What if she had cried right at the very beginning? Could she have made him feel bad? One year when she was in junior high, a whole group of people decided to make fun of her day after day. She just kept her mouth shut and didn’t let them see that they were hurting her. That’s what you did. That’s what everybody did. Toughed it out. But they kept right on doing it. Later she wondered, what if she had burst into tears that very first time, forced them to come face to face with the fact that they were hurting another human being? Would that have made them stop? Probably not, unfortunately. At least when they were younger, bullies had enjoyed making people cry. But maybe by the time they were a little older, it would have had an effect. Maybe by that age, they would have felt ashamed. She didn’t know. She’d never tried it. Anyway, he would probably have just laughed and made her cry some more.
What if she had kissed him the very first thing? What would he have done then? What if she had looked into his eyes that first moment with an expression of surprise and of awe. “It’s you,” she might have said. “I’ve been waiting for you.” And kissed him again. And maybe he would have raised his eyebrows in shock, but begun to kiss her back. And when she kept kissing him, voluntarily, even hungrily, touching him, maybe he would have felt some amazing new feeling inside. Relief. Finally, he’d found her. And she would have kept kissing him and treating him like the lover she’d searched for all her life. Until she’d gotten the chance to use her gun.
But then, she probably would never have gotten that chance. Because even if she’d done all that, he would never be able to trust her. And that was a funny thing, in a way. Usually it’s the bad guy that wants the good guy to trust him. This was the other way around. There’d be a part of him that wanted to trust her. There had to be. But he couldn’t allow himself to. Ever. Even if it turned out she really was the one for him. He could never afford to take that chance. He was doomed by his own actions. Once he did what he did, he could never trust anyone.
It was a funny thing to think about, if you had a sick sense of humor. People met in all sorts of ways: bumping into each other, heading for the same table or movie seat, sitting opposite each other on a train. Their eyes met, and sometimes, they just knew. What if it happened to him, on one of his jobs? He’d never be able to pursue it. He’d always have to assume that she was just waiting him out, waiting to catch him off his guard. He’d never know.
A gal could get a lot of thinking done while she was being raped. Who knew?
He wasn’t demanding anything of her at this point. Just brutally, methodically wearing her down. What he was doing had become a solid drone of pain. And it was working. Here she was daydreaming in near-delirium. Not even thinking anymore of how or what was next. Just passing the time.
He would stop eventually. He had to. He was only flesh and blood. And bone. And then she would have to figure out what to say next. She was getting tired. She was running out of ideas. She needed to get herself back. Think. Think.
She knew she needed him to think he had broken her before he actually had, but the window between the two states was rapidly closing. Far too rapidly closing.
Maybe this was all an illusion, she thought, grasping at straws. A shared illusion. Maybe none of this was actually happening, and what really happened was that she woke up in his arms, he finished raping her, and then he suffocated her to death, because that’s all he was really there to do. But in that last second of shared consciousness, like in
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
, together they cooked up this extended fantasy that couldn’t help but highlight their talents and wit. He wanted more than anything else in the world to find the woman/victim that would be worthy of his skills, that would make his blood rush, that would make his cock endlessly hard, that would bring him the satisfaction that had always eluded him. He would win, of course, but it would be a contest, a true test of their fortitude and will. And she would have precious more hours of life, which, even if painful and stressful, were lived in a context where she was the absolute center of a man’s attention again, and where she found everything she believed in tested and finally, having fought as long and as hard as she could, she would die with nothing left to regret. Or maybe she wouldn’t die, maybe their combined fantasy would end with him dying, because perhaps he didn’t really relish going on after his experience with her, maybe he’d even ultimately let her win because after her, after this, what was the point? His life, he knew, was an empty and distorted one. Why not finish it on a high note?
These things could happen. Maybe the whole world was really a combined fantasy of all the souls circulating around it. Maybe existence was like a Ouija board, with everybody’s hands subconsciously creating the messages from beyond. Maybe those seconds, those last seconds, were the only real things in the world, when people’s truest dreams forced their way out, and everything else, like
The Matrix
, was a sham to distract us from that vital knowledge of what we truly were and what we were really meant to do.
After all, everything that mattered really took place inside your head, didn’t it? There were no feelings without that, no insights, no struggles, nothing that wasn’t felt there, along with wherever else. In those last seconds, maybe anything was possible. Maybe a villain and a victim could discover that they actually needed each other, could go back and undo what was done, and do instead what they needed each other to do.
Maybe life was a shared conceit, like shame; death was, too, and so was suffering and triumph. All make-believe, all a child’s game.
Or maybe she needed to take it back further.
Maybe nothing had been real after her son’s death. Maybe she had died then, too, not her husband. Maybe she was the one who couldn’t bear to stay, who had climbed into that car and driven away and off the earth that day. And everything since, her husband, the business, this man, they were all just the last flaring, misfiring bits of electricity in her dying brain. It felt like time, but maybe there had been no time. No anything. And she was, in the real now, floating in the water beyond that cliff, floating and mostly if not quite completely, officially but not unquestionably, dead. That meant this could go on for what would feel like a long time, if it was not really happening at all. Entire lives could be lived between the seconds that ticked on a clock in the real world. Where those synapses had taken her was not good, was not peaceful, not at all. But who knew how that worked? Maybe she was stuck here in what would seem like forever, the last firing of a neuron an event that set a soul loose from time and space, a prisoner of whatever the last thought or fragment of a thought was. Maybe you couldn’t control what those last thoughts were, or maybe she had chosen poorly. Or maybe it was up to her subconscious, which was the weakness in the whole system since the subconscious could certainly not be trusted to do what was best, to think what was best. So where was she going with this? The logical place.
