In late October she moved north to a cottage belonging to Donald’s sister. At night, the porch. The moon caught on the screen in the semi-deep woods.
Her leg was well enough to manage the uneven ground along the path to the dock and back. Once in the morning and once before bed, she’d climb down bundled in a flannel coat and sit for a time with the still lake reflecting at its edges deep greens by day and black at night. She had rejected psychologists and group therapies, hadn’t looked at the readings Harold had collected for her on trauma and recovery. But she needed time alone and thought it would do her good to be as close as possible to a change of season. Shenny had found three sets of people to sublet her place, Vancouverites and Americans in town to work on movies. Marian and Donald came up on weekends, and once Marian stayed a full week, but mostly it was the quiet.
When the snow finally came in November, a restorative blankness, she seemed to settle with it. She was an urban girl and didn’t know the names of things here in summer, the shrubs and trees, the constellations, and the things she did know she now seemed to know less certainly, all of them blunted. But the snow levelled the ground and sky to white and grey, and for a minute or so every morning she resolved into a simpler creature of movement and need.
For weeks after the assault she had drawn against an invisible weight, and she slept and woke feeling no better. But as winter set in she emerged from a dormancy, as if lagging the world, and her body began to come back to her. Her leg had required only one surgery so far. The side of her quadriceps had been impaled on a half-inch steel rebar rod, which had then torn through the outer sheathing as she continued her fall. There was little vascular trauma but undetermined nerve damage. The wound and its repair had left a cartoonish scar and a burning in the leg that might or might not go away over time. Her other injuries had healed, though on the dock or in the porch she often felt an ache in her ribs. Her nose had been slightly displaced. She’d been advised to consider cosmetic rhinoplasty but wouldn’t pretend that things could be put back in place. She looked a little different now, as she should.
Citing “personal reasons,” she’d quit everything in one-line emails – her job at the museum, her work at GROUND – and now had nothing to do. At first the tasklessness was difficult, and then it wasn’t, and then it was time to put her brain to work. She had Marian and Donald bring up CDs and books and when they left again she practised her languages. Listening to herself speaking Russian one day, she thought she detected a slur in her speech in some region of pronunciation she didn’t normally occupy. It was possible, but unlikely, that the head blow she’d received or the fall had caused a neurological deficit that would grow over time, but the scans revealed nothing as yet.
“Eto nastoiashaia istoriia.”
The story is genuine.
She began to put her time in order. She slept from ten to four a.m. Each morning began in the dark. With fire and tea she prepared herself for the day’s rhythm of physical labour and study. Two hours studying languages, then, at first light, building the woodpile she’d need if she stayed into winter. The wood had been hauled before she arrived, unsawed, unchopped boles and thick branches, and so she learned from manuals to use a chainsaw and an axe, and she was terrible at both, these motions she didn’t know, and then got stronger and better. In the shed beside the cabin she learned to dress the axe with a foot-pedal grindstone and to cool it in the snow. After two hours she would stop and go inside for bread and cheese, and then again take up her books and audio lessons. After lunch she would nap, and in the afternoon she set out with a shovel to keep the road clear on the steepest grades all the way out to the main highway. If there’d been no new snow she’d hike along one of the routes she’d devised. The only neighbour within walking distance was half a mile away, and the one day she came near the house she peered in the windows – it was shut up tight, lawn furniture stacked in the kitchen. Several times while hiking she saw deer and evidence of other animals, tracks and scat she didn’t recognize. There were what had to be wolf prints. Part of her expected an encounter but didn’t expect it would kill her. All her fear was occupied. While cooking and eating she listened to the radio. After dinner she resumed her studies. Once a week she started up the car Marian had now more or less given her and drove to a town thirty minutes away for supplies.
Every three or four weeks she went to the city for medical appointments, hers or Marian’s. Her mother’s test numbers were good, though no one was talking remission. She stayed for two or three days at a time, in her old room at the house, spending the mornings with Marian. The city was in its chill phase. It was comforting to sit in a café window and watch it go by, remembering student apartments past, a harpsichord on FM as she read for her classes or fell in love with a poem. She found she wasn’t more afraid in the city, but it was winter, and she hadn’t yet been out at night alone. And anyway, the fear didn’t reside in the place.
