
# PRELUDES

## JOHN  
BROOKS

### PUBLISHED BY:  
johnbrookswriting
Preludes

_Copyright © 2014 by John Brooks_

_All Rights Reserved_

# WARNING—ADULT CONTENT

In order to fully illuminate the horror of child sexual abuse from a child's perspective, this book contains graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of a child.

# DEDICATION

To all who have suffered child sexual abuse.

And especially those who've suffered it

behind the veils of affluence and respectability.

May your healing progress.

# Contents

Foreword

PRELUDES

1. The Bedside Table Clock

2. The Week Before

3. What His Father Told Him

4. The Bath

5. The Bathroom Window Shade

6. Where They Were

7. At the Dinner Table

8. The Prayer

9. The Nights that Followed

10. In the Classroom

11. Remembering, Not

12. Partitions / Enfolding

13. "Mature"

14. Metamorphosis

15. Bedtime Prayer

16. What His Father Asked

17. At the Doctor's

18. The Bedside Table Clock

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Cover Design

About The Author

# Foreword

Requests:

First, some requests:

If you read _Preludes_  and find it worthy of recommendation, I would be most grateful if you would post a review on the _Preludes  _page of the ebook retailer where you obtained your copy, and would be most grateful, as well, if you would share your recommendation on your social media.

And I would be triply grateful if you would become my supporter, for as little as a dollar a month, on Patreon, which is basically a 21st century version of the time-honored patron-based method of supporting artists in their work by its enabling of crowdfunded support of artists, including writers, on an ongoing basis. You can find my Patreon page here and, in case it might help you decide whether to become my supporter, find out more about me and my writing on my website—johnbrookswriting.com.

* * *

In December of 1989, at the age of thirty-four, after decades of not remembering, I began recalling episodes of my father sexually abusing me when I was nine years old. The story you are about to read, though fictional in some significant respects, is based to a substantial degree on these memories.

Why should child sexual abuse survivors write about their abuse for publication? A number of reasons present themselves, including the validation and support survivors can receive for their efforts at healing from their own abuse experiences through acquainting themselves with those of others; the understanding that people who have never experienced such abuse can gain of the severity of the damage it can inflict, during childhood and beyond; and the vital role essays, memoirs, stories, and other writing by survivors can have in motivating people to work steadfastly towards the realization of whatever improvements might be made in human societies—however gradually, in the years, decades, and centuries ahead—to lessen the occurrence of child sexual abuse and to better assist its victims.

But more important, for me, than any other reason, or, perhaps, than all other reasons combined, is the role that survivors' stories can serve in helping to break down the toxic shame and taboo that continue to surround child sexual abuse as a topic of public discussion—shame and taboo that survivors often begin to internalize from childhood and that, in any case, can make it all the more difficult for survivors, as adults, to face the effects the abuse has had on their lives and to do all that they need to do for their healing.

May this story serve all of these worthy ends.

John Brooks

January 2014

# PRELUDES
# 1

## The Bedside Table Clock

THE BOY WOULD LIE AWAKE in bed and watch its face—the second hand sweeping across the numbers backlit by the luminescent dial—12, 3, 6 and 9—and the black dots that marked the hours in between. Sometimes he would reach to pick the clock up and hold it to his ear to listen to the sounds its gears would make, their tug and hum, as they pulled the second hand around and around, progressed the minute and hour hands slowly but nonetheless steadily, on and on without ceasing.

Setting the clock back on the table, he would continue to watch it until the second hand's movement would start to seem like a steadily chastising finger, an endless accusation, and so, despairing, he would turn his head to stare at the ceiling's whiteness in the dim light that spread weakly from the dial and filtered in from outside, around and through the shades of his alcove's dormer windows, but then, fearing he would lose track of Time, he would return his gaze to the clock's face, the progression of its hands, and all the while the words would be going and going in his mind: _So what do I do what do I do what do I do?_

# 2

## The Week Before

THE BOY AND HIS SISTER, two years older, shared the upstairs loft, though every evening, after their mother would go back downstairs after putting them to bed, when they would trade _good night_ s from their separate alcoves, the silence following the two quick words of his sister's disembodied voice could make him feel utterly alone as they drifted into their separate sleeps and all thought of his sister disappeared completely.

He woke in the middle of the night to the sound of his father's voice softly saying his name, the feel of his father's hand gently shaking him. He opened his eyes to see his father in his bathrobe sitting on the edge of his bed.

"Oh, hi," the boy slurred groggily.

"Hi. Were you asleep?" The words came from his father's mouth wrapped in a soft warmth.

"Yes," the boy replied, his mind foggy, drowsily wondering why his father had come to his bedside in the middle of the night to wake him.

"Good, good," his father said gently.

Then his father sighed slowly and his words flattened, took on an edge as he said, "Well, Sam, you've misbehaved and I'm going to have to punish you for it."

"But I haven't done anything wrong," the boy, suddenly alert, replied instantly, kept saying as his father, his voice flattening, hardening further, insisted that he had, then told him to pull down his pajamas and turn over for a spanking, shushing him, telling him to keep his voice down so he wouldn't wake his sister as the boy continued to repeat in a taut, angry whisper, "But I haven't done anything wrong!"

Finally, teeth clenched, his father said, "OK, if you're not gonna pull 'em down, I'm gonna do it for you!" The boy could hear the barely-contained fury in his father's voice as his father grabbed his pajama bottoms at the waist.

"OK, OK!" the boy said as he pulled his bottoms down to just below his buttocks. He figured there was no use in resisting any longer. "Your underwear too," his father said, and the boy did as he was told; then, as his father instructed, he turned over on his stomach.

At this point there was a moment of peace, a brief lull as the boy lay there, gathering himself for a spanking, thinking, _Gee, this is ridiculous. I haven't done anything wrong._ Decades later, as a man, he would sometimes seek solace by envisioning his boy self suspended in that moment for eternity—removed, unreachable; in some never-ending embrace of whatever remaining childhood innocence he'd still, by the age of nine, managed somehow to preserve.

Then, yanking the boy's bottoms and underwear to his ankles, his father said, "And instead of spanking you, I'm gonna do this."

The boy felt an intense pressure at the back of his neck, the base of his brain. He had started to make some sort of sound—to gasp loudly or cry out—and that was when his father, now on top of him, had wrapped his hands around his neck and started squeezing, at the same time using his thumbs to press down at the base of the boy's skull, pressing and pressing until the boy began to feel as though his father's thumbs were about to press through his skin. As he felt his father's thumbs pressing even harder, his father's fingers tightening around his throat, the boy tried to say he couldn't breathe. Loosening his hands just a little, his father asked him what he'd said. The boy gasped again that he couldn't breathe. His father told him to promise not to make any noise.

"OK, OK, I promise," the boy barely managed.

So his father kept his hands just loose enough for the boy to breathe, just barely, and the boy gripped his pillow (had his fingers ever gripped so tightly before?) and clenched his teeth so as not to make a sound. Still, sometimes sound would come out—rasping expulsions from down in his throat; sudden, gasping releases of breath—and he would feel the squeeze of his father's fingers, the pressure of his thumbs, increasing until he was completely quiet.

Then came The Blackness. Thick and viscous, It would start to fill his mind and it was all the boy could do to try to stop Its surge. The boy was filled with terror, for it felt as though if he went into The Blackness completely, he would lose himself forever, never to return. So he did everything he could to stop It, gripped the pillow even more tightly, clenched his teeth even harder. But The Blackness kept coming and the boy started to go into and out of It, and as he did so, he imagined he could taste It, and that It tasted sweet because It could save him from the effort of staying silent and the struggle of resisting Its surge; and so finally he welcomed It, entered It completely.

# 3

## What His Father Told Him

HE CAME OUT OF THE BLACKNESS to the sound of his father's voice, edged with worry:

"Sam? ... Sam? ... Are you OK?"

His father was sitting beside him again, one hand still halfway around his neck, though loosely; the other shaking his shoulder. His throat felt tight and raw, but he managed a quiet, constricted "Yes."

"Good." His father sounded relieved.

Then his father leaned down and the boy could feel his father's breath in his ear as, noticing a smell on it that, remembering as a man, he would identify as alcohol, he heard his father—enunciating each word clearly and concisely, matter-of-factly, his voice leaden with complete and utter seriousness—say: "And Sam, if you tell anyone about this, I will _kill_ you"—the last four words deliberate and evenly spaced; the _k_ of the "kill" sharp and percussive, producing a puff of air that struck the boy's ear with undeniable reality. "Understand?"

The boy kept silent, hesitating, then felt his father's grip tighten against his throat, the pressure of his thumbs at the base of his skull. "Yes," he managed to get out.

"And that includes your mother. Understand?"

Hesitating again, the boy felt the thumbs press harder. "Yes," he gasped.

Then his father stood and, as he tied his bathrobe, said, "And Sam, I love you."

And then he was gone.

# 4

## The Bath

AFTER HIS FATHER HAD LEFT, the boy continued to lie on his stomach, and as he lay there, on his bed in the middle of the night, he did not move, he did not think, he did not feel; he did not see or hear or make any sound save that of his slow, shallow breathing.

Then slowly he began to notice the silence and the stillness all around him, and he began checking and rechecking that they were really there, persisting through Time, and he began, also, to notice the quietness of his body, for as he listened, checking again and again that the silence and the stillness were still there, all around him, he continued not to move or make any sound save that of his breathing. Then, finally, after checking all of these things again and again, he began to let his muscles relax by the smallest of increments; to allow the smallest relaxation, deepening of his breathing; tried to let himself settle back into his body.

And as he tried, at first he felt only soreness and stiffness in every part, and in the midst of the soreness and stiffness, he began to feel the pain—the plumes of it that kept detonating from somewhere deep within his rectum, as though his rectum were being bruised through like a piece of tender fruit, inside out, again and again. And with each detonation he would release a soft, crying sigh, full of fear and confusion. ("Plumes," "detonating," "detonation," "rectum"—several of the many words he would learn only later, that he would employ as an adult to describe, to himself and others, what had happened to him; that, lacking as a child, left him, by their absence, inarticulate and, therefore, all the more fearful, all the more confused.)

Slowly, carefully, he shifted himself until he was lying on his side. Noticing his underwear and pajama bottoms were still down around his ankles where his father had yanked them, he pulled them back up ever so gingerly, their waistbands to his waist, then pulled the covers snug to his chin, drew his knees towards his stomach, and held himself as, continuing to feel the plumes of pain bruising him again and again, inside out, he released a sigh with each detonation.

He felt himself trembling for no reason. He shouldn't be cold—the covers were snug. He couldn't understand why he kept shaking; why the plumes kept detonating no matter how carefully he adjusted the bend of his knees—drew his legs up or straightened them. And so he reached his hand behind him, slid it under his bottoms and underwear, and cupped it over his buttocks at their cleft as the pain continued exploding, pluming, and he cradled the pain with his hand as though it were a newborn child. He did not understand the child—where it had come from or why it had come to him—but he knew that it was his. And so he tried his best to comfort it in the middle of the night with the stillness and the silence all around him.

He could not understand what his body was saying. Not understanding frightened him more than the pain itself. He kept shaking; the pain kept coming. By now he was crying softly between his moaning sighs. He thought that maybe if he went to the loft's bathroom that he and his sister shared—if he went there and used the toilet, the pain might go away. With his soreness and stiffness, his pain and his fear, it required a great effort—not only physical but also of will—simply to shift his position on the bed; still, he managed to move himself to the edge away from the wall. Standing and walking would require more effort still, but he felt he had to get to the bathroom, to make it to the toilet. Several times he sat up and almost swung his legs over the side, only to hesitate and lie back down. He wasn't sure whether going to the bathroom would work, but when he would lie back down, the pain would still be there, rising up from deep within his rectum, bruising him through and through.

Finally he managed to stand and—still trembling; his steps small, halting—began to make his way slowly towards the bathroom. The polished wood flooring felt cold against his feet, and he had to stop several times to place his hands on his knees, take some deep breaths, and re-gather his resolve, but finally he reached the bathroom door, opened it slowly, then closed it softly behind him. Years later, as an adult, wondering how it could have been possible for his sister to have slept through all that had happened, he would conclude that, in fact, it could have been, given the formidable degree of quietness with which, thanks to his father's hands around his neck, the rape had, for the most part, been executed. ("Rape"—another word whose meaning he had no clear idea of as a child; that he would employ only later, when remembering as an adult.) But on this night he did not even question whether his sister was still sleeping, and so he did everything he could to make as little noise as possible, for he did not wish to wake her.

