I Will Find You: In Search of the Man Who Raped Me. Joanna Connors
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Название: I Will Find You: In Search of the Man Who Raped Me
Автор: Joanna Connors
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007521876
isbn:
The grand staircase led me down to the basement, a dim warren of offices and storage rooms. A canteen near the stairs sells tepid coffee and off-brand packaged snacks, and every time I went there I passed divorce lawyers huddled at the wobbly tables with their clients, most of them weeping.
In this basement, the county’s Clerk of Courts keeps all of its millions of pages of transcripts and criminal evidence. In 2006, when I first went there, none of the records were digital, and the archives of documents overwhelmed the space allotted.
In the hallways, towers of stacked file boxes along the walls formed a cardboard canyon of mortgage foreclosures, divorce actions, child-custody battles, competency hearings, property disputes, robbery trials, murder trials, rape trials. These were the records that would not fit in the overstuffed file rooms, where more boxes were stacked to the water-damaged ceilings.
As I walked through the canyon of files, I felt like a visitor to the Catacombs of Paris, wandering through tunnels lined with skulls and bones. I had entered an ancient repository of grief, a place that held the memories of the collective pain, bitterness, fear, and sorrow of the people of Cuyahoga County. My small piece of it came in the file of Case Number CR-193108: The State of Ohio v. David Francis.
I filled out a printed form and handed it to a clerk in a crowded office at the end of the hall. He returned a few minutes later carrying two expandable dark red envelopes stuffed with files, each held together with a rubber band. He gestured toward a table in the hallway and said, “Don’t take these out of this area.” That warning was the extent of the court’s security system.
I opened the smaller envelope. Out tumbled the evidence from my trial: a gold cross on a chain, a dozen Polaroids, some mug shots, and two tiny glassine envelopes containing pubic hair samples, mine and the rapist’s. I had forgotten about the embarrassing collection of the hair. I put the envelopes back with my fingernails, as carefully as if they contained anthrax.
The Polaroids showed my body, most without my head. Two of them showed my back, an abstract design of red lacerations and bruises turning blue and purple. Others showed a small red gash on my neck and puncture wounds on my fingers. I studied them. The photos looked like porn for a scar fetishist. They were crude shots of a body without the woman inhabiting it, a portrait of everything the rape did to me. I slid them back into the envelope.
The second one, much thicker, held the trial transcript.
On the first page, I read: Be it remembered, that at the September, 1984 term of said court, to-wit, commencing on Wednesday, the 17th day of October, this cause came on to be heard …
I trembled, surprising myself.
Be it remembered.
I turned to my testimony. There, on the onionskin pages, I found the Joanna of twenty-two years before. She was trembling, too, I remembered, as she told the jury what happened that day.
“If I have to go to prison, I’ll miss you”
Monday, July 9, 1984. Cleveland.
On the last day of the first part of my life, I’m running late. As usual.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
I’m driving up Euclid Avenue in my Toyota hatchback, fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, pushing it to twenty, headed east out of downtown Cleveland for a 5:00 p.m. interview at Case Western Reserve University.
It’s already 5:00. Rush hour starts at 4:30 here, and I’m trapped in the daily exodus of workers leaving their offices in the city for the suburbs, all of them stepping on the gas through the bad parts of town, speeding past the brick housing projects and the weedy vacant lots that mark the spots where riots burned through in the ‘60s.
At East 55th Street, the borderline between downtown and the inner city, you can almost hear the steady beat of car locks clicking down, the percussive sound track to Cleveland’s deep racial divide.
I slalom from the left lane to the right lane and back, swearing and scolding myself the way I always do.
Why don’t you leave more time? Jesus. What’s wrong with you?
It’s high summer, and I’m worked up and jittery, hitting the steering wheel as I talk. The car has no air-conditioning. My open window lets in the heavy, hot fumes of summer, melting tar and truck diesel. All I want to do is get to Case, do a quick interview, and then head to my neighborhood pool for an evening swim before it closes. I’m thinking more about the pool than the interview, which I’m doing only because the guy who runs the little summer theater on the Case campus bugged me so much about it. I’ve agreed to watch a rehearsal of their next show, and then talk to the playwright, someone I’ve never heard of, who’s in from Peru. I’ve been so busy I haven’t read the play or anything about the playwright. I’ll wing it.
At this point, I’ve lived in Cleveland only ten months. I still get lost, still don’t know all the shortcuts. I keep up the yelling at myself and other drivers as I head into the rush-hour snarl of University Circle, a hub of culture, education, and verdant parks at the eastern edge of the city. The Circle is the rose on the lapel of Cleveland’s threadbare jacket, financed by the likes of John D. Rockefeller and the city’s other titans of the Gilded Age as the home to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, two history museums, a botanical garden, art and music schools, and Case Western Reserve University.
On the many occasions when our civic dignity is wounded, Clevelanders always invoke University Circle to restore our pride. It’s no easy task. Magazines continually put us on soul-crushing lists, naming us the fattest city in America, or the poorest, or the least sexy, or—the latest—the most miserable city in America. I like to imagine teams of statisticians with clipboards going door to door, measuring the misery of an entire city, offering tissues and hugs as they listen.
I forget how this one determined misery. The choices are many, topped by dreary winter weather, high unemployment, and the sorry history of our teams. Cleveland still has three major-league teams, but they all lose so often, and so spectacularly, that my newspaper calls it a “streak” if any of them win two games in a row. The nickname for the stadium where the Cleveland Browns play is “The Factory of Sadness.” After LeBron James took his talents to South Beach, ESPN found few reasons to even mention Cleveland, and resumed paying attention only when he came back in 2014. Before the first home game after LeBron returned, Clevelanders filled the streets downtown, the mass celebration reaching a level of joy and mayhem that other cities might reserve for a World Series or Super Bowl win.
The Cavaliers lost the game.
After delivering that familiar disappointment, the team then astonished everyone in Cleveland by starting to win, making it to the playoffs, winning again, and continuing to the NBA Championship Finals. Which they lost.
Clevelanders, their hopes crushed yet again, immediately started talking about next year.
On one border of University Circle you have the massive Cleveland Clinic, a Legoland where new buildings appear almost overnight, usually followed by squat bodyguards outfitted with Secret Service–style earpieces, there to protect the Middle Eastern shahs and СКАЧАТЬ