LIKE A FILM, IN REVERSE

Back at the hotel, I lie in bed, mentally reviewing how I handled my meeting with Mark. I didn’t hug him. I was friendly but I pushed back when he, as Sarah would say, started equalizing our experiences. I think I talked more than he did. But that’s okay. That’s more than okay. That’s a good thing. Right?

Oh, and right: he acknowledged that he knew, before carrying me into his basement room, that the basement would work to his advantage.

I could reconstruct today’s conversation from memory, but I have the audio. I may as well listen to the audio.

Or I could mute his voice. I could just listen to mine. I can handle listening to mine.

Or what if I went hyper-experimental? What if the transcript read something like . . .

ME: I was hurt, and sort of surprised.

ME: I remember feeling relief that I didn’t have to keep this from my dad.

ME: I know so many women who’ve been sexually assaulted.

I text him: Thanks for today. It was extraordinarily helpful.

Mark texts back: Good! And glad I could help. I kind of felt like I was being really inarticulate, honestly.

I reply: I’d feel a little skeptical of flawlessly delivered explanations of sexual assault.

He texts: Hah, that’s a fair point.

Instead of thanking him, I should have texted: Today was useful. No, that would’ve been too cold. Or: I’m glad we met today. It’s so hard not to slip into thinking of him as a friend.

Have I learned nothing from this entire project?

When talking with him, I don’t think I used the word rape.

Each time I close my eyes, I see the rape. I imagine watching it, like a film, in reverse:

I stop crying. Mark removes his hand from between my legs. He kneels, dresses me slowly. Jake walks down the steps. Together they lift me, carry me upstairs.

But why stop there? Why not rewind until my dad is breathing again?

Cut it out, I tell myself. Either sleep or work.

I start transcribing the audio.

. . .

ME: Okay, so it’s okay that I’m recording this?

HIM: Yes.

ME: Okay. [We laugh nervously.] I think I can black it out. [I turn off the iPad’s screen display. Then I turn it back on to confirm the app is still recording.] Yes. It works. Okay, so [I turn off the screen]—how have you felt since we last talked?

HIM: It was good to get some of that off my chest. And you actually caught me at a useful time of the year, for you. Just because I had, in the winter, or February, when we last talked—I’m not as overwhelmed with work. I’m able to be more emotionally present. I actually took a personal day today because I didn’t want to come here and be totally fried.

ME: We’ve talked on the phone, but I haven’t seen you in—I guess it’s been more than fourteen years.

HIM: It’s been an awfully long time.

ME: How have you felt since we last talked on the phone? Has anything changed? Or have you had that experience where you ruminate over something you’ve said and start to pick it apart?

HIM: I will say I went about sixteen sort of iterations over whether I should offer to pick you up from the airport and then decided not to. [We laugh.]

ME: That’s okay. So nothing?

HIM: I don’t know how to feel about it.

ME: Let me cover this [I cover the iPad with paper] because this is probably distracting.

HIM: A little bit. [We laugh.] Um. It’s just been a strange experience. I think I had buried it a little more than I thought, and so I’ve been sort of reprocessing my actions—so that was really stressful for a while because I’m basically not happy with who I was. And you know—I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I’m glad that you’re willing to forgive and move on and this is an interesting project. It’s an awkward position to be in, to just be apologizing over and over.

ME: It’s hard, I would think. I have this concern a lot of the time when I’m writing nonfiction—about authenticity, about being genuine, all while being inventive and reconstructing an experience.

HIM: Well, you’ll never be able to write your inner monologue in real time.

ME: Right. [Silence. Server is nearby.] Do you want to order?

HIM: I think I do. Maybe just the cheese plate.

ME: Is here okay? I figured a museum restaurant would be quiet. We can move to a bench or table in the atrium if you want.

HIM: No, this is okay.

ME: Okay. So when you were picking apart your memory of that night, I guess that process is a reckoning with your actions and—

HIM: The problem with picking it apart is my memories are so fragmentary. In some ways it feels like it was somebody else. Not to excuse myself. I don’t know. I’m having trouble accessing the headspace I was in at that time. It’s— [Silence. Server is nearby.] I don’t really know what to say.

ME: I understand that you’re not trying to excuse it.

HIM: I don’t know how to own it and be embarrassed and ashamed of it at the same time. [Server comes. We order.]

ME: You’ve felt like it wasn’t you who—

HIM: I just—and this is not really—it’s not just about this incident. It just seems to be how my memory works. I feel like I’ve done about five different iterations of myself. I was just such a mess as a teenager.

ME: I can understand that.

HIM: The thing that keeps me up at night is I can remember you crying. That’s what sticks.

ME: You’ve said before that this one experience warps your memories of our friendship. For me, I was really worried when I asked you for the five good memories and I hadn’t heard from you in a while. I thought, Oh. Maybe this friendship—

HIM: Did we actually never have this friendship?

ME: Yeah, and that was tough for me.

HIM: Coming up with memories, that was harder than I thought.

ME: You sent me a memory of us in Chicago. Was that from our freshman year?

HIM: It must have been. I think it must have been. I remember I hitched a ride with Jake and his uncle. They were going to a football game.

ME: You must have stayed in my dorm.

HIM: Yeah.

ME: Because I was thinking, When did that happen? People think I have a good memory, but I’ll insist on never having seen an entire movie and then, right when the credits come on, I’ll realize: I have seen this movie before! [We laugh.] I was really happy that you had that memory. And that detail, of us getting lost.

