2

(Thursday morning)

My deployment skin was thick, and I ruffled a few feathers. Really I was high and that’s why I remained so confident.
Either way people seemed to understand why I was quieter today, trying to seem more approachable and less domineering.
I’m in shock again, can’t hardly talk, my chest pounding. The shock I felt as a child, the shock I have always known from him raping me.

__________

　
(Friday)
　
I met the Sergeant Major at work. I hadn’t known him because the old one retired while I was deployed.
Sergeants A__ and J___ were also in his office, hanging out. _Are you the one I’ve heard so much about?_ he asked me jokingly when I stepped into his doorway to update Sergeant J__ on something. (I’d been away from work because I’d been deployed for fifteen months.)
The Sergeant Major turned to A__ and J__ and said with a surprised, sly grin, _He doesn’t act gay at all._
The three of them laughed. _Oh I never said that,_ Sergeant J__ said with innuendo. _I told people he was my young cub and I was the Cougar._
I hate being the youngest.

__________

　
(Friday evening)
　
I feel like they look at me like some sad loser who is too old to feel sorry for. I feel like they laugh at me, make fun of me behind my back, don’t respect me.
I notice when I say I’m not married people blink a little bit unnaturally, like I’m too old for that. One guy today didn’t blink like that, but he thought I was twenty-two, so I figured that solved it.
I don’t have anybody but myself, so that’s supposed to make me a loser. I don’t see it that way.
It‘s the end of the work week and it’s hard to shake it off; that’s what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to feel identified with that place. I didn’t want to feel invested and defined by it. It’s killing my evening off. I remind myself: nothing happened today.
I cleaned the house, felt I was good to go, ate a snack and took forty pills with a glass of orange juice.
I close my eyes and look on the back of my eye lids for the other world there. It’s like when I would shift but this time I don’t have to worry about which is real because I know the high will end. It’s not like the Shifting where I had to be careful not to get too confused and lose my psyche forever.
I listen for when the insides of my body get so loud they’re unmistakable. That’s when being not-numb becomes easy and effortless. I can hear my own heartbeat and the throb it sends through the rest of my body.

__________

　
(Friday night)
　
The forty pills are beginning to kick in. I can feel the physical-ness of it, and the memories the physical-ness implies, brings up, triggers.
Okay I can do this, I think to myself.

__________　Now I’m high, officially.
The shifting’s started, I can’t type now

__________

　
(Saturday morning)
　
I’m calmly happy. It will take at least three days to get off this high. It seems like I refuse to lose Him, no matter how inebriated I get, he’s still aware, still calling the shots, he’s still the voice in my head. The high isn’t an escape, it’s challenging to the point that Him comes forward because he has no choice because otherwise my psyche will collapse in on itself forever.
How I perceived it as a kid: like a line to go out on stage. That’s how I entered the world. Mom and R__ were there, just on the other side of the stage door, and the neighborhood, and I knew it that way. I was right at the veil, the one Trevor stays so near now.
Rape. I used to know the word. I saw it as a kind of dark thing. I would play with the letters R. A. P. E. Feel them out with my tongue. I remember playing with the word once after I saw a clip of the film The Color Purple as Mom watched Oprah. I didn’t know English good, but I understood what the film was about.
I remember the commercial they would show on TV when I was little. It was in black and white and in slow motion. A young light-skinned guy in a wife beater and shaggy hair. He had a look of desperation on his face as he’s running in slow motion. A voiceover talks about the inevitable future of someone who uses drugs. Then the cop chasing the guy reaches out a hand and grabs the guy’s shoulder in slow motion. Maybe I grew up to be that guy.

__________

　
(Saturday evening)
　
The blurs of colors. I jump on the balls of my feet and let my arms free and turn my head back and forth to the beat and blast the music. Lady gaga telephone, halfway gone by lighthouse. Top twenty stuff but the beats are strong.

__________

　
(Sunday)
　
It’s like I’d still rather act raped than say ‘raped.’
As a boy I didn’t have the understanding, but now I do. And I’ll take care of it. Monday I’ll go to social services and then the police. That’s what the boy wants.

__________

　
(Sunday night)

It occurs to me the world might be so f-cked up that there is nothing I can do legally. Now that I m Real, murder doesn t seem like some foreign idea you only see on the television. I can feel the ability in my fingertips. I can feel the intelligence to get away with it in my head.
It s the same intelligence I ve used to do all the things I ve had to do that I ve never done before: fixing the upstairs sink, working on the well system, working on the Jeep, working on the lawn mower .. Surviving each day in the House.
A capableness I had never been in touch with before until I accepted the rest of what was in my brain and my bones, its cost being memories seemingly impossibly horrific.
If I go to the police, and am turned away, I ll always be suspect number one if something were to happen to them. If I don t, I probably won t be a suspect at all. If I go to the police, I lose the option of killing them.

