by M. O. Walsh
Why not? I had just heard her voice on the phone.
She had dialed my number. She had thought of me.
She had said, “I’ll talk to you later.”
Anything was possible.
So, I made a double-decker sandwich and sliced up a cucumber. I walked back to my room with the plate stacked high and a bag of chips between my teeth. As I passed through the den, my mother was quietly organizing the laundry she had folded, her face resigned and grief-stricken. Rachel was quiet.
When I got to my room, I heard my mother say: “I don’t care how you kids dress, Rachel. To me, you’ll always be angels.”
25.
I was no angel.
Yet in the summer of 1991 it became easy for mothers and fathers to feel blessed by their children. All over America, parents looked at their kids for a minute longer than they had just that spring. They forgave them of minor transgressions. They stole moments to hug them tight in the grocery store, at the swimming pool, to study their profiles and feel proud. The reason for this was simple. On July 22 of that year, every mother and father learned of a place they hadn’t considered before, a small dot in the northern part of our country known as Apartment 213, where dwelled the rapist, serial killer, child molester, cannibal, and necrophiliac named Jeffrey Dahmer, a man who was somebody’s child.
A little perspective:
On the night of Dahmer’s arrest in late July, while I likely sat atop my comfortable bed in my enormous suburban home scribbling a list of pros and cons about calling Lindy back—cons: she won’t answer; pros: she will answer—an African American male named Tracy Edwards ran terrified through the streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Earlier that night, Tracy had accepted an invitation from an articulate blond man who was interested in taking pictures of him. The man had been generous with Tracy all evening, buying him drinks and complimenting his physique. They flirted in a manner that made Tracy feel good. And even in the car that night, on his way to this man’s apartment, Tracy Edwards likely felt that this was something he deserved, the simple excitement of another person’s body, of his touch, of a stranger’s mouth pressed against his own.
However, by the time I had decided to call it quits in Woodland Hills, to wait perhaps one more day before gathering enough courage to speak to a girl I had known my whole life, Tracy Edwards was sprinting through the streets of another neighborhood, one thousand miles north of me, with two swollen hands; one from being handcuffed and the other from punching that same blond man who, minutes before, had swung at him with a butcher knife. He waved frantically at passing cars. He called out for help. And since Tracy Edwards was a black man in a rough part of Milwaukee—one with a handcuff on his wrist, no less—he drew the specific attention of two police officers on their patrol. They got out of the car and ordered Tracy Edwards to the ground. They steadied their pistols and radioed dispatch. They thought he might be a prisoner escaped.
“You have no idea,” Tracy told them. “You have no fucking idea.”
And they didn’t.
It was only by following procedure that they allowed the blubbering Tracy Edwards to lead them back to Apartment 213, where they found the well-spoken blond man he had described to them, living in a place that smelled of rotting meat. As Tracy pressed himself to the wall and shivered, the articulate blond man calmly explained to the officers that he and Tracy had been drinking and were in the midst of a lovers’ quarrel. He then graciously offered to go to his bedroom and retrieve the keys to the cuffs they’d been playing with. And, by casually following him to this place, one police officer noticed strange pictures on the walls: photos of naked men, dozens of them, both before and after they had skin.
He reached for his gun.
In the kitchen, his partner yelled out, “There’s a goddamned head in the fridge!”
Our country was never the same.
Don’t get me wrong. At sixteen, I wasn’t saddened by any of this. Even though I had come to know a thing or two about death myself, my heart did not immediately go out to the victims’ families. I still thought of death as something that happened only accidentally or naturally, only to Hannah and the old. I didn’t consider what it must have been like to be the mother or father or brother or sister or friend of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s seventeen murder victims. I had no capacity, nor did I even try, to imagine these people coming home to this news while they still had stacks of hopeful leaflets on their desktops:
MISSING: Matt Turner. MISSING: Oliver Lacy.
MISSING: Tony Hughes.
LAST SEEN: smiling. LAST SEEN: out with friends.
Understand, please, World: THIS IS MY SON.
At sixteen, I also didn’t consider the trauma of the policemen and women forced to work this case, opening Dahmer’s closet to jars of genitalia preserved in milky formaldehyde, to severed heads with holes drilled through the skulls while the victims were, Dahmer later confessed, still alive. To be a cop on this beat? To take each photo off that man’s walls and label it? To give it a name? For your day’s work to be devoted to testifying to the fact that this happened, that this was real, that this was a part of humanity? How do you go home after that? I didn’t even think of it then. All I knew was that this monster was the talk of the world, and I wanted to be a part of it.
So, I picked up the phone.
It had been more than a week since Lindy called to apologize, and I’d thought of calling her back in nearly every hour that passed. I just needed a reason, I figured, to actually dial the number. I just needed a talking point, something other than me, something other than us, and what I got was a national tragedy. As more and more details emerged—the bone shrine Dahmer had built in his apartment, the meals he had made of the dead—the story seemed to me as good of an opening line as any.
