It's that face. I knew I'd seen it
before. I was standing in the lobby of a movie theater
surrounded by crowds of people waiting to enter the
auditorium to watch a film about a bunch of teenagers and a
dead body and codes of teenage silence. It was the end of the
previous show and the doors flung open and hundreds of people
were pouring out towards the exits. Suddenly that face. It
was one anonymous face in the crowd that tripped the switch
in the back of my head. I froze and the face became
magnified. It expanded in size until it was five feet tall
and disembodied and floating in the darkness of the open
doors. I guess he froze too. He was a pale grey colour with
fastidiously combed hair plastered down around the skull.
Thin lips, bloodless and tight. His eyes were colourless and
they widened for a moment. We both stood there trying to
uncoil each other's private histories and solve the
dislocation of familiarity. I had been drugged, tossed out a
second storey window, strangled, smacked in the head with a
slab of marble, almost stabbed four times, punched in the
face at least seventeen times, beaten about my body too many
times to recount, almost completely suffocated, and woken up
once tied to a hotel bed with my head over the side all the
blood rushed down into it making it feel like it was going to
explode, all this before I turned fifteen. I chalked it up to
adventure or the risks of being a kid prostitute in new york
city. At that point in my life dying didn't mean anything to
me other than a big drag. I had mixed feelings about death.
When I was trying to get enough money to eat or find a place
to sleep for the night, death actually seemed attractive, an
alternative. I would go without changing my clothes or
bathing for months at a time. I could see my reflection in
the legs of my pants if I bent close to them. Periodically if
I had a surplus of money from spreading my legs in seven
dollar hotels on eighth Avenue I would walk to the Port
Authority bus terminal and look at all the various names of
towns painted on the glass windows 
of ticket
booths. I'd choose one that suggested bodies of water and
then buy a ticket, get on the bus and ride it for as long as
it took till I spotted a lake or pond in the countryside. I
then asked the bus driver to let me off, usually having to
argue with him because it wasn't a scheduled stop. After the
bus continued on its way I would walk across the field and
into the water until I was up to my neck. I never bothered to
take off my shoes or my clothes. I would float around for
hours and then hike back to the road and hitch a ride to a
bus-stop or all the way back into the city.
That face. When I noticed his suit and his hands, palms back and manicured nails, I remembered. Maybe it was the quality of light or lack of it in the lobby as the door swung open and people were exiting before the end of the film. Maybe it was the colour of his flesh, the look of no oxygen, the look of anticipation or fear, the complexion of anticipation. I remember that night fifteen years earlier. I had spent the later part of the afternoon paddling around this small pond, pushing my face under water looking for signs of life. It was rapidly turning to dusk and I was wet and feeling cold. The town was too small to offer much evening traffic so it was hard to get a ride. I didn't really know where I was. I was grey inside my head and wishing that killing myself was an effortless act.
Those eyes, that face grey and
floating disembodied in the dark of the open window. A small
beat-up red pick-up truck coasted to a stop along the side of
the road. He was waving me into the truck. I remember
thinking his skin was fake, like a semi-translucent latex. I
asked him how far he was going. Oh, a ways. Thin tight voice
layered with a friendliness I couldn't hook into. We drove
for a while in silence and I looked out the side window at
all the illuminated houses and occasional glimpses of people
in driveways, interacting with each other. A stray dog
running along the highway in a small panic. He said he worked
for a bank in the city. That depressed me for some reason,
maybe the formality of it that translated into an image of
years and years of writing in ledgers and stale cups of
coffee and dealing with people in need. At some point he had
his dick out and stared out through the windshield at the
beacons of light illuminating the dark roadway. He steered
with one hand and jerked with the other. I was leaning
against the door and didn't answer when he murmured something
about this place he knew where we could go. After a while he
made a left turn down a gravel and dirt road winding up
through a forest over small hills. I remember moths andbugs
diving into the headlights, a small wooden sign with a boy
scout symbol on it, and then some scattered cabins. The sound
of lake water in the near distance.
He got out of the driver's seat and pulled open the passenger door I was seated behind. Squat down and make it squirt. I didn't move. He had shut the engine and the headlights off. Get out. I felt suddenly much more tired than I ever remember feeling. I swung my legs out from the seat and stood in front of him with my hands in my pockets. A wind was coming up and it was starting to bring with it a light rain. He took me by the arm and led me to the back of the truck and turned a metal latch and swung up the back door of the camper. One of his hands floated up to my face and then encircled the back of my neck and I realised I was being propelled forward towards the black interior of the camper. I crawled obediently inside, it was loaded with blankets and sleeping bags and boxes of indecipherable staff. It was kind of moist and smelled like earth and grease. He climbed in behind me and pulled the door shut. Everything was reduced to smells and the sound of trees and the squeak of his shoes against the metal parts the floor. I lay down and curled up on a mass of smelly cloth. I could see his silhouette half-rise before me, blocking out the minimal light and then dropping to my side. The sound of a zipper opening. His hand on my neck again. Pulling. I want to go home, I said. What are you talking about? I realised his head was further back in the truck than I had thought. I couldn't see anything. The rain was coming down hard; sheets of water making the dimness more dark. I don't know, I said, wondering where I would go even if I got out of the truck without him stopping me. You like it in your ass? No. Good, he said and then hit me. Very hard.
