This essay contains descriptions of sexual harassment and references sexual assault.

Shortly before 2 a.m., I reach my limit, overcome by one, or two, or fifty touches too many. My awareness resets at every squeeze of my thigh, every touch on my shoulder that becomes a caress in its slow, silent recession of skin from skin, dropping downward to light upon my back, my hip before pulling away in a brief respite. Begin again. The tacit timer clicks along, my body tensing as I wait for him to wrench it back to zero; still, I startle at the pressure of his hand reattached. I’m alert to where he is at every moment, to people's eyes on us, to the way he claims and directs my body, pulling me here and there until we move like conjoined twins connected not just at the hand but at the shoulder, arm, and hip; linked—no matter how many times I make myself small and pull away.

Ethnography is haunted by stories left untold. Lines of prose thicken into images of life, of being there, of presence narrated into truth only through absences and unspoken moments. Experience splinters in the writing, where thickness redacts as much as it reveals. I am pulled to invert this thickness, to throw the unseen into relief. To read the gaps, to recognize the fictions; to hear what's not said, what can't be named. To imagine what becomes of scholarship—to the publishable account—when description reveals what it is meant to conceal. To speak that which in turn becomes unsayable.

He had picked me up nearly twelve hours earlier. Emerging from the hotel, I glanced right and left, my eyes initially passing over the parked across the way, expecting a silhouette, realizing his was the lone car on this sandy expanse passing as a road, drifting toward him. A man sitting outside the neighboring restaurant took my hesitation as an opening, hurling greetings that intruded on the midday quiet; I paused in the abandoned road, torn between a spectacle of rudeness for the interlocutor ahead and my resistance to the stranger behind. In those seconds of indecision, he looked past me to the car. Oh, you’re with a man—he said, returning to his careless squat in the shade of a striped awning.