He flipped the switch for the bathroom's overhead light, shuffled across the linoleum, with its pattern of blue plaids that now felt even colder to his feet than the wood, pulled down his pajama bottoms and underwear very slowly, and, very gingerly, sat on the toilet seat. The seat's coldness increased his trembling, so he hugged himself, rocking gently forward and back, the pain still detonating, pluming as he waited for something to come out, but nothing would. He tore some sections from the roll of tissue in the dispenser attached to the wall, folded them, and, hoping it might somehow help the pain, wiped himself, then, after hesitating, inserted the tissue as far as his could into his rectum before the increasing pain made him draw it back out; then, after hesitating again, looked at it and saw red spots soaking its whiteness. Years later, as an adult, wondering if it could have been possible for the blood not to have stained his bed sheet and, after he'd pulled them up, his underwear and pajama bottoms as well, he would conclude, on this point also, that it well could have been, provided the bleeding's locus had been deep enough; provided the blood had coagulated sufficiently before it could reach his anus.

The spots of red on the white of the tissue increased his fear. He couldn't understand why he would have blood down there, where the pain was. Holding himself, unable to stop his trembling, he got off the toilet seat, pulled up his underwear and pajama bottoms, shuffled to the sink, and looked at his face in the mirror. And in his eyes he saw incomprehension and terror—what, remembering as an adult, he would identify as the borderlands of insanity, but, as a boy, felt simply un-nameable and utterly forbidding.

He raised a hand and touched his cheek ever so lightly, caressingly, then pressed both hands against the sides of his head so hard it began to shake. He kept looking more and more deeply into his eyes; into their wild yearning not to believe even as he faced the inescapability of believing—of admitting—that yes, this was real; was really him, standing before the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night, full of terror and incomprehension, of trembling and pain.

But instead of finding answers in the reflection of his face—to how he had become such a child of pain; to how he had gotten to this place—his face only asked more questions. So he went back to the toilet seat, but again nothing came out. He dared not wipe himself a second time.

That's when the claw-footed bathtub caught his eye, the sheen of its porcelain radiating a glimmer of sustenance, a flicker of hope that managed to penetrate his tiredness and stiffness, his terror and despair. Slowly he pulled his pajama top over his head, his bottoms and underwear down, let them drop to the floor, stepped into the tub, sat, and began to run the water. He adjusted the faucet's ivory handles—their "H" and "C" etched in black—until the water was running hot as he could take it without it hurting, then fit the black rubber plug snug into the drain, held himself, and started rocking back and forth. He felt the water's warmth, and he let its warmth and the sound of its gushing embrace him. When the water would fill the tub, he would pull the drain plug, and, still rocking himself, let the water's level go down; then re-plug the drain so the water's gushing would not stop and its warmth would not diminish. He did this again and again as he held himself in the water's embrace, rocking himself back and forth, thinking of nothing, and as he did so he began to cry more freely—though quietly still, so as not to wake his sister—and the water embraced his crying. Back and forth, back and forth he slowly rocked, and, as he did so, the boy began to whisper over and over: "Get away! Get away! Get away!"

# 5

## The Bathroom Window Shade

AGAIN AND AGAIN he pulled the plug and let the water drain down, then plugged the drain to let the tub fill again, repeating the cycle over and over, and, as he did so, his tiredness and stiffness and fear and despair began to lessen, migrating slowly from deep inside to his skin, sliding away like layers of dead cells.

He began to wonder what time it was, moved away from the faucet to the tub's opposite end, reached to draw back the bathroom window shade. From the window's position at the side of the house, he angled his gaze towards silhouettes of trees in the neighboring front yard, then studied the street beyond, lined by trees, streetlights, and sidewalks, with cars parked here and there along its curbs—everything still and quiet, untroubled, at peace with itself, save for a sprinkling of autumn's first-fallen leaves, which scuttled low across the ground as though in restless search for something.

Yes, the boy assured himself, it was just a calm, silent night—a night that said everything was safe, everything was normal. He let go of the shade and moved back to the faucet and its gushing warmth, held himself and began rocking again, back and forth, over and over, but now he smiled as he pretended, and as soon as pretended believed, that it was still before his usual bedtime; that he was simply taking his regular bath—the one he always took before he would towel himself dry and put on his pajamas, then call for his mom, who would come upstairs to help him say his prayers ("Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep / If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take"), then tuck him into bed for "a good night's sleep." That's how she always said it—that she wanted him to get "a good night's sleep"; a sleep that would last till morning.

And so he filled the tub over and over as he smiled and trembled with excitement at this fantastic dream in which he now so suddenly, so completely believed. He let the water embrace the dream, felt the dream in the water's warmth and heard it in the water's gushing, and he felt the warmth of the dream throughout his body and began again to shiver, but not, this time, with cold and against his will but of his own volition, with lightness, ecstasy, and hope. And the more he believed in the dream, the more euphoric he became: everything was OK!

Sometimes he would move away from the faucet to the back of the tub again, reach to lift the window shade and check that the still and quiet, the calm and peaceful night was still there; to find that, yes, it was and everything was really OK. And so, smiling and holding himself and rocking back and forth, he carried the dream with him through the night, not once faltering, never doubting or wondering if it could actually be real, until the time, that is, he turned once more to the back of the tub and immediately noticed the difference—an increase in the light filtering through the shade and around its edges, beyond what the streetlights and whatever the moon and stars had managed to provide. An increase that felt odd, made no sense at all, for, even as he reached to lift back the shade, he clung to the dream's last, desperate pulsings: it was still _before_ his bedtime; his mother would be coming up _after_ he finished his bath ... Wasn't it? Wouldn't she?

But, as he pulled back the shade, a single glance at the sky left no doubt: he was seeing the light of morning.

A great weariness filled the boy as he turned off the faucet, pulled the plug, and slowly got out of the tub. Soon it would be time to get ready for school. It would be time to face the day.

# 6

## Where They Were

NASHVILLE—THE BOY WOULD ONE DAY REALIZE, looking back and reflecting from an adult perspective—was, as it remains, a prosperous community. As the state capital and the economic magnet of Middle Tennessee, it featured three TV stations (WSM, Channel 4; WLAC, Channel 5; and WSIX, Channel 8); a growing apparatus of state and local government; a burgeoning country music industry; a major Mid-South presence in banking, insurance, and medical services; and a contingent of respected colleges and universities—circumstances which never left the Chamber of Commerce short of attributes with which to tout the city. West Nashville, where the better residential areas were located—the boy's family's included—partook of the bulk of this prosperity and offered an especially hospitable environment for a family headed by an up-and-coming member of the Economics Department at the city's foremost, nationally-reputed institution of higher learning, Vanderbilt University.

The family's residence on Central Avenue rested in the middle of a pleasant, middle class neighborhood of decades-old houses that appeared quite content with themselves—houses of brick and stone featuring designs drawn from Colonial, Tudor, Greek Revival, Craftsman-Bungalow, and other respected American architectural styles; that enjoyed comfortable placements on modestly-sized yards groomed by the tidy _snip-snip_ of trimming shears, the insistent growl of gas-powered mowers, and the clickety-click of motor-less, rotary blades; that faced streets shaded by tall, long-limbed hardwoods—ash, walnut, hackberry, locust, beech, cottonwood, maple, oak, and more—far older than the houses themselves.

In addition to their house, the boy could see his family's favorable circumstances manifested in a number of other ways: in the yardman and the maid who came by bus from another part of town to do the bulk of the lawn and house work; in the warm smiles and earnest handshakes that greeted his parents every Sunday at Westminster Presbyterian Church, with its high-steepled sanctuary and magnolia-dotted lawn facing West End Avenue; in the lifestyle of his mother, who, thanks to the maid and the yardman, had ample time for church circles—ones for needlepoint and knitting, for discussing books, for touring homes and gardens—and time, as well, to take the boy and his sister, with their younger brother, then a kindergartener, in tow, to the assortment of after-school and weekend lessons she regularly enrolled them in—from piano, French, and classical music appreciation, to swimming, tumbling, and children's theater.

The boy appreciated his mother's free time more than ever when, to celebrate his seventh birthday, she and other moms took him and his buddies from the first-grade at Ransom Elementary to WLAC's downtown studios on a weekday afternoon to watch "Popeye and Friends," a local program for kids featuring Popeye cartoons and "Captain Bob," the station's handsome, young weatherman, who, dressed as a sea captain, with a white-crowned, black-billed cap perched jauntily on his head and a navy blue jacket with gold stripes on the sleeves, would serve as host. With the mothers looking on, Captain Bob had invited the boy and his buddies from their studio audience seats to stand beside him in front of the camera; had called him "The Birthday Boy" and ruffled his hair, congratulating him with a handshake, a wink, and a smile. For the briefest moment, as he looked into Captain Bob's twinkling eyes, the boy fantasized, with a fervent hope, that Captain Bob was his actual father.

But, fantasy aside, his real father was what mattered, for in the midst of all the indicators of his family's status, the boy came more and more to recognize his father as the key. By the time he was nine, he could see this quite clearly.

He could see it in the stately buildings and spacious campus of Vanderbilt University and the respect his father received, from everyone it seemed, as a Vanderbilt professor. He could see it in the tailored suits, starched white shirts, and narrow silk ties his father wore to church and work, and in the plaid button-downs and wool and linen slacks that served for his father's casual wear (the boy had never seen his father in jeans, save, that is, for the only church retreat the family had ever attended, held at a state park an hour's drive from the city, where his parents had looked halting and unsure of themselves, moving about in the rustic cabin they'd been assigned for accommodation, as they'd changed into the brand-new denim wear his mother had bought for them the week before at Sears), just as he could see it in the thick wool overcoat—its pattern, the boy would later learn, a herringbone tweed—his father donned in winter. He could see it in the parties his parents gave for his father's Economics Department colleagues—parties with serial servings of alcohol (wines, cordials, brandies, liqueurs, cognacs, vodkas, whiskies, and more—his father pronouncing the names of the spirits, as he offered each in turn, in tones of fondest affection) that fueled a giddy ambience billowed by wave upon wave of lively conversation, in English spoken in accents that spanned the continent and stretched around the globe, moving from economics to politics to philosophy to the arts to the latest gossip about university politics, all of it laced through with a laughter-filled banter whose punch lines the boy managed to understand scarcely if at all.

More than anything, however, the boy's awareness of his father's importance rested on the word that people not connected with Vanderbilt would often, when addressing his father, place before his name: it was never "Mister Inverness"; was always " _Doctor_ Inverness."

# 7

## At the Dinner Table

THE EVENING AFTER THE RAPE—after a day, at home and school, of routines and tasks performed robotically, in a state of numbness, without the scarcest recollection of the events of the previous night—the boy sat with his family for dinner.

His father, as always, had still been in bed when the boy had left for school that morning. His mother had noticed the boy's affectless demeanor as he ate his breakfast of Rice Crispies with milk and sugar, but, given the boy's laconic state, she'd chosen to attribute this to a greater than average fluctuation in the boy's overall mood—a fluctuation that she judged, nonetheless, to be still within the range of normal—rather than attempt to pry out of him a possible cause by anything in particular and so had sent him off to school with her usual wave and a smile. When the boy had returned home that afternoon, his mother had again noticed his funk but only in passing as she was busy with calming the boy's brother—who, screaming as he writhed on a throw rug in his first floor bedroom in the rear of the house, was in the midst of a tantrum over a broken toy—and with supervising the maid's preparation of dinner.

The boy had ascended the stairs to find his sister, who had come inside from a climb of her favorite tree in the backyard, lying on her bed reading another Nancy Drew mystery she'd checked out that day from the Ransom Elementary library. For several long seconds he'd observed her—engrossed in her book, utterly oblivious to his presence—then placed his school bag on the card table that served for his desk and returned downstairs to, as he always did, sit on the living room sofa and watch his usual mix of cartoons and other shows, including "Popeye and Friends," on the family's single television—an 18-inch black-and-white RCA that sat on one of the end tables.

Or rather, to try to watch, for on this day all the words—of people and characters, cartoon and human, including Captain Bob—had sounded like senseless noise as the boy switched from channel to channel in his usual pattern as one show would end and another begin, continuing to stare blankly at the screen as the half hour of cartoons that ran from five to five-thirty on WSIX, the ABC affiliate, had come on; still staring blankly when a short while later he had noticed the sounds of the motor of the family's '53 Plymouth sedan winding down as it had pulled up to the front curb, its front door opening and closing, his father's footsteps proceeding up the front walk, but when the screen door had opened and his father had walked through the living room without saying a word, the boy had done his best to ignore it (for, after all, such behavior was not at all uncommon for his father, who often seemed completely lost in himself as he went about the house); had kept staring at the screen as the last episode of Woody Woodpecker came to an end and—following a commercial for Frosty Morn Country Sausage featuring a trio of cartoon pigs dancing on their hind legs, chorus-line style, to the refrain of "Sing It Over and Over and Over Again, Frooooos-teeeee Morn!"—the station's fifteen minutes of local news and weather had started.

