“Their lives were ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us were aware of it yet.” Jo Ann Beard recalls the campus shooting at the University of Iowa, in 1991. NewYorkerArchive
Christoph Goertz. He’s hip in a professorial, cardigan/jeans kind of way. He’s tall and lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old, with an elegant trace of accent from his native Germany. He has a great dog, a giant black outlaw named Mica, who runs through the streets of Iowa City at night, inspecting garbage cans. She’s big and friendly but a bad judge of character, and frequently runs right into the arms of the dogcatcher. Chris is always bailing her out.
“You have control over this,” he explains in his professor voice. “You can decide how long she suffers.” “You call him back and I’m forced to kill you,” Caroline says. She exhales smoke and points to the phone. “That is evil shit.” The collie appears at the foot of the stairs with her head cocked and her ears up. For an instant she looks like a puppy, then her feet start to slide. I run down and catch her and carry her upstairs so she can watch the show. The squirrels careen around the room, tearing the ancient wallpaper off the walls. The last one is a baby, so we keep it for a few minutes, looking at its little feet and its little tail. We show it to the collie, who stands up immediately and tries to get it.
They’re speaking in physics, so I’m left out of the conversation. Chris apologetically erases one of the pictures I’ve drawn on the blackboard and replaces it with a curving blue arrow surrounded by radiating chalk waves of green. Bob blows his smoke discreetly in my direction and waits for Chris to finish talking to Gang Lu, who is answering questions in a monotone—yes or no or I don’t know. Another Chinese student, Linhua Shan, lets himself in after knocking lightly. He nods and smiles at me and then stands at a respectful distance, waiting to ask Chris a question.
He stares at each person in turn, trying to gauge how much respect each of them has for him. One by one. Behind black-rimmed glasses, he counts with his eyes. In each case the verdict is clear: not enough. Delicate Chinese characters all over a page. She was a kind and gentle sister, and he thanks her for that. He’s going to kill himself.
Gang Lu walks quickly down the stairs, expelling spent cartridges and loading new ones. From the doorway of Dwight’s office: the fifth bullet in the head, the sixth strays, the seventh also in the head. A slumping. More smoke and ringing. Through the cloud an image comes to him—Bob Smith, hit in the chest, hit in the hand, still alive. Back up the stairs. Two scientists, young men, crouch over Bob, loosening his clothes, talking to him.
“Now they’re trying to stir Bob into the stew,” I tell Mary. She nods; she’s heard this, too. I have the distinct feeling there is something going on that I can either understand or not understand. There’s a choice to be made.We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside my head I keep thinking, Uh-oh, over and over. I’m rattled; I can’t calm down and figure this out.
The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time. He asks Shirley if I’m holding up O.K. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living room.
Julene’s hesitant face. “She wanted to come visit you,” she tells me. I bring the collie in and close the door. We sit by the tub. She lifts her long nose to my face and I take her muzzle and we move through the gears slowly—first second third fourth—all the way through town, until what happened has happened and we know it has happened. We return to the living room. The second wave of calls is starting to come in, from people who just saw the faces on the news. Shirley screens.
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