“Was that you in the house today?” I asked. There were a million other, more important questions. But that’s the only one that came to mind.
He smiled, but it was not the warm and reassuring smile that I expected and needed from him. He offered a slow nod, and he didn’t seem like the person I knew at all.
Run, said the voice in my head. Get away from him.
But I was frozen where I stood. I couldn’t get my head around the idea that this man… my mentor, my adviser, my professor… was anything other than my trusted friend.
This was always my Waterloo, that I’d stand around trying to figure out the things that confused me-like that day on the playground after I pushed the boy who’d been bullying me off the jungle gym. The world was so impossibly complicated, so many factors at play in any circumstance-physics, psychology, chemistry. That boy and I hadn’t liked each other, that was the first thing. Bad blood. He’d teased me, so I pushed him. Cause and effect. He was too close to the edge to save himself with a step back, too heavy to stop his own backward momentum. Physics.
Such a delicate interplay of forces; and I had always been fascinated by how things wove together. I got lost in contemplating it. It always unsettled people, made me seem like a freak-just standing there and thinking like I did.
I saw Langdon bend down and pick something up.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. "What do you want?”
“I’m here for you,” he said. “Just like I’ve always been.”
He moved closer, reaching out a hand for mine. I let him take it and realized how little physical contact we’d had over the years. His palm was cool and soft.
“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me who you are,” he said. “To let me in.”
His nearness unsettled me; he didn’t even look like himself. There was a strange yearning gleam to his gaze. He kept moving toward me and I realized too late that he was leaning in to kiss me. I pulled back quickly, shrank from him, really. It might have seemed like disgust, but it wasn’t that. I don’t know what I was feeling, other than a desire to get away. Certainly, under other circumstances I’d have been more gentle with him. I watched that yearning turn to anger, dark and petulant.
“No,” I said. “I’m not like that. It’s not like that with us.”
It was a realization for me, too. I started backing away from him. Again, that voice in my head: Run. This time I nearly listened, but it was too late.
“I have to go,” I said. I still thought he might let me. “Okay?”
He didn’t answer, just drew his arm back. Then slowly but inexorably, his fist was flying in my direction. But I was already on the ground, my head filled with the twin sirens of fear and pain, when I realized that he had hit me.
I stared up at him, feeling small and helpless. He stood over me, a rock in his hand. I tried to ask him why he was doing this. It was crazy… and what did he want? But none of those words made it out into the world. His face, as blank as my own, was the last thing I saw before everything went from bright white, to fuzzy gray, to black.
28
When I came back to myself, I was lying on the cold, hard earth and night had fallen. The cloud cover must have hung thick and low, because I couldn’t see the stars, and the moon was just a silvery glow in the sky. I squeezed my eyes closed, assessing the pain in my head, the hard place where my hip connected with the earth, the bindings on my wrists and ankles. There was a rhythmic sound that echoed off the trees around me. It was a sound I recognized immediately. And for a second I thought I’d lost my mind or that I was stuck in some kind of nightmare loop in my life.
The night I helped to carry my mother’s body out to the place where my father buried her, I kept thinking I was dreaming. Several times I was sure of it. Because such things didn’t really happen, and my daydreams and nightmares were often much more vivid than my waking life. And, certainly, even with all I’d suffered, nothing had prepared me for a reality like this.
The truth was that I often knew my visions weren’t real. I knew there wasn’t an old woman in my room that told me my mother didn’t love me anymore. I said things like that to upset my mother when I was feeling jealous or insecure. And I had overheard my mother and grandmother talking about my child-murdering grandfather. That time I was trying to comfort my mother. Maybe if she thought my grandfather was sorry, she wouldn’t think he was so bad. And if she didn’t think he was so bad, maybe she wouldn’t be so worried about me. It all makes a sick, twisted child’s kind of sense, doesn’t it? My poor mom. I wonder if she’s at peace now. I hope she is.
The digging continued, and I listened to its echo in the night.
This is the right thing. I know you’ll see that someday, my father said. I sat weeping against the tree. Otherwise, what will happen to you? Stop crying. You’re too old to be crying like a girl.
Yet another gender inequality: Boys and men are not allowed to feel. They’re not allowed to accept and express their emotions in the same way that women are. It’s weakness. Only pansies and little faggots cry. Everyone always talks about how bad women have it, how systematically they have been abused, maligned, hated, and discriminated against throughout history. And, of course, it’s true. But no one ever talks about how that misogyny has had its backlash on men. When you hate women, you hate all the female elements of your own psychology. Jung believed that there were two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The animus is the unconscious male, and the anima is the unconscious female. Because a man’s anima, his more sensitive, feeling side, must so often be repressed, it forms the ultimate shadow self-a dark side that is hated and buried. Jung was a big believer in accepting the shadow, embracing it… or suffering the consequences in psychic pain.
I didn’t want to stop crying then. My father himself had been weeping just minutes earlier. The pain inside me was a living thing, a beast of fear and grief and horror. If I didn’t weep, I might have imploded.
But I didn’t cry this time. I lay very still, listening to the sound, wondering what the hell was happening to me and what I was going to do. No one knew where I was. I was not experiencing normal levels of terror for the situation I was in. Part of that had to do with the beta-blockers in the medication I was taking. They dulled the chemical fear response, hence my flat affect, which people were always so put off by. Tonight, I had a feeling my emotional flatness was going to work in my favor. Then the sound stopped and there was only silence.
I waited.
I have thought long and hard about those shoes I saw. I remember they were smallish and that I thought they might have been my mother’s. They were sensible, leather lace-ups-not like anything my mother would ever wear because she was all about style. She’d tell the girls at the group home that when we put on clothes, we’re telling ourselves something, and we’re communicating that something to every person we meet. If your clothes are dirty, or wrinkled, or ill-fitting, you’re telling people that you don’t care enough about yourself to put yourself together. It speaks volumes to teachers, to prospective employers, and to men. If you don’t care about yourself, why should they?
Those shoes belonged to someone who was practical, who cared little about form or style over function. But if they had been lying by the door when I came in, which I couldn’t swear to anymore, they were gone when my father and I left. I think. See? It’s hard. When you’re crazy to begin with, and deeply traumatized to boot, your so-called eyewitness testimony is next to useless. There were voices, too. I remembered hearing voices from my hiding place under the bed. But I couldn’t be sure of that either. Male or female, I didn’t know. And over the sound of my own frantic screaming, I certainly didn’t hear any words.