Genre: General
Word Count: 5159
It was like the first time I was raped.
No, not physically. It’s not what you would think it sounds like. I don’t want your sympathy. I’m using the word because that’s exactly what it was like—being violated completely, helpless, humiliated. I’m using the word for the violence, for the power. There’s a power in that word that you don’t get from other words. You tell others you were violated, it’s not the same. You tell others you were taken advantage of, it’s not the same. It was rape, pure and simple, and not any of that smutty sexual nonsense either. No, it was mental rape, reading those words, being completely unable to stop the thoughts from coming, from sweeping through and cleaning out. The mental pictures, all the most extreme I could, in my limited experience and memory, conjure up. The little girl I had once seen half-naked in the alley when my parents had taken me to Philadelphia. I had wanted to point and say something, but they just pulled and kept me going. We’re going to be late. We’re going to be late.
Late for what?
That little girl and then some dark negro slaves I could later tell I retrieved from watching Roots in history class. Blood and sweat, ragged flesh and unrequited tears. I could see myself, too, that one time in the girl’s bathroom after school, Laura and Chrissy and their friends all laughing and pointing, me in the corner leaking tears, even after they had left, leaking tears. These were the characters in the cinema of my head. The most extreme things my subconscious could come up with and more, fighting and living and losing while in the background O Fortuna and Rachmaninoff and Scriabin and maybe even a voice recording of some terrifying part of the Bible played all superimposed.
It’s hard to describe, you can see now, right? It’s hard to describe, because it was so intensely me. Me. My rape. Not yours. Mine. My most intense experiences, all condensed and concentrated into one long, inescapable daydream, just from reading.
You see why I call it rape now? Everything I thought about the world shattered, everything I’d tried to hide myself in discredited, hanging in tatters around my exposed self. I couldn’t think of anything else, no matter how hard I tried. All I could see was that poor, poor horse, legs moving frantically, desperately, trying with all its might to move the wagonload of drunken people, and the whip flashing up and down, up and down, then the shovel coming up and down on the horse’s back, up and down, rippling flesh every time it made impact, the sickening sense of breaking bone even though you can’t see it, even though you can’t hear it. The laughter, the amused laughter as the man continued to strike the horse, the poor, poor horse, and I could see myself there among them, almost as if from third person, standing there and laughing, and then the horse was that little girl in the alley, and then the slaves, and then me, and then the people had dissolved into laughing faces, and then just into pure emotions—I’m not sure how to describe them, but I could feel all of them, pure undiluted emotions just taking their turns lashing and hitting and striking. And it hurt, oh how it hurt.
My heart felt about to burst, I was so humiliated. This was the world. This was the way things were. Even the smallest things, a small joke at someone’s expense, just flogging that horse, over and over and over and over again.
That was Dostoevsky. That was my rape.
You’re probably looking at me funny now. Blinking. Incredulous. Alright, Sarah, you can calm down now. No, no, I can’t. It’s the trauma you see. I’ve been traumatized. People look at me funny and say things like, I know books can be powerful, I know you were touched, but it’s just a book. It’s just a story. It’s not real.
It is real. Let me tell you now. The trauma is real. The rape was real. I had always appreciated books before but now… the power they have, don’t underestimate them. I wonder sometimes if Dostoevsky considered it when he was writing. Was it with malice? Was it with regret? He knew what he was wielding. The words he chose, the words he probed with, penetrated with.
In a way, it might have been worse than rape. I don’t know. I’ve never been raped in that way, yet. Who knows. People are terrible things.
I don’t know. I never feel like I know anything anymore. All I know is that it hurt, and it was embarrassing, and that somehow, something was wrong. Nothing was right. Nothing was ever right. I remember just curling up there, crying, another dead horse on the side of the road. I stopped trying in school, stopped reading, stopped painting, stopped everything. What did it matter?
There were a lot of doctors. A lot of tears. My poor, poor mother. Somehow I knew what I was doing was horrible, the pain it was bringing her, but then at the same time, I just didn’t seem to care anymore.