HIM: I was just mortified for days. I really wanted to go to the Skydeck of the Sears Tower and I marched us probably a mile down Michigan Ave. in the wrong direction toward the John Hancock Building, and then it was closed. [We laugh.]

ME: I remember we both tried to pretend that what happened hadn’t happened. [Server comes, checks in.] I forget where I was going with that. I do remember reaching the point where we stopped talking. My mom would give me updates about you. And, up until then, I had trouble acknowledging that I was angry at you. But then I’d get these updates—because your dad would tell my mom how you were, what you were doing—and I remember feeling indifferent. I remember thinking, Yeah, so? And when I learned you’d dropped out of college, part of me felt bad for you, but another part of me felt indifferent. But now I want you to have a good life. I want you to be happy. And I think that’s because this project is giving me closure. That’s not necessarily why I’m writing it. But the fact that it’s community service in some way. [We laugh.] And before, I tried to rush through the forgiveness process—I forgive you, just read Franny and Zooey and things will be fine—instead of letting myself feel any anger. And by doing that, it wasn’t genuine forgiveness. It was Dr. Phil forgiveness.

HIM: If you say it enough, you’ll believe it.

ME: Or: I’ll forgive and I’ll just feel better. I was jumping past the emotions, and so there were no negative emotions to overcome. No anger or resentment or whatever. And so it wasn’t real forgiveness, which is probably why I found it hard to move on. And given the years I distanced myself from you, I realize I probably felt contempt. But now, I don’t know—to know that you’ve felt bad about it, I find that helpful. And that you acknowledged it was bad, that has been helpful to me—in processing some of this. For years I thought, Maybe it wasn’t that bad.

HIM: Jesus.

ME: Well no, but really.

HIM: I get the rationalization process there, but just—it’s one of those things that I regret you had to go through that process let alone— [His voice trails off.]

ME: I remember after it happened, Amber saying—she was really upset—saying, Jeannie, that was rape, and I said, No, it wasn’t. And then Jake finding out. And then the masculinity, the impulse toward violence, coming out. Jake saying, I’m going to kick his ass. That was another question I wanted to ask you: With Jake—you were never a bro-y guy. Do you think that living in that house with Jake—I remember posters of women in bikinis. I definitely remember Maxims and Playboys.

HIM: Jake and his uncle had their whole little bro-fantasy thing going on.

ME: Did that influence you?

HIM: I don’t—I mean, yes, it’s probably fair to say that it would have. I don’t feel like I was ever that guy. But, I mean, I may not be in the most objective position on that.

ME: Well, you said that what had happened changed the sort of narrative you could tell about yourself. You used to think of yourself as one of the good guys. Who were the bad guys, would you say? Who would you envision?

HIM: Semiserious answer: [name of high school football player].

ME: I completely forgot about him. Oh man, yeah, yeah, okay. What about him? Why?

HIM: He had this casual indifference toward the idea of learning about anything. He just—he was everything I didn’t want to be in high school. And he was also more popular. Not to drag up twenty-year-old high school drama. I really couldn’t stand that guy.

ME: Yeah, I completely forgot about him. So he was one of the bad guys.

HIM: He actually seems like he’s grown up to be—he’s actually a teacher in Sandusky now or something. For whatever that’s worth.

ME: There were some great teachers. But then there was my newspaper advisor. You knew something had happened between him and me, but you didn’t know what.

HIM: I never got a straight answer out of anybody. There was gossip that something had happened.

ME: I remember your dad—and this is a weird thing to remember—but there was something involving a mini-fridge. Your dad wouldn’t return a mini-fridge to my advisor, or he wouldn’t loan a mini-fridge to him. Your dad told me, I don’t like him anymore. And that meant so much to me—because there were some teachers who seemed to be on my advisor’s side. I’d see them laughing with him in the hallways. So, you didn’t know about my advisor. We never talked about him. The fact that we didn’t—the fact that you didn’t know what had happened. I’m surprised I didn’t confide in you. Recently that made me question my understanding of our friendship, which I really didn’t want to question. Though I didn’t confide in a lot of people I cared about. And I mean, of course the assault made me question our friendship. But also: the fact that the assault happened surrounding the one-year anniversary of my dad’s death. You knew I was upset about my dad. And it was the first time I’d been drunk. I was definitely vulnerable, and—

HIM: And I preyed on that vulnerability.

ME: Yeah.

HIM: I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time the extent to which you were having trouble dealing with your dad’s death. I don’t recall a calculation that I made, that like: This is my plan and I’m going to—she is in this vulnerable state and this is my opportunity to take advantage. Not to say that that would have been beyond me. But I don’t recall having that train of thought. But yeah, it’s just—it just makes me feel that much worse—about the timing of it. Not—I don’t know how to say it. There is just no polite way to talk about some of this. I don’t know. It’s one of those details that I don’t think I appreciated at the time. But looking at it, in retrospect, from your perspective, it’s just more heartbreaking.

ME: We would talk on the phone for hours after he died, and you remembered that fact. You knew, had to have known, I was devastated about my dad’s death. So—what was our friendship? Were we? Did you think of us as friends?

HIM: Yeah, I thought of us as really close friends and also—there’s no nice way to put it: I was in love with you as a person, the idea I had constructed of you. Which probably makes it worse, not better.

ME: What was the idea of me?

HIM: Just, we never had the relationship. I never had an intimate knowledge of your inner personality.

ME: My inner personality?

HIM: It’s tough to be in love with somebody you’re not—people don’t generally throw that word around. And it’s not generally with people they talk on the phone with an hour at a time. [Server brings us drinks.]