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Published in Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss, 1:309-315,
1996
Copyright Debra Anne Davis 2004
In The Abyss
Cliff frustrated me and angered me, but he never scared me until I let
him tie my hands together with a rope. He was doing magic. I had told
him he could show me one of his tricks at the end of class if he paid
some attention for most of the first part of the hour. He didn’t
often cooperate with me during the ninth grade geography class, but for
this day he did. So at 3:15 he pulled out a rope, and I knew then that
I didn’t want him to do his trick. But I’d promised. “C’mon,”
he said, “I’m not going to tie your hands together.”
But that’s what he did.
I’d put my hands out in front of me, just as he’d instructed
me to do. He’d done some twists with the rope, then laid it over
my wrists, pulled, and . . . now my hands were tied together. My hands
are tied together, my hands are tied together, I repeated to myself, again.
I tried to pull my fists apart. They couldn’t budge. “Take
it off, take it off!” I yelled at Cliff.
I wasn’t in my classroom. I wasn’t a teacher. He, this tall
boy, man, standing over me, wasn’t my student. My hands are tied
together. Suddenly, again, I was alone in my apartment and a strange man
was tying my hands together. . . . There were other people in the school
building, math classes, science. But Cliff and I were alone in the room,
and the door was closed. He was bigger than I. “Take it off, take
it off!” I used my teacher voice at first, then I simply begged.
“Okay, okay,” Cliff said and quickly untied the rope. “But
you didn’t let me finish the trick,” he whined.
I let him go early.
I kept my arms stiffly at my sides for the rest of that afternoon, so
no one else in the school would be able to tie my hands together. My tensed
stomach muscles didn’t relax until late in the evening. I didn’t
sleep well that night. That happened 3 years after I’d been raped.
* * *
At first I was afraid of anything that resembled any part of the attack.
I’d been raped by a person, so I was afraid of people. He’d
come in during the late afternoon and left in the evening, and so I was
afraid of sunlight and darkness. He’d talked to me, looked at me,
touched me; I was afraid of voices, eyes, hands. I was afraid of all the
things that reminded me of being raped. In
short, I was afraid of everything. After a few months, though, my fears
became more specific.
I was no longer afraid of absolutely everything. Somehow my mind narrowed
its focus, chose only certain things to fear—chose, it seems to
me, almost at random. These random objects and sensations became reminders,
jolts. Some of the things my mind chose to fear the most were men in white
T-shirts, knives with or without black handles, plastic honey bears and
plastic bands, loud voices, hard pulls on my hair, the smell of fresh
laundry, the sound of a knock at the door.
Walking down a sidewalk at noon, I might see a white shirt in the distance,
coming at me; I’d quickly change my route, go out of my way. A friend
would yell “Hello!” to me from across a room; I’d cringe.
Instead of hugging a load of warm clean laundry against my chest and breathing
in the light scent, I’d now sort and fold as quickly as I could,
trying to avoid the odor of fresh laundry, the smell of the rapist’s
clothes. But, always, the scent would waft into my face and remind me
and make me think about just how many parts of my life, both big parts
and small parts, had been ruined by the rape.
* * *
The rapist had tied my hands behind my back with three long, thin, clear
bands—one around each wrist and one between those two, to join them
together. An hour later, after he’d finished raping me, he tied
my feet together in the same way: one band around each ankle and then
one in the middle to join them.
Twenty minutes after that I’m in the police car, and the cop and
I are talking, and he pulls out from under his windshield visor a handful
of ... those exact same bands. “Sometimes we use them to restrain
people,” he explains, and I have my second flashback. (The first
had been when, 10 minutes earlier, I’d looked down at my neighbor’s
linoleum floor and seen that the three cops standing in a semicircle around
me were wearing the same black work shoes the rapist had been wearing.)
For the second time in my life, I experienced this: The sight of a particular
object causes me to relive, for a split second, being raped. A flash back,
a momentary return, almost physically, certainly mentally, unfortunately
emotionally, to a previous time in my life. An actual re-experiencing.
