Denial (18 page)

I read the letter again, finding myself a bit confused. On the one hand, the doctor appears to believe that a rape occurred. “He was found guilty of this one offense, which he is now serving.” The doctor does not appear to question the guilty verdict. He just doesn't find rape at gunpoint to be an example of “marked aggressive behavior.” And he finds it possible to describe a convicted rapist—whose guilt he appears not to question—as “not a sexually dangerous person.” What is the matter with this guy? Now I wonder, would he expose his daughter to this “gentle” gun-wielding rapist? If so, would he ensure that his daughter was armed? What about his wife? Now my thoughts run embarrassingly back in the direction of violence. I would like to shoot the two of them, both the learned doctor and the “gentle” rapist displaying “no evidence of mental disease.” But the rapist is now dead, and the good doctor is probably dead, too.

What sort of person fantasizes about shooting doctors, or lopping off their private parts?

He is conducting this interview with inmate Beat under strange circumstances. He wants the inmate to talk, but he must report what the inmate says; and the law requires that he inform the inmate of the risks to himself. This is exactly what I have done, countless times, with terrorists. I want them to talk to me about their violent crimes, but I write about them; and ethics requires that I inform them of the risks to themselves.

I return to my lima beans. I pull a barely used cookbook off the shelf, an old Fanny Farmer. I find a recipe for baked lima
beans. I boil the beans and drain them. I parboil a head of garlic to make it easy to remove the skin; my taste is a bit more robust than Ms. Farmer's. I put the skinless beans and the skinless garlic in a pan in a hot oven and leave them there to roast while I type up my thoughts. I think of removing the skin from my rapist's penis, to reveal a trembling sea slug; a man petrified of me, petrified of what I might do next. Perhaps this garlic will cure me.

I have just read this passage out loud to my sister. My sister knows that I'm doing this work, of course. But I don't send her too much of it to read, as I'm afraid to retraumatize her. But this rage, that seems okay to share.

“Your imagination is too vivid,” she tells me. She fears my readers will conclude that I am mad, harboring such violent fantasies. Here is my answer. Any person who has experienced acts of extreme violence will have such fantasies, though they might forget them. I took sexual violence into my body, and it became a part of me. It is better to know one's shadow side than to pretend it doesn't exist. Fantasizing is very different from acting.

Unbelievably, a second doctor concurred with these findings. Although Brian Beat was convicted of rape, this doctor altered the crime to “attempted rape,” confirming that Brian Beat was not a “sexually dangerous person.”

J
ohn Henry was living with Brian Beat on the Cape on the day that the police arrested him for rape. At the time, John told the police that Brian Beat was innocent. Now he isn't so sure.

John is the last member of Brian Beat's circle of three closest friends. Abby, Brian Beat's high school girlfriend, told me about John, but she thought he was dead. I don't know why she thought that.

The police told me they thought John was alive. He had been a witness to a murder several years ago, in Worcester. But they didn't know where he was living. Jack, my research assistant, was the one who managed to find him. It turns out that John often lives in the woods in a tent, but he was staying at his sister's house at the time we found him. We started sending John letters, both by mail and by fax, but it took him some time to
respond. It seems that he wanted to research me first. When we find him, he will tell me that he took my books on terrorism out of the library, and is now reading the second one.

Chet drives me, as usual; and as usual, by the time we arrive, I am so sleepy I can barely focus. I am tired of this sleepiness, tired of imposing on Chet in this way. He is tired of it, too, he confesses.

John lives in a one-room house at the end of a dead-end road on the edge of the lake. A summer retreat. Out the window I notice that there is very little here now that summer is past. An emptiness. Today it is bleak, with the cold white light of the late fall reflecting off the lake, and a bitter wind.

We pull up next to a pickup in John's driveway. He hears us arrive. Not a lot of visitors at this time of year. We see him come out to the front of the house to greet us, a thin man with weathered skin, in a heavy jacket. He is followed by a half-blind dog, so arthritic she can barely walk. The dog barks hoarsely. She means to protect her master, but she can barely summon the energy. I find myself slightly alarmed by the dog's unfriendly bark, while simultaneously distressed by her weakened state. “Don't worry,” he says. “She'll settle down. After she gets used to you.”

He offers me a rough, red hand. I am surprised. For some reason I expect him to feel that I might contaminate him. He is not like Abby or Simon. He seems self-contained, even refined. A refined recluse. We are here on a Sunday because John works as a landscape contractor the rest of the week. He urges me to sit next to the wood-burning stove. He's concerned that I might be cold. He offers Chet a chair nearby. The dog whimpers as she settles herself at John's feet. Life is pain, I think to myself.

I ask John how he first met Brian Beat.

“We went to school together at St. Louis. Starting in 1955. I was in the third grade.”

