The Good Father (26 page)

Subject was asked by this evaluator if he had ever thought about killing himself or attempted suicide. Subjected stated that for a time in Montana during the winter of 20__ he had “lost the will to live.” He stated that it was his “low point,” and he had thought about killing himself at least twice but never made a serious attempt. When asked what pulled him out of these feelings, he stated, “I’m not sure. There was a lot of darkness around me. Some days it seemed like I never saw the sun. And the cold, well, if you’re not prepared for it, it can really get you down.” When asked why he didn’t just leave the area and drive south, subject paused, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I felt like I couldn’t leave until it was time.”

When asked what he meant by that, subject stated, “I felt like what I was going through was part of the journey. That clearly I was meant to go through this … sadness. That if I could just hold on it would help me somehow, I don’t know,
figure out what I had to do
[emphasis added].”

At this time the evaluator asked if subject felt he’d figured out what he had to do. Subject nodded and stated, “Obviously.” When asked what the words “had to do” meant to him, and why he used them instead of
“wanted to do,” subject stated that he believed that the things that happen in life are “meant to happen.” He continued that though his journey may have seemed random, “looking back I can see that it was all adding up to what happened. What I did.”

The evaluator asked whether this meant subject felt that these things had happened
to
him, as opposed to being choices he’d made. Subject stated, “No. I think I made the choice, but it was also fate. Does that make sense? Like it was my choice, but there were no other good options.”

When asked whether he believed it was acceptable human behavior to kill someone, subject stated, “We’re not all put on this Earth to do what’s right. In order for there to be good, there has to be bad, and that bad has to come from somewhere. I’ve been thinking lately about Judas, about how he betrayed Christ, and Christ forgave him. But it’s interesting, because both Jesus and Judas had to do what they did. You could argue that there would be no Jesus without Judas. Without darkness there’s no light, right? This is what I think about when people say God has a plan. Maybe what I did will motivate other people to do good. Maybe what I did was give them a push. Or maybe I’m just trying to rationalize it. But I wonder sometimes. You know, Hitler was a monster, but by being a monster he gave the world the opportunity to do enormous good. Good they might not have done otherwise. There’d be no Israel without Hitler, right? Not that I’m Hitler. But, I don’t know, I do wish it hadn’t happened. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

When asked why he thought he had killed Senator Seagram, subject paused for more than a minute. He said, “When Charles Whitman killed all those people in Texas, they found out he had a brain tumor in his head. You kind of feel sorry for him, knowing that. Knowing that he didn’t want to kill those people. It was the tumor forcing him to do it. But then you think maybe that’s just a cop-out. Maybe the tumor had nothing to do with what happened. Maybe it was a coincidence. I could tell you a lot of things about how my daddy didn’t love me or how some girl broke my heart, but the truth is, I have no idea why I did it. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

¹
Though it is interesting to note the reference to former president Jimmy Carter (whom John Hinckley is known to have stalked, before he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan). Also, the last name “Cash” could be seen as a reference to country music singer Johnny Cash, who was known throughout his career as “the Man in Black” and was viewed by many to be a rebel or an outsider. It is also possible that the name “Cash” is a reference to money, and that the combination of the word for money with the name of an American president in the name of a political assassin could be a statement of cynicism about the American political process.

He went to the library every day for three weeks, wandering the stacks, waiting in computer lines behind the fetid homeless. He liked the way the spines of books felt when he ran his hands along the shelves, the rounded ridges, like spokes on a bicycle. There was a pleasure in finding an unused chair in a hidden corner, the feeling of a small animal nestling peacefully into its burrow. He was a nineteen-year-old man-child who had dropped out of Vassar. A kid who had surrendered his education to the road. Now, in the Hill Country of Texas, he was designing his own curriculum, an independent study of young men and their guns. Whitman, Oswald, Hinckley. He would work for Senator Seagram in the morning, handing out flyers on Guadalupe or registering voters on MLK, then walk down to the main library, passing the chain stores on the campus drag. The girl was part of it, his attraction to the place. Natalie, the librarian. She of the nose freckles and pouty lips. On September 14, he finally worked up the courage to talk to her. At three fifteen he approached the main desk and asked her for directions to the bathroom. He knew, of course, where the bathroom was, but when he’d stopped before the information desk, when he’d seen her long brown hair and slanted eyebrows, this was all he could think to say. She was wearing the blue dress that day, the one that gave her eyes that glacial shimmer. Natalie smiled and pointed. Daniel mumbled a thank-you and followed her finger, though he did not have to go. In the bathroom he splashed water on his face. Every day he spent in the West felt like a step away from himself.

He bought a notebook, started writing things down: notes, observations, theories. He had never felt that his thoughts were worth writing down before. They had seemed so ordinary. Rudimentary. The predictable, pedestrian ruminations of a typical American teenager. But now he felt inspired. There was something important floating around in his mind, something just outside his reach. Each word he wrote was like a shovelful of dirt taken off the top of a buried treasure. He uncovered many things under that dark earth, connections, theorems, a slowly revealed map of the world. One of the things he discovered in the midnight loam was a name. It came to him one day, an amalgam of his own and someone else’s.
Carter Allen Cash
. He stared at it, those three words, the heavy crescent of each “C.” He liked the way the first letter of the first two names were the same as the first two letters of the last.
C
arter
A
llen
CA
sh. But whose name was it? Was this someone he was going to meet? Someone he should look for? And then one day it occurred to him. It was his own name. The name he was supposed to have.

