He Said, They Said

Scientists believe that memory — the process of memory-­making, and of its retrieval — involves wide and disparate parts of the brain. Trillions of microscopic cells fire at once, sharing information across infinitesimally small gaps between them, working together spontaneously, constantly, to create and filter and store and reassemble sensory impressions into cogency. Lasting memories form when perception moves from short-term repositories to long-term, by way of the hippocampus, an irregularly shaped structure buried deep in the forebrain. Alcohol and drugs can disrupt this progression, can impair the movement of information between cells — can, in effect, erase our memories, or, more precisely, usurp the process as it’s occurring, like a photographer snapping pictures on a camera without film. This, we call blackout.

She was in his bed now, vomiting into a bowl. He chastised her: I take you out, I buy you drinks! “I couldn’t internalize that he was yelling at me,” she says. “I had no fear, I had no emotion.” She may or may not have vomited on her clothes. In a scrub top, in his bed, “All I wanted to do was sleep.” And here, she stopped remembering.

Until his hands were on her skin. She opened her eyes to the dark.

She hadn’t consented, she says, but someplace not fully conscious, her mind began rationalizing: “I don’t like this, but I’m so tired, and he’s not, like, raping me.” She fell in and out of sleep. “I was so tired.” He slipped his finger inside her. “I wanted him to stop.” And then he was on top of her. “That’s when I knew he was having sex with me, and then I got scared, and that’s when I pretty much woke up completely. But I wasn’t able to physically do anything. I couldn’t move my body, he was holding me down.” His grunts were soft; he did not speak. His chest was positioned above her head; he did not look her in the face. “There was the night light of the city coming into his bedroom. I kept telling him to stop. I said No. I was freaking out inside.” Once again, memories stopped forming; her mind went black. …

She woke again. It was dark, quiet: She was in his apartment, he was asleep beside her, naked, still but for his breathing. Slowly, quietly, she lifted her body from his bed. Found her way through the strange room to a small, dark bathroom. She left the lights off, door open. There was a window beside the toilet. She went to it, looked out onto the city far below. She focused on the GlaxoSmithKline building at Race and 16th. She fell apart.