I'm blind to the world and he's turning me
over and over and over. Where am I? In a muddy field in the
back of a stranger's truck and the truck is backed up to a
fence and the stranger has put his full weight on my back and
I feel like I'm in motion like something flung out of a giant
sling shot. A pale length of rope hastily torn out of a wet
cardboard box and wrapped around my hands pulled behind my
back. I'm on my belly and if I yelled or hollered the only
thing to hear me is the dead house miles back on the road dark and empty. Or the handful of
rundown shuttered factories on the main road. He's pulling my
hair, yanking my head back so his face appears upside down
floating before mine and he's smiling. But the smile looks
like a frown, it's upside down and he leans in and kisses
both my eyes. The windows have fogged up and he opens one
slightly and I can hear the occasional shine of an insect.
He's slapping my bare butt and driving his tongue into my ear
and running it down over the line of my neck and turning me
over and over periodically. I'm overwhelmed by the smell of
wet metal and the musky thickness of the cloth when my face
is ground into a blanket or sleeping bag. What's he
doing kneeling on my head, I ain't no doll with replaceable
body parts. He's stuffing a rolled up blanket beneath my
naked body forcing my ass up into the air. I can't feel my
hands any more all the circulation is gone. Funny how
everything all my life moved excruciatingly slow until this
moment and now I'm just begging for it to stop. He giggles
and disappears from the truck. I hear the sound of shoes on
the grit and wetness of the road and the truck dips as he
climbs back in. He lies on top of me. I'd feel fucking cold
but his body is generating intense heat. His shirt's off and
his pants are down or gone. He starts slamming his body down
on top of mind periodically his arm curving around my face.
Lick that bicep. His arm pulls back, fingers shove something
in my mouth; it's a wad of mud and sand. He treats me like he
owns me. I'm stuck in a drift, lost, no hope, or anything
familiar. 
Maybe now I'll get relief, maybe
he'll crush my skull or strangle me. Suddenly I recall
something from earlier when he loosened my belt and dragged
my pants down to my calves and smacked me as hard as he could
and it hurt so bad I tried to make it sexual I tried to
imagine it was gentle or that he was somebody sexy or that I
was a mile away walking in the opposite direction. Oh hit me
I said trying to act like I was into it so maybe he'd get
bored. Turning over and over and over what the fuck is he
doing that for? He lunghes and reaches far into the darkness
of the truck and I hear a container of liquid, sounds like a
metal container and liquid sounds the image of lighter fluid or gasoline went through my mind. Is
this it? I could see the flames; I could see my body being
turned over by campers looking like a side of beef left too
long in the fire, black and charred with bones poking out of
it. I felt the squirt of liquid all over my ass, a memory
smell from childhood flooding the truck. Baby oil. I just
want to die, I just want to die, I just want to die. If I say
it often enough will I lose my fear of his hands
tightening around my throat? I'm sinking in dark pools of
atmosphere and his palm is sliding around the small of my
back, into the crack of my ass cheeks. Oh what a gift you're
giving me, he mumbles. He grabs my tied arms pressing his
full weight on them pinning my elbows at an outrageous angle
to the cold metal floor and he shoves his dick into me.Ow.
He's biting my cheek. Slap. Slap. Burying his face in my neck
and biting again. I'm still sinking and his bites and slaps
are so specific I think he hasn't lost control just four
fingers in my mouth weight holding me down kissing my eyes
breathing hard in my ear pumping like a machine. You like
that steady rhythm? Uh.
In the codes that I carry in the sleepy part of my head, personal histories can turn on a dime and either rush away into disintegration or else turn and speed towards me looking to envelop. In the moment he was swept up in the crowd and moving across the lobby towards me I shrunk mentally and in size like a kid with no defences not even my pocket knife. I wanted walls to suddenly and abruptly burst out of the floor and rise between us. I wanted dozens of walls made of reinforced concrete and steel to keep us separated, to keep his hands from touching me. But I knew he would smash through them like some kind of dream psycho. It was like he was bleeding me right there in the crowded room. All my history and language had suddenly been erased. I knew somewhere that I could finally beat him up but I was stuck looking at him through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old skull. I just kept thinking I wanted to kill his gaze. Something weird happened where I physically shrunk and I took the moment where he and I lost track of each other to duck down the staircase to the restrooms. I went into a stall and sat on the turned down toilet seat for a long time listening to the sounds of dozens of people coming in and out to piss. When I finally went back upstairs he seemed gone. But I could still feel his gaze; it lingered like the stink after a bad fire*