I don’t regret what I did. I want to be really clear about that. The university counselor said that this is my chance to tell my story, my chance to be heard, and in my story, I don’t regret what I did. I do regret what happened. I don’t think that’s going to go away.
I’m not a victim. Maybe in the legal sense, in the as-far-as-the-university-is-concerned sense, but I’m not a victim. I did what I did so that I would never be a victim again. Maybe it would happen again, but I could fight back, could leave a mark, could have some proof so it wasn’t just my words, weak vapor against all the powers that be. So that, even if just for a single second, I could feel safe in my skin.
What horror do we make in trying to feel safe?
When bad things happen to you, a rot starts to live in your body, and the longer you try to ignore it, the more it spreads. When that rot sets in before a certain age, you forget what it was like to live without it. The rot is a part of you, a phantom limb that spasms and burns at the worst times, twisting you into something that you never should have been, that no one ever should have been. Most people can’t see it, not for what it is. They see the extra space it takes up, the mishappen nature of you as you stumble through the world, and they wonder why you’re so…strange, so…off. That’s what it is. You’re off, and it scares them even if they don’t know why, and if you’re lucky, you end up alone.
I say if you’re lucky, because some people can see that rotten limb, they can smell the decay like a vulture, and they circle you. They have rotten limbs too, so they recognize you in an instant. All they know is the rot, so it’s all they can give, and they give that rot and they take more of you until you’re so deformed that even they don’t want you anymore.
I don’t know how rotten Brendan Howe was when he came into my room that night, but I do know how drunk he was. The first recorded use of distilled ethanol is as an antiseptic, to clean out the rot that’s set into a wound, stop it from spreading, save the host. Even before I learned that fact, in an Islamic history class, I knew the principle. If you don’t live with the rot, you might think those of us who do get used to it, learn to live with it. We do, because we have to, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel it festering. There are many painkillers in this world, and we know them well. Ethanol does not stop this rot – I think for Brendan it made it worse – but it stops you feeling it for a while, and you learn to convince yourself that that’s the same thing.
Jenny Sage, my roommate, threw a lot of parties, so I was used to drunk people stumbling in if I forgot to lock my door, and once, even when I did. I didn’t like the noise, but Jenny prided herself on never leaving a guest thirsty, so I found ways to cope.
At this point, you have to decide what you want to believe, or rather, whom. Belief is a strange and terrible thing: what we believe is made real, and what we don’t simply goes away. I don’t want to litigate the great injustices of our existence here, but I have to point out the irony. I did what I did so that I would always be believed, and yet somehow, the faith of others still escapes me.
It’s going to be a lot easier for you to believe a certain version of this story: that I was drunk, way drunk, too drunk, past the point of fun and into that cold fear, sedated so heavily that I couldn’t count on my chest rising to pull in a breath. So far gone that I don’t remember, or only know the flashes, memories made in retrospect from the marks a ravenous want leaves on someone else’s body. It’s easier for you to believe that I’m crazy, or to be trauma-informed, experiencing dissociative amnesia. Easier to believe that the bugs were mined from my subconscious, the ramblings of an addled, liquor-soaked brain, or that I’d heard the rumors and filled in the gaps in an especially fucked-up way.
But that isn’t the truth.
During Jenny Sage’s “October” party, I was buzzed, not drunk, listening to music alone in my room and riding the chemical high that masked the rot for a moment. This party was, of course, unsanctioned by the university, so it kicked off quickly, and at the last minute. One second, the apartment was empty except for the two of us, and the next, it was suffocatingly full. I don’t know why I forgot to lock the door. That’s the thing my mind kept going back to as it was happening, how stupid I was to leave the door unlocked. But I did, and so, without any warning, preamble or grace, Brendan Howe stumbled through the doorway and into my room.
One of the things the rot changes in you is your fear, and not in the way other people would expect. Yeah, sure, sometimes it cranks it up so high you can’t even think, scared of every shadow until you can’t even tell what’s real and what’s just the mind-killer of that rot. But other times, most of the time in my experience, it turns it way, way down. When the worst has already happened, it’s too much effort to be afraid. Even when you’re back there, staring the horrors of the past square in the face, you’re too tired to run. So you don’t. You just stay still.
The counselor talked a lot about consent. I know it’s important, but I don’t know that it’s for people like me. How do you say “no” to the inevitable, to what happens to you like the tide because other people can smell that rot inside your body? How do you say “no” to the only touch you deserve, the only grace you’ll ever be given by another person? Give it long enough, and you start to think you want the bad, because the not wanting hurts too much.