Its power owed partly to her reluctance and then inability to find words for it. She hadn’t returned voluntarily to the attack – she didn’t have to, it was still immediate, in her physical pain and a disjuncture between her past and present selves – but in the first weeks at the cottage it was as if her imagination had been dulled so she might have time to distance herself from the event. One night not long after she’d moved up she’d heard something outside, a heavy presence, and then came the crash onto branches and a few hard breaths. Whatever it was scrambled up and away. She told herself it was likely a deer, a moose or bear. But for an hour or two she sat cold, waiting, armed with a poker from the fireplace. There was no one to help her. She’d stayed awake through the night.
She’d been told to expect the nightmares, and to think of them as a kind of purging, though they were not. Because her dreams were never literal she assumed they wouldn’t be of the attack itself, and the first ones that came had a familiar symbolic slant. She would be dreaming untroubled and then suddenly, thin black veins in the sky or along the walls that no one else could see, and when she looked again, they were gone. A drop of inky poison, absorbed. But then she met the real thing. Consecutive nights of vivid fragments of the event itself, with no illogic or distortion. It was here that she realized his nylon mask had small eyeholes that sat slightly askew. That at some point the eyes came up in the holes and he was looking down and his eyelashes were long, almost girlish. That lying in the dig she’d seen a concrete block near her face and thought how once the dumb square thing was set down the rest of the building would follow prefigured, without further invention.
In her dreams she kept passing by books in a window and the open door of a brightly lit improvised church.
And so she came to learn that she had only been managing the lesser symptoms of the fear. By day, the real fear was a kind of waking in the blood. Or a visitation to her conscious mind from her unconscious. It came upon ordinary moments. A December Thursday, late afternoon. She was making lentil soup, listening to news on CBC Radio, where the stories always began with a sound. This one, a documentary about AIDS education conducted by Canadian missionaries in Kenya, began with a choir. The hymn (the word like “him”), the mind’s picture of a singing congregation, and the next thing she knew, she was rigid and shaking. After a minute or so she reached over and killed the radio and in the silence the dread was stark. It remained for hours. She understood then that the fear was going to have her long after her attacker had.
Her attacker. Whom she did not contemplate. There were no suspects, only her vague description for the police. They could barely make a sketch from it. He had said nothing, his smell was particular but she couldn’t describe it except to say that he smelled like a closed room after long sex and she couldn’t, wouldn’t say that. The nylon mask made a false complexion, and she felt for no reason that he was dark white or light brown, not black or South Asian, but she couldn’t explain why she felt this. The smell might have been in the mask. He was not tall, of medium build.
The police investigator, a short, square woman with sharp arching eyebrows named Cosintino, whom Kim liked, had said it was unlikely she’d been followed from the coffee shop or the church when she first sensed a presence – he was more likely waiting for her on the dark block, with the gate open, knowing exactly how the attack would go down. He waited for a woman, not even necessarily a particular kind of woman, and along came Kim. It might have been significant that he found his victim on a downtown street rather than a park, or some jogging path in the valley. Maybe he liked the idea of raping her – Cosintino thought that was the idea – beneath all the high-rise windows, all the people who could be looking down. Knowing such a compulsion had not yet helped the investigation.
But if it were true that he’d waited for her, then how to account for her sense of being followed? Was the feeling not intuition but premonition? The other question was why she had turned down the dark street when she’d thought to trust her instinct and go north.
Some of the fears she had to manage belonged to friends and family. At first her three parents had all objected to the idea of her staying at the cottage. The most complicated moment had Marian asking, “Why would you want to be nowhere?” and then breaking down. She’d been the solid one until then. The assault had given her someone to be strong for. Even after Kim left, the reports from Donald were that Marian was already into her sober season, and it was holding. She didn’t drink at all on the weekends at the cottage. When Kim went home for four days at Christmas, the parents were on their best behaviour. Untaken baits, uncharacteristic silences. Harold and Marian didn’t know what to do with her, or with themselves around her. Then she went back to the woods.