Her mother answered.
“Hi, Mrs. Peggy,” I said. “Is Lindy home? I was wondering if she was watching all this Dahmer stuff.”
“I’m so glad you called,” she said. “Lindy hasn’t left the TV in days.”
And so it began. Lindy and I talked all that night.
To be fair, it was hard not to be morbidly curious about what we, as people, were now publicly shown to be capable of. Sure, there was the horror of it all, the sadness, but it was easier, especially as a teenager, to disconnect yourself from that entirely and simply gawk at the total abomination of a man in a solitary apartment. As a nation, it consumed us. That next year, by sheer coincidence, a film about a cannibal won an Academy Award. Jeffrey Dahmer’s father agreed to write a book for big money. The media ate it all up. People acted shocked.
Lindy, however, was not.
In our conversation that night, Lindy spoke in a way I hadn’t heard her before. She didn’t sound like the broken girl I’d seen at school that past year, who said acidic things to other people while chewing her thumbnail. Nor did she sound like the drunken girl I had held at Melinda’s, who whispered to someone far away. She also, I had to admit, did not sound like the young athlete I’d chased around my block those years back, laughing to herself about how quick she was, and how slow the safe world. There was nothing bubbly in her voice anymore, nothing as innocent as that.
“You know,” she told me, “it’s all the cops’ fault. If they just did their jobs, then the last, like, eight murders wouldn’t have even happened. Did you know that, at this point, Dahmer was killing a guy what, like, once a week? Fucking their corpses? Eating their brains? Doing whatever he wanted? How hard is that to figure out? Cops are so worthless it’s unbelievable.”
I was nervous. I agreed with whatever she told me.
“Fuck the police,” I said.
“Ugh,” she huffed. “I hate that song. Why do you listen to that shit?”
“I don’t,” I told her. “I was just kidding.”
“Hilarious,” she said. “Really funny. But, seriously, did you know that Dahmer had alread
y been caught molesting some kid however many years ago and the parole officer never even checked up on his apartment? The place was a fucking morgue and he was just too lazy to stop by. Isn’t that unbelievable?”
I did know that. Since the story had broken, I’d learned all I could about the case by watching the news and reading the papers. I’d even bought a copy of Time magazine at the grocery store while shopping with my mom. She looked worried about my interest in this but didn’t press me on the subject. In those days, she didn’t press me on anything.
“No,” I told Lindy. “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true,” she said. “And what about that foreign kid who escaped from Dahmer’s apartment and ran to a neighbor for help, all naked and drugged and bleeding from his ass? The cops just gave the kid back to him because they didn’t want to get involved with a couple of gay guys. Seriously, could they be any worse at their jobs? Somebody should eat them.”
I thought I understood Lindy’s outrage.
After all, it had been two full years and no arrest had been made in her rape, a tragedy likely as large to her as Dahmer was to each of these individual victims. As far as I knew, the cops never did anything more than conduct those initial visits, anything more than question the neighbors as if somebody’s lawn mower had gone missing. I’m sure there was more to it than that, at least I’d hope so, but I didn’t see it. And like I’d overheard Mrs. Peggy tell my mother, the police had stopped calling. The case itself had gone cold. It therefore wasn’t hard for me to imagine Lindy viewing all cops as slothful and uncaring, to see every policeman as off duty and overpaid. She could say whatever she wanted about them that night. I wouldn’t stop her.
More important to me, at the time, was what Lindy may have looked like as she was talking. The fight on the lawn was the last time I’d seen her, and that had been from a distance, a light-year. Before that, it was the dance where she wore makeup and gunmetal blue. Who was she now? I wondered. What color hair? What socks? What shoes? How many scars?
“You have to admit, though,” she said, “it is kind of badass. I mean, this Dahmer guy just not giving a fuck.”
“Where are you?” I said. “Do your parents let you cuss like that?”
“No one lets me do anything,” she said. “But, yeah, I’m in my room.”
I walked to my window. Her light was off and her shades were drawn. I looked over at my clock and realized that it was one a.m. and we’d been talking for hours. It is possible that I had never been happier.
Still, I should have understood even then that when Lindy and I spoke in those days, we were often talking about different things. My version of the Jeffrey Dahmer story, for example, was something out of a nightmare while hers seemed like an interesting dream. There was awe in her voice, a peculiar respect for the murderer. And as confusing as that sounds, I’ve since come to learn that this is not uncommon with victims of sexual violence. It is called rape trauma syndrome, in the clinical journals, and often manifests itself as vivid fantasies in which the victim of the violence becomes the aggressor. Female victims especially, it is said, still many years later, may often fantasize about killing their husbands, their sons, their brothers. They say they can’t help it. They say they feel terrible about it. They say they feel guilty. They say the most frequent method of murder, in a landslide, is by stabbing.
“Why is your light off?” I asked her. “I mean, if you’re in your room.”
