Naja Aidt - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Maloney trudges back into the restaurant. Thomas stands helplessly staring at the traffic. Shortly afterward an empty taxi approaches, and soon he’s on his own street. She’s been with another man, he thinks, full of heavy, almost stunned grief; she has another man, I was right, I knew it, and now I’ve heard it. I’ve heard her having sex with another man. I’m not angry. I ought to be raging with jealousy, ready to pound her and her lover. He’s slack and amazed. There’s nothing between himself and the world, the temperature’s the same, everything’s merging. For the third time the driver asks Thomas to pay up. He’s impatient. Thomas hands him the money and climbs out of the cab. He fishes his keys from his pocket. He unlocks the door. He punches the elevator button, can’t deal with the stairs. He waits. The elevator — with its familiar whirr and clatter — rattles down the shaft. But there’s another noise now. Behind him. Whimpering, breathing. He turns, stares down the stairwell to the basement, where it’s pitch dark. Makes out some kind of bundle in the depths. The basement door is ajar. “Help me,” a voice whispers, very weakly. “Help.” It’s Patricia’s voice. The elevator comes to a halt with its little ding .

He guides her toward the light. She’s naked below the waist. Her eyes see past him, an empty gaze, zombielike. He gathers her clothes and ushers her into the elevator. She’s pale as a corpse. When they reach the apartment, she goes directly to the bathroom and turns on the shower. “Who took your clothes off?” Thomas asks, grabbing hold of her. “You can’t take a shower, Patricia. You need to be examined.” She wriggles free of him and returns to the shower. He tugs her back and embraces her. She cries soundlessly. “I’m calling the police,” he says. He doesn’t know how to console her; he searches for the right words, but doesn’t find them — there are no words he can trust. Her entire body trembles, ice cold, in shock. Still this vacant stare. Abruptly she dashes to the sink and throws up. Afterward he gives her a bathrobe and holds her again. He asks, “Should I call the police, or do you want to wait?” She doesn’t want to wait. She washes her face in cold water and brushes her teeth. Scrubs her teeth for a long time. She plops down at the little table in the kitchen. He makes her a cup of tea and asks if she’s eaten. She hasn’t, but she doesn’t want anything. He regrets asking the question. “Did you know him?” he says carefully. She shakes her head. Shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. No. I don’t think so.” She looks at him. “I can’t be in my own body,” she says. “I want to shower.” She seems more calm and composed now. Two officers arrive thirty minutes later. Thomas has wrapped Patricia in a blanket and positioned her on the couch. He’s sent from the room while the officers talk to her. He jams his ear against the door and hears snatches of her incoherent account. She came home from work and was attacked from behind opening the door from the street. Everything happened so fast. A man shoved a towel in her mouth and hauled her into the basement. That’s where he raped her, on the concrete floor. She screamed, but no one came. She managed to call Thomas. But the man grabbed the cell phone from her hand and flung it. “He yanked at my hair. It hurt. Everything hurt. I screamed, but no one came, no one came. He. .”

“Yes,” one of the officers says.

But Patricia says nothing more. A few minutes pass. Despite the heat, Thomas is freezing. His heart gallops like a wild horse behind his ribcage. Someone entered his girlfriend’s body. Was close to her, forced her. Someone sullied her, besmirched her, caused her pain. She’s been violated . It’s completely unreal. He squeezes his eyes shut. Now he hears Patricia speaking again. They ask her if she saw the perpetrator’s face. No, he was wearing some sort of black hood. She couldn’t see his face. “And he had gloves on, I could feel them.”

“How old do you think he was? Could you tell?”

“He wasn’t very old. He was. . it was. .”

“Yes.”

Thomas hears her crying again.

“I don’t know!” she sobs peevishly. “I really don’t know! I couldn’t see his face!”

Her tears subside.

Long silence.

“Did he threaten you?” one of the men asks.

“Did he say anything. Did you hear his voice?”

And a short time later: “He said absolutely nothing to you?”

She’s probably shaking her head in response to these questions. Their voices are so low that Thomas can’t catch what’s being said. The two men exit the living room and tell him that he should drive her to the hospital. She needs to be examined for traces of DNA. In the meantime, they’d like to see where the rape occurred. They’d also like to take Patricia’s pants, panties, and shoes with them. “Do you have a car?” one of the officers asks. Thomas shakes his head.