One weekend in late January, Donald told Marian that he and Kim were going to drive to a hiking trail. They curved around the edge of the lake with Donald telling her he knew what she was made of. She said that at the moment she was made of confusion, that even the things she thought she knew, not just about the attack but about herself, were now in doubt. When they got out, he took from the trunk a rifle and some shells and began to talk about indeterminacy.
“In math we know that certain things are consistent only if they contain inconsistencies. Some things are built to be undecidable, Kim. You remember the liar’s paradox – ‘This sentence is false’ – which can’t be true even though it can’t be false.”
“The world is an Escher sketch.”
“Some parts of it are.”
“Those are the parts I’m in right now. And in the world I used to know, you wouldn’t be carrying a gun.”
They walked over the frozen lake to an island. She let him teach her how to load the rifle and fire it. He told her everything – the name of the gun, a Remington Model Seven SS, its primary use, the names of the parts, their material compositions, then the way to store it, to hold and carry it. To load, aim, and fire it. He said, “Imagine that dead birch down there as your target” – was she supposed to picture her attacker? could she see his face, his eyes in the knots, the light and dark reversed on the peeling parchment bark? – and she shot at it nine times and hit it twice. She had thought rifles kicked upon firing and sort of wished this one had. He said the tree was “at” sixty yards. She allowed him to remind her twice that this lesson was their secret. Because Kim wasn’t outwardly in ruin, Marian worried about her mental health. She told Kim it was important not to be strong for the sake of others. She had to confront the event head-on, when she was ready. Her mother apparently wanted her in tears.
When the lesson was over and they were driving back, Kim said she wouldn’t be keeping the rifle.
“It’s not how I want to deal with this, Donald.” His familiar baffled, hurt expression. Squinting behind rimless glasses, now fogging in the car. “I liked learning about the gun. I like knowing how it feels to shoot one.”
“I just thought you might feel safer.”
“No. And I can’t shoot what happened.”
The gun would call up shadows. A sitting gun, imagining its own completion. It would be different if she didn’t know that made-things incline to their use, but she did know it. And she was vulnerable, to images and songs and who knew what else. Already she had to remind herself to take the fireplace poker from under her bed before the others arrived each weekend.
February was mild, sunless. She read novels and listened to Górecki and went skiing with uneven strides on the lake. The thought of the city in spring, the noise and press of it. She would have to prepare for her return.
One afternoon she closed a book in mid-sentence and admitted she was scared. Not just of the city but of this cottage, the lake. The vast forest invited the loss of body and mind. She was scared of the night sky. She lived at a pitch of fear just below awareness. Now and then it welled up, then sank again, but it was always close to the surface. It was a matter of time before she would begin seeing demons. She had removed herself to this place so she’d have no one to be brave for, but she’d been brave for herself from the first moment. The truth was, she didn’t know how to get past this. The authority of fear. She was being forced to make a project of herself.
He had calluses, she’d told the detective. She thought she could recognize his touch. She worried about touches, about how she’d respond to a man. She told herself what no one else would, that in some ways she’d been lucky. She hadn’t been killed. Or raped. Yet she could not accept the thought that had things gone differently she would feel even more violated. And that was it: violation. The expected word. Amid the many others, words like closure or recovery, it was hard to remember that there were brute facts, and words attached to them, and they were the right ones. Upon this revelation it seemed possible she might collect enough words to describe her fear even if she couldn’t describe her attacker. In a photocopied article with the heel of Harold’s palm at the base of every page she read about the neurophysiology of trauma. The fear, in material terms, was cerebral. The assault would have released a neurotransmitter in the amygdala that would have set off a calcium reaction that resulted in proteins gluing themselves to those parts of her brain that were active before, during, and after the attack, when her adrenalin was high. A fragment of gospel music, the sight of a construction crane, the smell of coffee, and she was cast back into the event.
And Harold. It was just bad luck that he’d been on her mind in those minutes before it happened.
The man with the calluses had changed her brain and she needed to change it back.
