Writing about bad people is different from writing about people who do bad things. The former focuses on individuals who commit heinous acts, ruin lives, break laws. The latter shows us the person behind the insidiousness—the person who is, or once was, capable of good and guilt. There isn’t an excuse for their actions, but there is a greater understanding of their being, which, somehow, makes their actions worse. For a moment, we see a person who isn’t that dissimilar from someone we might work with or sit next to on a plane. Maybe we even see a person who reminds us of ourselves. And with that knowledge, their actions feel that much more horrible—because they suddenly become more real.
For those reasons, “1961” by Laura Demers stuck with me long after I read it. The story follows a group of working men who kidnap and rape a random woman at a bar. They don’t set out for the evening with a plan to commit a series of crimes. They’re at the bar to watch the Giants play the Redskins, and then the woman enters their world, looking glamorous and out of place in their part of Connecticut. There isn’t any indication that they’ve kidnapped and raped someone before, although it’s possible. Instead, the night’s events seem to just happen, like a small tremor setting off an avalanche.
From a craft perspective, there’s a lot to appreciate about this story: the way it jumps in time, the little windows we get into the men’s lives that establish their characters, and the prose itself. But the sensation of being caught up in the weight of their actions—one choice building on another until the pressure is crushing—is captured so beautifully and painfully in the opening section. So, let’s start at the beginning.
They had her out the window now, so that her neck lolled backwards. Her false eyelashes had come loose on one eye, giving her the look of a doll in a little girl’s clutches.
“Help me,” she called. Her voice was far away, down the end of a tunnel. Salvator wished he had a moment to sit down and figure this thing out.
It was Bert who held her against the window frame and Anthony who held up her feet. She grabbed onto the frame of the window, fighting them. She screamed again, twisting her neck to the beach below, but there was nobody out there. It was a grim, cloudy day, the wind whipping the curtains, the sound of seagulls in the distance. For a confused moment, Salvator caught sight of the pier in the distance. He thought of when he went there as a kid, the barnacles that cut his feet when he hung them over the side, the striped t-shirt he had loved.
I’m a big fan of starting in medias res because it sets the stakes and builds momentum—we’re dropped right into the horror of the evening and must figure out the rest. But in the middle of this action, these first few paragraphs also introduce a sense of dissociation—being present to witness the horrors but also creating distance. The woman is dehumanized in the first section: her head lolls backwards, she looks like “a doll in a little girl’s clutches,” and her cry for help sounds like it’s coming from the end of a tunnel. When we first meet Salvator, our main character, we’re immediately told that he wants a break in the action to “figure this thing out”—that is, figure out how things spiraled so far that he’s caught in something out of his control. From a narrative perspective, we’re presented with a fascinating series of events that play with control and power: after the woman screams again, Salvator remembers spending time at the pier as a child. This memory interrupts the scene’s emotional intensity, which allows us to smoothly transition to Salvator telling the guys to bring her inside—but, crucially, no one pays attention to him, because it’s too late for him to have second thoughts. He’s powerless in this moment, just as the men have taken power away from the woman by dragging her to this hotel room on this random, terrible evening.
This sequence accomplishes a few different things: it establishes the group’s depravity, but it also complicates Salvator’s character because he’s the only one who expresses any doubts about what they’re doing to the woman. This doesn’t excuse the fact that he’s an accomplice to the crime, but it does make him seem like the most human member of the group, which is crucial as we continue to follow the story—Salvator is our lens, and because he feels the most real, we’re interested in following how he falls so far from grace and becomes the type of man who would help kidnap and rape a stranger.