I think I knew what he was going to do before he did it, and I knew it wouldn’t be as bad if I went along. Doesn’t that mean I wanted it? That I deserved it? I don’t know. I know that I wasn’t drunk, because I remember. The bird bones of my body that refused to cooperate with the path of least resistance, limbs wild, a wire cage that was only bondage, never safety.
In the moment, I didn’t think, but I can now. Weeks earlier, when Jenny made me her offer, I thought she was full of shit. I thought that generally. She was always talking about esoteric stuff that I didn’t care about, like “gaze theory”, and she looked like Stevie Nicks and smelled like clove cigarettes, so I thought the magic was bullshit like everything else about her. Jenny knows the rot too. Not like me, but it’s there for her too, and she told me she could do something that would keep me safe, give me something I could use if it ever happened again. She was intentionally vague about what exactly it was, what exactly would happen, but somehow, that made it all the more interesting. And the candles, the incense, the words I’d never told anyone scrawled on paper and pushed down my throat. It was weird and fun, in a Practical Magic kind of way. Getting everything out and then taking it back made me feel stronger. Less sick. Less rotten.
Like I said, in the moment, when Brendan Howe was there with me, I didn’t think. I just felt. I felt the rot more in that moment than I ever had before. It swelled and grew, burning through my blood, filling my lungs, breaking my ribs until I was nothing against it. For the first time, it was bigger than me, it was me, and whatever had been outside of it was gone. That phantom limb spasmed and reached out and grasped for something to destroy, the violence a need like breathing.
So I kissed him, bigger than God. I don’t think he was expecting it, but he didn’t pull away. I was expecting to feel something, a crawling in my mouth, or some change in the rot, but I didn’t. All the love and hate that I’d kept, locked away and bound up in my body for years, rushed out of my mouth and into his, and when it was gone, I only felt empty.
I don’t know exactly what happened next, because I wasn’t there. I only know what the police and the counselor told me. How Brendan roomed alone and had abysmal attendance, so no one noticed when he didn’t show up to class the next day, or the day after that. How Sam Watson, the Sisyphean head of the campus A.A. group had gotten a strange call in the middle of the night from a number that turned out to belong to Brendan. How there was no voice on the other end of that line, no breath even to call out, rasping against the dark, only quiet that brought a dread worse than any words. How the R.A. who found his body three days later still hasn’t been discharged from the psych unit of Northwestern General.
Obviously, no one wanted me to see the crime scene photos, but someone leaked them online, Instagram first. The content moderators took them down right away, but the internet is forever, and no one on campus could sleep that night. The university dragged out Dr. Burgh, head of the comp-sci department, to convince everyone that the photos were A.I.-generated, a deepfake from some horror engine. Everyone’s eyes glazed over when he started talking about pixels and generative algorithms, but belief is a strange and terrible thing. What we believe is made real, and what we don’t simply goes away. Everyone wanted this to go away.
Officially, Brendan Howe died of acute alcohol poisoning. It was a warm October, and the air conditioning for his dorm was out, so he rotted with “exceptional speed” during the three days before anyone found him. Sure, the maggots were concentrated unusually, spilling out of his mouth, bursting out of the soft flesh of his neck and down to his ribcage, a wide black swath of viscera opening down his torso. “The possibility”, the coroner’s report reads, “of animal involvement in the breaking of the ribcage and the exposure of the chest cavity cannot be ruled out.” There are, after all, a lot of racoons on campus, and they have come through windows before. Unusual, yes, but not unheard of. Not impossible to believe.
Jenny’s getting a lot of flak for this, more than she deserves. Brendan is hardly the first alcoholic to die after a college party, and he won’t be the last. I’m sure he was drinking before he showed up at the apartment, and a lot of people brought alcohol that night. Yeah, she did the ritual with me, but the university can’t discriminate based on sincerely-held religious beliefs. And I chose to kiss him, chose to unleash it, not Jenny.
I haven’t been assigned a new roommate since she was expelled. I don’t think I will be. They’re trying their best to protect me, but word gets around, and it’s not like I was winning “most popular” before, anyway. I like the quiet in the apartment, the wide berth in the hallways and the three-desk radius of empty seats around me during lectures.
Some mornings, I wake up to find the maggots crawling along my pillow or down my neck. Their bodies are small and soft, and if you didn’t know what they were, you’d never be afraid of them. You’d never believe that they could do what they do. I keep them in a jar by my bed. The phantom limb is strong now, and it’s nice to have the extra hand, if I ever need it.