Harold called her twice a week, sent her oddly rambling emails about his work and things he’d read, but he visited just once. He arrived late in the afternoon on a bright Saturday in March when the snow had crystallized and the sap was running, darkening the maples. She’d guided him on his cellphone until he lost the signal, and he made it the rest of the way consulting Marian’s written directions along the last kilometres of half-frozen, forking gravel roads. He pulled in at the cottage, somehow appearing out of place even before he emerged from his car.
She came out in her winter boots, in long johns and a sweater, and he looked at her, and there it was. Since the attack she’d detected a stutter in his perception whenever he met her slightly altered face.
She helped him unload the supplies she’d requested. In the spirit of a game they’d devised long ago, he made his complaints in Spanish.
“No me gustan las cabañas.”
“Ni siquiera has entrado todavía.”
“Imagino que las moscas negras no molestan tanto en esta época. Pero el lugar estará replete de musarañas.”
“What?”
“I said I hate cottages and I expect the place is infested with … shrews or something.”
They ate dinner with him scoffing at the knick-knacks on the walls, the lacquered wood clock in the shape of a fish, the inexpert oil painting of the lake, surmising the low-middle-brow set of Donald’s clan.
“These are likely treasured heirlooms I’m ridiculing.”
“Didn’t E.P. Thompson say something about saving the dead from the condescension of the living?”
He smiled. “So you know your Marxist historians. I’m happy to be forgetting them.”
Silences made him uncomfortable. He described a Belgian movie he’d read about, then Warhol films and Tarkovsky and what he called “the dignity of boredom,” and how “mind-numbingly dignified” he felt during long, static movie shots. He quoted a study on the growing illiteracy of new university students (“they call them ‘incoming,’ like shellfire”). He admitted to being “a revanchist” about his lost territories in the department and complained about younger colleagues protesting police patrols on campus.
At one point he looked down and seemed mystified by the food on his plate.
“You think he had a dark complexion.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“It’s in the police report.”
“I didn’t say dark. I said dark white. I didn’t see his face. I don’t know where I came up with that. Maybe his hands.”
“Mediterranean? North African?”
“Dark white is meaningless. Even if I’d seen it.”
They were never together in strange spaces like this. At the moment they were trapped in this one. Like the fear itself, her aversion to talking of the assault with her father, of all people, was physical.
“You think you were followed.”
“It’s just a feeling I had.”
“I know these are hard moments to relive, but have you considered the possibility that he might have followed you all the way from your apartment?”
It was as if he’d never spoken about it until now.
“No. I came from Mom’s house that night. Remember?”
“But you rode by your building. He might have been there, or anywhere along the route. It was the same route you always took. The lock on the gate was already broken. As if he knew you were coming and he planned for it.”
“It wasn’t broken, it was open. No one cut it. And if he’d followed me I would have noticed him.”
“Maybe he was a stranger. Or maybe he knew you.”
Here it was, then.
“Or maybe he was a stranger who knew me. Is that your theory?”
“I’m sure it’s occurred to you. That maybe he was one of the rejects.” He raised his hands in apology. “Sorry. I don’t know what to call them.”
He wasn’t sorry. It was what he’d needed to say. And there was more. As if to slow himself for emphasis, he started back into his dinner, and then resumed.
“What if it was someone you turned down? Some guy you turned down at GROUND because he was dangerous, which is why he was rejected by the Review Board. And he targeted you.”
“The police don’t think so. I don’t think so. Only you do. There’s no reason to think the man who attacked me isn’t fourth-generation Canadian. I wish you’d see that there are other mysteries to solve here.”
He finished his glass of wine and held it out to her. She filled it and put down the bottle within his reach. He shifted to the matter of her recovery. Any experience that marked itself, he said, lapsed immediately, distorted, degraded, into memory, language, story. The process was true of everything in history.
“I’m sure the attack is still close to you. It will stay vivid and immediate unless you consciously process it. It unfolds in real time in memory, in dreams. It confronts you in absolute detail. You have to cast out the details, as it were, by describing them. Find the words and describe them. If you wait too long it’ll be too late.”
You couldn’t always tell with Harold when he was speaking from his researches and when from his experience. For a moment she thought she’d ask him, but he would close down, and wherever they’d arrived now would be lost to them.
