The worst thing that was ever done to a person I know was committed by a man who claimed he loved his victim. “That was not rape,” he told her afterwards. He was in this regard highly unoriginal. Every rape survivor who has shared her story with me was also told by her rapist that what he did to her was not rape. The first months after my rape I would play macabre mind games with myself whenever I was left alone. I would, for example, ask myself at regular intervals: What punishment would be bad enough? Sometimes I would deliberately pose the question at a time of relative peace, to punish myself for allowing the memory of the evil to fade from the forefront of my attention. What punishment would be bad enough? What punishment would be bad enough? At two months out, I was able to make droll, dark quips about my little game with close friends. I would say that I wished I believed in hell so that I could believe he would burn forever, and I would add that faith in the possibility of eternal damnation is wasted on people who already have the comfort of a God. They would laugh and rub my back and tell me they were glad that we could make jokes. But in the skinless moments, when wit was beyond me, I would fantasize about one particular punishment. I wanted my rapist to think “That is a rapist” every time he saw his own reflection. I wanted the word to rise like bile in his throat every time he read his own byline. His condign punishment would have been the burning tang of his own evil present as a taste on his tongue. 
Rape is like explosive ammunition. The bullet fragments beneath the skin, wounding all parts of the body. The initial rupture is then succeeded by a thousand subsequent tears which commit compounded, invisible violence over time. The damage spreads far from the site of the wound. The damage cannot be contained. A victim must track its effects. She must understand how she has been shredded within. She must identify and extract each shard, or else the shrapnel will continue to do damage. Feigning health is not an option. A woman whose name I did not recognize direct-messaged me on Instagram a few months ago. I will call her Eve. Eve told me that she had reason to believe that a man who had just violently attacked her may have once done something similar to me. “Would you be willing to meet or to talk on the phone? I live in Philadelphia but can make the trip down.” We scheduled a phone call. On the phone Eve relayed that impressive social media detective work had yielded the following interesting results: her rapist and I had once been close friends, but we no longer follow one another on any platform. There was a photograph of us on a beach taken from a few years ago that he still had on his Instagram grid, though there was no trace of him in any photos on my Instagram account. Suspicious. The police, who had taken swabs of blood and photographs of the bruises which covered her chest and arms after the attack, had told her that rapes like hers are usually perpetrated by repeat offenders. Her rapist had said and done things which indicated to the cops that he had likely said and done those things before. Eve had been looking for her fellow victims, for others who had suffered as she had by the same hand. “Her rapist” might also be “my rapist.” “My rapist”: what a heavy appellation. It binds you grotesquely. When a woman I love revealed to me that she had been raped three times by three different men, the first thought I had — viscerally, before I could catch myself from forming it — was that it was like having three ex-husbands. “My rapist” denotes a permanent relationship. This is one of the injustices for which I had been unprepared before my own experience. Another shard. But Eve had guessed wrong. “No, he didn’t rape me.” I told her. “It’s strange you reached out. I did break off contact with him shortly after I was raped, but I wasn’t raped by him. I was raped by someone else. A few days afterward he and I were talking about date rape and he said to me, ‘That’s not real rape, though. You know usually they’re both just drunk and then she regrets it and exaggerates.’ I wonder whether I would have broken off contact with him if I hadn’t just been raped. I probably would have just yelled at him. But after that remark I wanted nothing to do with him.” But I wanted to be absolutely clear, because we were speaking in a universe of innuendo. “No, he never did anything like that to me. And my rape wasn’t like that either. I mean, it wasn’t violent like that. I didn’t bleed. I was in and out of sleep when he penetrated me and was jolted wide awake when he started moving fast inside me.” “Oh my god.” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” Odd, I thought, that she could be moved by that detail when her story was far more gruesome than mine. It was a swampy summer morning in Washington, DC. I had been on a run but had stopped in my office for her call. Minutes into Eve’s account I slid to the floor and pulled my knees up against my chest. It was awful to listen to her, to hear the plea in her tone while she recounted the details, and to recognize that plea. I, too, used to beg implicitly when I retold my own story. “This is bad, right? Isn’t this very, very bad?” I could feel myself imploring people to understand. I wanted them to be moved by the
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