At this point his father would usually enter the living room to sit beside him on the sofa and switch back and forth between WLAC and WSM—the CBS and NBC affiliates—watching CBS's Evening News with Walter Cronkite and NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report, but this evening his father hadn't appeared, and so the boy, not changing the channel, had continued to stare at the screen as the WSIX newscaster had droned the news and then the weatherman—middle-aged and balding, like the boy's father; not at all like Captain Bob, whose weekday forecasts for WLAC fell, unfortunately, during the family's dinnertime and after the boy's bedtime—had applied a magnetized sun and some jots of magic marker to a map, giving the next day's forecast—sunny and crisp to begin with, but with a chance of late afternoon showers—which the boy had scarcely heard.

As the news and weather had ended, the maid, wearing her hat, coat, and gloves, had passed through, casting her usual _you have a good night now_ in the boy's direction as she'd closed the screen door gently behind her to go on her way towards West End Avenue where she would board a bus that would take her back to the part of town, a distance from the boy's neighborhood, where she lived. Not changing the channel, the boy had then stared at ABC's fifteen minutes of national news, watching an anchorman whose name he couldn't remember until, just as the news finished, he'd heard his mother's voice calling everyone to the dinner.

As always for their meals together, his father sat at one end of the rectangular dining room table. The boy sat to his father's right, with his sister opposite him, to their father's left. His younger brother sat next to his sister and to the right of their mother, who sat at the table's opposite end. This unvarying arrangement framed the family's nightly mealtimes.

As always, they held hands, bowed their heads, and closed their eyes, and his father proceeded to say grace: "Bless, oh Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service, in Christ's name, Amen." Before the prayer was finished, the boy opened his eyes to examine his father's face—gloom-darkened, as it often was, but, it seemed to the boy, more so this evening than usual. The boy kept looking at his father as they took, from under their forks to the left of their plates, the thick, white paper napkins his mother bought at the West End Avenue A&P, unfolded them, and laid them on their laps. (Linen napkins, embroidered with the initials of female ancestors, were reserved for Sunday dinner and guests.) He kept looking as his sister and brother, and then, at his mother's prompting, he also, handed their plates to their parents, who served them the dinner the maid had prepared. He kept looking as their father, his tie fastened to his starched white shirt by a thin brass clip, picked up a silver carving knife and its two-tined matching fork to slice the meat loaf that filled the china serving platter before him, placing the juicy slices on each of their plates as they were passed to him; and as their mother used silver serving spoons to add green beans, glazed carrots, and mashed potatoes from china serving bowls, spooning gravy over the potatoes with a silver ladle from a china tureen, then offered them home-made rolls from a cloth-covered wicker basket. Through all of these routine dinnertime activities, the boy glanced away from his father as briefly as possible—to unfold his napkin or when his mother took his plate to serve him his vegetables, then handed it back to him, or offered him a roll—returning to his father's face each time, searching for the smallest sign of acknowledgement.

Somewhere, perhaps, in the depths of the boy's heart, far beneath the level of his consciousness, with its complete forgetting of what had happened, a wild hope feebly stirred—a hope that, were it put into words, could perhaps have been articulated thusly: that his father would set down the carving knife and fork, look him full in the face, and, after settling himself with a long, deep sigh, say in the calmest and sincerest of tones, "Sam, I made a terrible mistake last night. You didn't misbehave and so, of course, you didn't need to be punished. In fact, _I_ was the one who misbehaved, and terribly so, and not just in punishing you for no reason, but in the horrible way that I did it. Sam, my dearly beloved son, can you ever forgive me?"

But his father finished serving the meat loaf silently, with averted eyes, serving himself last, then—responding to their mother's tautly cheerful, "Bill, would you care for some vegetables?" with a leaden "Yes," the same way he'd said the prayer—passing his plate to his wife via the boy's sister, receiving it back, hunching over his food, and becoming completely absorbed with his eating.

The china, a Blue Willow pattern by Wedgewood, was for everyday use. The boy's mother had given it a prominent place on her bridal registry, along with the sterling silver flatware—engraved at the handles in elaborate cursive with her initials—which also was for everyday, and which the boy, his sister, brother, and mother, following the father's lead, now picked up to begin eating. The pattern's platter, serving dishes, tureen, and plates all depicted a faraway world of gazebos, pavilions, and willow trees bordering placid lakes and gently flowing streams over which glided pairs of beautiful, broad-winged birds—a world of harmony, order, and tranquility into which the boy would, on many evenings as he ate, frequently find himself escaping. But tonight the boy didn't notice this world at all, nor did he pick up his knife or fork as he kept looking at his father.

The boy looked from his father's laden fork, his cheeks bulging with food, his tensing and releasing jaw muscles, back to his own plate, but he didn't feel hungry at all—this though he felt an emptiness inside greater than he'd ever known. When his mother offered the butter dish for buttering his roll, he shook his head slowly and returned his attention to his father, who, sullen-faced and hunched over his plate, continued forking in mouthfuls, chewing dully, swallowing, then forking in more.

The more he watched his father eat, the less desire the boy felt for the food on his plate. Each time he looked at it, it seemed even less appetizing while the feeling of emptiness deepened. The boy looked from his food back to his father again, waiting for his father to offer him the smallest crumb of recognition—a word, a smile, the briefest glance, anything at all. A movement as small as a raised eyebrow might have struck the boy as a sign of acknowledgement, of approval even, but his father gave him nothing, seemed unaware of his existence as he stayed hunched over his food, consuming it with a mechanical regularity; his eyes glazed, seeming to look only half at what he was eating and half inside themselves; his attention absorbed completely with nothing left for the boy.

"Why aren't you eating your food, Sam?"

His mother's words broke his focus. His sister and brother looked up for a moment, glanced at their mother, then their father, hurriedly looked back down at their plates and returned to eating their food; but the boy, who usually ate more quickly than they, still hadn't taken a single bite. He looked at his mother, her brow furrowed with incomprehension, then down at his food, then at his father. His mother looked from him to his father, then back to him. The emptiness inside him felt like it wanted to, needed to, absolutely had to maintain itself. Glancing again at his food, then back at his father, he felt himself sinking into his emptiness.

"Sam, I want you to eat your food."

His mother's tone had sharpened, but the boy continued to stare at his father—at his father's mouth taking in food, chewing and swallowing; at his father's eyes and the way they seemed to be half-looking inside themselves.

"Sam, I will not let you leave this table until you eat your food!"

His mother's tone had sharpened more, turned absolute.

The boy cycled through again—looking at his mother, his father, then at his food—as he felt himself sinking further and further into the emptiness inside him. Then, sensing the hopelessness of it all, he picked up his fork, and, releasing a long, quiet sigh, cut a small piece of meat loaf from the slice his father had put on his plate, secured it with the tines of his fork, lifted it, put it into his mouth, and—his mother's eyes fixed upon him, his father still ignoring him—slowly began to chew.

# 8

## The Prayer

HE WOKE THAT NIGHT to the sound of his father's voice saying his name, the feel of his father's hand shaking him impatiently.

"Oh, hi," the boy said drowsily, as casually as he could, then half-closed his eyes, pretending to drift back to sleep. But his father released an exasperated sigh, his voice edged with anger.

"Well? Aren't you gonna pull 'em down?"

The boy hesitated for a moment, frozen by dread of what would follow. Then, feeling he had no choice—that things would be even worse if he didn't do as he was told—he released his own sigh, quick and fearful, and yanked his pajama bottoms and underwear to his ankles. This time his father didn't ask him to turn over, said instead, "Now cover your eyes."

So the boy placed his left hand over his eyes and then it began: his father stroking his penis, groping his testicles, and, after shifting the boy's pajama top up until it bunched at his shoulders and neck, fondling his nipples—doing one, then another, then the other, not always in the same order, for an eternity it seemed—the boy for the most part keeping his eyes closed and covered but opening them now and then, lifting his left hand slightly and glancing down to see what his father was doing, which would only make him want to close and cover them again.

At some point the boy—as his father continued to stroke and fondle—began to feel the pulses of pain rising up slowly through his solar plexus from a place that felt infinitely deep. He placed his right hand over the spot where the pain was rising, then tried to keep his body as rigid, unmoving as he could make it. If only he could achieve a perfection of stillness, it would be easier to believe he wasn't there, in his alcove with his father; that none of this was happening. But the pain continued pulsing slowly up through his solar plexus, and besides, he couldn't stop the movement of his breathing—not entirely. Still, he kept his breaths as high and shallow in his chest as he could, but sometimes the intakes would catch sudden and short when, with some change in the focus or increase in the intensity of his father's depredations, his diaphragm contracted spasmodically.

And no matter how much he managed to dull his awareness of his father's fingers as they stroked his penis and groped his testicles, of his father's slavering mouth and tongue as they began to lick and suck and take them in—sometimes his penis, sometimes his testicles, sometimes both at once—there was, together with the pain that kept pulsing up through his solar plexus, another sensation the boy was unable to numb: the delicate, murmurous tickling he would feel when his father would fondle his nipples. Like some delicate, fluttering butterfly it was, the tickling—this tweaking, ever so maddeningly, of his rigidity, his attempt at non-feeling; the previous night's rape finding its consummation (as, decades later, he would come to view things) in this exquisitely quivering, ever so gentle penetration of his numbness; a violation that, together with his father's continuing assault upon his genitals, was even worse, in a way, than the rape itself, for their mocking of any last remnants the boy still clung to of mastery over his body until soon a single prayer began to sound over and over in his mind:

Godhelpme Godhelpme Godhelpme.

Soon the words were flowing constantly, again and again, overlaying every sucking of his penis by his father's mouth, every brushing of his nipples by his father's feather touch; pulsing with the boy's every intake and release of breath:

GodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpme

GodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpme

GodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpme

GodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpmeGodhelpme

To the boy they weren't just words. He really did believe in God; really did believe God could help him—that God had the power to do so. That's what he was taught in church every Sunday. That's what he felt when he prayed at bedtime.

Over and over the boy prayed the prayer, repeating its mantra. Further and further into his mind he went until the pain rising up through his solar plexus began to fade and the words of the prayer began to fuse with the feather touch of the tickling, and then the prayer's words faded also, dissolving into the feeling in his nipples—a feeling he found he could take with him, ever further into his mind, until at last he could be with it only, just the feeling, far distant from his bed and his father; far, far distant and free, even from his body, until everything—his nipples, father, and all else dissolved, was forgotten, and all he was was the feeling, floating on and on, as though through outer space, far away from Earth; far, far away from the house on Central ...

"I love you."

His father's words, quick and taut; his father's lips, hard and dry, on his own—these things brought him back, and the boy, his left hand still covering his eyes, his right still over his solar plexus, said, "Love you too," even more quickly, tautly, hoping that would be enough to get his father to leave; not moving as he listened to the sound of his father's slippers shuffling across the floor, of his father descending the stairs; staying still until he heard the silence all around him, checking and re-checking that it was still there, persisting through Time.

And that was when he first turned to look at the bedside table clock; when the words of the question started going and going through his mind:

So what do I do what do I do what do I do?

# 9

## The Nights that Followed

IN THE NIGHTS THAT FOLLOWED, after his mother would say his prayers with him, kiss him goodnight, then do the same with his sister and return downstairs, the boy, who had forgotten his father's abuse completely during the day, would, as he lay awake after trading _good nights_ with his sister, remember it and, fearing his father's return, hear the words start in his mind:

So what do I do what do I do what do I do?

He would go on this way, his mind in a fretful whimper, kneading this single prayer bead of a question over and over, trying to keep the full-out panic down, until he would hear his father's slippered footsteps on the stairs—a stair creaking here and there with his father's ascension, detonating a panic that blasted him inside-out with a jagged shrapnel of woe, causing him to lose his hold on the prayer bead, which would fall away silently, disappear, and be replaced by:

Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!

Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!

Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!

The two words surging, wave upon wave, one upon the other, as his father would reach the top of the stairs, begin to move nearer; as the realization that his father was once again coming to his bed filled more and more of his mind with every slippered shuffle.

Hastily the boy would prepare the offering of his body—pull his pajama bottoms and underwear down, his top above his nipples; cup his left hand over his eyes, close his eyes tight; place his right hand over his solar plexus where it would feel the rapid rise and fall of his breathing, and the tremor, close by, of the beating of his heart, the two rhythms twining, growing swifter as the mattress would give and his father would be there, sitting beside him.

Without a word, his father would begin, and immediately the boy would feel the pain starting to rise up again through his solar plexus from a place that felt infinitely deep; would start once more to pray the prayer— _Godhelpme Godhelpme Godhelpme Godhelpme Godhelpme_ —the prayer going and going, dulling his sensation of everything but the fluttering feeling at his nipples, his father's touch like butterfly wings, triumphing so maddeningly, once again, over any shreds the boy had managed to reconstitute of a sense of self-possession, self-control; the boy repeating the prayer's mantra over and over, going further and further into his mind; the prayer's words starting to fuse with the tickling before fading, dissolving, and the feeling of being carried away from his bed, his body, further and further distant, free from his father and everything else until everything was forgotten and all he was, once again, was the feeling of floating on and on through deepest space; then the sound of his father's voice— _I love you_ —and the feel of his father's lips, hard and dry, on his; and his _love you too_ —quick, constricted—said just to get his father to leave; then listening to his father's slippered footsteps shuffling away, across the floor, and back down the stairs until the silence was all around him and he could look at the bedside table clock, at the ceiling, at the clock and the ceiling again, again and again as _so what do I do_ would start up— _what do I do what do I do what do I do?_ —kneading this prayer bead once again, again and again until it gained so much heat it would flare, ignite, and spread its raging firestorm—its words the fuel and the flames—to the furthest reaches of his mind.

