Lucky

SEVEN

The burden of being father and mother to a rape victim fell very heavily on my parents during the summer of 1981. The immediate question that loomed over them was what to do with me. Where should I go? How could I be least damaged? Was it even a consideration for me to return to Syracuse?

The option most discussed was Immaculata College.

It was too late in the game for me to enter any normal college, which had already accepted its students, both freshmen and transfers, for the following year. But my mother was sure Immaculata would take me. It was a girls' school and it was Catholic and she said a major advantage was that I could live at home. My mother or father could drive me the five miles down Route 30 each day and then pick me up when classes were over.

My parents' priorities were my safety and the chance not to miss a year of college. I did my best to listen to my mother. My father was so clearly disheartened by her plan that he could barely muster the requisite endorsement (but then, he had no other options). From the very beginning I saw Immaculata as one thing and one thing only. It was a prison. I would be attending it for one reason alone: because I had been raped.

It was also ludicrous. The idea of me, me, I said to my parents, attending a religious academy! I had picked theoretical arguments with the deacon of our church, cultivated any obscene narrative I could get my hands on, and imitated Father Breuninger's sermons to the delight of my family and even Father Breuninger himself. I think Immaculata and the threat of it inspired me, more than anything else, to come up with an airtight argument.

I wanted to return to Syracuse, I said, because the rapist had already taken so much from me. I was not going to let him take anything more. If I returned home and lived in my bedroom, I would never know what my life would have been like.

Also, I had been granted admission to a poetry workshop led by Tess Gallagher, and a fiction workshop led by Tobias Wolff. If I did not go back, I would be denied both of these opportunities. Both of my parents knew the one thing I cared about was words. No one of Gallagher's or Wolff's caliber would be teaching at Immaculata. There were no creative-writing workshops offered at the school.

So they let me go back. My mother still refers to it as one of the hardest things she ever had to do, much harder than any long drive she had to take over many bridges and through countless tunnels.

That's not to say I wasn't scared. I was. So were my parents. But we tried to work the odds. I would stay out of the park and my father would get on the phone and write letters to get me a single in Haven Hall, the only all-girls' dorm. I would have a private phone installed in my room. I would ask to be escorted by campus security guards if I had to walk after dark. I would not go to Marshall Street alone after 5:00 P.M. or hang out. I would stay out of the student bars. This didn't sound like the freedom college was supposed to promise, but then, I wasn't free. I had learned it, as my mother said I learned everything, the hard way.

Haven Hall had a reputation. Large and circular, set on a concrete base, it was an oddity among the other square or rectangular buildings that comprised the dorms on the hill. The dining hall, which had better food than many others, sat up off the ground.

But the weird architecture and the good food were not at the heart of Haven's campuswide rep. It was the residents. Rumor had it that only virgins and horse lovers (read: lesbians) lived in the single rooms of Haven Hall. Soon I knew the "tights and dykes" moniker to include a variety of female freaks. Haven was home to virgins, yes, and to lesbians, but it was also home to jocks on scholarship, rich kids, foreign girls, nerds, and minority girls. There were professionals-those students who traveled a lot and had things like a commercial contract with Chap Stick that necessitated flying to the Swiss Alps on the random weekend. There were children of minor celebrities and sluts on the mend. Transfer students and older students and girls that for a variety of reasons didn't fit in.

It was not a particularly friendly place. I don't remember who lived on one side of me. The girl on the other-an Israeli from Queens who was attending the S. I. Newhouse School of Communications and who practiced her radio voice incessantly-was not my friend. Mary Alice and the girls from freshman year, Tree, Diane, Nancy, and Linda, all lived in Kimmel Hall, sister to Marion Hall.

I moved into Haven, said good-bye to my parents, and stayed in my room. The next day, I traversed the road from Haven to Kimmel, my skin on fire. I was taking in everyone, looking for Him.

Because Kimmel was a sophomore dorm and many of the people from Marion had naturally ended up in Kimmel, I knew most of the girls and boys who lived there. They knew me too. It was as if, when they caught sight of me, they had seen a ghost. No one expected I would come back to campus. The fact that I did made me weirder still. Somehow my return licensed them to judge me-after all, by returning, hadn't I asked for this?

In the lobby of Kimmel I ran into two boys who had lived below me the year before. They stopped dead when they saw me but didn't speak. I looked down, stood in front of the elevator, and pressed the button. A few other boys came in the front door and greeted them. I didn't turn around, but when the elevator arrived I stepped in and turned to face the front. As the doors closed, I saw five boys standing there, staring at me. I could hear it without needing to stick around. "That's the girl that got raped the last day of school," one of the boys who knew me would say. What else they said, and what they wondered, I've kept myself from imagining. I was having enough trouble just walking paths and riding elevators.

