Broken (6 page)

Ethan pauses to shift his weight across the chair and let everyone react to what he’s just said.

“Chickens?” Paul asks.

“Head to toe”, Ethan says, nodding. “We had little eye holes to look out of, and Alice’s kept slipping down because the suit was too big for her, but that was it. We couldn’t see each other and we could barely see what it was we were meant to be doing. The heads didn’t come off, so even when we stopped for lunch, it was a choice between taking the whole suit off and just pushing the food through the mouth-hole to eat it. Until I finally saw her, I had no idea in the world what she looked like. It didn’t even know she was a girl when we first showed up.”

Ethan loses himself in the memory and I let him stay there for as long as he wants to, before I ask my question. “What were you doing?” I say.

Ethan’s eyes drift lazily up to me and there is a pause where I wonder if he’s heard me at all. It’s like watching an automaton come to life when someone presses the button.

“Oh, you know, some promotion for a chicken restaurant, I think. They gave us as much free chicken as we wanted for lunch and about fifty bucks for the whole day handing out flyers. We were both broke students so it was perfect. After that, we just kind of hit it off. To be honest, I fell in love with her when she had the suit on. Seeing her when she took it off was just a bonus. Alice was a beautiful woman. You know, I didn’t even recognize her at first when I saw her for the first time afterwards. That was kind of embarrassing, but I guess that’s a story for another day.”

Ethan smiles at the group, grabs the sides of his chair with his hands and drops his gaze to the floor, zoning out to the meds or the memory, I’m not entirely sure which.

I could listen to Ethan all day, and hearing him speak gives me the impression that it’s those kind of stories that he comes here to tell. He was obviously in love with his wife, I can hear it when his throat catches saying her name, and I can see it manifest itself in his actions. His smile, the way his eyes light up at the memory. I want to know what happened to him and why he lost all of that. I want to help him heal.

1
0 November 2015. Fifty eight days after.

I tell the story about how Alice and I met, because I feel compelled to give something back to Jo. It’s her second session today, and already she looks more confident, more inclined to engage, more present in herself. She tells us what happened to her, in much more detail than most of the other members of the group have - Paul excluded -, and I mentally take a note of the name Jason Fleitman for subsequent research when I’m back in front of my laptop.

It’s not a name I recognize immediately, but if he’s just come through the system, it’s possible I haven’t added him yet. He could already be there, of course, and I’ve overlooked him. That could be possible too.

Jo tells her story in the same way most victims of rape do. She’s plain and precise and she doesn’t linger too long on the detail of how it made her feel. I find her testimony difficult to listen to, because it produces images inside my head of what may have happened the night that Alice was killed.

After she is finished, she takes a deep breath, and I wonder for a moment whether she is going to cry. I smile to show her that I have listened, and I understand her pain. I
do
understand her pain because I feel something similar every day. No-one deserves to go through what Jo, or Patricia or Alice, or the countless other rape victims have.

I lost my wife, but sometimes I feel like a fraud for being here. I wasn’t raped myself. Nobody forced themselves upon me and violated my personal, intimate space. They took from me the most important thing in my life, but sometimes I feel like what I feel, compared to what some other people have to go through, pales in comparison. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed to feel the way I do.

I change what I’m about to say because of that. I tell the story about how we met, and I find myself re-living the memory in a way I haven’t done for a long time. Whenever Alice and I used to meet new people, either at a party or at work or anywhere else, we’d tell a stripped down version of that story. It was our kind of icebreaker into a conversation. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any reason to bring it out, so it feels nice to do so here. You can only learn so much about somebody if they tell you the tragedy they’ve gone through, because it represents something passive, not active. It’s a situation in which they have no control. We learn almost nothing about that person beyond the one way they are forced to react.

