We agree, collectively, that the amount of time we have devoted to studying his skull shape, lineage, caffeine intake, and psychiatric history is neither helpful nor tasteful.
On his bookshelf: Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Updike, Conrad, Nabokov, Murakami, Dickens, Proust, Mann. Much is made of the depth and diversity of his reading, but then much is also made of the absence of women from the shelves. The Stanford professor who has arranged access to the bomber’s copious marginal notes plans, separate from his assistance in interpreting these notes for the interested government agencies, to release his own analysis of the man’s literary thinking. How long he will have to wait for clearance is, naturally, the issue.
When the bomber was eleven, he took a Hershey’s bar from the pharmacy shelf and snuck it into the public restroom, where he consumed it in three bites. Terrified of the incriminating wrapper, he folded it in half, fourths, eighths, sixteenths, but decided against the toilet, which might clog. He put the wrapper in his mouth and chewed it like gum, and when it was soft enough, he swallowed. Much is still uncertain, but on this one fact we are clear.
According to his mother, he was framed. According to his mother, the laws of the universe are incompatible with her son, her son, her son doing this. We wonder, collectively, why it’s so important to us that she understand what we understand — that yes, he did this, that he bought the ticket, that he wrote that letter, that the basement was full of chemicals — despite our wish to spare her. Wouldn’t it be better if she thinks it’s the rest of us who’ve gone mad? We ask if she hasn’t been through enough. But we need her to understand.
The briefcase he used was a gift from his sister. Something to replace the canvas bag he’d carried through his academic life. She was the one who identified a scrap of it, charred leather and a bit of buckle.
There are things we can assume: that he was terrified, that he almost wet his pants, that he rehearsed, that he ordered a good meal that morning but wasn’t able to eat it, that he prayed, that he didn’t look at faces in the crowd. That his own name, when he checked into the hospital, sounded to him like a death sentence. That he’d pictured some glorious future, some altered universe, in which history would be written by the victors, among whom he’d be chief. That he couldn’t sleep the night before. But maybe those are facts about us, about the way we’d be.
The bomber’s ex-girlfriend is not ready to talk, but her roommate has given certain details: the fight about the keys, the time he broke the girlfriend’s wrist, the addiction to Indian food. The roommate starts most sentences with “If I’d known.” We are happy to allow her this.
He liked to solve puzzles. He liked to fix machines. When his third-grade teacher, Miss Mullens, told him there was not enough time to talk about sharks, he slowed the mechanism of the classroom clock. “Look,” he said. “I made the day longer.”
If he hadn’t felt the need to watch the explosion, he’d never have fallen from the roof of the bank, and would not have snapped his leg. Three days later he wouldn’t have stumbled, dazed and infected, to the hospital. He would not, when he saw the nurses’ eyes, when he realized the police were on their way, have barricaded himself, wouldn’t have taken the hostage, wouldn’t have demanded the suicidal drugs, wouldn’t have shot himself when they were denied. Or so we assume.
The country where he was born is on the map, but only a detailed map. It has a flag, but not a flag we’ve seen. His country is smaller than Luxembourg, larger than Lichtenstein, with a surprising number of sheep. To be honest, we’d forgotten about his country. We aren’t at all sure what he wanted.
The night before his twenty-third birthday, he sat in a mostly empty movie theater and watched Audrey Tautou run through the streets of Paris, suitcase in hand. As a botanist, he hated that the wrong things were blooming on-screen: This was meant to be August, but here were tulips in the park. Each flower, to him, had a taste. He’d rarely tasted nectar, just a few curious times — the viscosity, if not the flavor, reminding him of his girlfriend, of afternoons on her small white bed — but he knew each flower’s smell so intimately, so clinically, that when these tulips appeared he felt it on the back of his tongue. He admired the director’s brazenness (he assumed it wasn’t ignorance) in deciding what flowers bloomed when. He admired men who molded the universe like plastic. After this thought, his popcorn lost its flavor. We’ve gleaned all this from the video surveillance.
His mother stands on the porch and again and again says why, till it doesn’t sound like a word at all. It’s a different why from ours. We are ready to accept this.
He had a tooth pulled in the spring of 2012. He was allergic to strawberries. He excelled at tennis. There was no food in his refrigerator. He was dead before they could interrogate him. His blog has been erased.
We plan to learn more. We plan to keep updated. We plan to look for patterns. We’ve obtained a new map, with slightly different colors.
We will repeat these facts till they sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound like fate.
PAINTED OCEAN, PAINTED SHIP
To Alex’s personal horror and professional embarrassment, the Cyril College alumni magazine ran an obnoxiously chipper blurb that September, in a special, blue-tinted box. She read it aloud to Malcolm on the phone:
FOWL PLAY
Assistant Professor Alex Moore has taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” many times since joining the English Department in 2008, but she developed an unexpected intimacy with the poem when, duck-hunting in South Australia this June, she accidentally shot and killed an actual albatross.
Moore, whose doctoral dissertation at Tufts focused on D. G. Rossetti and his muse Jane Burden Morris, took aim at what she thought was a goose.
“My students are never going to let me hear the end of this,” she says.
Because the birds are protected under Australian and international laws, Moore incurred a hefty fine — hopefully the extent of that legendary bad luck! She has no plans to hang the bird around her neck. “The wingspan was over two yards,” says the 5-foot-2 Moore. “That would be asking for it!”
Those exclamation points killed her, the way they tacked the whole episode down as farce. And the cheery italics. None of Alex’s tired sarcasm had come through. She vowed in the future only to give quotes via e-mail, so she could control the punctuation. (“You’re my favorite control freak,” Malcolm said.) Plus there was that photo to the side, her book-jacket photo with the half smile, perfect for suggesting Pre-Raphaelite intrigue and scandal, but here verging on the smug. A month stuck dealing with the South Australian police and Parks Department; half her grant spent on the fine; her research summer wasted; and all of it snipped down by a freelance writer named Betsy into photo, irony, pretty blue box.
And as for the bad luck, it was just starting, waiting for her back home like her postal bin of unopened mail. Not the “hefty fine” kind of bad luck, but the “Your career is over” kind, the “Why aren’t you wearing your engagement ring?” kind.