white soap, and began lathering and scrubbing.

As the water heated up, Josie ducked her head under and willed herself to be clean. She rubbed the bar vigorously and repeatedly everywhere, but especially on her breasts and genitals where he had pawed and prodded her. Soon her skin was red. Raw. The water had become scalding, and she turned it back just one touch so she could stand the heat of it.

No,
she thought. It was the only articulation her mind would allow. She turned the knob back to full force. She would burn away the Charles. That was the only way.

She lathered and scrubbed some more, paying no heed to the physical pain. She rubbed the soap in her hair, on her face, all around her neck, her armpits, her feet. Every crevasse felt so dirty, so horrid, so putrid. She scrubbed her genitals and thighs some more and then her head and hair again.

But none of it, no matter how she worked the soap and hot water across her skin, got any cleaner. And she knew why. The dirt, the filth, wasn't on her skin. It was on the inside. It wasn't him that was so foul, but her. For all of it. For playing demure games with him, for giving herself to him– to
him
of all people!– for doing Gertrude's bidding, for being proud of how well it had all been going, and especially for knowing she wasn't nearly done and would not stop… she was for all these reasons foul and filthy and putrid and so much of a whorish waste of human life. She was putrescence personified.

Josie slowed and finally stopped scrubbing herself raw, twisted the HOT knob hard to the left in the hopes of extracting even more heat, and crouched to the floor of the tub. The scorching water pelted her head and back, still stinging with every drop. She wrapped her head in her arms. The water ran down her face, across her eyes, nose, mouth. She could barely breathe.

The heat and humidity were stifling. She could sense the cloud of steam billowing around the top two feet of the ceiling, dropping lower with every passing minute, and rolling down the mirror. Her long wet hair was splayed out to all sides, sticking to her body. Back, sides, face, arms. She could barely live.

Then, when the new nightmare images finally subsided and she was able to think again, there was a realization.

I can't cry,
Josie thought.

And then,
I'll never cry again.

She sat there, feeling the water, feeling the grime inside her, feeling her shame. If Charles had come in at any point, she would not have been able to hide the truth. She was vulnerable.

But Charles did not come in, and Josie did not feel alive again for a long, long time.

Lucy stared at the paper in front of her. She had wanted so badly to leave behind a memorable letter, some kind of legacy to who she was and what she had experienced, and now the time had come and she had absolutely no idea what to write.

All these years,
she thought.
All these feelings. How can one woman sum everything up with a handful of words on a handful of pages?

The words of Hemingway came to her then, and suddenly she found herself laughing. 'Writing is easy,' he had purportedly explained. 'All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.'

She wished she could do that. It would be so much easier to open a vein than to open her mind. But the words would simply not come. What came instead were images. Images of dying men and screaming women. Images of her father's reddened, yelling face which morphed so easily into Gertrude's.

She thought of the men running from her black car out in the field. There were so many blood splatters and so many released screams of terror.

She thought of Gertrude and Monica who pushed and sculpted each girl who came and went. Now there were so many flowing tears and so many held screams of anger.

I can do this,
she told herself.
I
have
to do this.

But still, no words came to her. Her pen hovered over the top of the paper, seeming to mock her even as it waited for inspiration to come.

Another line came to her then, this one from some women she was sure she should remember but could not. "People will forget what you said," Lucy quoted. "They'll forget what you did, too. But they'll never forget how you made them feel."

Over the years, Gertrude and Monica had made her feel like she was no safer on the island than she ever had been at home. They made her feel the prisoner, the slave. It was true they made her feel power and strength just in
being
a woman, but they made her feel hatred for how she ran her life and uttermost fear for her immortal soul.

She was retiring from the island so soon now, so soon, and all she wanted was to leave a message which would give someone something better than that to feel. But try as she might, the only emotions that came were fear and hatred and despair.

"So why am I trying to tell a lie?" she asked the empty room.

It was then the words finally came.

"
Dear woman
," she wrote at the top of the paper. 

And then she opened her proverbial veins, and bled.

As the scalding water cascaded down, somewhere deep inside her Monroe's Island and it's teachings– it's Cause– called to Josie. It had been calling, she realized, ever since her rapist had appeared before her across the black macadam of a world she had long-since put behind her. Totally ingrained after the six years she'd spent on the island, her required womanly power was ever-present and even now found a voice.

Slowly, as the water coursed over her, Josie was eking back that strength and resolve that was her chief virtue. And when enough steaming water had rushed across her delicate skin, she finally took note of her desire to once again gain control.

With eyes closed, she waited for it to grow on its own, hoping she had enough strength and resilience to overpower her immense shame and self-loathing. Then she opened her eyes, and the full change that she eventually achieved started with her toe.

Her toe, shorter and pudgier than she would have liked, was the first thing she noticed as herself again. She was fascinated by this realization. It was
her
toe.
Hers.
And nobody had a toe quite exactly like that one. Quickly followed by her foot, leg, and rest of her body, Josie began seeing and feeling all the parts of herself anew.

Slowly, consciously, she took back what Charles had taken from her. She touched her calf just to feel the texture of the skin. She turned off the water just to feel the last of it trickle down her body, just to feel the heat of it fade away and a soft chill slowly encircle her as it slowly evaporated. She breathed deeply just to feel her lungs expand in the cooling bathroom air. It all helped.

Every movement, every decision, every answer to every question put another small piece of herself back where it belonged. Eventually, after she had completely air-dried and felt the joy of tightened skin and aching muscles, she was able to stand and look at herself in the mirror.

There were so many questions there. So many holes left to fill in. But there would be time for that now, and her heart smiled in spite of her mouth's inability to do so. She looked at her body, expecting to see something so terribly ugly, but saw instead not an object to be ogled, but a pillar of strength.

She had done this just a day ago, hadn't she? And she'd been happy with what she'd seen. But this time she saw something beyond the muscles and curves. Perhaps it was seeing herself in
this
mirror in
this
world. But she was also truly attractive. Beautiful, really. And for once she wasn't looking at her body, but into her reflection's eyes. What she was seeing was one of the most normal, regular things she'd ever seen. What she saw, in all its simple beauty, was a real woman. Regular, and yet complicated. And powerful. Scared. Everything. She saw everything. She saw herself.

She saw the courage it had taken to withstand Charles, to defy island rules, to feel compassion for men whose punishments far outweighed their crimes. She saw how the beauty that had so confounded her mother was not in her hair or her skin or her figure, but in her character. In her most subconscious mind that decided when to laugh, when to cry, how to live and how to die. Finally, Josie was seeing what was beautiful on the inside.

What she did not see was a woman of Monroe's Island. What she saw was her own self, not someone's perception of it. She was the woman Josie, and she could handle anything, including Charles.

Anything. Including Gertrude.

She smiled again with genuine joy, scared, but confident it wasn't a trick.

Without pausing to plan, she suddenly came to a bold decision. It was the kind of valiance which even Gertrude would have been proud to witness, if it hadn't also meant a whole host of island mutiny.

What will you do when you see me return?
she thought.
Your punishment was a test designed for me to fail. But I'm stronger than you think, Dirty Gertie. I'm stronger than all the muscles you could ever grow.

Without covering herself, Josie straightened her shoulders and opened the bathroom door. The rest of her life was out there, and there was nothing about any part of it which should make her feel ashamed.