The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (33 page)

I Googled “chaos theory Harris Klebold.” Zilch.

Googled “chaos theory Colorado State” and got the curriculum vita and the university office number of Mickey Schmidt, my seatmate on that flight that had brought the two of us out of the Rockies and
east—me to my dying aunt and Mickey to Wequonnoc Moon Casino, where he planned to beat the house by applying chaos-complexity theory. Maybe Mickey could guide me through the explosive bifurcation of it all—point me in some direction that might lead us out of the maze. It was December 31, 1999, somewhere after 11:00 p.m. Y2K was upon us, and it was semester break besides. College professors would be away from their offices for weeks. I picked up the phone and called him anyway, and guess what? He answered.

“Who’d
you say this is?”

“Caelum Quirk. The guy on the plane. We talked about chaos theory. You said you were writing a book for gamblers.”

He told me he thought I’d called the wrong guy.

“No, I didn’t, man. Your picture’s on the faculty Web site.”

“Look,” he said. “I’m busy, and
you’re
drunk.”

“You told me you were afraid to fly,” I said. “You asked me to hold your hand during takeoff.”

“And did you?”

“I …”

“No,” he said. “You didn’t. You had me grip the armrest instead. You couldn’t do that one small thing.”

He hung up before I could get to my questions about Columbine. And so, in the waning minutes of the twentieth century, I finished my drink and poured another. Shut down the computer, rested my cheek against the keyboard, and started sobbing like a baby. I cried so loudly that it woke her up. She came down the stairs. Sat down next to me and touched my cheek. Stroked it, over and over.

“Everything’s all right,” she lied.

The overhead light shone on her bald patches. The pajamas she wore night and day were stained with food, missing a button. “No, it’s not,” I said.

“I’m going to get better, Caelum,” she said. “I am. I promise.” And by the time I stopped crying, it was January. A new year, a new century. Outside, the snow was filling up our fallow fields.

I DON’T KNOW. MAYBE WE’RE
all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we’re scared shitless of explosive change. But we’re fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium—the devils let loose from their cages. “There but for the grace of God,” the faithful say. “It’s not for us to know His plan.”

Which, I’ve concluded, is bullshit. Big G, little g: doesn’t matter. There
is
no mysterious Master Planner, no one up there who can see the big picture—the order in the disorder. Religion’s just a well-oiled, profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all. That’s what I’ve come to believe. Because if some merciful Lord and Master Puppeteer were up there pulling the strings, then why did my wife have to crouch in the dark inside a cabinet that day, listen to all that murder, and survive, only to become her frail, bitter, self-absorbed unself? O come all ye faithful and tell me why, in the heat of the moment back in 1980, your all-seeing, all-knowing, Intelligent Designer would
not
have spared us those two collisions of sperm and egg, those divisions and multiplications of cells that became Eric and Dylan. Tell me why, if a benign god’s at the control panel, those two kids had to exist, hook up, and stoke each other’s mind-poisoned rage.

Not
available for downloading are Eric and Dylan’s “basement tapes”—the smug, ridiculing rants they recorded late at night, mostly in the Harrises’ basement, and left behind for the cops to find and confiscate. Too disturbing for public consumption, a judge ruled. Too much danger of copycat crimes.
I’ve
seen them, though—the basement tapes. Some of them. It happened more or less by accident.

“Good news!” Cyndi Pixley told me over the phone that December
day. “The Paisleys sold their house, so we can go ahead and schedule the closing on your place. How soon do you think you could make it back?”

I hired one of Alphonse’s counter girls to stay at the farmhouse with Maureen and flew back to Littleton. And after the Paisleys and I had signed all the paperwork and shaken hands, Cyndi Pixley, whose husband was a cop, casually mentioned that the sheriff’s office was showing the basement tapes to the media that afternoon. “Where?” I said.

“The Dakota building, I think Ron said.”

“When?”

“One o’clock?”

I looked at my watch. It was twelve forty-three. I ran.

At the door to the screening room, a woman cop stopped me and asked to see my press credentials. “I don’t have any,” I said.

“Then I’m afraid I can’t let you in, sir.”

“Oh, I’m going in,” I said. “I was one of their teachers at Columbine.”

“Well, sir, this viewing is only for—”

My wife was one of their victims,” I said.