I ran away and went to the city, though I didn’t know why then. I know now. I went around like a bum, scrounged around for food, was taken to child services a couple of times, but always managed to find a way to escape. I threw myself into it, life, threw myself into the misery. Oh, I had the horrible stomach cramps of hunger, the horrible feeling of unbelievable thirst, the cramps of raw, defiled food lurching in the body. I felt them. They were real, but I just didn’t seem to care.
I wanted to care. I wanted to care so badly, but somehow I couldn’t. All I could see was that horse. That poor, poor horse. So I would just go back to sleeping in the shelters, searching the alleys, walking the streets, not even begging, but always having some change shoved in my hands somehow.
I hung out a lot in the alleys, especially the dark ones. I’d hang around the ones with the broken streetlights, so that as the light faded away at twilight, you could just see and sense the shadows growing around you. I’d just stand there, leaning against the filthy bricks, watching people as they hurried by, all possessed by a sense of nervousness.
I wasn’t nervous. I’d just stand there and watch, feeling empty, feeling bored, but yet, feeling a desperate desire to live on still, even through all the misery and meaninglessness of it. I knew why I was hanging about the alleys. I knew why I watched the people. I was always attracted to the shady ones, the ones who would glance around furtively. A few would look up and see me, seem to size me up, consider me, but they would just go on. I knew why.
I wanted to get raped. I wanted it to happen. I can’t exactly tell you why, but for some reason, I wanted it to happen. I wanted to be utterly, completely violated, left exposed and unprotected among the garbage of the city. I wanted to suffer it all and then more, because… because that was what it meant to be human, right? I wanted to be hurt. I wanted to be rejected. I wanted to be treated like nothing.
I would go to the fancy part of the city every once in a while, the place with the ritzy apartments and penthouses and the place with the money and where the beggars always congregated even though they were always forced away when the police would be called—they’d always come back anyway because there was the hope. There was still that hope lingering—only two weeks ago Thomas had gotten a hundred dollars… a hundred dollars! All in one go!
I’d go there and walk right up to the door—I’d get myself there somehow, one way or another. I’d make my way to a door, and then wait there, just wait there for the owners to come home. And when they would come home and see me there, they’d just give me this look of utter contempt. Some of them would have pity, first, maybe hand me some money, but I’d just let it fall and keep staring, and keep sitting there, not moving, and always, always the contempt would come. They’d hate me, and yell at me, and call the police, and yell at me some more, and the police would be all apologetic, and then yell at me, and then I’d move, I’d run away with the whole apartment complex yelling at me, and the police wouldn’t even chase me because I didn’t matter, because I was so worthless.
I only really did it once, stay there long enough to be kicked at and have the police called, but I did do it, and no one chased me. I went back to my alley, the darkest, shadiest one, the one where every once in a while, there’d be a drug deal or whatnot, but not anymore, because I guess they knew I was there and because they knew I didn’t care, and maybe even because they didn’t even think to even rape me, I was that worthless. All dirty and filthy although my hair was usually half-decent and I always somehow managed to be forced into a shower and new clothes, I don’t know how. I went back there to lean by the wall close to the opening, close to where the scratched, old cars were parked far too close to each other, where the parking meter was bent in a near 180 loop towards the ground in a feat of super-human strength, where the rats poked around the litter and old gum and who-knows-whats around the ground. I was leaning there, and watching and waiting, and then I noticed this old, old guy in front of the closed down antique shop across the street standing there and watching me, not just taking a look, but watching me, an old geezer who looked as if he should have been in some nursing home somewhere, hunched over and leaning on his cane that probably should have been a walker.
He just stood there for a long time. Even in the dark when I couldn’t see him anymore, I could sense him still there, watching me. I just left after a while, found a different alley. He bothered me, I couldn’t tell you why.
The next day I hiked up to the suburbs, took me most of the day. By the time I got there, it was almost dinnertime, but that didn’t stop me. I just picked a neighborhood, picked a street, picked a house, and then there I was, standing at the door, ringing the doorbell like a madwoman.
The woman who came to answer the door wasn’t quite sure what to say. She never really opened the door completely, but even so, having the door slammed through that half-crack of space still felt good. I just turned around, moved down the sidewalk, and up to the next house. I had five doors slammed in my face before the police came and I made my escape.