It helps, of course, to tell it, it’s an essential part of the process of moving on, but it helps the teller of the story much more than the listener. It makes
them
feel liberated, but it does nothing to help us connect. I know Katy knows this. I know everyone else does to. That’s why most of the time we talk about stuff that doesn’t matter, we talk about how the weather was bad over the weekend, or our favorite TV shows, or other normal stuff that we find fill our lives now. I talk about running, and working the bag, and I listen to others talk about the jobs they’ve felt the courage to finally return to, or the kids that are struggling in school, or the holidays they want to go on.

I don’t talk about my future much, not my real future anyway. I talk about the goals I want to achieve with my exercise, and other stuff I think they’ll want to hear, but to be honest, I haven’t really thought much about it myself, beyond finding
him
and doing what I want to do to him. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do, I don’t think I’m going to have much purpose.

“Hey.”

Suddenly Jo’s up alongside me, and I wonder if I’ve been zoning out like normal, and she’s been there a really long time.

“Hey”, I say slowing down so she can fall in alongside me.

“I’m this way too, I thought we could walk together, that’s if you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t mind”, I say, and we walk together a little in silence, side by side.

“Your story was beautiful”, Jo says. “Thank you. It was lovely to hear it.”

I smile at her. I want to say ‘it doesn’t have a happy ending’, but I don’t think it would be fair. Jo’s trying to be nice and make a connection with me, and I appreciate that even though I’m happy not to have it.

“I’m sorry about what happened to you”, I say.

I see Jo’s eyes darken before she pulls them away. “I just want to forget about it now. My dad is the one that wants to see him punished. Hanged might be a more appropriate word. I don’t even know if I can cope with going to court. I’m-”, she pauses to look me in the eyes. “-a bit of a mess right now.”

At the intersection we part company. I watch her for a while isolated against the industrial bleakness that surrounds us, before I turn away and head up the hill for home.

I’m glad we talked, even if it was only to exchange a few words. Sometimes only a few words are enough to change the way you feel.

––––––––

1
2 November 2015. Sixty days after.

I buy a gun.

The old Ethan would never have done this, but the old Ethan died the same day my wife did, or later, the day I fastened that noose around my neck and tipped myself off the chair.

Alice was fiercely anti-guns. We both were. The idea of owning an instrument that had the potential to kill someone was not an idea we ever thought we would be likely to entertain. Perhaps if we’d done it earlier, Alice would still be here with us. I have these thoughts much more now. I guess that until something has been taken from you, you don’t realise what you could have done to protect it. What you should have done. If I was there, things would have been different. If Alice had a gun.

This isn’t middle America, and gun shops around here aren’t all that easy to come by. I find one though, just a little way out of town, and drive out there with no intention in mind other than to buy something suitable, I can guarantee will leave whoever I point it at certifiably dead.

I’m not interested in the latest models, or the biggest chambers, or any of the safety features, I want something lightweight, something I can conceal on my body, something that will destroy this thing that’s growing inside me.

I have never been in a gunshop before in my life. I guess if you don’t grow up around it, you never have a need to.

“Home protection?” the guy in the store asks me.

I tell him I just want something my wife can use to protect herself. That we live in a bad neighborhood and we’ve already been broken into once. That she needs something lightweight she can handle, but powerful enough to stop someone. I hesitate and he fills in the word for me.

“Dead?” he says, nodding slightly, rubbing the stubble of his chin, assessing me, giving me a story and a purpose and a future. “We can do that for you.”

Every American’s right. It feels colder in my hands than I thought it would, heavier.

“You ever fired a gun before?” he asks me.

The answer is clearly ‘no’, but I lie. I tell him my father and I used to go hunting. That I have a cousin in the police force, another in the national guard. It seems enough to convince him. I hold the gun up, aiming it towards the target he has on the wall behind him. I make a triangle with my legs, the weight shifted slightly to the back one, bend my knees and shut my left eye.

“
Pow!” he says with a smile, as I squeeze the trigger.

1
3 November 2015. Forty seven days after.

