ME: I’m sure there are gaps in his memory too. They were both drunk as skunks. Who’s to say she wasn’t the rapist and he the victim? He wasn’t in any position to consent either.

L. BASCOMBE: By the very nature of sexual intercourse, the man is more likely to be the aggressor. You know that, Lucy. Your feminist studies must have shown you that.

ME: So, are you saying that every act of sexual intercourse with a drunk woman is rape?

L. BASCOMBE: If her consent was not fully or meaningfully given, then yes. No one should have sex with a woman whose judgement is impaired by alcohol or drugs or mental challenges. You know this.

ME: But still . . . my rape was worse than hers. Wasn’t it?

L. BASCOMBE: This is pointless. It is meaningless to apportion degrees of terribleness to rape survivors. Trauma is a personal thing. One woman may process an event more quickly than another. PTSD can manifest itself immediately, or only years after the event. There is no correct or appropriate response to rape. There are as many responses as there are survivors.

* * *

And so, I am in the wrong again. My feelings are invalid and my responses inappropriate. I can’t even get this right, this business of being a rape victim. I am the wrong kind of victim—the kind that goes off-brand.

People are particularly shocked by my wrongness because fiction-Lucy is so very right. She is a noble creature who harbours no bitterness. I, on the other hand, am a tightly wound ball of bitterness. I seethe with resentment. People expect me to be calm and forgiving. It is a great disappointment to them to discover that I am a rage-filled harpy.

I should take fiction-Lucy as my model. Whenever I don’t know what to do, I should ask myself, WWFLD? What would fiction-Lucy do?

My friend Moira thinks this is a good idea. She thinks I could sort my whole life out like this.

“Fiction-Lucy wouldn’t live in this chaos.”

She has come to my place to help me track down John Coetzee. She has access to departmental websites and online bulletin boards that are now closed to me. My status at the university has been downgraded to “inactive.” First, I was on leave. Then I was on sabbatical. Then I was on leave-of-absence. Now I am inactive.

I was just a few rewrites away from resubmitting my PhD—a hundred or so words at most. It might as well be a million words. I can no more finish it right now than I could finish an ultramarathon.

I can’t think of a better way to describe myself than inactive. I don’t know how to become active again, but Moira has some ideas.