The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  For some reason this towel was one of the first things I asked Schroeder about on the phone back in November.

  Funny you should mention it, he said. That towel’s sitting right here on my desk.

  The hallway of my apartment took another dive.

  So did the courtroom floor, a few months later, as I watched Schroeder snap on latex gloves at the January hearing and pull this towel out of its cardboard evidence box, as if retrieving a piece of flotsam floated in from the far, dark banks of the River Styx. The fabric of reality had to tear a little to allow it into it.

  By the time the medical examiner is unfurling this towel at the July trial and describing the nature of the “heavy, intense bloodstain” found in its center, however, the surreal will have given way to the horrible. I may not have known Jane, but I know I share in that blood. So does my mother. So does my sister. I know this every time I see it, and every time I see it I feel like I’m being choked. If asked, I would have described the dense, chaotic, thirty-six-year-old spiral of dried brown blood as one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. A sorrow beyond dreams.

  The witnesses and detectives fold and unfold this towel many times, always with a certain solemnity and formality, as if it were a flag. But the flag of what country, I cannot say. Some dark crescent of land, a place where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their graves, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades.

  THE TOWEL turns out to be but the overture. One by one, over the course of the trial, all of the remaining items from that night make their way out of the evidence box. Each one comes encased in its own plastic bag, like some demented load from the dry cleaners. The ritual is as follows: a detective snips each item out of its plastic bag and hands it to Hiller, who then ceremoniously carries it over to a medical examiner on the stand, as if passing off a torch. The examiner then holds each item up for the court and describes it for the record. During this display I make my own list:

  one wide, powder-blue scarf, pure silk, very lovely

  one blue-gray jumper, probably wool, tweed-like, looks like it hits right above the knee, a silver pin on the upper left

  one wool overcoat, you could call it blue or gray (which accounts for the discrepancies of color in newspapers and books), looks bloodstained, hard to tell

  a bunch of clothes on hangers

  one blue turtleneck, looks like cotton, turned inside out, also looks bloody

  one pair of pantyhose, marked all over with little strips of masking tape

  one pale yellow 1/2 slip bottom, patterned with ladybugs

  one pair of yellow flowered underwear, size 7, also with ladybugs

  one matching bra, more ladybugs

  one crimped, sky-blue headband, about an inch wide, streaked with brown blood.

  Whenever the examiner holds up the jumper, the 1/2 slip, or the coat, the shape of a woman suddenly hangs in the courtroom. Size 7. The shape of Jane. You can see the care she put into the layering, into the coordination of colors: yellows underneath, a scheme of blues on top. Her undergarments might as well have sprung from a time capsule. Ladybugs, for God’s sake.

  Each time “Exhibit 32” appears, a certain hush moves through the room. “Exhibit 32” is the pair of pantyhose Jane was wearing on the night of her murder. The prosecution has also made a digital slide of the hose: a still of two brown legs bent toward each other against a white background. The fate of a man’s life depends on this tattered, pigeon-toed pair of pantyhose, whose diaphanous legs now dance emptily in air.

  On a different page of my legal pad, I start another list—one that catalogues various words used throughout the trial that agitate me, and why:

  “ligature”—sounds too elegant for a stocking used for garroting

  “debris in the skull”—sounds like garbage, not bullets

  “contusion collar”—sounds like “ring around the collar”

  “wound track”—sounds like a Top 40 song

  “The Book of Shells”—sounds like a children’s book about treasures from the sea, not an old ammunition log from a hardware store with Gary’s signature in it.

  Over the course of the trial smaller, stranger items also straggle out of the box. The oddest of these are not the things that Jane wore or carried, but the things that were taken out of her. The bloody Tampax she had in her vagina on the night of her murder, for example, preserved in a glass jar. Also in glass jars: the two bullets picked out of her brain during her autopsy. One jar is labeled “Brain,” the other, “Left temp.” The “Left temp” bullet is intact enough to reveal some discernible markings—namely, “six lands and grooves with a right twist.” The other, “Brain,” is a hopeless pile of lead shards. Bullets are softer than guns, a firearms expert for the state explains. They deform when they hit something hard. “Brain” entered Jane’s head at a very thick spot at the base of her skull, and thus disintegrated immediately.