“Here’s another question,” she said. “Why are you always watching me?”
My stomach sank.
I remembered what Lindy had accused me of at the party, the way she’d told everyone how I watched her. I’d gone over it in my mind every day those past months. Was it possible, I wondered, that she had seen me in the water oak those nights, squatting like a thief outside her window? If she had, why didn’t she say something? If she hadn’t, why make it up? Why try to hurt me? How much about me did she know?
“I don’t watch you,” I said. “Why do you keep saying that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“At Melinda’s,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”
“Look,” Lindy said. “I have zero interest in talking about that night. And my light’s off because I’m lying in bed. That’s what people do when they go to sleep. It’s not a big mystery.”
“You’re in bed?” I asked.
Lindy laughed. “Jesus,” she said. “Do you want to know what I’m wearing, too?”
“No,” I said.
“Good. Because maybe I don’t want to tell you.”
But here’s the thing. I thought I’d heard something sly in Lindy’s voice when she said that. I swore I heard something crafty. Despite her new cynicism, her hard outer shell, Lindy still had the ability to place herself directly between what I imagined I both could and could not have, both could and could not understand. Therefore, part of me thought she was being flirtatious while the other part became a paranoid wreck. I thought she was teasing me. I thought the few friends she still had might be listening in the background, hoping I’d say something they could bury me with. The telephone connection seemed suddenly sharp and crystal clear and I had no idea how to react.
I tried to be funny.
“Why don’t you want to tell me?” I asked. “Are you wearing fuzzy bunny slippers?”
“Ooh,” she said. “So close.”
“An evening gown?”
“Nope.”
“A gorilla suit? A garbage bag?”
“Silly boy,” she said. “Who said I was wearing anything at all?”
I had no retort.
In our silence, ocean liners moved across the sea.
In the world, mountains grew.
“Wow,” Lindy said. “You need to get laid.”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Right,” she said, and I thought I heard her sit up in her bed after this, maybe move around and adjust some pillows. She also made a noise to sound as if she was leaning over, reaching for something, and I imagined her bare breasts against her sheets. I imagined her clicking off her night-light to get comfortable. Her white bed. Her pink comforter. Her soft skin. Her legs. The way she used to wear her hair when we were only slightly younger than we were then. The way she used to run. A small brown freckle that I saw, once, on her neck. Her tan fingers.
Maybe she was right about me.
“Anyway,” Lindy said. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
And that was it. She hung up.
Across the street and two doors down from me I watched a faint blue light click on in her room. I imagined her turning on a television before bed, falling asleep to the drone of an anchorman’s voice, and I wanted to watch whatever she was watching. I wanted to be with her even if I couldn’t. It was like I already missed her.
So I left my room and walked toward the den, where our TV was also on. In those days, it was not a strange sight to see my mother up late. Whenever I would venture through our dark home to raid the pantry, thinking everyone asleep, I’d often find her standing alone in her nightgown, milling around in different rooms, quiet as a ghost. And if the glow from the open refrigerator lit her up, or if I’d ask her what she was doing, she would just tell me that she had forgotten to lock some door or turn something off and would kiss me on the forehead and go back to her bedroom. “Good night, Mom,” I would say. “Good night, son,” she would say. And we wouldn’t mention it again.
That night, she sat on the couch with a blanket on her lap. The room smelled sour. In the soft light of our television her eyes appeared dark and expressionless, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking at me. The TV was tuned to CNN and, as had become common, a mug shot of Jeffrey Dahmer took up most of the screen. It surprised me that she would be watching this.
“Mom?” I said, and sat next to her on the couch.
I saw a wastebasket on the floor, a wet towel on her wrist.
“What are you doing up?” I asked her, although I knew.
In the months since Hannah’s death, Rachel told me that she had often heard our mother, late at night, throwing up by herself in the bathroom. This image of grief was so devastating to me that I didn’t believe her. I made up excuses to explain it. I told her that Mom had mentioned to me she was feeling sick, maybe coming down with something. I said that Mom was fine, and she was probably just hearing things. Rachel told me that I wasn’t hearing anything at all.
Sitting beside me on the couch, my mother closed her eyes.
“Do you think it’s better?” she asked me. “Do you really think it’s better that they caught this guy?”
I looked at Dahmer’s picture on the TV.
People often remark, after their initial arrest and scandal, about how much serial killers look to them like “regular people,” like any random guy you could meet at a bar one night, anyone working a cash register. This was never the case with Jeffrey Dahmer. The more we stared at his mug shot that late summer—on our television screens, in our newspapers and magazines—the more obvious his guilt became. His eyes were, to everyone who saw them, a stranger’s eyes. His mouth was, to everyone who heard it, a dirty one. Even his mustache looked crooked and pasted on, like part of some devilish disguise, and simply by staring at him for a while we knew it was true, what he had done to those men. We could see it. This person was not like the rest of us. His lips were made to kiss people, yes. But his tongue was made to lick their dead skin.