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She doesn’t answer.
“Jesus. Cut to the chase, ok?”
“I can’t…” she sighs. “I can’t say it. Just see for yourself. I’m going to send you an encrypted link to view; it will delete itself in an hour.”
“This is going to go public soon?”
“I don’t think I can stop it. And Ethan? Make sure you go somewhere private before you open the link.”
She hangs up before I can protest again. The link comes through a minute later. I’m tempted to open it in the cab, but something in her tone makes me wait.
When we reach the hotel, I sprint upstairs, hoping to find Victor in our room, but it’s dark and empty. Since his things are still where I tidied them instead of thrown everywhere, I don’t think he has been back.
I sit on the edge of the bed, breathing hard. The link opens onto a list of video files. Six of them, thirty minutes each. Holding my breath, I tap the first one.
“My name is Victor Jakob Lang. It is the, uh, the fifteenth of July, uh, 2016.” The simple video shows Victor, in a suit, sitting in front of a beige wall. Based on the date, this would have been a month before Rio, before the dope scandal.
His clothing and hair are as immaculate as ever. He also looks like he hasn’t slept in months. The dark circles under his eyes are so pronounced it looks like someone punched him. Then, to my horror, I realize that someone has; the skin around his right eye is puffy and blue, and a broken blood vessel stains the white of his eye red.
A stack of paper sits in front of him, but he doesn’t look at it. He keeps hesitating and glancing off-camera for information or reassurance.
If I thought the Victor I met in his pool four weeks ago was broken, it’s nothing compared to this. His empty eyes never stop moving, and he flinches at every little sound. He’s bouncing his leg, fidgeting with a pen, and sometimes he reaches up to finger his black eye, wincing. His strained voice can barely be heard over the ambient room noise.
He stumbles to a stop after saying the date, and someone off-screen murmurs something I can’t make out. He blinks, then takes a deep breath. “I wish to state for the purposes of this deposition…” He trails off, closes his eyes. The person off-camera speaks again, and he twitches. His voice is a whisper. “I wish to state for the record that Coach Clint Simmons has been abusing me for four and a half years.”
As soon as the words leave his mouth, it all makes so much sense. The pieces come together so clearly that, even though I’m in shock, I hate myself for not figuring it out sooner.
“In twenty, uh, twenty twelve, after Junior Nationals, Simmons invited me to his home in Las Cruces, near our team’s compound, to, um, give me a gift. He, uh.” Victor blinks rapidly, staring at nothing. “He.” He looks at the person off-camera. “Can I—”
Someone whose face I can’t see comes around and sits on the table, facing him. She puts her hands on his shoulders and speaks quietly, then gives him a hug. When she turns around I realize she’s just some legal assistant, an employee of whoever’s recording the deposition.
He did this all alone, with no one but a stranger to hold him. Jesus Christ. I think of all the times he went on TV in the months before Rio, his untouchable smile. He didn’t just suffer alone; he suffered alone in front of millions of people who could probably have helped him if he had found some way to tell them.
Victor swallows and his voice gets stronger. “He touched me and made me touch him and he, uh, he told me that professional athletes and coaches do this stuff all the time and everyone would make fun of me if I talked about it.”
I pause the video and put my head in my hands. I can’t stand to listen to any part for more than a few seconds, so I skip around at random through the files. In just five minutes, I hear enough to scar anyone for life.
The last meal I ate is rising to the back of my throat. Then I remember that there are six fucking videos, three full hours of footage, and I do puke, right in the garbage can which is still full of wrappers and bags from our floor picnic.
He just talks and talks, the emotionless monotone, the fractured stammering and long hesitations. He explains everything in childish terms, like his brain got stuck the day his coach first touched him. If he was “good,” the man took him to nice hotel rooms in the city and treated him gently. But most of the time he was “bad”, and he was beaten, raped, shared with other men, photographed for images like the one Nicola sent me earlier.
When he got old enough to fight back, his coach started drugging his food and trying to convince him, through never-ending mind games, that they were in love.
I remember how hungry he always looks, how he won’t touch anything that he hasn’t seen prepared or sealed. His absolute terror of the word love. The way he told me that the water has always protected him. I want to throw things, to hurt someone, to curl up in the bed and never get out.
By the end of the last video, his voice has worn down to a scratchy rasp. He’s staring at his lap now, never looking up, talking so quietly it’s hard to hear. When he finishes, he turns to the woman off-camera with tortured eyes. “Was that ok?” he breathes. “Can you use that?”
“Thank you, Victor. You did well.”
He puts his arms on the table and buries his face in them. I can’t tell if it’s agony or relief.
But in the end, all of those words meant nothing. None of this ever went public. Someone, somewhere had the power to silence him, to take away his voice and shut the bright summer boy away, alone in the dark.
