He held his hands up by his face like he’d been ordered to do so. “You got it, baby,” he said.
I was under the spell of an intoxicating sense of invincibility, which is to say I was twenty. Leif and I dated for about a year and then we moved in together, a secret to which only Dee was privy. Leif was twenty-eight, which was much too old for my mother’s and Pete’s tastes. I suspected Pete was particularly worked up about it because Leif was only a year older than he was. Why can’t you date someone your own age? Pete had whined when he found out about Leif. Because men my age are animals, I’d told him smartly. Over a series of laborious Sunday dinners, Leif gradually charmed my mom and brother (or so I’d thought), but I knew they’d never come around to us living together in Riverwest. So, after we moved in together that spring, I told them I was living with two friends from school in a flat on the East Side.
When I look back now, I see how it was over almost before it began, but at the time I felt the whole hot promise of a life with him. I still remember our belongings on the sidewalk outside that apartment building. There was trash everywhere. Springtime turns the city of Milwaukee briefly into a landfill; the snowmelt from the most stubborn snowbanks reveals heaps of trash: cigarette butts, dog shit, shredded newspapers and magazines, vomit, crushed cans, and plastic bags whipped into stringy ropes. Each year, after resident weatherman John Malan has determined the city won’t be visited by any more snowstorms, they send inmates out to collect all the winter trash in white plastic bags. Afterward they cart the trash away to the landfills west of the city, and they bring out pressurized hoses and spray down the sidewalks and the streets with water pumped fresh out of Lake Michigan. I love the smell of cold water on concrete. That’s spring to me, not tulips or daffodils or rain, but Lake Michigan’s cold bathwater washed over the whole city.
There were still blackened snowbanks in front of the building in Riverwest when we unloaded our furniture. We were young enough then to be thrilled by things like a kitchen table belonging only to us. Our first night we spent there, Leif made steak and we drank red wine out of the bottle and ate on the living room floor, which was filthy, and then we fucked on the floor. We were covered in dust. At the end of the night, the soles of our bare feet were black. It’s hard to believe now. Showering without a shower curtain, air-drying our damp bodies in that dirty apartment, Leif shaking sheets out for us to sleep on top of the mattress on the floor, the way he held me that first night to make sure I knew it was safe in there. He checked and rechecked the locks.
Riverwest was, and remains, one of the few somewhat mixed neighborhoods in Milwaukee, a city that is intractably segregated. And Riverwest was, and still is, often described as dangerous. As far as I could tell, though, the reputation was unearned and due mostly to the fact that the neighborhood’s western border was Holton Street. This street, to many Milwaukeeans, represented a kind of tenuous border between the wealthier, mostly white East Side and the poorer, mostly Black communities on the North Side of the city. Riverwest was like a long, funky, porous borderland between these two parts of the city. So, of course, Leif loved it there. He said it was like living in a liminal zone: a place with its own rules and its own separate zones of possibility. I teased him that he was only glad it was safe for him to smoke weed on the streets there, although I knew that wasn’t what he meant.
Frankly, I often felt more afraid on campus than I ever did in Riverwest. Once during my first semester as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, I left the library after dark and walked across campus to my dorm. I had gotten in the habit of spending long afternoons that blurred into late nights reading, or doing homework, or writing in the library. I avoided my dorm room, which wasn’t conducive to studying and which also smelled permanently dank, like the primate house at the county zoo. I would stay at the library until I couldn’t stand the hunger anymore, and then I might walk to Oakland Gyros and flirt with the boys behind the counter who sometimes gave me extra fries for free. On this particular night, a Friday, I was trying to avoid being witness to the excessive alcohol consumption I knew was taking place in my dorm room, but as usual, by nine-thirty, my stomach was growling and my focus was shot.
The fall chill had just sunk its teeth into the city, so that already layers upon layers of clothing were necessary in order to be outside. I’d forgotten a hat, so I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head and went out to brave some kind of disgusting sleeting rain.
