Bruises Fade but the Questions Linger

Maybe it was because she was calling from the other side of the basin, from a little yellow two-bedroom apartment on Los Angeles’ Westside. Maybe it was because it was night, and I was in front of the fireplace in a cozy house in the suburbs. Maybe it was because, at this moment in California, hysteria is out of style.

Whatever the reason, the young woman’s voice seemed distant and tinny, her story not of this place or this era of diminishing crime. “You know that guy they’re looking for? The Westside rapist or whatever? Well, I’m one of the women who was attacked. Although, personally, I think there’s more than one guy.”

The voice was tough and articulate, with that sweet bravado that seems to inflect the voices of certain California girls in their 20s. She’d gotten my number from someone else who’d been interviewed for an earlier story; she said she was calling to warn women to be careful, but it seemed, too, that she just wanted to talk.

“I’m here alone,” she said. “I just got home to find that my stupid roommate went out and left all the doors and windows open. Now I’m just sitting here, freaking out, looking at all the closets, wondering if someone’s going to leap out.”

A month and a half ago, she said, she was asleep in her room, on the old lime-green sheets her mother gave her, with two roommates in the next bedroom and two male friends crashed downstairs in front of a flickering TV. They kept their door unlocked because they were all current or recently graduated UCLA students, and they felt their friends should always have a place to come if they didn’t want to drive drunk.

He just crept in on tiptoe, a slim, predatory shadow with baggy clothes and spiky hair, and when she woke, he was on top of her, hitting her, shoving her cheek into the bed. She struggled, trying to shout, trying to figure out whether this was real or she was dreaming.

“Don’t make any noise,” the shadow said.

*

It’s been a strange, unsettling spring in California. The crime rate is down; we are statistically safe. And yet the domestic peace keeps getting disturbed by these intermittent molestations and scattered, grotesque murders, as if the dark side of humanity were sending some message to Three Strikes lawmakers and beefed-up police forces and the like.

In placid San Luis Obispo, college students turn up missing. In beautiful Yosemite, a mother and two teenage girls turn up horrifyingly dead. Meanwhile, for four months now, someone has been raping and beating Westside women. Or maybe it’s several someones. First there were attacks in Santa Monica, then attacks at UCLA that police thought were unconnected; now they’re all being looked into by the same task force investigating a series of attacks in nearby Palms.

What does it mean? This is what the California girl on the telephone wonders. “You think if you don’t put out violent energy, violence won’t come to you. I refuse to live with paranoia. But you start to wonder if all those authors you read in school were right when they told you that violence is just a random part of life.”

Far away, at the other end of a vast web of phone lines, she’s talking to herself now, remembering how her roommates burst in before he could finish, how he leaped like Spiderman out the window, how he left her mouth bloody and her jaw bruised. Her first thought, she says, was that this was how Jacob must have felt, wrestling with the Angel of God. Her second was: “They could have found you dead and broken and raped and blue.”

*

Two weeks later, we meet in person. She is dark-eyed and tiny, infinitely more fragile than her voice implied. Her jaw has healed; her spirit is another matter. She can’t sleep. She can’t forget. She can’t seem to stop stoking her rage.

“It’s not fair. I’m not a horrible person,” she says, her pink lips bitterly curling. We’re sitting on a park bench in the windy sunshine. She’s wearing an overcoat, and she pulls it close with pale, delicate hands. “I look at guys now, and I think, ‘Do I know you? Do I really know you?’ Because who really knows who’s doing this?”

Two weeks, and the manhunt continues. The attacks now number 10 or more.

“Are you cold?” she asks. I am not. I am a statistically safe Californian, sitting on a park bench in April, wondering whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. Whether security is in the eye of the beholder. Whether a California girl’s sweet bravado, once shattered, can be restored.

*

Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.