Last Day on Earth

by David Vann

  Thomas becomes a positive role model for Steve. Steve writes later, for a questionnaire for Mark, that Thomas “was effective because he led by example and pushed those around him to excel, whatever they did, and lived by the philosophy ‘to each to his own ability.’ He wasn’t a communist, to be sure, as the quote may imply, but he did make you feel as though you were on an equal level with him, which I feel is a powerful quality of a leader. For a leader to make their underlings feel as though they are in the proverbial trenches with them, that is a powerful and unique ability for any charismatic leader to have.”

  I MEET JIM THOMAS FOR THE FIRST TIME on April 9, 2008, at his house in DeKalb. It’s an older section of town, a small two-story. I talk with his wife Barbara, who is an artist. She’s friendly and smart and interesting, but I can tell she’s also worried about my coming here, wants to protect her husband after all he’s been through with the media. Media trucks were on the lawn that first evening, and Jim finally interviewed with someone from the Associated Press, then appeared on CNN, but without showing his face.

  Jim has agreed to meet with me partly because I’m a professor and memoirist, writing about suicide, not a reporter. And my intention at this point is to write about Steve primarily as a suicide, not as a murderer. I’m hoping to write something more sympathetic than other media. I don’t yet know, of course, about his juvenile record or really anything else of his earlier story. I believe the accounts that he was a sweet grad student who snapped.

  Jim drives me to campus and we park in the lot right next to Cole Hall. I’m surprised by this. I wasn’t expecting something so direct right away. Jim was Steve’s friend as well as mentor.

  “He was very methodical, very careful,” Jim tells me. “He would have parked as close as possible.”

  This is the first time Jim has been to Cole Hall since the shootings almost two months ago. There’s no snow now, and that circular drive in front has a small pond in the middle, with lovely bridges. We peer in the windows (the building has remained closed as a crime scene), and I can see bloodstains on the floor, though no broken windows now. Flowers have been set outside.

  I didn’t ask for this tour, but Jim walks me through the scene, including Steve’s earlier preparations. He took the sim card out of his phone, the hard drive out of his computer. Jim speculates that he might have been paying for meals with cash. The shooting was on Thursday, in a class that met Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Jim believes Steve must have come to check on Tuesday. “He would have taken a risk in doing that,” Jim says. “He could have been recognized. He still knew a lot of people here.”

  It’s cold out, Jim’s breath steaming as he talks. He’s tall and doesn’t wear a hat, used to the weather here, but he looks fragile anyway because of this event and its effect on his life. What I admire is his courage to examine it head-on, trying to find out the truth despite how that feels.

  “Jokes,” he tells me. “That’s a lot of how we’ve gotten through.” And he shares some of these jokes. “People say I was his mentor, so I trained him to do this, but I tell them I must not have done a very good job, because if I had, a lot more people would be dead.”

  Everyone who knew Steve has been accused by media for almost two months now of missing warning signs. So their jokes reflect that.

  We walk around the building to the back doors.

  “I think he came in these back doors,” Jim tells me, “and checked both auditoriums. One has a sound booth, but the other has a screening room, and that has a door onto the stage.”

  We both peer into the windows. We can’t go inside, because Chief Grady of the NIU police has locked everything down. He won’t meet to talk with me. His secretary slipped and told me that he’s let other people tour the hall, but since then she hasn’t even returned my calls.

  Jim has rehearsed Steve’s last actions over and over, and he talks about them sometimes in first person. “It makes perfect sense to remove the sim card. I would do that, too. And I would lock the bag in the hotel not to throw off police—because they could just cut through a bag—but because I know I’ll be out during the day and don’t want someone from the hotel finding all the ammunition.”

  “Why did he come back here?” I ask.

  “He was returning here to Cole Hall because this is where it all began, his struggle to make something of himself through academic achievement after the group home.” Jim tells me Steve always felt he wasn’t worthy, and what he did with his final act was to annihilate all that achievement, giving in to that dim view of himself, making it true.