I hadn’t decided what to eat or where when I saw a group of boys, already absolutely loaded, headed in my direction. I thought maybe I could cross the street to avoid passing them, but cars whizzed by in both directions. I stuffed my hands into my sweatshirt pocket and focused on the cement. Probably harmless, I thought. Probably you will be fine. They were loud, though, and judging by the way they were walking and monopolizing the sidewalk, the case of PBR they’d just drunk had them all feeling like kings. I inched to the edge of the sidewalk. When they got close, one of them, whose face I never saw, bumped into my shoulder with his whole body, even though I was taking pains to be as far away from them as possible. I stumbled off the sidewalk and into the wet grass. Rain and mud leaked through my canvas sneakers and soaked my socks. The boys laughed. They passed, and when I thought that was the worst of it, and I was already letting out a breath, the same boy turned around and said loudly to my back, “Your hood won’t keep you from getting raped, you know.”
I didn’t make any sudden movements. I walked like I hadn’t heard a thing. They kept walking too. I made myself keep moving. Down the block, I spotted a pay phone, and I called Peter. He picked me up ten minutes later and drove me to Ma’s. During those ten minutes, I tried to make myself very small. I pretended I was invisible. I didn’t say anything in the car, and Pete didn’t ask. I studied his movements: the assuredness with which he drove, which was the same way I remembered my father driving when I was a girl. Was Pete capable of this kind of behavior? It seemed impossible. Pete squeezed my knee. I jerked away from his hand. He tried not to notice.
“Ma and Dee will be thrilled to have you home,” he said.
I said nothing.
At home, Ma fed me a reheated slice of Cornish pie, a meat pie in a buttery crust that I slathered in ketchup and practically inhaled. Then Dee and I curled up on the couch together with her head on my legs and my hands in her hair and we watched Full House until we fell asleep.
Later, when I told Leif about this incident, he was shocked: He said what to you? I was often confused when men were outraged by these stories; I assumed so many of them had witnessed or participated in some degree of it at one time or another. Maybe the outrage was a performance for my benefit? Or maybe fewer of them participated than I suspected? Or maybe these stories manufactured, in their minds, some scale of heinousness that easily reassured them that their own transgressions were comparatively minor. Was it in this way that the men I knew often didn’t see themselves as the problem? Sometimes I worried that telling these stories would only assure them of their superiority rather than forcing them into reflection: Jesus, well, at least I’ve never done that.
March 2019
The psychic’s face appeared out of a headline I clicked on. He was small and blond, with bones like a bird. Television beautiful, Dee used to say about people whose faces appeared too smooth, too perfect, to believe. But we must believe.
Television beautiful had become Internet beautiful. When I clicked on the boy’s face with my own tiny computer, a different man appeared in the video. A freelance reporter for Vox stood grim-faced in tight khakis and a denim button-up in front of a vacant lot. (Most people who’d never been to Milwaukee underestimated the unpredictability of the weather and came either underdressed or overdressed. He was the former; he struggled to keep his teeth from chattering.)
“This is 924 North Twenty-fifth Street,” he said, “where the famed cannibal and serial killer once lived.” He motioned behind him where a crowd of people had gathered with homemade signs. “A
celebrity psychic, in collaboration with the popular Netflix series Dark Tourist and a local cigar bar and former whorehouse (also reportedly haunted), will be hosting a special series here in Milwaukee commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the serial killer’s death.”
A few weak boos from the crowd gathered behind the news anchor. A bead of sweat formed on his temple despite the spring chill. Dried, pulverized leaves blew through the alley next to the empty lot. A garbage can tipped over and the wet contents spilled across the cement. More boos. A block away, a siren. Photos of young men on the posters. Old photos. Ages frozen. Fourteen, eighteen, twenty-five, nineteen, seventeen, twenty-two. Signs that said: Grief vampire, just stay away. The families, the anchor reported, were protesting the psychic’s show. An old woman holding a baby girl on her hip spoke into the anchor’s mike.
“Those men,” she said, “none of them, none, have ever gotten the respect, in death, they deserve. They’re going to let a serial killer speak from the grave before they’ll let us speak.”