The old man came back, though. When I finally dragged myself back to the city, he came back. A different alley, a different place, but he came slowly limping down the street, and when he saw me, he just stopped and stared. I stared back at first, but for some reason, I couldn’t hold it. His eyes were so empty, completely devoid of any sort of emotion it was too awkward.
He didn’t go away either. I mean, of course, after he stared for a minute or two, then he’d turn around and limp away, but it wasn’t as if he disappeared from my life. Every couple of nights or so, he’d show up and watch, but he wouldn’t ever do anything, so I just left him alone, and tried not to worry about it. It wasn’t too hard. I’d stopped worrying about just about everything else, so it wasn’t as if it were something I wasn’t used to doing.
After a few weeks, though, he brought along a few others. A young man and young lady, maybe boyfriend and girlfriend, maybe even his grandkid and his—or her, I dunno—fiancé. They’d just stand there and watch. The girl would keep turning and saying something, maybe even trying to say that she wanted to help me or something, but they never actually did anything… until now.
Now, the boy turned to look at me, and for the first time—it’s hard to believe, I know, but somehow, I’d managed to make contact with him for any length of time—our eyes met and, well, it was like being raped all over again. I don’t even know why. There wasn’t compassion in them. There wasn’t pity. There wasn’t even disdain or contempt. There wasn’t really anything, just impassive and everything, and all of a sudden, I was having mental doors slammed and mental kicks and hallucination-stage visions in my head. The agony, all over again, and I didn’t even want it to stop.
When the tears were finally clearing, they were standing over me, the three of them, looking down, still completely impassive. The boy prodded his grandfather—for some reason I could sort of see the resemblance now—and the grandfather opened his and said something.
He said something, I’m not sure what, but he said something in that raspy voice of his. When it was clear that I didn’t understand a thing, he cleared his throat and tried again.
“You know, there was a time when I would have raped you.”
From an ancient old man, probably in his mid-eighties or something. I didn’t know how to react.
“He used to be a Nazi death camp guard,” the boy said finally. “Since the first time he saw you, he’s wanted to talk to you, but his voice is about gone now.”
The girl helped me sit up, and I didn’t protest for some reason.
“He told me that he thought he could help you.”
“I don’t want help,” I told him.
“You’re only running away. You’re trying to get away from it all, but you can’t and there’s still a part of you that won’t let you.”
I couldn’t say anything to that. It was true. Incredibly true.
The old man cleared his throat again. “I was a Nazi death camp guard.”
The girl said something to him in German, probably encouraging him not to talk.
“He’s being deported tomorrow,” the boy said. “They want to try him in Israel.”
I got up. They weren’t making sense. None of it really concerned me.
“Don’t go,” the girl said, alarmed. “He wants to tell you something, but he can’t. It’s very frustrating for him. He told Ben, so Ben could tell you, please stay and listen.”
The near-incoherent voice: “There was a time when I would have raped you.”
“What makes you think I want that?” I protested automatically, protecting my own lack of dignity. How ironic.
“You stay near the dark alleys, follow suspicious men, I’m surprised you’ve survived intact. God was watching over you,” the boy said, but he wasn’t really talking from himself. I could tell somehow that he was using the old man’s words, that the old man was speaking through him.
“What do you know about God?”
“I would say that he loves you very much, but you would only laugh at me.”
I laughed. “You just said it.”
“You’re not a beggar, I can tell. You’re just here. You’re disillusioned about life.”
“I’m not disillusioned.” I told him. “You’re disillusioned. I see things as they are.”
He smiled. I didn’t understand it. Why did he smile?
“You’re right. You’re not the one disillusioned. You see things as they are, but not completely.”
“What do you mean?”
