Two nights before I came here, I was in bed with my girlfriend, Janna. After law school, I came out as gay. It was as though leaving the law—jettisoning the life I’d planned—forced me to accept the rest of who I was. For years I’d been afraid that if I came out, and anyone learned I’d been abused as a child, they would think that that was why I was gay. As if that had turned me gay. In my heart I knew that wasn’t it. The first time I slept with a woman, my chest opened up. I hadn’t known until that moment how closed it was. I’m gay because I love women, it’s as simple as that. But for so long the possibility that anyone might even think otherwise kept me hidden.
Janna and I are opposites. I have my mother’s narrow shoulders and broad hips, the olive skin and dark curly hair of my grandfather. Janna is broad-shouldered and muscled, her hips as narrow as a boy’s and her blond hair as short, her Germanic skin so pale it’s almost translucent. When I came out as gay, my eating disorder faded, as though my body had been waiting for me to accept who I am. Now I cook elaborate meals. Janna would live on protein bars and caffeinated gum if she could, whatever she can fit in a hiking backpack or on the back of a bike. Maybe our differences come down to that I am a writer and she is a scientist. But often the superficial differences seem to reflect something larger: the way we experience time. For me, always layered. For her, the moment. We haven’t been together long—only a little more than half a year—but part of what we give each other is the chance to see differently.
That night we were lying on my bed kissing. My studio apartment in Cambridge is tiny, chosen because it’s an affordable way to live within walking distance of Harvard, where I now teach writing. Stacks of books are everywhere—and at the room’s center, there is the bed. We were lying on top of it, not quite gone to bed together but not quite denying what we were doing, either. I turned onto my elbows so I was above her and I leaned down and kissed her. I love kissing her. My whole body seems to dissolve into sensation, nothing of the past about it, only that moment and her mouth and my tongue. We kissed and we kissed, and soon my hands were at her shirt and I was tugging it off. She slid her hands up my back and fumbled with my bra’s clasp. I yanked hard to pull the elastic band of hers over her head. Then I let my body fall forward into hers, closing my eyes to concentrate on the feeling of her skin meeting mine. I kissed her again and her tongue found my mouth. I reached down between her legs. She reached down to touch me and then we were moving together and it felt good and I moaned and it felt good again.
And then it didn’t.
When this happens I know it only the way you realize that the water has suddenly gotten too hot in the shower, has crossed over some invisible threshold and is now burning. Though it would be smarter to just hop out of the shower entirely—damn the bathroom rug, so it gets wet, who cares?—you stand under the spray that is now scalding you and you grope and fumble for the shower knob.
“Oh, fuck,” I said when I realized I was going under, into the memory. All I could say, before panic overwhelmed. “Oh, fuck.”
My breath quickened. I gulped air. I fumbled for something to hold on to. She was there and so it was her, but in that moment I was so gone I only wanted something solid. “Hold me,” I gasped, and I felt her arms go taut around me. I gripped her arms. I clung.
Where does the mind go in these moments, while the body trembles? For me it is a white-hot slipstream blank-out, the nothingness of no time and nowhere and no one. It used to be a feeling, a single concentrated excruciating feeling: the smooth hot texture of my grandfather’s penis against my hand, for example, or the specific purple-pink color his penis had, a color that still makes me uncomfortable no matter where I see it, though the discomfort is vague now, the signal no longer traced back to its origin, with only the effect felt. But as the years have blotted the origin out (I am grateful), they have blotted the sensations, too, as though the film reel of the memory has been played so many times it has gone torn and blotched. Now I have only to ride the panicked blankness. “Oh, fuck,” I say when the wave of sensation starts to break over me, inside me, and then I breathe to keep up with the panicked race swell of my body, the heartbeat and the breath. The wave builds and builds, it crests and breaks.
(It sounds as though I am describing something else, doesn’t it? But this isn’t an orgasm. It is terror.)
When it breaks, I cry. The wave flows out of me. My breath slows, and I can feel the tears on my cheeks, hot, though I am not aware of them leaving me or even of any feeling of sadness. I am a sack into which the wave has broken, and now it must come leaking out of me. I have been a vessel; I am now only a throughway. Who I am outside this feeling becomes as irrelevant as time.
*
I meant to book a motel room a comfortable distance from Iowa. I intended to stay in Lake Charles, where, yes, the trial had happened, but where none of the sensitive events of the murder had. I had in mind that I would sleep somewhere safe and distant and would dip my toe into the past each day as comfortably as testing bathwater from the solid stance of a tiled floor. I did not book the cheapest room. I read reviews. I studied addresses. I wanted something clean and safe, a refuge I could grant myself at the start and end of each day.
I flew into Baton Rouge, not New Orleans, intent on giving myself the shortest trip possible. Two hours from the airport, I had only a third of a mile left to drive, my phone’s navigation told me, when I noticed the CASH MAGIC sign ahead. There it was, high in the ashen sky. My breath raced. My chest grew cold.
I drove past the sign as if in a dream. I’d looked at the motel’s address. How had I made this mistake? Wanting to book away from the murder, how had I instead booked into its heart? There on my right was the counter where Pearl had worked, the pumps Lanelle had turned on for the drivers, and the window through which she had watched Ricky one long day and wondered whether he was the kind of strange that could kill a child. There on my right was the asphalt that had been laid down where crushed shell used to be.
My motel was one block away and across the street. From its entrance I could still see the green CASH MAGIC sign. At the front desk I gave the clerk my name, I must have, and my credit card and I made the kind of small talk one makes and then I took my room key and went to my room. I fell onto the bed. I fell into thirteen hours of blank dark memory-sleep.
I am pulled to this story by absences. Strange blacknesses, strange forgettings, that overtake me at times. They reveal what is still unresolved inside me. They plunge me toward what I most want to avoid.
Ricky brought me to this story. He’s the one I keep thinking about and chasing after, trying to understand. But being here, and what happened the other night in bed with Janna in Massachusetts, makes me realize I have to start with Jeremy. He’s who carried Ricky’s crime in his body.