The Salt of the Earth

How Group Therapy for Survivors of Childhood Sexual Assault Helped Me to Basically Fix My Entire Life

The Duck Knight

Let’s start in the middle of this story, because laughter is healing…

It is the dead of night. Picture a large parking lot filled with hundreds of vehicles outside of an enormous office complex. The air is filled with a cool white glow, a combination of fog and modern LED street lamps. The sound of a violent struggle emanates from behind an old sedan. Shadows on the ground magnify a horrific scene. A silhouette of a female held down by two males.

I burst onto this scene heroically, sweat-covered, and brimming with emotional energy. I burn with a passion for justice. This is me at my physical peak, two hundred and forty pounds of pure muscle with the endurance of a marathon runner. It seems to me that I have never been so alive. I am prepared both to die and to kill.

At this point, I’m ethically obligated to end your suspense by adding that some of the sounds the distressed female is making are quacks. The males are also ruffling their feathers quite loudly. Which is a roundabout way of saying that everyone but me in this story is a duck.

It doesn’t matter.

I’m still charging into a parking lot in the middle of the night, growling like a berserker from ancient times, far away from any sensible jogging path. The sound of the struggle drew my attention and I began acting before I had a chance to think. Every cell in my body commands that I must save this duck from being raped. Which is an emotionally charged word that is probably not appropriate when applied to a mallard duck. Yet all I could see in that moment was my own abuse, and all I could think about was every time in my whole life when I’d sat down like a coward and done nothing in the face of injustice.

Never again, Dear Reader.

Not while there is breath left in my body.

What those ducks represented was my own history. My own tortured soul, covered in green and brown feathers, a momentary incarnation in miniature of one of the ugliest aspects of being itself. An externalization of my own fetid wound, now burst open and draining. I had but to extend my will and some small part of the universe would be set back to right. Some not insignificant part of myself would be set to right along with it. At least in microcosm, I would no longer be the kind of man to stand by silently in the face of horror.

I almost leapt over the hood of the car.

I hollered as I brought my foot back and kicked.

Once.

Quack!

Twice.

Quack!

There was power in me to crack the bones of the devil, but the ducks just sort of lofted away instead of exploding into clouds of feathers. Probably something to do with my shin being the same surface area as their entire body and the shock absorbing properties of lots of feathers. I reached down to strangle one of the fiends, but he was too quick and had already dodged under another car. Its accomplice did likewise, fleeing in the opposite direction. I momentarily pursued each of them, clapping my hands and hollering. Before long, each took to wing and flew a hundred or so yards away to a nearby field.

Gasping to catch my breath, tears of raw anguish running down my face, I looked down at the drab female duck whose chastity I had saved. She looked up at me, then backed away slowly until she was half hidden under a fender. She regarded me quietly, a look on her face that transcended biology as if to say, “You know I’m a duck, right?”

That’s when it hit me.

Perspective.

What in God’s name was I doing?

Nothing in my head seemed to fit together. I had, very shortly previous to this, had a religious experience but it had not healed me. Rather, it was like it had lanced a wound and excised some foreign body from my soul, but the closing of those wounds was left in my hands. Now from somewhere in that oozing chasm I had summoned forth an extreme passion, a sense of righteousness I had never been able to find before, to defend the sexual integrity of… a duck?

I was surely going insane. None of this was normal. I was even seeing a therapist!

I considered briefly what I was supposed to do next and the absurdity compounded. Was I supposed to take the duck to a veterinary rape crisis center? Of course such a thing does not exist and does not need to exist. So what did that leave? Drape a tiny blue woolen blanket over her wings and get her into an ambulance like in the movies? Take her to a church and leave her in the care of some nuns sworn to a duck-centric order? Take her home with me and do my best to make sure she didn’t transfer her gratitude for my having saved her into feelings of unrequited romantic love?

At that last thought I started to giggle like a madman. Still crying, but howling with laughter as well. In my darkest and deepest depressions, my sense of humor has rarely failed me.

“Oh wow,” I said, “this is nuts.”

I was always muttering things like that out loud in those days, if only to remind myself to preserve a sense of perspective. It was like everything I should have been feeling for years was starting to come out. In the weirdest and most awkward possible ways.

I left the rescued duck behind without another word.

What was I going to do? Tell her to call 9-1-1 for ducks if those other ducks came back? I was suddenly embarrassed that someone might have seen me, so I quickly resumed my run.