I recognized her. From almost thirty years ago. She’d protested the murderer’s insanity plea outside the courthouse. One of those dead men’s sisters. She looked as if she’d been crushed down by time, an aluminum can that had been pressed flat by a giant hand. I supposed that was how I looked too.
“We won’t see one cent of this damn money. They’re selling those tickets for two hundred dollars. So they can walk around and continue to glorify this monster? So these people can drink old-fashioneds and hear what he did to my baby brother? To talk to that monster from the other side? That damn cigar bar sells T-shirts with his picture on it. Now, you tell me that isn’t exploitative.”
A gust of wind blew a flattened cereal box against the anchor’s shins; he was anxious to finish the segment. I thought I saw snowflakes caught up in a gust of wind. They wouldn’t land. “Thomas Alexander, Netflix, and the local cigar bar have put forth a joint statement reiterating that they have the utmost respect for the people of Milwaukee, they understand the sensitive nature of their enterprise here, and therefore they will proceed with absolute deference. Local businesses have also noted that the exposure could be good for tourism. A spokesperson for Thomas Alexander has said that the special-edition tours will run every other Friday and Saturday through the summer. The show will air on Netflix on November twenty-eighth, the day the Milwaukee Cannibal was killed in a Wisconsin prison by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver.”
After this video ended, another began, and I knew immediately that it was the video my mother had wanted me to watch. Four point two million people had recently watched this clip. The family had that average-American look going for them—the man wore a baseball cap and a blue pocket tee, and the woman wore a white blousy button-up and tasteful silver hoops in her ears. The couple was graying, though not completely gray yet, and they were plump in their middle age. I wondered if only I, or someone like me or Ma, could see the few things that were really different about them: the almost imperceptible sag of the shoulders, a few uncontrollable nervous tics, and most prominently, the deadness in their eyes.
The most remarkable part about the video was that, by the end of it, after the psychic told them who had murdered their daughter, this deadness disappeared. It had been either destroyed or replaced, temporarily or permanently. I wasn’t sure it mattered what had happened to it or where it had gone. All I knew was that I wanted the deadness gone from my mother’s eyes; I wanted her to be like these people. Hell, I wanted to be like these people. I began then to become wed to the idea that this was possible. Apparently, so did Pete. He watched this video too, and after, he called the psychic, and just like that, Thomas Alexander was hired.
I once believed Pete named his eldest daughter, Dana, in homage to Dee, though he denied this. In the end I began to believe him, if only because my niece Dana turned out nothing like Dee. For starters, Dee had a head full of messy blond curls she was constantly teasing out, whereas Dana had dark brown hair that she wore in long straight greasy strands. Her mother, Helena, was constantly begging Dana to wash her hair. Dana’s refusal was a kind of stand, though against what none of us were entirely sure. I supported it, which endeared me to her, though it did me no favors with my brother or my sister-in-law.
And where Dee had always seemed to be at the center of attention, no matter the setting, Dana was perennially reserved. She spoke only if someone spoke to her first, and even then she often seemed eager to end interactions with adults. She abhorred eye contact, and she rolled her eyes at most things people said. In these ways, Dana reminded me more of myself, though it pains me to admit this because it would be a great tragedy for her to become anything like me at all.
But even though she looked nothing like Dee, and acted nothing like Dee, her presence always called my sister to mind. It’s difficult to explain. When Dana was near me, my memories of Dee, and of our girlhood, seemed to float easily, almost heavenly, to the surface of my consciousness, where they became suddenly clearer, more accessible, even more honest, than they often were when I tried in vain to recall them on my own: lying in bed drunk, or staring at a data-entry form at work, or stuck in traffic on I-94. I don’t know why, but I felt closest to Dee, or to what I had left of her, when I was near Dana. I never told anyone about this, maybe because it embarrassed me, or because it was too difficult to explain. I wondered if the same thing would happen with my youngest niece, Sophie, as she grew older, but though I loved Soph desperately, she did not bring Dee to mind the way Dana did.
Though it sounds strange, I was aware of this effect from the minute my niece was born. The night Helena went into labor, I hoped, prayed, even, that she would give birth to a boy. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to love a girl child who was not Dee. But of course my “prayers” were neither heard nor answered, which I did not take personally, because I’d never been much of a believer. True faith is not a fair-weather practice. I, of all people, know that.
