Joe Victim: A Thriller

“She called me the following day,” I tell my psychiatrist, and I’ve switched from Joe Escape Artist back to Joe Victim, and that’s fine, because Joe Victim gets a much prettier view. “I thought she was going to wait for the weekend, but she called me after school. First she spoke to my mother and told her she wanted me to help around her house, and in return she would pay me. My mother thought it was a great idea because it meant that was less time I would be spending around our house. So I went there and mowed her lawns. Then it turned out she wanted the garage painted, inside and out, including the roof. So that became the project for a few weeks. Only it wasn’t the only project. She kept calling me day after day to go around there until . . . well, until she grew tired of me.”

“Tired of you?”

“Tired of me.”

“Grew tired of you doing the chores?”

“Not exactly,” I say, and I look down at my cuffed wrist, at the arm of the chair, at my feet and at the floor. The view might be prettier for Joe Victim than it was staring at my lawyer ten minutes ago, but looking into the past is ugly. “She grew tired of me about two years later.”

“Joe?”

I look up at her. “Do I have to spell it out for you?” I ask her.

Slowly she’s shaking her head and she’s trying to hide the disgust on her face, but she’s not doing a great job. She pauses, taking a few breaths before continuing. “Are you trying to tell me your auntie kept your secret in exchange for sex?”

“I’m actually trying not to tell you about it,” I say. “But yeah, that’s what happened. Like she said, she was lonely. She hadn’t had a man around the house for six years.”

“She blackmailed you.”

“What else could I do? If I didn’t do what she wanted, she would go to the police. She would tell my parents. She said she would tell people I had raped her if I didn’t go along with it. So I had to keep going back. I mean, the only thing I could think of was to kill her. And no matter what you think of me, I’m not a killer. At least I don’t want to be one.”

“Was it the first time you’d ever had sex?”

“Yes.”

She keeps staring at me as if she’s about to ask me how much I enjoyed it, and if it went anything like this, followed by her taking her clothes off and bending over the table. “Tell me about it,” she says.

As much as I want her turned on, I don’t really want to tell her about my auntie. “Why?”

“Because I asked you.”

“About the sex itself?”

“Tell me about your auntie. About leading up to what happened.”

I shrug. Like it’s no big deal. Like being forced to have sex with one’s auntie is as trivial as talking about the weather, although marginally more entertaining. But it is a big deal. One that for a long time had stayed bottled up inside of me. After my auntie died and we were going through her house, after I saw the crossbow, and after mom packed everything away, I felt sick. I actually went to the cemetery she was buried in that night, and I found her grave and I took a shit on it. For me it was a form of closure. It was a way of saying good-bye to a woman who made me feel bad about myself, good about myself, and then bad about myself all over.

“I had just finished painting the roof,” I tell my psychiatrist. “It was a hot day. Back then summer was always hot days and blue skies—at least that’s how it seemed. These days we’re lucky to see blue sky twice a week,” I say, and my earlier thought was right—auntie rape is as trivial as weather watch. “I got burned pretty bad up on that roof. I’d been working for my auntie for four days. The Big Bang happened on my fifth, which was our first Saturday together. I was up on the roof and—”

“You call what happened the Big Bang?”

“What would you have me call it?”