  “The media hasn’t caught on yet to the significance of the first-person shooter games Steve played,” Jim says. “He would have checked out the auditorium ahead of time to make sure he staged his ‘game’ correctly. He was very methodical. He wouldn’t have left anything to chance.”

  We walk to the student union next, very close by, and I grab a sandwich at Subway. Jim says he doesn’t ever eat lunch. Then we walk to his office, where Steve often sat and worked and helped other students.

  Jim says I’ll get to meet Josh and other friends of Steve’s from the American Correctional Association student group on Friday, when we tour a community corrections center in Chicago. He tells me that he and Josh used to joke, even in front of Steve, that “Steve must be a mass murderer, because he’s so nice.”

  “He was so deferential and polite, respectful,” Jim continues. “He was deferential to a fault, really. Josh and I tried to get him to relax, and he did open up and come out of his shell. He could be funny, and we got him to have a few drinks now and then.”

  The media reported that a paper on self-mutilation in prisons was coauthored by Jim, Josh, and Steve, because it seemed like one of those warning signs, but Jim tells me it was actually started by another author, Margaret Leaf. She and Jim were really the authors of the paper, Josh did the research, and Steve did a bit of research but was mostly the editor. “He’d admonish us with ‘who wrote this?’ and it was fun. He was good at putting everything together, all of our messy writing.”

  Then Jim sighs, shakes his head. “I would try to praise him and his work,” he says, “but he always felt his work wasn’t good enough. I tried to get him to submit a paper for a prize, but he wouldn’t submit it. ‘I don’t want to embarrass myself,’ Steve said, but it was a great paper. It could have won the prize.”

  “Where do you think his insecurity came from?” I ask.

  “That doesn’t necessarily come up directly in conversation,” Jim says. “You can talk with someone for years and still not know some things.”

  MEETING JIM THOMAS improves Steve’s life considerably. The fall of 2003 is much better for him than previous semesters. But he still has trouble sleeping, starting in October. By February 18, 2004, he finally goes in to see a doctor. Careful not to say anything about depression or anxiety, but just constantly thinking of things at bedtime. The doctor recommends he see a psychiatrist, of course, but that’s the last thing Steve wants.

  In the summer, he takes a statistics course at Harper College, just on the side, to get ready for a statistics course he’ll be taking at NIU the next spring. He gets through the summer mostly, though, by playing first-person shooters online and reading about mass murderers and serial killers.

  In fall 2004 he meets Mark, who has a half-burned Bush/Cheney American flag on his door. Steve is excited. “I could never do that,” he says. He has an anti-Bush sticker, but a half-burned flag?

  Mark is someone he can talk to, finally, about all of it—the methodology of Columbine, going through weapons choices, the plan, each step, what they could have done differently. Mark a fast talker, smart as hell, quiet and calm but well-versed in all this stuff. Randy Weaver, the Turner Diaries, Waco, Oklahoma. The federal government. There’s a new angle here. Before it was Bundy, Dahmer, Hitler, and conspiracy was on the side, but the two can be brought together.

  Libertarians, that’s what “Greg” says they are. Another new friend. Steve
convinces Greg to switch his major to political science. They talk about the individual. Steve’s favorite author is Nietzsche. The superman, above moral code. Only the weak let themselves be ruled by morality. They talk about Firearms Owner ID (FOID) cards. “It’s back to the days of the Hitler regime,” Steve says. “The government is trying to track us.”

  Greg grew up in a hunting family, beaten once for using the wrong caliber on a pheasant. Watched his uncle slaughter a pig with a dull axe and had to finish it with a sledgehammer. He has good insight into how Columbine could have been improved. He agrees with Steve, also, on zero tolerance or respect for the NIU administration, for Sallie Mae and everyone else who controls us.

  Steve’s academic focus is shifting away from political science, though, toward sociology and criminology, because of Jim Thomas. Steve helps found the NIU chapter of the American Correctional Association on campus and becomes its treasurer and later VP. He gets Mark to join, even though he’s in political science. This is when he tells Thomas, “I’m focusing strictly on academics. I want to make something of myself after the group home.”

