"Guests check in and check out; gamblers come in the early evenings and stumble out the next morning; and hundreds of rooms are endlessly dirtied and then made clean again by hotel workers. But the phone remains silent. I like to think that the rotating check-in staff are always alert and prepared even for the call that they don't know is coming."
"There in that hotel, a little over four years ago, I was raped by a group of men during a three-day trip I took to Las Vegas with two of my best friends. Of the rape, which lasted all night, I remember both too much and too little. I never did anything about it. I didn't tell anyone who could have done something about it, either, such as the hotel staff or the Las Vegas police."
"With the passage of time comes the passing of statutory deadlines. There's no room in the law for my personal combination of indecision, confusion, and avoidance. Put differently, the legal frameworks we have for processing crimes often conflict with our emotional and affective responses to those crimes. But more than anything, the looming deadline of the statute of limitations for pressing criminal charges against those men has forced me to confront the reasons why"
A hotel in Las Vegas has had a silent phone for over four years that the narrator imagines as an open line for a call that never comes. In June 2021, the narrator was raped there by a group of men during a three-day trip with friends. The narrator remembers parts of the assault and did not report it to hotel staff or police. Time is eroding the possibility of legal recourse as statutes of limitations approach. The narrator experiences persistent haunting, frozen memory, guilt, indecision, and a conflict between emotional responses and legal frameworks.
Read at The Nation
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