But the second floor was a girls' hall, so I thought the worst was over. I was wrong. I got off the elevator and someone rushed to me, a girl I had barely known from freshman year.

"Oh, Alice," she said, her voice dripping. She took my hand without asking and held it. "You've come back."

"Yes," I said. I stood there and looked at her. I had a memory of borrowing her toothpaste once in the bathroom.

How can I describe her look? She was oozing, she was sorry for me and thrilled to be talking to me. She was holding the hand of the girl who had been raped on the last day of school freshman year.

"I didn't think you'd return," she said. I wanted my hand back.

The elevator had descended and risen again. A crowd of girls got off.

"Mary Beth," the girl standing with me said. "Mary Beth, over here."

Mary Beth, a plain, homely girl whom I didn't recognize, came over.

"This is Alice; she lived on the hall in Marion with me last year."

Mary Beth blinked.

Why didn't I move? Walk down the hall and get away? I don't know. I think I was too stunned. I was understanding a language I'd never keyed into before. "This is Alice" translated to "the girl I told you about, you know, the raped one." Mary Beth's blink told me that. If it hadn't, her next comment sure did.

"Wow," this homely girl said, "Sue's told me all about you."

Mary Alice interrupted this exchange, coming out of her room nearby and seeing me. Often, because of Mary Alice's beauty, people thought of her as a snob if she didn't go out of her way with them. But for me, in a moment like this, people's reactions to her were a plus. I was still in love with her and now my adulation included everything she was that I no longer was: fearless, faith filled, innocent.

She took me to her room, which she was sharing with Tree. All the girls of freshman year, save Nancy, were there. Tree tried with me, but we would never recover from that moment in the shower after the rape. I was uncomfortable. Then there was Diane. She was patterning herself so heavily after Mary Alice-imitating her language and trying to compete in coming up with dopey schemes-that I didn't trust her. She greeted me kindly if eagerly, and watched our mutual idol for her cues. Linda stayed by the window. I had liked Linda. She was muscular and tan and had close-cropped black curls. I liked to think of her as the jock version of me-an outsider who got along by having something that distinguished her in the group. She was a top-rung athlete; I was a weirdo, just funny enough to fit in.

Perhaps it was a kind of guilt at the memory of passing out that accounted for Linda's inability to meet my gaze for very long. I don't remember who it was that day, or how it got around to this, but someone asked me why I had even come back.

It was aggressive. The tone it was asked in implied that in having come back I had done something wrong-something not normal. Mary Alice caught the tone and didn't like it. She said something short and sweet, like "Because it's her fucking right," and we left the room. I counted my blessing in Mary Alice and didn't stop to count my losses. I was back in school. I had classes to attend.

Some first impressions are indelible, like mine of Tess Gallagher. I was registered for two of her classes: her workshop, and a sophomore-level survey course of literature. The survey course was at 8:30 A.M. two days a week, not a popular time slot.

She walked in and strode to the front of the room. I was sitting in the back. The first-day sizing-up ritual began. She was not a dinosaur. This was good. She had long brown hair held back by combs near her temples. This hinted at an underlying humanity. Most noticeable, though, were her highly arched eyebrows and Cupid's-bow lips.

I took this all in while she stood silent in front of us and waited for the stragglers to settle and for backpacks to be zipped or unzipped. I had pencils ready, a notebook out.

She sang.

She sang an Irish ballad a cappella. Her voice was at once lusty and timorous. She held notes bravely and we stared. She was happy and mournful.

She finished. We were stunned. I don't think anyone said anything, no dumb questions about whether they were in the right class. My heart, for the first time back in Syracuse, filled up. I was sitting in the presence of something special; that ballad confirmed my choice to return.

"Now," she said, looking at us keenly, "if I can sing a ballad a cappella at eight-thirty in the morning, you can come to class on time. If you think that's something you can't manage, then drop."

Yes! I said inside my head. Yes!

She told us about herself. About her own work as a poet, about her early marriage, her love of Ireland, her involvement in Vietnam War protests, her slow path toward becoming a poet. I was rapt.

The class ended with an assignment out of the Norton Anthology for the next class. She left the room as the students packed up.

"Shit," a boy in an L. L. Bean T-shirt said to his female companion in a AOX T-shirt, "I'm out of here, this lady's a fruitcake."

I gathered my books with Gallagher's reading list on top. Besides the required sophomore Norton, she recommended eleven books of poetry that were available at an off-campus bookshop. Elated by this poet, and having hours to pass before my first fiction workshop with Wolff, I bought tea in a place underneath the chapel and then crossed the quad. It was sunny out and I was thinking of Gallagher and imagining Wolff. I liked the name of one of the books she'd listed, In a White Light by Michael Burkard. I was thinking of that, and reading the Norton while I walked, when I ran into Al Tripodi.