He gave the girl this name when he finally worked up the courage to talk to her again. Natalie. She of the white pants and blue tank top. The frat boys at the house talked about how wearing white pants meant a girl liked it in the ass, but Daniel couldn’t imagine this girl enjoying anything so coarse. The truth was, if he thought about it too much, he felt light-headed. He could hardly even believe she had a hole back there. He pictured Natalie like a Barbie doll—smooth, tan, devoid of animal orifices, just a tiny ridge running between her legs where the plastic molding had been set.

She was reshelving books when he approached her the second time. This time Daniel had written down what he wanted to say, sketched it out on the back of the notebook he held in his hands. She was wearing sandals today. He noticed her toes were perfectly tan, and, where most people’s were of different length, hers were all the same, as if each one of her toes had been forged from the same mold.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where do you keep the Russians?”

That wasn’t right. He glanced at the notebook. He had forgotten a word.

“Novelists,” he said. “The Russian novelists.”

He had noticed that Natalie liked to eat her lunch among the foreign
classics—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn. She seemed to gravitate to these shelves several times a day, touching the spines of each book, as if for luck.

She smiled at him, and again it made his tongue feel watery.

“Are you looking for someone in particular?” she asked.

“Dostoyevsky,” he said. “
Notes from the Underground
. Oh, and, uh, Gogol.”

He could see she was—not impressed but intrigued. He was a good-looking boy, with an open face and a body hardened by months working outdoors. He was also the progeny of East Coast intellectualism and West Coast freethinking. A catch, in other words.

“Is this for a class?” she said.

“No,” he told her. “Just for me.”

She chewed her lip for a moment. It was one of those gestures that may have started as unconscious but had become something she did, an advertisement.

“Follow me,” she said, and led him through the stacks. His chest felt tight, and he couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands. His fingers kept curling into fists. The way she moved in those white pants was nothing short of a miracle. At night, when there wasn’t a game to watch, the frat boys would put on porn. They kept a library in the bathroom, the boxes stacked chest high. Someone said the collection had been around since the eighties, with each successive generation adding a few classics. The titles lined the walls, so that when you were sitting on the bowl you could read the names—
Beaver Tales, Breast Man, Asspounders XII
. As Daniel lay on his bed in his room and read his library books, the sound of women being violated clawed through the walls.

White pants
, he thought now.
White pants
. Why did they have to tell him that? Now it was all he could think about—this beautiful, innocent girl and the frat boys who wanted to sodomize her.

“
Notes from the Underground
,” she said, stopping in front of a set of worn hardcovers. She pulled a book off the shelves and handed it to him. “Gogol is in the next aisle.”

He could see her excitement to share these books with him. It was a pleasure she took in her job—to help others discover the words that mattered so much to her.

He looked at the cover, a bearded young man, formally dressed but
disheveled, an unbalanced look in his eye. It was the kind of book he normally shied away from, one that felt old, outdated, irrelevant. He could feel her looking at him expectantly. He didn’t know what to say next, so he flipped to a random page and found himself reading aloud.

“ ‘I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way. I tried hard to be in love. I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you. In the depth of my heart there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery.’ ”

“It’s one of the earliest
psychological
novels,” she told him. “One of the first books that tried to look at what people think, not just what they do.”

He slid the book on top of his notebook to indicate he would take it.

“I could use help with that,” he said. “Understanding why people do what they do.”

“And by people you mean ‘girls,’ right?” she said with a little laugh.

He knew he should laugh, but the weight of the moment kept him quiet, its import to his future. Instead he said, “Does Gogol do that also? People’s minds?”

“No,” she says. “He was more of a satirist.”

“How do you know so much about this stuff?” he asked.

“I’m a literature major,” she told him. “I like the Russians best. Their passion.”

He thought about saying something clever, something the frat boys might say, like
I bet you do
, or
Well, if you like passion
 … but it didn’t feel real. It felt like a movie thing to say. So many moments in life felt this way, and he wondered when the world had stopped being a real place and had started being an opportunity for rehashing movie moments—the
meet cute
, the
race against time
, the
big confrontation
. It had gotten so you felt driven to satisfy the conceits of the moment as imagined by screenwriters, instead of saying what you really meant. He was sure the Russians of Dostoyevsky didn’t live like this, nor did Brits in the age of Dickens. When had it started? The fifties maybe. Everyone trying to be Humphrey Bogart or Gary Cooper. Real people aspiring to be fake.

Six days earlier he had walked into a gun shop on South Congress. There was a buzzing in his fingertips, a kinetic thrum. A tiny silver bell rang as he entered, the harsh sunlight behind him turning the store into a dark cave. The chime of the bell triggered something in him, an anticipation, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust, to identify the shapes
hanging on the walls as what they were: rifles and shotguns. There was a bearded man and a middle-aged woman behind the counter. Faded paper targets hung on the wall behind them. The bearded man had a submarine sandwich on the glass counter in front of him, wrapping paper splayed out in a star pattern, crumbs falling across the glass display. The woman watched a melodrama on a small black-and-white TV.

The floor was linoleum. The walls were a faded wood veneer. He had grown up in coastal cities where guns were taboo. What struck him most about the shop now was how ordinary it felt, how pedestrian, as if buying a gun were like buying chains for your tires or spackle for your walls. There wasn’t even the artificial embellishment that surrounds buying a new television—the myriad displays blaring hallucinogenic action sequences from summer blockbusters.
Get excited!
Standing there, he realized that there are places in this country where a gun is just another tool, like a rake or a shovel, a few ounces of oil and metal—dangerous, certainly, but so is a chain saw. So is the lye you buy to clean your drain—with none of the mythos assigned to guns at cocktail parties on the Upper West Side or celebrity fund-raisers in Beverly Hills. This was where he stood now, inside a nine-hundred-square-foot yawn, searching for a tool he wasn’t sure he needed, in order to carry out a job he had yet to define.