The Comfort of Monsters
Page 1
Epigraph
Memory is a mosquito
pregnant again
and out for blood.
—Gayl Jones
I have to say what is said. I don’t have to believe it myself.
—Anne Carson
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue
Epigraph
Federal Rules of Evidence
March 2019
September 1986
March 2019
February 1991
March 2019
April 1991
Federal Rules of Evidence
March 2019
May 1991
September 1984
April 2019
May 1991
May 1991
April 2019
May 1991
Federal Rules of Evidence
April 2019
May 1991
April 2019
June 1991
April 2019
June 1991
Interstitial
April 2019
June 1991
Interstitial
Federal Rules of Evidence
April 2019
July 1991
April 2019
July 1991
April 2019
July 1991
May 2019
July 1991
May 2019
July 1991
Federal Rules of Evidence
May 2019
July 1991
October 1979
July 1991
May 2019
July 1991
Federal Rules of Evidence
May 2019
July 1991
May 2019
July 1991
Interstitial
Federal Rules of Evidence
June 2019
August 1991
June 2019
August 1991
June 2019
August 1991
June 2019
September 1991
Federal Rules of Evidence
July 2019
September 1991
November 2019
Interstitial
February 1992
November 2019
May 1992
December 2019
May 1992
December 2019
August 1992
January 2020
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Memory, of course, is also a story. It feels like the truth, especially when there is no one to dispute your recollection of events. But it is a story nonetheless—some moments have been elided, and others have been emphasized and made either luminous or horrific or both. Who, or what, does this editorializing is not clear to me. I know it’s not me or not exactly. And maybe that is what frightens me now: I can see how much of the story is out of my control. I don’t choose what is carried along year after year and what is discarded. (My sister, Dee, once took her shoes off during a long road trip north and threw them out the car window. We craned our necks to watch her white tennis shoes bump down the highway behind us.) And because now, more than ever, my sister’s case depends on these memories, I am terrified that crucial pieces of evidence have been lost along the way.
Epigraph
If you think of a torso as a box, you can see
how someone might want to open it with his fingers.
—Beth Bachmann
Modernity has eliminated the comfort of monsters because we have seen, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, that evil works often as a system, it works through institutions as a banal (meaning “common to all”) mechanism. In other words evil stretches across cultural and political productions as complicity and collaboration. Modernity makes monstrosity a function of consent and a result of habit.
—Jack Halberstam
Federal Rules of Evidence
Article I. General Provisions
Rule 102. Purpose
These rules should be construed so as to administer every proceeding fairly, eliminate unjustifiable expense and delay, and promote the development of evidence law, to the end of ascertaining the truth and securing a just determination.
March 2019
Let me try to be clear about what this is: I have a layperson’s understanding of the law. Until several months ago, when I was fired, I was a library and circulation services assistant at Marquette University’s law library. I’d spent most of my five years there studying textbooks with anesthetizing titles like Evidentiary Foundations. (I often stole these books, stashing them away with the files from my sister’s case, so I could keep studying at home.) But even so, all I can say with confidence is that the most compelling story is the truest story. Unfortunately, it’s rarely the other way around.
What I’ve learned from Graham C. Lilly’s book, for example, is that when lawyers argue a case, they aren’t interested in the truth. Instead, they are concerned with curating a body of evidence that is favorable to their client. The fact finder, either a jury or a judge, is then tasked with evaluating that evidence and deciding what has occurred. During closing arguments, lawyers have one last chance to shape the meaning and weight of the presented evidence, and to construct a believable story, a series of plausible events, that is supported by the evidence. Legally speaking, evidence is any matter, verbal or physical, that can be used to support the existence of a factual proposition. In this particular case, I bear the burden of producing evidence that will persuade law enforcement of the following factual proposition: A man I knew as Frank Cavelli murdered my sister, Candace McBride. So far, I have failed.
This failure of persuasion, according to police, lies in the fact that I am missing the only piece of evidence that has ever mattered: my sister’s body. No body; no crime. They’ve repeated this mantra so often over the years that I’ve begun to hear it at all times, like it’s etched onto one of the very fine bones inside my ear. What the police mean to say is that my account of Dee’s disappearance is inconsequential. It’s not just that they don’t believe me, it’s that even if they did, without her body, my story does not legally matter. I’m sure this true. I’m also sure that they aren’t inclined to hear my story because of the unofficial form it takes. So, I’ve tried over the years to engage in a process of translation: to transform these memories into evidence and to apply the federal rules of evidence to these memories. This is an impossible endeavor. The language of the law was designed to exclude, to be cold and unfeeling, and above all else, to confuse. I’ve done my best.