“Then we’ll call an ambulance.”

She says very little during the short drive to the hospital. She stares out the window at the darkness. Once in a while her lip quivers. He holds her hand and doesn’t know what else to do. He wants to embrace her, to lie on top of her, to protect her, to warm her, but he’s afraid she’ll feel trapped, that she won’t be able to stand the physical proximity. The medics seem so solid, everything they do seems right, they make Patricia smile faintly, they inspire in her a sense of security. They don’t turn on their flashing lights, they drive slowly and calmly through the city, chatting reassuringly. Patricia doesn’t want to leave the ambulance. But the man who’d sat beside them persuades her, and he explains to Thomas where they need to go. They wait in a long, green hallway, the fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling juddering as if an entire colony of cockroaches has taken up residence inside them. Finally her name is called. It’s a female doctor who’ll examine her, thank God. She guides Patricia gently through a door. Thomas texts Maloney: “she was raped.” He writes the word raped , and it cuffs him upside the head like a baseball bat, and he gasps, as if only now does he understand what has happened. He pictures this masked monster pulling his girlfriend into the basement and having his way with her, he pictures his gloved hands holding her wrists, clutching her throat. What if he had killed her? He could have killed her. Maloney calls him up, shocked, quietly frightened, ashamed that he’d led Thomas to believe she’d voluntarily been with another man. “I’m so sorry, Thomas,” he practically whispers, “tell me if there’s anything I can do for you two.” Thomas requests that he look after Alice in the store, since he doesn’t figure he’ll be at work tomorrow. “I’ll call Jenny,” Maloney says.

“No, don’t tell anyone. I don’t know if Patricia wants anyone to know.”

And then he sits and waits. Time seems to stretch endlessly. But according to the clock on the wall, only twenty minutes have passed. Soon Patricia returns. She says nothing about the examination. She says nothing at all, and he doesn’t dare ask. At home she takes a long shower before they go to bed. Afterward her skin is red from the hot water; it looks as though she scrubbed herself with the nail brush. She doesn’t have many injuries, just a few scrapes and some bruising on her buttocks and the backs of her thighs, which she must have gotten when she was thrown down on the concrete floor. Before she crawls into bed, she pulls on stockings and a long-sleeved woolen jersey. She pops the sleeping pill the doctor gave her. She breathes rapidly, inhaling quick bursts of air. Then she falls asleep. Thomas, on the other hand, lies awake half the night, because he realizes in an instant — an instant that gashes time, burns itself into time like hell’s roaring flames — that the break-in at the store and the rape might be connected. The apple core in his father’s apartment, the slit armchair. All of it might have something to do with him, and the money in the microwave. Rigid with guilt and fear he lies breathless beside the sleeping Patricia. And he took what he wanted from her roughly at the museum, against her will. He held his hand over her mouth, forced himself into her. As if he were giving her a foretaste of what would happen to her tonight. As if he himself had incited violence against her body. As if the violence surrounds them now — he brought it into their lives. The ransacked store. The symbol on the countertop. Patricia’s beautiful face, stiff and empty. Her freezing cold body, exposed from the waist down. Someone had waited for her. Someone had planned it. Why else would you cover your head? Why else would you wear gloves? Or was it just a coincidence? Why didn’t he ask the police if a serial rapist was terrorizing the city? I hope there is, he thinks desperately, I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with me. He imagines the two assaults against Patricia, one of which he was responsible for. Here she’s sprawled across her desk on her stomach, trying to turn, biting his hand, and here she’s lying on the basement floor, on her back, a figure leaning over her, blocking her face from view. Holding Patricia’s wrists in an iron grip. The images are soundless and repetitive, an endless stream of images, two situations, time looping from one to the other: Patricia deprived of the opportunity to decide for herself. Deprived of the opportunity to say no. It’s unbearable. Thomas gets out of bed and wanders the apartment, restless and unhappy. The cat follows him with its eyes from its seat on the couch. Not until it’s almost morning does Thomas glide into a short, uneasy slumber, but Patricia wakes him at 6:00 A.M. The sleeping pill has worn off. She’s drenched in sweat. It’s at least eighty degrees in the bedroom; the sun is up.