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Published in Ascent (Concordia College), Volume 28 Number 2, Winter 2004

Copyright Debra Anne Davis 2004
 
 
The Face on the Table
 
I have always been an art class failure. It makes me feel a bit sad—but not embarrassed—to admit this. In elementary school I sometimes took great care with my projects. But I was never singled out for praise, not for my blue clay dinosaur, not for my multicolored drawing of a haunted mansion, not for my annual hand-shaped construction-paper turkeys. In high school my glass etchings of Led Zeppelin symbols and the alphabet I shaped entirely of half-circles bored my teacher. But I don’t blame these teachers. They were honest, and maybe they did me a favor. I have since given up drawing and painting and don’t feel that my life is any less rich because of that. But I am left with an awe of anyone who can represent three-dimensional reality on a flat surface, anyone who can imagine a visual world into being.
 
When I was 25, I was raped by a stranger. The rapist was caught, thanks in part to a police sketch I helped create; he is still in jail.

Sitting here at my desk today, safe on a sunny afternoon, more than a decade after the attack, I have a very hard time looking at that sketch again. I have a photocopy of it, and I know where it is, in a stack of official papers dealing with the attack. When I look through this stack, I always try to avoid the sketch, but it always catches my eye. The other papers are all text, lines of words, paragraphs, bulleted outlines—insurance forms and medical reports and counseling pamphlets. But this page is different. As I hurriedly fan through the papers, it jumps out at me. His face. Sometimes I see it only from the back, but still the eyes show through in muted grays, still the same mouth and nose, even if in reverse. Before I pick up that sheaf of papers, I have to steel myself, prepare; then I glance, quickly—and look away. The outlined features are sinister, threatening, accurate. I won’t look at the sketch again for a long time. Still, it makes me gasp.

The sketch artist, I think, would be proud of this. And she should be. In recreating a horror, she helped bring a criminal to justice—and helped a victim get the image onto paper, out of her head.
 
Two days after I was raped, a police detective drove me to the artist’s office in a state building and introduced us. The artist was friendly and businesslike. She smiled and greeted me and waved me to a chair at a long metal table. She seemed as eager to get started as I was reluctant.

On a shelf behind us there were neat canisters of pencils, charcoals, and paint brushes. These were the mundane objects she would use to make my recollections tangible. My memory and words would guide her talents and tools. She couldn’t have done it, obviously, without me—and I, certainly, couldn’t have done it without her.

And so, I embarked on this arduous task, a civic duty that required me to re-envision my attacker’s face, to re-experience the brutality of all that he’d done to me, and then to describe it, at length and in great detail. The context was nightmarish, but the process seemed magical. She was able to change my verbal description into a visual representation.

First, she needed a general description. “Average-looking” was what I started with, which I knew wasn’t helpful. I’d have to find the words. “A white guy, maybe 30, kinda pale skin,” I told her. She nodded.

“Facial shape?” she asked.

Average, I thought. “Oval?” I said. She scratched in some lines, a big egg in the middle of the page. She needed to fill it in, and I had to tell her how. She prompted me. Forehead size?  Placement of eyes? Thickness of lips? I wasn’t used to describing people this way. She had images to help me, a stack of mug shots. I might see some facial feature that reminded me of him. I looked through mug shots of “white” suspects (the “black” and “Hispanic” photos remained where they were). A series of men, in black and white photos, none smiling. I found it difficult to screen out all my memories and concentrate on the concrete, the shape of his eyes, the size of his lips or the length of his nose.

She had magazine clippings, advertisements, even props. I looked through the stacks of glossy photos. The men in these pictures didn’t look like criminals. They were smiling, barbecuing hamburgers in their back yards, driving shiny red cars, smiling at children. They seemed to live in a different world. In their world, none of this happened, rape, police investigations. But they were humans and had eyes and ears and hair. I did find some near matches and showed them to her. She scratched in more lines and some circles.