For decades now I’ve kept all of Dee’s files crammed inside my one-bedroom apartment on Milwaukee’s East Side. And I’ve been rehearsing my story. And recent events have convinced me I cannot wait any longer to argue this case. Otherwise I’m afraid Dee and I, and the rest of my family, will be forgotten, because our story will dissolve first into the annals of the local newspaper archives and then finally into meaninglessness. This has already happened once. Lately I’ve also become afraid that someone else will tell this story and their version will prove to be more compelling than mine.
Among the legacies of misogyny that live on today is a general distrust of women, a belief that we are conniving and cunning by nature. Still a fear exists that women are capable of controlling, using, and abusing men with their feminine wiles. Lest we believe that this hysteria peaked in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1693, the forty-fifth president of the United States has publicly propagated these biases saying, among other things, that he has seen wo
men manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye, or perhaps another body part.
The social constructions surrounding gendered categories have had grave and lasting consequences. Consider, for example, early civil laws on the European continent, inherited from Roman codes, which were based on the inferiority and subjection of women. In these early courts, women were not allowed to be witnesses, and later, even after they were deemed legally competent to testify, their testimonies were almost ubiquitously cast as worthless.
Today, though the United States’ Federal Rules of Evidence indicate that “every person is competent to be a witness,” this language only calls attention to the courts’ long and ongoing history of exclusion. This storied history is very much not behind us.
I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that a few years ago, I became emboldened when the MeToo movement picked up steam and everyone started saying they were going to “believe women.” Excellent, I remember thinking. I waited for Gary Wolski, Jr., the MPD detective who had been assigned to Dee’s case twenty-eight years ago, to call and say let’s hear your story. I waited for the MPD to call and say we’re sorry we didn’t believe you before, but we’re listening now. I waited for the Journal Sentinel, for BuzzFeed, for anyone to call and say let us help you tell your story. No one called. No one checked in. I reorganized my files for the six hundredth time. Finally, against my better judgment, I called Wolski. He picked up immediately.
“Ah, Christ, Margaret. I thought you might call,” he said, sighing. “I’m sorry.”
My heart leaped. An apology!
“Should I come into your office now? I have tapes. And the files. Or I could fax everything.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “That won’t be necessary. I just wanted to say I’m sorry for what happened between us.”
“Between us?”
“Yeah, I know now, uh, it wasn’t right.”
I paused. I recalibrated. “I’m not calling about that.”
“Oh.” He breathed a quiet and incriminating sigh of relief. “I thought you were going to MeToo me.”
“Should I?” I asked him sharply. We’d slept together once, a very long time ago, when I was in a bad way. I blamed him, of course, but I blamed myself more. He didn’t take the bait.
“Why did you call, then?” he asked. He suddenly sounded bored and eager to hang up. I was disoriented.
“I thought maybe, with the climate and everything,” I said, “maybe you guys could take another look at my testimony, my evidence.”
There was a long pause. I held my breath. And then I hung up on him. I didn’t need to hear what he was about to say because I’d heard it too many times before.
No body; no crime.
Almost thirty years after Dee went missing, and twenty-three years after she was eligible to be declared legally dead, my mother proposed that we hire a psychic to help us find her body. Three decades before, I would have said, and I believe my mother would have agreed with me, that we weren’t the kind of people who hired psychics. But later I finally understood, given the right circumstances, anyone can become this kind of person.
For instance, I was initially resistant to hiring the psychic for all the obvious reasons: the expense, the fraudulent and unethical nature of their businesses, etc. But many of these reasons proved much less compelling than the only reason we had to hire him: We all wanted to find Dee’s body. And at some point, perhaps after watching the video my mother sent me, or perhaps after she begged in her bed at the nursing home, I began to entertain the idea that the psychic could be successful. Local law enforcement had given up on us decades ago, and we’d exhausted ourselves by holding weekly, then monthly, then annual canvasses looking for her body. We’d exhausted ourselves by sorting through bogus tips and prank calls. We’d exhausted ourselves by begging local and state and national presses to cover our story. We were exhausted. It was a permanent state.
Here is a piece of evidence with many stories behind it and also without any story at all: In America over half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner.
September 1986
Dee was always my father’s favorite. Pete was Ma’s favorite. And I guess I was nobody’s favorite. Well, maybe I was Dee’s favorite, or maybe I just believed that and was desperate to continue believing it. The idea was very comforting to me. My mother named my younger sister Candace, but my father quickly shortened this to Candy, which I quickly shortened to just Dee, and Dee stuck. Almost no one called her Candace, and only my father was ever allowed to call her Candy.
We were born thirteen months apart, so our father called us Irish twins. Dee and I loved this—we believed that we could read each other’s minds and that our heartbeats were synced. But when we were older, our mother made it clear to us that though we could say we were Irish, on account of our father’s grandfather, we were not actually twins. This was disappointing news to both of us. Even worse, we discovered that because of how our birthdays fell on the calendar, we would be two years apart in school.