“But I can’t describe them,” she said. “I don’t have the words. And so trying just compounds my sense of helplessness. If I say he seemed sure of himself, like he’d done it before, then I sort of believe that’s a fact. But then, you know, his mask wasn’t on straight, and I got away from him, so how slick was he? And so I doubt myself as a witness. And I feel powerless all over again.”
“So keep trying. Maybe take it from angles. Find the smaller composite truths within the larger one. You need to make it something to share. It’s the hopeful idea of two or more people seeing the same thing. Disarm it with scrutiny, as if it happened long ago, to someone else.”
“Who’s my audience? I wouldn’t want anyone I know so-called sharing this with me.”
“Tell it to yourself. Your older self. She looks in an old journal some day far off and finds the examined details. And they seem very real and very distant all at once.”
Did he keep a journal? she wondered. This was not a précis of some article he’d read or the usual hectoring about resuming her studies. He was telling her something he’d discovered.
“Have you told your mother what happened?”
“You can, you know. You can tell either of us, if you need to.”
“So now we’re sharing our worst moments?”
He pretended to look directly at her but his eyes took in only her forehead and then dropped back down to the food, his shoulders now set slightly forward.
“You’re very aware of my worst moments, whatever you imagine them to be. I think you’ve let them shape you.”
“Really. What do I imagine them to be?”
“Well. The marriage had its worst moments. You were there for those. Or in nearby rooms, and the aftermath. And you’re angry with me, for her sake and your own, and –”
“Yeah, I know. So I sabotage my could-be career to disappoint you. Isn’t psychology simple.”
There had been not a sabotage but an awakening. Her first two terms in New York had gone well enough. She had a title for her proposed thesis – “Homeless Truths: Pluralism in Postwar North America” – and a lengthy reading list, but in her second year she began wondering what wasn’t in the studies, theories, and source documents. To Harold’s distress, her inspiration had always been those historians whose work admitted speculation – Donald’s interest in the Battle of Quebec began when she’d given him Simon Schama’s essay-fiction about Wolfe and Montcalm. As her second winter there began, and she realized that New York had covered her in a mood of broken promise, she returned in her reading to fiction-inflected histories. She became dreamy, stopped attending classes, and wrote nothing but vignettes, scenes that came to her unbidden, written all in one sitting. She was adrift, on other people’s money. And so she dropped out and went home.
They’d entered the brief pause before finishing their meals. Kim noticed how they mirrored each other, each with the left hand on the table, holding the stem of a wineglass, and the right resting on the edge. Harold pressed his palm against the table, spreading his thumb and fingers as if measuring the span of a thought.
“There’s no use denying the force of large events,” he said. “If we’re awake at all, we spend our early adulthood discovering that the world is more complex than we thought, and the rest of it discovering the main human themes have been the same for thousands of years. You can name each one in a word or two.”
“You know, you’re right that I was in nearby rooms. And I remember what I heard you two say to one another.”
“That was just dumb emoting. Mostly meaningless.”
“Well then maybe that explains my directionless life, because I thought I caught some spit wisdoms.”
“I can’t imagine which ones.”
“That some people live their lives inside a single ambiguity. You said that. All the yelling stopped and there it was. I don’t remember the context, I likely wouldn’t have understood it. But I’ve come to think of the statement as hard-won truth, maybe a confession. And I’ve always wondered what it was, your single ambiguity.”
“I don’t recall saying that. And I can’t imagine what I meant.”
“So then it’s left to me to imagine. And you’re right, after all. I guess what I imagine has shaped me.”
They had never talked at such length about anything that mattered, not that he’d opened up newly for her. He was still the sly interlocutor, defending not just his positions (his colleagues found him suspiciously apolitical, at best; she knew some of them were handy with polite recriminations) but something in himself, something she had never been able even to glimpse whole. And there it was again, the particular mystery of him. She could almost touch it.
The next morning he was gone. The day was clear, the light through the pines lined the cottage. Now that she was alone again the place felt not empty but pristine.
What she’d been waiting for was a line of address, and in the wake of Harold’s leaving it finally appeared. She needed to discover what she already knew.