The firestorm would approach exhaustion points as the words of the prayer would start to burn themselves out, and he would try to take advantage of these interludes of relative calm to consider his situation rationally; would cup his chin in the palm of his hand or hold it between his thumb and bent index finger, as he'd seen his father do when engaged in sober contemplation. Or, attempting to imitate the gestures he'd observed his father employ in conversation, during parties, with his Economics Department colleagues, the boy would start gesturing assertively under the covers with his hand and forearm—though in a crimped fashion, the movements taut, jerky, pulled close to his chest by the constraint of the covers and his only marginally diminished panic and terror—gesturing as though he were in debate with himself, emphasizing the salient features of the matter under consideration, or rather, the matter that he could only _wish_ could be under his consideration, his control. The matter that, in fact, on a nightly basis was on top of him, all over him, threatening to envelope him, to devour him whole.

"Rationally," "sober contemplation," "salient features," "matter under consideration"—vocabulary of the sort the boy would hear his parents and the other Economics Department professors and their wives use at his parents' parties; words beyond the boy's own powers of expression but which, along with similar words and phrases, the boy would one day employ, when considering the matter as an adult, to best articulate and understand what, on these nights when he was nine, after his father would leave him, during these intervals of comparative quietude, he was attempting, which was to discover an escape from the maze of ever so narrow and shortened thought corridors in which he found his powers of reasoning, such as they were at that age, confined. An escape that would allow him to arrive at a sensible solution to the quandary that confronted him; a wise and prudent decision as to what to do. An escape he would achieve by taking on and employing, as best he could, the persona of reasonableness, of rationality his father presented to the world in hopes that so doing might help him vanquish the horrors his father was nightly bringing to his bed.

Sometimes a thought would occur to him—a turn in the maze; another prayer bead: _I know what I'll do—I'll tell Mom. Yeah, I'll tell Mom!_ —and he would jab his hand with extra energy as he'd think this. But then, remembering what his father had told him, he would sit up in bed, place his hands on either side of his head, and squeeze, thinking: _But I can't do that, can't do that, can't do that! If I do that he'll kill me!_

So the boy would lie back down again, turning his eyes once again to the bedside table clock and its steadily proceeding hands, the maze complete—no exit; his mind kneading the first prayer bead once more, sounding its words again and again:

So what do I do what do I do what do I do?

The firestorm raging, subsiding, then raging and subsiding again, again and again until finally—and sometimes after he would notice the forlorn whistle of a freight train moving down the tracks of the Tennessee Central Railroad, which bordered his neighborhood—the boy, despairing utterly, would go to the bathroom, get in the tub, and, adjusting the water until it was running as hot as he could take it, give himself over to its refuge, believing more and more in his fantastic dream, on and on through the night, until he would turn once more to the bathroom window shade and, noticing the change in the light, move to the back of the tub, lift the shade, and see that it was morning.

# 10

## In the Classroom

THE BOY SAT AT HIS DESK AT SCHOOL, staring at his teacher, trying to understand what she was saying. Mrs. McCready's mouth was moving, making sounds the boy knew had to be words as she spoke to him and the other students, but it was as though she were speaking in a foreign tongue. He couldn't understand a thing.

Then Mrs. McCready stopped talking, was looking directly at him, staring at him with a question on her face. She started speaking to him, but all he understood was what, with raised eyebrows and a smile, she said last, in a thin, nasalized voice that sounded like it came over a two-way radio: "Calling Sam, calling Sam—do you read me? I repeat, do you read me?" Then the other students, who were all looking at him, started laughing. Feeling a slackness in his face, he looked back at Mrs. McCready and after a while the other students stopped laughing, just stared at him along with their teacher, who wasn't smiling anymore. He felt like he was inside a movie, watching it. The other students and Mrs. McCready, the classroom and the rest of the school—everything but himself—was part of a movie he was watching from inside out.

Mrs. McCready started speaking to the whole class again, but she kept casting glances at him. The question on her face had grown bigger.

# 11

## Remembering, Not

IN THE DAYTIME the boy did not remember what happened at night. Even at night—after his father would leave his bed and return downstairs; after the firestorm in the boy's mind had raged and subsided again and again and the boy had tried and failed over and over to think of a sensible solution to his quandary, a wise and prudent decision as to what to do—as, finally, giving up, he would make his way, despairing, from bed to bathtub, he would begin to forget what he'd seen when he opened his eyes and lifted his hand to look down his body at what his father was doing to him, and he would forget more and more as he took in the water's warmth, filling and draining and filling the tub again and again as his feelings, as well, about what had happened also began to fade and be replaced by his trembling excitement at his impossible dream—that it was still before his bedtime; that he was taking his normal bath; that when he finished he would towel himself dry and put on his pajamas and his mother would come up to help him say his prayers and tuck him in to bed for a sleep that would last till morning—so that by the time dawn's first light would begin to seep around and through the bathroom window shade, he would not only have forgotten what his father had done to him, or even that his father had come to his bed at all; he would have forgotten, as well, his panic and woe, his helplessness, anger, and grief—these feelings replaced by a leaden tiredness, a dull depression as he lifted himself from the tub to get ready for school; to prepare to face the day.

He would not remember as he put on one of his pairs of jeans and a T-shirt, white socks and his high-top, white canvas Keds—his standard school attire. He would not remember as he tied his shoelaces—which, even in his depression, he did as fast as he could, from long-formed habit, as though he were going for a record—or as he took his school bag from the card table and went downstairs for breakfast. He would not remember as he sat at the dining room table before the plain, white cereal bowl, the napkin, spoon, and box of Rice Crispies, and the wax-coated cardboard carton of milk and the bowl of sugar his mother always set out for him. He would not remember as he poured the cereal into the bowl, sprinkled sugar over it, then poured the milk, causing the Rice Crispies to began to snap, crackle, and pop just like the TV commercial—with its three smiling, elf-like characters playing piano, guitar, and bass as they took turns singing a jaunty jingle—said they did. He would not remember as he picked up his spoon and began to eat with the jingle's lyrics going in his mind—the first elf singing to the jingle's melody:

Snap—what a happy sound

Snap is the happiest sound I've found

You may clap, rap, tap, slap, but

Snap makes the world go 'round.

Snap, Crackle, Pop—Rice Krispies!

Followed by the second, who sang:

I say it's Crackle, the crispy sound

You gotta have crackle or the clock's not wound

Geese cackle, feathers tickle, belts buckle, beets pickle,

but Crackle makes the world go 'round.

Snap, Crackle, Pop—Rice Krispies!

And then the third:

I insist that Pop's the sound

The best is missed unless Pop's around

You can't stop hoppin' when the cereal's poppin'

Pop makes the world go 'round.

Snap, crackle, pop—Rice Krispies!

He would not remember as he continued eating, chewing, and swallowing the cereal, the lyrics sounding in his mind without conferring the modicum of lift they usually managed to give him; as he thought dully of how he hadn't been able to decipher the swiftly-sung "Geese cackle, feathers tickle, belts buckle, beets pickle" ("peace cackle"? "belts puckle"? "feets bickle"? "feathers tickle" was the only part he'd felt sure of) until one day, standing in the lunch line of the Ransom Elementary cafeteria, he'd overheard Trudy Miller talking about the commercial to Linda Nichols—Trudy Miller, who more than once had bragged that her family had a subscription to the _The New York Times_ , which her father would read every evening when he came home from work; who the previous year, when they were third graders, had opened an early lead over him in the color-coded graded reading program (reaching Blue when he was still at Red, then Aqua when he'd reached Blue), then maintained it the entire year, finishing two full levels ahead of him; Trudy calmly saying each word of the troublesome line to Linda Nichols' nodding approval.

He would not remember what his father had done to him or how he had felt about it as the jingle's lyrics continued sounding in his mind and he offered minimal responses to whatever breakfast small talk his mother might attempt to engage him in ("Do all your homework?" "Yes." ... "Looking forward to Field Day?" "Yes." ... "It's Friday next week, isn't it?" "Think so." ... "You look tired—how did you sleep?" "OK." "Well good."); as, finishing breakfast, as usual, before his sister came downstairs and his brother had woken, he would spoon the last of the sugar-sweetened milk into his mouth, get up from the table, slip his arms through his school bag's straps, and, tugging the straps to adjust the bag's position on his back, start for the front door, neither quickly nor slowly but at a regular pace, blank-faced, feeling his weariness and depression as his mother's words trailed behind him.

"You didn't brush your teeth."

"I'll do it tonight."

"Have a nice day."

He would not remember as he proceeded down the front walk, turned left onto the sidewalk, and walked down Central Avenue to Central's intersection with Bowling; as he crossed Bowling and started up Central's gradual slope towards Park Circle; as sometimes, noticing a movement ahead on the opposite sidewalk, he would spot David Levy, his sister's sixth grade classmate, with a hand-sized SONY transistor radio pressed to his ear, loping along at an easygoing pace; as he would slow his steps to avoid catching up, catching David Levy's attention, so he wouldn't have to wave or say hi.

He would not remember as he turned right where Central ended at Park Circle; as he walked up Park Circle, crossed Richland Avenue, and continued to West End, where he turned left and came to a set of small, one-story stores with plain, straightforward names—"Coronet Studio Photography," "Gladney's Hair Styles," "Mac's Laundromat," "Gus Drug," "Schwartz's Deli," "Freed's Bakery," and "Austin Electric."

He would not remember as he stopped in front of Gus Drug to wait at the crosswalk, ignoring David Levy and other children, hardly noticing the glints of morning sunlight that, reflecting off the windows and chrome of passing cars, flashed in his eyes, causing him to involuntarily squint as the morning crossing mother, uniformed in a navy blue jacket with brass buttons, a white cap perched jauntily on her bouffant hair, after she'd judged enough children had gathered, would place her whistle in her mouth and, spreading wide her white-gloved hands, stride out into the middle of West End's four lanes and all cars would come to a stop as she blew her whistle shrill and sharp in the air of the crisp fall morning; as the four sixth grade boys who, as crossing guards—Mrs. Jones's deputies, sporting white, chrome-buckled sashes and wooden poles with square, yellow banners hanging at their ends—would step out into the street, two from each side, as well; as, crossing with the other children, the boy would glance at Pete Peterson, the 6th grade's star athlete and the crossing guard he'd begun to look up to with a passion whose fierceness approached adoration, worshipful love, ever since the morning in the first week of school in early September when a car, without a muffler it seemed, had sped through the school zone in a low-pitched growl, at a speed far in excess of the limit clearly marked, at the zone's beginning and end points, by yellow cones and "15mph" signs placed on the center stripe—the car speeding through at the precise moment when Mrs. Jones had spread her hands and taken her first stride out into the road, at which point Mrs. Jones had blown her whistle more shrilly than the boy had ever heard, then yanked it from her mouth and yelled, "Get his license!" and Pete Peterson, as though he'd trained for this very moment for years, had dropped his pole, whipped out a notepad and pen from his back pocket, and, eyeing the back of the by now fast escaping car, begun jotting rapidly.

"You get it Pete?"

"Sure did, Mrs. Jones."

And Mrs. Jones had reported it to the police that morning, then a week later announced triumphantly that the driver had been identified, had his license suspended, and been made to pay a heavy fine.

The boy would not remember as he gave Pete Peterson the briefest glance, then looked away quickly, not hoping, as he usually did, for the briefest glance back.

He would not remember as, walking up the right-side sidewalk of Park Circle South, with the tracks of the Tennessee Central Railroad running parallel in a ravine to his left and small-lotted, unassuming houses passing by on his right, he kept his head down, trying not to notice the students around him; as he crossed Gillespie where it ended at Park Circle South, and walked on towards Byron, with Ransom Elementary now coming into sight, its schoolyard appearing to him as a pointillist animation of students in varicolored dress approaching its two front entrances from every direction; as he crossed Byron and started up the walkway that began at the schoolyard's corner and bisected the yard at an angle, leading to the main entrance; as, taking the entrance steps, he passed a long row of bicycles, their front wheels resting in the metal slots of bicycle stands arranged end-to-end along the front of the building, not trying, as he usually did, to spot his sister's bike among them, see if she'd made it to school ahead of him by her separate route, which she claimed was shorter.

