It’s summertime still, and I’m in a nice park reading an old book.
The park is Dupont Circle. Even among circles, it has a really gorgeous radial symmetry to it. The water brims up into a great marble basin and pours down in sheets. It falls past the Sea and the Stars and the Wind. Most of it falls into a greater marble basin, but some of it is taken up by the Wind. He walks it out, first as a spray and then as a mist, casting it over a shifting sector across concentric rings. Stones. Benches. Lawn. Stone. Benches. Lawn. The water goes out of the park, over the road, into the neighborhood — lets itself wash into the Sea, feels itself burned up by the Stars. I’m sitting on that outer ring of almost continuous bench, at the easternmost point of the thousand-foot loop, straight downwind from the fountain and its cool mist.
The book is the Odyssey. It’s the twenty-second volume of the fifty-volume Harvard Classics. I pulled the full set out of a warm home in Northern Virginia. Each book smells like tobacco generally and Marlboro Lights specifically — the democratization of education. The man who sold them to me told me his father read through the whole set once in the sixties and again in the eighties. The copy in my hands is a 1959 printing of a 1909 edition of an 1879 prose translation by S. H. Butcher and A. Lang. Bound in green leather. Embossed with gilt letters. I’m at the start of Book XXII, and things are getting good.
***
I’m increasingly convinced that the greatest motivator of reactionary politics is not storytelling but joketelling. A significant number of people really think they should be able to joke about whatever they want. What these people don’t realize is that you can joke about whatever you want. But there are — and have always been — rules about telling good jokes and consequences for telling bad jokes. These people think that they should be able to transgress without consequence. For this reason alone, they do not deserve to feel the heady buzz of rulebreaking.
One of the underlying rules is that you shouldn’t joke too hard about things that don’t belong to you. People innately understand this rule. My brother and I can joke about our mother, but as soon as you try to get one in, it’s a problem. This rule applies to all of joketelling and most of storytelling.
All this is to say that I’m about to pursue the heady buzz of storytelling. If you want to pursue the heady buzz of jokehearing, that’s on you.
***
You shouldn’t joke too hard about things that don’t belong to you, and this put school shootings in an odd spot for us. There was no doubt that the school shootings belonged to us.
Even before we knew about Columbine, we could feel that Columbine knew about us. We could feel it radiating out from a point source, scattering past us. We knew about the distant collisions, the reactions, when some potential went kinetic and became another point source. The only real unknown was the rate of decay. I remember the first lockdown — second grade, doors closed, lights off, out of sight. That was Virginia Tech. I remember the space between Thanksgiving and Christmas, helicopter footage of a flat roof, long lines of little children. All the adults could do was ask that we say nothing of it to our younger brothers and sisters. That was Sandy Hook.
The question was not if school shootings belonged to us, but how. On the one hand, we were the ones vulnerable to getting shot. On the other hand, we were the ones liable to do the shooting. So when you joked about it, you had to joke about it carefully.
Whenever something bad happened — any tragedy of any kind — they would take all of us into the gymnasium or the auditorium for an assembly. I remember having such a sharp awareness of information management. And as we waited to hear that someone had drawn a swastika in the boys’ bathroom or that someone had just been orphaned by a murder-suicide the night before, we would chatter nervously. Isn’t it a little counterproductive that they gather us all in one place for these things? And you did feel exposed like that, stacked up on the bleachers. All sightlines. No exits.
Whenever something bad might be happening — any credible threat — they would lock us down. It was the luck of the draw, you know, what class you were in when the announcement crackled from the wall. When someone found a single round of 9mm parabellum in the basement, I was locked in my physics lab for six hours. And that was alright. Our teacher was a young guy, pretty easygoing. Besides — all lab partners are brothers. I was among a good set of compatriots while the police department searched every locker in the building. When the cops got to our room, they let us into the hallway one by one to search our backpacks. They didn’t bother with the girls. Seems a little sexist to me. And she was right. The cops were playing a numbers game, but trends only tell you about the past.
Sure enough, the person who came closest to shooting up my high school was a girl two grades above me.
***
I’ve been surprised by the women in the Odyssey. It always seemed like I was the only person on earth who made it through high school without reading any Homer — that’s why I’m reading it now — and so I knew the book only by reputation. And by reputation, the book seemed pretty rough in its treatment of women. That isn’t quite what I’ve found. There’s Calypso and Clytemnestra, sure, but there’s also Athena and Arete. I found the section with Anticlea especially moving and the section with Nausicaa positively delightful. Even Circe came around in the—
Some shade falls on the page.
“Excuse me,” he says, “Any chance you could spare some change?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I say. “I left my wallet at home.” And that’s true.
I had noticed him a few minutes ago, dozing in a patch of sunlight with a long beard. It made me think of Whitman.