She began with a blank computer screen, facing the windows and lake. The first pages covered the day of the attack. She found a space above the story from which to tell it, neutrally, in the first person but a little outside herself. She tried not to invent or speculate, and ignored moments that only seemed true and ironies she couldn’t have known at the time. She wrote of her ride to work that night. As she drew it out, as if to delay the occurrence, the moments began to build more acutely with each line, and she found that if she stayed in them long enough, there were returns. The rust on the panel above the rear wheel of a parked car she’d locked her bike beside, the way the door to the café stuck a little, the smell of the spilled mint tea she’d stepped in near the entranceway, and the wet tread prints from her shoes on the sidewalk as she looked back to see if she’d dropped a napkin from the tray. A man walking ahead of her in jeans and a fitted blue shirt. He entered a house and was gone.
Then, the moment when she’d passed by the door of the brightly lit improvised church and a chill fell upon her. She was seeing herself on the page from a ground-level distance. She was seeing herself from the cold.
Every day she wrote to this point and no further.
One crisp morning when the fire wouldn’t catch, as she lined up the same moments the same way, a breakthrough. She’d made a mistake. There were tread prints, yes, but not hers. It was the night before the attack that she’d stepped in the tea. And this small error admitted the possibility of others. It showed up the deficiency of her method. On the night of the attack she would have looked back and seen the prints and known they were someone else’s and been reminded of her own on the previous night. She might even have felt an echo of the disjointed time she’d experienced minutes earlier when she’d pictured herself riding in the morning, going home in the opposite direction. And wouldn’t she then have felt an eeriness? If not consciously, then in some part of her? And mightn’t this feeling, and the footprints behind her, have prepared her for the sense that she was being followed?
She began over now, allowing for her interiors. The writing ran deeper, and though the account was sliding to speculation, she felt herself returning in the prose. If a misremembrance could lead her to a fact she’d overlooked, then maybe so could other variations from the narrow-seeming truth. And so she half remembered, half invented the night.
One morning she wrote,
I left dinner with my parents and rode south through the dark towards work.
She stopped. The words that made distances were wrong. She realized that the “I” itself was wrong, for whoever she was now was not who she had been, and one letter could not be them both.
Before the shift that night she left dinner with her parents and biked south in darkness past her apartment building, along into her usual path. The afternoon storms had broken the heat and departed without trace. The air was drying, late-summer cool. On the side streets near campus were weakly haloed car headlights and shadowed figures waiting to be briefly illuminated.
She wrote for almost three hours without stopping, finally deep into something true, without any sense of present time and place. Then she turned off her computer. Some minutes later she found herself outside, at the woodpile. She split six pieces of elm and lay them in the handled canvas. She smelled the wood and a sugary scent that she followed around the back of the cottage. On one of the maples a bucket had been knocked off a tap that had begun to drip sap. There were bear tracks all around. She stepped away, seeing everything.
Back inside, she sat by the fire, stared out at the lake. The animals were waking from their dens. Seeing the prints had brought forth the smallest things. The faintest yellow in the grey of the dormant beech buds. The weather seemed no different but it was already spring in the ancient systems.
All moved forward from here. It was time to go home.
Her thoughts returned to the half-written story. She was still standing outside the church and she couldn’t go further without confronting what she couldn’t. Fear had stopped her, but also an incapability. How to think of him? He was faceless, without even a name to hold the substance of him in place. She wanted him known, not named, not by her. Any name might skew her sense of him one way or another. And so instead she designated him with only a letter, and for reasons she didn’t speculate upon, the letter that seemed right was R. A letter rolled on some tongues, though she didn’t roll it now. A letter that sounds like are. Her attacker, a plural state of being.
A verb in English, she thought, at which point her intuition that he didn’t speak English was useful to her. The man had language, but not hers. The detail opened up more of the globe than it closed in her conception of him. And it isolated him within the city, which made sense, she decided. And thinking of him without English, in fact, meant she could attribute to him any life she wanted.
She expected he would come to her like this, that one day she’d call up her narrative, and begin writing, and there he’d be, fully present and named.