One day, Karen was at home in their apartment by herself. She was looking for a page she’d forgotten to bookmark on the browser of the computer in the second bedroom, which they used as a home office/exercise room when they didn’t have guests staying with them. The page she was looking for had the pattern for a sweater she was going to knit for David for his birthday and she couldn’t remember the name of the site where she had seen it. She was scrolling through the history file when she noticed an address that made her stop her search. The name in the URL was so strange and unexpected — www.pleasehitme.com — that she clicked on it before she thought about what she was doing. The screen winked and shifted and the site began to load, background first, then rows of images popping into view one after another.
What she saw upset her right away. The page was filled with pictures of men and women, naked or nearly so, displaying various kinds of injuries on their faces and their bodies: black eyes, split and swollen lips, torn skin. Some of their injuries had obviously been inflicted by other human beings — bruises the size and shape of fingers, parallel gouges left by fingernails — while others were just maps of unexplained damage. Some of the men and women wore handcuffs or were tied with rope. But the pictures she found herself looking at most intently showed just expanses of blued and purpled flesh, lacerations and incisions in the smooth sheet of the skin, in which the faces of the subjects were not even visible, only the pale or dark angles of their bodies with their hair and creases, the shapes of the flesh and the bone beneath and the saturated colors of the wounds.
Karen stared in disbelief. She was not naive about the existence of pornography online and she would not have been especially shocked to find a link to a site showing posed and naked women that her husband had been looking at. She would not have been pleased exactly but she would not have been surprised; in fact, she would not have cared about it very much at all. She might have closed the window feeling mild annoyance or disappointment; she might have forgotten it by the time David came home later that evening.
But this was different. This she would not be able to forget, not only because the images were appalling in and of themselves but because there was nothing that she knew about the man she lived with that could help her understand what she was seeing. In all the years she’d known him, David had never shown any propensity for physical violence toward himself or others; the most forceful thing he’d ever done in her presence was to slam a heavy book down on a table once when they were arguing; he’d certainly never raised his hand to her. He did not like grisly films, did not play video games involving gruesome violence or slaughter. He even found piercings and tattoos distasteful because of the association that they had with pain.
Karen sat at the computer with the mutilated bodies and ecstatic-looking faces illuminated in front of her and for several minutes she had no idea what to do. She could not unsee what she had seen. She stood up and walked around the apartment in a circle then decided to go out for a walk to try to clear her head. She shut off the computer and picked up her purse and took the elevator down to the street and walked in a daze in the direction of the park. She was so distracted that she didn’t look carefully where she was going and, crossing Amsterdam Avenue, she stepped off the curb and into the path of a taxi that was racing through a yellow light. The driver swerved trying to avoid her, but he did not change course fast enough and the left side of his fender collided with her legs.
She felt the initial impact of the car as something personal, malicious, a giant force that seemed to come out of the air and shove her whole body angrily up and forward. Then she felt the pain of impact as she hit the ground. Her consciousness seemed to splinter and after that she remembered only fragments of what happened, flashbulb instants: the paramedics cutting off her clothes, people shouting, the stretcher she was lying on being loaded into the ambulance, the siren starting up as they began to move. Later she learned that she had broken her jaw and one side of her collarbone when she hit the ground. In the ambulance she lost consciousness altogether.
When she woke up, David was there. He was sitting beside her bed, holding her hand. He saw she was awake and stood up so that she didn’t have to move her head to look into his face. He was staring at her with an expression of anxiety and tenderness more intense than any she had seen before, and for a moment she was flooded with simple relief at seeing him and gratitude that he was there. Then she remembered the events that had led up to her accident, and the bruised and bloodied faces from the screen came into her mind as vividly as though she had seen them only a moment before.
She looked up at her husband, his gentle, rapt expression and her stomach turned. Was he looking at her or at the damage she had suffered? She could picture how she looked right now: her face swollen up and lacerated where she had fallen on the pavement. She closed her eyes and tried to swallow but the muscles in her throat ached when she tried to move them and her mouth was as dry as paper. Her head was throbbing and her jaw ached and her whole body felt like one gigantic bruise. She closed her eyes wanting the world to go away.
“Sweetheart,” David was saying somewhere above her. “I’m so sorry.” But she knew he did not mean that he was sorry for anything he had done, only that he regretted what had happened. Then he bent to kiss her on the forehead. She saw his face lowering toward her, his eyes sorrowful and his lips pressed together and she tried to tell him not to touch her but found it hurt too much to speak. She made a noise in the back of her throat that sounded to her like the shapeless noise a drowning person might make.
“The doctors said you shouldn’t try to speak until your jaw has had time to heal some,” David said as he looked at her and bent again to kiss her. She shrank away from him to the far side of the narrow bed but she couldn’t move far enough away to avoid him. When he kissed her she felt his lips linger on her skin. She found that her left arm moved pretty well and she raised it even though it hurt and pushed him away. He looked bewildered and she knew he didn’t understand. When he tried to kiss her again, she managed to roll over so that she was facing away from him toward the wall.
“What?” she heard him say. “What’s wrong?” But of course she couldn’t tell him.
Through the weeks of her recovery, whenever he would try to touch her she would pull away. Even when she was well enough to speak and walk around, as her bruises began to heal and turned from red to purple to black to green and yellow, as her cuts began to heal, she still found that each time he came near her she would think of the pictures she had seen and wonder: does he find me more beautiful now than he did when I was well? She would shy away from him, upset and revolted by this possibility. David for his part responded to her coldness with solicitude and careful, gentle attentiveness, which might have been caused by simple pity for her condition but which seemed to Karen to show that in fact he actually cherished her more in her damaged state than he had before and made her avoid his touch more assiduously than ever. Each gesture he made to demonstrate his affection had the effect of putting more distance between them, more strangeness and silence until she could hardly stand his presence anywhere near her; she would flinch when he touched her, she could not look into his face without crying. She felt too upset and ashamed to tell him what she’d seen on the day before her accident. Too much time had passed, she thought, and she’d caused him too much anxiety by her behavior to tell him now what had occurred; it seemed both too small and too vast to have been the seed of their estrangement.