“You got Venmo don’t you?”I must sort of cock my head to the side. Too late. I see that he sees it.
“What? You think just ‘cause I sleep out here I can’t have a phone?”
“I don’t know, sir,” I say. “But I don’t have my phone on me.” And that’s a lie.
That patch was a long way from this bench. He went past a lot of people to get to me.
***
The police didn’t find any guns when they searched her house — this was suburban Philadelphia, after all — but she nevertheless had a stated interest in becoming “the first female school shooter”.
The story, as I remember it, was that a boy in her class asked to borrow a piece of paper and that she handed him this notebook full of violent musings and that he basically stood up and walked across the room and handed it to the teacher.
The story, as my friends her year remember it, was that she was basically bragging about the notebook — in sort of a meek taunt — and that she got up to get a drink of water or something and that the boy snatched it from her desk and walked across the room and handed it to the teacher.
In either version, the notebook came to the attention of a teacher who then called the administrators who then called the police.
I was later surprised that the clutches floating around the halls that day were faithful — almost verbatim — to what was in the notebook and reprinted in local newspapers.
I am about to get very violent.
I'd want to trap them, pick them off one by one.
Blow up the cafeteria, maybe. Shoot everyone in classrooms.
Imagine the power, the bullets leaving the gun with a loud bang, piercing kids around me, the way they collapse, their blood splattering the floor.
Flood the halls with corpses.
Leave survivors? Or nah? I kinda want to.
I exude danger. You should fear me.
***
I’ve sort of zoned out the last few minutes. I’m less concerned with what he’s saying and more concerned with how he’s moving. The man has stepped away from me, out into the middle of the sidewalk, but his movements are increasingly animated. He’s throwing his arms in the air, driving his fists toward the earth. He glares at me occasionally, his chin tucked to his chest. His voice is raised, but it doesn’t carry far — a staged shout. So long as he keeps that distance, I’ve allowed my mind to drift.
He has the carriage of an affiliated man, but I can’t tell whether he’s a Nation of Islam type or a Black Israelite type. His speech is marked by the peculiar cadence of feigned extemporaneity. Something about gentrification or something. Nothing he’s saying is strictly untrue, but none of it has any real bearing on the issue at hand. Still — I glance around at the other parkgoers — it probably works for him more often than not.
“No different than the Jews!” he points at me.
I try to slot this point into one column or the other, but I’m not quite sure where it goes.
“No better than the Jews!” he corrects himself.
Ah.
But who is visiting me? I’m still not sure. His head is bald and his beard is long and his shoulders are uncovered. Light glints off his arms and chest. I can’t tell if that’s sweat perspiring from his skin or mist condensing to the same. He has no tattoos that I can see. His pants are loose fatigues, tied up with a rope at the sciatic. There’s nothing in his pockets or about his waistband. Is it worse to disrespect an old beggar or to indulge an extortionist? I’m close to finding out.
“No different than the Greeks!” he points at me again. “No different than the Romans!”
Brother, that’s no way to put a white boy down.
The marble basins. The green lawns. Those figures — the Stars and the Wind and the Seas. From long ago, some clutch of Ovid floats up to me.
Nor sun nor air nor water's gentle flow
Are private things by natural design.
The gifts I seek are public property.
I feel my vision of him changing, as if with the heat. His eyes are wild with practice. His forearms do not flex as quickly as they should. His stomach is distended, as if — I think — by worms. This all looks normal to him. He looks bored.
Then comes something like righteousness. This man is not only wasting my time but disturbing the peace. His actions are a breach of some deep contract — an affront to human society and a squandering of its fruits. I would sooner die than pay him for his labors, such as they are.
I feel a violent instinct wash over me like bathwater, flow down to the fingertips that grip the hardcover like a cudgel. I want to put the spine through what teeth he has left. All that green and gilt.
“Sit thou there now, and scare off swine and dogs, and let not such an one as thou be lord over strangers and beggars, pitiful as thou art, lest haply some worse thing befal thee.”
***
The police described her plans as calculated. She wanted to kill a certain teacher, kill her classmates in a certain way, and vaguely injure herself in the process. She had an age cut-off for her intended victims. I always appreciated that detail.
The truth is that I knew the girl fairly well. We sat next to each other in German class — assigned seats, I think — through my freshman year and into my sophomore year . . . or through her junior year and into her senior year . . . or right up until the day she was charged for making terroristic threats and we never saw her again.
And all things considered, she was a pretty nice girl. She was bright, and her German was very good. Her sense of humor was a little awkward, but in a way that was charming or at least disarming. In a foreign language class, you spend a lot of time talking with your classmates. I vaguely remember that she switched from Latin to German to better appreciate her favorite bands — that’s why she was in a class of freshmen. She sometimes didn’t do her homework, but she still did it a lot more than I did. If she saw any of us in the hallways, she would call us by our German names — so I was Hans to her — and I’m not sure she knew all our English names. I think she enjoyed being in a class of people younger than her. My year was known for being much friendlier than the others, and my classmates treated her with a warmth she seemed unused to.