It happens to me every time I see one of those bands. And you’d
be surprised how many times you see them, discarded, on the sidewalk or
in the gutter, among the little piles of potato chip bags and beer bottles
and baby diapers. I love to walk, and I walk a lot, and so I see these
bands on the ground often. Many times they look like they’ve been
cut after being fastened, too, like mine had been—stiff, clear plastic
in the shape of a wrench, or a claw.
* * *
Whenever I have one of these flashbacks, I first jump, physically move
up from my chair a little, or bounce to my toes if I’m standing,
jerk sideways if I’m lying on my bed. Then I freeze. Whatwhatwhatwhat
what?!? My brain screams inside me, demanding an answer from I don’t
know whom or what. Then I have to do something. I have to take care of
something, prevent something, defend myself, attack maybe, or run or….
I feel it first in my stomach; the physical movement of the spasms in
my stomach are what cause the initial jump. Then my arms, the under side
of my arms—they hollow out. Only later do I feel it in my head:
The soundless screaming begins.
* * *
I couldn’t stand to look at knives. Any knife. Each time I saw one
sitting on the counter, I also saw it floating up in the air, blade side
out, and then flying at my throat. I saw this. I refused to touch them.
One evening, about a week after the attack, I was beginning to do regular
tasks again, trying to act like a regular person. Bobby had been doing
all the cooking or we’d been eating out but now I was happy to be
making something myself. I set the plates on the table, tore the
lettuce, even peeled the carrots—but I couldn’t cut them.
I stood in the kitchen, looking down at the shiny orange carrots on the
cracked wooden cutting board. What could I do? I tried to imagine myself
calmly picking up the long, black-handled knife, standing over the cutting
board, doing the same activity I’d done so many times before: chop,
chop, chop. But each time I imagined picking up the knife, I felt it squirm
away from me, twist up out of my hand, jab into my neck. I finally had
to ask Bobby to cut the carrots for me, and I didn’t watch him.
* * *
If it were just the flashbacks, just these isolated events, these few
specific objects I feared, I might hope to get over all this someday.
After all, my fear of the sight of knives and of those plastic bands has
lessened. But still, more than 5 years later, as I write this sentence,
I have many fears. I have new fears. These fears are less specific, less
connected to the rape itself and, therefore, surprisingly, alarmingly,
bigger.
Thunderstorms, for instance. One, I remember especially well. It was when
Bobby and I were living on the third floor of a big complex called Pecan
Grove in Austin. I was just sitting around the apartment one day after
work, and the storm came up very quickly. The branches on the trees were
crazy, going all around. There was rain, of course, but also this huge
thunder that I’d never heard before, like the loudest KNOCK in the
world. The lightning was shooting down all over the parking lot. Why did
this thunderstorm scare me so much? Because I thought the lightning could
get me. It wouldn’t hit any of the other apartments; it would hit
mine. It could come in through my sliding glass door; I couldn’t
even hide in the living room. It would shoot right in at me. And I was
afraid to use the phone because the lightning could get me through the
phone. I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t hide anywhere. I
was trapped. There was nothing I could do—nothing, nothing.
* * *
I have post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. I first learned about PTSD
in the emergency room of the hospital on the night I was raped. A counselor
from the Rape Crisis Center had come to talk with me; she gave me several
pamphlets with information about crisis recovery. At the time “PTSD”
and even “recovery” meant nothing to me because I was, in
fact, in the first of seven “stages of adjustment” listed
in one pamphlet: shock. And shock, it turned out, was a very nice place
to be. There at the hospital, I felt confused by the simplest questions;
I had a hard time remembering things like my phone number and age. I had
a hard time thinking and a hard time feeling.
It was when the shock wore off and I was able to think and feel clearly
again that I began to realize what the lasting effects of what had happened
to me would be. This is when my fears began. In contrast to the numbness
of shock, my mind seemed to think now, too much. I developed a list of
objects and sensations to fear; I watched out for them constantly; I was
frightened easily and often and deeply.
