I have been up until nearly three in the morning here in Paris, watching a man named Bob Clark, on a program called MK Confidential, walk through the life of John List — the accountant who, on a November afternoon in 1971, waited in the family house in Westfield, New Jersey, for his wife, his mother, his three children to arrive, and killed them, one by one, and then vanished for eighteen years into another life, another marriage, another town, another Sunday morning in another church. And what caught me — what has kept me at this window with the cigarette burning down to nothing — is not the horror of it, which is available to anyone, but a single conditional phrase that surfaces whenever men like List explain themselves: if it wasn't necessary. That quiet architecture. Not I wanted to, not I lost myself, but I determined, on balance, that this was the sensible thing. The reasonable man's grammar.
Clark is right to linger on the ordinariness of the figure. I only want to say: linger longer. The ordinariness is not the mystery. It is the confession.
Because we have built, in this country, an entire theology out of that little word — necessary — and then called the theology freedom. Every atrocity in the American record was committed by a man who had done his arithmetic and found the ledger balanced. The slaveholder found it necessary. The man who dropped the bomb found it necessary. The man who will not rent you the apartment, will not hire your son, will not meet your eyes on the elevator — he, too, has run the numbers, and he sleeps.
List simply carried the national logic to its conclusion inside a single house. He did not suspend his reason to do what he did. He employed it. He wrote it out beforehand in a letter, the way a man writes a memo justifying a layoff. That is the terror MK Confidential circles but does not quite name: he was not our monster.
He was our mirror, wearing our glasses, using our word.
And then, afterward, he joined a church. Of course he did. Where else does a man go when he needs his own account of himself confirmed by a louder narrator? I know that hunger. I have knelt inside it.
I preached at fourteen, in Harlem, because I needed God to arrange my suffering into a story that had a third act, a redemption, a shape I could survive. List needed God to reclassify a massacre as a mercy — to certify that he had spared his family some worse fate, poverty, godlessness, whatever the ledger required. The difference between us is everything; I will not pretend otherwise. But the mechanism, baby — the mechanism is the same congregation, the same posture, the same terrible request breathed into the same silence: tell me that what I did was not what I did.
But it is the eighteen years that will not let me sleep. Not the afternoon — the afternoons that came after. The coffee. The commute. The second wife who lay beside him and did not know she was sleeping next to a man who had waited out a whole autumn day for his children to come home so that he could end them.
We keep asking how a man does the thing, when the harder and more damning question is how a man does the ten thousand ordinary Tuesdays that follow, unhaunted enough to butter his toast. The banality is not a paradox to be marveled at and set down. It is the entire point, and we refuse it because refusing it protects us. Evil does not require the suspension of the ordinary. It has never required that.
It requires only a sufficiently furnished room — a job, a pew, a marriage, a word like necessary — in which a man can go on forgetting himself in comfort. The room is the crime. The forgetting is the second one.
So I want to push the program's fine, patient portraiture one step past where it rests. Do not ask what was wrong with John List, because that question flatters us — it lets him be a specimen, a wound in someone else's country, sealed behind glass. Ask instead what is so terribly right about him, right by the nation's own measure: the discipline, the arithmetic, the faith that a hard decision honestly reasoned is thereby cleansed. He is not the exception that proves our sanity. He is the proof itself.
And the only defense any of us has against becoming, in our smaller way, some version of that man in the furnished room is the refusal to let the word necessary do our forgetting for us — the willingness to stay awake inside our own Tuesdays, and to call the thing we did the thing we did.
