“Be it remembered”
I was thirty years old when I left my body for the first time.
When it happened, I had not taken any drugs, not for a couple of years. I was sober, it was the middle of the day, I was working, and I did not believe out-of-body reports any more than I believed a man could bend a spoon with his mind.
I worked for a newspaper, where facts mattered and skepticism was essential, and I tried to develop the cynicism I saw in older reporters while praying no one would figure out I was a fraud who had no business being in a newsroom.
I had just moved to Cleveland from Minneapolis to start work at The Plain Dealer, the city’s daily paper, and, as it proclaimed in the front-page banner, “Ohio’s Largest Newspaper.” It was my second job in what amounted to the family trade. My grandfather had worked at The Knickerbocker News in Albany, New York, my father was a reporter and editor at the Miami Herald when I was a girl, and I had worked at the Minneapolis Star (now the Star Tribune) before going to Cleveland.
I had resisted following in my father’s wake until I was nineteen. I didn’t want his career. By then, he was a magazine editor, and I was determined to separate myself from everything about my parents and their suburban lives. On visits home, I used the term “bourgeois” a lot. I was very young.
The only reason I walked into my college newspaper to ask for a job was because my sister Nancy worked there and told me they paid ten cents a column inch. I found my career and met my husband in that little basement newsroom, where I discovered that newspaper work takes you places you’d never get to go otherwise, and introduces you to people you would never come near without a press pass. Even better, newspaper people know how to have fun. I learned that early in life, when I was seven years old and my parents had a Miami Herald party in our backyard. I stayed up late with my sister, peeking through the window, watching them drink and laugh and flirt and, when it got very late, jump into the pool naked. My parents didn’t get naked, which would be too disturbing to recall, but the party did end dramatically, with my mother stepping on a broken glass and having to go to the hospital for stitches in her foot. I remember one of the men saying, “I’ll just pour some gin on it, Susie,” and my mother shouting, “No!” and everybody laughing. This frightened and thrilled me in equal measure.
Going to work in a newsroom used to be like going to a cocktail party every day, with all your clothes on and without the booze or the blood. Usually. Every newspaper has its feuds, gossip, and vanity; most have a legend or two of a newsroom brawl. At The Plain Dealer, people swore that a reporter once threw a typewriter—a heavy electric one—at an editor and then left the building, never to return. Everyone remembered the fight; no one remembered the reason for it.
Cynicism is both a badge of honor and a professional liability. Newspaper people don’t start out that way; almost everyone I know started out as an idealist wanting to bring justice to an unjust world. Cynicism seeps in over time, a slow acidic leak that erodes the idealism, the natural result of being told lies all day long, of calls not returned and records withheld, of corners cut to get a story in on time.
So I did not believe that out-of-body experiences were real. And yet: At 4:30 p.m. on a hot July afternoon, on a college campus in Cleveland, Ohio, I slipped away from my body and rose, up and up, until I was hovering somewhere in the air.
I looked down at the stage of a small theater, where I was on my knees in front of a man who held a long, rusty blade to my neck and was ordering me to suck on his penis.
“Suck on it,” he said, pushing on my head.
From my perch above this scene, I watched with a calm I’d never felt before.
It had come in an instant, this leaving my body. It happened as soon as I saw my own blood on my hand. The blood stunned me. I had not felt a cut, just the cool metal at my throat, as the man dragged me across the stage, but I didn’t know he had used it until a few minutes later, when I put my hand to my neck. It felt sticky.
I looked at my hand, and saw a smear of red.
Dread struck at once, slithering through my chest and into my stomach. I felt its venom spread outward, through my limbs, and then up into my throat. The poison worked in quick stages: shock, then panic, then paralysis.
By the time my brain began to work again, I was looking at myself from high above, up in the theater’s fly space among the ropes and lights. From that vantage point, I watched the man rape me.
I observed with an odd detachment. It was as though what was happening on that stage was happening to someone else. I was viewing a Hollywood thriller, and we had come to the inevitable rape scene. They were actors; I was the audience.
The woman on the stage looked up at the man. She moved in slow motion.
“Suck on it,” he said again. “I got to get off.”
I wondered when he would kill the woman. Not whether he would do it, but when. I knew it would happen, the way you know certain secondary characters will be killed in a movie. From my position above, I accepted it as a necessary plot element.
I was not sad, or scared, hovering up there. If anything, I was curious. How would he do it? What would I feel?
I understood that the girl on her knees was alone, but soon she would not be. She would join all the other girls who had been raped and then killed. I wondered if this was how they felt when it happened to them. Detached. Alone. Floating out of time.
All those dead, lovely girls. I still think of them, all the time.
We printed their high-school graduation pictures in our newspaper, their faces turned and tilted by the photographer so that they seemed to be gazing toward a future they had just started to imagine, their long hair so shiny you could practically smell the Herbal Essences shampoo when you looked at them.
Our editors sent reporters and photographers to the woods and roadside ditches where sheriff’s deputies were digging, where the girls had lain, ever patient, waiting to be found. The reporters interviewed their keening mothers while the silent fathers, stunned by loss and fury, tried to comfort them. The reporters took their graduation pictures back to the newsroom, and when the time came they covered the trials of the men who killed them. If the time came.
And then, a week or a month later, we forgot them. We went on to the next one. There was always a next one.
I pictured all the girls together, somewhere. Maybe they were watching this happen, just as I was, and waiting for me.
I guess you could call this the story of a quest. When it all started, though, I didn’t think of it as one. The great quest stories all revolved around men—men going off into unknown lands on brave adventures. Kings and gods sent them off on their journeys, sometimes giving them magic swords. Poets sang of them, telling stories of heroes who sailed ships on wine-dark seas, rode over mountains on the backs of elephants, searched for holy treasure, rescued beautiful women.
I was a middle-aged, middle-class working mother, living in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, a woman who once thought of herself as fearless but now was afraid of just about everything.
I did not undertake journeys. When I had a choice, I rarely left my house.
This was not how I always was. There was a time