by Lamb, Wally
I can still see her, sitting across from me in that booth, poking at her poached egg. She had no idea I’d just spoken. Psychic numbness, it’s called. Wherever she was, it wasn’t at the Cracker Barrel.
Later, waiting in line at the register, I watched her wander, disengaged, among the normal gift-shop customers—all those folks who had the luxury of not being able to recall what they’d been doing back on April the twentieth. “You ready?” I asked, itchy to make more miles. She said she’d better use the rest room first. Glancing over at the line of ten or eleven women she could have already been in the middle of, I nodded. Managed a smile. I told her I’d wait for her outside.
The porch had for-sale rocking chairs. I sat on one and pulled out my pocket calendar. Rocked and wrote.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 21, 1999
———————————
Game plan for August:
Get moved in
Get her a shrink
Look for teaching job
See financial planner about house sale $—maybe beef up our IRAs?
Tear down apple house
Scrape, paint farmhouse (maybe)
See lawyer about probate stuff
Set up home office—maybe sunporch upstairs? If so, figure out what to do with Great Grandma’s boxes, papers, etc. Dump or donate??
That was seven years ago. I had Sophie put to sleep in 2002; her hip dysplasia had gotten so bad, she couldn’t even walk across the kitchen floor. The following year, Chet had barreled down the driveway in pursuit of a squirrel and gotten himself killed by a passing oil truck. Today, the apple house is still standing, although it’s listing badly to one side, and most of the roof’s fallen in. The farmhouse’s exterior remains unscraped, unpainted. Inside, on the upstairs sunporch, Great-Grandma Lydia’s boxes, ledgers, and filing cabinets full of prison business still occupy the space. The Connecticut State Library didn’t want them, and the Three Rivers Historical Society said they didn’t have the room. I quit calling places after that, but I could never quite haul it all to the dump. Like I said, I can handle small projects. The bigger ones overwhelm me….
The closest thing I have to a home office is the dining room. My books are stuffed to overflowing in the china closet and stacked in columns on the mahogany buffet. There are plastic bins on the floor marked “Teaching Stuff,” “Colorado,” “Farm,” “Financial.” I use Great-Grandma’s dining room table for a desk; its surface is littered with bills, office supplies, reams of computer paper. One cardboard carton brims with Columbine articles and printouts, another is marked “Maureen—Legal.” Over the years, rather than go through stuff and throw out what I might not need, I’ve added table leaves. My computer sits on the dining room table, too. I set it up there the week we moved back—temporarily, I’d thought, but that’s where it’s stayed. Sometime during our first year back, I pushed the table up against the wall so we wouldn’t keep tripping on the wires and cords, or that cinder-block-sized backup battery. The dining room’s overhead fixture is ugly, but it sheds some decent light, and, hey, it wasn’t like she and I were going to be throwing any dinner parties. Outside of Alphonse and the occasional duos of Jehovah’s Witnesses or Latter-Day Saints, I can’t remember us ever having company.
The money we got from the sale of our Colorado house is gone now. Capital gains tax took a chunk of it, and Mo’s medical bills and lawyers’ fees ate up the rest. The farm property’s assessed at a million six, but because of an agreement Lolly signed with the Farm Bureau back in 1987, we can’t sell it to anyone who’s not going to farm it. And these days, small dairy farms have gone the way of the dodo bird and the eight-track tape player. Everything’s geared to the big guys now—the agribusinesses. So, like Caelum MacQuirk’s widow, the infamous Addie, we’re land rich but cash poor. And if the Sea-berrys go through with the civil suit they’ve threatened, we could lose the property, too. “Be optimistic,” our attorney says. “People’s anger subsides after a while, and threats about lawsuits fade away.” He means well, but it’s painful to have to listen to a lecture about human nature from someone who was born during the disco era. His name’s Brandon, for Christ’s sake. Looks like he started shaving the day before yesterday. But anyway, if they do go forward with it and win, they could take the house, the farm, basically everything we’ve got left. The problem is, when Lolly was making out her will, she called and asked me if I wanted the farm put in just my name, or both our names. “Both,” I’d said. It was an act of faith, you know? Maureen and I had just reconciled. But that’s the problem. Maureen’s name on Lolly’s will makes us vulnerable.