“You saw suffering once. You saw it and you were moved by it. You understood the way very few others understand it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You understood that something was wrong. You got that. A lot of people see that something is wrong, but they don’t understand it. They keep saying to themselves, no, no, that’s just a special case. That’s not how it really is. That’s not how it should be.” The boy paused. “And that’s not how it should be. You feel that way, too, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t care, but yet, I keep caring.” And it was true. I didn’t know why I didn’t care and yet cared at the same time. I’d always wondered why I didn’t just end it all and commit suicide. I’d always had a feeling that it wouldn’t really be ending it all, that it was only a shadow of an escape. Escape wasn’t there. It had felt empty to me. Maybe I didn’t want to be romantic and see it as a final act of rebellion. Rebellion against life. No, that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to embrace life, but rebel against it. But to embrace life, I… I didn’t know how. “What did you want to tell me?” I addressed the old man. A long string of drool hung out of his mouth, and only after he had moved it several times did it detach itself and drip to the concrete.
“He was a Nazi death camp guard,” the boy said again, and then, he sighed and changed his voice slightly. “I was a Nazi death camp guard,” he said. “Sixty years ago, I was in Nazi Germany and I killed Jews.”
“What are you trying to say? You saw suffering? You caused suffering? So what? So do I. To survive, I eat. Someone else could have eaten what I ate. I probably just made someone else endure hunger for an extra hour or so. I’m causing suffering right now. My mother probably thinks I’m dead. So what, boo hoo, so maybe you actually actively killed a few people, maybe even tortured them, so what?”
“I did. I killed people.” For some reason, it didn’t seem weird to me at all that the boy had started speaking as if he were the doddering old man next to him, as if he were the half-dead man about to be deported to be tried for crimes that were committed more than half a century ago. Why didn’t they try themselves? They would say that this old man, who couldn’t even really say things anymore, committed crimes against humanity and that he probably deserved death, or maybe life in prison, whatever, for the remaining two years of his life. Justice is served. Yeah right. As if that was justice. As if all the suffering those judges themselves caused could warrant no punishment. All the children they probably could be feeding. All the violence they could be stopping.
The boy looked uncomfortable. “I killed people. I raped women. I separated families and forced mothers and fathers to watch as I threw their babies into the crematorium. I watched as they would disfigure their faces and bodies in horror and then I’d take the mother and rape her right in front of her husband.”
“Of course, this is what you’re going to be saying to the jurors.”
“I whipped people. I kicked people. I did all sorts of horrible things to people.”
“So what?” I laughed. “So what? I once told my mom I hated her, and she was terribly upset. She probably went and was in a bad mood when father came home and she probably said something that might have made him annoyed so that the next day, when a he got a caller with the wrong number, he might have been slightly rude and pissed off the caller and made him do something that made someone else do something and made someone else do something and made some perverted tramp on the street decide to end it all and rape the woman he’d been fantasizing of for years while choking her at the same time. So what? I’m a rapist, too.”
“I did these things, and I didn’t feel bad about them,” the boy continued.
“Oh yeah, I don’t feel bad about them either. Maybe some of them, I do, but there are plenty more things I’ve done that I don’t even remember or consider and those I sure don’t feel bad about. Maybe I even feel good about them sometimes, what’s it to you?”
“Don’t shout,” the girl hushed, “Don’t shout.”
“I can shout if I want,” I said, but I quieted down. There was no reason to shout. I had just gotten a bit out of control. I had probably made my voice heard by a random passerby in another alley who might have just thought that God was calling him to fight with his wife. God, what a laugh. God.
“You understand, I see. I had guessed, but you do understand.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. Look, I’m probably causing you some suffering right now.” I couldn’t help it. I really couldn’t. For some reason, I was just so bitter and uncaring.
“But you understood, and just abandoned hope—”
“Hope. It’s that thing that you use as an excuse for your own filthiness. Hope doesn’t solve your problems. It only gives you an excuse to keep doing what you’re doing. To keep causing all this misery and suffering.” I laughed. “I suspected you’d try to throw this at me. Maybe some religion now, right? My God saves. If you believe in him, everything will be alright. No. It won’t be. Because you’re still human. You’re still a rapist. You’re still a murderer.”
“I won’t try to convert you,” the boy said, and there was a hint of annoyance now. For some reason, I was so delighted by that annoyance. I wanted nothing else but to make him even more annoyed, to make him lose his temper.
“Sure you won’t. Just like you said you wouldn’t say that God loved me very much. Mentioning by saying you won’t mention it. It’s still a mention. What a sly person you are.”
