The Phantom Lover
I used to think evil people were easy to spot. Like in horror movies, like TV monsters, and men in mugshots that brought out their lack of humanity. But evil rarely introduces itself that way. Sometimes it walks casually past your front gate in a dirty-white cowboy hat on an ordinary October morning while you hold your four-year-old son’s hand. And sometimes, hours later, it puts a knife to your throat in your own home. Years have passed since that night, yet I can still remember the exact sensation of a cold steel knife pressing against my neck. The muffled voice in my ear. The disbelief. I had a strange separation from reality—as if part of me had floated to the ceiling while another part tried desperately to survive. People often ask what terror feels like. It feels like your body is becoming both heavy and weightless at the same time. It feels like hearing your heartbeat pounding in your ears. It feels like time is breaking apart. Ten minutes becoming an eternity. It feels like realizing that safety is not guaranteed simply because you locked your door.
Afterward, I expected rage. Instead, I felt numb and then confused. Then I was out of sorts because I didn’t feel like everyone, including myself, expected me to feel. For a long time, I couldn’t understand why part of me kept trying to believe that the man who raped me somehow cared about me. He threw a blanket over me so that he wouldn’t get cold. He engaged in conversation with me when I spoke to him. Especially when I realized I was about to be raped. When he’d told me to “strip,” I’d said, “Oh, this is about sex?” I shook my head matter-of-factly. “I can’t have sex without a conversation first.”
He took a breath and exhaled. “So, what kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a dental hygienist,” I replied, trying to look calm although the words, “please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me,” swirled in my mind. “What do you do?”
He must have realized that he was not there for a friendly chat, because he abruptly said, “Get on the bed.” He didn’t hurt me, even though he could have. He had a conversation with me, even though he was not there for a chat. He let me live, even though he threatened me with a knife. And he covered me with a blanket when he left so I wouldn’t “get cold.” He rescued me in a sense, and my emotions were mixed and confusing. My therapist called this syndrome “the phantom lover.” The mind searches for meaning inside horror because the reality is too much to bear.
The hardest part was not only surviving the attack, but also surviving what came after. The fear followed me everywhere. Every unfamiliar sound at night became a threat. Home no longer felt safe. The world no longer felt predictable. And yet, something unexpected eventually happened. The fear slowly transformed into power. One day, I walked into the county jail where he was held and confronted the man who raped me. Not because I wasn’t afraid, but because I wanted my power back. I wanted to surprise him as he’d surprised me. I wanted an apology, and I wanted to know what goes on in the mind of someone like him.
And then, I asked him why he did what he did–raping women and sometimes hurting them (that’s a different story for later). What he told me about why and the forces of evil within him shaped much of my writing about darkness, trauma, manipulation, and evil. Not because I’m fascinated by monsters, but because I wanted to understand evil, and what goes on inside a man who bragged he could easily kill without remorse. The truth is this: The most frightening thing about evil is not how alien it is. It’s how human it can look.