“Sir, there were thirteen victims: twelve students and a male teacher.”

I nodded. “Dave and I used to eat lunch together in the faculty room. My wife is one of their collateral victims.”

“But like I’ve told you, this screening is strictly for—”

She can’t sleep. Can’t concentrate. Can’t work.”

Sir, I’m sorry, but I have my orders.”

“The investigation you guys did? Where you had everyone go back in the library and get into their same positions? Man, that request did her in. The thought of having to see the bloodstains, the dead kids’ names on cards.”

“She was in the vicinity of the library then?”

I nodded.

“Sir, these tapes are very disturbing.”

“She’s lost,” I said. “I’m lost.”

We stared at each other for the next several seconds, neither of us looking away. Then she took a step back and swung the door open wide. There was one seat left, at the end of the second to last row, against the wall. “Morgan McKinley,
Chicago Sun-Times,”
the guy next to me said. I looked at the hand he was extending, then shook it. “Yup,” I said. “Good. Great.”

“Where you here from?” he asked. To my relief, the officer up front stopped talking, and the room went dark before I could answer him.

The tapes resurrect them. In the first one, they talk about what they’ll do “next month,” so it’s March. Lolly’s alive, the blood still flowing to her brain. Maureen’s mentally healthy—in charge of herself and the kids in her care. It’s late at night, long after Eric’s parents have gone to sleep upstairs. Looking into the lens of a camera they’ve borrowed from school, they address the cops, their parents, the classmates they hate, the rest of us. Their shotguns are in their laps. They swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and reveal their plans and preparations, their philosophies. They’re “evolved,” they tell us. “Above human.” Theirs is a two-man war against everyone. They sound so fucked-up full of themselves, so pathetically juvenile, that it’s hard to believe they’ll cause this much pain. “We need to kick-start the revolution here,” Eric says. “We need to get a chain reaction going.” He stands and opens his trench coat, the better to display his gear. “What you will find on my body in April,” he says.

“You’re fucking going to pay for this shit,” Dylan warns us. “We don’t give a shit because we’re going to die doing it.”

They knew we’d be watching these tapes after they’d killed the others, then themselves. Their suicides had been a part of the plan. They laugh, imagining themselves as “ghosts” who will trigger flashbacks in the survivors’ brains. Make them go insane.

That was when it hit me, with the full-force pain of a kick to the
groin. They had foreseen Maureen’s struggle. Orchestrated it. I’d gone looking for the monster and found it in the darkened room of a municipal building, on a television monitor hooked to a videocassette player inside which tape spooled from left to right. My heart pumped wildly, and the fight-or-flight adrenaline surge I’d felt that morning out at Paul Hay’s house was with me again. But there was no pipe wrench in my hand this time, and it was futile to fight videotaped ghosts. I did the only other thing I could do. I fled. Jumped from my chair, pushed past the people standing in back, banged open the door, and ran, stumbling, down the well-lit hallway. And when a men’s room door presented itself, I shoved it open, whacked open a stall door, and emptied my gut into a toilet.

On the direct flight back to Connecticut, the seat next to me was empty. I decided I wouldn’t tell her—could never tell her—that I’d seen those tapes.

ON THAT MILLENNIAL NIGHT WHEN
Maureen came downstairs to stroke my face and quiet my sobs, she had promised me she would get better. And she had, too. Little by little, small gain by small gain. At least it seemed so.

She started getting dressed in the morning. Started walking the dogs after breakfast. And because the exercise energized her, she began eating more. “Caelum, come here,” she said one morning, and I followed her voice into the bathroom. She was standing on the scale, smiling shyly. “Ninety-seven? That’s great, Mo!” I put my arms around her and pulled her close.

“Ow, ow,” she said. “You’re hurting my back.”

She began taking vitamins, taking the car for short runs to the grocery store. She went to the little IGA on Orchard Street, not the Super Big Y, where, she said, the lights were too bright, the array too overwhelming. When her bald patches grew in, the stylist talked her into having the rest of her hair cut off to match that inch or so of new
growth. “Looks cute,” I told her. And it did, too, in a boyish, Peter Pan kind of way. Despite her weight gain, she still wasn’t menstruating, far as I knew. Sex? We didn’t go there. I was pretty sure she didn’t want to be touched, and my desire to touch her had waned, anyway. I got that need taken care of in another lost corridor of the Internet.

