#clamped

When he raped her she thought of sand, her face in the sand, the particles flying down her nostrils into her lungs; she thought of the quarry with sand so thick it caked off like brick. She felt her lungs fill up and stiffen with sand. She felt her breath thicken, dense to sand. [...] Her tongue felt thick and she could not hear. She saw the dust under the couch, the velveteen fabric hanging towards the floor, a raised pattern gold and beige. She saw shoes ox-blood and shine, the door knob far away as if it were not a door but another wall in the room, a button on a wall. If she lifted her head she knew that it would fall off grain by grain and so she lifted it and it fell and crumbled. If she’s losing every part of herself then what part feels this, which limb and which sense; whose breath is she breathing with, whose eyes is she using now. Who is in her body making sand, grinding glass. Why does she get up leaving herself on the floor, walk to the sink, recognize her face, turn to it again on the floor, against the wall. She sees paint, yellow paint, the water and blood from her mouth, her mouth stretched from screaming with no sound. When she closes it again it feels wider. She walks out of the house and down the street sure that her sand is spilling spilling all along the way. She knows that in the house she’s just left the man has not moved. He is sitting on the velveteen sofa or perhaps looking at sand out his window. He does not fear her, he knows that she will not tell anyone. He knows that the fingers of her left hand will be numb for some time to come. They are swollen. Her eyes are bloody, almost closed. There is a bruise near her waist, under a rib. He knows she will not go to a hospital. He knows that she will not go to a police station. She knows that she cannot go back to the sewing factory. She won’t tell anyone. Not even Jocelyn. Perhaps she’ll move.

How did you sleep? I said, and was about to ask her about the physicist from Cleveland, whether she was deaf, as I suspected, but Moji looked out over the river, narrowing her eyes. Then she turned to me and said, in a low and even voice, emotional in its total lack of inflection, that there were things she wished to say to me. And then, with the same flat affect, she said that, in late 1989, when she was fifteen and I was a year younger, at a party her brother had hosted at their house in Ikoyi, I had forced myself on her. Afterward, she said, her eyes unwavering from the bright river below, in the weeks that followed, in the months and years that followed, I had acted like I knew nothing about it, had even forgotten her, to the point of not recognizing her when we met again, and had never tried to acknowledge what I had done. This torturous deception had continued until the present. But it hadn't been like that for her, she said, the luxury of denial had not been possible for her. Indeed, I had been ever-present in her life, like a stain or a scar, and she had thought of me, either fleetingly or in extended agonies, for almost every day of her adult life. Moji went on in this vein for what was probably six or seven minutes. She told me who else had been at the party that night, and she described her precise memory of what had happened: we had both been drinking beer, she was close to passing out, and I had taken her to another room and forced myself on her. For weeks afterward, she said, she had wanted to die. I had refused to look at her, she said, and her brother Dayo knew that these things had happened, not that they had discussed it, but it was inconceivable that, in the shadows and absences of the night, he would not have known, and she hated him, she said, for having done nothing to protect her. And now, here we were, all grown up, and she still carried this hurt, which seeing me again, and seeing that I had lost none of my callousness, she said, had renewed and had brought back to her a distress comparable in intensity to what she had suffered in those weeks, only this time, she said, she had tried, for reasons unclear even to her, to keep her pain hidden and put a happy face on the situation. She had tried to forgive, she said, and to forget, but neither had worked. Moji's voice, which had never increased in volume, had by now taken on a strained, shattered tone, as if she were getting hoarse. You'll say nothing, she said. I know you'll say nothing. I'm just another woman whose story of sexual abuse will not be believed. I know that. Look, bitterness has been eating away at me all this time, because this was so long ago, and it's my word against yours, and you'll say it was consensual, or that it never even happened at all. I have anticipated all your possible answers. This is why I've told no one, not even my boyfriend. But he sees through you anyway, you, the psychiatrist, the know-it-all. I know you think he's a buffoon. But he's a better man than you. He is wiser, he understands life better than you ever will. That is why, without me having to tell him anything, he knows what a malign influence you have been on my life. I don't think you've changed at all, Julius. Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them. You forced yourself on me eighteen years ago because you could get away with it, and I suppose you did get away with it. But not in my heart, you didn't. I have cursed you too many times to count. And maybe it is not something you would do today, but then again. I didn't think it was something you would do back then. It only needs to happen once. But will you say something now? Will you say something? Other people had woken up, and were beginning to move around inside the apartment. Moji stopped speaking, and kept her eyes focused on the shimmering Hudson. I thought she would begin to cry but, to my relief, she didn’t. Anyone who had come out onto the porch at that moment could not have imagined that we were doing anything other than enjoying the play of light on the river.