We tweeted earlier about the birth of the DC Improv - its fame led to a late-night performance by none other than Robin Williams #OTD in 1996. His audience the next night, however, was a bit more formal. #DCHistory https://t.co/Ym2mScWMnv We tweeted earlier about the birth o…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 7, 2022
Marathons take place in almost every major city today, and garner thousands of runners into their races. The original ‘marathon mania’ in DC attracted thousands of spectators and over 100 runners! #DCHistory https://t.co/c32RaDsdAd Marathons take place in almost every major …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 7, 2022
As the comedy boom spread throughout DC in the late 1980s, the birth of the DC Improv led to numerous famous comedians taking the stage in the city. 30 years later, the club continues to thrive. #DCHistory https://t.co/C5KeuoCeN8 As the comedy boom spread throughout DC in th…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 7, 2022
1930s Art Deco matchbook cover from the restaurant at the Kennedy-Warren Apartments in Cleveland Park. @ClevePkHistory @OldTimeDC https://t.co/q0e3Hv5YJJ 1930s Art Deco matchbook cover from the restaurant at the Kennedy-Warren Apartments in Cleveland Park. @ClevePkHistory @Old…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 7, 2022
Happy birthday, Joseph Cannon! The Illinois representative had pushed legislation that would have DC residents pay for half of the then-new National Zoo. As a result, writers at The Washington Post had a few snarky ideas on how to thank him. #DCHistory https://t.co/tmdptUzdao …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 7, 2022
Today in History - May 7 https://t.co/xTPu9dWOla Archibald MacLeish, poet, dramatist, and ninth Librarian of Congress, was born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois. Continue reading. On May 7, 1915, the German U-20 (submarine) sank the British ocean liner Lusitania. Approx…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 7, 2022
After staying in the luxurious National Hotel, newly elected President Buchanan caught a mysterious illness, along with hundreds of others that stayed at the hotel. What caused their illness? #DCHistory https://t.co/JzmyZF81AJ After staying in the luxurious National Hotel, n…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
Considered one of the founders of Georgetown, Colonel Ninian Beall led quite the impressive life. It seems only fitting that the memorial to his legacy had a bit of a quirk, too. #DCHistory #MDHistory https://t.co/hvE9BtqVIn Considered one of the founders of Georgetown, Colo…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
When he first stepped up to the plate against the Hagerstown Braves as the first African American player in their league, Willie Mays received “the worst treatment” from the crowd. Over 50 years later, his return had a much different reaction. #MDHistory https://t.co/GmTeMXtVqJ…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.
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Various Authors | Washington City Paper | May 5th, 2022 | 12,400 words
Another day, another beloved print publication calling it quits. Washington City Paper, which nurtured such writing luminaries as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Katherine Boo, Jason Cherkis, and the late David Carr, has printed its last-ever physical edition. In a special package, veteran staffers describe what working at the alt-weekly meant to them. The anecdotes are spectacular. Sex workers in the newsroom lobby, looking to buy ads. A reporter getting punched by a guy named Casino. Final proofs being shipped to the printer via Greyhound bus. Editors pouring their hearts and souls into young writers’ copy. WPC will continue to publish online (and you can support its work), but not everyone in the city it covers has access to the internet. This bittersweet collection of memories stands as a testament to the unconscionable harm that late-stage capitalism and its attendant greed have done to local news. (Speaking of unconscionable harm, consider also reading Rebecca Traister’s fiery essay about how feckless Democrats and their “anemic” rhetoric helped usher America to the precipice of Roe v. Wade‘s reversal.) —SD
Astra and Sunaura Taylor | Lux | January 6th, 2022 | 6,846 words
In this thought-provoking essay published in January, Astra and Sunaura Taylor make a socialist feminist case for veganism, which can open outward into other calls for liberation and help us understand and be part of the paradigm shift that needs to happen to create a more egalitarian and sustainable society. Capitalism is about controlling bodies, they write, not just of humans but of nonhuman animals like cows and pigs. “While the trauma inflicted on people and animals … isn’t the same, it is interconnected. We are all caught in the same racist, sexist, colonial, and ecologically catastrophic capitalist system.” This is a call for cross-species solidarity and to consider veganism alongside other social justice movements on the left. It’s a tough read — particularly for people who consider themselves socialists, feminists, or animal advocates and continue to consume meat and dairy products — but an important one. —CLR
Leslie Jamison | Astra Magazine | April 27th, 2022 | 7,261 words
What do you daydream of? Justice? Love? Wealth? Fame? Peace and quiet? Something else entirely? In this terrific essay at Astra Magazine, Leslie Jamison explores the pleasure and release she feels in daydreaming as well as the shame and regret she can experience when her thoughts drift from the present to the future perfect. “My shame about daydreaming is the shame of solipsism and self-centered fantasy, the shame of turning from the banality of daily life toward the hollow calories of wish fulfillment, the shame of preferring the hypothetical to the actual…Restraint. Indulgence. Punishment. This triptych of impulses has structured my relationship to desire for so long: with food, booze, men.” —KS
Mark Pupo | Toronto Life | April 25th, 2022 | 5,296 words
Mark Pupo has a vested interest in his subject matter — the Cheese Boutique — in this essay for Toronto Life. He freely admits, “For me, more than most any store, the Cheese Boutique delivers a blissful, calming dose of retail therapy.” However, his bias does not get in the way of a lovely narrative. The owners, the Pristines, were originally immigrants from Kosovo who managed to make a home on a “once lonely, ungainly street” that now attracts hordes of Land Rovers on the weekend, their drivers desperate for a cheese fix. It’s a joyful success story of a business that thrived even during the pandemic — by starting virtual cheese-making classes and adding a food truck — yet kept its family roots. Even though the shop attracts fancy customers (Dustin Hoffman is a visitor) and fancy prices, two generations of Pristines are still there seven days a week to run it. Come for the family story and stay for the luscious cheese descriptions: “You let it come to room temp, slice off the top rind, and spoon out the gooey inside (called the “paste”). The odor is nauseating—reminiscent of rot and ancient back alleys—but to the tastebuds it’s awesome. Mellow and buttery.” Yes, please! —CW
Madeleine Aggeler | GQ | May 5th, 2022 | 3,054 words
At the nexus of Influencer and Extreme Fitness Bro lies Brian Johnson, a man who drags unholy amounts of weight through the Texas woods. A man who does burpees on crowded New York subway cars. A man who, along with his family, sleeps without mattresses in order to better mimic the behavior of his primal ancestors. A man who eats a pound of raw liver a day — yes, a day. It’s hard for me to type these words without laughing, yet the joy is nothing compared to that derived from reading Madeleine Aggeler’s rollicking profile of the man known to millions only as The Liver King. Will you leave feeling sorry for his poor kids, sparring in their mansion’s living room and taking a fork to pigs’ heads in some Lord of the Flies fever dream of prepubescence? For sure. But if a magazine is going to give multiple pages to a bearded madman and his paleolithic worldview, you could do a lot worse than this vivid (but still humanizing) portrait. And a word of warning to my vegetarian friends: maybe look for a text-only version, lest the many photos of glistening organs and animal parts drive you to apoplexy. —PR
This expansive 1861 panoramic map features the Mississippi River Delta and the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. Take a closer look here: https://t.co/bsmowiO1e0 https://t.co/K1KS3KQ9az This expansive 1861 panoramic map features the Mississippi River Delta a…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 Splashes Down via NASA https://t.co/L9bmthkbG1 https://t.co/Gf1efrpEKA
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
Happy birthday Orson Welles! On October 20, 1938, Welles’s broadcast of author H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” set the country into a panic, and D.C. residents who listened in had a lot to say after it aired. #DCHistory https://t.co/0DFOtrdCHi Happy birthday Orson Welles! O…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
A streetcar waits at the end of the line in Takoma, on 4th Street NW just south of Cedar Street, circa 1960. The building on Cedar Street in the rear survives, but most everything else has changed. The old Takoma Park B&O railroad station, long gone, is visible in the rear r…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