I didn't know Al Tripodi. As was becoming more and more common, Al Tripodi knew me.

"You came back," he said. He took two steps forward and hugged me.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I don't know you."

"Oh, yeah," he said, "of course, I'm just so happy to see you."

He had startled me but he was happy, truly so. I could see it in his eyes. He was an older student, balding, and with a vibrant mustache that struggled for attention with his blue eyes. His face may have seemed older than he was. The lines and creases in it reminded me of those I later saw on men that thrilled in riding motorcycles cross-country with no helmets on.

It came out that he had something to do with campus security and was around the night I was raped. I felt awkward and exposed, but I liked him too.

It also made me mad. I couldn't get away from it. I began to wonder how many people knew, how far the news had spread and who had spread it. My rape had made the city paper but my name wasn't used-just "Syracuse coed." Yet I reasoned my age, and even the name of my dorm, could still make me one of fifty. Naively, perhaps, I hadn't known I would have to deal with this question every day: Who knew? Who didn't know?

But you can't control a story and mine was a good one. People, even naturally respectful ones, felt emboldened in the telling because the assumption was that I would never choose to return. The police had placed my case in the inactive file when I left town; my friends, save Mary Alice, had done the same. Magically I became story, not person, and story implies a kind of ownership by the storyteller.

I remember Al Tripodi because he saw me not merely as "the rape victim." It was something in his eyes-the way he placed no distance between the two of us. I developed a sensing mechanism, and it would register immediately. Does this person see me or rape? By the close of the year, I came to know the answer to that question, or so I thought. I got better at it, at least. Often, because it was too painful, I chose not to ask it. In these exchanges, where I shut off so I could order a coffee or ask another student for a pen, I learned to close a part of myself down. I never knew exactly how many people connected what had been in the paper or the rumors that had come out of Marion Dorm with me. I heard about myself sometimes. I was told my own story. "You lived in Marion?" they would ask. "Did you know that girl?" Sometimes I listened to see what they knew, how the game of Telephone had translated my life. Sometimes I looked right at them and said: "Yes, that girl was me."

In class, Tess Gallagher was keeping my pencil busy. I wrote down in my notebook that I should be writing "poems that mean." That to tackle the hardest things, to be ambitious, was what Gallagher expected of us. She was tough. We were to memorize and recite, because she had had to as a student, a poem a week. She made us read and understand forms, scan lines, had us write a villanelle and a sestina. By shaking us up, using a rigorous approach, she hoped to both encourage us to write poems that meant, and to dispel any belief that feigning despond was what created good poetry. It got so you knew, very quickly, what would get Gallagher riled. When Raphael, who had a pointed goatee and a waxed mustache, said he hadn't a poem to turn in because he was happy and he could only write when he was depressed, Gallagher's Cupid's-bow lips pursed, her preternaturally raised eyebrows raised farther, and she said, "Poetry is not an attitude. It is hard work."

I had not written anything about the rape except journal entries in the form of running letters to myself. I decided to write a poem.

It was awful. As I recall it now, it ran five pages and rape was only a muddled metaphor that I tried to contain inside a wordy albatross that purported to be about society and violence and the difference between television and reality. I knew it wasn't my best but I thought it showed me to be smart, to be able to write poems that meant but also had format (I divided it into four sections using Roman numerals!).

Gallagher was kind. I hadn't turned the poem in to be work-shopped, so we met in her office for a conference. Her office, like Tobias Wolff's across the hall, was small and crowded with books and reference materials, but whereas Wolff's looked like he hadn't quite settled in, Gallagher's seemed like she had been there for years. Her office was warm. She had tea in a mug on her desk. A colorful Chinese silk shawl was draped across the back of her chair, and that day her long, wavy hair was held back by sequined combs.

"Let's talk about this poem you've given me, Alice," she said.

And somehow I ended up telling her my story. And she listened. She was not bowled over, not shocked, not even scared of the burden this might make me as her student. She was not motherly or nurturing, though she was both those things in time. She was matter-of-fact, her head nodding in acknowledgment. She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.

"Have they caught this guy?" she asked after listening to me for some time.

"No."

"I have an idea, Alice," she said. "How about you start a poem with this line." And she wrote it down. If they caught you…

When I finished this poem I was shaking. I was in my room at Haven Hall. Despite its wobbles as a poem, its heavily Plath-influenced rhymes, or what Gallagher later called "overkill" in many places, it was the first time I'd addressed the rapist directly. I was speaking to him.

