Seed

            We imagine it went something like this:

            On a Sunday morning in 1966, like almost every other Sunday morning in 1966, Charles Joseph Whitman ate his eggs and potatoes and orange juice. He and his wife Kathy, they really ate, they shoveled, and her cheeks puffed out round and happy, and she caught him looking and her eyes flicked up bright and she gave him this half-smile. After breakfast he rinsed and she dried and then he reviewed some self-improvement notes he kept in his journal, among them a numbered list entitled “Good points to remember with Kathy,” beginning with number one: Don’t nag. Number five and number seven were underlined: Pay little attentions; Be gentle. “Be gentle” was capitalized and underlined, hard.

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            At 6:45 that evening he wrote some notes, and then in the middle of the night he went upstairs and stabbed his mother and his wife in their hearts, his mother once and his wife three times, and then at 3:00 a.m. he did some more writing. As confused as he was, he wrote like a marksman, precise, to the point.

            That Sunday morning, like every other recent Sunday morning, a mass, a glioblastoma tumor, throbbed with each heartbeat in Charles’s brain, between his hypothalamus and amygdala. People call the hypothalamus the lizard brain. It’s primitive and old and essential. And the amygdala, that’s our fight or flight, that’s the hidden source of power that opens up when a plane crashes into the ocean, or a tornado tugs at a mother’s child, power that we never knew we could have.

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            Those of us alive then, we heard about what Charles did on the nightly news, from Walter Cronkite. And those of us in Texas, we called our friends and family in Austin. If they didn’t pick up the phone, we bit our nails and worried. For weeks, we listened to Cronkite tell us about the sniper in the clock tower, about the young students’ bodies splayed across the sidewalk.

            There was shaky black-and-white footage of a woman standing behind a tree. She didn’t look very frightened, even though the tree offered little cover. She wore a light-colored sundress and her dark hair was short, in a bob. Regular gun reports sounded off in the background every two and a half seconds or so. They echoed the way guns do when they are fired from high places near buildings, vibrations ricocheting off concrete, like the crack of a whip.

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            The last doctor Charles saw, Dr. Maurice Heatley, noted Whitman as “a massive, muscular youth oozing with hostility,” complaining about not seeming to be himself and who made a “vivid reference to ‘thinking about going up in the tower and shooting people with a deer rifle.’” Charles wrote in his 6:45 note that “After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder.”

            He would get these headaches; he ate Excedrin like mints, little segmented chalky white mints. Thirty-three years later, a newspaper writer named Frank Rich called Whitman evil, “if only for lack of a more precise term.” It will have never occurred to any of us that evil could be so biological. Something to take Excedrin for.

            This is what he wrote: “It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight after I pick her up from work at the telephone company. I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this.”

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            After the first year’s anniversary, we thought that it would be over. The nightly news had fresher tragedies to sate us. And over time, the clock tower would only come back every few years, then every tenth anniversary. Gary Lavergne wrote a book.

            And then in 1977, only eleven years later, we heard Harry Chapin’s song “Sniper” on the radio. Whitman was featured on American Justice. We saw Flanders climb a cartoon clock tower, high-powered scoped rifle in hand, in The Simpsons in May of 1994. We peer down the scope with him and he pulls the trigger again and again. Choosing. Some of us relive it; some of us experience it for the first time. The clock tower shooter has become a cultural archetype, a facet of our shared consciousness.

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            We know now that the tumor must have started, as all tumors do, with one genetic mutation, twisted by a mistake, or from an invisible wave of radiation in the air. It could have come from anywhere. The TV makes them. Radio signals buzzing through the air. Microwaves-it’s even in their name, waves. The sun.

            The tumor lay dormant, waiting, until, for one unknowable reason or another, it started chanting, divide, divide, and it spread its roots into the pink layers of Charles’s brain. Tumors have roots. Then the headaches started, and between each throb of bright, wavy pain Whitman began hearing something quiet, subtle, whispering to him from behind his eyes. Changing him.

            We don’t stand too close to microwaves anymore. We are suspicious of cell phones. We bring umbrellas to the beach. We always, always wear sunscreen.

            Whitman finished his eggs and potatoes and orange juice and wrote some and later he killed his mother and wife and wrote some more and then the next morning he put on some khaki overalls, what he would have called work clothes, and went out to buy some guns and he filled a foot locker with those guns and he took that foot locker and he climbed the steps of the University of Texas administration building. Whitman knew his way around guns better than most. He had spent some time in the Marines before enrolling at the university, and though he had never fired a weapon at a live person, he had an informed understanding of what it would probably be like. He said hello to the receptionist, and then he hit her on the head until she was still and there was a slick stain of blood on the floor. He stuffed her body behind the furniture, not particularly carefully. Her elderly, pantyhosed calves and her feet were still in sight, heels ajar, if someone were to look for them.