In a corner of her office, I noticed a box of what looked like Halloween costumes. I asked her about them. “Sometimes they wear disguises,” she said. She had worked with the victims of a robbery, she told me; the robber had worn a mask. So she made a sketch, Bozo, with a round red nose, pointy triangle hair. The mask, with this background, looked diabolical to me now. But I imagined the sketch she had drawn of it; it would be matter-of-fact. Her job was to take all this information, the victims’ words, the magazine pictures and mug shots and props the victims picked out for her and create a likeness, not a duplication but a representation—thick with information, void of specious material. Like a translator, she would represent the victims’ words as best she could but not enhance them with her own interpretation.
We spent a long time on his hair. It was coarse and wavy. I searched through the scattered images again, looking for someone with that hair. I didn’t pay attention to the numbers typed at the bottom of the black and white photos, or the blank expressions on those faces. I didn’t look at the shiny cars they stood next to in the glossy color ads, the leather briefcases they held, their straight white teeth. Hair, all I looked at was their hair. Did it match? Did it almost match? I scanned and rejected quickly, went on to the next pile. My task was limited, had very specific parameters. I wasn’t being asked to describe to her the horror of the experience, to relive the physical pain. I was looking at pictures of hair. It was intellectual, not emotional—compartmentalized and easier to accomplish. When I found it, the good hair, she drew it on top of his head. And it did look like his hair—a small victory in itself.

The police were pleased I had gotten a very good look at the guy. In fact, I’d seen him from almost every angle possible over the course of the hour he was in my apartment. The rapist had been a complete stranger. But he’d made no attempt to hide himself from me—no masks on his face, no blindfolds on mine.

I looked back at the paper in front of her. He now had eyes. Or, at least brows and lids. If eyes are the mirror of the soul…. Did he have a soul? He certainly had eyes. He had begun his attack with his eyes. First, when he’d barged in, he’d looked into my face with such intensity that my first thought was, He is very rude. “It’s not polite to stare,” we’re told when we’re young. He looked straight at me, straight into me. I was offended by his sense of entitlement. Eyes are private; they reveal our vulnerabilities. He searched for mine; he found them and used them.

But now. I was sitting here with the artist. Yes, I could remember his eyes. I closed mine. I told her what I saw in my mind. I fell almost into a trance, creating my sentences for her. No one had ever listened so intently to the content of my words before. I heard her pencil softly shading in the irises, jabbing in the pupils. I slowly opened my eyes and looked down at our work.
“What mistakes do you see?” she asked me. She wasn’t asking me to judge the merit of her artistry. This was not a blue dinosaur or a haunted house. “Tell me if you see anything I should change.”  This portrait was not an expression of some aesthetic vision of hers. It wouldn’t be graded or taped to the refrigerator or hung in a gallery. It had a very specific purpose and would be judged solely on this: Would it help put a rapist in jail? “Maybe thicker eyebrows,” I told her.

We kept working. Both of us bent over that one piece of paper, me offering brief phrases, she erasing and scratching, the two of us together shaping and fine-tuning. I remembered some parts of the attack more visually than others. I could flash to the time that we were up on the bed, when I was lying flat on the rumpled blankets and he was on top of me. His sweaty face was inches from mine. He kept taking off and putting back on his glasses. Forty eight hours before, this was where I had been, this was what he had done to me. Now, though, I was appropriating the images to use against him. I searched a long time for just the right glasses to show her. His glasses would now be used as evidence against him.

After about three hours, she suggested that we take a break. We walked down the gray hallway to a drink machine. She chatted briefly with some colleagues. She dropped her quarters in and bought me a Sprite. We went back down the hallway, sipping our sodas, and walked back through her door. I had, for just a second, forgotten why I was here in this office building. I gasped. On the cold metal table was the rapist’s face. Looking up at us, a blank expression in his eyes; not his living flesh, but a frozen cartoon of it. I told her I was afraid of the picture. “Good,” she said and smiled at me. “That means we got it right.”

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