IN A VARIATION of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, we are instructed to imagine the steel chamber from the perspective of the cat. Except the cat has been replaced by a person, and the poison gas and radioactive trigger have been replaced with another life-terminating device—an assault rifle, let’s say. Every ten seconds, the weapon is either deployed, killing the person, or it makes an audible click and the person survives. Outside the chamber, those two outcomes—death and survival, the bullet wound and the sound of the empty chamber—exist in equal probability, creating a paradox as in the original experiment. Inside the chamber, the person might have been killed or not killed—click—but because the mind is bound to follow whatever path does not lead to death, and because it isn’t possible to experience having been killed, the person’s only possible experience is of having survived the experiment, regardless of the odds.
Every few months, or years, or days, or some random and indeterminate amount of time, I enter his name into a search engine. I look for any news: an address, a phone number, a blog post, any indication of whether he is in this country or out of it, whether he is trying to find me or is content to let me go. At first I collected the information in a real, tangible manila file I kept in a drawer of my desk. Now it’s in a folder of bookmarks on my computer.
I can open the folder and see that the first story about the kidnapping runs in the local city paper on July 7, 2000: two days after I escape. In the upper-left corner, there is a tiny, low-resolution photo of the accused. Unattractive, unassuming, he does not, even now, look to me like a rapist. But there, above the photo, the headline reads: GRAD STUDENT SOUGHT IN RAPE. The article, written by a female journalist on the local city paper’s staff, gets the facts only slightly wrong. She writes that the victim found her car outside covered by a tarp with the keys still inside. The keys were not in the car, but on a table in the apartment. I remember this because I spotted the key chain, a lizard, which My Good Friend had made for me a few nights earlier, stringing green and white plastic beads onto a length of clear plastic twine.
For years I imagine the female journalist as elderly, as a sort of female journalist archetype, so hardened by the decades spent covering petty or disturbing small-town crimes that she can’t be bothered to get the facts exactly right. But when I enter her name into a search engine, I discover that she is not an elderly journalist, but a woman roughly my age, who had only recently graduated when she wrote the article. For some reason, this allows me to forgive her for the factual inaccuracies. I bookmark her website and add it to the folder on my computer.
An article appearing in the Tuesday, July 11, 2000, issue of the same local city paper warns readers that the search for the man accused of abducting and sexually assaulting his former girlfriend has become an international pursuit. The article describes how, after tracking his credit card activity, detectives learned that The Suspect purchased an airline ticket to Mexico, and then another one to Venezuela, where he stayed for a time at a resort on the coast. He’s a very intelligent individual who’s scaring me, says a captain on the local police force. A professor from the Spanish department describes The Suspect as erratic and disorganized as a scholar, but affable, . . . a gifted, erratic dilettante. The professor asks not to be named. I read the article from the safety of the home I share with My Husband and our children, wondering why this professor could have possibly thought he, of all people, was at risk.
Subsequent articles describe slim chances of extradition: under a provision of the recently revised Venezuelan constitution The Suspect’s dual citizenship with Venezuela and the United States protects him from extradition. It’s not clear, the captain says, when or whether The Suspect can be returned. The authority of the United States government to extradite in this case depends on interpretations of citizenship based on the laws of Venezuela, matters that can easily end up in foreign courts. It’s a very difficult and complicated area of law.
One article in the university student paper describes the process of sending the warrants to Venezuela: Interpol notifies the Venezuelan government that one of its citizens is wanted on felony charges in the United States, but officials there may or may not arrest him and transport him to the US embassy. Even though a treaty has existed between the United States and Venezuela since 1922, the article explains, the new constitution under Chávez makes things a little more complicated.
The article in the university student paper is written by a woman I will meet one night, after I have returned to my new apartment, after I have started taking medication, and have found a job at the university press, and have started fucking the man who will become My First Husband. My Good Friend and I have gone out drinking. We’re settling into a booth when she points to a woman across the bar. The friend of a friend of a friend. The woman sees us both, comes over to our table, sits down. Maybe she introduces herself as a journalist before putting her hand on my hand. I’ve been writing about what happened to you, she says in a near whisper, her tongue piercing clicking against the back of her teeth. Don’t worry—click—your story’s safe with me.
According to a resume he has posted on a website for freelance translators, in the years between 2000 and 2007 he works a variety of editing, translating, and interpreting jobs, sometimes for large, international corporations. He spends time as an interpreter for the Venezuelan lower courts. He translates a Motorola cell phone instruction manual and its product description from English into Spanish. He edits several titles on conflict management for the University for Peace.
During those same years I marry. I divorce. I marry again. I change addresses at least once every year. I give birth to a child. Less and less frequently I e-mail The Detective to ask about the case. Any changes? Any news?
One Halloween, seven years after the kidnapping, an e-mail from him appears in my inbox. He has just been released from jail in Venezuela after a failed extradition attempt and wants me to finally and officially drop the charges in the United States. I hope you’ll consider my plea, he writes. And I would like to hear back from you even if it’s just to say that you’re sorry. Even if you decide not to respond to this message, I wish you all the best.
I close my laptop screen and draw the blinds. I lock all the doors and turn off the television. I pull my daughter out of bed and call her father in a cold sweat. We’re hiding on the floor in the kitchen when he finally bursts through the front door, dressed as Clark Kent for a Halloween office party, his tie loosened and pulled to the side, his shirt half unbuttoned, the blue fabric of his Superman t-shirt visible underneath. I call The Detective, who now works as a lead investigator for the county’s prosecuting attorney. He wants me to respond to the e-mail, to try to bait him, to lure him back to the United States one last time.
