Free The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson Page B

file any more. In court after court he and his lawyer insisted that he was mentally competent, that he knew what he was doing. Like Gary Gilmore before him, Ross was fighting to die. I want no gravestone, no reminders … I just want to be forgotten , he said in an interview posted on the elaborate Web site he maintained from prison.
    On this same Web site, Ross described his mental state—which is clinically (if broadly) classified as “sexual sadism”—as follows:
    I guess the easiest way to explain it is everybody’s had a tune in their head, like a melody that they heard on the radio or something. It just plays over and over again … I have that & no matter how hard you try to get rid of that melody, it’s still there. And that kind of thing could drive you nuts. But if you replace that melody now with thoughts of rape & murder & degradation of women …
    This description chilled me to the bone. It was an excellent description of murder mind.
    On January 23, 2005—the Sunday before his Wednesday execution date—the Hartford Courant was thick with Ross. I saw its front page through a cracked, graffitied newspaper box on Main Street, in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts that served as a kind of halfway house for the town’s many vagrants. The Dunkin’ Donuts was adjacent to the local theater, which was now featuring the horror movie Saw. Its poster featured a woman’s severed, bloody leg, alongside the tagline How much blood would you shed to stay alive?
    I went inside to get change, bought the edition with a fistful of quarters, and sat down at the counter to look at it.
    The front page bore several large color photographs of four girls and young women, with this text underneath them:
    These [victims] were snatched by a man who first made small talk with them, then forced them into his car or into the woods. He has admitted to raping all but one. After the rapes he forced them to roll over on their stomachs. Then he would straddle them and strangle them from behind.
    I knew these kinds of articles well. A few years back I had spent a long, sweltering summer printing out dozens of them from microfilm in the basement of the New York Public Library in service of Jane. I blasted through reel after reel of the Detroit News , keeping my eyes peeled for the row of photographs that signified the dead girls. Invariably I would get moored up in the wedding pages until I realized my error: Not dead, just married.
    Although over thirty years apart, the Detroit News and Hartford Courant articles kept to a similar script. They both paired a “she had so much to live for” sentimentality with quasi-pornographic descriptions of the violence each girl had suffered. The main difference was that the ‘60s articles used a more modest lexicon: “violated,” “co-ed,” etc.—and that they were sandwiched in between articles about the war in Vietnam instead of the war in Iraq.
    How does one measure the loss of eight young women? asked the Courant. There is no way to know what they would have done with their lives—the careers they might have pursued, the people they would have loved, the children they might have had.
    I know that I am supposed to care about these questions. Especially as the author of Jane , in which I bent over backwards to pay more attention to Jane’s life than to her death. But somehow they instantaneously make me not want to read on. How does one measure the loss of anyone? Is measurement a necessary part of grief? Is a life less grievable if its prospects for the future—here imagined as a range of career options and the potential to bear children— don’t appear bright? The people they would have loved —that was a nice touch. But what about the people they already had loved? Or what if they hadn’t loved anyone, or no one had loved them?
    More to the point, I knew that this tally of grief, along with the brutal physical details of Ross’s rapes and murders, was supposed to do more than bring tears to