Madeleine nods.
We think of “witness” as a passive role, but it’s not, it can be terribly difficult. That’s why we say “to bear witness.” Because it can be so painful. Watch me.
“What would happen if you told your parents now?”
Madeleine stops weeping. “Oh I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“My dad’s not well, I might — it could … kill him.” She blows her nose.
“What about your mother?”
“I don’t know…. What if she—?” Madeleine groans because here comes the sorrow again. “I don’t want her to comfort me.”
“Why not?”
“Because she hates what I am.”
Nina waits.
“That’s not fair, she loves me. I just don’t know what she’d do with the information.”
Nina waits.
“She’d — she’ll say, ‘So that’s why you’re the way you are.’” Something so precious and individual, put down to a crime, an obscenity…. No.
Nina says, “If surviving sexual abuse were a recipe for homosexuality, the world would be a much gayer place.”
Madeleine smiles. “I’m all better now,” she says.
“Glad to hear it.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Not for a second.”
She dreams again of too much light. Too green grass. Legs so heavy she can barely walk, thighs like wet cement, pressed down to earth by yellow light.
ABRACADABRA
“You know,” he added very gravely, “it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle, to get one’s head cut off.”
MADELEINE BUYS TWO AVOCADOS for Olivia and, on her way past the butcher shop in Kensington Market, catches a glimpse of the clock between stripped rabbits hanging in the window; a handprinted sign beneath them announces, “Fresh Hairs.” She has a date with Christine for “some closure” in forty minutes — enough time to do a little writing.
While she’s sitting outside at a guano-festooned table, making notes on a napkin, the ass of a big grey suit passes inches from her face. “Pardon,” says the puddingy voice, like the cartoon hippo making his way down the row in the movie theatre. Restaurants and theatres: the only public contexts in which it is perfectly acceptable to have the ass of a stranger grazing your nose. Madeleine leans back to give the man room. It’s Mr. March. Her stomach plummets. He has kids, a son and daughter. Foiled again, doc — Mr. March would be sixty-something by now, he would be … her hands go cold on the wrought-iron table, she gets the point. He would be sixty — maybe seventy-something. He has continued through time, just like Colleen and Madeleine and the clock in the butcher shop and the rabbits on their way to the pot. He is not a ghost in a classroom, playing out the same eternal scene. He has been teaching for the past twenty-three years. He may still be teaching. He is still out there.
She gets up and leaves. Goes to Olivia’s apartment, finds the key under the brick, enters and calls the police.
She is referred to various departments within the OPP, and finally reaches someone who takes down her story of sexual abuse—“It wasn’t just me, he had a group of us—” and promises to get back to her.
What else is right in front of her that she can’t see?
Various roommates begin to arrive. Someone starts playing the banjo. Of course they don’t mind if she hangs out. She curls up at the end of the heavenly collapsing couch, under a blanket that smells like years of laundry, and waits for Olivia.
Rape.
It’s embarrassing to find out that you are like other people. Even if half of them are celebrities. Especially if half of them are celebrities. It can happen to anyone. I am not special.
“I feel like I’m making it up.”
Nina says, “When we invest so much in denying the truth, it can feel unreal when we finally speak it.”
“Wape,” says Bugs.
Nina waits.
Madeleine can cope. People who can cope take responsibility for things. Which means they need to have had them coming. The alternative is too terrifying: that bad things can just happen to them. It will be you the icicle falls on from twenty storeys up. You waiting for the bus when a motorist has a stroke and mounts the curb. To have been available to disaster once means to be permanently without a roof. Unless it was somehow your fault.
“It’s not like I never had a choice, even at nine,” says Madeleine. “You always have a choice.”
“And you’re willing to drive off the road to prove it.”
Sexual violation is a form of robbery. You arrive home to find your house ransacked. All items, the precious and the mundane, the priceless and the merely expensive, have been treated the same way. All items have been turned into the same item. Overturned, flung aside, the picture of your grandparents and the contents of the cutlery drawer. You can still hear the foot-stomps through your house. You can buy a new TV but only time will restore the cushioned peace of your home, heal the rent in the air on the stairs, the aftershock in the living room, all those places where emptiness has been allowed to leer obscenely into your home. Why us? Nothing personal.
“I feel sick.”
“Would you like some water?”
Rape treats the victim like nobody, like everybody, like anybody, bitch! Up the ramp, through the door to the slaughterhouse. The uncountable qualities that make one individual different from another, shocked away; the soul, shocked from the body, looks on in sorrow and pity at what is happening to its sister, its brother—bitch! It will be very difficult for the body to allow anything to inhabit it after that. Very difficult for it to allow the soul to re-enter. The soul may have to be content to follow close, make common cause with that other lonely follower, the shadow. Very difficult for the body to know whether that light request at the nape of the neck, please let me in, is the soul or the shadow. It is the soul. The shadow’s request is more humble, it asks only to be seen. Please don’t turn away, every time you turn away, I die.
“I feel carsick.”
“Put your head between your knees.”
Sexual violation turns all children into the same child. Come here. Yes, you. Children heal quickly, so that, like a tree growing up around an axe, the child grows up healthy until, with time, the embedded thing begins to rust and seep and the idea of extracting it is worse than the thought of dying from it slowly. I’m not hurting you. Once pleasure and poison have entwined, how to separate them? What alchemist, what therapist, what priest or pal or lover?
“I’m not into that ‘repressed memory’ bullshit,” says Madeleine and picks up the pink stone, weighing it in her hand, cool marble, satisfyingly oval. “But you know that story ‘The Purloined Letter’?”
“Yes.”
“I feel like there’s stuff just lying around but I can’t see it.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
“Yeah. Or camouflaged.”
“Like a frog changing colour to match its surroundings?”
“Yeah, or like um, you know, like speckled eggs that hide in the uh … in the….”
“Grass?”
“Yeah.” She is weeping.
“What is it, Madeleine?”
“I don’t know, my eyes are crying.”
“Why?”
“Search me, doc.” She puts the stone back on the table, spins it.
“What were you saying when your eyes started to cry?”