The next two sections backtrack in time and establish a few key details about Salvator’s life—his wife doesn’t like his friends, so he drinks with them outside of the house because it’s “none of his wife’s business who he drank with outside of the house.” When the woman sits with the men and we see the dynamic among his friends, the prose shifts into hints of danger: we learn Bert “could be dangerous when he drank,” and as they’re talking, Salvator’s heart races uncontrollably. We know where the night is heading because of that opening section, so these little nods to the tension within the group feel even more palpable—rather than bits of foreshadowing, they are confirmations that these men are drunk and reveling in this woman’s attention. That level of attention is juxtaposed against two more flashbacks, in which we see Salvator interacting with his wife (a tense exchange, but one in which Salvator tells his wife that he won’t be late—which adds an extra complication to the evening, that he’s expected home by a certain hour and will have to answer to his wife’s questions about where he’s been) and another flashback, at the start of the day, where Salvator takes out the trash and then quietly watches his wife through the window:
He stood up and made his way down the hill, wondering what had become of the DeSalvos. When he was almost back at the house, he was perspiring from his short walk, and decided he would take a quick shower before meeting the others. He saw his wife through the square living room window, standing and ironing and watching television. He watched her move the iron from right to left, right to left, never taking her eyes off the black and white screen. He willed her to look up from what she was doing. The longer he stood there, the colder he got.
There’s an overwhelming sense of emptiness in this description. Salvator is incredibly average: a man who knows his neighbors well enough to wonder where they’ve gone, but also a man who has fallen into a certain way of living. We get this sense from the way he watches his wife ironing (and the amount of time it’s implied that he spends outside): she’s following a specific routine, and he’s following his, and they will continue following that routine in their neighborhood that could exist anywhere in the state, anywhere in the country, because that’s the life they live. Salavtor’s life is static—and then this woman comes into the picture, and there’s an opportunity to do something distinctly different. That opportunity is enough for Salvator to go along with the rest of his friends, and we can infer that his friends are in similar headspaces—perfectly average, run-of-the-mill guys who decide, on a night like any other, to commit a series of crimes.
The next section underscores this tone. It begins so straightforwardly (“They were raping her now, taking turns. The day would be dark in about forty minutes.”) that we’re thrown off-kilter for a moment, shifting from Salvator quietly watching his wife through the window to Salvator watching his friends take turns with the woman. Later, Salvator doesn’t know if he’d taken a turn or not; he doesn’t even know how they got there. We can read “They were raping her” in two different ways—Salvator is part of the group, or he’s watching them, part of the crime but distanced. Both versions are horrific, but that level of uncertainty also complicates Salvator’s character further. How evil is he? Is he the type of person who joins the group, or is he the one that watches? We don’t know, and he says he doesn’t know, so he can’t absolve himself of anything.
That final interaction between Salvator and the woman is loaded—with anger, with guilt, and with a desire for redemption that, of course, the woman doesn’t owe Salvator and which he doesn’t deserve. She scratches his face, and he allows it to happen (“When she finally stopped, he dropped his hands and she spit in his eye”). She leaves a scarf in his car, and the story ends with Salvator stuffing the scarf in his jacket pocket while he sits in the driveway of his house. It’s a quiet way to end such a catastrophic series of events, and the narrative doesn’t reveal anything about Salvator’s thoughts beyond the awareness of “the uneven beating of his heart.” Rather than diving into Salvator’s guilt, or showing us another flashback to his childhood, the last section is distantly observing the actions of a man who is changed. I appreciate the restraint here; the net effect is that he is lost, even though he is home, and there’s runway for the reader to recognize him as a monster but also to feel a kernel of sympathy for him. That’s one of the most impressive feats of this story: Salvator is an accomplice, whether or not he actually raped the woman, but we also see and feel his shock and guilt. The scarf becomes a reminder—of what he did, but also of what he didn’t do, and that complication makes this ending truly land.
How do we write complicated characters? How do we, as readers, recognize ourselves in the villain? We are shown shreds of their humanity—the people who feel stuck and seek an outlet, those who can justify their actions even when we don’t agree with their rationale. “1961” demonstrates that heinous acts don’t always have clear motivations, and that’s what makes this story one to remember.
by Rebecca Paredes