That night we trick-or-treat like regular people. In the photo, I’m dressed as a sheriff, looking like I’ve seen a ghost. Or I am a sheriff-ghost. We walk up and down the streets of our suburban neighborhood. My daughter keeps pulling her hand from my hand. I am holding her too tight, picking her up too often, trying too hard to rush her back home. All the while I’m looking and looking and looking over my shoulder.
In the morning I write to The Detective to tell him I can’t do it. I can’t set the trap. I can’t be the bait. I have too much to lose. I remove my profile from all the social networking sites. I call all of my former employers and ask them to pull my bio down from their websites. It’s the only thing I can think to do.
But somehow he’s the one who disappears. Maybe he’s been murdered or has changed his name. I can see that his ex-wife and half brothers are “friends” on Facebook, a fact that makes me both worry and hope. Maybe one of them knows where he is, whether he is still living, but I can’t bring myself to write to them.
Each morning I look in the backseat of the car before I pull out of my driveway. I search the rearview mirror while driving my children to school. I scan the parking lot before unbuckling them from their seats.
Back home, I sit at my desk and watch for him out my window. I do not leave the house after dark. I turn the lights off at bedtime and lie awake in fear that he will come into my house and kill me while I am sleeping.
If I sleep, he brings a gun into my dreams.
I used to have this wooden comb he bought for me on a beach in Mexico. A few yards up the beach, lobsters smoked over half-drum grills. The old woman came to our blanket, putting beautiful carved things in my hands: a horse, a bracelet, the comb. After I’d used it on my hair every night for years and years, the handle snapped off. And then I kept it in a drawer until I caught my daughter running it through her hair and finally threw it away.
I still have coins from Belgium and Hungary and Spain. I think I have a few Danish kroner tucked into a book somewhere. I kept the watercolor paintings we bought from a street artist in Prague—they hang in the only hallway of my house—and a stein I stole from a Biergarten in Germany. I never wear the beautiful silk shawl from Spain, though I’ve kept it. I kept no fewer than thirty postcards I never wrote on or sent.
I left behind the two skirts he bought for me in a market in Amsterdam. But I kept a strand of glass beads he bought from the same market, the same day, each orb an imperfect apology for the bruise on my face. An accident, he insisted. Or maybe he admitted he did not love me. Afterward, we slid into a series of low-slung booths to order hash from a menu and sink into a wordless haze, which sent us toward the narrow red-lit streets, toward those women who stand and kneel and bend to press against the glass. I envied them that glass, the explicit transaction, the lock on the door. What was the word there for silence? Something about an attic room. A flowering tree: how the blossoms open and are lost instantly.
In the transcript of the Venezuelan extradition trial, he testifies that he was arrested only by chance, for having mistakenly associated with a member of a drug cartel, that only after questioning him about his associate—whom he barely knows—did the police conduct a background search on him and find the charges: kidnapping, rape, forcible sodomy, felonious restraint. After he admits that the Interpol case exists, he explains to the court that they must understand that this is a ridiculous farce initiated by a bunch of hillbillies. He explains how it looks in the United States for an older man to be with a beautiful young girl, and to be Latin on top of that, in a place where to be Latin is to be black.
After he explains that he lived with this young girl for years until she abruptly cut him off, he admits he did follow her, he did take over the use of her car, he did bring her against her will to an apartment where he asked her to apologize. I was affected. I wanted explanations. He tells the court that, after the girl finally did apologize, We cried together and had consensual relations, as couples do.
He had to leave to run some errands, he tells the court, and admits tying the girl’s hands to the chair. When he returned, twenty minutes later, the police were already there. At that point he fled and decided to return to his own country, where he’s been living ever since, working at his job, paying his taxes like a good citizen.
The only time he’s talked to the girl since returning to Venezuela, he says, is when she called to beg his forgiveness. He says the girl told him at the time that she wanted to withdraw the charges but was afraid to because the authorities would punish her for giving false testimony.
The gringos, he says, solicited an extradition for an American. But I’m Venezuelan. The court records from the trial say this is exactly why they release him and deny the extradition. The Venezuelan government, the court rules, has the responsibility to protect its citizens.
I know the case will never come to trial. The FBI and Interpol will never catch him outside Venezuela’s borders. And the Venezuelan government will never hand one of its citizens over to another nation’s authorities.
And for that I am grateful.
It spares me a certain set of uncomfortable choices: whether or not to travel to the trial with my children, how much and when to explain, whether or not to meet his gaze across the courtroom, or to confront him in the hallway, or in his cell in the courthouse, or in the shuffle before they drag him ceremoniously away. Where would I begin? Thirteen years after the kidnapping, the possibility of sitting in the same room with him seems so perilous: a precipice beyond which I can’t see. I’m spared the shame of the witness stand, of having to say out loud what exactly happened in the back bedroom of the basement apartment. Could I speak those words? I’m spared the sentence he might serve, which would begin and end. And then he would walk free.
I haven’t seen the official case file at the offices of the county prosecuting attorney. Because the case is still active and open, The Lead Investigator says he can’t copy and send me the file, but he’ll let me see it anytime I want. He doesn’t see any reason I couldn’t visit the evidence room, where they’ve stored the snakeskin-print shirt I was wearing the day of the kidnapping, and my favorite jeans—the ones with a hole in the right knee, and the bracelet with the carnelian stone Mom bought off QVC for my twenty-first birthday, and the plastic sheet he used to cover the mattress on the floor, and the down duvet he brought home from Denmark, and his handwritten notes, and the used tampon he pulled from my body, and the tissue smeared with my blood that police found on the floor. They still have the rifle.
I can go see it anytime I want, The Lead Investigator says.
But I won’t go, not ever. Because I already know what it looks like, how it smells. I already know the sound each time the trigger is pulled.
Click.
Click.
Click.