crammed on top from crashing into the mighty Thames.
Lydia chose a river of evil so black and
swirling you couldn’t see the bottom. Mrs. Baker asked her to read her report out
loud to the class, probably because she knew it would keep us awake at our desks.
I’ll never forget Lydia’s
chilling delivery of her opening lines, stolen from the coroner’s report.
The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis
of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left
cheek.
While most of her
classmates were contemplating whether “I Am the Walrus” was just one big
John Lennon acid trip, Lydia had buried herself in the story of Jack the Ripper’s
final victim.
Mary Kelly met her grisly death at the 26 Dorset Street boardinghouse, room 13. She
was 5’7”, twenty-five years old, a buxom prostitute, and owed
twenty-seven shillings on her rent.
She was heard singing in her room hours before she died.
It doesn’t take a memory expert to
figure out why I remember such details so many years later and very little about the
medieval London Bridge. Lydia had turned on a British accent during her presentation. At
one point, her fist thumped her chest three times in a dramatization of the first knife
strikes.
Silly.
Creepy.
To write that report, Lydia had immersed
herself for two weekends in the Texas Christian University library, reading
dissertations and nineteenth-century medical reports and essays from self-proclaimed
“Ripperologists.” She tucked it in a plastic binder and told me to flip to
the last page before she was supposed to turn it in.
I was gripped by horror porn: a
black-and-white photograph of Mary Kelly lying in her flophouse bed, her insides ripped
out. I never knew where Lydia found this, in the days before Google. Only that Lydia was
always a relentless digger.
Why am I thinking about this now?
I
rub my hand across my forehead, wiping away sweat, leaving crumbs of dirt. I’m
back in the kitchen, my foot on the trashcan pedal, dropping my collection into the
trash. And then it hits me.
I had dismissed the scrap of paper because
it didn’t bear a sadistic poem. Now I’m picking it out of the bin, examining
it more closely. It
could
be part of a candy bar wrapper.
Was it the kind
of candy bar I bought at Walgreens the night I disappeared? The kind I bought every
Tuesday for Roosevelt?
Roosevelt was a fixture on my Wednesday
running route, nicknamed because at straight-up noon every single day, he stood on topof an old red bucket and spouted the entirety of FDR’s first
inaugural speech.
By the time I flew by on Wednesdays after
school, he was always long done with his diatribe. We had worked out a routine. I tossed
a Snickers bar, his favorite, into the air without slowing my pace. He never failed to
catch it and shoot me a big, toothy grin. It became a ritual of good luck during track
season and a pact I kept up when summer started. I never lost a race after meeting
Roosevelt.
And so it was decided. Every Tuesday night,
I bought a Snickers bar. I didn’t buy two or three or four at a time. I
didn’t buy them on Mondays or Saturdays. I bought one every Tuesday night, and he
caught it on Wednesday afternoon, and I won and won and won.
But in those missing hours, I apparently did
something I would never, ever consider doing. I ate his candy bar. There were traces of
it in my vomit at the hospital.
I was committed to my ritual with Roosevelt.
To winning. Did I eat the candy bar that night because I thought that I would never run
a race again?
I grab a plastic snack bag out of the pantry
shelf and seal the wrapper inside.
Did he touch this? Did he stand under my window,
snacking?
My cell phone rings out from the living room couch, disturbing the
silence that is everywhere except my chest.
Hastings, William.
“It’s late, Bill.” No
Lydia chose a river of evil so black and
swirling you couldn’t see the bottom. Mrs. Baker asked her to read her report out
loud to the class, probably because she knew it would keep us awake at our desks.
I’ll never forget Lydia’s
chilling delivery of her opening lines, stolen from the coroner’s report.
The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis
of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left
cheek.
While most of her
classmates were contemplating whether “I Am the Walrus” was just one big
John Lennon acid trip, Lydia had buried herself in the story of Jack the Ripper’s
final victim.
Mary Kelly met her grisly death at the 26 Dorset Street boardinghouse, room 13. She
was 5’7”, twenty-five years old, a buxom prostitute, and owed
twenty-seven shillings on her rent.
She was heard singing in her room hours before she died.
It doesn’t take a memory expert to
figure out why I remember such details so many years later and very little about the
medieval London Bridge. Lydia had turned on a British accent during her presentation. At
one point, her fist thumped her chest three times in a dramatization of the first knife
strikes.
Silly.
Creepy.
To write that report, Lydia had immersed
herself for two weekends in the Texas Christian University library, reading
dissertations and nineteenth-century medical reports and essays from self-proclaimed
“Ripperologists.” She tucked it in a plastic binder and told me to flip to
the last page before she was supposed to turn it in.
I was gripped by horror porn: a
black-and-white photograph of Mary Kelly lying in her flophouse bed, her insides ripped
out. I never knew where Lydia found this, in the days before Google. Only that Lydia was
always a relentless digger.
Why am I thinking about this now?
I
rub my hand across my forehead, wiping away sweat, leaving crumbs of dirt. I’m
back in the kitchen, my foot on the trashcan pedal, dropping my collection into the
trash. And then it hits me.
I had dismissed the scrap of paper because
it didn’t bear a sadistic poem. Now I’m picking it out of the bin, examining
it more closely. It
could
be part of a candy bar wrapper.
Was it the kind
of candy bar I bought at Walgreens the night I disappeared? The kind I bought every
Tuesday for Roosevelt?
Roosevelt was a fixture on my Wednesday
running route, nicknamed because at straight-up noon every single day, he stood on topof an old red bucket and spouted the entirety of FDR’s first
inaugural speech.
By the time I flew by on Wednesdays after
school, he was always long done with his diatribe. We had worked out a routine. I tossed
a Snickers bar, his favorite, into the air without slowing my pace. He never failed to
catch it and shoot me a big, toothy grin. It became a ritual of good luck during track
season and a pact I kept up when summer started. I never lost a race after meeting
Roosevelt.
And so it was decided. Every Tuesday night,
I bought a Snickers bar. I didn’t buy two or three or four at a time. I
didn’t buy them on Mondays or Saturdays. I bought one every Tuesday night, and he
caught it on Wednesday afternoon, and I won and won and won.
But in those missing hours, I apparently did
something I would never, ever consider doing. I ate his candy bar. There were traces of
it in my vomit at the hospital.
I was committed to my ritual with Roosevelt.
To winning. Did I eat the candy bar that night because I thought that I would never run
a race again?
I grab a plastic snack bag out of the pantry
shelf and seal the wrapper inside.
Did he touch this? Did he stand under my window,
snacking?
My cell phone rings out from the living room couch, disturbing the
silence that is everywhere except my chest.
Hastings, William.
“It’s late, Bill.” No
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