Today in History - May 6 https://t.co/30tt65fdHX On May 6, 1856, Robert E. Peary, who claimed discovery of the North Pole, was born in Cresson, Pennsylvania. Continue reading. On May 6, 1864, Confederate General James E. Longstreet was seriously wounded, caught in the fire …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 6, 2022
Crew-3 on the Way Home Aboard SpaceX Dragon Endurance via NASA https://t.co/jnDKrs5xK6 https://t.co/8kGVXYEibP
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 5, 2022
After its grand opening in 1951, the Parkington Mall was ahead of its time in terms of retail shopping. Today, its legacy lives on as the Ballston Common Mall, which is (again) getting a makeover. #VAHistory https://t.co/6d2x9o9DQ3 After its grand opening in 1951, the Parkin…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 5, 2022
When the National Theatre refused to rescind its segregationist policy and continued to deny Black patrons and performers entry, ‘First Lady of American Theatre’ Helen Hayes used her fame and position to protest the theater. #DCHistory https://t.co/xEOTXy9jcN When the Nation…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 5, 2022
This enthusiastic 1973 map showcases the recreational amenities of Kerr Reservoir in Virginia and North Carolina. Take a closer look here: https://t.co/kSwb1ThRRT https://t.co/29vhONuIVD This enthusiastic 1973 map showcases the recreational amenities of Kerr Reservoir in Virg…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 5, 2022
New on SoW: History of the @PhoenixParkHtl near Union Station: https://t.co/oAU3NyoqAP https://t.co/pSTVgLxn8a New on SoW: History of the @PhoenixParkHtl near Union Station: https://t.co/oAU3NyoqAP https://t.co/pSTVgLxn8a — Streets of Washington (@StreetsOfDC) May 5, 2022
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 5, 2022
After years of frustration from DC’s Latinx community, the riots of 1991 were evidence of the boiling point for many. The ensuing riots forced local government to look into why residents had taken to the streets. #DCHistory https://t.co/FAu0Ihf0N5 After years of frustration …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 5, 2022
Today in History - May 5 https://t.co/ChziAMGITv Mexican troops under General Ignacio Zaragoza successfully defended the town of Puebla on May 5, 1862, temporarily halting France’s efforts to establish a puppet regime in Mexico. Continue reading. On May 5, 1925, high school…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 5, 2022
In 1920, 12-year-old Roy Thomas set out to deposit $20 at the Bank of Del Ray. He could’ve never known that he’d walked in on a bank robbery, and the bank’s misfortune didn’t end there. #VAHistory https://t.co/E6aansewmD In 1920, 12-year-old Roy Thomas set out to deposit $20…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
After announcing the invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, college students across the country protested and rioted against the decision. At the University of Maryland, the protests resulted in calling the National Guard to campus #OTD. #MDHistory https://t.co/useehcviSD…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
Black Holes Are Hard to Find via NASA https://t.co/DAgiAwIk2l https://t.co/7P05kkuj5y
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
While the earliest populations of Filipinos living in DC only made up 0.2% of the total population in 1900, by 1937, the community was brought together by the Manila House, with generations of families sharing fond memories of the building. #DCHistory https://t.co/tyuXEbbHMh …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
Susan P. McNeill was the first female African American attorney to be promoted to the rank of Colonel in the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. We regret the error. Susan P. McNeill was the first female African American attorney to be promoted to the rank of Colone…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
Correction: The description of Susan P. McNeill’s military service on page 17 of the spring 2022 issue of Washington History is incorrect. Correction: The description of Susan P. McNeill’s military service on page 17 of the spring 2022 issue of Washington History is incorre…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
If you are interested in reading more, you can find this edition for sale at the DC History Center Store, a digital version on JSTOR, or join as a DC History member to never miss an issue again! If you are interested in reading more, you can find this edition for sale at th…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
The spring issue of Washington History is hot off the press! Check it out to learn more about local life in DC, including a lead essay by Susan P. McNeill on the life and legacy of her father Robert H. McNeill, a photographer who captured everyday life in a segregated city. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
May the Fourth Be With You! To celebrate the galactic legacy of the Star Wars franchise, we’re looking back to its premiere in DC, where viewers were quick to become mega-fans of the first film. #DCHistory https://t.co/IAWU1Km7w6 May the Fourth Be With You! To celebrate the …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
Today in History - May 4 https://t.co/6rkRGzsu9B On May 4, 1626, Dutch colonist Peter Minuit arrived on the wooded island of Manhattan in present-day New York. Continue reading. On May 4, 1894, Bird Day was first observed at the initiative of Charles Almanzo Babcock, superi…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) May 4, 2022
Katia Savchuk | The Atavist Magazine | April 2022 | 17 minutes (4,588 words)
This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 126, “A Crime Beyond Belief.”
The Atavist, our sister publication, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.
Just after seven in the morning on June 9, 2015, Misty Carausu joined a group of police officers lining up outside a dark green cabin with white trim. The blinds inside were drawn. Jeffrey pines cast thick shadows across the driveway. The air was still but for the scrape of boots on asphalt and the occasional call of a bird.
Carausu, 35, was at least a head shorter than the other officers, and the only woman. She wore iridescent eye shadow and pearl earrings along with a tactical vest. As she gripped her gun, she felt as if she’d stepped into one of the true-crime documentaries she binge-watched at night. It was Carausu’s first day as a detective.
En route to the scene, she’d been filled in on the case. Around 3:30 a.m. the previous Friday, a 52-year-old nurse named Lynn Yen, who lived at the edge of Dublin, the suburb east of San Francisco where Carausu worked, had called 911. Minutes earlier, Lynn and her 60-year-old husband, Chung, woke to a flashlight and a laser shining in their faces. A masked man dressed in black stood at the foot of their bed. “We have your daughter, and she’s safe,” the man said. Kelly, 22, had been in her bedroom across the hall.
Using what Lynn described as a “calm, soft voice,” the intruder told the couple to turn over and put their hands behind their backs. Then he announced that he would tie them up. When Chung felt the man touch him, he took a swing. Lynn grabbed her phone from the nightstand, locked herself in the bathroom, and called for help. She told the dispatcher that she heard fighting, then her husband yell, “Honey, go get the gun,” even though they didn’t own one. A few minutes later, the intruder fled downstairs and out the back door, which opened onto miles of rolling hills and open fields.
When officers arrived at the scene, Chung had bruises on his arms and face and was bleeding from a cut above his ear—he said the intruder had hit him with a metal flashlight. A window near the back door was open, and the screen had been removed. In the couple’s bedroom, police found a black wool glove and three plastic zip ties. On a gravel path behind the house, near a cluster of foxtails, officers recovered another zip tie and a six-inch shred of black duct tape. Kelly, who was unharmed, handed a sergeant something she’d found on a hallway cabinet near her room: a cell phone she didn’t recognize.
Police later traced the phone number to the cabin Carausu and her colleagues were now preparing to enter. It sat on a residential street in South Lake Tahoe, a ski resort town 130 miles from Dublin. As the raid began, Carausu heard the cabin’s front door splinter. Officers barked “Search warrant!” as they shoved through a barricade of chairs. Carausu maneuvered around clutter on the living room floor: a set of crutches, license plates, clothing, electronics, a massage table. Empty boxes were piled against a window; open bottles of wine and cans of spray paint littered the kitchen counters.
Carausu’s job was to process evidence. She snapped photos of a black ski mask, black duct tape, and mismatched black gloves. A stun gun sat on a rocking chair. In a banker’s box she found more duct tape and gloves, along with walkie-talkies, a radar detector, zip ties, rope, and a device for making keys. In a bathroom were makeup brushes and a partly empty bottle of NyQuil. An open tube of golden brunette hair dye lay on the sink, near a disposable glove stained with the dye’s residue. In one bedroom were three more gloves, yellow crime-scene tape, and, on the bed, a spiked dog-training collar; in another was a bottle of Vaseline lotion, used paper towels, and a penis pump. “This is creepy,” Carausu recalled thinking as she stuffed items into paper bags. “Something crazy happened in here.” The police also collected flashlights, cell phones, hard drives, and several computers, including an Asus laptop that had been stashed under a mattress.