It took us a year, year and a half, to work our way down the list of psych referrals Dr. Cid had given us before we left Colorado. Dr. Burrage just plain didn’t get it, she said. Dr. Darrow’s flat affect unnerved her. The drive down I—95 to Dr. Kersh’s office was too nerve-racking. “But you’re not driving,” I said. “I’m driving.”

“Zigzagging in and out of lanes, passing every single truck you see. By the time I get to his office, I’m a nervous wreck, and then I’ve got to sit there for fifty minutes and look at that lazy eye of his. Therapy’s supposed to make you feel better, not worse.”

Dr. Bain gave her homework: a ten-page form that she kept sighing and crying over as she filled it out. I saw the form poking out of her purse the morning of her appointment. She was upstairs; the shower was running. I guess I shouldn’t have, not without asking her, but I pulled it out and read it. The symptom checklist got to me: her suffering, spelled out in all those X’s and O’s. Her answers on the bio contained some surprises. She’d told me her first husband had sometimes been “a bully,” but I didn’t know he’d hit her. And the high school stuff: she’d run away with a boyfriend? Shoplifted? I noted that she’d left “sexual abuse” unchecked—had given her father another free pass.

But Bain must have been on to something regarding “Daddy,” because after their fourth session, Mo said she wasn’t going back. “Because he’s fixated on my parents,” she said, when I asked her why not. “My mother’s dead and Daddy’s basically out of my life. What’s the point?”

“Well, I think—”

“I was
there
that day. I heard those kids being murdered.
That’s
the point. Not what my parents did or didn’t do.”

“But maybe there’s some connection between your reactions to what happened that day and your reaction to what your father did when—”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “My father never touched me!”

Dr. Bromley’s office had an odor that made her feel nauseous. Dr. Adamcewicz was condescending. And if stupid, frog-eyed Dr. Mancuso thought he was going to put her in a trance and guide her back to that library, he could go to hell.

I pointed out that we’d reached the end of Dr. Cid’s referral list.

“Good!” she said. “Great! Then I’m done with shrinks!” Her brain wasn’t the problem, anyway, she told me; her body was. If she could just be free of the pain in her back and knees, the pressure she felt at the top of her head, she could sleep through the night. Have a life again. Go back to
work.

Her bringing in a paycheck would have helped, I had to admit. The month we moved back, JFK, my old high school, had been advertising for an English teacher. I’d applied for the position but hadn’t even gotten an interview. Nineteen years of service? Yeah, so what? A few months later, Kristen Murphy—my former
student
teacher, for Christ’s sake—was getting ready to go on maternity leave. I asked to be considered for the long-term sub’s job but wasn’t. That’s when the lightbulb finally came on. I’d done my penance and gotten that assault charge expunged from my record, but it had never been expunged from the superintendent’s memory. They were done with me.

What I did was stitch together an income. I took an adjunct teaching job at Oceanside Community College: two back-to-back evening courses. Basic English, thirty-five hundred bucks per, no health insurance. Steve Grabarek gave me ten or twelve hours a week at his sawmill. I pinch-hit weekends for Alphonse’s nighttime baker. So I was doing a little of everything, but what I
wasn’t
doing was making enough to meet our monthly expenses and pay her doctor bills. Once the probate stuff was settled, we’d be able to get at the money in Lolly’s bank account and pay down our Visa bill. Until then, I had to
keep dipping into our house sale money. It was hard not to pressure her, you know? She was an RN, and places needed nurses. But she couldn’t handle a job yet. We both knew that.

She saw an osteopath, two neurologists, a chiropractor, and three GPs about her chronic pain. Well, five GPs, but at the time I only knew about three. Dr. MacKinnon suspected it might be Lyme disease, but the test came back negative. Dr. Mosher ordered a bunch of tests, reviewed the results, and concluded that Mo’s pain was psychosomatic. She dismissed him as a quack. Dr. Russo ordered retests of some of the ones she’d already had, plus a CAT scan and an MRI. When all the data was in, the three of us sat down for a powwow. “Mrs. Quirk, I imagine it must have been a terribly tight squeeze inside that cabinet,” Russo said. “How long did you say you were hiding in there? Four hours? In the fetal position, right?”