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Authors: John Philpin
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asked.
“Inside. He didn’t exactly
grab
her, Doc. They walked out together. What fuckin’ difference does that make?”
“He established face validity,” I said. “He was believable, seemed trustworthy, a nice guy.”
“Nice guys don’t do this shit, Doc”
The knee-jerk reaction had been to call these murders random, senseless, motiveless. They weren’t. In our revulsion, our need to assign a label, and an equally strong need to distance ourselves from these killers, we hastened to dismiss them as sick, demented, insane. They weren’t. Many of them were “nice guys.”
What I eventually concluded offended everyone’s sensibilities. It arrived one day in a blinding flash from Walt Kelly’s
Pogo:
“they” were “us.”
When I was young, in addition to a taste for the comics, I learned many things from my father. It is difficult to gain enlightenment from someone who is inebriated most of the time, but when he spoke in that thick brogue of his, I listened. He was uneducated, at least formally, but intelligent—a working-class drunk who imbibed philosophy when he wasn’t sucking down Seagram’s Seven in his tea.
He was … an unusual man. I wanted to know him, and I wanted him to know me. I remember wandering into his room one morning. He was reading, so I sat at the foot of his bed.
“Did you know that William Blake saw God?” he asked.
His voice had a raspy quality. It always did. Like someone shaking off the morning’s alcoholic rust and trying to jump-start the day.
I shook my head.
“When he was a wee lad, about your age, he saw God looking at him. Blake wasn’t crazy. He knew that the things we touch and smell and hear can matter only when they lead us back into our minds to what we can imagine. He knew that we must have evil. How else would we measure good? If we have heaven, we must have hell. He trusted his own mind, lad. He didn’t wait for the priests and teachers to catch up. It’s a heavy burden to bear, this trusting of your own mind.”
“If I saw God,” I said, “I might believe in Him.”
“Aye, but ye’d probably be wrong. Maybe Blake did see the old guy. Maybe he didn’t. But he definitely
felt
God inside his mind.”
He coughed, lighted a Pall Mall, then added, “That never happened to me, but I remain open to the possibility.”
Now, my father’s words echoed in my head:
He trusted his own mind, lad.
That’s what I had always tried to do, and it’s what I had to do now. My mind would lead me to a killer, if I allowed it to.
After the pilot’s announcement about our arrival time and the weather in D.C, Lane flipped open her laptop computer.
“You kids can’t go anywhere without those things,” I said, trying to focus my attention on a volume of poetry by Christina Rossetti.
“Do you think you’re ever going to join the twentieth century, Pop?”
“Doubtful. I’m in the nineteenth right now.”
I watched as she popped disks in and out, tapped commands, read whatever it was that the screen had to tell her.
“When did you ever work for the DEA?” she asked.
“Never did.”
“When I get all of these characteristics in here and run the search, it says GOTO:DEA . But when I type DEA, nothing happens.”
“Give Ginger a call when we get to D.C.,” I suggested. “I don’t know anything about it. We don’t have those things here in the nineteenth century.”
“Used properly, it saves time. Think of it as a tool.”
“Technology is a drug. If we allow ourselves to become dependent on it, we’re going to forget how to use our own powers of reasoning. People don’t read enough anymore. They have ‘multimedia experiences.’ Sounds vaguely obscene, if you ask me. I’ll take
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
any day.”
Lane laughed as she slipped the small computer back into its case.
It was time to include my daughter in my thinking,so I started with the day of the shooting. “I saw him. He was dressed in black, dark glasses, maybe six feet
“Inside. He didn’t exactly
grab
her, Doc. They walked out together. What fuckin’ difference does that make?”
“He established face validity,” I said. “He was believable, seemed trustworthy, a nice guy.”
“Nice guys don’t do this shit, Doc”
The knee-jerk reaction had been to call these murders random, senseless, motiveless. They weren’t. In our revulsion, our need to assign a label, and an equally strong need to distance ourselves from these killers, we hastened to dismiss them as sick, demented, insane. They weren’t. Many of them were “nice guys.”
What I eventually concluded offended everyone’s sensibilities. It arrived one day in a blinding flash from Walt Kelly’s
Pogo:
“they” were “us.”
When I was young, in addition to a taste for the comics, I learned many things from my father. It is difficult to gain enlightenment from someone who is inebriated most of the time, but when he spoke in that thick brogue of his, I listened. He was uneducated, at least formally, but intelligent—a working-class drunk who imbibed philosophy when he wasn’t sucking down Seagram’s Seven in his tea.
He was … an unusual man. I wanted to know him, and I wanted him to know me. I remember wandering into his room one morning. He was reading, so I sat at the foot of his bed.
“Did you know that William Blake saw God?” he asked.
His voice had a raspy quality. It always did. Like someone shaking off the morning’s alcoholic rust and trying to jump-start the day.
I shook my head.
“When he was a wee lad, about your age, he saw God looking at him. Blake wasn’t crazy. He knew that the things we touch and smell and hear can matter only when they lead us back into our minds to what we can imagine. He knew that we must have evil. How else would we measure good? If we have heaven, we must have hell. He trusted his own mind, lad. He didn’t wait for the priests and teachers to catch up. It’s a heavy burden to bear, this trusting of your own mind.”
“If I saw God,” I said, “I might believe in Him.”
“Aye, but ye’d probably be wrong. Maybe Blake did see the old guy. Maybe he didn’t. But he definitely
felt
God inside his mind.”
He coughed, lighted a Pall Mall, then added, “That never happened to me, but I remain open to the possibility.”
Now, my father’s words echoed in my head:
He trusted his own mind, lad.
That’s what I had always tried to do, and it’s what I had to do now. My mind would lead me to a killer, if I allowed it to.
After the pilot’s announcement about our arrival time and the weather in D.C, Lane flipped open her laptop computer.
“You kids can’t go anywhere without those things,” I said, trying to focus my attention on a volume of poetry by Christina Rossetti.
“Do you think you’re ever going to join the twentieth century, Pop?”
“Doubtful. I’m in the nineteenth right now.”
I watched as she popped disks in and out, tapped commands, read whatever it was that the screen had to tell her.
“When did you ever work for the DEA?” she asked.
“Never did.”
“When I get all of these characteristics in here and run the search, it says GOTO:DEA . But when I type DEA, nothing happens.”
“Give Ginger a call when we get to D.C.,” I suggested. “I don’t know anything about it. We don’t have those things here in the nineteenth century.”
“Used properly, it saves time. Think of it as a tool.”
“Technology is a drug. If we allow ourselves to become dependent on it, we’re going to forget how to use our own powers of reasoning. People don’t read enough anymore. They have ‘multimedia experiences.’ Sounds vaguely obscene, if you ask me. I’ll take
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
any day.”
Lane laughed as she slipped the small computer back into its case.
It was time to include my daughter in my thinking,so I started with the day of the shooting. “I saw him. He was dressed in black, dark glasses, maybe six feet
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