I know that identifying the culprit should give me some sense of closure, that the lack of a political motive should mute the inner voice that says all could have been avoided if we hadn’t screwed the country with our greed and hubris, then celebrated that screw-up by drinking aged bourbon in the ironic glow of Fitzgerald’s green light. But I do not feel exonerated. Because Broder came to me the night of the party. He came and he wanted to talk. He needed to talk. In my stoned and selfish state, I refused.
I remember Ricky on Halloween, dressed as a pirate in my grandmother’s silks. I remember his hippie phase, the self-sewn patchwork stripes on his cords. His hairy back at the beach. The way he wore tiny watches to emphasize his giant hands. How he rolled such beautiful joints. I remember him in fourth grade, after knocking Steve Wyck to the ground in my defense. He hooked my arm in his and we walked like that—together—back to class.
“I miss Ricky,” I say.
Rachel asks if I’m hungry.
We stop at McDonald’s. Outside the vehicle, a grade-school field trip briefly enfolds us like a flock of flamingos, kids wobbly on stick legs, all wearing the same knee-length pink T-shirt. Rachel says, “Dude, have you ever, like, listened to the lyrics on that album? That guy is super rapey, huh?”
“It’s a persona,” I say, though my heart isn’t in it. I’ve mounted this argument a million times to friends, relatives, and baristas, waving my arms as I exposit on concepts of postmodern posturing, questions of identity and assumption: Em as irony, Em as sincerity in transparency, Em as Internet troll, Em as the freed id of American masculinity, Em as commentary on it all. But, in this moment, I can’t bring myself to go there. Because maybe Rachel’s right. What is persona but an excuse for one’s worst self? Ricky was right too. Eminem isn’t the most important artist of our nonexistent generation, but only the most important artist of my own life. And if he’d never been born, then maybe some white kid in Des Moines would never have locked his girlfriend in the trunk of his car, and another white kid in Tacoma would never have opened fire at that mall, and Ricky would be alive. It occurs to me that I know nothing about anything, and that all of my problems come from my always having pretended otherwise. Maybe this is what’s meant by privilege.
We smoke against the hood of the Porsche. Rachel slaps her belly like a bongo drum. We must be a sight, the derivatives trader and his face-tattooed sister wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK COPS.
Inside, the rest area smells of urine despite its glut of competing odors. The school kids have sugared up and now roam the crowded space, sliding across mopped floors and throwing burgers at each other.
Back in the car, I cover the roof. Rachel finishes her fries and falls asleep. Em surveys the anxieties of fatherhood, the dueling strands of love and rage that wind around one another like lengths of barbed wire. I’m reminded of a story by the writer Andre Dubus, who lived in Haverhill, Mass., and wrote with a Masshole sensibility that assuaged my homesickness when I moved to New York. In the story, a good Catholic guy helps his daughter dispose of a corpse after she kills someone drunk driving. It ends with the man gone crazy, yelling at God from his lawn. If it had been one of his sons, the man explains to the Lord, he would have let him rot in jail. But a daughter is different; God can’t understand; God only ever had a son.
I imagine Nina in the passenger seat instead of my sister. In this fantasy, Nina’s a redhead like Wendy, downy chinned and puffy cheeked. A sun rash blooms on her pale skin. We’re coming home from a day at the beach. Her forehead leaves marks on the window. A towel draped over the seat to stop sand from dirtying the Porsche comes loose in her twisting and falls to the floor. I can’t picture her face.
Detective Ryan looks tired, back curved in T. rex scoliosis, tie already loose, a strip of lettuce crusted to his collar. He’s grown a salt-and-pepper beard that adds five years to his appearance, but helps to hide his second chin. An unplucked bridge connects his eyebrows’ distant boroughs. The gun sits on a steel tray that belongs in a dentist’s office, a resting spot for the dentist’s torture tools. It glimmers beneath Detective Quinn’s desk lamp, still slightly wet from its bath in the toilet.
“To summarize,” says Quinn. “A heroin addict, who you hadn’t seen in twenty years until he turned up on the night of the murder, disappeared for a week, then took a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride . . .”
“Sometimes more with traffic,” I add.
Rachel gives me a look, but I know from TV that timelines are important.
“Why don’t we round up and say an even five hours?”
“I think that’s unnecessary,” I say. “Maybe just note that it sometimes takes longer. It also might have taken less time if he took an express bus.”
Quinn taps his skull to indicate he’s stored the information.
“I’ll start again: a heroin addict, who you hadn’t seen in twenty years until he conveniently”—I don’t like his conveniently—“showed up on the night of the murder, disappeared for a week, took a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride—give or take, considering traffic and whether the bus he took was express—to the Berkshires, where he walked five miles from the bus station to your parents’ doorstep, the location of which he remembered from a visit he made twenty years ago. Upon arrival, you invited this
