Jessica is crying again, and I feel terrible.
“I’m really sorry,” I say. “I’ve never done this before, and I don’t think I’m ever going to do it again.” And this is true. This story has been grueling, and I have no desire to investigate anything like it ever again.
“On the way over here,” she says, “I was freaking out about talking with you. I was asking Josh, why can’t I just tell him what to write and what not to write?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “And we don’t have to talk anymore. We can stop.”
She takes me up on that offer. “I need to go home and cry,” she says. Afterward, she posts on her Facebook page that “Jessica is thinking that if Steve knew the consequences of what he was doing, I think he would have thought twice,” and by this I think she means not only the deaths and injuries and effect on her, but also the exposure, Steve’s private past laid bare.
Steve’s memorial service, with his family and friends, is not held until June 28. They have to wait that long, four and a half months. Jim Thomas isn’t able to go, it turns out, which he finds terribly disappointing. He’s just returned from California, has a touch of the flu, and finds out a second cat is diabetic and needs insulin shots twice a day, but the main problem is that something really scary is going on with one of his eyes, so he doesn’t trust himself to drive on the expressway. “I wanted to be there, if for nothing else than to support Jess. Both bummed and guilt-laden, but there’s really no way I could have made it.”
Mark goes and says it’s good to find some closure. “Obviously it was a tragedy,” Mark says, “and in any kind of tragedy, you have to feel bad for the victims, but Steve himself was a victim. And a lot of people didn’t identify that, and mental illness. Steve was a victim of himself. I don’t see that it was really planned. I remember back in fall of 2006 that Steve enjoyed the guns and the shooting range. In DeKalb, he went to the shooting range. He wasn’t a gun nut, though. He owned a couple guns, but no big deal. The media, they’ll put a spin on it and say he’s a gun nut and then blame it on guns and all that stuff.”
Jessica writes, “I don’t think that the memorial helped me all that much. I just kept thinking how it was exactly not what Steven would have wanted. I keep forgetting that the memorial wasn’t for Steven, but for everyone else. Jim was disappointed that he couldn’t make it. I was devastated when he said that he couldn’t come. There were a few NIU people there and that was comforting to me. Some UI people were there too, but they were there more for Susan than for Steven.”
Memorials are important, and one issue still to be decided is the future of Cole Hall. The governor of Illinois and NIU’s president proposed demolition, leaving the site as a memorial, and building a new “Memorial Hall” nearby for $40 million. But after more discussion and an online survey of students and faculty, the plan shifted to a remodeling for $7.7 million, no longer using it as a classroom, and building a new auditorium elsewhere. In January 2011, limited renovation work finally began.
Put into perspective, though, six gun deaths is nothing for the United States, and this discussion of Cole Hall misses the point, if I may be forgiven for saying such things. One weekend while I was in DeKalb investigating, April 19 to 20, 2008, there were thirty-six separate shootings in Chicago, with nine homicides. Is it “media spin” to mention this? Weapons included an AK-47 assault rifle, which is becoming more readily available in the United States. We average over ten thousand handgun deaths a year in this country, and the Supreme Court upheld, in June 2008, an individual’s right to bear arms, striking down a gun ban in Washington, D.C., and threatening such bans in Chicago and elsewhere. After the NIU shootings, the Illinois state legislature tried to pass that bill that would have limited handgun purchases to one pistol per month per person, meaning anyone could still have gone out and bought a dozen handguns per year, and even that couldn’t pass. DeKalb’s own representative voted against it. Every time I drive into Champaign to interview Jessica, I see signs by the side of the road that claim “Guns Save Lives.” If that’s not spin, then what is spin?
~ ~ ~
I DON’T THINK I’LL EVER ENTIRELY UNDERSTAND the year after my father’s suicide. I told everyone my father died of cancer, and I didn’t see a therapist. I didn’t have a real conversation with anyone. Instead, I shot things, the guns a terrible substitute. A year of the most basic brutality, a year I’m lucky to have escaped without hurting anyone. I was an insomniac — and would be for the next fifteen years — and as I lay wide awake in bed every night, I couldn’t help thinking over and over about the.44 magnum my father had used to kill himself. I had fired it once, at maybe eleven or twelve years old, and though I had used both hands, it flew back so hard it nearly hit me in the face. But the scariest part was that it fired with only the slightest pressure on the trigger. It was difficult to put your finger on the trigger and not have it fire. So what I kept wondering was whether my father had really intended to kill himself. What if he was just thinking about it, just testing it, or what if he had one moment of deciding but it was only a brief moment and, with the hair trigger, that was enough? I wanted to hold that pistol in my own hands, feel the possibility, feel the heft of it and know what it felt like pressed against my head. And I’m glad now I didn’t have that opportunity.
I finally sold my father’s other guns when I was in graduate school. I needed the money, but I also just didn’t want them in my life anymore. What I really wanted was for them never to have existed. But once I sold them, I was surprised by this terrible feeling that I had sold off a part of my father, because I have so little of him left. He vanished with his suicide. We sold our land, also, that hunting ranch, for peanuts, stupidly, and it was mostly the land that held our family’s history and that connected all of us every year, scattered now.
I still love my father, even twenty-nine years after his suicide. The feeling hasn’t diminished at all, hasn’t faded over time, but I have nothing left to attach it to. If I could hold his.300 magnum now, would he come back to me, some closer memory, some echo of hiking with him through live oak and manzanita, watching him raise that rifle high over his head as we pushed through brush? If I remember that rifle, really focus on it, I can remember the sunlight on my father’s light-brown curly hair, receding, his lopsided grin as he looked down at me. But more than that, I can almost remember how the moment felt, what it was like to be there with him, to hunt with him, what it was like to belong. My father was what attached me to the world.
It turns out I don’t really have that many similarities with Steve. I certainly don’t share his racism, libertarianism, love of horror, fascination with killers, military training, ambivalent sexuality and sprees online and with prostitutes, medication and mental health history, drug-dealer friends, tattoos, disturbing mother, interest in corrections, etc. But I did inherit all my father’s guns at thirteen, when I was most hyped up on hormones, and the world meant nothing to me after he put that pistol to his head. I had nothing to lose. And I had witnessed a lot of brutality.
I watched my father gut shoot two deer once. It was on the upper glade of our ranch. We spotted a group of deer, including two bucks. We were so far away, they couldn’t possibly sense us. My father sighted in with his.300 magnum. I watched through the binoculars.
A great boom like artillery, my father recoiling, and I saw the buck hit in the stomach, gut-shot. It fell over and began tumbling down the steep slope, gathering speed in the dry grass. It was screaming, just like a human being. The voice really the same.