He would not remember as he entered the building and walked down the hallway of the school's newer wing, echoing with students' chatter, to Mrs. McCready's classroom at the end; as then, head down, he entered the classroom, not giving even the briefest nod, wave, or glance to anyone, even his best friends—Glenn Woodson, the fattest boy in the class but smart and good in sports; Scottie Shelton, with his creased slacks, button shirts, and neatly combed hair; and Gary Peterson, Pete Peterson's younger brother and the fourth grade's best athlete—much less talking to them; instead going straight to his desk where he would sit and, propping his elbows on its wooden surface, cupping his chin in his hands, fix his gaze on the long, thin, shallow recession of the pencil slot at the top of the desktop as he would begin to feel the press of Mrs. McCready's examining eyes.

He would not remember as, for yet another day, he endured Mrs. McCready's question-marked stare, listening to what had become the steady drone of his teacher's voice, which before the rape had—with its varying topographies of pitch, stress, volume, and tone—never sounded remotely as it routinely did now, like a dull, steady discharge of meaningless noise—noise which frequently felt far more distant, even, than what his Uncle Maurice, his mother's younger brother and an electrical engineering major at Georgia Tech, could pick up on his shortwave radio when the boy and his family would visit relatives in Atlanta (Maurice, eyebrows raised, assessing each signal as he adjusted the dial to the point of least static: "Now that, I think, is Chinese . . . and that's Japanese . . . and that . . . that I'm not sure about. This stuff is coming from halfway around the world, you know. Can you grasp that?"), for the boy could often no longer imagine the noise that came from his teacher's mouth as being a language at all.

Nor would he remember as then, by degrees, day by day, Mrs. McCready's voice proceeded—at first as though, it seemed to the boy, miraculously, but soon as if it were the most natural thing in the world—to reassume its topographies; and as, day by day, he managed to understand more and more of what she was saying and even to respond to her questions, initially in the briefest of fashions—with the slightest of nods and halting one or two word answers—then, by stages, more and more completely, until he'd managed, even, to begin injecting into his voice the barest colorations of affect—of tones and timbres suggesting pleasantness and equanimity; had managed to begin the process of masking his deepest weariness and despair.

He would not remember as he passed through, observed, and took part in the various enactments of normalcy within the routine of his day-to-day existence; as he began, more and more, to participate in the normalcy at his previous, pre-rape levels, forming, more and more, day by day, as he did so, the wordless realization (a realization he would gain the capacity to articulate only after reaching a point in his adulthood at which he would find the serenity needed, first, to recall and then to reflect upon this period of his life with clarity and dispassion) that, in fact, he was not merely watching a movie but was expected to be part of the movie himself; was expected to assist, as a cast member, in its day-to-day production, from one scene to the next, along with everyone else. He would not remember as he sensed that this normalcy could far more easily deal with deviations of magnitude on the order of a car speeding through a school zone—provided, of course, the car didn't strike any children, or, perhaps, he sensed, even if it did—than it could long tolerate the transgression of his unadorned display of—or, rather, lack of effort to hide—his unexplained depression. He would not remember as he realized that the normalcy was carrying him along in what felt like its unstoppable flow; carrying him steadily forward, in unwavering pace with itself, its demand insistent, unrelenting, that he continue to assist its enactment by making whatever sacrifices of emotional honesty, by offering whatever covering shows of ersatz feeling were thereby required, whether or not he felt the least inclination to do so.

And he would not remember as he began, more and more, to realize that, in fact, he _did_ feel the least inclination, or even more than the least inclination, to do so—that is, to fake it. As he realized more and more that perhaps more important to him than anything else—the preservation of his genuine feelings included—was his desire that the steadily flowing stream of normalcy never release him, leaving him behind, stranded on its banks. As he sensed that his best friends even, noticing how he wasn't talking to them in the halls, the classroom, on the playground, or in the cafeteria, had started to think he was strange. That they may have started to see him as someone who no longer knew how to act right; who might never know how to act right again. To see him as someone who, if he didn't watch himself, might, permanently and forever, turn into a flat out nut case.

He would not remember as, every afternoon at three PM, the clackers of the round, flat, electric school bells mounted at intervals high on the Ransom Elementary hallway walls—with the closest bell just outside Mrs. McCready's classroom door—began to vibrate, ringing the end of classes for the day; as he gathered whatever books, booklets, and mimeographed handouts he needed for homework, placed them in his school bag, then stood and, slipping his arms through the straps, walked out of the classroom. As he walked down the hallway, out Ransom Elementary's main entrance, down the walkway, then down Park Circle South. As the afternoon crossing mother, with her white cap perched on her own bouffant (though at a slightly different angle, the boy had occasionally again begun to notice, than the morning crossing mother's), blew her whistle and, spreading wide her white-gloved hands, stepped out into West End Avenue, her 6th grade deputies stepping out as well, grasping their yellow-bannered poles. As he stopped at Gus Drug for bubble gum and a Three Musketeers bar or a 5-cent bag of M&Ms, paying Gus, who manned the register, from the 50 cents allowance his mother gave him every week. As, eating his candy (and with a deep sense of guilt—which he didn't understand and wouldn't in the least have been able to articulate—prodding him, for even faintly enjoying its taste, to finish it quickly), he entered Austin Electric to briefly look at the expensive sets of miniature trains and racing cars—that he could hope to be given only as Christmas presents, and only if he was good—and then more seriously at the plastic sets of World War II armies he could afford by saving his allowance. As, taking the next set he'd set his sights on—Rommel's Afrika Korps—off the shelf and looking through the box's cellophane window at the soldiers in their khaki uniforms and German-style helmets and the sleek-lined Panzer tanks, he again calculated how long it would take, if he cut down on his gum and candy purchases, before he had enough money to buy the set, though his once enthusiastic desire to possess it, dulled greatly by his depression, now echoed only faintly and far away. As, unwrapping his bubble gum and placing it in his mouth (his guilt here assailing him for enjoying, however vaguely, the taste of the gum as well), he walked up West End, leaving Gus Drug and Austin Electric, which had failed once again to deliver their usual lift, behind.

He would not remember as he turned right off West End onto Park Circle; as he crossed Richland, then turned left off Park Circle onto Central, descended the slope, crossed Bowling, and walked the final stretch of sidewalk to his house; nor would he remember as he came up the front walkway, opened the screen door, tossed his school bag on the living room sofa, which, with the front window behind it, was positioned along the wall to the right of the door, and sat at the sofa's far end. He would not remember as he reached over the sofa's arm to the RCA TV, twisting the small ON/OFF knob on the control panel clockwise, increasing the torque until with a muted click the tension released and, crackling with electricity, the screen gradually came to life, or as he moved his hand to the larger knob for selecting channels, clicking from Channel 8, where the maid watched "General Hospital" for her afternoon break, to Channel 4 for "Leave It To Beaver" or Channel 5 for "Popeye and Friends," leaning over the arm every few minutes to switch back and forth between these two three-thirty to four PM shows; and he would not remember as he continued his weekday afternoon viewing with, from four to four-thirty, "The Three Stooges" (Channel 4) and "Superman" (Channel 8) followed by "The Mickey Mouse Club" (Channel 8) from four-thirty to five since there were no viable alternatives for that time slot, what with the Bobby Lord Show, a country music program, on Channel 4, and The Big Show, which had movies he never found interesting, on Channel 5—this being the thirty minutes of viewing he would often feel himself actually struggling to get through, for there was something about the whole idea of having a club with "Mickey Mouse" in its name that felt childish, for kids much younger than himself, even though some of the kids on the show—who, increasing the silliness of it all, were called Mouseketeers—looked older than himself. Plus, he thought the Mickey Mouse hats, with their big black ears, that everyone, the show's adult leaders included, often wore, made the boys look like sissies, but, worse than everything else, there was something troubling about the effect that Annette Funicello, the oldest girl Mouseketeer, could have on him, especially when, in a close up, she looked into the camera, right at him, or sang a song in a voice that sounded sweet as candy. He hated to admit to himself that he felt attracted to her, but, then again, deep down, he couldn't deny it. As, feeling at once attracted and disturbed by his attraction, the boy would keep watching her, his eyes not wavering from hers on the screen; as all the while his father's fingers stroking his penis, fondling his testicles; his father's mouth sucking his penis again and again and how, as he listened to the suctioning sound this made, he would wonder if this was some way his father had found to suck out his soul; the butterfly-wings touch of his father's fingers on his nipples and the pain that kept welling up through his solar plexus again and again from some place inside that felt infinitely deep; his father's thumbs, on the first night, the rape night, pressing down on the base of his brain; his father's hands choking him, keeping him silent as the rape progressed, bringing him into the Blackness, and then his father's words when he came out It ("If you tell anyone, I will kill you... . And that includes your mother."), not to mention lying in bed on that first night, the rape night, after his father had left him, with the silence and stillness all around him and the separate pain that then started bruising up from another place deep inside him, up through his anus, bruising through him again and again and again like he was a piece of tender fruit; not to mention, also, _so what do I do what do I do what do I do_ and the other turns in the small, narrow maze of his thoughts or the baths and _get away! get away! get away!_ or anything else that would happen to him, inside or out, from the time when, his prayers said, his mother would leave him and he would lie awake waiting for the sound of his father's footsteps to the time when the lightening of the bathroom window shade would announce the arrival of morning—as, all the while, all of these things and every other thing connected to what his father had done and was doing to him were being kept sequestered by his mind at the absolute furthest possible remove from his consciousness as he would gaze at Annette Funicello and her eyes staring into his own.

But were they? Or were they, instead, just a few synaptic firings away? But, even if so, the synapses were somehow blocked, dealt with so they absolutely would not fire and he absolutely would not remember as he would watch Annette and the others sing the closing song of "The Mickey Mouse Club."

From five to five-thirty he would stay on Channel 8 for cartoons—on Monday there was Huckleberry Hound, Tuesday had Peter Potamus, Wednesday Yogi Bear, Thursday Magilla Gorilla, and Friday Woody Woodpecker—still not remembering, feeling flat as he watched each episode, scarcely noticing he was missing the usual sense of mild comfort the cartoons gave him, finding himself thinking as he watched each character: _This is what they do. This is what they're supposed to do_ ; imagining that each character was surrounded by an invisible mold—a mold that was super thin and flexible so that the character, or maybe even a real person if people had the molds too (which the boy, when he thought about it, suspected they might), wouldn't notice their mold at all, at least not normally; so that they could eat and drink and smell and touch and wash themselves and even breathe and piss and shit through their mold without noticing it was there, because their mold could let things pass through it that way, as though it wasn't there, and as long as they kept doing more or less what they were expected, what they were supposed and allowed to do, their mold would remain cooperative—thin and flexible, invisible—but from the moment a character or person started to do anything they _weren't_ at all expected, _weren't_ supposed and allowed to do—if Woody Woodpecker, say, instead of pecking trees, were to start pecking people's faces, or if Annette Funicello were to begin grinning crazily and singing songs in a voice that sounded like the Wicked Witch of the West, or—it shocked him that he imagined this, but he did—if Annette were to suddenly pull a flame thrower out from under her skirt and start torching the rest of the Mouseketeers—if a character or a person started seriously misbehaving in any fashion, then their mold, if _it_ behaved as _it_ was supposed to, would, though still invisible, immediately begin to harden and thicken in order to help keep them from doing what they shouldn't, but once the character or person had, with their mold's assistance, ceased their misbehavior, their mold would again become thin and flexible, and as long as they hadn't done anything seriously destructive or illegal—like pecking people's eyes out or torching Mouseketeers—they would be OK. At first the boy wasn't sure how to feel about this, and, especially, about the mold that he suspected, more and more, surrounded himself. On the one hand, it disturbed him that his mold could control him this way. On the other hand, he started to feel more and more comforted by the thought that his mold could keep him in line.

But could it?

For he began to suspect that there might be a catch—a limit to what his mold was capable of. If a person were strong enough and had enough willpower to do what they weren't expected, weren't supposed to do, no matter how hard and thick their mold became, they might be able to crack it—crack their mold, and then maybe for a few moments they might feel completely free, but then something very bad, the boy began more and more to worry, might happen. The person might start becoming invisible, little by little, just like the mold, to the people around them, until eventually they faded out completely. Or maybe they would start to break up into a million little pieces that would be swept up as garbage for disposal. Or maybe something else would happen, but whatever it was, it would mean the end.

And that, the boy realized, was something he was _very_ afraid of: that his own impulses to act as he shouldn't—by never smiling, say, or not answering Mrs. McCready's questions, or refusing to eat his food at dinnertime—might, at any moment—a moment he wouldn't recognize until it was full upon him, start to surge up within him so powerfully that these impulses became stronger than his mold, thereby giving his willpower an absolute determination he wouldn't be able to stop; a determination that would crack his mold, bust him out of it completely; that would, yes, maybe provide him with a few brief, joyful moments of pure, complete freedom, but that, whether it ended up making him invisible or breaking him into a million little pieces or doing something else to him just as bad that he couldn't imagine, would, in any case, set into motion a chain of events that would, inevitably, end up _ending_ him. And so, he decided that when it came to preserving his mold the only thing as strong as his willpower would be his willpower. He had to figure out how he could use his willpower to stop itself. To stop itself from breaking his mold.

