He clearly had no idea where newspaper reporters lined up on the pay scale.
Monday, July 9, 1984.
It’s 5:15 p.m. when I pull into the parking lot at Case. I run to Eldred Theater, stumbling a little in the heels and linen skirt I put on that morning to look professional. The doors into the building are open when I get there. Maybe they’re still rehearsing and haven’t even noticed I’m late. I run up the stairs to the small lobby area on the second floor and look into the theater.
Empty. The whole place is empty.
Damn it! They’re gone.
I must have said it out loud, because a voice comes out of the shadows across the landing. “They said to wait a few minutes. They’ll be back.”
The guy who said it is leaning against the wall, smoking. He’s wiry, not much bigger than me, with an Afro and plastic-framed glasses the size of salad plates, just like mine. It’s the ‘80s, the decade of the Giant Glasses.
“They did?” I say. “Oh.”
I wait, sticking to my side of the little lobby. I feel awkward, like I should say something else, but he’s not saying anything, either. I think about asking him for a cigarette, even though I don’t really smoke. I used to, starting when I was a freshman in high school, and hid my cigarettes in a metal Band-Aid box, right up until I was twenty-two and my chain-smoking father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. The day after his funeral I quit, though I still bummed cigarettes when I was in a bar or around other people smoking.
I’m about to ask the guy for one when I smell menthol in the smoke curling across the lobby. Forget it. I hate menthol.
A couple of minutes pass. He stubs out his cigarette on the floor, shakes another from his pack. Kools.
As he lights it, I decide I’m done waiting and turn to go back down the stairs.
“I’m working on the lights,” he says to my back, his voice mild. “Do you want to see what I’ve been doing?”
A yellow light flashes briefly in my head: Caution. You don’t know this guy.
I ignore it. It’s just a flash, and I speed through it the same way I’d sped through every yellow light on Euclid Avenue driving here.
“OK,” I say.
The door to the theater is closed.
I open it and walk through, into the dark theater and the second part of my life.
I make my way down the narrow right aisle and climb the two steps to the stage, the guy right behind me.
I turn and look up at the stage lights. They’re off. Only the house lights are on. He says, “I should turn them on.” He doesn’t move.
Animal alarm flashes through my body, followed by a flood of adrenaline. The surge makes me dizzy.
This is not right, I think. In fact, this is bad. Really bad. Get out of here. Now.
“I think I’ll wait outside,” I say. Still polite. Still the good girl.
I know it’s too late in the second before he grabs me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides.
I try to scream. I want to scream. It should be natural: Danger leads to fear leads to scream.
But my body has other ideas. Panic overtakes me and closes my throat into a tight, burning knot, muting me. All I can manage is a strangled, small, “No,” just above a whisper.
“Be quiet,” he says.
I feel metal on my neck, moving slowly under my jawline. A sharp point presses into the skin.
I stop moving, stop trying to scream. My attention focuses on that one small point of cool metal against my throbbing vein.
He has a knife. He has a knife. The thought pulses with my blood, a hundred beats a second.
“Please don’t do this,” I say. “Do you want money? Do you want my purse? Take anything you want, but please don’t hurt me.”
“Now, just be quiet,” he says, his voice calm, soothing, as though I’m a child who just woke up from a nightmare.
He pushes me behind the scrim, a translucent screen at the very back of the stage, then backs me hard against the concrete wall, his hand to my mouth. He shows me the knife. It isn’t a knife, though: It’s half a pair of long utility scissors, the kind with black handles and a sharp point. A makeshift dagger.
“Now, I can kill you,” he says, still calm, like he’s saying he can get me a cup of coffee. “But I won’t kill you if you do what I say.”
My breath stops. Wait. Kill me?
The world shrinks into the small, still space behind the scrim. Nothing else exists.
How did this happen? One minute I was running toward a college theater, thinking about how I would fake my way through the interview, get to the pool, and then figure out something for dinner. The ordinary middle of an ordinary day of my ordinary life.
I catch a flash of steel when he moves his hand. An image appears, unbidden: my mother cutting fabric on our dining room table, pins held between her lips, her long, black-handled utility scissors crinkling the tissue-paper patterns of dresses.
His hand still covers my mouth. I nod: Yes. I will do what he tells me.
He takes his hand from my mouth. I do not say anything as he starts fumbling with the buttons on my blouse.
I shake. I try to stop it, but I can’t.
This is it. My rape. I knew it was coming. Every woman knows it, anticipates it, fears it, yet also doesn’t believe it will happen to her. And now here it is. My turn.
My stomach drops, but I do not let myself cry. The effort burns my throat.
I think of something that might stop him. “I’m having my period,” I say. I try to sound apologetic.
“Be quiet.”
He tears at the last button on my blouse, and as he pulls it off I see drops of blood dotting the front.
My mind takes a few seconds to catch up to this new piece of information.
My blood?
I put my hand to my neck, where the dagger was. Sticky.
I look at my hand. A bright red smear.
Yes. My blood.
I look down and see more blood on my skirt. My new linen skirt, bought to celebrate the new job. Bought to look professional.
As though it recognizes itself, the blood in my veins springs to action. I feel it pounding upward, squeezing through my carotid artery, pushing into my head. My body is electrical wire, the current switched on.
Then, just as suddenly, it turns off.
I slip away from my body, like Peter Pan’s shadow, into the fly space above the stage. My fear has vanished. I look down at the stage. I see myself. I look small, standing there in my bra. I look scared.
From the moment we humans are shocked with the terrible knowledge of our own mortality, we wonder and fear: How will I die? When will I die?
A guy smoking a Kool just delivered my answer.
Now.
Now is when it happens to me.
I don’t find it strange that there are two of me. On the stage, I feel his hands on my body. I feel the blade next to my neck, then next to my chest. I feel the rough concrete wall scrape at the skin on my back.
From up above, I watch all of this with a soothing