Around noon, Carausu and her colleagues drove to a tow yard to search a stolen white Mustang recovered near the cabin. Inside, they found items they thought could be linked to the Dublin break-in: two gloves matching one from the crime scene, both covered in foxtails; receipts for a flashlight, a speaker, and zip ties purchased near Dublin the night of the home invasion; burglary tools; and a metal flashlight. The back seat of the Mustang had been removed. Carausu wondered if someone had made room for a large object, such as a body.
Strangely, other clues didn’t seem connected to the Dublin crime. Among the recent destinations on the car’s GPS was an address in Huntington Beach, 400 miles south of Lake Tahoe. In the trunk, Carausu saw a blood-pressure cuff, a camouflage tarp, and a mesh vest with a wireless speaker in one of the pockets. She also found a BB gun, a dart gun, and a Nerf Super Soaker that had been painted black, with a flashlight and a laser pointer taped to the barrel. Stuffed in a large duffel bag was a blow-up doll in black clothing, rigged with wiring so that it could be made to sit or stand. The bag also contained a military-style pistol belt, its pouches crammed with two pairs of Speedo swim goggles. Carausu pulled one of them out. Black duct tape covered the lenses. Caught in the tape was a long strand of blond hair.
None of the victims in the Dublin home invasion were blond. Neither was the suspect, which Carausu knew because she’d watched officers escort him out of the cabin in handcuffs. He didn’t put up a fight when they burst through the door. He wandered out of a bedroom and obeyed commands to lie on the ground. In his late thirties, tall and fit, the man wore a black athletic shirt and jeans. He resembled Charlie Sheen, with a chiseled jawline and tousled dark hair.
“Do you know why we’re here?” a detective asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
The suspect said nothing else as officers led him to a patrol car. Before they loaded him inside, Carausu told the man to look at her camera. He stared intensely into the lens, his mouth an indecipherable line. Carausu read his name on pill bottles and mail scattered around the stolen Mustang: Matthew Muller.
Muller grew up in the suburbs of Sacramento, where homes flew American flags, wild turkeys roamed the streets, and fathers took their sons fishing for bass in Lake Natoma. His mother, Joyce, was a middle school English teacher, and his father, Monty, was a school administrator and wrestling coach. The family spent summers hiking in the Sierra Nevada, abalone diving in Bodega Bay, or relaxing at a lakeside cabin in Michigan. Each Christmas they hosted a party on their cul de sac, and Monty dressed up as Santa.
Muller was a strong-willed, introverted child. Despite his father’s best efforts, he didn’t take to wrestling or football, preferring to run or ski or walk the dog alone. He played trumpet in the school band and devoured dystopian novels by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. His favorite short story, Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” was about two children who project their fantasies onto the walls of a virtual reality “nursery,” until make-believe lions come to life and eat the siblings’ parents.
Muller had a core group of friends at school, but bullies teased him about being overweight. Being picked on fueled his instinct to stick up for underdogs, an impulse he sometimes took to extremes. When his younger brother, Kent, was slow to talk, he appointed himself spokesperson to a degree that concerned their mom. “He’s never going to have a vocabulary if you keep speaking for him,” Joyce recalled thinking. Later, Muller stuffed gum in a girl’s trumpet after she taunted someone at a music competition.
During his senior year of high school, Muller learned that his father was having an affair. Monty moved in with the woman he was seeing, and he and Joyce divorced. Muller soon decided to enlist in the Marines, telling Joyce that he needed discipline and wanted to get in shape. In truth, he worried that paying for college would strain her finances.
Muller “was a round peg struggling to fit into a square hole” in the Marines, his roommate during boot camp later wrote. In the first 13 weeks, he lost more than 50 pounds. He didn’t join his platoon mates on weekend outings, instead squeezing in extra workouts. For a time he subsisted on Powerade and garlic rice. He earned the nickname Sergeant Mulder, after the FBI agent on The X-Files, because of his deadpan demeanor. Muller bristled at recruits who preyed on perceived weakness: When some bullied his roommate, Muller stood up for him.
Muller spent three years playing trumpet in the Marine Corps band at bases in California and Japan, where he also started a nonprofit to teach locals about the Internet. In 1999, he deployed to train soldiers in the Middle East. He earned several medals and a promotion before being honorably discharged.
Back home in California, Muller attended Pomona College, where he threw himself into volunteer work, which included helping homeless people secure government benefits and running an outdoors program. “More than anyone I had ever met, he strived to be noble, to be kind, to be generous,” his friend Eve Florin later wrote.
In the summer of 2001, Muller traveled to Prague for an academic program. There he met a driven young woman from Kyrgyzstan with a slight figure and long dark hair. They fell in love. (The woman declined to be interviewed. At her request, The Atavist is not using her name.) After Muller graduated from Pomona, they exchanged vows under an arch of white roses on the sun-dappled shores of Donner Lake, about 15 miles north of Lake Tahoe.
In 2003, the couple moved to Boston, where he started at Harvard Law School and she attended Boston College. Muller became involved with Harvard’s Legal Aid Bureau, where he represented low-income tenants and immigrants who were victims of domestic violence. On one occasion, a client’s husband found a business card that the bureau’s receptionist had given her and beat her so severely that her jaw had to be wired shut. Muller blamed himself. “Their crisis felt like it was part of my life too,” he said in an interview.
After earning his law degree, Muller stayed at Harvard to teach and work in the Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. Dressing in suits for class, he came across as “very formal,” “intense,” and “guarded,” but also “extremely knowledgeable” and “someone who truly cared about the cause and the immigrant community,” a former student of his recalled. Muller earned near perfect ratings as a lecturer and worked with Deborah Anker, a leading scholar of immigration law, authoring papers and Supreme Court briefs. When Anker went on sabbatical, she tapped him to head the clinical program. “He was warm, caring, earnest, smart, enthusiastic, engaging, thoughtful,” Anker recalled. “He was a super good human being.”
Muller was unusually devoted to his clients, buying one a wedding gift and letting another stay at his apartment. Even when he won a case, he couldn’t shake the injustice he perceived in the world. “Part of me would be really sad, because it should not take all this effort just to make something the way it should’ve been,” he said. He likened the feeling to “going into a room and needing to straighten the picture, set it right.”
For the program’s anniversary one year, Muller tracked down dozens of alumni and framed their messages as a gift to Anker. His own note read: “Learning from you has been, and I think always will be, the highlight of my legal career.” This struck Anker as odd. “I thought he was going to be a leading immigration lawyer in America,” she said. “This is not the height of your career—this is the beginning.”
Muller scoured the room for anything out of place, anything that could be a bug. Over and over, he searched for answers among the snaking wires and blinking lights.
It came as a shock to Muller’s parents when, in the summer of 2008, he revealed that he had bipolar disorder. Mental illness ran in Monty’s family, though they didn’t speak of it much. Muller had never mentioned any mental health problems to his parents, beyond sometimes feeling blue during the winter months, and neither had his wife.
In fact, Muller had grappled with disturbing thoughts since his time in the Marines. After receiving a series of anthrax vaccines before his Middle East mission, he struggled to get out of bed for weeks, and his performance on fitness tests plummeted. (He later attributed his symptoms to Gulf War syndrome.) For the first time, bleak thoughts took up residence in his mind: You’re not good enough, you’re the worst person in the world. He’d been considering a long career in the military, but now he decided to request a discharge.
In college, Muller fell into a cycle: Every summer and fall, he was productive and slept little; every winter and spring, he labored to finish assignments and his mood darkened. As the winter chill set in during his second year of law school, negative thoughts cut particularly deep: You’re not doing enough to help, you’re horrible, the world is terrible. For the first time, he contemplated suicide.