Gallagher loved it. "Now that's the ticket," she said to me. I had written an important poem, she told me, and she wanted it to be workshopped. This was a big step. This meant sitting in a room with fourteen strangers-one of them, as it happened, Al Tripodi-and basically telling them I had been raped. Buoyed by Gallagher, but still afraid, I agreed to do it. I worried over a title. Finally, I made up my mind: "Conviction."

I passed the poem out and then, as was standard practice, I read it aloud to my fellow students. I was, as I read it, hot. My skin blushed and I could feel the blood rush to my face, prickle along the tops of my ears and the ends of my fingers. I could feel the class around me. They were riveted. They were staring at me.

When I was done, Gallagher had me read it again. Before she did this, she told the class that she expected everyone to comment. I read it again, and this time it felt like torture, an instant replay of something that had been hard enough the first time. I still question why Gallagher was so insistent that I workshop "Conviction" and that each and every student-this was not standard-respond to it afterward. It was an important poem by her standards, in that it dealt with important material. Perhaps, by her actions, she meant to emphasize this not only to the class, but to me as well.

But the eyes of most of my peers had a hard time meeting mine.

"Who wants to start?" Gallagher asked. She was direct. By her example she was telling the class: This is what we do here.

Most of the students were shy. They buried their response in words like brave, or important, or bold. One or two were angry that they had to respond, felt the poem, combined with Gallagher's admonition that they react, was an act of aggression on her part and mine.

Al Tripodi said, "You don't really feel that way, do you?"

He was looking right at me. I thought of my father. Suddenly, there was no one else in the room.

"Like what?"

"You don't want to shoot him in the knees and that other stuff with the knives. You can't feel that way."

"Yes, I do," I said. "I want to kill him."

The room was still. Only Maria Flores, a quiet latino girl, had yet to speak. When Gallagher told her it was her turn, she passed. Gallagher pressed. Maria said she could not speak. Gallagher said she could formulate her thoughts during the break and then speak. "Everyone must comment," she said. "What Alice has given you is a gift. I think it's important that everyone recognize this and respond to her. You are joining her at the table by speaking."

We took a break. Al Tripodi quizzed me further out in the flagstone hall near the display case where faculty publications and awards sat on dusty glass shelves. I stared down at the dead bugs that had gotten stuck inside.

He could not understand how I could write those words.

"I hate him," I said.

"You're a beautiful girl."

Presented with this for the first time, I was unable to recognize something I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both for Al Tripodi?

I told him about a dream I had over and over again those days. A daydream. Somehow, I wasn't sure how, I could get at the rapist and do anything to him that I wanted. I would do those things in my poem, I told Tripodi, and I would do worse.

"What is there to gain by that?" he asked me.

"Revenge," I said. "You don't understand."

"I guess I don't. I feel sorry for you."

I scrutinized the dead bugs on their backs, how their legs went out and then shot back in at sharp angles, how their antennae fell in stilled fragile arcs like lost human eyelashes. Tripodi could not see it because I didn't move a muscle, but my body was a wall of flames. I would not take pity, anybody's.

Maria Flores did not come back to class. I was infuriated. They just couldn't deal, I thought, and this made me angry. I knew I was not beautiful and in Gallagher's presence, for three hours that day, I didn't have to care about being beautiful. She, by writing that first line down, by workshopping the piece, had given me my permission slip-I could hate.

Exactly one week later, Gallagher's If they caught you would turn out to be all too prescient. On October 5, I ran into my rapist on the street. By the end of that night, I could stop calling him "the rapist," and start calling him Gregory Madison.

I had workshop that day with Tobias Wolff.

Wolff, whom I met the same day I did Gallagher, was a harder sell. He was a man, and at the time men had to surprise me before I even so much as thought about trusting them. He was not a performer. He made it clear that his personality was not the issue-fiction was. So I, who had decided to be a poet and had lucked into this fiction thing, took a wait-and-see attitude. I was the only sophomore in Wolff's class and the only one to wear weird clothes. The fiction writers wore a lot of starch and denim, shirts emblazoned with sports teams or upright plaids. Poets flowed. They did not, most certainly, wear shirts emblazoned with the logos of sports teams. I saw myself as a poet. Tobias Wolff, with his military posture and never indirect analysis of a story, was not my bag.

Before class I needed to get something to eat. I walked down to Marshall Street from Haven. I had been in Syracuse for a month and begun to make quick trips to Marshall Street, as everyone did, for snacks and school supplies. There was a mom-and-pop store that I liked. It was run by a Palestinian man in his sixties, who often told stories and who had an emphasis, when he said "Good day," that told me he meant it.