He speaks slowly, carefully, trying to get this right.

“I first met him on the playground at St. Louis. I was eight years old. Maybe nine. He was bigger than everyone else. He was choosing people for his team. I remember that he was smiling. He had a nice smile. You want to be on my side, he said. But then he suddenly punched me so hard I lost my breath…. He was still smiling. I don't think he meant to hurt me. I was stronger than he was, so it was strange that he did this.

“My sister Cathy knows a lot more about his family. My sister lived with Brian's birth mother from the time she was eleven. His birth mother was my sister's foster mother. You should talk to Cathy,” he offers.

I ignore this reference to Cathy. I worry that he will want us to leave before I learn what I need to know. “But you became friends,” I ask, “despite his having punched you like that?” I can see that John is a loner. “I wouldn't say I was friends with him back then,” he says. “I don't know why he punched me. It is still a mystery to me. Most of the time he was nice. Ninety-nine percent of the people who knew him would probably say he was nice. But I sometimes saw a side of him that wasn't nice at all.

“I was with his pack briefly and then decided I didn't like what was going on. There was an apple tree near our school. He would try to get us to throw apples at the school and at other kids. He'd be smiling all the time, even when he was doing something like that. I got tired of it. Brian was always doing things that would make you mad.

“I spent more time with Brian later. I became homeless when I was sixteen years old. That's when we started hanging around together as a group—Simon Brown, Brian Beat, and me. That's when we started getting more into drugs.”

A memory from my own teenage years intrudes into his story. I was sixteen, the year after I was raped. I was gathering my books for school. I was planning to ride my bike. I was late, half rushing and half dawdling, the way kids do. Rushing, but
also curious about what the house would feel like empty of kids. No one knew I was home. I could hear my stepmother in the kitchen. I heard the crash of pots being put away with an efficient hand. An angry hand. She was telling my father that she was fed up with me. She had had it up to here. I was fed up with me, too. Too many mothers. I knew I was difficult, but I couldn't seem to help it. I ran away. I spent the night in a graveyard in Concord center. I'm not sure why I wanted to sleep among the dead. This wasn't the only time I ran away, but it was the only time I slept in a graveyard. Those grave markers built into a hill. I can still feel the old gray stone, worn thin by the wind. The smell was bracingly cold: the scent of cold, gray facts. The fact was, she did not like me. The fact was, I was difficult. The fact is, you are always alone when you die. But there was that other scent, too—the scent of grass that tufted behind those thin gray grave markers, some of them from before the Revolutionary War. Somehow, the knowledge that people have been dying and living for hundreds of years was a comfort.

Now, the sound of John's voice brings me back into the room. “My stepfather was an alcoholic, and he would come after us kids when he got mad. My mom and my real dad split up when I was five. Then my mom married my stepdad. He was going to shoot my mom and my two sisters and me…. My parents were having money problems and fighting and my stepfather had us all sitting on the couch and said he was going to kill us and he had his shotgun. He was holding the gun. Running around screaming at my sisters and me with his gun in his hands. He said he was going to kill us, but I wasn't going to let him. I was strong. Stronger than him. I grabbed that shotgun out of his hand. I went after him with a baseball bat. I threw the gun into the middle of the millpond. When the police came, they found the gun there, in the pond.

“That's when he kicked me out. He kicked all of us out of the house, including my mom.” I catch my breath. I try to push down
whatever chemical is rising in my veins, but it is hard. Like trying to will mercury in a thermometer not to go up when the temperature is rising.

John's narrative comes to me as a shock, though I don't know why it should. The children in Brian Beat's circle were all seriously abused in some way. But I have lost my tolerance for their pain.

He continues.

“I'd been watching my stepfather beat my mom since I was eight years old. He would get into these heated arguments with my mom, under the influence of alcohol. If I started telling you the grisly details—”

He pauses.

“It would be the whole book,” he says, finishing his sentence, but not his thought. I can see that there is some awful memory plaguing him that he wants to unburden himself of. He wants to tell me, but he is afraid that I won't be interested. I sense this, but I do not help him. I just listen, trying to stop myself from empathizing. Writing this now, I feel ashamed that I did not want to hear any more. I want to tell him that I, too, suffered, even though I was never homeless, and even though I look so well cared for and well fed.

“My sisters and I. We used to huddle together and cry under the covers at night. Whenever it was possible, I protected them. I was the oldest. They black it out. They've forgotten. I'm sort of jealous….”

“I'm an oldest sibling, too,” I tell him. I don't voice the thought that I, too, saw and remember more than my sisters do. I, too, saw and remember more than I wish.