But anyway, I sat on our bed that day and tried to decide whether to keep that 1999 pocket calendar or toss it. Then, without seeming to direct the operation, I watched my hands pull it apart, tear up the pages, and throw those torn bits of paper into the toilet. Watched my piss hit them. Watched them swirl down the hole.
* * *
APRIL 20, 1999. IN THE days, weeks, months, and years, now, since they opened fire, I have searched wherever I could for the whys, hows, and whether-or-nots of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s rampage. They had been my students first, but I became theirs, stalking them so that I might rescue my wife from the aftermath of what they’d done. On that day, Maureen had escaped execution by opening a cabinet door and entering a maze—a many-corridored prison whose four outer walls were fear, anger, guilt, and grief. And because I was powerless to retrieve her—because I, too, entered the labyrinth and became lost—my only option was to find its center, confront the two-headed monster who waited for me there, and murder it. Murder the murderers, who had already murdered themselves. You see what a puzzler it was? What a network of dead ends? Like I said, I was lost.
On what they called their “little Judgment Day,” Dylan had armed himself with a TEC–9 nine-millimeter semi-automatic handgun with shoulder strap and a Stevens twelve-gauge shotgun, its double barrel cut down to twenty-three inches. Eric’s weapons of choice were a Hi-Point nine-millimeter carbine rifle on a strap and a Savage Springfield twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Because he had stunted its barrel, the kickback when he fired it at his victims in the library had been powerful enough to break his nose. He didn’t seem to be in pain, one eyewitness noted; he had kept smiling, and the gush from his nostrils made it look as if he’d been drinking his victims’ blood. By the time it was over, Eric had fired the nine-millimeter rifle ninety-six times—thirteen shots in the library, thirty-six inside the rest of the school, and forty-seven outside. Dylan had fired the TEC–9 fifty-five times: twenty-one inside the library, thirty-one inside the rest of the school, and three times outside.
They had taped match-strikers to their arms for quicker lighting of the bombs they carried. Dylan wore a black glove on his left hand; Eric wore its twin on his right. Both wore utility belts, their pouches filled with shotgun shells. They’d tucked the legs of their cargo pants into their boots, Nazi-style, and had stuffed their pockets with CO2 bombs and clips of nine-millimeter bullets. Both boys were armed with knives, but neither used them. They carried their bombs in a duffel bag and a backpack. Thirty of these exploded: thirteen outside, five in the library, six in classrooms and hallways where the boys wandered, and six in the cafeteria. Forty-six bombs did not explode: two outside, twenty-six in the library, fourteen in the hallways and classrooms, and four in the cafeteria. Twelve unexploded bombs, in-eluding the components for a car bomb, were found in Dylan’s black BMW. One unexploded bomb was discovered in Eric’s gray Honda Prelude. The bombs in the cafeteria included two twenty-pound propane tank bombs, which failed to detonate.
They had planned for a much higher body count—higher, they hoped, than Oklahoma City. Their goal was two hundred and fifty casualties—the number they’d need to out-McVeigh McVeigh. Having studied the traffic flow in the cafeteria, they’d set the timers on the propane bombs for 11:16, when the maximum number of students would be gathered: five hundred or more, at the tables, in the lines. The fireball would
race through the room, eating oxygen. They’d be waiting, geared up outside on the hill, and would pick off the ones who got out alive. Some of their friends would have to die, but war was war. Sorry, guys. Nothing personal.