I felt the timelessness of the choice. How important it was, how it might affect whether I was Him or what the Abuse insisted I was.
Is it possible to murder assertively instead of aggressively? Am I capable of killing my own mother? If it s what the boy wants, then yes.
It s just me now, it s on me to honor the boy and the Tough one. I thought about the TV show Dexter. I thought about the film In the Bedroom. The only law is Nature.
If I was Natural I would be thinking of killing them, deciding whether or not to do it. So I guess I m Natural.

Is killing him my natural responsibility? How many children at church did he mess with? How many of A__ and H__ s future kids will he mess with?
What happens when they find me and ask me how I could ve left the situation undone. Honoring the boy and honoring the future boys and girls he would have access to may be the same thing.

So what does the boy want?

__________


The speakers, blasting music. The House s colors swirling, except I m not drunk or high this time. I jump up and down and swing my head back and forth, looking slightly down with my eyes closed so my neck will straighten but relax at the same time. The muscles in my shoulders let go and my arms start to swing freely. The beat makes me vibrate.

It's why I always had low-self esteem and a loud, wordy ego filling my head with mental noise. Because I was lying.
I wouldn't admit that I was raped - it felt like I couldn’t remember - now it's like I wasn't strong enough - old enough - to understand - to truly register it.

He punished me for being a better man than him, even when I was little. His punishment added up to taking these years of my life away from me. Years not mine but mine, just out of reach due to a syllable I understood had to do with me but whose meaning I couldn't quite make out.

So who won? He won by his own rules. I won by transcending those erroneous rules that insisted the inside doesn t matter; insisting that it's not what's on the inside that counts. I win because I am my soul. He loses because he's degraded himself to the point where he raped a little boy nightly for ten years.
He thought it was all being done in the Soul Place but tomorrow I'm making the rounds at Child Protective Services and the police and I'm insisting that what he did was done in the Real World, not some secret place no one can get at.

I'd naturally fall into erroneous dynamics and it wouldn't work because - frustratingly - I'd still turn out to be the alpha male. I didn't understand. The answer was that my body had been raped. It had been forced into a role; forced to feel something pleasurable in a situation that went against my soul.

R__ tried to take Him away from me. I win because I'm Him, and I can write.

That's why I would never show myself - because I had been turned. For me to remember my natural movements I had to remember the rapes. The rapes were so traumatic I couldn't remember them.

I feel this pull to take care of myself. To go shopping for good, proper shoes. To eat good, proper food.

When I look down at my arms, hands, and feet, I see a young man. When I look in the mirror at my face, I see a judgment. I feel like not being overly-good looking was Life's judgment on me. Like I was born as penance. Like the life I lived was my own penance.

Everyone acts like I did such a good job with my life - the house, the job, the savings - but it's not my life. I want to go to school. My environment kept telling me to escape the house, to pay this bill, to worry about my financial future and its getting me nowhere. Everything I've done, everything I've accomplished, I had to do. That's not a life.

I dreamed of older Trevor the other night. The one who would walk me through the after life.
I did good, being virginal. I didn't let him win. I saved my soul if not my body. I gave up everything to keep my soul - looks, health, sex - everything to stay Him. R__ didn't think I could be that strong, that brave.

.. hence the girl or guy leads me into the bedroom, encourages me to penetrate and penetrate deeper and deeper to take more and more responsibility for them and the orgasmic, ravaged body left in my wake .. There's a loneliness to it; no wonder there's so much superficial macho-ism in the male gender. They're scared. (My name is Brave.)

So this is who I am, jumping up and down, swinging left then right, in front of big speakers I think: there could be someone else here, with me. It was House, once. But he was pretending, he was lying; being whoever he had to be. I just have to find someone.

Him could be a cop one day. Him could be an FBI agent if the boy wanted to be . Him could be a murderer, like in White Tiger, and Invisible Man. Him could, but he would try the law first. He would respect the job they have. He d give them a chance, even if it meant losing, and he d explain that somehow to A__ and H__ s children, even if He had to stick around in the not-all-the-way-dead place where Trevor is, we d just stick around together maybe, watching over A__ and H__ s children trying to jog their memories through dreams, trying to remind them of the truth: they are Hims and Hers.

__________