The police said she had “a fascination with serial killers” and did “a lot of reading about torture” and felt “a keen interest in the Columbine shooters”. She had “a history of mental health treatment” and wrote letters to the parents of the Columbine shooters saying she identified with the mass murderers. But all things considered, she was a pretty nice girl.
I don’t remember much of the day she got arrested. It was a Monday — that always felt like a salient detail — and I think it was before lunch and German was after lunch, so we hadn’t seen her yet. I remember some commotion in the hallways, but this might be crossed wires. It must’ve been quite the story from the outside. Helicopter footage of a flat roof. All the adults could do was ask that we say we say nothing of it to the news crews gathered out by the bus loop.
I don’t remember anyone joking about it — we mostly just felt sad for her. Besides, that window was closing quickly. I was out of high school when Parkland happened. That was the first time I was one of the adults, the first time the unalloyed horror really hit me. I was out of college when Uvalde happened. That was the first time in a long time, or so it seemed. I remember spinning around the office while it happened, and it happened for some time. Oh God, I thought, I’d forgotten what these felt like.
That’s how I experienced these stutter-step tragedies. You forget slowly and remember quickly. Sometimes the clicks of the Geiger counter blur into a frantic, solid tone. Out of staccato, vibrato.
Those who are older than me insist that school shootings are a modern thing, that there was a time before them and it was good. I’ve never really believed them. Everything older than you is ancient, and nothing about this feels modern.
***
What happens at the end of the Odyssey? The man comes home at last, kills the suitors with some joy, kisses his wife with some sorrow, and makes nice with the families of the dead. In movements, it’s revelation, retaliation, reunion, and resolution. If you’ve encountered a story from James Joyce or the Coen brothers or anyone in between, you know it well.
It’s a great trick of nominative determinism — or at least nominative suggestion — that reading Homer should involve so many issues of the home and homesickness and homecoming. There are the well-arranged halls and the manners of houseguests and the ethics of hosting. And there’s the whole experience of reading Homer, that feeling of regression into the childhood of the human race, that feeling of looping back to the roost. You find it so familiar as to be alien and so alien as to be familiar. You were looking for all that texture.
What really happens at the end of the Odyssey? A great man is in disguise, hidden in plain sight, laid low by the fell clutch of circumstance. He is tormented by a crowd of lesser men who hold power over him only by their massing. These should be the best of Ithaca, its young elites, its hometown heroes — rich kids and golden boys and jocks.
Our hero slinks among them, collecting a set of injustices unprovoked and otherwise. He is slighted and insulted. They throw food at him and laugh loudly. This sequence is drawn out — in part by the hero himself — as he slowly musters the rage to set his plan in motion. He assembles a small band of outcasts, and together they plot. They case the building, noting the patterns of life and flows of movement. They cache their weapons and bide their time.
Then Odysseus of many counsels stripped him of his rags and leaped on to the great threshold with his bow and quiver full of arrows . . .
Now he, so long as he had arrows to defend him, kept aiming and smote the wooers one by one in his house, and they fell thick one upon another.
Then again Odysseus, the wise and crafty, he and his men cast their swift spears into the press of the wooers . . .
. . . so did the company of Odysseus set upon the wooers and smite them right and left through the hall; and there rose a hideous moaning as their heads were smitten, and the floor all ran with blood.
. . . so now the wooers lay heaped upon each other.
“But go forth from the halls and sit down in the court apart from the slaughter, thou and the full-voiced minstrel, till I have accomplished all that I must needs do in the house.”
Even so he spake, and pale fear gat hold on the limbs of all, and each man looked about, where he might shun utter doom.
They go around the cafeteria and shoot almost everyone. The violence is punctuated by little scenes. Someone begs for mercy, and the shooters grant this, rather self-satisfied. Someone else begs for mercy, and the shooters deny it, again self-satisfied. Still others are marked for special cruelty. There are snippets of dialogue as they single out particular victims, name their grievances, savor some taunts. When they’re done with the boys they line up the girls — the sluts, really — and kill them too. At last, they cleanse the whole place with fire.
***
The man has now drifted into my personal space. I know it. He knows it. The people now glancing over — they know it too. This language is very, very old.
When I get off the bench, I sense his weight shift back. I look him over again. Nothing in his waistband — maybe there’s something in his bag, but that’s far away. His arms are short and faintly trackmarked, and I can see that he bites his nails. He couldn’t even scratch me.
I come up to my full height and step a little too close to the man. I watch my shadow cross his face. I let him feel that I’m forty years younger and forty pounds heavier than him. I let him see that my eyes are wild too.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go.”