  The jury passes around these little vials of broken lead, squinting at the remains of the shells with bafflement. As they do so the camera from CBS whirls over to my mother and me on our bench, and I can already hear the voice-over: Family members look on in horror as the jury scrutinizes the debris removed from the victim’s skull over thirty years ago.

  But I am not really thinking about this debris. I am thinking about my own box of debris—a little white cardboard box I have carried with me for over twenty-two years, from city to city, apartment to apartment, desk drawer to desk drawer. In this box lie about nine fragments of my father’s body, along with some white dust of his bone. My mother, sister, and I scattered his ashes together in a river in the Sierra Nevada back in 1984. But I held on to a handful, which I carried tightly in my fist the whole long drive back down the mountain. I then deposited the remains into this little white box and tied a rubber band around it tightly, intentionally mislabeling it “Dad’s high school ring” to throw any thieves off the track. I had big plans for these ashes, plans no one else could know about. Plans no one else had been smart enough to think up. I just didn’t know yet what they were. Years later, when I heard the premise of Jurassic Park—scientists figure out how to reconstruct dinosaurs from their DNA, and they return to roam the earth—I had the flash: Perhaps this is what I’ve been waiting for.

  These ashes are not really ashes, however. They are more like chunks. A few look like I once imagined cremains should look—graceful, moon-colored shards of bone, like seashells chipped and smoothed by the sea. But others are just weird. A spongy, light-beige chunk that could be a miniature rock from Mars. A piece of porous, dark brown matter about as big as an eraser. And, strangest of all, two pieces of porous white bone affixed to what appear to be hunks of dried, bright yellow glue.

  I remember asking my mother about these bright yellow hunks shortly after we scattered his ashes. She didn’t have an explanation, but she gamely ventured a guess: Maybe they cremated him while he was still wearing his glasses.

  I found this image bewildering. I contemplated it back at home, alone in my basement room, poking at my little box of ashes, or chunks. I imagined my father being fed into a wood-burning stove like a pizza, his stocky, tan body glimmering in the firelight, entirely naked except for his glasses. I’m still imagining it. The box is sitting right here.

  At the Tracks

  AN EX-BOYFRIEND of mine from long ago has recently moved to Ann Arbor, and one night after court my mother and I go visit him and his family at the quaint house they’ve just bought in town. His wife’s doing a residency in gynecological surgery at the U of M, and they have two kids—a precocious four-year-old named Max, and an adorable baby girl named Tillie. We sit and chat in the kids’ playroom, watching Tillie push herself along the carpet on her belly like a seal, and Max masterfully navigate a complicated-looking bridge-building game on the computer. My mother has come along because
she got along quite well with this ex-boyfriend, and in fact stayed in touch with him for some time after he and I parted ways. As I listen to them talk and watch her hoist his happy, drooling baby against her hip, I get the sense that I am attending their awkward reunion more than one of my own.

  We tell them a little about the trial, and his wife has to remind us repeatedly to spell out words like M-U-R-D-E-R and R-A-P-E so that Max can’t understand them. It’s hard not to feel as though we are the bearers of seriously bad tidings. Imports into the scene. I feel this way all the more as Max leads me by the hand down to his bedroom to show me some acrobatic tricks on his bed, and I find myself thinking two equally unsettling thoughts: (a) if I had stayed with this boyfriend, maybe this would have been my solid, comprehensible, happy-making life, and (b) Max is about as old as Johnny Ruelas was when he dripped the infamous drop of blood onto the back of Jane’s hand.

