Then Ken showed up. He was out of breath and nervous. He was a small, fragile man-the year before, I had romantically compared him to a pint-size David. So far, he had not shown much ability to handle my situation. Over the summer he had written once. He explained, and at the time I accepted it, that he had reinvented what had happened to me so it wouldn't hurt him as much. "I have decided it is like a broken leg and like a broken leg, it will heal."
Ken tried to improve on my sketch, but he was too nervous-his hands shook. He sat on my bed and looked very small to me, frightened. I decided he was a warm body who knew me, who meant well. That had to be enough. He made several attempts to draw the head of the rapist.
There were sounds in the hall. Walkie-talkies tuned to a self-important pitch, the sound of heavy footsteps. Fists thumped against the door and I answered them as girls came out into the hall.
Syracuse University Security. They had been alerted by the police. They were amped. This was the real shit. Two of them were quite wide and, in my tiny studio, their size was accentuated.
Within seconds, the Syracuse City Police arrived. Three of them. Someone shut the door. I relayed my story again and there was a slight squabble about jurisdiction. The SU Security seemed personally disappointed that since the original incident had happened in Thorden Park and the sighting was on Marshall Street, it was clearly a City of Syracuse matter and not a campus one. On a professional level, this reflected well on them, but they were not as much university representatives that night as they were hunters with a fresh scent.
The police looked at my sketches and Ken's. They repeatedly referred to Ken as my boyfriend, though I corrected them each time. They eyed him suspiciously. In his slight physique and nervousness, he stood out as a freak in a room populated by large men armed with guns and billy clubs.
"How long ago did you see the suspect?"
I told them.
They decided there was still some chance, since I hadn't acknowledged him, that the rapist would be loitering in the area of Marshall Street. It was worth a ride in a squad car.
Two of the city police took my sketch, leaving Ken's behind.
"We'll make copies of this and send out an APB. Every man in the city will keep this in his car until we find him," one said.
As we readied to leave, Ken asked, "Do you need me to come?"
The looks from the police must have burned into him. He came.
With six men in uniform escorting us, we left the building. Ken and I got in the back of a squad car with one officer in the front. I don't remember this man's name, but I remember his anger.
"We're gonna get this puke," he said. "Rape is one of the worst crimes. He'll pay."
He started the engine and turned on the red and blue flashing lights of his squad car. We roared down to Marshall Street, only a few blocks away.
"Look carefully," the officer said. He maneuvered his squad car with a manhandling agility I would later recognize in New York cabbies.
Ken was slumping down in the seat beside me. He said the flashing lights hurt his head. He shielded his eyes. I looked out. While we drove up and around Marshall Street a few times, the officer told me about his seventeen-year-old niece, just an innocent girl. She had been gang-raped. "Ruined," he said. "Ruined." He had his billy club out. He started smacking the empty seat with it. Ken winced each time it hit the vinyl. Having thought this mission was probably futile from the start, I began to be afraid of what this policeman might do.
I saw no rapist. I said this. I suggested leaving, looking at mug shots down at the station. But this officer wanted release and he was going to get it. He braked hard on the final pass down Marshall Street.
"There, there," he said. "What about those three?"
I looked and knew immediately. Three black students. You could tell by the way they were dressed. They were also tall, too tall to be my rapist.
"No," I said. "Let's just go."
"They're troublemakers," he said. "You stay here."
He got out of the squad car in a hurry and chased after them. He had his billy club in his hand.
Ken began to suffer some version of the panic I was familiar with from my mother. His breathing was labored. He wanted to get out.
"What's he going to do?" he said. He tried the door. It had been locked automatically. This was where criminals as well as victims rode.
"I don't know. Those guys aren't even close."
The lights were still flashing overhead. People began to come up to the car to stare in. I was mad at this policeman for leaving us there. I was mad at Ken for being a wimp. I knew no good would come of an angry man, speeding on adrenaline, looking for revenge for his raped niece. I was in the center of it all and simultaneously I realized I didn't exist. I was just a catalyst that made people nervous, guilty, or furious. I was frightened, but more than anything, I was disgusted. I wanted the policeman to come back and I sat in the car with Ken whimpering beside me, put my head between my knees so the people on the outside of the car looking in would be met with "the back of the victim," and I listened for the sounds I knew were taking place in the alley. Someone was being beaten, I knew that as surely as I knew anything. It was not Him.
The officer returned. He swooped into the driver's side and laid his billy club firmly against the palm of his hand.
"That'll teach 'em," he said. He was sweating, exhilarated.
"What did they do?" Ken ventured. He was horrified.
"Open container. Never talk back to an officer."
I did not overlook what happened on Marshall Street that night. Everything was wrong. It was wrong that I couldn't walk through a park at night. It was wrong that I was raped. It was wrong that my rapist assumed he was untouchable or that as a Syracuse coed I was most certainly treated better by the police. It was wrong that the niece of that officer was raped. It was wrong of him to call her ruined. It was wrong to put the lights on and strut that car down Marshall. It was wrong to hassle, and perhaps physically hurt, three innocent young black men on the street.
There is no but, there is only this: That officer lived on my planet. I fit into his world in the way I never again would fit into Ken's. I can't remember whether Ken asked to be dropped at home or whether he came with me to the station. Whatever the case, I shut him off after the search on Marshall Street.
We reached the Public Safety Building. It was now after eight. I had not been back to the station since the night of the attack, but that night, the police station felt safe to me. I loved the way the elevators let out onto a waiting area at the end of which was a huge door that locked, automatically, behind us. Through the bulletproof glass you could see out into the lobby but no one could get at you.
The officer led me in and I heard the smooth, hydraulic hush and firm click of the door behind us. To our left was the dispatcher sitting at the command center. There were three or four uniformed men standing nearby. Some held coffee mugs. When we entered, they quieted down and stared at the ground. There were only two kinds of civilians: victims and criminals.
My officer explained to the man at the, front desk that I was the rape case out of the East Zone. I was there to look at mug shots.
He set me up in a small file room across from the dispatcher. He left the door open and began to pull large black binders off the surrounding shelves. There were at least five such binders and each was filled with small, wallet-size mug shots. These five books were of black males only, and only those near the age that I thought my rapist would be.
The room seemed more a storage area for these books than a place for victims to sit and pore over the photos. The only surface was an old metal typing table, and I had difficulty balancing the books in my lap and on the rickety table, whose flyleaf kept collapsing under the weight. But I was a good student, when I needed to be, and I studied those books page by page. I saw six photos that reminded me of my rapist, but I was beginning to believe the process of mug shots would turn out to be fruitless.