I pulled out the pamphlets I’d received at the hospital and read
an “Overview of the Rape Trauma Syndrome” and a list of the
“Stages of Adjustment.” “Immediate impact reactions,”
the pamphlets informed me, include shock. Yes, I’d been in shock.
And, the pamphlets continued, a victim may develop phobias such as “fear
of being in crowds, of being alone;” she may have to check behind
doors and in closets, may be “afraid to walk places alone.”
Yes, that was me, too. I’d had those reactions, had developed those
phobias. The pamphlets seemed to describe my feelings perfectly. I was
suffering from rape trauma syndrome.
What I was going through, then, was not odd at all. As one pamphlet put
it: “These are normal reactions to a trauma” and: “these
reactions can be extremely upsetting to the victim who doesn’t know
what to expect.” But here I had it all described for me. I knew
just what to expect. When I developed a “phobia,” when I began
to fear knives and plastic bands and, later, thunderstorms, I knew that
I wasn’t overreacting, that I wasn’t losing control of my
mind. These fears, I knew, were normal. They were a natural reaction to
the trauma I’d experienced.
And so, for a while, the pamphlets and the knowledge did comfort me. But
as the “weeks since I was raped” turned into “months
since I was raped,” and now “years since I was raped,”
I began to realize that my phobias no matter how normal, seemed also to
be permanent. And it is this that is my biggest fear: I will always be
afraid because I am still afraid.
* * *
For example, I live in a new apartment. I feel safe in this apartment,
most of the time. It’s in a safe neighborhood, in a safe city, a
safe state; there are two locks on the front door, and I’m never
home alone after dark. But the sound of the refrigerator makes me jump
several times a day, several times a night.
I have studied this with my ears. There is something loose in the back
of the refrigerator. When the motor switches off, the refrigerator shakes.
The shaking rumbles on the floor and vibrates the stuff that’s inside—ceramic
bowls, the ketchup bottle, ajar of jam. All that rattling sounds, to me,
like a window pane being slid up. The sounds aren’t similar after
they get going. It’s the initial bang and the first part of the
rumble that sounds like the window is being opened. The man who raped
me did not crawl in my window. But I think that maybe that will happen
next time: This is what makes me think I’m about to be raped again.
This is why, several times a day, several times a night, I jump, fling
my arms, scream to myself WHAT! when I’m safe in
my own home.
Every time it happens, after my little jump and quiet scream, I tell myself:
It’s just the refrigerator. It’s just the refrigerator. Not
a window. Not a rape. Do Not Be Afraid Next Time You Hear That Sound.
I am determined and confident. And then, the motor switches off, again,
I jump.
* * *
I’ve tried to understand all this, my fears. While I was being raped,
I was terrified, terrified of the rapist and of his power over me. But
why, then, am I still afraid—when I am safe from him? Why has the
trauma of that one attack lasted so long? How could the events of that
one hour in my life affect so profoundly, so intricately, all the tens
of thousands of hours since?
The answers to my questions appear in sometimes unexpected ways. The semester
after Cliff tricked me and tied my hands together with a rope, I was teaching
English to a different student, Chris. We were reading Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, and, as Chris read a short passage aloud, I heard him describing
me, describing something I now knew but hadn’t yet put into words.
I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me.
Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice that I read
in
books or heard from others as tales of ancient days or imaginary evils;
at least they were remote and more familiar to reason than to the
imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me
as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood….
I listened to Chris read this, and suddenly I wasn’t in that
classroom; I wasn’t the teacher. I was, instead, a student, and
Mary Shelley was explaining to me why it was the world seemed so different
to me now. Why evil, which had only been a theory to me before, was now
so real. Why I felt threat rather than thought about it. How
it was that this misery had come into my home, into my mind, into my life.
And how it might stay.
I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands
are crowding and endeavoring to plunge me into the abyss.
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