Over the years, Muller saw several psychiatrists. One at Harvard diagnosed him with major depression, noting that he also showed signs of mania. Muller tried medication but stopped each time because he didn’t like the side effects. He took pains to hide his condition from his parents, from his colleagues, and, as much as possible, from his wife, who moved away in 2005 to attend law school. “It felt like a weakness, something I shouldn’t be troubling other people with,” Muller said.
He especially didn’t want anyone finding out about the time a delusion took hold of him. It happened while he was working at Harvard, in an office on the fourth floor of Pound Hall, a concrete building at the edge of campus. He began to suspect that the government was tapping his phone and hacking his computer. Officials were after him, he decided, because some of his clients had been accused of having links to terrorists. Nothing specific triggered his paranoia—it began as a feeling and his mind filled in the gaps.
Muller frantically inspected wall conduits that held bundles of telephone wires and followed their trail to a server room in the basement. Through a crack between two doors, he glimpsed a mess of equipment. He scoured the room for anything out of place, anything that could be a bug. Over and over, he searched for answers among the snaking wires and blinking lights.
***
Muller hoped that escaping New England’s winters and trading asylum law for the tamer world of patent litigation would improve his mood, so in 2009 he and his wife moved to Silicon Valley, where he started a job at a large law firm. But instead of feeling better, he again became suicidal. He agreed to get help, and a psychiatrist prescribed Wellbutrin. The antidepressant quieted Muller’s suicidal thoughts and kept him productive at his new job, but it also prevented him from sleeping.
One night, he was tossing and turning on the couch to avoid waking his wife when he heard a distant, muffled voice. Half asleep, he thought the TV had come on. He heard voices again on subsequent nights, closer and clearer this time. At first he told himself he was dreaming, but eventually he was forced to admit that the voices were there when he was awake. They were androgynous, almost robotic. They didn’t tell him what to do; instead, they kept up a running commentary, mostly about his faults.
Muller didn’t tell his family, concerned they’d think he was “dangerous crazy.” Nor did he inform his psychiatrist, fearing it would end up in his bar application. He had let his new employer assume that he wasn’t yet licensed to practice law because he needed to retake the bar exam; in fact, he had passed the exam but not yet registered with the California bar, agonizing over what to write about his mental health in the required “moral character” section of the paperwork.
In Muller’s telling, to quiet the voices and wear himself out enough to sleep, he went on long walks at night. Often he hiked to the Stanford Dish, a radio telescope along a popular trail near the Stanford University campus. Not long after midnight one Friday in late September 2009, he was returning to his car in College Terrace, a residential neighborhood in Palo Alto, when a police officer stopped him and asked to see his ID. According to Muller, when the officer inquired what he was doing there so late, he said that he was visiting a friend—he was reluctant to admit that he’d trespassed on a trail that was closed after dark. The officer reported that Muller claimed to be a visiting professor at Stanford, which police later determined was false.
Three weeks later, a Palo Alto police detective came to Muller’s apartment and left a business card with his wife. When Muller called the number, he learned that police wanted to question him about an attempted sexual assault in College Terrace. His name had come up in recent reports of suspicious persons in the area. He told the detective that he’d read about the incident in the local paper, and he agreed to meet.
According to Muller, before he could make it to the station, two detectives showed up at his law firm to question him. The encounter set him on edge. He wondered if the detectives had come to install spy equipment in his office. Recalling his recent asylum cases, he decided that they were conspiring with the Chinese government. (The Palo Alto Police Department declined to confirm that Muller was questioned at his office, citing an open investigation.)
Muller already had suspicions about a certain Honda Accord often parked near his apartment. He’d been placing pebbles behind the wheels to check whether it moved and varying his route to work to avoid being followed. Now he memorized exit routes in his office building and worked with the blinds shut. When he became convinced that his pursuers were using a laser microphone to pick up sound vibrations in his office, he decamped to the firm’s library. “It seemed like this was going to rapidly escalate. They were trying to destroy me, because they wanted to make me lose my job, isolate me, make me lose my credibility,” Muller recalled thinking. “At that point, I started getting afraid for my family.”
He felt he had no choice but to flee. Muller traded his car, which he assumed was bugged, for his mother’s SUV and stocked up on food and survival gear. A few days later, he disappeared.
The day after the South Lake Tahoe raid, Misty Carausu arrived at her new office on the second floor of the Dublin Civic Center. At the time, the police department occupied half the building, which resembles a ring cut in half and the fragments slid apart. Carausu sat down in an empty gray cubicle in a room with drab carpeting. She hadn’t yet tacked up photos of her teenage son, whom she had at 16 and raised on her own.
Carausu didn’t plan on becoming a cop. Pretty and bubbly, with manicured nails and striking hazel eyes, she was in her mid-twenties and working as an assistant manager at a Safeway when a friend’s husband was convicted of sexually assaulting a mutual friend. She joined the force hoping to find justice for rape victims. After a decade as a deputy, Carausu, who fostered bunnies, sometimes compared herself to Judy Hopps, the idealistic rabbit who works as a cop in Disney’s Zootopia.
As she labeled evidence from the cabin, Carausu couldn’t get the blond strand of hair she’d found in the Mustang out of her mind. “This wasn’t his first time,” she told her colleagues. “We’re going to solve some crimes.” With her boss’s support, Carausu began to investigate whether they’d stumbled onto something larger than a single home invasion.
In police databases, Matthew Muller’s name yielded a hit for an unsolved 2009 break-in near Stanford. A 32-year-old woman was sleeping in her apartment in College Terrace when a strange man jumped on top of her. He appeared to be in his twenties and was white, tall, and lean. He wore a mask, black gloves, and black spandex-like clothing. The man tied her hands behind her back, bound her ankles with Velcro straps, and covered her eyes with tape. Then he gave her a choice: drink NyQuil, get shocked with a stun gun, or be injected with what he called “A-bomb.” When she opted for the NyQuil, the man confirmed with her that she wasn’t allergic to any of its ingredients before pouring the medicine down her throat.
The intruder gathered personal information and indicated he’d use it to steal her money. At times the victim heard the man whisper to someone, and she would later describe seeing a silhouette in the room, but she never heard a second voice. She reported that the man tried to rape her and she fought back. When she made up a story about having been raped in high school, he stopped, saying he didn’t want to victimize her again. Before leaving, he threatened to harm her family if she called 911, and mentioned that he had “planted evidence” to mislead authorities.
Three weeks before the attack, Carausu learned, a police officer had come across Muller walking late at night in the vicinity of the crime. Police later discovered that the College Terrace victim, a Stanford student, had attended an event that Muller organized at Harvard the previous year. Palo Alto detectives identified him as their primary suspect. But DNA recovered at the crime scene wasn’t a match. Ultimately, law enforcement didn’t find enough evidence to recommend charging Muller.
Carausu discovered that the home invasion had eerie parallels to two other unsolved crimes in Silicon Valley. Less than a month before the College Terrace incident, a 27-year-old woman in Mountain View woke around 5 a.m. to find a man on top of her. He appeared to be white and slim, about six feet tall, and wore tight black clothing and a ski mask. When she started screaming, he put his hand over her mouth and explained that he was part of a group of criminals that planned to steal her identity and wire money abroad. The man bound her hands and ankles, then placed blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes—she felt her hair catch in one of the straps. He made her drink what tasted like cough syrup before collecting personal information. At one point, he used her phone to send a message to her boss saying that she was sick. Periodically, the woman heard him talking to someone, but she never heard or saw anyone else.
Eventually, the man told her, “I have some bad news. I’m going to have to rape you.” According to an account the victim later shared with NBC’s Dateline, she begged him not to and he relented. “I can’t do this,” he muttered. “I’m sorry about this.” Throughout the encounter, the intruder was “polite,” the victim recalled. Before leaving, he advised her to get a dog for protection. The woman told Dateline that when she called the Mountain View police, they initially suggested she might have had a bad dream. Ultimately, authorities concluded that the person behind the attack had also likely committed the one in College Terrace. (In a statement for this story, the Mountain View police said, “We continue to keep this investigation open and have been and are treating it seriously.”)