I was walking down the street when I saw, up ahead, a black man talking to a shady-looking white guy. The white guy stood in an alleyway and talked over the top of the fence. He had long brown hair, to his shoulders, and a few days' growth of beard. He wore a white T-shirt whose sleeves were rolled up to accentuate the small bellies of his biceps. The black guy I could see only from the back, but I was hyperaware. I went through my checklist: right height, right build, something in his posture, talking to a shady guy. Cross the street!

I did. I crossed the street and walked the rest of the way to the mom-and-pop store. I did not look back. I crossed the street again to walk directly into the store. Time slowed down here. I remember things in the way one rarely does. I knew I had to go back outside and I tried to calm myself. Inside the store I chose a peach yogurt and a Teem soda-two items, if you knew me, that testified to my faltering composure. When the Palestinian man rang them up, he was brusque and hurried. There was no "Good day."

I left the store, crossed directly back to the safety of the other side of the street, and shot a quick glance over to the alleyway. Both men were gone. I also noticed a policeman to my right, on my side of the street. He was getting out of his patrol car. He was very tall, over six feet, and had bright, carrot-orange hair and a mustache. He seemed in no hurry. I assessed my surroundings and decided I was okay. It had been just a more intense version of the fear I had felt around certain black men ever since the rape. I checked my watch and quickened my step. I did not want to be late for Wolff's workshop.

Then, as if out of nowhere, I saw my rapist crossing toward me. He walked diagonally across the street from the other side. I did not stop walking. Or scream.

He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street.

I knew him but I could not make myself speak. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again.

"Hey, girl," he said. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" He smirked at me, remembering.

I did not respond. I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel. Knew I had kissed those lips, stared into those eyes, smelled the crushed-berry smell on his skin.

I was too afraid to yell out. There was a cop behind me but I could not scream: "That's the man who raped me!" That happens in movies. I put one foot in front of the other. I heard him laughing behind me. But I was still walking.

He had no fear. It had been nearly six months since we'd seen each other last. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. My devastation was a pleasure for him. He was walking the streets, scot-free.

I turned the corner at the end of the block. Over my shoulder I saw him walking up to the redheaded policeman. He was shooting the breeze, so sure of his safety that he felt comfortable enough, right after seeing me, to tease a cop.

I never question why I went to tell Wolff I couldn't attend his class. It was my duty. I was his student. I was the only sophomore in the class.

I walked to the Hall of Languages at the top of the hill and checked my watch. I had time before Wolff's class to make two phone calls from the phone booth on the bottom floor. I called Ken Childs, told him what had happened, asked him to meet me at the library nearby in half an hour. I wanted to make a sketch of the rapist and Ken was in art school. Then, as soon as I hung up the phone, I called my parents collect.

They both got on the phone.

"Mom and Dad," I said, "I'm calling from the Hall of Languages."

My mother was attuned now to any waver in my voice.

"What is it, Alice?" she asked.

"I just saw him, Mom," I said.

"Saw who?" my father asked, as always two beats back.

"The rapist."

I don't remember their reaction. I couldn't. I was calling because I needed them to know, but, once I told them, I did not wait, I rushed at them with facts. "I'm going to tell Professor Wolff I can't come to class. I've called Ken Childs, he's meeting me to walk me home. I want to make a sketch."

"Call us when you get there," my mother said. I remember that. "Have you called the police?" my father asked.

I did not hesitate. "Not yet," I said, which meant to all of us that it was not a yes-or-no question. I would call them. I would pursue this.

I went up the stairs to where my workshop was held, and ran into Wolff as he was about to enter the English office.

The other students were filtering inside. I approached him. "Professor Wolff," I said, "can I talk to you?"

"It's class time, we'll talk after."

"I can't make it to class, that's what it's about."

I knew he would not be happy. I did not know how not happy he would be. He proceeded to tell me how lucky I was to be in the class, and that missing this one class was equivalent to missing three classes of a regular undergraduate course. All this I knew. All this had been why I walked blindly up to Humanities Hall instead of returning directly to my dorm.

I begged Wolff to give me just two minutes of his time. To talk to me in his office, not the hall. "Please," I said. Something in the way I said it called to that place inside him beyond the formal rules of the classroom, which I knew he valued. "Please," I said, and he responded-still it was a concession-with, "It will have to be brief."

I followed him down the short hall, turned the corner after him, and stood there while he unlocked the door. Looking back, I can't believe how calm I remained from the moment I saw my rapist on the street to that moment, inside Wolff's office, with the door closed. Now I was with a man I knew would not hurt me. For the first time, I thought it was safe to exhale. He sat facing me while I hovered over and then sat in the student chair.

I burst.

"I can't come to class. I just saw the man who raped me. I have to call the police."

