The Long Highway Pt. 09 - "The Dog"

"The Dog"

There always seem to be visitors these days, though it's not the holidays or anything. When Nelson and Leticia were here I went up to the roof at one point to get some time to myself, break like a cigarette break if I'd smoked. On the way up the stairs, I heard noise and realized the roof of the apartment building was not empty. Some people rent their places out as home stays and guests, tourists that is, have parties.

"Someone's having a party," I said when I opened the heavy door and beheld the scene, a group in their late teens or early twenties. At first glance I thought they were barbecuing, but that wasn't it.

"Yeah, we're having a party," one said to me. "And we're listening."

In front of them was some kind of game console playing music with images, colorful like in a casino.

The group, comprised of only three or four, girls and boys, weren't unfriendly to me, might even have welcomed the outsider to their party, but there was an air of defiance, defensiveness, insecurity, their stance conveying the message: "Don't fuck with us, challenge our right to be here."

Of course I wouldn't join them- and doubtless they wouldn't invite me. I walked to the other side of the roof but saw the peace and quiet I wanted wasn't available there either. The space was too limited. The only way I could get some for myself would have been to jump off the edge, and who wants that? I decided not to stay.

On my way back to the door leading down, I addressed the party.

"Enjoy," I said. "Life is.." I was going to add "short" but at the last moment changed it to "beautiful," Keep the mood positive, I thought. They don't need my middle-aged ideas about limits.

Descending the three flights, I remembered a terrible event when I was their age, in my early twenties, something that happened to a woman I knew- only by sight; I met her at a party once; we had friends in common.

"Bad things happen.." The words of the awful subway oracle came back to me as they do from time to time, much as I wish to forget them.

The woman in our circle of recent graduates (from the college where Nelson taught) was raped on the roof of the building where she lived in a tough neighborhood. She and friends were saving on rent; they were artists, aspiring to be, anyway, leading a bohemian existence, for a few years at least, most with financial help from families willing to support them as they found their way, chose serious careers (the number of people able to survive on art alone can be counted on your fingers, as the saying goes).

They were sort of self-styled mavericks, pioneers in the dangerous neighborhood, like settlers out of the old West, mavericks in their lives as in the art work they wanted to make- similar, I suppose, to Akemi in that respect, though she wouldn't think so (She's not American; that's not her history).

She- the friend once removed- was out for a walk with her dog when a gang of four (was it?) took her off the sidewalk and brought her to the roof, where they took turns, evidently.

Details were hard to listen to but fascination, hankering to know (the usual thing) riveted my attention when a friend told me about it.

The dog had barked, protective of her, so the gang had thrown it off the roof (I suppose hearing the noise on the roof of my building now had reminded me, though that was a different kind, of course, music).

There'd been talk of the group throwing their victim off too. In the end they hadn't, thankfully.

You can't help wondering. How did it go down? While one was raping her, what were the others doing? Just watching? Was it a party atmosphere with cheering and laughing or somber, serious? What state of violence had there been for them to hurl the dog to the street so casually. Had it been casually?

A tenement building would have had five or six floors, I'm guessing.

When some were waiting their turn, did they ever join the rape in progress, one fucking her while the other had her suck him, one in front, one in back? Had they fucked her in the ass?

Had each taken just one turn or did some go back for seconds, turned on again by the time the others had finished, from watching?

That unknown is too much, the scene unimaginable, yet it really happened. Thinking about it sets off the mind, like water churning past a boil.

A friend in the know told me that one of the guys showed some kindness, gave her a coat to cover herself in the end. It was cold that night.

The crime was written up in a local newspaper with a readership of artists, counterculture types. I remember she was quoted as saying, "I just wish they'd have to experience being naked in the cold so long so they'd know what it feels like."

I admired her pluck as I read that but guessed she must also have been using the show of strength to hide her other feelings, possibly even from herself. For sure they would surface eventually. How could a trauma like that be lightly dismissed? It would have an effect, even if you didn't want one, your mind, in effect, raping you again later. What a terrible way to think about it. How my mind works. But that seemed true.

I'm even reluctant to put this out there on the off-chance she happens upon and reads it.

I saw her at a party later in the same neighborhood, among college friends who lived there. She was with a boyfriend, very protective. At least my fleeting impression suggested as much. They sat on a slump-backed couch, the kind of furniture we all had in those days, stuff bought secondhand or even picked up off the street. He was tall, rangy, with long arms and seemed to be guarding her with his greater height, staying close, keeping one arm up on over the top edge of the couch, over her. Maybe I was just imagining the meaning of his posture.

She moved out of that part of town soon, I heard.

I don't want anything like that happening to Akemi. Of course this was also in my mind as I walked back downstairs to our apartment and Nelson and Leticia, who I was actually glad to see. They were friends, after all, not criminals.

I wondered if Leticia would also like to be with Akemi, to eat her pussy, she and Nelson and Akemi together. My mind at a boil. All the components churning together. Akemi has had lesbian affairs, as I've told you, at least one.

No "cigarette break." Have a drink.

I was dealing with other things, at work in particular, as I've mentioned. A student from Russia took issue with the treatment of the current government of her country in reading I'd given the class. Educated (and indoctrinated?) woman in her late thirties, old enough to have her character, opinions formed, hardened. She objected strongly to what she saw as political bias on the part of the author and by extension me, since I'd assigned him, and she wouldn't drop the subject. I hadn't even noticed the passage that had bothered her. If there was something there, it was very subtle. Problems were endless and you never knew where the next would crop up.

"Things happen to a pretty young woman like her."

Was she pretty? I don't even know, wasn't looking at her like that, was just wondering how she'd gotten through it, what was left of you after such an ordeal.

No, I don't want Akemi to endure something like that, not anything close to it.