Music for Wartime (16 page)

The briefcase he used was not the black one shown in phone footage. The black case belonged to Marion Cates, deceased, and contained two egg salad sandwiches. That the black case appeared so persistently on the news and on social media, despite being of no interest to investigators, delayed the apprehension of the bomber by as much as two days.

We’re told that in third grade, his English was lacking. We’re told that he refused to smile for class pictures, but he was a happy child, he
was
. We are told he loved painting. We’re told that Miss Mullens is too overwhelmed at this time to answer more questions.

He was on the FBI’s radar, and then he was not. He was someone’s son, and then he was not. He had a girlfriend, and then he did not. He had a beard, and then he did not. His sister understood him, and then she did not.

There is no question that he acted alone.

He suffered from plantar fasciitis, cluster headaches, a borderline attention disorder, and repeated sinus infections. His heart was broken five distinct times. This much is clear from the autopsy.

He studied botany, specifically the sticky and miraculous unfurling of single grains of pollen into long strings that drilled down the length of the pistil and into the ovary. His graduate work addressed the lipids involved in this reaction. His research was nearly complete.

His finances were in order. He paid bills the day before the bombing, which leads us to wonder if he thought he’d get away with it, go home and need electricity, water, credit cards; or if some ingrained societal obedience overrode all he knew of the future.

His one indulgence was scarves. He spent more income, proportionally, on scarves than on entertainment. In eleven of the sixteen photographs available to the public, he wears a silk scarf of one pale color or another, tucked expertly into the collar of his leather jacket. Affected, perhaps, but not for a European, which he was, after all, even if he was also American, even if he was also a thousand other things, not the least of which was vain.

We agree, collectively, that the amount of time we have devoted to studying his skull shape, lineage, caffeine intake, and psychiatric history is neither helpful nor tasteful.

On his bookshelf: Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Updike, Conrad, Nabokov, Murakami, Dickens, Proust, Mann. Much is made of the depth and diversity of his reading, but then much is also made of the absence of women from the shelves. The Stanford professor who has arranged access to the bomber’s copious marginal notes plans, separate from his assistance in interpreting these notes for the interested government agencies, to release his own analysis of the man’s literary thinking. How long he will have to wait for clearance is, naturally, the issue.

When the bomber was eleven, he took a Hershey’s bar from the pharmacy shelf and snuck it into the public restroom, where he consumed it in three bites. Terrified of the incriminating wrapper, he folded it in half, fourths, eighths, sixteenths, but decided against the toilet, which might clog. He put the wrapper in his mouth and chewed it like gum, and when it was soft enough, he swallowed. Much is still uncertain, but on this one fact we are clear.

According to his mother, he was framed. According to his mother, the laws of the universe are incompatible with her son, her son, her son doing this. We wonder, collectively, why it’s so important to us that she understand what we understand—that yes, he did this, that he bought the ticket, that he wrote that letter, that the basement was full of chemicals—despite our wish to spare her. Wouldn’t it be better if she thinks it’s the rest of us who’ve gone mad? We ask if she hasn’t been through enough. But we need her to understand.