I remember his face and I remember it vividly. He was a father. I knew this vaguely at the time. He had little boys. He came near me. He wanted to comfort, but then, instinctually, he pulled back. I was a rape victim; how would I interpret his touch? His face fell into the recesses reserved for the pure confusion one expresses when there is nothing on this earth that he or she can do to make something better.

He asked if he could make a call, if I had a way home, what, if anything, he could do. I told him I had called a friend who would meet me at the library and walk me home, where I would phone the police.

Wolff walked me back out into the hall. Before he let me go-my mind already working on putting one foot in front of the other, thinking of the phone call to the police, repeating over and over again in my head maroon windbreaker, blue jeans rolled at cuffs, Converse All-Star sneakers-Wolff stopped me and put both hands on my shoulders.

He looked at me and when it was clear to him that for that second he held my attention, he spoke.

"Alice," he said, "a lot of things are going to happen and this may not make much sense to you right now, but listen. Try, if you can, to remember everything."

I have to restrain myself from capitalizing the last two words. He meant them to be capitalized. He meant them to resound and to meet me sometime in the future on whatever path I chose. He had known me for two weeks. I was nineteen. I sat in his class and drew flowers on my jeans. I had written a story about sewing dummies that came to life and sought revenge on dressmakers.

So it was a shout across a great distance. He knew, as I was later to discover when I walked into Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York and bought This Boy's Life, Wolff's own story, that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.

The walk to the library, only two hundred yards across the front of the quad and on the other side of the street fronting the Hall of Languages, was a walk I made on automatic. I became a machine. I think it must be the way men patrol during wartime, completely attuned to movement or threat. The quad is not the quad but a battlefield where the enemy is alive and hiding. He waits to attack the moment you let your guard down. The answer-never let it down, not even for a second.

With every nerve ending pushing out against the edges of my skin, I reached Bird Library. Although I was still wary, I allowed myself to exhale here. I walked through the fluorescent light. It being still early in the semester, the library was not busy. The few people I passed, I did not look at. I didn't want to meet anyone's eyes.

I could not wait for Ken; I was too afraid to stop. I kept walking. Bird was constructed so that by walking through the building, I could exit on the other side of the block, no man's land. It was a street populated by old wood frame houses, many of them used by fraternities and sororities, but it was no longer the sanctified quad. The streetlights were fewer here and in the time it had taken me to walk from Marshall Street to tell Wolff I couldn't come to class, it had grown dark. I had only one goal: to get back to my dorm without injury and to write down everything he'd worn, to detail the features of his face.

I got there. I don't remember seeing anyone. If I did, I brushed by them without comment. Inside my small single, I called the police. I explained my situation. I had been raped in May, I said, I was now back on campus and had seen my assailant. Would they come?

Then I sat down on my bed and made a sketch. I had written out details. I started with his hair, went next to height, build, nose, eyes, mouth. Then there were comments on his face structure: "Short neck. Small but dense head. Boxy jawline. Hair slightly down in front." And his skin: "Pretty dark but not black black." At the bottom of the sheet, in the left-hand corner, I did a sketch of him and beside this noted his clothing: "Maroon jacket-windbreaker-style but with down. Jeans-blue. White sneakers."

Then Ken showed up. He was out of breath and nervous. He was a small, fragile man-the year before, I had romantically compared him to a pint-size David. So far, he had not shown much ability to handle my situation. Over the summer he had written once. He explained, and at the time I accepted it, that he had reinvented what had happened to me so it wouldn't hurt him as much. "I have decided it is like a broken leg and like a broken leg, it will heal."

Ken tried to improve on my sketch, but he was too nervous-his hands shook. He sat on my bed and looked very small to me, frightened. I decided he was a warm body who knew me, who meant well. That had to be enough. He made several attempts to draw the head of the rapist.

There were sounds in the hall. Walkie-talkies tuned to a self-important pitch, the sound of heavy footsteps. Fists thumped against the door and I answered them as girls came out into the hall.

Syracuse University Security. They had been alerted by the police. They were amped. This was the real shit. Two of them were quite wide and, in my tiny studio, their size was accentuated.

Within seconds, the Syracuse City Police arrived. Three of them. Someone shut the door. I relayed my story again and there was a slight squabble about jurisdiction. The SU Security seemed personally disappointed that since the original incident had happened in Thorden Park and the sighting was on Marshall Street, it was clearly a City of Syracuse matter and not a campus one. On a professional level, this reflected well on them, but they were not as much university representatives that night as they were hunters with a fresh scent.

The police looked at my sketches and Ken's. They repeatedly referred to Ken as my boyfriend, though I corrected them each time. They eyed him suspiciously. In his slight physique and nervousness, he stood out as a freak in a room populated by large men armed with guns and billy clubs.

