by David Vann
He leaves in the afternoon, drives almost three hours to DeKalb, past farmland covered in snow, checks in to the Best Western Hotel at 6:44 p.m. Uses his Chase VISA and goes to his room, 134, then calls the front desk on his cell phone after five minutes and checks out ten minutes later, at 7:00 p.m. He drives to the Travelodge. Maybe the VISA was the problem. He shouldn’t have used a credit card. He could be tracked.
The Travelodge has a big black tarp out front covering the empty pool. Some kind of construction nightmare with chain-link fence all around. The place is a dump. The manager, “Matt,” is a pothead, red eyes, impaired, slow to understand, slow to speak. Steve pays cash for his room. No records.
Perhaps he grabs something to eat, paying cash again. Back in his room, he sends Kelly his email about the Manson concert. She’s written, “For my Black History Month celebration I plan to get a bucket of extra crispy chicken and a 2 liter of strawberry soda and have an In Living Color marathon.” So he starts off his email with “Don’t forget the watermelon! Sorry to hear about your sucky day, but things will get better! Right now I’m watching MSNBC and listening to Coma White.” This is her favorite Marilyn Manson song. He tells her he’s going to close his email account because of spam, asks her to call him later.
He erases everything in his email account and closes it. Jessica tries to email him and it bounces, so she calls him. It’s a short conversation, seven and a half minutes, at 9:56 p.m. “He told me how sorry he was for all the times he had hurt me and made me cry and that I should find someone better,” Jessica tells Mark later. “No matter how many times I told him that I loved him and how great he was, he never thought he was good enough.” Steve also tells her, “I’m sorry things did not turn out differently for us. Thank you for not holding anything against me. I appreciate what you have done for me. I love you.” He never says “I love you,” so she thinks this is odd. She thinks he’s getting depressed.
Steve has a call waiting from Kelly, so he hangs up on Jessica and talks with Kelly for half an hour. He tells her it was a bad idea living with an ex-girlfriend, because Jessica gets jealous when he talks with other women. They talk about the Manson concert, and he wishes she could have been there, but it would have been uncomfortable because of Jessica. He tells her he talked with and visited his godfather. He doesn’t tell her he’s in DeKalb. She asks what he’s doing for Valentine’s Day, and he says he isn’t going to be around. He also says he wishes he’d met her before things “got so fucked up.”
Steve talks with Jessica several more times that night, until midnight, and then he can’t sleep. His usual thing, lying awake from midnight to 3:00 a.m. He gets up and sends Kelly an email at 3:23 a.m., telling her to call if she wants to talk, because he’s cancelling this email account, too.
The next day, Tuesday, February 12, he buys four books for Jessica on Amazon, all to help with her studies. He includes the gift message, “You are the best Jessica! You’ve done so much for me, and I truly do love you. You will make an excellent psychologist or social worker someday! Don’t forget about me! Love, Steve.”
He also buys her a phone and memory sticks for $426, a purse for $302, sterling silver peace earrings for $38, data cables and other accessories, CDs, and he wants to buy her an engagement ring, something she’ll receive after the event. He wants to take care of her. He calls her in the afternoon, but she’s at work.
He tries to reach Joe Russo and also his father. Jessica calls him back at 3:38 and they talk for a little over ten minutes. He asks her what ring size she is and ‘what finger a woman wears her marriage ring on.’ He tells her she’ll be receiving a package in the mail from him. She can’t open it until Valentine’s Day or it won’t make any sense.
Jessica thinks he’s going to propose.
A COUPLE DAYS AFTER MY FATHER SHOT HIMSELF on the phone talking to my stepmother, saying “I love you but I’m not going to live without you,” she received flowers from him. A romantic gift from the grave, the same as Jessica will receive. And how can anyone ever make sense of this kind of gift?
One of my former colleagues at FSU, Thomas Joiner, is an expert on suicide, and he maintains that suicide is not a selfish act. “That’s not the way they’re thinking,” he says. They often believe their suicide will help the people they leave behind. My father, for instance, believed his insurance policies would help us, better than miring us in his financial problems with the IRS. We’d be better off in the end. Thomas Joiner’s father committed suicide, too.
After twenty-eight years of suicide bereavement, I’m moving closer to Joiner’s view. At first, suicide seemed like the most selfish act possible, and I felt rage and shame. Now I’m not so sure. But here’s what my father did to my stepmother, here’s how he was a monster.
Eleven months before my father’s suicide, my stepmother lost her parents to a murder-suicide. Her parents had a big house on top of a hill, overlooking an entire valley in Lakeport, Northern California. A valley with pear orchards and hills all around. They had horses. They were well off from a successful pool and spa business. I spent a lot of time at that house, riding all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes, swimming in the pool, learning to play backgammon, hunting and shooting. My stepmother’s father had a gun collection, pistols and shotguns, in cases. A room with dark wood and velvet. Many of the guns rare.