At the hospital fourteen years ago, when Pete handed the baby to me and I looked at her face, how unbelievably alien and ugly, the raw pink vulnerability of her, still wet with her mother’s insides, I cried. And it wasn’t just because she was a girl and not a boy, but also because I sensed that night, already, that I needed her. There is no word for the feeling of finding something you didn’t even know you needed and realizing you’ve found it, that before, you had been just barely alive. I cried too because I understood then that we aren’t even born unburdened: Already at birth we carry so much.
Perhaps more profoundly than any of us, Dana understood the gravity of our involvement with Thomas Alexander. No one in our family listened to her except maybe me, and I don’t think even I heard what she wanted me to hear.
Pete and Helena had given her an iPhone at twelve. Not long after, she boasted an Instagram following of thousands, and she followed thousands more. Apparently, this was “typical” for people her age, or so she told me. I didn’t know if all her followers were real. I’d read an article about bots which I sent to her, but she never responded. I knew many, maybe even most, of the people she followed were celebrities. One of these celebrities was Thomas Alexander. When she heard the news of our mother’s plan to hire him, she scolded Pete and me and rolled her eyes. I was at dinner at Pete’s when Dana tried to tell her father what she knew about the psychic.
“You have no idea how famous he is,” she said. She looked to her little sister, Sophie, who was twelve, for confirmation.
Sophie bobbed her head. “He has, like, millions of followers.”
“So?” Pete asked. “Why do I give a damn about his followers? That doesn’t matter.”
“No,” Dana said. She made eye contact with me briefly, frowned, and then studied her food. “It does. Look at it this way: Followers are like money. The more you have, the more powerful you are.”
I laughed at this, but Dana cut her eyes at me, glaring.
“Dana,” Pete said. “Enough. It�
�s already done. I don’t want to hear about it.”
I did want to hear about it, so after dinner, as I was on my way out, I nodded for Dana to walk me to my car. She mindlessly twirled the ends of her dark hair between her fingers. Dee hadn’t had that habit, exactly, but the way Dana was doing it made me think of Dee.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked her.
Dana looked past my right shoulder and into the street, where a group of boys were tossing a football. I hated the noise of them. I wondered if she did too. “I don’t think you guys get it,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I felt sometimes like Dana spoke in code purposefully, in order to frustrate us, though maybe it was just the years between us.
“Whatever he says, millions of people will hear it, and they will probably believe him.” One of the boys threw the football in our direction, and it rolled toward Dana’s feet. She kicked the ball back into the street, and the boys snorted and laughed. “That will be her story.”
“I’m sure your father can write a nondisclosure agreement for us,” I said. She shrugged. “That means—”
“I know what it means.”
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“Okay. Still. What if you don’t like what he says?”
“I’ve been doing this my whole life, babe. I’ve grown accustomed to hearing things I don’t like,” I told her. She put her hands on her hips. “I’ll be fine. I promise.”
She was unconvinced. “Just get your story straight,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
I once read that watching a video right after an event can overlay and alter the actual memory of the experience. I wondered if that was true for photos and stories too. Can looking at a picture of a moment replace the memory of the moment with what you see in the photo? What is the difference between the memory and the photo of the remembered moment? I don’t think I know. (What do I remember of the moment Dee left me for good—Leif’s hard hands on the sharp part of my cheekbones, the sour taste of my own saliva dripping from my open mouth, the sweet rush of wetness between my legs, Dee’s face folding in on itself like a paper fan snapped shut, her small hand opening to show me an acid tab, the crush of a camera shuttering open and closed.) Could telling a different story of what happened replace your original memory of the event? I felt, after Dee disappeared, my memories from that summer beginning to drip and harden like stalactites forming in a dark cave. Dana didn’t know it, but I’d spent most of my life guarding these fragile formations fiercely, even though I hated many of them. I was not eager to allow anyone to replace them—they were all I had left of Dee.
The Comfort of Monsters Page 3