Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

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.

The briefcase he used was a gift from his sister. Something to replace the canvas bag he’d carried through his academic life. She was the one who identified a scrap of it, charred leather and a bit of buckle.

There are things we can assume: that he was terrified, that he almost wet his pants, that he rehearsed, that he ordered a good meal that morning but wasn’t able to eat it, that he prayed, that he didn’t look at faces in the crowd. That his own name, when he checked into the hospital, sounded to him like a death sentence. That he’d pictured some glorious future, some altered universe, in which history would be written by the victors, among whom he’d be chief. That he couldn’t sleep the night before. But maybe those are facts about us, about the way we’d be.

The bomber’s ex-girlfriend is not ready to talk, but her roommate has given certain details: the fight about the keys, the time he broke the girlfriend’s wrist, the addiction to Indian food. The roommate starts most sentences with “If I’d known.” We are happy to allow her this.

He liked to solve puzzles. He liked to fix machines. When his third-grade teacher, Miss Mullens, told him there was not enough time to talk about sharks, he slowed the mechanism of the classroom clock. “Look,” he said. “I made the day longer.”

If he hadn’t felt the need to watch the explosion, he’d never have fallen from the roof of the bank, and would not have snapped his leg. Three days later he wouldn’t have stumbled, dazed and infected, to the hospital. He would not, when he saw the nurses’ eyes, when he realized the police were on their way, have barricaded himself, wouldn’t have taken the hostage, wouldn’t have demanded the suicidal drugs, wouldn’t have shot himself when they were denied. Or so we assume.

The country where he was born is on the map, but only a detailed map. It has a flag, but not a flag we’ve seen. His country is smaller than Luxembourg, larger than Lichtenstein, with a surprising number of sheep. To be honest, we’d forgotten about his country. We aren’t at all sure what he wanted.

The night before his twenty-third birthday, he sat in a mostly empty movie theater and watched Audrey Tautou run through the streets of Paris, suitcase in hand. As a botanist, he hated that the wrong things were blooming on-screen: This was meant to be August, but here were tulips in the park. Each flower, to him, had a taste. He’d rarely tasted nectar, just a few curious times — the viscosity, if not the flavor, reminding him of his girlfriend, of afternoons on her small white bed — but he knew each flower’s smell so intimately, so clinically, that when these tulips appeared he felt it on the back of his tongue. He admired the director’s brazenness (he assumed it wasn’t ignorance) in deciding what flowers bloomed when. He admired men who molded the universe like plastic. After this thought, his popcorn lost its flavor. We’ve gleaned all this from the video surveillance.