I couldn’t feel anything but my heart pounding through my narrowed eyes.  My body was numb, filled with God knows how much booze.  The small white chair I was perched in acted like a nest as my gaze slowly moved from under the slits formed by my eyelids.  As my teeth grinded behind my lips, I could vaguely hear someone speak.  It was hard to focus my gaze, but when it did, I saw a man sitting on the couch next to me, speaking in a serious voice.  He leaned over abruptly and began writing on the back of an envelope he pulled from the pile of unopened mail on the coffee table.

            “Who did this to you, can you remember?”  The words blasted from the haze of jumble and my slouched shoulders bolted upright and square.  Surprised, my eyes widened and I focused on the man’s face.  What was he talking about?  I saw through his head to the window behind him as I thought.  It was night.  Very late.  It was pitch black outside.

            “Not really,” I answered after a brief moment.  I still gazed through the man’s head as I spoke.  “I remember his nickname, though.  That’s the only name he ever used.”

            “What was it?”

            I swallowed and shifted my weight.  I looked at the man again.  He looked severe.  He looked like hell, and appeared even more drunk than I was.  His pale blue eyes were set widely against a large nose and olive skin.  An unusual combination, I thought fleetingly.  “Bama.”

            “What?”

            “Bama.  As in ‘Alabama.’  He was southern.”

            “Gotcha.  Tell me everything you remember.”

            “I’ll try…” I said slowly.  I looked down at myself and stifled a gasp.  I was wearing a thin black tank top, no bra, and black lace panties.  That was it.  Trying not to show my shock, my eyes darted around the room.  There was my front door, my entertainment center, my family in the pictures on the walls.   Why was this juxtaposition so shocking?  “I met him at a bar in northeast Minneapolis, near Lowry,” I began.  My eyes burned.  “He bought me a bunch of beers and some tequila.  I hadn’t planned on drinking that much, but he seemed nice and into me, so I kept accepting them.  The last thing I remember I was in his car.  The whole world was spinning and I kept slipping in and out of consciousness.  I think he…”

            “He spiked your drink.”  The man with the pale blue eyes looked over at me.  I could see the pity, but that was in the far background compared to the rage I saw growing there.

            “Exactly,” I agreed, tasting the whiskey on my tongue.  “I remember he had a pickup truck.  I think it was red.  I was at a house near where I grew up.  I remember him having sex with me.  I felt paralyzed, like I couldn’t move.  I remember opening my eyes, and seeing him above me.  Thrusting… you know.  My pants were off and I was on my back, my butt and legs hanging over the edge of the bed.”  A lump grew in my throat.  Why was I telling this guy such a terrible story?  I hadn’t told anyone about this, not even my closest friend.  My heart felt like it was going to explode, but I kept talking.  “The next time I opened my eyes, I was asleep on the bathroom floor.  I was terrified, completely terrified.”  My hand raised to my face.  I wiped the tears that were now streaming.  I looked down at my hand, and my fingers were all smeared black.  “I tiptoed to the next room and found him sleeping on the bed.  I grabbed my clothes and my phone and ran out the front door.  I called a cab to bring me back to the bar, where my car was parked.”

            I took in a deep breath and held it.  Expectingly, I looked at the man.  He looked close to exploding himself.  His jaw was clenched and visibly pulsing, his cheeks were flushed.  The envelope on the coffee table was now scribbled with notes.  He licked his lips and sat back, deep in thought.  As he took a swig from his can of Coors, he looked over at me.  “This guy needs to be hunted down and shown that raping women is not okay.”

            “Yes,” I agreed.  I shivered as a damp night breeze came in the window.

            “I’m not kidding.”

            I nodded. 

            “I know a guy who can take care of it. He’s done it before and has never been caught.”

            I knew he was talking about something violent, but the extent of it, I had no idea.  The world spun and a big part of me thought it was just a game, just a game of words he used to passively tell me he cared about me.  I pressed my lips together and nodded again.  The world slid around in my eyes.

            “I’m gonna call him.  Right now.”  He set down the beer and picked up his phone.  I saw a vein in his temple bulge and his lips moving, but now the game cut out.

            A bright light teased my eyes open.  I lifted my head; my neck was stiff and hurt to move.  My limbs were sprawled over the arms of the white chair in my living room.  As my eyes acclimated to the light of morning, I moaned.  I felt like I had died, and my house looked like a tornado had gone through it.  Dishes, clothes, and empty beer cans were scattered everywhere.  Why did I let this happen all the time?  The thought reverberated through my brain and caused a wave of nausea to wash over me. 

            An overwhelming urge to cover my body hit me.  I stood, but was soon floored by dizziness.  Double vision bounced my eyes around until I found what I thought were my jeans across the room.  Without shame, I crawled in that direction, but the sickness got to me first.  Desperate strength propelled me up the stairs and soon I was on my knees in the bathroom, my arms draped over the toilet rim.

            I was alone.  Again, my brain begged the question, what had happened?  A small voice that rarely got a say in my life peeped up, Don’t let it happen again.  I said that each and every time, and each time here is where I found myself. 