"How long ago did you see the suspect?"

I told them.

They decided there was still some chance, since I hadn't acknowledged him, that the rapist would be loitering in the area of Marshall Street. It was worth a ride in a squad car.

Two of the city police took my sketch, leaving Ken's behind.

"We'll make copies of this and send out an APB. Every man in the city will keep this in his car until we find him," one said.

As we readied to leave, Ken asked, "Do you need me to come?"

The looks from the police must have burned into him. He came.

With six men in uniform escorting us, we left the building. Ken and I got in the back of a squad car with one officer in the front. I don't remember this man's name, but I remember his anger.

"We're gonna get this puke," he said. "Rape is one of the worst crimes. He'll pay."

He started the engine and turned on the red and blue flashing lights of his squad car. We roared down to Marshall Street, only a few blocks away.

"Look carefully," the officer said. He maneuvered his squad car with a manhandling agility I would later recognize in New York cabbies.

Ken was slumping down in the seat beside me. He said the flashing lights hurt his head. He shielded his eyes. I looked out. While we drove up and around Marshall Street a few times, the officer told me about his seventeen-year-old niece, just an innocent girl. She had been gang-raped. "Ruined," he said. "Ruined." He had his billy club out. He started smacking the empty seat with it. Ken winced each time it hit the vinyl. Having thought this mission was probably futile from the start, I began to be afraid of what this policeman might do.

I saw no rapist. I said this. I suggested leaving, looking at mug shots down at the station. But this officer wanted release and he was going to get it. He braked hard on the final pass down Marshall Street.

"There, there," he said. "What about those three?"

I looked and knew immediately. Three black students. You could tell by the way they were dressed. They were also tall, too tall to be my rapist.

"No," I said. "Let's just go."

"They're troublemakers," he said. "You stay here."

He got out of the squad car in a hurry and chased after them. He had his billy club in his hand.

Ken began to suffer some version of the panic I was familiar with from my mother. His breathing was labored. He wanted to get out.

"What's he going to do?" he said. He tried the door. It had been locked automatically. This was where criminals as well as victims rode.

"I don't know. Those guys aren't even close."

The lights were still flashing overhead. People began to come up to the car to stare in. I was mad at this policeman for leaving us there. I was mad at Ken for being a wimp. I knew no good would come of an angry man, speeding on adrenaline, looking for revenge for his raped niece. I was in the center of it all and simultaneously I realized I didn't exist. I was just a catalyst that made people nervous, guilty, or furious. I was frightened, but more than anything, I was disgusted. I wanted the policeman to come back and I sat in the car with Ken whimpering beside me, put my head between my knees so the people on the outside of the car looking in would be met with "the back of the victim," and I listened for the sounds I knew were taking place in the alley. Someone was being beaten, I knew that as surely as I knew anything. It was not Him.

The officer returned. He swooped into the driver's side and laid his billy club firmly against the palm of his hand.

"That'll teach 'em," he said. He was sweating, exhilarated.

"What did they do?" Ken ventured. He was horrified.

"Open container. Never talk back to an officer."

I did not overlook what happened on Marshall Street that night. Everything was wrong. It was wrong that I couldn't walk through a park at night. It was wrong that I was raped. It was wrong that my rapist assumed he was untouchable or that as a Syracuse coed I was most certainly treated better by the police. It was wrong that the niece of that officer was raped. It was wrong of him to call her ruined. It was wrong to put the lights on and strut that car down Marshall. It was wrong to hassle, and perhaps physically hurt, three innocent young black men on the street.

There is no but, there is only this: That officer lived on my planet. I fit into his world in the way I never again would fit into Ken's. I can't remember whether Ken asked to be dropped at home or whether he came with me to the station. Whatever the case, I shut him off after the search on Marshall Street.

We reached the Public Safety Building. It was now after eight. I had not been back to the station since the night of the attack, but that night, the police station felt safe to me. I loved the way the elevators let out onto a waiting area at the end of which was a huge door that locked, automatically, behind us. Through the bulletproof glass you could see out into the lobby but no one could get at you.

The officer led me in and I heard the smooth, hydraulic hush and firm click of the door behind us. To our left was the dispatcher sitting at the command center. There were three or four uniformed men standing nearby. Some held coffee mugs. When we entered, they quieted down and stared at the ground. There were only two kinds of civilians: victims and criminals.

My officer explained to the man at the, front desk that I was the rape case out of the East Zone. I was there to look at mug shots.

He set me up in a small file room across from the dispatcher. He left the door open and began to pull large black binders off the surrounding shelves. There were at least five such binders and each was filled with small, wallet-size mug shots. These five books were of black males only, and only those near the age that I thought my rapist would be.