  ON A SUNNY, COLD FRIDAY MORNING in April 2008, I drive to Chicago and park in front of a large warehouse that has been converted to lofts. Josh Stone comes downstairs to let me in. He looks like a large farm boy, with a red goatee. He’s the current president of the NIU chapter of the American Correctional Association. I feel awkward, but I shouldn’t. He’s friendly and easy.

  Josh leads me upstairs to Jim Thomas’s loft, which has a narrow hallway and then opens into a bar–living room area with floor-to-ceiling windows and a fantastic view of the Chicago skyline. I meet Amy, Kathryn, Ilana, and Diana, all members of ACA. They’re friendly, but I also know I have to be careful. This group has developed a code of silence. They’ve been hounded by TV crews at all hours and by one Chicago Tribune reporter for over a month. They’re not willing to talk to media. But Jim has told all of them, in a blast email, that I’m *NOT MEDIA*. I’ve clarified this by letting everyone know that I’m writing a story for Esquire and a book, and I’ve also said my intention is to write a more sympathetic piece about Steve, looking at his final act primarily as a suicide.

  “What a beautiful view!” I say, and for the next five hours, I don’t breathe a word about Steve.

  We’ve met to tour the Salvation Army’s Community Corrections Center, the largest halfway house in the country, helping former inmates transition back into society. Amy has toured thirteen prisons so far. She and Josh tell me about a tour to Angola, a maximum security prison that holds a rodeo twice a year. They strap a poker chip onto a bull’s forehead and all the inmates try to grab the chip to get fifty dollars. The inmates also play a poker game in the middle of the ring while a bull is let loose, and whoever is the last to remain sitting wins. They have monkeys strapped to dogs, inmates who have never ridden doubling up on horses, etc., and the whole thing is also a crafts fair.

  We walk a few blocks, meet the Salvation Army program director for lunch, and then take the full tour, marching up and down narrow stairways and hallways, peeking in residents’ rooms with closets full of protein powders, hearing about programming and challenges. This was Steve’s field, criminology and corrections, and these were his friends, so I try to just soak it all in. The place was formerly a YWCA, and it feels like that, similar to a large, simple youth hostel in a city, only with a few more rules. I’m surprised to learn that the average time inmates stay in prison in the United States is only a year. And it’s the work of places like this to undo all the negative behaviors inmates have learned during their year in a broken system.

  Steve was in a group home with similar rules, and several others in the ACA have connections, also. Josh’s brother was in and out of juvenile detention, for instance. “Whenever he was out, he had the stigma of being from juvie,” Josh says, and this created an awful momentum. This is what brings Josh and others to want to do such selfless work, helping people change the momentum of their lives.

  We walk to a café afterward for drinks, and now, after five hours, the group begins to talk about Steve. I’m all ears, but I don’t ask questions. They say they thought it was someone else when they heard the shooter was a sociology grad student. There were several others, in fact, who seemed more likely to snap. “It couldn’t have been Steve,” Amy said. But then the group talks about how Steve dressed up for Halloween as Billy the Puppet, the doll from the SAW movies, which were his favorite.

  “Do you think the gun he had was real?” Jim asks.

  “Could be,” Josh says. The others don’t know, but they remember him carrying a pistol that night. “I can’t believe the media hasn’t found the photos of that costume,” Josh says.

  Afterward, I drive Josh home an hour to DeKalb, then have dinner with him and his wife and her friend. Josh tells me funny stories, how he was afraid of Disney World for years because his dad almost drowned him twice and lost him there. On a water ride, his dad leaned back to make it more exciting but that banged Josh’s head into a piece of metal and he had to be fished out of the water and given CPR. Then Josh was trying to stand up on some kind of boogie board or surfboard and fell and it whacked him in the head and he was knocked out again and had to be dragged ashore. Then his parents lost him and he was found by a showgirl from the Horseshoe Saloon, and a guy in a sheriff’s outfit with a star went and found his parents.

