The Office of Historical Corrections(48)

Though he was a political scientist, not a historian, I had taken a jointly listed class with Nick my first year in graduate school, but our dalliance had not begun until the next fall, when we found ourselves trapped in a cocktail party corner with a drunk senior faculty member who said he wasn’t complaining, exactly, about political correctness, but he did miss, sometimes, humor, or the capacity for particular kinds of observation, that he had told a harmless joke and his undergraduates had complained that it was racist. Alarmed that he was going to segue into the joke, and I was about to learn who would laugh and who wouldn’t, I intervened brightly to suggest that I too sometimes worried my funniest jokes might offend, for example, A white man walks into a room. While everyone waited for the punch line, I excused myself and headed to the porch. That’s it, I called behind me. That’s the whole joke. Everything else disappears.

Nick had appeared outside beside me a few minutes later. He put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a firmer squeeze than was comforting.

“I would have said something if he’d told his joke,” said Nick.

“Isn’t it nice that we’ll never have to know if that’s true,” I said, and after we shared a cigarette we left the party together and stayed intermittently together for the next two years. Once I was alone again, navigating my way through a beautiful but bleak Eau Claire winter and trying to find the people and places welcoming enough to feel like home, I realized I had become so accustomed to Nick’s presence that it was surprising again when I went places and people treated me like myself. It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polis, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met. It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst. I couldn’t, of course, say any of that aloud, though what minimal decorum I had I’d only recently reacquired: I’d become accustomed to Nick shielding me from the more outrageous things I said. Without him, I had to relearn a certain modulation. Back in DC, first with men whose birthdays and favorite colors I didn’t bother memorizing, and then eventually with Daniel, I’d had to learn again how to watch a man move through the world and calibrate his every step to be disarming, how to watch a man worry about his body and the conditions under which someone might take his any gesture the wrong way. I’d had to remember back to high school, when my heart belonged only to boys my color, to whom I had to insist that no one else’s disrespect of me was worth a fight, was worth what a fight would cost them. That Daniel could only assume everything about my relationship with Nick had been exploitative bored me. That it wasn’t only Nick that Daniel would have hated, but the person I became when I was with him, cockier, more reckless, willing to take it all for granted: that kept me up at night, or at least, sometimes it kept me up, or as a metaphor it kept me up. In Nick’s room, in his platform bed, under the locally made quilt, I in fact slept very well.



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Over breakfast we skirted the issue of my purpose for being there. The night before I’d withheld most of the details—pled state secrets and repeated back to him the years-ago insults he’d lobbed at my work. “It wouldn’t interest you why I’m here,” I said, knowing full well nothing interested Nick like a mystery. At his breakfast table, after eating locally made yogurt and granola I caved and explained the background of the case. I wanted him to come with me and do the magic thing that made strangers in small towns more welcoming, and I wanted, I supposed, another read on the situation.

He offered to drive me all the way to Cherry Mill, since I hadn’t picked up my rental car yet. In the car, he gave me what felt like the tourism board’s official spiel on everything charming to discover there. I was certain it would indeed be charming, but the Upper Midwest made me moody; people made me feel like I was being asked to speak a language I’d never learned and in which I was constantly misunderstood. When I lived here, it had taken me months to recognize that the pushy advice strangers gave about things like where to buy cheaper bottled water and which store was having a sale were not meant to be intrusive or judgmental or presumptuous but simply friendly, that they were considered friendly whether or not I experienced them that way, and even more months for me to understand that long meandering conversations full of small talk, the kind I considered a brief prelude to real human interaction, were never going to open up into genuine discussions or open expressions of feeling on their own, they were only going to restart on a loop. Once I had offended a Minnesotan colleague at IPH by saying it was no surprise this region was full of serial killers because what could be easier than being a horrifying person in a community where gossip and open conflict were shunned. The next day I found affixed to my desk a corrections sticker noting that most serial killers came from California, followed closely by Florida.

So far as history recorded there had never been a serial killer in Cherry Mill. True cherry-growing country was farther north, in Door County. I’d made the drive up with Nick the summer we’d spent here together and had to concede it was idyllic, even though I didn’t like cherries and distrusted lakes. Cherry Mill was in the Fox River Valley, just south of a cannery and situated in between two paper mills. It was close enough to Lake Winnebago that it picked up vacation traffic, though mostly from visitors who couldn’t travel far. Still, I recognized in the solicitous festivity of the two blocks that comprised downtown something of the energy of DC in summer, the desperate language of tourist traps everywhere, selling a performance for people eager to believe they’d found whatever they’d come for.