No Outlet.

I decided, or I should say it became clear, early on that, because the “idea” of this book was not rational—well, it makes perfect sense to me but it’s not the kind of sense I could describe in simple sentences or an outline or some such thing, it’s more of an intuition that it all hangs together—that, even though the project would obviously require a lot of research, I would let the process of discovery determine the eventual shape of the book. Because one of the ideas motivating the writing of this book is that what’s erased or hidden or destroyed shapes lives and “life” as much as what is recorded, shared, archived, I knew going in that there would be some knowledge of the subjects of the book, some history, that I would be able to find and other knowledge I would not. And that I would be okay with setting out to find things and coming up blank. That very circumstance is the story.

But there’s something about a mystery. The longer and harder you look for something, the more difficult it gets to stop. In research there are no dead ends—there’s always another trail to follow, no matter that none of them looks promising; they always look unpromising until they’re not.

There’s a story I want, it was reported in local papers at the time, referred to in articles and books, mentioned on podcasts, but never from the point of view of the person at the center of the story. His story, in his words, exists, or did exist, in his testimony in a 1986 trial. I’ve seen references to the testimony several times. I was certain I could get the transcript in Chicago. I did not, but I was hot on the trail (and learning a ton about legal research in the process). I went from office to office downtown, was sent here, then there, then back to here, finally found someone who, though she didn’t have access to the transcript, told me exactly whom to call and what to ask for. When I got home, I called the court reporter’s office and they told me they didn’t have it, that something that old would have been “warehoused” at the county clerk’s office. I’d been to the county clerk already, but I called anyway, and they told me they didn’t have it, that the court reporter definitely should have it. So I called the court reporter again, spoke to a different person, and she said yes it should be there but she looked and it isn’t. (I should say that every one of these people in all these offices, in person and on the phone, took my request seriously, treated me with patience and kindness, and truly tried to help me find this transcript.)

The last evidence of this trial transcript is a record that it was requested by the post-conviction attorney, prepared, and picked up by her office in 1993. She didn’t return it and it was never seen again. (In 1986 there were no digital copies. There was often just one copy, typed up from the court reporter’s notes and passed around.) That attorney is still practicing—in fact, she’s kind of famous—so I emailed her office to ask if she still has it. I haven’t heard back.

This slipperiness of history is exactly what my book is about. The story I was chasing is about an incident that occurred in public in a small town, lots of people know the people involved, saw it unfold, most certainly everybody in town was talking about it, there are accounts of it in the local papers, in books, in articles, all of which contain obvious distortions, speculation, and omissions that were repeated from account to account, and most certainly a bunch more inaccuracies that aren’t so obvious, so I don’t trust any of it. History is like memory: the more times a story is told the further it gets from the “truth.” Even if I were to get hold of the trial testimony containing the protagonist’s own account of the thing, it would be shaped by whatever concerns he would have brought to the telling: pride, embarrassment, fear, ego. Court testimony doesn’t have any special claim to the truth.

All of which is to say that I did exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t do: I got attached to telling the story in a certain way that depended on knowledge I didn’t have but thought I could obtain.