“One time they were fighting so severely. There were French doors. I hate French doors to this day. I was watching through the French doors. He stuck her on a hook. I saw my mom on that hook. I was nine. I ran up to where she was. I had to take her off
the hook. She fell on me. We were lying there in a pool of fluids and blood that was coming out of her,” he says.

A pool of fluids. Terrible thoughts come into my mind. Perhaps her eyeballs were leaking. Perhaps an organ got caught on the hook. Perhaps an eardrum had burst, releasing a thin yellow stream. It was probably just blood. The sight of blood and tears would be shocking to a nine-year-old boy, I tell myself.

“I would never do that to someone,” he says. Why does he tell me this? Is there a someone he would have liked to hang? Is he worried I might think he would?

“I wish it never happened,” he adds.

I have a sense that there is more to this scene than he remembers, images or sounds or scents that he could not process at the time.

“Of course she stayed with him after that,” he says, bitterly. “She had that syndrome.”

At this moment, neither of us remembers the phrase
battered-wife syndrome
.

“She said she married him for the sake of us kids,” he says, skeptically. “I think it would have been better for all of us if she had remained single.” An understatement.

In spite of myself, I am drawn into the story. I am with this nine-year-old boy now, who was so determined to protect his little sisters, those sisters who cannot even remember what happened.

“My sisters have successfully blanked this out,” he repeats.

I see that John is alone on this earth, that he is haunted by the image or sound or scent of those fluids, whatever they were, even at age sixty-three.

“I know that those kinds of experiences could lead me to be very violent. That is why I became a vegetarian and started meditating,” he says. He tells me that he started meditating as a teenager.

“I don't get close to people. I don't enjoy the give-and-take
of close personal relationships. He travels fastest who travels alone.” I don't respond, still overwhelmed by his story.

“You know that saying, don't you?” he asks. “‘Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels fastest who travels alone.'”

I tell him that I recognize the words, though I don't know what they are from. He's not sure either. Later I will find that the longer version of the proverb comes from Kipling. Gehenna is a Hebrew word that refers to hell, the place where evil is ultimately destroyed.

“We all got kicked out,” he continues. “My mom kept us together for a year and a half. But she wasn't up to raising us on her own, and one day she just disappeared, leaving us behind.

“So it's during that period, when I was homeless, that's the time when I spent a lot of time with Beat. We did a lot of drugs. I regret that now,” he says.

“What kind of drugs?” I ask.

“Brian's girlfriend was working in a nursing home, and she could steal prescription drugs. She could steal anything. We always had pills…. We could get any pills we wanted, for a long time.”

He must be referring to Abby, I realize now. This is what her brother was talking about when he said that Abby had laid her own bed and now she had to lie in it. That terrible bed.

“I was homeless, so I was spending time with these guys. It got me in trouble in '66 or '67. We had a party at a house that I was living at, and the police came looking for drugs. I had to go to jail for a few months for that. Jail was a wake-up call for me.

“After that I moved to the Cape. I got off drugs. I had calmed down. I had a day job, cleaning up a restaurant. I was living in a tent. It turned out that Brian was living down on the Cape, too. One day I ran into him. He asked me where I was living. I told him. He said to me, I got a place, I could use a roommate. He had rented a small house. He seemed to be doing really well.
He had a nice job. He was working long hours as a plumber's apprentice.

“Brian was strange, though,” he says, returning to the topic I came here to discuss. “He had a mean streak.”

“What do you mean by a mean streak?” I ask.

“He wasn't mean the way I picture rapists.”

So he knows that Brian was guilty.

“It was as if he had a dual personality. He was always smiling. But he could be sadistic.”

He thinks of an example. “We used to do intravenous drugs—we prepared them out of the drugs that his girlfriend brought us. We made opium out of paregoric. It was used to put on baby's gums when they are teething, but it has opium in it, so if you had enough of it you could extract the opium. We had all done it enough so we knew what we were doing. It was easy to find the vein and stick the needle in. But there was a girl with us who didn't know what to do. Brian offered to help her. He missed the vein. If the drug goes into your muscles, it burns. He burned her arm very badly. Her arm swelled up, but he was smiling the whole time.

“Brian had this grin on his face,” he repeats. “We all agreed later that he did it on purpose. He seemed to enjoy it.”

He pauses.

“I would say he was disturbed,” he says. That word again. The same word Mary, the Beats' neighbor, used to refer to Brian Beat.

Now he has some misgivings. There is a part of him that is like Mary. He, too, would like not to speak ill of the dead.

“I feel disloyal telling you all this. He could understand the beauty of a beautiful poem, but he couldn't arrange his life so he could live that way. He could envision the beauty of life and the goodness of life but somehow wasn't able to actualize what he knew was possible. It's a shame. Like I said, most of the time he was a nice guy. It's just that one of the gears didn't mesh….”

I don't respond. I have little tolerance for this kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, especially in this context.