The room seemed more a storage area for these books than a place for victims to sit and pore over the photos. The only surface was an old metal typing table, and I had difficulty balancing the books in my lap and on the rickety table, whose flyleaf kept collapsing under the weight. But I was a good student, when I needed to be, and I studied those books page by page. I saw six photos that reminded me of my rapist, but I was beginning to believe the process of mug shots would turn out to be fruitless.

One of the officers brought me some weak but still-hot coffee. It was an island of comfort in an otherwise alien environment.

"How you doing? See anything?" he asked.

"No," I said, "they all just blur together. I don't think he's here."

"Keep trying. He's fresh in your mind."

I was coming to the end of Book 4 when the call came in.

"POP Clapper just called in," the dispatcher called over to my officer. "He knows your man."

The officer left me in the room and went out to the front desk. The uniforms who'd been waiting for assignment surrounded him. I listened to the Abbott and Costello-like routine that followed.

"Says it's Madison," the dispatcher said.

"Which Madison?" asked my officer. "Mark?"

"No," said another, "he's up on a charge already."

"Frank?"

"No, Hanfy tagged him last week. It must be Greg."

"I thought he was already in."

And so it went. I remember one of the men said something about pitying Old Man Madison-how it was hard raising sons alone.

Then my officer returned. "I've got some questions to ask you," he said. "Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"Describe again that policeman you saw."

I did.

"And where did you see his car?"

I said he'd parked in the Huntington Hall lot.

"Bingo," he said. "It looks like we may have our man."

He left again and I closed the mug book lying open on the typing table. All of a sudden, I didn't know what to do with my hands. They were shaking. I placed them under my legs and sat on them. I started to cry.

A few minutes later I heard the dispatcher say, "Here he is!" and those inside the locked door cheered.

I stood up and frantically searched the room for a place to hide. I chose the corner that shared the wall with the door. My face was pressed up against the metal shelving that held the mug books for years past.

"Great work, Clapper!" someone said, and the air rushed out of me. Could it just be the officer, without my rapist in tow?

"We'll get a statement from the victim and then make out the warrant for an arrest," someone said.

Yes, I was safe. But I still didn't know what to do. I wasn't able to join them. I was a victim, not really a person. I sat back down in the typing chair.

The men outside were happy. Slapping backs and teasing Officer Clapper for his red hair. He was a "beanpole," a "carrottop," and "young stuff."

He ducked his head in the room.

"Hi, Alice," he said. "Remember me?"

I smiled ear to ear. "Yes, I do."

The men outside roared.

"Remember you? How could she forget you? You're the next best thing to Santy Claus!"

Things settled down. A call came in. Two of the men left to respond. Officer Clapper had to go write up a report. My officer brought me back into the room where I had met Sergeant Lorenz three days short of exactly six months before. He took my affidavit, quoting heavily from the detailed description I had written down.

"Are you ready for this?" the officer asked me at the end of the affidavit. "We'll arrest. You have to be willing to testify."

"I am," I said.

I was driven back to Haven Hall in an unmarked car. I called my parents and told them I was fine. The officer filed his final report on case F-362 before it was transferred back to Sergeant Lorenz.

Rape 1st

Sodomy 1st

Robbery 1st

While I was still in the CID Office with the victim the Gen Mess. was broadcast and immediately upon the broadcast there was a response from Car #561 P.O.P. Clapper, who stated that he had spoken to a person who fit the rape suspect's description at approx 1827 hrs on Marshall St. He informed me that the person whom he had spoken to was one Gregory Madison. Madison has a record and has done time in prison. A photo line-up was to be conducted in CID Office by P.O.P. Clapper but there was no negative. It is almost certain that the suspect in question is Gregory Madison. An affidavit was taken from the victim and P.O.P. Clapper. Arrest is imminent.

Description broadcast to both 3rd and 1st shift coming on. If located observe and ask for assistance. Suspect considered armed and dangerous.

That night I had a dream. Al Tripodi was in it. In a prison cell, he and two other men held my rapist down. I began to perform acts of revenge on the rapist but to no avail. He wrested loose from Tripodi's grasp and came at me. I saw his eyes as I had seen them in the tunnel. Close up.

I woke screaming and held myself upright in my damp sheets. I looked at the phone. It was 3:00 A.M. I couldn't call my mother. I tried to sleep again. I had found him. Again, it would be just the two of us. I thought of the last lines in the poem I had turned in to Gallagher.

Come die and lie, beside me.

I had issued an invitation. In my mind, the rapist had murdered me on the day of the rape. Now I was going to murder him back. Make my hate large and whole.