My stepmother’s mother felt bitter about her husband. He had cheated on her, was thinking of leaving her for another woman. Their years together were not what she had thought they were, her life a kind of lie. I remember her sitting in the kitchen on a stool, her little dog running around clicking its nails on the linoleum. She chain-smoked, had a raspy smoker’s laugh. I was always a little scared of her.
One day she went to the gun collection and picked out a shotgun and a pistol. She shot him at close range with the shotgun, killing him, then killed herself with the pistol.
Killing him had not been the plan, though. She included a letter to him in her suicide notes: “I’m really sorry for your last miserable 15 years. I really didn’t know. I really thought you loved me . . . Above all, Rollie, be happy because I’m taking your hell away. I’ve loved you more than you will ever know.”
This was a small town, a small community, and for their five children, the shame was nearly unbearable, but they all stayed. They fought each other bitterly over the will, over the money.
My stepmother had already lost her daughter’s father to a car accident. Then her parents’ murder-suicide. She told my father, right near the end, “Don’t do this to me, Jim.”
But he did it. And he sent her flowers that she’d receive afterward. And to me, those flowers are the greatest cruelty. So although Jessica Baty has lied to me over and over, and should have seen warning signs, and is one of the most psychologically screwed up people I have ever met, buried deep in denial and still not able, really, to acknowledge Steve’s victims, the people he killed and wounded, I will never stop feeling sorry for her. Can you imagine believing a proposal is coming on Valentine’s Day, then finding out instead that he’s a mass murderer?
THAT TUESDAY AFTERNOON, FEBRUARY 12, after Steve asks Jessica ‘what finger a woman wears her marriage ring on,’ he talks to his father for about fifteen minutes. He gets a call, also, from the Navy recruiter, Nole Scoville, and puts him off, says he’s too busy to come in to the office. This is remarkable timing, a last chance to go another direction. Does he hesitate at all?
Steve orders Jessica a platinum ArtCarved Montclair six-millimeter ring for $1,435.50 from Amazon. That evening, he talks with Jessica again for eighteen minutes, then again for fourteen minutes, several calls for just a few minutes, and a longer one for twenty-one minutes at midnight. What do they say in these calls? There are limits to what Jessica will tell me. She hides as much as she can.
Steve talks with Mark that evening, too, and it’s a normal conversation. “He was asking me about someone I dated down in Louisiana, and what it was like living out there and a different cult
ure, and we talked about that for about twenty minutes, and about the PS3 [PlayStation3], and that was about it.” Mark doesn’t sense anything wrong with Steve, maybe a bit formal on the final goodbye, is all. Steve talks with Joe Russo, too, for sixteen minutes, and Joe doesn’t think anything is wrong. The conversation ends as usual, with “talk to you later.”
Has Steve gone out at all today, even for food? He has Red Bull and cigarettes, a bottle of lotion on the nightstand.
Kelly sends him an email, asking to get together: “This week was craptastic. The ice on my windshield was completely impermeable to scrapers and ice melt spray this morning, so I was 20 min late to class as well. On a positive note, I didn’t slip and fall once today! :) What day did you say you weren’t doing anything later this week? I forgot already. We should do something . . . karaoke, movie, whatever. I just need to get out of here for a bit. Anyway, I hope your day went well and I’ll talk to you soon!”
He answers her the next morning, Wednesday, February 13: “I know what you mean about getting out once in a while, Kelly, lol.” He’s been in the Travelodge now for two days alone, waiting. “The snow and melted ice were a pain to deal with today, but at least you or I didn’t fall! Friday may work, but I’ll have to see what’s going on. karaoke is always fun!” But he’s not trying to get together with her. What about the prostitutes: Megan, Elyse, Katie? They’re all a long drive south, but “Sheri,” a woman with multiple arrests for prostitution, is closer, in Chicago. Does he see her? He has handcuffs on the nightstand beside his bed, which he’s mentioned before with Kelly, for light bondage, so maybe someone does visit. Sheri tells police Steve “seemed weird,” tried to get her to come to DeKalb, and even tried to arrange transportation for her. But she denies ever coming to DeKalb.
Steve goes to the post office and sends Jessica a package with the return address of Robert Paulson, 1074 Stevenson C, NIU, DeKalb, IL 60115, his old dorm address at NIU. He’s asked Jessica recently whether she remembers who Robert Paulson is, and she remembers he’s the one who dies in the movie Fight Club.
“In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name: his name is Robert Paulson.” Immortality and martyrdom. The protagonist in the movie teaches a victim the value of his life by threatening to kill him. Just like Jigsaw. He self-mutilates, pours lye on his own hand. He builds an army, in which all are “maggots,” with no individual self or even a name allowed, until after they die, starting with Robert Paulson.
The first rule of Project Mayhem is “You do not ask questions,” just like the army Steve served in, with no reference to right or wrong, and though the project seems radical and to the left, it’s actually libertarian and to the right, erasing financial records and eliminating all tracking of the individual by the government or banks.
It’s all about the individual in the end, and in this case, it’s a split individual. The movie begins with a gun in the protagonist’s mouth, held there by his alter ego, Tyler Durden. Tyler explains the genesis of this double self: “You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart and capable and, most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.”