            It was almost noon, the hottest time of day, just under 100 degrees but it felt hotter because it was dry and clear and cloudless. There was very little wind, even at the top of the tower. Sightseers came and went. A couple stopped, chatted with Whitman. It was hot out, the view was good, have a nice day. Whitman had a rifle in each hand. He was pigeon shooting, they thought. There was blood on the floor. Maybe it was oil, they thought. He smiled, said “Good afternoon,” and he continued on his way.

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            Pigeon shooting. Oil. We would have known. That was something that Whitman has taught us. There was a man in a tower on a clear, windless day, a sharpshooter’s day, a rifle in each hand, blood on the floor.

            We know now how that story ends.

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            Whitman barricaded himself in the observation area, two hundred and thirty-one feet up. From there, he killed two passers-by and disabled two others with a sawed-off shotgun. The shotgun was particularly messy. A ring finger here, intestines there. They were a family.

            Then, using a scoped rifle, an un-scoped rifle, and a carbine, he murdered eleven more people from the parapet overlooking the surrounding park and campus buildings­- including an unborn child and a man who died of his injuries thirty-five years later- and wounded twenty-eight more. From that height, they were arms and legs and torsos. No faces. Just jeans and maroon jackets. An eggshell dress and a bob of dark hair standing behind a tree.

            Two hundred and thirty-one feet below, Paul Sontagg, an eighteen-year-old lifeguard and student, stood up from behind cover to call to his fiancée. “Claudia,” he called, “this is for real,” and then he was shot through the mouth. He didn’t die right away. He tried to get back up and then collapsed again in this spastic, animal way. He wrung his own neck trying to staunch the flow of blood. Paul gurgled. Claudia screamed and got up and ran to him, and Whitman shot her down. She was eighteen, too.

            To her, Whitman was just a glint of light in a faraway tower, the source of a ballistic trajectory, the soft snap of a rifle chamber and the sudden spray of red. The ejection of a brass cartridge. To her, Whitman was just a flare and a puff.

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            We wondered if we loved our Claudia enough to stand up in the sights of the clock tower sniper and call to her. Whether we would forget our own safety in the face of her danger.

            And we wondered whether we loved our Paul enough to run to him. What it would have been like to have been there. To have died like that. 

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            All of this ended when two police officers, one carrying a revolver and the other carrying a shotgun, got into the observation area while Whitman was distracted firing on the crowds below. The first officer emptied his revolver into Whitman, and the shotgun officer shot Whitman in the head and shoulder. Whitman slumped into the parapet, his head open and pink, finally bringing fresh August air to the glioma in his brain. The officers then traded weapons, and the new shotgun officer walked up to Whitman’s bullet-riddled corpse and opened fire again, point blank.

            This is what he wrote: “If my life insurance policy is valid, please see that all the worthless checks I wrote this weekend are made good. Please pay off my debts. I am 25 years old and have been financially independent.” And, “Donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.”

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            There was something different about the clock tower shootings, something that confounded moral classification. This was mass murder. But if we say that the tumor was the cause of it, that Whitman the sniper was not Charles the man, but an act of God, then we are left with a mass murder with no murderer, only victims.

            If we say that it was the tumor, then the sniper in the clock tower becomes something different than a murderer. Charles Whitman becomes like an earthquake, or like lightning. What Gary Lavergne called a “legend.” And we can’t prepare for a legend. We can’t negotiate with a chaotic universe.

            Faced with this, we become afraid.

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            We can’t really know if the tumor was the source of what Charles Whitman called those “unusual and irrational thoughts.” For the most part we think we’ve forgotten the flare and the puff. We go to bed on Saturday with as fine a woman-or a man-as a man-or a woman-could hope to have, and we wake up on Sunday and we have eggs and potatoes and orange juice. But some nights, late, when we’re red-eyed and vulnerable, and the clock tower comes on The History Channel, we might have thoughts. If what we’re thinking is what we’re really thinking, if who we are is who we really are. If there’s a seed of change taking root inside our brain. But they’re just thoughts, and when we see those eyes flick up across the table, that half-smile, we say, “I love you,” and then we forget.