            That fatalistic hopelessness took a hold of me as I wreched in the toilet again.  Just like a smoker who knew the dangers of the habit, I knew that associating myself with that man, the one with the pale blue eyes and olive skin, the one who used his charm as manipulation, was bad for my health and against my best interests.  But I did it anyway.  Not even me, or God himself, could explain that one rationally.

            Legs wobbling, I stood up again slowly and flushed the toilet.  I closed my eyes, getting my bairings about me.  As the lids lifted slowly, I decided I could keep my feet on the ground this time and walked down the short hallway, to the flight of stairs that led back down to the living room.  Now the question remained: was I ready to face that horrendous mess?  The all too real reminder of my sins?

            The sun that came in through the blinds cast a hazy yellow hue to the room, with contrasting black and brazen yellow rectangles across the entire first floor.  They draped over everything without discrimination.  The area closest to the window was the couch; the trek back down the stairs had made the dizziness come back, so I decided to plop down on the couch and wait it out.  But as I did so, something caught my eye.

            The stack of mail I kept there was scattered all over the table and the nearby floor.  An envelope on top was torn and one hand written word jumped out at me and sobered me up fast: Bama.

            “What…” I said out loud, my voice low and husky from smoking a pack of Marlboros the night before.  The stale cigarette taste with a hint of booze made my stomach flip again.  “How…?”

            Then it hit me.  I told someone.  I told Brian.  But why?  Why on earth did I tell him something so… so personal?  So shameful, so embarrassing, so… torturously forgettable? 

            My eyes fluttered as I remember a snippet of a fight Brian and I had gotten in before we broke out the beers and started partying the night before.

            “You gave it to me,” he had said, furious.

            “I did no such thing, I’m clean!  I was just checked a couple months ago,” I recalled answering, tears welling up in my eyes.

            “You’re the only one I’ve had sex with in the past few months,” he continued.  “The girl before you was a virgin.”

            “I swear to God I’m clean,” I said, my voice raising.

            “How did I get herpes then?!” He had screamed that last one, his hand balled up around a lamp, the tense shaking threatening to throw it.

            “I… I don’t know.”  Tears ran down my face when I added, “But there was this one time a few months ago… I think I was drugged…”

            I snapped out of the daydream then, not wanting to recall any more.  It made sense, but why had Brian wanted to know the whole story?  Why had he wanted the guy’s name, where he might live… Why did he say he was going to call someone?

            “Who would he have called?” I whispered to myself, turning the envelope over and over in my hands.  “The only person that would make sense is…”

            Oh, no.  No, no, no.  Not Mike.  Had he called him?  Like, last night, had he picked up the phone and called Mike?  Did I dare call Brian and talk to him about it?  To confirm the call was placed?  That horrible Mike had been brought into it?

            Nope.  No, it had all been exasserbated by the drinking.  The entire story, blown out of proportion.  I was remembering it wrong.  That was all.  I ripped up the envelope into tiny shreds, marched back upstairs, opened the toilet, and sprinkled them in.  As I pressed the handle down, I watched the pieces swirl around in the water and down into oblivion.  They reminded me of pieces of ripped bread my mom and I would throw into the lake for the ducks to eat when I was a child.  Water logged, turning a filthy transparent tan, torn apart and lost in the muck.  Soon they were gone, and so was any evidence.

            But the fact remained.  I may unknowingly (yet knowingly) be apart of something potentially terrible.  To clear my mind, I decided to go take a look around the Lowry neighborhood for myself, once my massive handover was gone.  I blinked.  “Probably tomorrow,” I said in a definitive whisper.

I slumped to the ground and buried my head in my hands.  “Why do I let this happen?” I whimpered.

            The houses were World War II era, wide and tall, like petrified teethy grins growing out of the ground.  Intricate shutters in a wide array of colors, roofs like double breasted suits, each one similar but so different the city looked like a vintage set of Candy Land.  Ancient trees grew taller than eyes could see along the boulevards, casting a greenish shadow along the side streets.  The air smelt perpetually humid and even when the sky was overcast, a brightness seemed to reach the buildings, springing the colors to life.

            I drove down one such side street in Minneapolis.  It was early afternoon on a Monday, so most cars had driven off to downtown or one suburb or another for work.  I felt like I was the only set of wheels spinning for miles, and that was fine with me.  For the mission I was on, I wanted to be alone.  Although my mind fought against it, I tried to remember the night I was drugged.  What way had the perpetrator, the so-called Bama, driven when he took me from the bar?  I decided to start at the bar and retraced the path as best I could from there.  He had gone west, that much I knew for sure, but on what road?  I picked a regularly traveled thoroughfaire that most people used now that the Lowry bridge had been closed and subsequently demolished: 42nd Avenue.  Heading west, I felt my throat tightening and my stomach heaving, but I pressed onward.  I needed to make peace with this now or I never would.