The final case Carausu learned about happened three years after the other two, in November 2012. A 26-year-old woman who lived just north of the Stanford campus awoke at 2:20 a.m. to see a masked man in gloves and dark clothing at the foot of her bed. He held her down, but she screamed and fought back. Eventually, he fled. The woman later noticed that her computer had been moved and found two “bump keys,” which open any lock from a certain manufacturer, near the front door. In neither that case nor the one in Mountain View was Muller named as a suspect.
Carausu stumbled upon an additional clue when she called the owner of the stolen Mustang police had recovered in South Lake Tahoe. He turned out to be a medical student who lived on the edge of Mare Island, 40 miles northwest of Dublin. In early January 2015, he had returned from a trip to find that someone had taken his car keys from his home and driven his Mustang out of the garage. When Carausu told him that her department had arrested someone for a home invasion near where his car was found, he asked if she’d heard of the “Mare Island creeper,” a Peeping Tom.
Between August 2014 and January 2015, at least four women in the area had reported seeing a man peering through their windows or climbing on their roof. Two had just taken a shower when they spotted him. One saw him taking pictures, while another saw him descending a ladder. Two of the women lived on the same street: Kirkland Avenue.
Some of the women described the voyeur as a white man, 25 to 35, wearing a black jacket. In August 2014, according to a Facebook post later documented in a police report, a Mare Island resident who heard sounds on his roof late one night saw someone fitting a similar description flee with a ladder. The resident encountered a strange man on two other occasions: One night, the man was crouching under the resident’s window; he said he was searching for his puppy, a husky. Another night, the resident found the same man in his backyard, where he claimed to be looking for 531 Kirkland Ave.; the address didn’t exist. The student spotted the man a third time, walking a young husky and a golden retriever. According to a Facebook post, a woman who lived on Klein Avenue, a block from Kirkland, said that her neighbor had a husky and a golden retriever. The owner of the Mustang told Carausu that he’d heard the woman’s neighbor was a former lawyer who had been in the military.
Then, as suddenly as the Peeping Tom incidents started, they stopped. “It was about the same time that the Vallejo kidnapping happened,” the Mustang owner told Carausu. Why does that ring a bell? she thought.
After the Dublin home invasion and Muller’s arrest, a colleague of Carausu’s had put out an alert asking area police departments for information about similar crimes. Vallejo didn’t respond. Online, Carausu found news stories about the kidnapping, which occurred three months earlier. She noted that one of the victims had blond hair. Then she remembered why the case had caught her attention: The Vallejo police had deemed it a hoax.
Read the full story at The Atavist.
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William Torrey | Longreads | April 2022 | 22 minutes (6,162 words)
For Matt McAuliffe
I
Sometime during what I hoped would be the end of the pandemic, I found myself hungover and alone in my front yard, sweating as I stared at the piles of crap I had to cram into our Subaru, piles that would somehow cohere into our temporary new life. “Fuck me,” I said. “And fuck this.” My family and I were leaving for the summer, but not by choice. I work at a boarding school. Which is a win mostly — free house, no commute — but sometimes not. Like when a virus wreaks havoc on a global scale and we’re forced to vacate so the school can fast-track renovations while the students are gone.
“I hear the Torreys are moving,” a colleague said, a little too cheerfully, when he saw me on my walk. (In those early COVID days, as my wife and I struggled to work without childcare, I burned hours marching in circles with my kids in the stroller.)
“Not exactly,” I said through my mask. The man’s eyebrows arched.
“They’re installing central air,” I explained. “So we’re moving now, then coming home in August to move back in.”
“Well,” he shrugged, “at least you’ll have A/C.”
“But we also have to move. Twice. In three months. With two kids. All while the world is falling apart.”
“Strange times,” he said. “But you’ll survive.”
***
But complain though I did about the move, I knew deep down I needed a change. Late in 2019, my wife and I had become parents for the second time, and after a long paternity leave, during which I celebrated my younger son being much easier than his brother by blasting Marlboro Reds and pounding cheap pinot noir, I decided to see if I could stop drinking. Shockingly, I could. All through January, as the booze worked its way from my system, I felt reborn. I lost weight. My skin glowed. People kept saying there was light in my eyes. By February, I marveled at why I’d blown years getting wasted in the first place. Why had I been so keen to embarrass myself, to black out and barely remember the nights I’d been dying to enjoy? And what was this feeling I was feeling? Then I realized it was joy — or at least the absence of shame. When you’re not constantly hungover, it turns out, the world’s a kinder place.
“I like this,” my wife told me as we sat up chatting in bed.
“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”
And so began the thinking of big thoughts. While I bathed my sons or stayed up late reading, I swallowed a sad truth I’d known for a very long time. I was an alcoholic. While my friends all had bad nights, for me it was different. I was always drinking almost normally, then abnormally, then insanely and then, after making a supreme ass of myself, I’d rein it in, only to begin the cycle again. The idea of saying goodbye was scary, but I already had two months under my belt. All I had to do was keep going.
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But then I turned 35 and got smashed drunk. The night was unremarkable. My wife and I sipped drinks while watching the BBC’s Normal People. She quit after a few glasses of rosé, but I plowed through Negronis until I passed out. In the days after, as the liquor re-adhered to my psyche and I struggled to reckon with my choice to get fucked up, the news all at once became all about COVID. One day, Trump banned travel from Europe. On another, New York friends called to talk through plans of escape. Soon after, we were all in the middle of a Global Pandemic.
Somewhere in all this, I found myself at Costco with a T-shirt on my face. My wife had sent me in search of diapers and wipes and, hopefully, a gigantic pallet of toilet paper, but there I was, as if by magic, alone in the liquor department, filling my huge shopping cart with alcohol, and not just the normal haul of tallboys and budget wine — multiple handles of whiskey and gin. What the fuck am I doing, I thought as a sad-looking lady rang me up. But then of course I knew: I was leaning into the worst of my instincts, telling myself without telling myself that if the world didn’t have to play by the rules, neither did I.
***
My days collapsed into a parade of hangovers so bad I wanted to die. Each morning, after waking in agony and bearing a barrage of anger from my wife, I did what I could to make breakfast for my kids and not suffer a total meltdown as they turned our kitchen into a shithouse of cereal and yogurt. And then, somehow, unshowered and in the middle of a five-alarm headache, I’d barricade myself in my bedroom, often with a baby on my lap, skim poems by Marie Howe and Adrienne Rich and do what I could to inspire my students to be anything more than what the pandemic had rendered them: depressed and shell-shocked little thumbnails, too naive to see how booze-whipped I was and too good-natured to do anything as reasonable as bitch, but kids who’d nonetheless devolved from pupils I adored into another obstacle between waking and drinking.
“How was class?” my wife asked.
I gave her a dead-eyed stare as I put the boys in the stroller, thinking all the while: Must. Stop. Destroying. Self.
***
When night fell and my kids were asleep, I’d practically vibrate at the notion of getting drunk. I knew how to mix a drink, of course, but I also knew I’d need six drinks to feel (or not feel) the way I wanted to. I also knew that my wife’s patience would never abide that many. But two — that could be done. So I made my first as strong as three.
Most often I drank in a plastic chair in my front yard. As another day faded, I marveled at life’s strangeness. In the span of a month, I’d burned down my nascent sobriety and watched the pendulum swing so hard that, as a 35-year-old father of two, I was drinking more than I had as a college frat boy. My community had vanished — either strictly sequestered or gone entirely — and campus felt like purgatory.