“I was with a group unloading a new batch of prisoners. These were politicals, not just Jews, but people against Nazism, ministers who wouldn’t bow to Hitler, opposition party leaders, anyone who looked suspicious. I was helping to unload them, and us guards decided to play a game. We lined them up, just like we would have the Jews. One big line, and at the end, we were there, judging, deciding. We wanted to figure out just how much these men wanted to live. Just how much they would do. Would he be willing to be castrated? Would he be willing to eat his own shit? Would she strip and fuck all of us right there in front of everyone? Listen to me, dammit! Listen to me, girl.”
I listened. I had nothing better to do anyway.
“You wouldn’t believe what people would do. You wouldn’t believe it. To live. To live someone would murder someone else. To live someone would cause someone else to suffer. Just to live! But then there were the others. The others would thought about it, and just decided to die. ‘It wasn’t worth it’, they would say. They were trying to preserve their dignity. ‘We’re human,’ they would say, ‘not animals’. And of course we laughed. What made humans any different than animals? All that mattered is that we were strong, and they were weak. That was how the world worked. We were strong, and we could do these things to them. They were weak and could not protest.”
“Hurry up and get to your point.”
The boy grabbed me and leaned forwards. “You don’t understand. This is my point! You know what I’m saying, but you’re still running away. Your whole life is running away. You see that this isn’t the way it ought to be, that this isn’t the way it should work. You’re living this life that you’re living, saying that you see that humans are like this, and yet you reject hope.”
“Why shouldn’t I? No one listens. The last thing anyone wants to hear and admit is that they do wrong things every once in a while. We hear the saying: we’re human. We make mistakes, but we don’t want to accept it. Sure, sometimes, we may make mistakes, but not all the time. We’re good most of the time, right? It’s not like all of a sudden, the world’s going to change and humans are going to see that. Even if people see it, what can we do about it? The most powerful people in the world have been trying to fix the world’s problems for hundreds of years, but yet they’re still there. What hope?”
“There were two men who got to the front of the line. Both were afraid. Both were trembling. Both had seen the horrors that had happened in front of them. Both wore crosses around their neck. We pointed and laughed. ‘Where is your God now?’ we asked. One stared wildly at his cross, and then tore it violently from it, took it in his hands, cast it to the ground, stepped on it and stomped it into the dirt. ‘There is no God,’ he said. We laughed. We mocked. The other suddenly was not afraid and was calm. He put his hand on the first man’s shoulders. ‘What do you mean, there is no God?’”
“You’re trying to convert me.” I tried to twist away.
The boy didn’t let go. “The first man turned back. ‘If there is a God, then I know nothing of him. He said he loved man. He said he cared for man. Bullshit! What is this then? What is this?’”
“Elie Wiesel said the same thing,” I told him. “I read it in a book. So what?”
“The second man smiled. ‘You fool! You don’t see him now? This is the proof. This is one demonstration of how much he loves us, this concentration camp here. He loved us so much he didn’t force us to love him back. He loved us so much he lets us stay here in our folly, even though he knows what is best for us. It is in our best interest to turn to him, but he loves us so much he won’t come unless we ask him to.’ ‘I already asked him. No answer. Where is your God?’ ‘He respects us so much he would let us do horrible things to one other, but yet not intervene. Intervening would do nothing. It would just be one disaster averted. Life would go on. People would ignore him. No, suffering is man’s choice. We chose suffering, so he allows us. He respects our choice. When we finally come around to choose him again, he is so happy. He will respect that choice, too. He will save us into his heavenly kingdom, where there are no more tears and no more sorrow and no more suffering. This is our God.’”
“So what? So suffering doesn’t disprove God, I never said that.”
The boy let go at last. The old man was crying, and his tears were dripping down his wrinkled face and onto my bare legs. “There is hope.”
“What? You believe that this hope can fix everything you did wrong and save you? So you’ll end up going to heaven after all the shit you’ve done?” I realized that I was talking to the boy and not the old man. I turned to the old man. “There’s no such thing as heaven. There can’t be. There’s no good place to go when you’re dead. There can’t be, because if there were even a single man there, it wouldn’t be the good place anymore. I can’t help it. Even if I were to run away and live in the middle of nowhere all by myself, I’d somehow manage to hurt someone else, I know it. How can there be a good place with that sort of person in it, huh?”
