by Ani Katz
It sounds invasive, I know. A violation. But over the past few months I’d grown so accustomed to checking devices, constantly monitoring my daughter’s internet usage to make sure she wasn’t getting into trouble again, that casual surveillance had become second nature. My daughter had earned back her own phone with texting privileges over Thanksgiving, but she still used my wife’s phone sometimes, browsing online boutiques and playing music videos in the passenger seat of the car or at the kitchen island while dinner was prepared.
But if I’m being honest, that wasn’t even why I checked. I don’t know what I was looking for. It may have been wrong, but it was unconscious, my fingers working of their own accord to type in my wife’s passcode and scroll through her messages and history.
It’s pointless for me to describe what I found, what I saw. All those messages in French to people I didn’t know. The details don’t matter, certainly not anymore. I know that cataloging those simple facts might show something of the life she was living—the sliver of her life that excluded me—but I also know that it would fail to add up to anything that could possibly explain the inexplicable.
It was nothing, really.
Other men may have faced their suspicions head-on. They may have confronted their wives, asking questions, demanding explanations. They may have raged through their houses, extorting tearful apologies, hounding their women into meek submission.
But I would never do anything like that. I wasn’t that kind of man.
Besides, it was nothing.
* * *
—
The following Friday the first shipment of Christmas presents arrived; I found them waiting for me on the front porch when I came home from work.
It had been a tense and exhausting week, my subordinates giving me a wide berth, Greg throwing around ominous words like accountability and probation when he deigned to speak with me. I had a few small, new projects—fewer and smaller than I’d expected—and I was struggling to begin meaningful work on any of them. Nothing had been said about my bonus, or my raise, or about anything else coming up after the New Year.
The girls were still out. My daughter must have been at some kind of lesson, but who knows what my wife was doing, or where she was. Maybe with friends I didn’t know. Maybe alone at a bar. Maybe sitting in her car, tapping out more of those messages, her fingers tickling and stroking her screen.
There were several packages stacked on the porch. Most of what I’d ordered was for the girls, but there was one item I’d ordered for myself, something that had caught my eye during my late-night browsing: a simple piece from a craftsman in War Eagle. It was something I realized I’d wanted for a while, my own talisman for today. As soon as I’d seen the product photo—red cedar posed on a brick mantel—I’d been able to feel the club’s reassuring heft in my hands, and as soon as I’d clicked Buy It Now I’d already felt more secure. More in control.
The falling snow had silenced our street. I stood on the porch for a while in the thickening dark, surveying the precarious pile, this bulwark that shielded our threshold. Then I knelt, gathered the boxes in my arms, and carried them into the house.
IV
Dawn in the valley, a distant sound of bells.
The first pale blue of the day reveals the hidden shape of the mountains, still black against the new light. A young shepherd sings a song to the goddess of spring and plays his pipe, his tune by turns jaunty and mournful.
A lost and lonely traveler awakens, sprawled in dew-soaked grass. He is surprised to find himself there, safe and alive, as though he has survived a shipwreck. Indeed he has, in a manner of speaking. At the very last moment, he chose to leave an underworld of erotic reverie and return to the world of mortals, leaving the sins of his past behind. Now he hears the song of pilgrims traveling through the rifts and ridges of the vale. They approach, exhausted yet euphoric, their voices soft at first, then swelling over the solitary music of the shepherd boy and his pipe.
The traveler stands stunned for a moment. Then, overcome with gratitude, he falls to his knees, and the chorus of the pilgrims overwhelms the pastoral scene. The traveler takes up their song, praising God for his deliverance, his own voice rising up to heaven.
Then a harsh clap of static, a deafening pop against the ear.
Sorry!
My daughter tiptoes barefoot from the kitchen into the dining room, her arms spread like wings, her wrists bent, her fingertips splayed—a performance of exaggerated care.
There was something wrong with the stereo receiver. If you moved around the downstairs of the house with too heavy a tread the signal would fade, voices drowned by a rush of garbled buzzing.
Daddy, why does it keep doing that?
It’s doing that because of all the other electronics in the house, like your cell phone. They’re interfering with the reception.
That’s crazy. I don’t believe that.
Just don’t move around so much, okay?
When is this going to be over?
It just started.
Ugh, really?
You know, sweetheart, many people are of the opinion that this is the greatest opera ever written.
So?
So just listen.
We are listening to—or rather, trying to listen to—the Met’s Saturday live radio broadcast of Tannhäuser. It is Saturday, April 13, the first unseasonably warm weekend of the year. Outside, purple and periwinkle crocuses adorn the dirt along the driveway, and the yellow heads of the daffodils are beginning to peer out from their slim paper bag sheaths. There is a heavy stillness in the unaccustomed heat, a buzz of insects in the air. Light and moisture hover like a beaded curtain, golden and solid. The first promise of summer, the good seasons still before us.