Sometimes I’d FaceTime friends, making light of how drunk I was, the fucked-up state of the world. But mostly I gazed at the branches of a chestnut tree, watching as another evening fell to black, my brain all the while making sad calculations. How long would the pandemic last? Would I lose my job? Myself? Could all this drinking destroy my marriage? And you could just stop, I thought. Be a good husband and dad and teacher and resume your personhood. That option remained. But so did the other one, the one where I kept pushing, the one where I pretended this wouldn’t only get worse. Besides, my drink was empty. If I got up to make another quickly enough, my wife would never know about the first one.
***
By Easter, I was coming apart. After trying in vain to dye brown eggs and watching my older son lose it when he learned he couldn’t eat all the candy in his basket in one sitting, I put on my Mizunos, blasted Fiona Apple — “That’s where the pain comes in/like a second skeleton!” — and made for the school’s trails. Summer was coming, and as I jogged past groves of walnut trees, I made myself believe I’d be OK. Once we escaped to Habersham, South Carolina, the posh community where my wife’s parents and aunts and uncles had all retired, and our COVID destination, our problems would be solved. I’d be born again in the Southern heat, not sober, but sober-adjacent. My in-laws would help with the kids, I’d get some writing done, we’d spend afternoons by the pool, and the evenings would be a pleasant carousel of single malt scotch and peel-and-eat shrimp.
While my friends all had bad nights, for me it was different. I was always drinking almost normally, then abnormally, then insanely and then, after making a supreme ass of myself, I’d rein it in, only to begin the cycle again.
Rounding a bend in the trails, I made out a lone figure: the school’s French teacher, who I hadn’t seen in months. As I called her name, she turned and shrank. “Oh, Will,” she said, “you scared me.” She’d just come back from New York, where friends and family had contracted COVID. A few had even been put on ventilators.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah. They might, like, actually die.”
When she asked about my family, I wasted no time in lashing out at the school for making us move, at Trump for mishandling the plague, at the drudgery of teaching on Zoom. As I got more and more riled, I could see in her eyes a glimmer of alarm. Earlier in the fall, my wife and I had hosted her for duck à l’orange and too much wine, and we stayed up past midnight trading stories and cracking up. Now I was a bloated derelict shouting into the wind.
“And my drinking,” I said. “Every day I tell myself to stop. But I can’t. I sit alone and drink myself into oblivion.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just – ”
“No, no. It’s okay. I just think you’ve gotta get rid of the alcohol. Just get all the bottles and pour them down the drain.”
“Right,” I said.
Back home, I told my wife in my most solemn tone I was done drinking.
“For how long?”
“Forever — or at least until the world goes back to normal.”
That night, as we set the table for lamb chops, I walked into the kitchen and uncorked a bottle of red.
***
And this was just the way life was.
For a hundred days, as a murderous virus floated through the air, I drank myself into a hole. But the time to move finally arrived. The Subaru was packed. All that lay between now and a better life was 700 miles of I-95.
As I locked the car, another colleague passed, this time the school’s biology teacher.
“South Carolina tomorrow?” she asked.
“Come hell or COVID-19.”
She smiled and turned but stopped. “Say, did you hear about that woman down in Kiawah?”
“No. What happened?”
The biology teacher shook her head. “Eaten by a gator.”
II
The heat.
After 11 hours barreling down the interstate, past Capitol Harbor, past South of the Border, past two enormous Confederate flags, and stopping just once to piss in the parking lot of a Walmart in Bumfuck, North Carolina, driving on and on with two kids drunk on Benadryl and Sour Skittles, the noise of Raffi blaring all the while — after all that, what I remember is the heat.
All-enveloping. Time-stopping. Like a blanket of ennui.
We’re here, I thought, and as soon as I got out, crunching the gravel behind our townhouse, I felt the sharp sense that nothing would change.
***
On our first morning, after a night alone drinking rum in the bathtub, I loaded the boys and set out on an hours-long march. My older son marveled at the new terrain: oak trees draped in Spanish moss, camelia and foxtail ferns, the ground alive with lizards and crabs.
Somewhere along the way, a fat old man buzzed up in a golf cart.
“Y’all be careful now,” he said, nodding to one of the man-made ponds. “Momma gator up the way. Extra territorial.”
“What did he say?” my son asked.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
We strolled past the pool and along the marsh. We listened to egrets and professional power washers, readying rich people’s homes for the summer, stopping now and then simply to marvel at this place, our swampy little hideaway in the Low Country, half a nation away from the cold desolation that had been our lot. Where was COVID here, I wondered. Even the notion of it seemed like a myth. People down here didn’t even wear masks.
On our way back to the townhouse, we crossed a footbridge. I waved to two teens fishing, and their eyes went wide. Before I could think, my head swiveled to a patch of grass, where an enormous alligator basked and stared at my children. How long would it take, I wondered, for this beast to steal my kids? Ten seconds? Five?
“Careful,” one boy said.
“Yeah,” I told him, “thanks.”
***
Habersham was to be a happy place. It was not.
My wife and I were on the edge of a meltdown, and the change in scenery we’d hoped would fix us had only made things worse. Within days, after we’d worked to turn the half-furnished home of a family friend into our short-term crash pad, I began to realize that, just as I’d fashioned a secret fantasy for the summer — one wherein I kept drinking without consequences — so, too, had my wife. Only her secret fantasy had been me getting my shit together.
Everything would’ve been better had we made time to talk, but instead we lashed out. My wife screamed at me for half-assing the assembly of our new bed. I shouted at her for always being on edge. My wife screamed at me for making too many big drinks. I shouted at her for always picking fights.
At the end of our first week, after putting the kids to bed, she found me slouched at the granite island, drinking a Double Manhattan.
“You fucking drunk!” she screamed, eyes bright. “Just sitting here getting smashed!”
I thought of the neighbors — an old couple who, unsure of COVID etiquette, had welcomed me to the block with a fist bump. If she shouted any louder, they might call the cops.
“The only time we have to breathe,” she went on, “the only time we have to think, and you’re just down here knocking yourself out!”
I’d like to say I poured out my drink. I’d like to say I said sorry. But what I did instead was scream back. Instead we yelled until our faces burned and then sat in silence at a bistro table on the porch, pushing pesto salmon and orzo around in utter silence. What happened was my wife went to bed early, and I stayed up getting drunk.
***
With the help of my wife’s parents, we resumed our lives. In the mornings, my in-laws braved the heat and took the boys on walks so I could write and my wife could work. In the afternoons, during naptime, I went for runs and ran errands while my wife sat on Zoom. In the hours before bed, we loaded the stroller with floaties and beers and walked to the pool, where rich retirees basked in the sun. My in-laws came over for dinner, and most nights, I held myself together, at least while they were there.
***
One night, alone and drunk, my phone lit with news that a woman in Minneapolis had filmed a cop killing a Black man. I told myself not to watch, but in the stillness of the screened-in porch, I felt paralyzed to do much else. I clicked the link and sipped warm gin, the liquor humming through me as I watched this man’s whole being slacken from anger to fear to resignation and then death.
I set down my phone and stared at the fan. Slowly spinning and spinning.
I watched the reel again.
***
Days later, as we strolled to the pool, my wife’s brother called to say our sister-in-law was in labor with our second niece. As I lounged in the cold water, greased in sunscreen and sipping IPAs, I couldn’t stop seeing them in that delivery room, my sister-in-law doing what people had done for all eternity: pushing a living person out into an uncertain world. Only now the world was less certain than ever. When would I get to meet this baby? Would she be healthy? Would COVID ruin her entire childhood?
For a hundred days, as a murderous virus floated through the air, I drank myself into a hole. But the time to move finally arrived. The Subaru was packed. All that lay between now and a better life was 700 miles of I-95.
That evening we sat on my in-laws’ porch, sipping French chardonnay and doing our best to answer these questions, doing our best, I think, not to feel lucky that our own kids had been born before this started.
As the sun fell into the trees by the marsh, we said good night and made for the stroller. But just as we turned, we heard a strange noise — a dull thud, a crashing. I cut my eyes in time to see what I was sure was a rolled-up rug landing after a toss down a porch staircase.
“Is that a person?” my mother-in-law asked.
