SO WHY DO I STILL FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE?

Immediately after the assault happened, there, in the basement, with no one listening except for Mark, I whispered: He raped me. I don’t remember this, but I believe Mark’s memory. So why do I still feel uncomfortable using the word rape?

Mark is still him, regardless of what I call him.

And as for what he did—

Regardless of what I call it, his actions remain the same.

. . .

ME: Do you—have you thought about getting a therapist? Since we’ve started talking especially?

HIM: Have I thought about it? Sure. Am I at all likely to take the sort of action that leads to doing that? No.

ME: It’s hard to find a good therapist.

HIM: It is, and like, I don’t—like I said earlier, I could probably use somebody that’s not you to talk about some of this stuff with, but my process is just more to not talk about it.

ME: Are you close friends with the guys you work with?

HIM: I was pretty good friends with a couple of the guys, but we’ve had some turnover. It’s a really small business. It’s mostly me and Sam. I like Sam fine and we get along, but he’s five years older and has a wife and three little girls. We don’t hang out.

ME: So who do you spend time with, then?

HIM: I sort of don’t. I don’t want to make myself out to be too much of a sad sack, but I really don’t have a lot of close friends. I’m just bad at maintaining those relationships or starting new ones. It is sort of what it is.

ME: When you went back to college, to grad school, was it helpful taking classes with other people?

HIM: It was really helpful for me initially because it was good to have an excuse to think about—the kind of problems you have to do in engineering come pretty naturally to me. There’s no non-braggart way to say this, but that kind of classwork is just not that hard for me. I can just sort of do it. It felt good to be back in that environment, to being the smart kid in the class. The math and physics of it is interesting to a certain extent, but I kind of realized that culturally I wasn’t that interested in actually doing engineering. I don’t have the part of me that wants to do six years of research. I’m not built to be an actual academic.

ME: Did you make many friends in grad school?

HIM: I would say I was friendly with my classmates. I kind of became friends with one of the guys, and then I was kind of shitty about it and just kind of ignored that relationship after we graduated.

ME: Why do you think that was?

HIM: I don’t know. Part of it is I was trying to come to grips with, to come up to speed with the camera stuff, and my head just wasn’t in the engineering stuff anymore. I’m bad at keeping friends around, which is really what it comes down to. I don’t have that instinct that says to call up people because I haven’t talked to them in a week or two weeks or month or whatever it is, and all of a sudden it’s been three months and I haven’t talked to the guy and now I feel like we’re strangers.

ME: I can see how our friendship coming apart was hard for you. It was hard for me. But does it surprise you then that I don’t feel enraged?

HIM: Yeah. I’ve been surprised by the extent to which you seem to have actually put it behind you and are engaging with it at a detached position, which, I don’t know if that’s accurately describing how you’re feeling. Like I said earlier, it’d be expected I guess and easier to navigate if you were just furious at me for the rest of time.

ME: Why do you think it would be easier to navigate? How would you navigate it then?

HIM: Obviously we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’d be like, I did a bad thing, and the person I did the bad thing to hates me now. I know what that is. That makes sense. It’s unfortunate but the forgiveness is, like I said, it’s great but it is more complicated. I feel like I have to have earned it, if that makes any sense, and I feel that I didn’t.

ME: This makes me really happy, to talk with you again. Which is messed up probably, because I’m like, How nice it is of him to agree to talk to me. I’m recognizing how complicated that is. I certainly had nightmares about what happened over the years. Conceptually, nightmares interest me because of the lack of consent that happens with nightmares.

HIM: Right. You can’t opt out of the nightmare.

ME: To be sexually assaulted, that’s really close to being a nightmare. You’re usually in a bed, and you have no way of pushing the nightmare away. It’s just going to happen.

HIM: There is some metaphor working overtime there.