And this was where another TV show figured in, for as, from Monday to Friday, the boy would watch Huckleberry Hound, Peter Potamus, Yogi Bear, Magilla Gorilla, and Woody Woodpecker, he would find himself remembering "Sea Hunt," the program which used to occupy Channel 8's five to five-thirty time slot.

And as an adult he would—with the assistance of Cable TV re-runs and, eventually, the Internet—remember the show again—how much he would look forward, when "Sea Hunt" was showing, to the shot that opened every episode—of Lloyd Bridges, who starred as Mike Nelson, a professional scuba diver, standing on the deck of his boat, gazing out over the water as though in search of something, then donning his wet suit cap and goggles, preparing himself for another underwater adventure. How, then, after a commercial break, Mike Nelson, his powerful chest and biceps auguring success, would proceed to enact a sequence of stratagems that ensured the survival of himself and whomever he was entrusted with protecting for the episode; stratagems that involved actions ranging from spearing fish for food while under threat of starvation in a life raft shared with a group of jumpy tourists, to evading electric eels and torpedo rays, to forestalling the bends in less experienced divers, to defusing underwater explosives, to extracting a drum containing a poisonous chemical from the bottom of a reservoir, to, in any number of cases, fending off sharks—Mike Nelson accomplishing all of these feats with his trademark cool and deftness under pressure.

At age nine, only half-watching whatever cartoon was on, the boy would recall how "Sea Hunt" always ended—with Lloyd Bridges, wearing a captain's hat (with its wrinkled fabric, much more genuine, it seemed to the boy, than Captain Bob's shiny new one), turning from the controls of his boat to offer a reassuring smile directly to the camera, along with words the boy could remember verbatim, that, still remembering, the boy would confirm as an adult: "Hello there. I'm Lloyd Bridges. Skin diving is fun and adventure for young and old, but it can be dangerous, so know the sport well and don't take any chances. Be with you next week, for another exciting Sea Hunt." The kindness in Lloyd Bridges' eyes, the gentleness in his face as he gave this weekly farewell—these things too the boy would one day, as an adult, remember and confirm as well.

The boy had eagerly looked forward to every "Sea Hunt" episode, but one day instead of Lloyd Bridges on his boat, gazing out over the water before donning his cap and goggles, the boy had been greeted, after the five o'clock commercials, by a smiling Yogi Bear. Recalling this at age nine, he would feel a deep sadness, for he felt certain that he would never see Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson again, and just as certain that none of the cartoon characters—so full of the childish, goofy stupidity he now felt inside himself—would be even remotely adequate to the task of assisting him were he ever in desperate need, as he sensed, despite his daytime oblivion to what was happening to him at night, he now was; and this assuming that he could still envision the characters magically emerging from the screen and coming into his living room—a possibility he was well past the age of being able to readily entertain.

Nor could he easily believe that, other than Lloyd Bridges, any of the TV shows' real-life actors or the characters they played could actually help him either: not The Beaver—about the boy's own age, who often seemed as powerless and childish as the boy had recently felt; nor the Beaver's older brother Wally, who, like the Beaver, seemed to have a knack for getting into trouble he had difficulty getting himself out of; nor the Beaver and Wally's parents, June and Ward Clever, whose utmost challenges in life all seemed to revolve around their children's trivial and unthreatening predicaments; not the Three Stooges, with their bumbling antics; not Superman or his alter ego, Clark Kent, a mild mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, since Clark Kent often seemed ineffectual and by age nine the boy had become almost completely convinced that Superman was as much a cartoon-like fantasy as any of the characters he watched from five to five-thirty; and certainly not Annette Funicello or anyone else, child or adult, on the Mickey Mouse Club.

And so the boy sat on the sofa with his flatness and depression, hoping to feel some kind of support, of sustenance from what he was watching, but failing to sense anything at all; sat there thinking of how it was only Lloyd Bridges who could give him what he needed—could teach him how to control himself by harnessing and controlling his own willpower.

For only Lloyd Bridges, the boy felt certain, had the potential, in his role as Mike Nelson, to break out of his mold in a good way, without then disappearing or breaking up into a million little pieces; maybe even the potential, somehow, to come through the TV screen, or, more realistically, the boy started to hope, to actually travel to Nashville, to come to their house on Central Avenue—pulling up in a big convertible with its top down, his boat in tow, and, dressed in his wetsuit, getting out and walking up the front walkway, stepping onto the porch and ringing the doorbell—the boy could see it, hear it so clearly—Lloyd Bridges ringing the doorbell or knocking on the screen door and then, when the boy would come to the door to see Lloyd Bridges standing there in all his cool confidence, asking, "Mind if I come in?" and the boy would reply, "Sure," and the screen door would open and into the living room would walk Lloyd Bridges in his wetsuit, holding his flippers in one hand and his air tanks in the other to show the boy he'd already prepared for a dive that he and the boy were going to go on together, by themselves—a dive that would take them deeper than even Lloyd Bridges had ever gone, to a place where they would discover something, the boy had no idea what, but something that would make everything—every single thing—in his life all right. And maybe, the boy imagined, Lloyd Bridges would sense his reluctance, his fear of leaving his home—of leaving, for better or worse, everything he knew for something completely unknown, some wild adventure, and so the boy would imagine Lloyd Bridges, dive-ready, sitting down beside him on the sofa, placing an arm around his shoulders and looking with his calm, confident eyes into his own as he said, "Don't worry, Sam. I'll take care of you all the way down and back. So what do you say—are you ready?"

And then maybe—after they'd walked out of the house and down the front walkway, and after Lloyd Bridges had shown the boy the set of smaller-sized scuba gear he'd prepared and placed in the back seat of the convertible just for the boy, beside which he would place his own; maybe after they'd gotten into the convertible and, pulling the boat behind them, driven away from the house on Central and reached the open highway, headed with the top down under a bright sun and blue sky for California or Key West or wherever it was they'd be going for their dive; maybe then, the boy imagined, he would be able to start telling Lloyd Bridges anything he wanted, anything he needed to tell, though he couldn't at all imagine, as he would sit on the sofa watching whichever cartoon happened to be on that day, what those things—that as an adult he would realize had lain behind the high, thick wall of his depression—would be.

And so the boy would go on that way, no longer really watching the cartoon at all, fantasizing his time with Lloyd Bridges, until, that is, invariably, he would hear, instead of the deep, purring growl of Lloyd Bridges' convertible, the familiar rapid staccato of his father's '53 Plymouth pulling up to the curb; would hear the car door opening and closing; would, not once looking out the front window but continuing to stare at the TV, notice the click of the heels of his father's Florsheims on the concrete of the front walkway, the steps, and the porch, and then, as he kept his eyes on the TV, the sound of the screen door opening and closing, followed by the click of the Florsheims on the wood of the living room floor, his father not stopping to talk or even say hello, ignoring the boy completely as he crossed and exited the room.

And he would not remember as he sat beside his father at the dinner table for another evening meal, dully eating his food under his mother's watchful eye; his brother and sister not glancing up, continuing to eat their food; his father not speaking to him, seemingly unaware of his existence. Nor would he remember as, the meal completed, he sat at his card table in his alcove doing his homework, then, with his sister on her bed, engrossed in her Nancy Drew, went back down to the living room for thirty minutes of the new public TV channel—the only viewing his mother permitted on school nights after dinner—before returning to the loft to take his bath and then, after toweling himself dry and putting on his pajamas, lie on his bed staring at the ceiling while his sister took her own; before his mother would come up to help them say their prayers and tuck them in for a good night's sleep.

# 12

## Partitions / Enfolding

RENDERING HIS FATHER'S SEXUAL ABUSE impervious to recollection, far from being something new for the boy, was a survival tactic he'd long practiced—or, more precisely, that his mind had long practiced, automatically, unconsciously—for his father's sexual abuse hadn't descended upon him full-blown, for the first time, when he was nine. Rather, it had perpetrated itself over the span of his life to that point, in an assortment of various episodes which he would one day, as an adult, having reached a point at which it felt safe enough to recall them, realize stretched back to his earliest memories. Episodes whose deleterious effects—he would also realize, once, as an adult, he had gained the insight requisite to see—had speckled the path of his life beyond childhood like flecks of bright, fresh blood.

As an adult, trying to make sense of it all, he would go through a phase during which he would consider the contents of each episode over and over, though dispassionately, as if from a distance, to whatever measure of precision his memory, to the best of its ability, could manage, until he had come to a point at which his recollections formed a well-ordered catalogue of suffering—each abuse event recalled with a brevity and clinical detachment suitable for a report to a child welfare agency:

—An after bedtime digital penetration of his anus occurring during a family visit to his paternal grandfather's home, set on a hill overlooking a small town nestled in the mountains of northeastern Georgia—the house a two-story red-brick colonial with dark green shutters, its front yard dotted with dogwoods and maples, its front facade skirted and front walk lined with box hedges, always neatly trimmed; a property every bit as respectable looking as the house on Central, the episode taking place when the boy was two or three, after his mother, having put him and his sister to bed in one of the house's two guest bedrooms, had returned, via a shared bathroom, to the one she and their father were using; the episode involving the boy's father coming to his bed, initiating anal penetration, then quickly disengaging when the boy had cried out; the father, as he backed away from the bed towards the hallway door, shushing the boy, admonishing him not to wake his sister; the boy then falling into a fretful doze in which he dreamed or fantasized that a bear had gotten into the house and made its way into the bedroom; a bear that was touching his spine with one of its claws, going down his backbone lower and lower until the boy felt completely paralyzed, unable to move; the boy emerging from his doze—and the dream or fantasy—to scream until his mother was at his bedside; the boy crying out to her, "A bear! A bear!" and, in fact, bears sometimes came down from higher elevations in the middle of the night to rummage people's garbage cans for food, producing, as they did so, a dull, disordered clanging of the metal cans and their lids that had sometimes torn the boy from his sleep, but he'd never had nightmares or fantasies about it, and on this occasion his mother had reassured him, saying, "There's no bear," and, "I'm here," and, "You're safe"—repeating these things over and over, holding the boy's hand and rubbing his back, until the boy had quieted down and eventually gone to sleep.

—An occurrence of exhibitionistic masturbation, carried out one day when the boy, to the best of his recollection as an adult, was three or four, in the house on Central, in which his father had stopped him as he was passing through the downstairs hallway, where the "Smile Club" photos hung—family photographs, taken at least once a year, in which all family members were invariably smiling (his mother's prerequisite for hallway display) and under which, in the bottom margin of the framed prints, his mother would write "Smile Club" in a neat, calligraphic cursive, along with the date the photo was taken—his father waylaying the boy before the smiling faces as he was about to enter the stairwell to go up to his alcove in the loft, or to go to the living room to watch TV or outside to play—exactly where he couldn't clearly, as an adult, recall; his father, in any case, intercepting him in the hallway, ushering him into the downstairs bathroom with "Come here, I wanna show you something," uttered in a halfway cajoling, halfway hectoring tone, following which, as the boy stood near the sink and watched, his father had unbuckled his belt, pulled down his tailored wool slacks and dark plaid boxers, sat on the toilet seat, and, saying, "Watch now—I'm gonna show you how to use the bathroom," started stroking his penis, his penis growing bigger and bigger as he kept stroking it, saying, "This is how you do it—see?"; the boy transfixed by the penis, how large it was growing; by his father's complete absorption as he stared down at it, kept stroking; the sight of it all backing the boy against the edge of the sink, clenching his throat, tightening his chest, moving his breathing higher and higher until it felt like he just barely had enough space inside himself to breath; his father all the while continuing to stare down at his penis, saying, "See? This is how you do it, see?"; his father stroking and stroking until some sticky-looking white stuff that reminded the boy of the tapioca his mother or the maid would sometimes make for dessert started coming out of the place where pee usually came and here his father had started squeezing and pulling on his penis as though he were trying to make as much of the white stuff come out as he could. Then, as his eyes started to get a lost look, like they were half-looking inside themselves, his father tore some toilet paper off the roll that hung on the wall and wiped off what hadn't already dripped down into the toilet bowl, let go of the paper and flushed, his voice slackening, losing intensity, his face looking completely drained and sad as, continuing to hold, stare at his now rapidly softening penis, he said with a tired sigh, "And that's how you do it," then—when the boy, still transfixed, didn't move—added with an edge of bitter anger "That's all. You can go now."

—What, remembering as an adult, the boy would come to think of as "the bathtub incident," which occurred when he was around five or six and which began with his father taking a bath with him to teach him a new game: the boy had to reach out as quickly as he could to touch his father's penis whenever it bobbed to the water's surface, with matters quickly proceeding to a point at which the boy, following his father's instructions, was standing in the tub so that his father, standing also, penis erect, could proceed to orally rape him, after which ...

And so on.

One way that, as an adult, he would attempt to make sense of how, as a child, he could have forgotten incidents such as these would be to think in terms of partitions—that his mind, when he was a child, must have possessed an immense capacity for forming them, partitions that is, and of an absolute nature, such that they would, not only throughout his childhood but for years afterwards, remain virtually impenetrable by his powers of recollection; that his mind exercised this capacity in order to safely sequester and quarantine such incidents both from each other and from the relative normalcy, such as it was, of the other parts of his life. ("Relative," "such as it was" since the stressors of his father's alcoholism and related manic-depressive mood swings punctuated the rhythms of the house on Central on a frequent, often daily, basis.)

Another metaphor he would utilize was that of enfolding—of thinking in terms of his mind enfolding each incident of his father's abuse, as soon as completed, into the relative, such-as-it-was normalcy of his everyday life in a fashion similar, in a neurophysiological context, to the way in which the blender they'd had back then, with its two rotary blades, would mix the dark vanilla extract into the blandness of the light yellow batter for the cakes his mother and the maid would make; his mind dispersing each incident into parts so small and separate as to insure a diaspora of his suffering to a point of invisibility.

As an adult, having remembered, he would reach a place at which he would possess the wherewithal to understand his father's abuse and his own forgetting of it in such a distanced, reflective, analytical fashion, just as, as an adult, he would arrive at a place at which he would be able to openly communicate with others concerning these matters—with counselors, support groups, close friends, his siblings (who shared memories, in some cases recovered, in others never forgotten, of their own experiences of their father's abuse, sexual and other), even with his mother, who, getting a divorce as soon as it became clear what her husband had done to her children and how much it had damaged them all, came to recognize how her naiveté had blinded her to what was going on. ("Back then," she would one day say, sipping a glass of iced tea, "you never imagined something like that going on inside a family like ours." "A family like ours" meaning, of course, middle class, high status, respectable.)

As an adult, he would come to a point at which he would be able to discuss these matters readily and fluently, logically and dispassionately, and to agree:

—That his father was a deeply disturbed individual.

—That, of course, no childhood misbehavior on his part could have justified his father's abuse.

—That the fact that his father was, in many respects, a highly talented, empathetic, intelligent, and, in behavioral terms, completely "normal" human being made his alcoholism, manic-depression, and sexual predations all the more tragic—infinitely so—for himself and his family both.

As an adult he would come to a place at which he would receive immense healing from such understanding—healing of such a degree as to see him through what in some ways, among all the challenges his father's abuse had presented for his life from childhood onward, would prove to be the biggest challenge of all: his father's failure to ever admit to what he had done.

(And was this failure on his father's part, the boy would one day wonder, due to his father's own amnesia concerning what had happened, whether accomplished by ironclad partitions, consummate enfolding, or, perhaps, by a personality so fractured as to have become entirely split, multiple? Or was his father's incapacity—which manifested in an unbroken denial of wrongdoing stretching from the time when his grown children began, individually and together, to confront him with their memories, until his final hours as he lay, cancer-ridden, on his deathbed—due to more external factors? For, regardless of whether any legal action one or more of his adult children might have taken against him could have succeeded (a decidedly uncertain prospect given the applicable statutes of limitation, criminal and civil, for which, under any standard interpretation, the deadlines had already, by the time his children began their confronting, long since run), his father—the boy would one day speculate—may have felt an utter terror of public humiliation, particularly within the sphere of West Nashville society, were one or more of his children to take any admission of wrongdoing on his part public. But no matter the reason—his father's incapacity to admit would be something the boy would one day, as an adult, however reluctantly, sometimes sadly, be able to live with, move on from.)

In adulthood, the boy would gain such advantages of remembering, understanding, healing, and letting go.

But as a boy, he—or his mind, rather—would simply forget.

# 13

## "Mature"

SOON AFTER THE RAPE and commencement of his father's nightly molestations, the boy's sister—picking up, perhaps (the boy as an adult would one day speculate, though his sister would be unable to recall) on the tension in the boy's voice when, their mother having put them to bed and returned downstairs, they would trade _good night_ s—began to tease him, saying _good night_ again and again as the boy with ever-rising frustration said _good night_ in return, until the boy would be shouting each _good night_ through his tears and their mother would come upstairs again to admonish his sister to stop and tell them both to settle down and go to sleep.

The boy's sister continued her goading during the daytime as well, until the boy would fly into screaming fits; his sister, sensing the approach of these tantrums, egging him on, taunting him with _temper temper temper_ , uttered in tones of maddening softness—until the boy would start crying, then sobbing, exploding into shrieks of _Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!_ repeated over and over at the top of his lungs until their mother would intervene to restrain her daughter and quiet the boy down.

One day, with his _Shut up!_ s rising to a crescendo as his sister, confronting him at the top of the loft's staircase, kept repeating _temper temper temper_ , the boy, who'd never struck his sister in his life and rarely gotten into fights with anyone, punched her in the stomach as hard as he could—so hard that he knocked the breath out of her, doubling her over, and here the boy was certain he could feel his mold instantly start to thicken and harden, then start to crack as his continuing _Shut up!_ s and his sister's moans brought their mother up the stairs, where, placing a comforting arm around his sister, she eyed the boy sharply, her face harsh with condemnation. Pointing a finger at him, she shook it in rhythm with her words:

"Sam, this is _not_ acceptable. You _must_ not hit other people, do you under _stand_?" She looked at his sister, stroking her hair—"Especially girls, even if Claire is a tomboy and still bigger than you."—then fixed him again with her gaze. "If you do this again, I'm going to tell your father, and he can decide how to punish you."

The boy didn't hit his sister again, but his sister's teasing—always finishing with _temper temper temper_ —and the boy's tantrums—always peaking with _Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!_ and ending in sobs of despair—continued.

One day when the boy exploded in yet another top-of-the-stairs tantrum, his mother—her face taut with an exasperation clear to the boy through his tears—pointed and shook her finger again:

"Sam, you have _got_ to stop acting this way. You're acting like a three-year-old child. If you want to grow up to be a man some day, you need to learn to be mature and stop getting upset over every least little thing. If you keep on this way and don't learn to be mature about things, you will never grow up to be a man."

_So that's it_ , the boy thought, drying his tears, standing alone in the loft after his mother had gone back downstairs, taking his sister with her. _So that's it—"mature."_ A new word to understand—a word that could help him learn how to be a man.

That night in the bathtub, the boy listened to the water's gushing, tried to enter its trance space. "Get away! Get away! Get away!" he whisper-screamed, as always, but this time the water refused him, its noise and heat resisting instead of embracing, pushing his words back into his mouth. Remembering what his mother had said, the boy found himself feeling suddenly, horribly embarrassed, monstrously ashamed of his words and tears and tantrums and all the feelings behind them. Yes, _monstrously_ ashamed, _monstrously_ humiliated, for "monster" was the word that came to him now, as he sat in the tub, pushing "Get away!" further and further down into himself, since that was the only thing a three year old boy living inside a nine year old boy's body could be, wasn't it? A monster?

He fell silent; his tears stopped flowing. He remained still as the water filled the tub; as he pulled the drain plug and let the water run down, then re-plugged the drain, his mother's words sounding, the harshness of her face, with its bunched brows and tight, thin lips, pulsing in his mind. He waited silently as the water filled the tub again, his shame and humiliation moving inside him, all through him, changing into something altogether different—something hard and fierce.

"Be a man ... be a man ... be a man ... be a man." At first the words came in the faintest of whispers and haltingly, with wide gaps between each utterance. Then the gaps began to close as the words' intensity kept building and he started feeling something filling the words, suffusing them and himself both, more and more, each time he said them. "Be a man! Be a man! Be a man! Be a man!" Something that pulled the cords of his neck muscles taut; that closed his hands into fists and pressed his teeth together until his head began to shake with the pressure, just as—he would realize, remembering and reflecting as an adult—it had shaken on that first night, the rape night, as he stood in front of the mirror, but this time the feeling wasn't one of insanity, of losing his mind, but rather of gaining something—of gaining control.

The words and the way he was saying them felt good, and so he continued until he was whispering the words as though he were screaming them, with more intensity, determination than he'd ever said _Get away_.

Be a man! Be a man! Be a man! Be a man!

Be a man! Be a man! Be a man! Be a man!

He relaxed his neck muscles after each whisper-screamed burst, then tautened them again and released the next burst. Sometimes he just thought the words, didn't say them out loud, the better to focus on his tautened muscles, on the shaking of his head and the feeling that was beginning to blossom inside it, from the depths of his paroxysmal rage—a feeling of utter lightness of being; of euphoria and blessed release. The boy could hardly believe it, but as he continued uttering and thinking the words, tightening his fists, tautening his neck muscles and pressing his teeth together, he could feel a smile start to bloom on his face.

And there was another cause for the happiness—the boy began to realize—that he found himself feeling at this moment. A cause beyond, simply, this dramatic change in the words and feelings of his midnight bath routine: he had finally found a way, without the help of Lloyd Bridges, to harness his willpower. A means, through his rage, of turning his willpower inward, against itself, and every shameful part of himself that might attempt to use his willpower for its own purposes. This way he could be sure he would never break out of his mold. Ever. This way he could train himself to be a man.

# 14

## Metamorphosis

SOON, AS HIS FATHER CONTINUED to engage in his nightly fondling, stroking, and sucking, the boy's penis started to feel raw and sore, so that when the boy would open his eyes and lift his hand just enough to look down his body at his father's depredations, he would fear what he might see. But the light filtering through and around the shades of the dormer windows would be too dim for him to check with any certainty, so he would close his eyes, cover them back over with his hand, and turn his head away, the pain all the while pulsing up through his solar plexus, his mind filled with utter hopelessness; with the thought that this would never end.

For, after all, he had no choice. No choice but to take it—all that his father was doing to him and all the pain it gave him. And least of all because his father had said he would kill him if he told anyone; more than anything, he'd started to feel, because he wasn't taking the pain only for himself—he was taking it for the entire family. So that his mother, sister, and brother wouldn't have to suffer what he was suffering. So that the "Smile Club" photos that hung in the downstairs hallway—that, by their presentation of an appearance, however superficial, of a collective family happiness, gave him and, he sensed, his mother, sister, and brother, and his father as well, hope for what, as a family, they might one day become, and hope, too, for leaving behind, somehow, the family that every day made more and more clear they actually were—so that the "Smile Club" photos wouldn't suddenly change, with all their smiles vanishing and their faces filling suddenly with tears and cries; cries he could imagine sounding through the house in the stillness of the night, of the sort that fit, the boy felt sure, the name of a Book of the Old Testament the minister at Westminster Presbyterian would sometimes, opening the King James Version of the Bible to its pages, read verses from: a Book named "Lamentations."

And then too there were the "Smile Club" photos that were yet to be taken and hung on the wall—the ones that would never be if he couldn't manage to take the pain—receive all of it unto himself.

And so the boy would close his eyes, let his own meager, constricted flow of tears dry on his cheeks, and take it.

It was only when he would enter the bathroom, switch on its overhead light, and gingerly remove his underwear, which he would pull back up to his waist every night after his father would leave his bed, that he would see the damage done—damage he could no longer not remember his father was inflicting. His penis, head and shaft, was changing into a swollen mottle of dark reds and purples, so that it had started to sting when the water filling the tub would rise to meet it, hurting as much as it did when his father would lick and suck and fondle it; so that the water's gushing warmth no longer gave him comfort as he would look at this part of himself that now appeared to him as ugly and grotesque, as monstrous as his three-year-old behavior; as he would whisper-scream, "Be a man! Be a man! Be a man!" with an ever-increasing despair—a despair that made ever deeper inroads into whatever lightness and euphoria these words and their accompanying rage had been managing to produce.

And so the boy would wonder: how much longer would he be able to last? How much longer could he take it?

# 15

## Bedtime Prayer

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Amen.

ONE NIGHT THE BOY HAD JUST FINISHED saying his bedtime prayer when, as his mother tucked him in, he started to whimper, but this time his mother didn't tell him—as she had when he'd had his last tantrum—that he was acting like a three year old. Instead, for several seconds as his whimpering continued, she stayed silent, observant, as puzzlement, then concern clouded her face.

"What's wrong, Sam?"

The boy shook his head, kept whimpering.

"Sam, please tell me what's wrong."

The boy's eyes grew wet with tears; he shook his head again.

"Sam, please, you have got to tell me what's wrong." His mother's words sounded like the look on her face—pleading, determined.

Releasing a sighing cry, the boy pulled his pajama bottoms and underwear down just enough for his mother to see. Her eyes grew wide; she gasped, then, trying to recover, took a deep breath, gulped silently.

"How did this happen?"