  He also tells me grad school made Steve really anxious because there wasn’t enough structure. “Steve liked being told what to do when, like in the group home.” When he was assigned a paper or other work, he’d do it immediately, far ahead of Josh, and then still worry about it. “He was all about control.” Josh also says that when Steve moved away to the new grad program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, he lost his support network, all his friends in DeKalb. He didn’t make new friends easily in the new school.

  After the shooting, Josh was going around trying to help everybody, trying to be there for friends, and he was staying up all night drinking. He’d drink a full bottle of hard liquor and then wake up feeling even worse. He stopped, finally, when he almost gave his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter the wrong medication. That scared him enough to stop.

  So this is how my first two weeks go. I visit Jim’s classes, both under-grad and grad. I attend a conference the department holds on ethnography and learn that what I’m doing here is really an ethnography, trying to blend into this community. And I go to a candlelight vigil for the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings.

  The sociology grad students all stick together, and they watch yet again as Steve is erased from memorials. Commemorative bracelets are handed out, and there are only five beads, for his victims, no sixth bead. “It’s like we’re not allowed to grieve because of what he did,” his friend Alexandra Chapman says. In the first days, she tried to remove a Columbine shirt that was stapled over Steve’s memorial cross on campus. “It was really hard to remove, with all the staples, and then suddenly there was a camera and bright light right in my face. The world met him that day, a different Steve than we knew, and they all hated him.”

  I feel sorry for Alexandra and the others. They’re going through suicide bereavement while the rest of the world is trying to make sense of a mass murder, hounding them for answers. And the truth is, they don’t know anything. I see why CNN, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many others have gotten nowhere. Steve was a very private person. He hid everything important.

  My last night in DeKalb, I go bowling with all the grad students, and after a few drinks, one of them mentions that her cousin, Julie Creamer, dated Steve in high school. “She and Steve lost their virginity together. They were both on lithium and bonded through having the same diagnosis. He was a Goth then, wearing all black, and he loved Marilyn Manson. Julie tells stories like he was violent at times, beating at a wall or something when he didn’t do well on a test. You should give her a call.”

  IN T
HE FALL OF 2004, the same fall he meets Mark, Steve also has a new girlfriend, “Kim.” An art student he describes as “eccentric,” but he likes her. It’s been a long time since he’s had anyone. So now he’s doing better socially.

  He’s sick from all the anxiety, though. “I had extended conversations with him regarding him and Kim,” Mark says. “When they were together, I provided him with quite a bit of advice. He always says how stupid he was for this or that. He had very low confidence with relationships. And at the beginning he was very to himself, right? So, it was hard to get him to open up, but once you became friends with him, he didn’t hold his cards as close—and that’s one thing he complained about with me, that I always held my cards close.”

  Steve gets physically sick from the anxiety. Abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea. His acne gets worse, too. His body betraying him yet again. He goes to the doctor on April 18, 2005, and the doctor tries again to get him to see a psychiatrist, for follow-up on his bipolar disorder, but Steve knows not to go in that direction.

  Senior year, he aces his statistics course with Charles Cappel, toughest course out there, ends up number 3 out of 90. Doesn’t mention the stats course he took at Harper College. He’s a piece of shit anyway. He knows this. They may be fooled, but he’s not fooled. Good grades aren’t going to change anything.

  He tries to hide all his stomach problems from Kim, his loose stool, his bulimia. Goes swimming in the ocean in Florida at the end of the summer, and the problems get worse. So he sees a doctor and is really nervous. Someday they’re going to catch up to him. They’re going to find out about his history, they’re going to put him on meds again. It’s only a matter of time.

  The doctor tells him the tests are fine and his abdominal conditions are likely from stress or anxiety. Tries to talk about this, but Steve is out of there. It’s his senior year. He’s not going to blow it now.