“The old man is crucified. We are being transformed. Jesus Christ paid it all.”
“Religious nuts,” I concluded. “It just doesn’t work that way. It’s not that simple. If it were that simple, everyone would be a wacko Christian and then Christ would return or whatever you guys say and then it’d be happily ever after. Except that’s not how it works. It can’t possibly work that way.”
“And why not?” the boy asked. “Why can’t it?”
I left. The boy kept yelling after me. “Why not? Why can’t it?” Idealists. Idealists, except ideas are just ideas. They don’t work. We say we want “justice”. There’s no such thing as justice, especially if man’s administering it. How can we make those people in the jury God? How can we expect them to do what’s right? Not just what they feel is right?—because what we feel is right isn’t usually wrong. I always thought I was right to keep trying to get the high scores on the test, not knowing that I was ruining some other girl’s life because her parents would always yell at her for never having the highest grades, no matter how hard she studied or tried. There isn’t anything that’s right. There isn’t anything that’s wrong. All that there is, is life. And life isn’t right or wrong. Some people go and commit suicide. Some people decide to keep living. Some people try to live “good” lives. Some people murder. Doesn’t matter. We’re making people suffer nonetheless, and that should be wrong. But is it? Is it wrong? It feels wrong, but does that make it wrong? If every person in the world thought murder was wrong except one person, does that say anything?
I wanted it to be true, you see? I wanted what the boy said to be true, but it just couldn’t be. It was just a delusion to explain away our sufferings, to explain away everything. But why? Why then? Why did I exist then? I’d asked myself that so many times now, but it just didn’t make sense. My very life itself justified its own existence, I wanted to say, but that made no sense whatsoever. I can create my own meaning, but that’s just so empty. I want to say that there are things that are just right. I want to say that there is a way this world was meant to be. But I can’t. I just can’t. Why not?
I shuddered. Why not?
Written: 8/24/2009
A/N: I literally just wrote this. It is very unpolished, I know, but as a whole, it does have some thoughts that I think really merit some thought. The thought of causing suffering to all is not really mine as it is Dostoevsky's and I will admit that I merely attempted to elaborate on it a bit more. This, I suppose, is one interpretation of the results of original sin. What is sin? A lot of people hear the word and instantly think "breaking the ten commandments" or "doing bad things" or something like that, but it really isn't just that. The book of Romans tells us that "all that is not out of faith is sin." In other words, everything that we do not turn to God for, but rather depend on ourselves for, is sin. Sin is selfishness, and this is within the entire human condition. Economic theory supports this completely. Everyone is acting for their own self-interest. The result of this selfishness is that people suffer. Something is not right with the world. We may say, oh, that's only if you're ambitious. That's only if you're really bad. We're all pretty bad. We all do things that lead to other things. We may not think it does, but what we do may have been the little bit needed to push someone to doing something else that eventually cascades into something really bad. It's not nature, it's the environment, we hear a lot. It's not only nature, it's nurture. Well, guess what? We are the environment. We are the nurture, and so it's our fault too.
This is why Jesus Christ is necessary. This is why God had to come. Man just wasn't good enough, so God had to do it. God cared so much about man that he didn't want to have to get rid of man when he got rid of all suffering and all evil. If he were to get rid of all evil, he would have to get rid of us, too, right? That's why Jesus Christ died as our substitute, so that, in effect, God DID get rid of us. He got rid of our sinful selves so that we can take up a new self that is no longer sinful in that day.
I know I'm preaching, but I think sometimes, there's this basis misunderstanding. All religions in the world basically say the same thing: something is wrong with man. All of them try to fix that problem. But only one of them says that the problem with man is so bad that man cannot possibly fix it himself. God had to come and fix the problem. This is Christianity. Not going to church. Not following the Ten Commandments, because no matter how hard you try, you're still going to fail. Love your neighbor as yourself? Yeah right. Not in this world. But in the next, because of Jesus Christ... yes... Christians are the ultimate idealists.