But we don’t get to enjoy the beautiful day. My girls and I are inside, ranged around the dining room table, absorbed in the creation of a school project. Spread before us is a pizza box that we have transformed into a topographical map, a board game charting Buck’s journey through the Yukon in The Call of the Wild.
My wife has become fixated on painting the crags and plateaus of each papier-mâché snow-capped mountain, dabbing their flanks with varying shades of blue and green to heighten their sense of depth, texture, and shadow. My daughter busies herself fashioning tiny animals out of clay—wolfish dogs, doggish wolves, lumbering bears and seals. The girls labor quietly, their faces peaceful in concentration, like angels in a medieval fresco, or two of Vermeer’s maids bent over their sewing in the window light. I’m making the playing cards:
Stolen from Judge Miller—Lose a turn
Defeat Spitz—Move forward 3 spaces and earn 3 tokens
Adopted by Thornton—Earn 2 tokens
Law of the Club—Go back 3 spaces
It has been well documented in numerous accounts of April 13 that the temperature would plummet forty degrees by nightfall, after I had dropped off my daughter at the old house where I grew up for a long-promised evening of movies and takeout with her grandmother and aunts. By midnight it would be snowing. Almost every article and official report makes note of this curious fact, as if the freakish shift from summer to winter that night was a sign of something more meaningful than just a particularly powerful cold front.
No, the schizophrenic weather meant absolutely nothing, but if any of these media or law enforcement philistines had even the slightest passing knowledge of opera or art, they might have noted the poetic irony of the Met’s Tannhäuser radio broadcast that day. The title character is the perfect antihero—noble and good-hearted, yet catastrophically impulsive in his emotions. The opera is irresistible in its scope, ingenious in the way it elevates the human drama of relationships to a struggle between salvation and damnation—a battle between our base, egotistical urges and our relentless pursuit of purity. These are the struggles we all face in our dealings with the ones we love.
&nb
sp; I have said before that I believe I share a strong affinity with Tannhäuser. I see myself in him, even as I question his choices. Why does he publicly admit to the crimes of his past when his world has already taken him back with open arms? Why does he throw it all away once more?
The truth is that it had to be that way. They all would have found out eventually. Elisabeth, his virginal true love—she would have found out. And then what would have become of him? No, he had to confess, and he had to suffer the terrible pains of the road that lay ahead. He had to lose what he loved most. His abnegation was the only way for him to be saved.
And this, in the end, is why I must tell this story: because only a public reckoning of what I have done could ever possibly absolve me.
* * *
■ ■ ■
But first, the shooting.
On a Thursday morning in March, a middle-aged man armed with two assault rifles, a family heirloom Winchester, and a kitchen knife walked through the service entrance of the Saint Perpetua School for Girls on East Ninety-first Street, where his estranged wife worked in the finance office. Shortly after entering the building, the gunman was confronted by a sixty-two-year-old security guard, a Trinidadian gentleman who was just four months from retirement. It was second period, the hallways empty. The gunman shot the security guard in the face, then barricaded himself in the nearest ground-floor classroom, taking twenty-one fourth graders and their two teachers as his hostages. Shouting through the door, he demanded to speak to his wife, who had just started the process of divorcing him.
Three hours into the standoff, the gunman executed the head teacher, a mother of twin boys who had taught at the school for almost two decades. About an hour later, the gunman killed the assistant teacher, a young woman who was an alumna of Saint Perpetua and had recently gotten engaged.
It is difficult to imagine what happened after that—what it was like in that bloody room for those poor girls. Supposedly the gunman insisted they sing pop songs, that they take turns as soloists. He told them to think of the whole thing as an adventure, a story to tell their own daughters one day. He was still sure his demands would be met and that the rest of them could go home safely.
He would have mercy on them.
I imagine the girls, gripped with terror in the familiar surroundings of their classroom, sitting cross-legged on the rug and staring up at the face of the lethargic clock, the black-and-white grid of their construction-paper silhouette self-portraits, the diagram of the water cycle, and the yellowed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence—all of it incomprehensible and alien, mysterious texts unearthed from a long-forgotten culture. None of it could help them now.
Negotiations broke down. The gunman executed two girls with single shots to the back of their heads before the SWAT team could break down the door. Another three girls were killed in the brief gun battle that followed.
We watched it unfold at the office. After the first breaking-news alert dinged our phones, someone turned on the television in the main lounge on the second floor, and all of us who didn’t need to be anywhere else gathered around to stare at the footage playing out on the screen, periodically checking the small screens in our hands for identical coverage. There were aerial views of the police cordon that had been erected around Saint Perpetua, pointless interviews with unconnected pedestrians, grim analysis from experts and talking heads. We watched it all, unable to look away. Greg poked his head in, saw that some women in the room were weeping.
I can’t deal with this right now, he said. He walked out.
Others, chastened, followed him back to work. Abigail had begun to sob, snuffling into her hands. Without thinking, I sat beside her and patted her shoulder in an avuncular gesture of commiseration, murmured something comforting as the room emptied around us.