  Once the kids have changed into their pajamas my ex and I decide to peel off to a bar by ourselves to catch up. Not knowing how much he and I will have to say to each other, I tell my mother I’ll probably be home early.

  At the bar he keeps saying that he can’t get over the coincidence of his having just moved here and my being here for a murder trial. Given the many coincidences regarding this case, this one seems slight. I am just glad to see him. We end up drinking quite a bit, and staying out quite late.

  To my horror I arrive back at Jill’s to find my mother waiting up for me. She was worried. She’s upset that I walked home so late alone. I tell her I didn’t, that my ex walked me home, there’s nothing to worry about, I’m fine, go to sleep. She apologizes, says she thinks the trial is getting to her. Bringing up all her old paranoid fantasies. It doesn’t help that she’s been reading The Devil in the White City, a best seller about a serial rapist/torturer/murderer in Chicago at the turn of the century, which, in an unfortunate stroke of irony, one of the book groups that she leads recently voted their next object of discussion.

  Of course my ex didn’t walk me home. Instead I wandered, drunk, from Main Street down to the railroad tracks, lay down there and listened to the quiet world. Smoked a cigarette on my back, feeling a part of the ground, one of night’s dark and lost creatures.

  For as long as I can remember, this has been one of my favorite feelings. To be alone in public, wandering at night, or lying close to the earth, anonymous, invisible, floating. To be “a man of the crowd,” or, conversely, alone with Nature or your God. To make your claim on public space even as you feel yourself disappearing into its largesse, into its sublimity. To practice for death by feeling completely empty, but somehow still alive.

  It’s a sensation that people have tried, in various times and places, to keep women from feeling. Many still try. You’ve been told a million times that to be alone and female and in public late at night is to court disaster, so it’s impossible to know if you’re being bold and free or stupid and self-destructive. And sometimes practicing for death is just practicing for death. As a teenager I liked to take baths in the dark with coins placed over my eyes.

  As a teenager I also liked to drink. I got drunk for the first time when I was nine, at my mother’s wedding reception. Photos from the event show me in a mauve flowered dress, passed out under a glass coffee table, hugging a teddy bear. I had a broken foot at the time, an injury I procured while doing a dance routine for my father, but as everyone thought this injury was a psychosomatic response to my mother’s marriage I hadn’t yet been to the doctor. In all the photos from the ceremony I am balancing on one foot. I limped down the aisle.

  I never told anyone that a few nights before the wedding, alone in my rainbow room at my father’s house, I punched my foot repeatedly in an attempt to make the injury visible. It worked, in a way—the ball of my foot swelled up terribly, and the pain got much worse. An X-ray taken a few weeks later revealed stress fractures in a constellation of bones called the “sesamoids,” and I came home in yet another cast. I’ve never known whether I brought on these stress fractures myself, in my bedroom, or whether they stemmed from the initial injury.

  But I really learned how to drink, or how not to, when I was fifteen, living in Spain as an exchange student. My entire time there is a blur of un gintonic, por favor; Peach Schnapps straight from the bottle in hotel rooms; throwing up whatever late-night cena my Spanish host family had served me before I went out to la discoteca—I vaguely remember a lot of tortilla atún—and then, after throwing up, rinsing out my mouth and going back to the bar; careening around the Spanish countryside in cars driven by drunk strangers; wandering around my midsized, industrial city at night, awed by the then-novel phenomenon of double vision, and by how much better my Spanish was when I was wasted; making out with faceless boy after faceless boy at la cuadra, the cluster of bars in my town, in a fog of wet mouths and hard cocks. I learned to appreciate then how being drunk or high siphons off fear, how it facilitates the perilous but deeply relieving feeling of having abandoned, for once and for all, the ongoing project of your safety. Later I will spend about a decade in New York City working in bars and wandering home near dawn using this same principle.