            Soon, an old cemetery materialized on my left.  The tall, black, iron fence stood out against the natural beauty of the neighborhood starkly, death personified.  Within the fence stood monuments of citizens past; towering obelisques and mosoleums plucked right out of the ancient near east.  It was past here, I thought to myself, tearing my eyes away from the cemetery and back to the road.  Keep going.

            I recalled distinctly, for some odd reason, crossing a wide road with a huge swath of grass in the middle.  Like a grand parkway, of which Minneapolis has many.  I approached one such parkway, and I knew I was headed in the right direction.  As I pressed on my break to stop at Victory Memorial Parkway, I looked around.  I could just imagine the red pickup sitting here, at this very intersection, that dark night at 2am, the only car on the road, a southern man in a baseball cap in the driver’s seat, a barely conscious woman with her head bobbing around in a fog slumped in the passenger’s seat.  “He crossed this parkway,” I whispered to myself as the light turned green, so I kept to my westardly course.

            The green street signs swept by as I drove but I found myself putting on my left blinker quickly; one sign jumped out at me.  It read Zenith Avenue.  This was the street he turned on, so I traced the turn and went south on Zenith.  Two houses from the corner I pulled over to the curb and stopped.  I wasn’t certain, but I thought I’d found it.  Blue house, dark blue trim, tan door.  The porch light was on, which illuminated the black iron gargoyle door knocker.  Its clawed feel grasped the iron ring, its forked tongue sticking out menacingly.  My own voice then echoed in my head.  Wow, what a fucked up knocker, it slurred, laughing.  I want one for my house!  I shivered.  That was the first time I had heard my own voice from that night.  What a random thing to remember; funny how the strangest things could be helpful in retrospect.

            I got out of my car and slowly approached the house, making my way through the green shadows.  I felt like a little girl making her way towards her first day of kindergarten.  No excitement, no happiness, just dread and fear.  The writhing in my stomach was becoming upbareable.  Just walk up to the door to say you did it.  Just to make sure nothing bad has happened.  I sucked in a deep breath.  It’ll put your mind at ease, just you wait.  Uncharacteristcally of me, I giggled.  How I thought seeing the house I was assaulted in might put my mind at ease, I had no idea.  At least it could close a chapter of my life I wish I had never even thought about, much less written and published.  It was the biggest mistake of my life the night I went to meet the stranger at that bar.  I was too trusting, I was too optimistic, I was too naïve.  I thought I could take the man for his word.  I thought sexual assault and rape would never happen to me.  Boy, was I wrong. 

            And now you may have made another drunken mistake trusting Brian with your darkest secret, you know how morbid and violent he can be… “Shut up,” I instructed myself as my foot landed on the opposite curb.  The house loomed, almost as if it breathed, as if the walls were whispering about what they witnessed that night.  If this place housed the monster that did this to me, would the walls be in on it?  Would they point and laugh saying, “That little bitch deserved everything she got!” Or would they be sympathetic and quiver, “We’re sorry this happened to you and we’re sorry we had to see it… Can we help you catch him?”  At the time, it felt like not only the southern man called Bama was the devil, but also the house that held him.  Hell, it even felt like God was really Satan in disquise and had gotten just what He wanted by sending the devil disguised as a sweet talking, conniving fuck named Bama to do me in.  If there was a God.  But that was a whole other story.

            When I mounted the three concrete steps that led to the front door, I noticed the screen door wasn’t latched all the way, and the inside door was open a couple of inches.  I froze.  The chill grew when, in the silence of the street, I could hear a buzzing sound emanating from inside the house.  Not understanding the situation, and unable to think straight, I decided to enter the house.  I might be naïve, but what if someone needed help?  What if a little old lady lived here now and she had fallen down?  Had a heart attack?  I burst inside without thinking further.  The buzzing grew louder as I entered the front room; the smell of cat urine hit me in the face.  My eyes watered.  It was the same smell I remember from that night, lying on the bathroom floor.  Tons of people have cats, my mind rationalized.  It made me even more sick to find my mind trying to explain everything away like it always did.  But I pressed forward, a wave of panic wiping over me.  My vision rippled with panic that grew to a level I was not familiar with. 

I found myself at the door of the back bedroom.  The buzzing throbbed in my ears.  I couldn’t help but open the door, and at the moment, as the door swung open and the buzzing flooded my brain, my panic was justified.  A human being was lying face down on the floor, in what looked like a pool of his or her own blood.  Hair, clothes, body; all were red, caked in blood.  The side of its face was gone and a hole ripped out of the back of its head.  I could feel myself quake.  I had seen this very scene in movies before, but this was real.  The sight was blood, the smell was death, it was too real.

I violently shook now, my vision leaping.  Near the body was a clock radio.  It was lying on the floor, the face cracked, as if it fell there.  12:00 blinked in digital red numbers, the ear piercing sound coming out of the speakers.  Inside the shadows the room held, everything was blue and grey; the blood glowed like kool aid in the transparent, urine soaked shadows.  My eyes followed the path of blood to near my feet.  There lay the gun.  If it wasn’t in the victim’s hand, it must have been a… it was a…