“No,” I said, but then I saw that it was: an old lady moaning on the ground.
*Some names have been changed to protect privacy.
As my mother-in-law and I ran over, I remembered who she was. Elaine,* a reclusive drinker, who — apart from lashing out at members of Habersham’s yard crew or leaving terse notes on illegally parked cars, as she’d once done to mine — was essentially a hermit. Just a lonesome old woman waiting things out.
She was an injured animal when we got to her, a little ball of pain in the grass. It was 90 degrees out, yet she wore slippers, sweatpants, and a thick cotton top.
She reached for my arm. “I was just putting out repellent!”
“Repellent?”
“For the deer!”
“We better call an ambulance,” my mother-in-law said.
“No, no. Just get me back inside.”
The light caught her face then, and when my gaze met hers, I watched a hematoma over her eyebrow balloon from a marble to a golf ball.
“You’re hurt,” I said. “Maybe badly.”
“I was just putting out the repellent!”
My mother-in-law looked at her neighbor. “Elaine, would it be all right if Will carried you in?”
I hoisted Elaine’s hundred pounds over my shoulder and climbed the stairs down which she’d just tumbled, the stairs that, had she fallen differently, might’ve killed her. Elaine’s clothes were stained and filthy. Her toenails gnarled and black. When I got her back in, I understood the warm clothes. The thermostat was so low that the sweat on my body became a sheet of ice, and as I laid her on the couch, I shivered.
While my mother-in-law sussed out whether it was safe to leave Elaine, I took in the room. White sofa and loveseat, high-end and pristine. A beautiful glass table spread thick with Southern Living and House Beautiful. And there at center stage, before the couch that served as the setting for most of her life, was a huge plastic cup brimming with white wine.
“Do you know what day it is?” I asked.
She did.
“Do you know who the president is?”
She did.
The hematoma grew bigger. Elaine thanked me again and again, but I knew deep down she was mortified. She just wanted us to leave so she could get back to drinking — to black out and forget all this happened. “You call me,” my mother-in-law told her. “If your head starts hurting, we’ll get you to the hospital.”
As we marched home, my mother-in-law was silent.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “I mean, to give your life over to booze like that. It … it’s — ”
“A shame.”
“Yes,” I said.
Then I went home and got drunk.
***
We trudged through the days.
In the mornings, I wrote stories about alcoholic teachers and went for long runs. I read novels by Philip Roth and James Salter and Michael Chabon. In the evenings, we watched the boys swim and shot the shit with other young couples, all of whom, upon hearing the events that lead us from a shut-down boarding school to Habersham, never failed to say how lucky we were. And it was true. While Americans shuttered restaurants and struggled to file for unemployment, we lived in a half-million dollar townhouse and took meandering strolls to the luxury pool. While the death count ticked up and up, we barely thought of COVID — and when we did, it was in the abstract, some faraway tragedy like a famine in the Sahara, something that was sad but didn’t have much to do with us. Nonetheless, we felt trapped and exhausted. Nonetheless, every night was the same. Whether I drank rye or gin or red or white — I drank too much. I drank to the point that I had to be careful getting up from my chair, to the point where watching a movie was pointless, because I’d never remember it. Every morning, I woke to the sting of another body-shaking hangover, and every morning I’d tell myself enough. But every evening, as I popped the cork on another bottle of Campuget, I smiled and thought, this time it’ll be different.
***
One morning, my older son startled me as I vacuumed. In his hands he held an old stethoscope, left behind by the previous tenant. I set down the Dyson and knelt beside him.
“What do you have, bubba?”
“Teth-a-scope.”
He stuck in the earpieces and put the bell to his chest.
“Do you hear it?” I asked. “Boom-boom, boom-boom.”
He moved the bell to my chest and looked right at me.
“That’s you, daddy. That’s your heart.”
***
Another night, drunk and alone on the screened-in porch.
My phone blinked with a flurry of texts. Old friends, all weighing in on another police killing. This time the Black man was Rayshard Brooks.
“Why did he run!?”
“What was he thinking!?!”
“He shouldn’t have been driving in the first place!”
“They should’ve shot him in the leg!”
I tossed my phone and swigged warm gin, feeling flaccid and angry.
My phone lit again, this time with friends from the first chain making a new chain to talk shit.
“They’re so narrow-minded.”
“And offensive.”
“And racist.”
“Do you think they’ve even seen the video?”
I realized then I hadn’t seen it myself. I finished my gin and loaded the reel. And as I drunkenly watched an over-the-line guy getting arrested for passing out in a Wendy’s drive-thru, and then trying, drunkenly, to run, only to be shot to death, I felt completely unstuck from reality. While a virus that virtually no one in South Carolina could be bothered to take seriously was straining our nation’s hospitals, while the notion of ever going back to normal remained totally unclear, I was drunk on a porch, watching another Black guy get murdered.
She was an injured animal when we got to her, a little ball of pain in the grass.
I called one of my friends from the chain. We talked a long time about how terrible it was — and how terrible we’d been as a couple of LSU frat boys, how we’d never done a thing but chase girls and get blasted, how we’d never so much as thought to wonder what it might be like to be anyone other than us.
“We both did and said things we shouldn’t have,” I said.
My friend sighed. “When I look back on the guy I was, I don’t feel proud.”
By the time our call ended, the booze in my blood had become self-righteous. “You know,” I typed on the original chain, “if the police found my drunk ass passed out in a car, and I tried to run or do anything even halfway threatening, no cop in America would ever shoot me.”
I hit send and geared up for an argument, but before long I passed out. When I came to, hours later, sweaty and confused and still on the porch, no one had replied. I made my way to the door, which was somehow locked. My wife had been asleep for hours, a reasonable human being, getting rest before another day of work without childcare. I pictured her wrapped in the sheets, snoring softly, and my whole self filled with rage. Sleeping outside struck me as the ultimate indignity. I pounded the windows until I thought the glass might shatter.
“Goddamnit,” I screamed into the night. “You’re so fucking … annoying!”
When my wife got up to let me in, she spoke only one sentence. “You know you locked yourself out, right?”
***
On the Fourth of July, we made our way to my wife’s aunt’s place, just a short walk from the townhouse. After scrambled egg casserole and fruit salad, we gathered on the porch to watch the parade. As we sipped mimosas, James Habersham Street came alive in a chain of tipsy white people in golf carts done up in patriotic crepe paper and Uncle Sam balloons. Families along either side of the oak-lined road shouted and waved, and as my older son hopped from one foot to the other, unable to contain his thrill about another holiday that, to him, meant nothing, I refilled my mimosa and looked at my phone. It hadn’t occurred to me until then to wonder who James Habersham was, but a quick Google yielded that he was not only a slave owner, but a slave owner against American independence.
As the parade rolled and the champagne settled, I thought of making a comment, or at least a joke, something to acknowledge the absurdity. Here we were, Americans celebrating America by watching rich Americans cruise along a road named for a person who not only loved slavery but hated America. Not a single reveler wore a mask. Not a single placard bore any slogan reminding us to KEEP OUR DISTANCE or REMEMBER GEORGE FLOYD or RAYSHARD BROOKS. And where are their families? I wanted to ask. What are they up to this Independence Day? And everyone on ventilators, what about them and the people they love?
But then the parade ended and the bar shut down. I packed the boys into the stroller for the eighty-billionth time and began to dread the hours ahead. It was barely 11 a.m., and I was drunk and dehydrated and deeply tired — with hours to go before naptime. I sighed a long sigh, unlocked the brake, and slowly pushed my children home.
***
If you hang around the pool long enough, you’re bound to make friends, and as July drew to a close, we did just that. Jason and Jenna were our age and had a set of twin boys right between our sons. After a handful of afternoons swimming and chatting, Jenna invited us to join them for a twilight boat ride.
“To be clear,” Jenna said, “this is a booze cruise.”