Maybe this was Hell. Maybe this was what Hell was, the extended unlife lived after the body died. This could certainly be Hell for a person like her. An endless mental battle against oneself and a worthy adversary. Maybe the Devil appeared in a billion different forms, and this man was merely one of them. He certainly couldn’t be explained any other way. There was no childhood that would account for his behavior, because whatever he had gone through, it was a foregone conclusion that someone else had been subjected to the same exact thing or worse yet had not become evil. So what would explain it? He was right to steer her away from trying. There was no point. And maybe the reason was that he was her own, personal Devil, the one who would make her afterlife an endless, living Hell. Occupying that space between being and not, life and death, the cusp, as it were, was where Hell was, and she could be here forever. It hadn’t been a choice. It was her punishment. Maybe she had been very, very wrong. She wouldn’t know, nor did she expect to be told, which sin or sins were the ones that had doomed her. Maybe loving someone who did bad things even for a good cause was the sin. Maybe everyone who operated in the world she operated in was damned. Maybe there was something she could have done to save her son, and she hadn’t done it.
Or maybe it was all about forgiveness. Maybe forgiveness was the power. Maybe she had forgiven her father, and he had, as a result, been spared this. Maybe her attacker would be spared as well for she had said the magic words to him. And her husband, whom she had forgiven, for leaving her the way he had. Maybe if you forgave someone, they would be spared. And maybe the problem was that the one person she had never forgiven was herself. She could have, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t thought to forgive herself for losing her son. For not, somehow, saving him. Not then or since had she forgiven herself. And there had been no one else left to forgive her. Maybe that’s why she’d be paying the price for that forever. And she was of two minds when she thought of that. That she had lost him and that she
should
be punished for it. And that there hadn’t been anything she could have done, and it was all dreadfully unfair, the whole thing. That it wasn’t her fault, so why
had
she been punished? Why was she still and always being punished? She hadn’t meant to lose him. She had done everything there was to be done. She hadn’t tossed him away, he had been taken from her. And it wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t fair.
And then, in the wake of that incomprehensible loss, came the one she could have saved, her husband, whom she hadn’t. She hadn’t even tried. Why not? This time, the answer came, and she couldn’t stop it.
Because she thought neither of them deserved it. Not a life, after the loss of their son’s; not the love they still would have shared. She’d punished herself. Because the fact was, they
could
have gone on as if things could once again be good for the two of them. People did, and they could have. That was what they both knew and couldn’t bear to accept. That was what he would rather have died than admit. And that was why she had let him. She had punished herself.
And for a second she felt a pain even greater than the external ones she had been hiding from, burrowing as deep as she could go inside her mind. She felt the pain that never stopped hurting, even though to survive, she had to pretend it didn’t exist. The pain that was there in the morning, and in the evening, and in the middle of the night. The pain that was like breathing.
And it was this pain that sliced through all the others. Through all the distractions and distortions that resulted when what was left of her, harried and hunted, was pressed, the way a suspected witch was pressed under the weight of boards and stones, the way she was being pressed by the body of this man who wanted to destroy her slowly and bit by bit. This one, singular pain cut through it all.
This pain was the one thing that could save her.
Or maybe not.
She could no longer hide from what he was doing to her. Not in abstractions, not in the metaphysical. Not even in insight or regret. It was no use. No use. Whatever seemed to be happening felt like it really was happening, and there was no refuge. She couldn’t speculate her way out of it. There was no way out.
Finally, the physical pain was taking over. It was beginning to surpass the other one, the one she thought – was it moments ago or hours? – was more powerful than any other. It turns out, she began to realize, that body is more dominant than mind or even soul. Consciousness and the thoughts and plans that flowed from it were being obliterated. All she could think about – if the word thinking could even be applied here – was escaping from it. If she could just move, if she could just move away. Something was always inside her. Inside her! And she couldn’t get it out.
Theories were gone, purpose was gone. This was what torture was. Torture was the pain that wouldn’t stop, overt and unsubtle and overwhelming everything else. Sometimes she felt the pain exactly where it was, localized. Other times it just seemed that her whole body was screaming. He wouldn’t stop. Her mouth, her ass, her cunt. How could anyone do this, turn something good into something so awful? Yet it was pleasure for him. Someone had really screwed up in the design for humans; there should not be physical pleasure in inflicting pain. She would take that up with Someone shortly. But it was hard to think of anything between the waves and eddies and tides of agony. And on top of it all, she was so tired. So tired. Her brain was tired, and her body was tired. If she could have passed out, she would have been fine, but he wouldn’t let her. He was loving it. That and the pain became the only things of which she was aware. She couldn’t see beyond the dark, narrow tunnel of suffering that ended at his face. She couldn’t hear anything but his voice, the words that he said, ugly words, and the groaning, happy, sexual sounds that he made.
Smug, smug, smug. His smugness became part of the pain. She wanted to smash his face. Really smash it. Into pieces. His smug, overconfident, miserable, pathetic face. Nobody could be happy doing this; he was lying to himself.