So when I was a junior in high school, Dee was a freshman. And when Dee started high school, it became clear to me, rather quickly, that our experiences would be different. For starters, unlike me, Dee was popular. I knew this was in part because she was rather classically pretty (and I was apparently a bit odd-looking; people said that my brow ridge cast a great shadow over my face so it looked like I was always wearing a mask), but also because she had the je ne sais quoi that some popular people seem to be born with: that special cocktail of charisma and confidence. (I definitely didn’t have that.) Sometimes this attribute doesn’t follow people once they leave the social bubbles of their schools, but sometimes it does. Anyway, Dee had a large group of girlfriends in high school, many of whom prided themselves on dating older boys.
One day during lunch Dee was standing in a circle of these girls as they chatted outside the cafeteria. I was sitting alone at a picnic table picking at a peanut butter sandwich and writing little poems in illegible cursive all over my notebooks. Every once in a while a group of boys, standing a good distance from Dee’s group, would cheer or hoot, and it took me almost ten minutes to figure out why.
It was a breezy fall day in Wisconsin. Though chilly, Dee and some of the other girls were still wearing short floral skirts with their Docs. Whenever a breeze came and lifted the girls’ skirts, these boys cheered. I didn’t know if the girls heard the boys or if they cared. Maybe they just enjoyed the pleasurable sensation of a cool breeze on the backs of their thighs. In any case, none of them seemed concerned, none of them clutched at their hems to keep them flat, and eventually one gust lifted Dee’s skirt up to show her underwear and a sliver of her butt. The boys screamed with joy. I felt, with absolute certainty, that I hated every single one of them.
Watching, I was suddenly afraid another, larger gust would reveal Dee’s underwear completely. This breach of privacy inspired a sinking dread in me. (As girls, Dee and I shared the same room and often the same clothes. I remembered her stepping into her underwear, our underwear, that very morning: an old ratty blue pair that had come in a cheap department-store pack of eight. She was fourteen.)
I leaped up from my picnic table and ran over to her. I gave her an aggressive hug from behind, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and pressing her spiny back into my stomach. Dee whipped her head around to see me. Some of the boys booed. Dee blushed. I kissed her cheekbone from behind and she shrugged me off.
“Pegasus,” she whispered into my ear. “Can you stop being so weird?”
“Sorry,” I said. She looked bewildered.
The lunch bell rang. Harried lunch attendants ushered us inside.
Later that day, one of the boys who’d apparently been particularly disappointed by my intervention keyed prude and slut into our parents’ car. I wasn’t sure how I could be both. Or maybe one was for me and one was for Dee.
“What did you do?” Dee screamed at me while we were inspecting the damage on the car. I st
ared at her with my mouth open, shocked that she would assume I’d provoked this treatment. I supposed that if one used the sick logic of our high school, I was, in fact, to blame.
“I don’t know,” I shouted back. “Maybe you should ask one of your blockhead fucking boyfriends.”
“Let’s go,” Dee said. We were aware that a small, whispering crowd was forming in the parking lot.
I never explained to Dee what happened that day. Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn’t. We never talked about it. I’d bet a lot of money that by the time we were both in college, she’d completely forgotten about the incident. I never forgot about it, though. And much later, after she disappeared, I would regret my unwillingness to even try to explain the dread I felt while I watched these boys watching her. It wasn’t, I might have told her, about some paternalistic desire to protect her from them or to shield her from their sight. It wasn’t a fear that they would hurt her or that she would be embarrassed. It’s difficult to explain. I suppose the dread came from an understanding that even then I was losing us: this we that had once been solely ours.
March 2019
When she was eighty-one, my mother suffered two strokes in one year. After the first stroke, she was unable to move the left side of her body and in need of full-time care. After the second stroke, she was affected. Or that’s how she described the feeling. She felt she’d briefly crossed over to the other side, where, she explained to us, she saw a world she’d never believed possible. Among the visions she’d had in this other world were: her own death at the hands of a final stroke by the end of the year, and Dee’s body decomposing in a handmade grave somewhere in the city of Milwaukee.
My mother first saw the psychic on the Today show after her second stroke. Thomas Alexander was featured in a long segment detailing his most recent success stories. One of these successes—a cold case the psychic claimed he helped solve—caught my mother’s eye. A young woman’s murderer was finally found, though the killer himself was by then dead too. My mother watched the woman’s parents speak about what this discovery meant to them, and she was shot through with jealousy, then with a fresh spike of hope. The jealousy could be managed; the hope was more dangerous, because in our family, hope could travel like a virus we passed between us.