The day of, I kept catching myself feeling nervous; it’d been so long since we’d hung out with a new couple I might not know how to act. My solution was drinking. That afternoon, on our walk to the pool, I guzzled a huge rosé then tore through IPAs with total abandon. By the time we got to Jenna and Jason’s, it was already too late.
The night itself was gorgeous. Jason zoomed us out past the marsh and into the open water, where we bobbed together, eating fancy cheese and pounding red wine. We motored about in the blue-gray night, my wife leaning into me the whole time, a smile on her face, enjoying a perfect evening with her husband in such a pretty place. But the deal of my blackout was already sealed. I kept up the banter as long as I could, trading stories about my years in New Orleans, about writing and teaching, but by the time we got back to dry land, I could no longer be counted on to get my thoughts from my head to my mouth. I could be counted on only for the insane sense that, no matter what, I needed to keep drinking.
As the night ended and we made our way back to Jason and Jenna’s, I invited myself in for a nightcap, a drink I’ll never recall. In my wife’s telling, we didn’t stay long, and though I didn’t make a fool of myself, I did go completely silent, staring up at the night sky and slugging back beer. Once we’d gotten home, I assumed I’d made a beeline to pass out, but instead I hunched like an animal at the kitchen island, gorging myself on whatever I pulled from the fridge. I woke the next dawn with the scum of chips and pork chops on my tongue and no recall of how the night ended. My brain made a million scenarios: I’d made some lewd comment to Jesse; I’d pissed my pants or exposed myself. Like always, none of these things had happened. But, like always, the shame in my chest could not have felt heavier.
“Everywhere you go, you embarrass yourself,” I whispered in bed before my wife came in. “Every time you meet someone, you show them you’re a fool.”
III
Somehow it got worse.
I started cracking bottles of rosé at 3 p.m., then 2:30. I could no longer have just a beer on the way to the pool. I couldn’t be counted on to form a sentence after sundown. I began to avoid my wife in favor of sweating alone on the porch, pounding wine and FaceTiming friends, friends who stopped answering. At some point, my wife started to film me, her sad subject in his sad little TV chair, eyes glazed, face slack, grunting and swatting at her phone when I realized what she was doing.
***
On the last day of July, after my in-laws and I took my wife out for her 38th birthday — our first time in a restaurant since the pandemic began — my wife and I put the boys to bed. Earlier that afternoon, we’d gone to the liquor store and carefully selected four bottles of nice wine, and as my wife yawned and began to wind down, she asked me, nicely, not to drink it.
“It’s good stuff,” she said.
I agreed.
“We should save it for having people over.”
I agreed.
And then she went to sleep.
There are no memories. Only flashes. I stand from my sad little TV chair and go to the island to get more wine. I call a friend who does not answer. I stand from my sad little TV chair and go to the island to get more wine. I call another friend who does not answer. I stand from my sad little TV chair and go to the island to get more wine. I switch on a movie I’m too drunk to watch. I stand from my sad little TV chair and go to the island to get more wine. I hit FaceTime on my college text chain and somehow connect with all of them at once, on video, and watch as their faces crumble from looks of excitement to looks of fret. I stand from my sad little TV chair and go to the island to get more wine.
Once we’d gotten home, I assumed I’d made a beeline to pass out, but instead I hunched like an animal at the kitchen island, gorging myself on whatever I pulled from the fridge.
Time is gone, I feel no feelings, a man hiding from himself.
I get more wine.
I get more wine.
I am a man, failing.
***
The next morning, light streamed through the shutters and bathed the wreck of me in a soft, warm glow. When my wife came in, she did not speak — did not have to, so clear was the pain in her eyes.
“I’m finished,” I said.
The words came without thought.
My wife looked out the windows.
“I’m finished,” I said again.
I’ll never quite know why it happened then. Why not the day prior or 10 years back? Why not never? All I know is, if you’re a person surrounded by love, you’re lucky. All I know is, if you’re a drunk, you either stop drinking or you die a drunk.
I stood, poured coffee, and rubbed the heads of my two children. I kissed their fat cheeks and made for the porch.
I phoned my brother- and sister-in-law, then my in-laws.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and they said they loved me.
“I lost myself,” I said, and they said that I had.
I held my wife and said, over and over, how ashamed I was.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
***
Later that morning, we drove the boys to Port Royal, where there was a grubby beach but a beach nonetheless. They called it the Redneck Riviera. Once the kids lost themselves stomping in tide pools and chasing tiny crabs, I drifted to the parking lot and pulled out my phone. I hammered out a text to all my close friends:
After a bad few months, I’ve made the decision to quit drinking. I’m not going to AA. I am just tired of being this version of myself. I cannot be a drunk while raising these boys. I know I have your support.
The replies came fast, and though every person said it differently, every message was the same.
This is good. This is right. We love you.
“You will never regret this,” one friend said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but what about – ”
“You will never regret this,” he said again.
***
The sun moved, shadows lengthened. There was a breeze and seafoam and the crashing of waves. My wife watched the children, and I watched my wife. The wine burned in my veins, and my head throbbed, but once it was done, I told myself, it’d be done for good. I’d endured nearly six months of self-destruction. I saw then I had no plan for where to go from here, but in my heart, scared and bruised though it was, I knew it didn’t matter. All that mattered was I was here. All that mattered was I was having this moment.
“We’ve been talking about coming here all summer,” my wife said as we strapped the boys back in their car seats.
“Well I’m glad we finally made it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”
***
Days later, sober as a judge before my laptop in the townhouse’s dining room, a room where few meals had been eaten but where I’d written through hangovers all summer long, I logged in for my first session with a therapist. My counselor — a hardy and whip-smart Harley-Davidson enthusiast, comically named Dr. Bliss — told me all the ways she could help me, and as she neared the end of her spiel, she paused.
“So how old are you?” she asked.
“Thirty-five.”
“And who will you be at 50?”
My mind did the math.
“My son,” I said. “My older son will be a senior in high school.”
She smiled.
“But who will you be?”
The right answers were obvious: Sober. A better husband and dad and writer.
But what I said was, “I just want to be a person who loves himself. A person who gives love. I want to know why I’ve hurt myself for so many years.”
She nodded and laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“You’re so introspective. And hard on yourself. I guess I’m just wondering why it took you so long to start therapy.”
I answered without thinking, “Because I knew they’d tell me to quit drinking.”
IV
At summer’s end, my family, my wife’s family, and all the kids and grandkids made the trip north for a week in Cape May, New Jersey. In our days there, wrangling toddlers beside the Atlantic, wandering from one rental to the next in an endless loop of family lunches, happy hours and dinners, I never once brought up my choice to quit. I chased my sons on the beach, made chitchat over dinner without wine by my plate, and brimmed glass after glass with fizzy water and lime.
One morning, while everyone else loaded carts with sunscreen and plastic pails for another day on the shore, I drove two hours back to our campus home to supervise while movers got all our belongings back into place. The new A/C outpaced the August heat with ease, and as I watched a crew of burly, tattooed dudes lug sofas and cribs around corners and up stairs, I had the sense that all that’d happened here — the pandemic, the beginning of my bad days — had been erased.
“Must be weird,” the crew boss said. “Moving back into your old place.”
“My man,” I told him, “you have no idea.”
***
Our final morning in Cape May was nothing special — just harried people scrambling to pack. Everyone was hungover and grumpy. Everyone except for me.
Down in the garage, we said goodbye to my mother- and father-in-law, my brother- and sister-in-law, and their two little girls. We did one final sweep and made for the Subaru.
I started the engine and looked at my wife.
“Are we ready?”
“I think so,” she said.
And we were. The boys were strapped in, we had plenty of masks, and Raffi shouted from the speakers, “Now’s the time to rise and shine!”
We’re going home, I thought, and for that I was thankful.
Now all I had to do was live the rest of my life.
***
William Torrey is Writer-in-Residence at St. Andrew’s school. His work has appeared widely in national literary magazines and has recently received support from the Delaware Division of the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. This July he will be a Resident in Fiction at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands