But watching that movie she’d chosen, watching a man endure and witness and even inflict almost unimaginable horrors, she saw the character remain, nonetheless, himself. There were more delicate souls, more heroic ones who didn’t make it until the end, but he did. He was a survivor; it was almost like he had no choice in the matter. There is no relief for the survivor. He just goes on. No rest for the weary.
Everyone wants to be the survivor, but they seldom realize how very high the cost is.
“Very funny,” he said afterwards.
“I thought so.” She sounded much more like herself by now.
“Is that how you see yourself? Like him?”
“Well, nobody wants to think they’re like him. But in terms of doing whatever is necessary to survive, however distasteful, I guess maybe.”
“Do you consider him the hero?”
“He’s not a hero. The heroes don’t survive. He’s what it takes to be a survivor.”
“And I’m the Shirley Stoler character, right?” he asked. “The concentration camp guard.”
“She’s cruel because she has power. And no compassion. She enjoys having the ultimate power over people.”
“Like me.”
“If you say so.”
“And Giancarlo Giannini’s character?”
“Well, that’s the question. He does whatever disgusting, dishonorable thing he has to in order to survive. Is he hopelessly degraded or triumphant? There’s nothing he won’t do, and you know the Europeans get a lot grosser than we do.”
“It’s always shit with them. I wish I understood the attraction.”
“Anyhoo,” she continued. “You have to decide for yourself, right? Is he horrible or beautiful? Or just a man with no illusions about himself? He had them at the beginning, but by the end? No.”
“Ah. Of course. Wait a minute.” His voice changed. “Is that really how you see me?” He took a moment to visualize the sequence again. “The look on his face as he’s giving head to that grotesque woman and smiling and pretending he enjoys it. That’s how you feel about me?”
“Well, I guess I’ve been doing a better job than he did, if you’re surprised. How else can I see you? That
is
you.”
“I’m a lot better looking.”
“Not from where I’m standing.”
“You’re not standing. You’re sitting. And you’re too comfortable. I think you’ve recovered. Get down on your knees, between my legs, and give
me
head. You can think about the movie as you do. If it makes you feel any better.”
“Predictable.”
“Now that’s cruel. Maybe I should come up with something else?”
“What does it matter? You’ve already done pretty nearly everything awful. And I’ll do whatever it takes. The game is over, you just won’t admit it.”
“I can get grosser.”
“Of course you can. And whatever it is, I’ll do it. And I’ll even pretend to like it, if you so demand. This isn’t working, can’t you see?”
“It’s been a day and half. We’ve only just begun.”
She sighed.
“If you’re so sure, you can certainly last through a bit more. But you wouldn’t be arguing so hard if you really did think it was over. You just wish it was. In the movie, it took years. He lasted for years.”
“Yeah,” she said almost hopelessly. “But he did last. He outlasted. That’s the point.”
“You may be like him. Or you may not be. That remains to be seen.”
“Your problem is, you’re smug. You have a one-size-fits-all approach.”
“I adapt to circumstances as they arise,” he said, a little defensively.
“Sometimes that’s too late. You’re just too smug. What if one of your victims happened to like rape?”
“Nobody has, so far.”
“You can’t always be fighting the last war. You make too many assumptions.”
“You,” he said, “are just the exception that proves the rule.”
“But what if I’m not?”
“I’m sorry, but you are. Most people in the situation you’re in don’t do a lot of calm thinking. You’re the first. Not that it’s necessarily helped you. Maybe just strung things out.”
“‘They only see what they want to see,’” she muttered half to herself. “‘They don’t know they’re dead.’”
“I’m the one who sees dead people,” he noted mildly. “Maybe you should be listening to me.”
“It’s so funny,” she said, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. “That I should end up here like this with someone like you. The same way I began.”
“Boy, do you have father issues. Do I really remind you of him?”
“Fundamentally, you’re pretty much the same. Even though he wasn’t consciously, intentionally evil. You both think – thought – you have the right to hold life or death over someone else.”
“Did you really, truly believe he would kill you?”
“Oh, he would have died for me. And yes, as if that’s so rare in this world – he would have killed me if the circumstances struck him as compelling. Not for crying too loud, like some dads. But for other, larger failures. Or disloyalty. Or to protect me.”
“Protect you? From what?”
“From the world. Or if he thought I was going to end up with my mother, who he considered on a par with the Nazis.”
“So what did you do?”
“I did what I had to do. And I got out as soon as I could.”
“Just what you’re doing here, if you could.”
“If I could.”
“And you can keep your focus, keep your nerves under control, even with me constantly threatening your life. Essentially. If not in so many words.”
“People pretend.”
“Pretend?”
“People pretend all the time that everything will be fine.”
“But you see the world as it is, not as you want it to be.”