The boy hesitated, closed his eyes, whimpering, shaking his head, remembering his father's words.

"I don't know."

His mother gulped again.

"How long has it been this way?"

The boy whimpered, shook his head, and, his voice full of despair, said the words again:

"I don't know."

Eyes still wide, staring, his mother shook her head.

"Tomorrow morning we're going to Doctor Sealy's."

# 16

## What His Father Asked

THAT NIGHT, after his father had come to his bed and started, the boy, unable to hold in his feelings any longer, felt tears running freely under his left hand, making their way down his face. He lifted his hand, opened his eyes, glanced down his body once more, then closed his eyes, turned his head away, and let out a moaning sob of despair. That's when he felt his father pause, heard his father's voice, sad-sounding and with the barest tinge of what years later, as an adult, he would name as compassion:

"I guess that hurts, doesn't it?"

The boy nodded, felt his chest rise high, then fall as he let out another sob, opened his eyes and lifted his hand to see his father, lips pursed, staring at his penis with a lost, vacant look, as if his eyes were only halfway looking at his penis, were looking also inside themselves, searching for something long since lost, forgotten.

(It would, anyway, seem plausible at least—that his father's eyes had been thus searching, perhaps for his own lost and forgotten innocence—when the boy would one day, as an adult, consider this pivotal moment of the final night his father molested him; would reflect upon it after his mother told him of how, after coming downstairs from putting the boy to bed, she'd gotten up the nerve to confront his father as he was watching the late news; had told his father what she'd seen—the condition of the boy's penis—and asked him if he had any idea of how it could have gotten that way, then listened to his father deny any knowledge whatsoever. But perhaps, the boy would one day reflect, his mother's confrontation had planted a seed of awareness in his father's mind; had managed, however slightly, to break through whatever massive denial or rationalization of his son's suffering had, until then, allowed his father to continue his abuse.

Perhaps.)

The boy continued watching his father's face staring at his penis; continued watching as, after a few moments, his father, not kissing him or saying "I love you" this time, slowly got up from the bed and left. The boy listened to his father's footsteps quietly descending the stairs, then, for a long time, to the silence they left behind.

And then the boy felt it: he was alone.

# 17

## At the Doctor's

THE BOY SAT ON THE EDGE of the examining table, its thin, firm, mattress jacketed in a crisp, white sheet, his legs dangling over the side, his jeans and underwear pulled down to his thighs. Dr. Sealy, a woman whose gray hair, netted in a small, tight bun, made her clearly older than his mother, stood beside him as she studied his penis, gingerly lifting, then lowering it.

"You don't remember an insect or spider biting it?"

The boy shook his head.

"And you haven't been touching it?"

The boy shook his head again.

Dressed again, the boy stood in the waiting room watching his mother and Doctor Sealy, who stood close to each other at the hallway entrance leading to the examination room. Doctor Sealy, arms crossed, spoke in a low mumble, as she often did when talking with his mother in the boy's presence; his mother, her arms also crossed, periodically nodding, as usual. Despite her mumble, the boy managed to catch a few of Dr. Sealy's words including "spider," "insect bite," and one he didn't understand: "masturbation."

His mother stared at the road ahead as she drove them home, her lips pressed together, her hands gripping and re-gripping the steering wheel.

"Are you sure you don't remember a spider or insect biting it?"

"No."

"'No' you don't remember or 'no' you're not sure?"

"'No' I don't remember."

"And you haven't been touching it?"

"No."

"'No' ... ?"

"No, I haven't."

His mother pressed her lips together again, opened them slightly, released a long, thin sigh as she re-gripped the wheel.

"Well, just don't touch it."

# 18

## The Bedside Table Clock

WHEN HIS FATHER STOPPED coming to his bed in the middle of the night, the boy—all memories of the abuse partitioned, enfolded—ended the baths and started paying less and less attention to the bedside table clock, focusing instead—as he would lie awake after his mother, or sometimes his father now, would come up to help him say his prayers and tuck him into bed—on a small, luminescent cross his father had recently given him, explaining that the cross was a present from the bank where he'd recently opened accounts in the boy's and his sister's and brother's names to save money for their college educations. Sitting next to the clock on the bedside table all day, absorbing the sunlight coming through the alcove's dormer windows, the cross would, just after bedtime, outshine the clock face, seeming to mute its glow.

When his father would put him to bed, sometimes he would say in friendly, gingerly tones, "Remember now, don't put your hands down there."

"Down where?"

"Down there, where your underwear are. Keep them near your chin or somewhere outside the covers. But either way—inside or outside—not down there, OK?"

"Why?"

"Because your mother and I, and Dr. Sealy too—we think it's better for you not to."

Why, the boy wondered, was his father talking about this? He couldn't figure it out, recall any reason. Sure, it felt good and somehow comforting to touch himself "down there," through his pajama bottoms and underwear, both at bedtime and later, when he would find himself lying awake, unable to go to sleep, but what harm did it do? The only other times he ever touched himself "down there" were when he was using the bathroom to tinkle and during baths, when he would wash that part of himself, which he'd begun to do again now that his wee wee had returned almost to normal, what with the last of the swelling gone and only the faintest tinges of maroon and lavender remaining ... and how, the boy wondered also, had his wee wee ever gotten that way in the first place? Dr. Sealy hadn't seemed to have any clear idea, and the boy couldn't remember anything himself. Did Dr. Sealy, and his parents too, think it had something to do with that new word—"masturbation"—he'd heard Dr. Sealy say to his mother? Anyway, his father was telling him this as though it were very important, so he might as well go along.

"OK," he would reply, shrugging.

So after his mother or father, having put him to bed, would return downstairs and he'd exchanged _good night_ s with his sister (who'd finally stopped taunting him when, with a dull depression blanketing his anger, the boy had stopped responding to her attempts to rile him), the boy would stare at the cross, sometimes taking it from the bedside table and pulling the covers over his head so as to observe its glow more intensely. He'd fall asleep that way, then wake in the middle of the night still holding it, but by then it would be but a faint smudge of light in his hand or darkened entirely, and it would feel light and brittle, as though any moment, if he held it too tightly, it might crumble into a million little pieces. The boy would feel an emptiness inside and a pain in his solar plexus as he'd set it back on the table beside the clock, then try to go back to sleep.

But often he couldn't, not right away, so he'd lie awake thinking of the "Smile Club" photos in the downstairs hallway, feeling comforted, then, by turns, disturbed as his mind would flash images—he had no idea why—of the photos disappearing or their faces—their eyes filled with tears, their mouths opening wide—on the verge of releasing cries of lamentation that would sound throughout the house and beyond, even to deepest space, and so, seeking anchorage, the boy would fall again into staring at the bedside table clock, its hands moving Time forward, on and on in steady progression, without ceasing, carrying him further and further from everything that had happened; everything his forgetting kept hidden—a forgetting held secure by three words and all they'd come to mean:

Be a man.

# Afterword

Requests:

To repeat the requests made in the Foreword:

If, having now, presumably, finished reading  _Preludes_ , you find it worthy of recommendation, I would be most grateful if you would post a review on the _Preludes_ page of the ebook retailer where you obtained your copy, and most grateful, as well, if you would share your recommendation on your social media.

And I would be triply grateful if you would become my supporter, for as little as a dollar a month, on Patreon, which is basically a 21st century version of the time-honored patron-based method of supporting artists in their work by its enabling of crowdfunded support of artists, including writers, on an ongoing basis. You can find my Patreon page here and, in case it might help you decide whether to become my supporter, find out more about me and my writing on my website—johnbrookswriting.com.

* * *

"Be a man"—the words which, for me as a boy, demanded that I shut down all of the "negative" feelings arising from my father's sexual abuse and, though I wasn't, of course, aware I was doing it, continue to keep suppressed all memories of the abuse itself. (A suppression I somehow managed to maintain completely for more than a decade, until a point in the first half of my twenties when I remembered the episode, described in the story, of my father's masturbatory display in the downstairs bathroom—an exhibitionistic assault perhaps constituting, comparatively, the least severe instance of the abuse. I recovered the remainder of my memories from the time I was thirty-four.)

"Be a man"—an injunction that seemed to insist, in other words, upon the exact opposite of allowing oneself to be open to the emotional truth of one's abuse experiences, which is a key ingredient of all that, I would come to realize as an adult, healing from childhood sexual abuse requires.

Having, in my case, to unlearn such a deeply embedded, false lesson of what it means to "be a man" is but one example of how immense, for male and female survivors both, the challenges of healing can be. And yet I believe that healing _is_ always possible—substantial, transformative, life-affirming healing—for those possessing sufficient resolve to make the effort, and sufficient quantities of insight, support, and whatever other wherewithal they may require for that effort to generate positive yield.

And healing is not only possible but crucial. For it is through healing, achieved by whatever painstaking means, that survivors can gain the ability, by whatever slow degrees, to accept themselves simply as human beings, in all of their imperfection and weakness, and all of their excellence and strength as well.

And it is through healing, to add to this story's Prologue, that survivors can triumph over toxic shame—a shame whose power can reach so far into the psyche of the abused as to, in cases such as mine, assist in the banishment of all memory of the abuse experiences to a subconscious, totalitarian netherworld of the mind which, were it to prevail in maintaining its hegemony, would keep survivors forever silent to the truth of those experiences, even to themselves. Forever silent and incognizant, and, thereby, forever subject to the destructive influences of the abuse upon their lives.

Through healing, and triumphing over such shame, survivors can grow ever stronger in their ability to experience all of their feelings without judging—"positive" and "negative," every single one—concerning every aspect of their lives, including the ability to experience happiness in its simplest, most elemental form—that happiness which arises from appreciating the "mere" fact of one's existence; that comes, not as some lead actor in a show performed for the exclusive purpose of pleasing others or of maintaining a false, falsely "positive" self-image, but that emerges with deepest authenticity, from one's very core.

(And what of minor attracted adults—pedophiles? People like my father, who, due to whatever combination of factors, environmental and/or genetic, find themselves erotically attracted to children? What could "healing" mean for _them_? What could it have meant for my father? And what of those pedophiles who see themselves as being in no need whatsoever of "healing"? I will here set aside these and related questions, hoping to give them ample focus elsewhere.)

Even with the greatest resolve and effort, and the self-insight thereby attained, for that great majority of survivors who as children receive no effective treatment for their abuse, healing's immense challenges can prove daunting. (This is, of course, not to say with respect to the comparatively fortunate minority who do as children receive effective treatment that healing is anything close to easy.) For in addition to having to face and dissolve their own inner impediments, including internalized toxic shame, survivors must be willing to confront, as well, various shame-related barriers maintained by their own families and society at large. Barriers constructed from, among other things, a continuing widespread ignorance of the nature of child sexual abuse and the effect it can have upon its victims, and from a continued resistance to engaging in a full and open discussion of this issue.

I hope, therefore, that this story may serve as a call to action—a call to action to any individual or organization wishing to help reduce such ignorance, promote such discussion, and otherwise heal the wounds child sexual abuse has inflicted and continues to inflict as well as nurture conditions in which the frequency of its occurrence may be lessened. I've provided a list of helpful resources on my website—see the "About Me" section, several pages ahead, for a link.

# Acknowledgements

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to all those people who've read my work, seen potential in it, and provided useful feedback and additional support, including individuals among the following groups:

—my writing instructors and fellow writing students at Stanford University;

—fellow writers at iPublish, Time-Warner's now long defunct internet publishing community;

—classmates and instructors in the writing courses I've taken online through UCLA Extension;

—members of the writers workshops in which I've participated;

—professionals in the publishing industry;

—my book-loving friends and relatives.

In addition, I also wish to thank the authors of all of the books that have provided me with sustenance, guidance, and inspiration, both for my healing from my experience of child sexual abuse and for my writing and my life in general over the years, including:

—Ellen Bass and Laura Davis ("The Courage to Heal" and other books)

—Richard Berendzen ("Come Here: A Man Overcomes the Tragic Aftermath of Childhood Sexual Abuse")

—R. A. Dickey ("Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest For Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball")

—Margaux Fragoso ("Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir")

—Richard B. Gartner ("Betrayed as Boys" and "Beyond Betrayal")

—Scott Heim ("Mysterious Skin")

—Judith Herman ("Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror" and other books)

—Mike Lew ("Victims No Longer")

—Alice Miller ("Thou Shalt Not Be Aware" and other books)

—Walter de Milly ("In My Father's Arms")

—Chuck Rosenthal ("Never Let Me Go")

—Jane Rowan ("The River of Forgetting—A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse")

—Marilyn Van Derbur ("Miss America by Day").

# Cover Design

Cover design by Jennie Kondo

# About Me

I'm a Tokyo-based writer, child sexual abuse survivor-activist, climate change activist, and animal rights activist, among other things of course.

To learn more about me and my writing, please check out my website, at johnbrookswriting.com.

Thank you for your interest.

John Brooks