For a while, I clung to the editorialists’ oversimplifications: the cause-and-effect of school bullying, violent video games, nihilistic song lyrics. Maybe overly permissive parenting was to blame. Or America’s rampant, godless consumerism. Or the kickback effect that anti-depressants can have on children. Or the sorry fact that an eighteen-year-old girl, accompanied by her underage friends, could stroll into a weekend gun show and buy two shotguns and a nine-millimeter carbine rifle without a permit or a background check. The problem was, I couldn’t follow the thread between those causes, alone or in concert, and the grim realities of Maureen’s post-Columbine existence. Back in Connecticut, her weight dropped to a dangerous eighty-six pounds. Her hair fell out in clumps. She couldn’t work, couldn’t complete household chores, couldn’t remember where she’d put things. She complained incessantly about the chronic pain in her back and knees, and at the top of her head. In one of Mo’s nightmares, Dylan and Eric took turns shooting me in the head, splattering her with my blood and brains. In another—a dream she dreamed twice—she was trapped in the backseat of a black car. Dylan was at the wheel, taking the hairpin turns of a narrow mountain road at suicidal speeds.
I’ve searched for answers in churches, and in the offices of my wife’s psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. I’ve stalked the monster during long, meditative runs on country roads, at the bottoms of wine and scotch bottles, and over the Internet, that labyrinth inside the labyrinth.
Google “Klebold Harris,” and you get 135,700 hits. From there, you can lose yourself in the hundreds of pages of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department’s report, or among the myriad criticisms of those official findings. You can listen to the 911 calls, print out the autopsy pictures, take a virtual tour of what the library looked like after the shootings. You can click on the killers’ school essays and journal entries, Dylan’s elementary school pictures, Eric’s Web-site spewings, his pencil sketches of superheroes and minotaurs. You can visit the site where bloggers conjecture about whether Dylan put the gun to his own head or Eric killed him, and whether or not the boys—ridiculed at school as “fags” and “homos”—were, in fact, lovers. And if you have a particularly strong stomach, you can check out the “tribute” Web sites. Built by romantic young women and men who seem to have crushes on the killers, these recast them as misunderstood tragic heroes whose smiling, soft-focus studio portraits stare back at you while sappy pop songs play through your computer speakers.
Because they’d been vicious videographers, Eric and Dylan bequeathed to the police, their parents, and the rest of us several hours’ worth of VHS evidence that they’d been hiding in plain sight all along—that we might have stopped them if we hadn’t all been so blind. And because individuals and organizations went to court to ensure your right to see it, you can download and watch some of this in-your-face evidence. You can view, for instance, their performances as “Trenchcoat Mafia Protection Services” hit men. Produced for a class assignment, the video shows them first intimidating and then executing unsuspecting bullies. You can watch their shooting practice out at Rampart Range. In that one, they get acquainted with the TEC–9 pistol, the carbine rifle, and the sawed-off shotguns they’ve gotten hold of with the help of Robyn Anderson and Mark Manes. Manes practice-shoots in this video, too—he, and his girlfriend, and Phil Duran, Eric and Dylan’s Blackjack Pizza coworker. It was Duran who introduced them to Manes, and Manes who, for five hundred dollars, sold them the TEC–9 Dylan later used during the massacre. While examining a bowling pin they’ve just shot up, Dylan muses about the damage a shotgun shell will do to someone’s brain.
My pattern was to get Maureen up to bed first, then come back downstairs, pour myself a couple of inches of scotch, and go online—cybersearch for an hour or two, often longer, sometimes much longer. Occasionally, I’d be on that thing until the sun came up. On the night I downloaded the Rampart Ridge video, I watched it twice, then got up, went outside, and stared up at the indifferent moon, the clouds drifting in front of it. Stared for a while at the halogen glow from the women’s prison. I recalled the sight of Lolly, in her uniform, walking down Bride Lake Road on her way to work. That purposeful gait of hers, her arms swinging at her sides. She’d been the most reliable person of my whole life—just about the only reliable person—and, once again, I felt the sharp pang of having lost her at the point I needed her most. Then I went back inside and poured myself another drink. Googled “chaos theory” and got fifteen million hits. I clicked on a random one and scrolled down. Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another. Well, they had that right: there was our life before April the twentieth, and our life after it.
