BY THE CANAL

Returning to the scene of a brutal violation

- SARAH BECKWITH

Awoman is running. In the path, a man appears as if from nowhere. He is masked and he holds a knife. What are her choices? On one side is the canal and on the other a high, impassable fence, aluminum and concrete. She can run back to where she came from, but he will be faster and quicker. Perhaps she will be lucky, and some cyclist or walker will show up and the man might vanish as quickly as he had appeared. She calculates her chances of surviving. At this moment, they don’t seem good. Perhaps he wants to rape her without taking her life? Perhaps her desire to live will lead her to undergo whatever the man wants, hoping it will be short of death. Would a struggle, an attempt to escape, make him angry enough to wield that knife to stab or slash her? Her rapid thoughts and instincts are in the hope of life. The base tone of them all: a man who wants to rape her could be careless enough of her to kill her. In this, she turns out to be right, not just psychologically and ethically but as a matter of history.

She, her. I am avoiding the first person. I, me. I was raped. This happened to me.

Almost forty years after I was raped, I happened upon the place where it occurred. I was on a walk. Some genius loci, some presentiment, told me that I was very near, if not at, a place my body remembered.