“Everyone’s nice,” Geno told Vern on the phone. “It’s a good place.”
Good in that it could decidedly be worse. He could be locked up in some dingy, gross mental hospital with Nurse Ratched. Exodus Project, he had to admit, was a beautiful facility. Clean and well-maintained and easy on your eyes. The staff was kind and respectful. The food was decent.
Everyone had his own room, because nobody in this joint was keen on roommates. Each room had its own adjoining bath, because residents were even less keen on communal showers. Privacy was held above all else, leading to a stiff politeness on the residence floors. If someone’s door was closed, you knocked and waited for an answer. If the door was already open, you asked, “Can I come in?”
Nobody touched.
He was told Exodus Project had no age restrictions but right now, he was the youngest resident. The oldest, Corley, was fifty-six. They were black, white, Latino and Asian. Blue collar, white collar and one had been weeks away from a priest’s collar when he was attacked at a seminary retreat. Some residents were gay. Most were straight. All were raped, and Geno learned their stories during group therapy.
Hasan was a former prostitute. One of his tricks stalked and raped him. Chaow was trafficked from Thailand, kept locked up in a shipping container and sold for sex. Juan and Patrick were both raped in prison. It happened to Corley while he was in the navy. To Albie in a college locker room. Pablo’s ex-boyfriend brutalized him with a mop handle after they broke up. Jeff was minding his own business, taking a leak at a gas station bathroom, when three guys busted in and raped him at knifepoint.
Story upon story piled up in the center of the circle. A charnel heap, buzzing with flies and oozing blood.
Then it was Geno’s turn.
His mouth opened and nothing came out.
“It’s okay, man,” Corley said on one side.
“No shame,” Pablo said from the other.
Geno swallowed and tried again, then shook his head. He couldn’t. Mos had a death grip on his throat. Ruby, the woman from the rape crisis hotline, had a fistful of his hair.
We don’t talk about this.
I won’t let you do this.
“Try a sentence,” the group leader, Nolan, said. “It doesn’t have to be a story.”
“Don’t worry about not being believed,” Patrick said. “We already believe you.”
“Believe me, dude,” Jeff said, staring at his hands. “We believe you.”
He couldn’t do it. Not at that meeting nor the next. By his fourth group session, Geno had descended two levels below rock bottom into some primordial swamp. He sat in the circle, his hoodie cinched tight, his perpetually cold hands fisted in his pockets, letting the discussion stream around him. Albie was talking about his relationship with porn before and after he was assaulted. Patrick said he didn’t wish death on anyone, but he’d sit front row at the public execution of a child pornographer. Jeff agreed, because remember that fucked up-shit that went down in New Jersey last summer?
“That was me,” Geno said.
All eyes turned. Geno almost turned as well, looking around to see who said that.
A stab of silence as everyone stared at this half-open door and waited.
“You got this,” Corley said quietly.
Geno pulled in a double lungful of air and stepped through.
“The house the police raided,” he said, holding his breath. “I was there. In the basement. I was there almost two days. I got raped by seven guys.”
As one, the heads in the circle nodded. Hands fisted onto knees. Muscles bulged in clenched jaws. Faces pale and eyes wide as the rotting meat of Geno’s story plopped onto the pile in the center of the ring.
“Breathe, man,” Hasan said.
Nobody touched him, nobody looked away. No averted gazes or hands slid over mouth and nose to create some kind of shield. They sat still, stony and attentive, like a fence of Easter Island statues.
“Breathe,” Nolan said. “You did a great thing today.”
Geno waited to feel triumph. Or relief. Or validation.
He only felt sick to his stomach. Nobody followed him into the men’s room, but when he came out, Pablo was waiting with a bottle of water and Hasan gave him some peppermint candy.
Geno threw up a lot that first week in therapy. Anxious puking was common in this place, as was gallows humor treatment.
“How you doing, man?” one would ask.
“I only threw up once today,” another would answer, to admiring looks.
Weak and dehydrated and riddled with anxiety, Geno had no energy for any of the other activities. Like when they went over to the other side of the building every day for art therapy, whatever that was. Geno had to go, in that he was required to be present in the room. Once there, he sat and looked out the window and felt sick.
Gradually, his mind shook off a bit of the fog and looked around. His eyes picked out more people who were part of his world now. The therapists on the other side of the old warehouse.
Beau deBrueil looked like Paul Bunyan. Tall enough to block the sun, big as a pile of boulders, with a beard that arrived in the room ten seconds before he did. Aedith Johnson had a gap-toothed smile taller than it was wide, with a Milky Way galaxy of freckles across her broad face. Katie Bernstein was pale as a glass of milk, her plump body always in demure vintage dresses that looked straight out of Leave it to Beaver.
If this place were a TV show, Steffen Finch would be the panty-melter. A tall, built silver fox, with rings on all his fingers and tattoos crawling along his neck and arms. Something about him kept drawing Geno’s attention. It wasn’t just the big-and-small encounter of the other day. It was his strong, steady presence. The energy changed when Stef came into the art room. It didn’t ratchet up or fly apart, rather it pulled together and concentrated.
“Day doesn’t really start until Stef gets here,” Beau said. “Like he’s the key that opens the place for business.”
“What if he goes on vacation?” Geno asked.
Beau’s smile split his big beard apart. “Then I’m in charge.”
During free time, Stef sat with his own sketchpad and some random object. Geno often walked behind to peek, amazed how Stef, using only pencils, could pull something up out of the paper. A flick of the point here, a sideways shading there, a smudge of his thumb and you could reach into the pad and gather the thing into your fingers.
He’s cool, Geno thought, sliding his hand into his pocket where Stef’s card was still tucked. He wants to work with me.
People in hell wanted ice water.
If work was to be done, Geno would decide when.