By the time I’ve collected all of the available facts, it feels as though my heart is bleeding and there is nothing left inside me to throw up. And while I continue to learn everything I can, I weep. I weep as I haven’t since my own child died. I weep for all of those mothers and fathers: I understand what this means to them all too well. I know mine is not a rational response: all this weeping to honor the death of other people’s children. But still. I weep on.
After a while, I feel a shift inside myself. I feel the grief hardening; morphing into something different. I stop crying and feel something growing. It’s an embryo at first. I lean into it. Embrace it. Feel it grow. I walk into a rage so pure and perfect, I have to sit back and taste it in my throat. This thing I feel is like love in its intensity. It fills my chest. Stops my breath. Fills me with need.
I look again at photos of the face of the killer. The man-child who has stopped the breath of at least sixteen rural California kids. I look at him and mark his face. Photos taken at the time of high school are the most common. His face would be more lined now and slightly more worn.
William Atwater. No violent history on record. Weedy. White. Maybe a little goofy looking, but nothing exceptional in his face. He looks neither super smart nor alarmingly dumb and, certainly, there is no hint in his face of the violence that will come. None I can see, at any rate, and I peer at the photos very closely. No hint of what, by the time these early photos were taken, may well already have begun, even if only in small ways.
He abducted these children, one by one. And other children perhaps, as well. He drove them into remote areas outside of town and he ultimately bled them, the way one does a cow at slaughter. That’s what was learned from the bodies that had been recovered. The ones that hadn’t been recovered, of course, no one knew for sure.
After reading all of this, digesting it as well as I can, I no longer feel anger. I have moved beyond it to a state that is unfamiliar to me. It feels like I’m stone, like I am altered. My feelings are so well defined and so pure, I can think of little else. I am consumed by it.
I understand that there are likely strong psychological reasons for all of the things Atwater has done. Behavior like this isn’t born in a vacuum. Abusive father. Absent mother. Whatever the hell else: shit has happened to this guy and broken him in some important way. I know what I should probably be feeling is sympathy. Empathy. Pity, even. But that isn’t what I feel. Maybe he could even be apprehended and repaired, but that isn’t what I think about. And while the talking heads on the newsfeeds bleat on and on about what should be done, I come to understand one thing: I want William Atwater dead.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE WORLD IS fucked. And if not fucked, then at least it is broken. And it isn’t only my world, though that part clearly is. But everything. Broken. People kill each other all the time, and for no reason and never mind all the people who get killed for big reasons. I have had a hand in some of those myself.
There are cops who kill innocent bystanders. Boom, boom, boom, boom: four in the chest for being born with a certain color skin. Or workers in a federal building. Or vacationers in an airport. Or a delicate line of kids whose big crime it was to breathe.
So the world is broken, and there is no way to fix it. At least, there is no way for you or me to fix it. Do you see? We can rage against a corrupt system. We can vent on our Facebook walls. Shake our fists or wave signs at politicians when we catch them unawares. We can tweet. But all of these things are acts of the powerless masses. Our hearts break with these things until we can’t stand it anymore, then we weep until, finally, we get hard and move on. We don’t do this because we are callous. We do it because we, quite simply, have no choice. We take the unthinkable and we grapple with it until, finally, we are forced to come to terms with the impossible. Sucks to be us. Yes, us. We make it thinkable and move on.
But what about me?
I can’t stop thinking about William Atwater. Somehow, despite everything, he is alive. At least sixteen kids are dead with what seems like the very real possibility of more to come. I can’t make all of these facts sit next to each other in my head.
Days go by and I think about this. Deeply and with no conclusions but, truly, there is little more for me to do. The plants have turned brown and have shriveled beyond life. The stew has been completed and divvied up into freezer bags and stored. I tramp around the forests some, but even the peaceful walks I usually enjoy don’t give me much pleasure. I keep thinking about a world without justice.