  Lying at the tracks now I mulled over the day’s events in court. I thought back to the testimony of a retired state policeman, Earl James, who had spent quite a bit of time discussing the horrific murder of Dawn Basom, the thirteen-year-old girl whose death was number five in the series. James had led the task force on the Michigan Murders back in the ‘60s, and has since devoted himself to the intrigue of serial murder. (In 1991, he self-published a book titled Catching Serial Killers under an imprint he christened “International Forensic Services, Inc.”) Perhaps because of this specialization, James tends to speak about Jane’s murder with great authority. She had won awards for debating and it was clear that she had established a rapport with the killer, he told a reporter during the trial. But he couldn’t let her go because she could identify him. He would seem to be the only person in the world to have access to such information.

  James had tears in his eyes throughout his testimony; Court TV later reported that as he described the rape of Dawn Basom and her subsequent strangulation with electrical wire, “he stared at the ceiling and his voice shook.”

  James’s tears were undoubtedly real, but they did not move me. In fact, they struck me as paternalistic, melodramatic, and more than a little creepy. I simply could not reconcile them with the spectacle of a man engrossed in making animated hand gestures to demonstrate exactly how the killer “sliced through the crotch of Dawn’s panties with his knife.”

  Then I remembered that at some point during his testimony, James had said that Dawn was last seen on the railroad tracks, wandering homeward. And so, lying there, I thought of Dawn. I thought of Dawn, and I thought about how beautiful the railroad tracks are at night, illuminated by red and green signals, the two silver parallel lines gleaming off into the distance. The whole world hushed and hot and flickering.

  Gary

  AS THE BAREST details of what happened to Dawn Basom might indicate, Jane’s murder was the least brutal in the series. She appeared to have died quickly, and she was the only one not raped. The prosecution wants to highlight this difference, as it seems to point to a murderer other than Collins. Nancy Grow’s son is subpoenaed to say that Jane’s bloodstained bag seemed intentionally “propped up” on the side of the road, as though a signpost leading to her body, while a retired cop who worked on the Michigan Murders testifies that the bodies of the other girls were tossed roadside or into ravines like garbage. Whoever killed these girls (Collins, presumably) also revisited them to inflict more damage—the hands and feet of the first victim, a nineteen-year-old named Mary Fleszar, were apparently cut off several days after she died, for example.

  The cop who first arrived at Jane’s crime scene reemerges to describe how her suitcase and copy of Catch-22 had been placed close at her side; her shoes, purse, and the yellow-and-white-striped towel between her legs; and her body then el
aborately covered—first draped with the clothes on hangers, then with her wool coat, then spread out on top of all that, her raincoat, as if to protect the whole pile from the elements. When asked to compare this treatment to that of Mary Fleszar, this same cop—now an elderly man—just shakes his head. That first girl, the shape she was in … Hiller has to prod him to continue. That first girl was just skin and bones. All beaten up with a belt. Her skin, he says, breaking off, shaking his head again, her skin was like leather.

  Earl James sums it up on the stand this way: It almost looked as though the perpetrator of [Jane’s] murder showed compassion for the victim.

  The press likes this formulation, and KILLER SHOWED COMPASSION becomes the next day’s headline in local and national articles about the case. Court TV builds on the theme, reporting that “the meticulous arrangement of her body showed tenderness.”

  When Schroeder first questioned Leiterman back in November, he too emphasized these gestures of care. He told Leiterman, I’ve worked in homicide a long time, and I’ve seen things done by absolute monsters. This crime was not committed by a monster. Whoever did this was not a monster. He says this line of talk almost got Leiterman to crack.

  I could appreciate this angle as interrogative strategy. But after skimming the KILLER SHOWED COMPASSION headlines at a Starbuck’s the next morning before court, my mother and I toss the papers aside in disgust. Shrouding a woman’s body as if to protect it from the cold after you’ve shot her and strangled her and pulled down her underclothes in a final stroke of debasement, carefully arranging the limbs and belongings of a person who will never be able to use either again—together we agree: these acts cannot be classified as “tender.”