Over six weeks have passed. Sometimes I find it impossible to believe that no matter what happens, the world refuses to stop turning. Day by day, minute by minute, molecule by molecule, nothing sits still. There is no state of absolute inactivity at any point, anywhere in this world, and it all goes in one direction only. We don’t stop moving forwards.

I’m going back to work. I think it’s a good decision. I’ve spent too much time in the house and too much time alone. I feel like I can’t breathe in here anymore, suffocated by the world I’m carefully trapping myself in. I’ve been going out, but still never at night time, and not for more than a couple of hours at a time. I get scared if I’m out alone so I try not to let that happen unless I absolutely need to.

I’ve also seen some friends, both from work and from outside of it. They still don’t know about what really happened to me, or why I stopped work in the first place.

As much as I’ve told anyone, is that there was a family crisis, and I’m seeing a therapist for depression. Some people think my parents are splitting up, some people think my brother is gay. After a while they just stop asking questions and let me get on with whatever it is I feel like I need to do. That, as I keep reminding myself, is to move on. Grieve, accept what happened and move on from it. Depressed is a lot more acceptable in this world than rape victim.

I’m going to start therapy too. Individual, one on one, no holds barred, make-me-better therapy. I know I said I was against it before, but I think it’s a good idea now. I feel better that I’ve opened up to the group, and I feel like I can do that again to a stranger, as long as I feel comfortable with them. Someone non threatening and completely non judgemental, like Ethan, for instance. I could easily open up to him.

I find myself thinking about him sometimes. There is so much pain amongst the other members of our group, I wonder if what I feel is valid enough. How can you measure pain? I wonder too, how some of these people can even move on with what’s happened to them. I makes me weep with despair at the things human beings are capable of. The things we do to each other in the name of need or selfishness or religion or war.

I Google Ethan. I don’t know his surname so I try keywords that eventually bring up a story I know instantly is his. I can’t finish the article. After I’m done, I rush to the bathroom and only just make it to the toilet bowl before I’m sick.

I feel so guilty that I’ve undermined his trust, that I delete my browser history, shut the laptop, pull out the cord and stand for a moment looking at it, as though half expecting it to disappear completely into thin air just because I want it to. I have the words going around my head, but now is the last time I need a cynical reminder. Time only goes forward.

I’m angry at myself for knowing something about him he hasn’t told me. The feeling fades a little as the day goes on, and I attempt to find argument to justify it - I already knew because I saw it on the news when it first came out or I just happened to mention you to a friend and they told me - but the lies seem worse than telling the truth. I find myself thinking more about it than is probably healthy, but at least it serves to take my mind off what is my usual topic of thought: having to see Jason Fleitman again.

I feel an urgent need to tell Ethan what I’ve done and apologize to him. It feels like looking through contacts of friends on facebook only to meet them after doing so, and knowing more about their lives than you have any right to, only in this case, it’s a million times worse.

The words stick in my head and won’t go away. Lacerations. Multiple fractures. Fourteen week old baby. The newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to print this shit. There was nothing at all after what happened to me.

I picture Ethan, and I picture everything that he has lost. I see him receiving the news, I see him at his dead wife’s side identifying her mutilated body, and I see the inside of him, his heart and his soul, ripped out and scarred completely, and I wonder if he’ll ever be able to overcome it.

I wonder too, if I have the strength I want to have to help him.

1
6 November 2015. Sixty four days after.

This is the day it all begins again. Alice is two months dead. The new year is now less than that away, and I feel like I’ve been re-born. I’ve been running about twenty five miles a week, working the bag every morning, doing push ups, pull ups, squats, bench presses, thrusts, anything at all to keep myself in shape. To prepare myself for the fight. I’ve practically converted the basement into a gym, and I spend a lot of time down there now I’ve managed to hook up an internet connection too. Martin leaves me alone, just so long as I’m not planning on killing myself again, which I’m pretty sure he’s convinced I’m not. The gun is hidden in a box of Alice’s things, at the bottom of the closet in my room. It’ll never be found there. I’ve got good at concealing things recently. It’s become what I do.