It’s just so awful, she moaned.
I know, I said. It’s unimaginable.
How could someone do that?
I don’t know.
Evil. It’s just evil.
Her flushed face felt hot beside mine. I moved my hand from her shoulder to her knee, rubbed the soft mound of it consolingly.
After work we went to our usual happy hour bar. I ordered two Laphroaigs for us, followed Abigail’s lead when she downed hers in one hard swallow.
Easy, kid.
Ha, she barked, wiping her plump mouth with the back of her wrist. So I’m a kid now?
You’ve always been a kid.
Oh please. Just get us another round.
We got drunk. The night became reduced, dark and slow, boiled down to isolated images: Abigail crying, Abigail laughing, Abigail licking her lips and sticking out her tongue. Abigail’s knee wedged between mine. Abigail leaning her heavy torso over the dark wood of the bar, her fingers raised in a crooked peace sign as she signaled for another round.
I got home somehow. Late. I don’t recall speaking with my wife, though I must have. She would have been upset about the shooting too.
The Saint Perpetua massacre troubled everyone. How could it not? Some people fret that with each new act of annihilation the public grows a bit more jaded, a bit less able to feel, but this one was different, somehow. The outpouring of grief was national in scale. Small towns all over erected memorials, planting octets of wooden angels in public squares. The president wept at a televised vigil. Charity drives were initiated and fully funded within days. Comfort dogs padded through the halls of the city’s schools. The governor of New York attended each of the victim’s funerals, was photographed clasping the hands of bereaved parents on the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral as raindrops slicked the shoulders of his dark suit.
Even so, even as the city and nation performed their rites of collective mourning, the weight of the tragedy felt especially onerous to me, as if its particularities had singled me out for suffering.
I couldn’t sleep. When I did sleep, I had nightmares. My daughter’s voice calling for me as I ran through a labyrinth of locker-lined hallways. A faceless figure behind a glass door, pounding and pounding, demanding to be let in. The governor of New York questioning me, asking me what I knew.
I couldn’t talk to my wife or my daughter about any of it. I didn’t want to upset them by forcing them to engage with my private horrors. Saint Perpetua was too much like Hutch; the tragedy had struck too close to home, and its reverberations rattled too close to our comfortable life. It was a reminder of everything I was powerless to prevent.
That’s when my night drives began. Around midnight, after the girls had gone to sleep, I would leave the house and drive to the vast, empty field of the mall parking lot, where the orderly painted rectangles glowed like farm plots under the moon of the streetlight. There, I would make ceaseless circles. First slowly and deliberately, as if looking for a parking spot, then as fast as I could gun the engine, racing myself around and around the lot. I’d turn the radio up until the bass shook the car, until I couldn’t even hear the music, my hands vibrating on the wheel. As the night streaked nauseatingly against my windows, I would grind my molars together until they squeaked and lean hard into each curve, and there would always be a moment in the turn when I felt so fast and weightless that I would almost lose control.
* * *
—
Thursday, April 11, a gray morning dampened by noncommittal rain. Just before nine a.m. a message whooshed into my in-box, alerting me that my attendance had been requested at a strategy meeting scheduled for two thirty that afternoon in the small conference room on the third floor. A good sign, I thought. Perhaps my probationary period was finally coming to an end. I accepted the invite and went about my day.
At 2:27 I went upstairs, a fresh coffee in hand and a pencil tucked behind my ear. As I strode down the hall, I may have wondered why the meeting was being held in this particular conference room—the windowless fishbowl with the frosted glass walls—when strategy meetings were
usually held in one of the larger crystalline tanks below, but I probably didn’t even register it.
I opened the door, and four silent faces turned to regard me. In the long moment that followed, I felt a chill slither down my sternum as I realized I did not know these people, save for a plain redheaded woman I thought I recognized from HR. The others were anonymous dark suits, positioned along either side of the conference table like pallbearers.
They had been waiting for me. They were not there for a strategy meeting.
The HR woman stood as I entered the room. She wore a black blazer that I’m sure made her feel very powerful, heels higher than I would have expected. A flush of freckles in the folds of her neck. I did not know her name, could not bring it to mind.
Mr. Martin, she said. She did not smile, and she did not offer me her hand. Please join us.
Excuse me, I said. What is this?
The HR woman gestured to an empty chair across the table from her, nodding at it as if she agreed with something perceptive it had said.
Please, she said.
I sat; the HR woman sat. Now suits surrounded me—one on either side, two across, the four of them boxing me in. Who were these people? Management I’d never met? Lawyers? I didn’t know them—didn’t know their hometowns or alma maters or favorite teams. I didn’t know anything about them.
On the table there were several pages of typed notes, ordered into two stacks. The print was upside down, facing away from me, too far away for me to decipher. When the HR woman saw me looking at the pages she drew them slightly closer to herself, then covered them with her folded hands. She cleared her throat.