“Well, it’s a little harder for me, I’ll grant you,” she conceded. “Especially since I know it won’t.”
He thought for a few seconds, twisting her hair in his hands, as she knelt in front of him, ready to do his bidding.
“You think too much,” he concluded. “And you talk too much. I know you’re doing your best to create a bond between us, so that I’ll feel an attachment that will make me reluctant to really hurt you. A Stockholm Syndrome in reverse. Tell me your sad story. Try to persuade me with logic.” He still spoke calmly, as usual, but with a strangely detached quality. “The funny thing is, I can feel for you, even root for you, in a way, in
my
way, without my intentions changing one little bit. It’s like what I’m going to do to you is a foregone conclusion, something that’s already happened, nothing that I can change. And nothing you do will make me change. Even if I were happier changing. We’re locked into this, I guess. Because of who I am and who you are. You’ll continue to probe for a weakness. Maybe you’ll find one. But it’s not likely. And I’ll continue to beat you down. And eventually, I’m sorry but it’s true, you’ll give up. Don’t feel bad,” he added, lowering his face to meet hers. “Ultimately, it will be a relief. You won’t have to fight anymore.”
She just looked at him and said nothing.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “In fact, new rules. No talking. I’ve been enjoying talking to you too much, and it’s delayed things. So talk, and I’ll punish you. Even more than what I’m going to do anyway. Remember, it can always get worse. Finished with the water? Good. Now blow me. We haven’t had sex in a couple of hours. We have some lost time to make up for.”
He pulled her head toward him, and, once again, she did what she had to do.
What she hadn’t told him about her father. That she had forgiven him. That the wound had closed. But it was important that he think it was still open. Open as a pathway for him.
How cold-blooded was she? Enough to scan inside herself and identify the most likely ways he could destroy her. Then she would feed him the clues. This, she reminded herself, was why she was going to win. Because he was hard, but she was cold. He fed on humanity; he needed it. She pretended she still had some. It was strange to discover that about yourself. That this is what you were, that this was all that was left, the knowledge of what it once was to be soft, to be weak, to love. In the way that all those still capable of love were weak.
She had been human once. She had needed to forgive the old man, and it was good that she had. It freed them both in a way. He could no longer hurt her, not physically, or emotionally. She had moved beyond him. That’s what forgiving was: seeing someone for what they were, flaws and all, not what you wanted them to be, not what they should have been. He wasn’t just her admittedly piss-poor father. He was a man, a very stunted, fucked-up man who had craved love and even more than that, respect. This man was right; it was betrayal that destroyed children. That the one hurting you is the one that you love and the one that loves you. And the love is real. He really did love her, she knew that for sure. Yet he hurt her. Terribly and repeatedly. But it didn’t destroy her, just her innocence, her faith, any possibility of optimism. But not her. Still the anger stayed with her, and the only way to discharge it was to get to the point where she could forgive him. And strangely, that happened only after she lost her son. It was, for some reason, only after she had suffered a more terrible pain than any he had ever inflicted that she was able to step back and see him fully, see him not as her father at all, but just in part.
She never said, “I forgive you.” He would not have even understood, for in his mind, like every faulty parent, he believed he had done the best he could. She didn’t even know when exactly she had forgiven him. Only that they had talked occasionally after the funeral, after both funerals, and she had seen how little he understood of how people lived, how people comforted each other, how they connected. He had never learned, and so he had demanded from his children what he did not know how to get any other way. He was still an asshole, she knew, but she just didn’t care any more. She pitied him. And somehow the forgiveness came.
And the funny thing was, it made him stop trying to hurt her. He treated her differently, respected her, it seemed. And that came in handy when it was his time to die. No unfinished business left between them. She had helped take care of him at the end, in the short time he had after the diagnosis. And when he died, there was nothing tugging at her, nothing dragging her even part of the way with him.
It wasn’t long after she’d lost the other two men in her life. It was funny. She had learned the important lessons by then, all the terrible lessons. She should have been a perfect human, but as the years passed, she had, she now realized, become less and less of one. She could forgive, but she could no longer love. She could understand, but she could no longer hope.
All she could do was survive. Until now.
When he didn’t come, he was able to stay hard for hours, and that’s what he did. He raped her repeatedly, front and back, up and down, without any of the preliminaries. He manipulated her as if she was a doll provided solely for his amusement, and she didn’t fight him. She made herself as limp and as loose as she could because, by this point, everything he did hurt. And not in a good way. But sometimes her body uncontrollably stiffened in wary anticipation of the next assault. And sometimes she screamed when it felt like his penis was hitting internal organs beyond her vagina or when she felt the delicate tissues around her ass being rended apart. He would smack her when she screamed or press her head into a pillow on the floor, stopping her from breathing long enough for panic to rise up on that score alone.
Finally, when his own genitals were once again beginning to chafe, he stopped.