I Googled “chaos theory Harris Klebold.” Zilch.
Googled “chaos theory Colorado State” and got the curriculum vita and the university office number of Mickey Schmidt, my seatmate on that flight that had brought the two of us out of the Rockies and east—me to my dying aunt and Mickey to Wequonnoc Moon Casino, where he planned to beat the house by applying chaos-complexity theory. Maybe Mickey could guide me through the explosive bifurcation of it all—point me in some direction that might lead us out of the maze. It was December 31, 1999, somewhere after 11:00 p.m. Y2K was upon us, and it was semester break besides. College professors would be away from their offices for weeks. I picked up the phone and called him anyway, and guess what? He answered.
“Who’d you say this is?”
“Caelum Quirk. The guy on the plane. We talked about chaos theory. You said you were writing a book for gamblers.”
He told me he thought I’d called the wrong guy.
“No, I didn’t, man. Your picture’s on the faculty Web site.”
“Look,” he said. “I’m busy, and you’re drunk.”
“You told me you were afraid to fly,” I said. “You asked me to hold your hand during takeoff.”
“And did you?”
“I …”
“No,” he said. “You didn’t. You had me grip the armrest instead. You couldn’t do that one small thing.”
He hung up before I could get to my questions about Columbine. And so, in the waning minutes of the twentieth century, I finished my drink and poured another. Shut down the computer, rested my cheek against the keyboard, and started sobbing like a baby. I cried so loudly that it woke her up. She came down the stairs. Sat down next to me and touched my cheek. Stroked it, over and over.
“Everything’s all right,” she lied.
The overhead light shone on her bald patches. The pajamas she wore night and day were stained with food, missing a button. “No, it’s not,” I said.
“I’m going to get better, Caelum,” she said. “I am. I promise.” And by the time I stopped crying, it was January. A new year, a new century. Outside, the snow was filling up our fallow fields.
* * *
I DON’T KNOW. MAYBE WE’RE all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we’re scared shitless of explosive change. But we’re fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium—the devils let loose from their cages. “There but for the grace of God,” the faithful say. “It’s not for us to know His plan.”
Which, I’ve concluded, is bullshit. Big G, little g: doesn’t matter. There is no mysterious Master Planner, no one up there who can see the big picture—the order in the disorder. Religion’s just a well-oiled, profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all. That’s what I’ve come to beli
eve. Because if some merciful Lord and Master Puppeteer were up there pulling the strings, then why did my wife have to crouch in the dark inside a cabinet that day, listen to all that murder, and survive, only to become her frail, bitter, self-absorbed unself? O come all ye faithful and tell me why, in the heat of the moment back in 1980, your all-seeing, all-knowing, Intelligent Designer would not have spared us those two collisions of sperm and egg, those divisions and multiplications of cells that became Eric and Dylan. Tell me why, if a benign god’s at the control panel, those two kids had to exist, hook up, and stoke each other’s mind-poisoned rage.
Not available for downloading are Eric and Dylan’s “basement tapes”—the smug, ridiculing rants they recorded late at night, mostly in the Harrises’ basement, and left behind for the cops to find and confiscate. Too disturbing for public consumption, a judge ruled. Too much danger of copycat crimes. I’ve seen them, though—the basement tapes. Some of them. It happened more or less by accident.
“Good news!” Cyndi Pixley told me over the phone that December day. “The Paisleys sold their house, so we can go ahead and schedule the closing on your place. How soon do you think you could make it back?”
I hired one of Alphonse’s counter girls to stay at the farmhouse with Maureen and flew back to Littleton. And after the Paisleys and I had signed all the paperwork and shaken hands, Cyndi Pixley, whose husband was a cop, casually mentioned that the sheriff’s office was showing the basement tapes to the media that afternoon. “Where?” I said.