My mother in prison, a dying animal. Some essential thing leaching out of her. My father shifting. The muscles around his eyes softening, relaxing, providing his face a new peace. In those days, in memory, he is so often in the distance. In the meetinghouse. On the beach with Hank. Crossing the yard, walking to the front door of his house. There is always a separating space—parking lot, sand, promenade, lawn.
Meanwhile across town: Tess pacing her cell. She is seething. She is losing weight.
Seymour is biding his time. He smokes. He gulps his whiskey down. He sweats. He eats little. Yet I have the impression he is never as drunk as we are. Always on the lookout, he is the careful one. He watches us. We make him nervous.
We are a single sick body. We are legion. Hot, sweating, trembling, hungry.
We were drinking too much. Those late nights at the bar, those afternoons on our off days, took on the mood of a lunatic militia’s operational meetings. No matter the time, the location, there was always some version of the same staging, the same blocking. Seymour and I stayed seated. Tess began in some elevated position—bar top, chair back, windowsill—and progressed, eventually, inevitably to standing. This is the sensation of that time, the visual tone: Tess high, us low. Tess in motion, us still. Leader and led.
What have I not told you? What have I not remembered?
Other rapes in other frat houses. No one’s surprised, of course. This we learned first from Marcy, and then from the White Pine Witness, proud pursuer of truth, rectitude and gun rights. I cannot remember the order of events. What we knew when, and all that. What difference does it make?
Whatever the case, this is what we came to know in those weeks before we fled White Pine for Seattle: No one had been arrested. Investigation ongoing. One rape was perpetrated by a group. A single witness had lost sleep and so came to the police. Or to the administration. The fundamental facts matter. And they are always the same. They compose the same stories, and are repeated year after year after year after year. The same violence, the same failures, the same impunity, the same verbs, the same nouns.
I am exhausted by them now.
I am defeated.
We have lost, I am sorry to say.
I am nostalgic for my old rage, my old fury, for the time when we believed we might destroy some rotten thing, some fundamental structure.
But I have given up.
The nights we drank and drank and drank. Nights we wanted to burn the houses down. Fraternity and sorority. Hell and heaven and the road between. Set them on fire. In the nights of our wild tears, our benders, we talked of pouring gasoline into bottles, stuffing them with rags.
But in the end, it wasn’t fire she wanted.