With all his checking behaviors, Steve is fundamentally not free. Tyler Durden’s freedom must look good, and Tyler himself (Brad Pitt) looks good. The entire movie is a meditation on ambivalent male sexuality. Tyler splices bits of porn into family movies during his job as a projectionist, and the final shot is a long one of a nude male body with a prominent penis and dark pubic hair. It’s the final image in Fight Club. Tyler Durden is a hyper-heterosexual male, who fucks like someone who wishes they weren’t gay wishes they could fuck, loud sport sex with women, over and over, in hypervirility. And in order to have this alter ego, the protagonist must make one promise to his darker self, that he will never tell anyone about his darker self. Secret sex, secret shame.
By filling out the return address as Robert Paulson, Steve left a text, a way to be read. This is how I find him most unlikeable, his thoughtful planning of mass murder, including control of how he should be interpreted. He left Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ as another text, and also Orwell’s 1984. He even marked a specific passage for Jessica from 1984, a romantic passage in which the characters, who have given up all other vestiges of individuality, watched over constantly by Big Brother, refuse, finally, to give up love:
O’Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.
“You are prepared to give your lives?”
“Yes.”
“You are prepared to commit murder?”
“Yes.”
“To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?”
“Yes.”
“To betray your country to foreign powers?”
“Yes.”
“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?”
“Yes.”
“If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulfuric acid in a child’s face are you prepared to do that?”
“Yes.”
“You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock worker?”
“Yes.”
“You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?”
“Yes.”
“You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?”
“No!” broke in Julia.
It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. “No,” he said finally. “Never see one another again?”
Jessica tries to make sense of it all in her emails afterward to Mark. She tries to put together a narrative that makes all the connections. “He was totally OCD, locking the doors, checking things, making me read a paper six times before I would turn it in. No one but me knew that he was on meds. He was embarrassed about it, which I told him was ridiculous. He used to be a cutter when he was younger. He tried to kill himself like seven or eight times. He was having big problems with his sister. They weren’t speaking, and she said some horrible things to him. He was also avoiding his father. It was really hard for him to let me read his mental health records, but he wanted me to know about his past. I told him a million times his past was his past and I’d never hold anything against him, but he thought it would haunt him forever. He thought that he was a burden to me and he thought I could do better, and he didn’t understand why I loved him, after everything that we went through. He was so intelligent. JT and I have been analyzing 1984, Fight Club, and Nietzsche. It makes a lot of sense.”
Jim Thomas (JT) explains things a bit differently. “I’m not looking for explanation or causes but looking at a story and trying to cast it in some sense-making model.” Jim’s approach is from narrative sociology, and there’s an odd remove to it. He says “I don’t look for value, I look for an account of the outcomes.” But this is similar, I suspect, to the social-scientific remove Steve had in understanding himself through the lenses of Fight Club, Orwell, and Nietzsche, and I suspect is part of why he was able to plan in advance and finally do something so inhuman and cold. In other words, I think we can see something related and close to Steve’s internal thought processes go
ing on now in how his mentor Jim is trying to put together the story. The police, according to Jim, are doing exactly the opposite. “What they’re trying to look for is motive, genesis,” Jim says. “They don’t understand. They’re looking for comfort and predictability.”
Steve’s last call to Jessica is just before midnight on February 13, wishing her Happy Valentine’s Day, promising he’ll see her tomorrow. “Good-bye, Jessica,” he says.
He takes the SIM card out of his phone, the hard drive out of his laptop, and hides them where they will never be found.
VALENTINE’S DAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2008. I imagine Steve sitting on the end of his bed in the broken-down Travelodge. Smoking a Newport. Stale smell of old cigarettes, of all the lives that have passed through this room. I know he’s dressed in black shoes, black pants, his black T-shirt with “Terrorist” in white letters above a red AK-47 assault rifle. Black stocking cap above dark eyes, narrow face. Small mouth, almost no chin. His eyebrows are plucked. He’s shaved his pubic hair.
Across his lap, the Remington 12-gauge shotgun, the barrel sawed off. One hand on the stock, one on the barrel. He can’t sit still, though. Always fidgeting.
Beside him, laid out carefully across the bedspread, all pointing the same way, three pistols. Glock 9 mm. Sig-Sauer .380. Hi-Point .380. He picks up the Glock, checks the clip, makes sure it’s full. Checks it again. Checks it again. Threes have always spoken to him, shown him what to do. Three pistols. Three shells in the shotgun. He could take out the duck plug, make it five shells. But then it wouldn’t be three.
The Glock doesn’t seem real. Heavy, but looks like plastic, feels like plastic. A toy gun, almost.
He sets the pistol down. Picks up the next, and the next, checks each clip three times. Checks the extra clips. A bullet is so small, so heavy for its size.
Waiting. Takes another drink of Red Bull. Pushes up the sleeve on his right forearm, looks at his tattoo again, Jigsaw riding a tricycle through a pool of blood. Cut marks in the background.