There is a phrase in that documentary about John List I cannot put down. If it wasn't necessary. He said it, or near enough, about the murders of his own family. Not a scream. A conditional.
The grammar of a man balancing a checkbook.
I want to take the makers of that episode at their word, because they saw something true and stopped one room short of it. They kept returning to the ordinariness — the accountant's ledger, the eighteen years he lived afterward under another name, the second wife who slept beside him and did not know. They called it chilling. It is. But chilling is where the story ends for them, and where it has to begin for us.
The chill is not the mystery to be solved. The chill is the confession already made, in plain speech, and waved past because we could not bear to hear it as speech.
Listen to what the man offered as his defense — not madness, not rage, but budget. The money was running out. The house was failing. His wife was ill, his mother old, his children drifting toward a world he could no longer afford to keep them clean for. So he sat them at the table, one by one as they came home, and did what he had decided was, on balance, the responsible thing.
He killed them, he said, to spare them a fall in station. That is the sentence to hold up to the light. It is not the reasoning of a monster in the sense we prefer — the aberration that lives outside us, that can be caught and caged and thereby proven separate from us. It is the reasoning of a man who learned, in America, that necessity is the highest court, and that a sufficiently reasonable man may sentence anyone in its name. The slaveholder found it necessary.
The man who will not hire you finds it necessary. List only carried the theology to its final and honest address, and then he went out for coffee.
And then, of course, he joined a church. He remarried. He taught Sunday school in the sunbelt under a borrowed name. I know this move from the inside, which is the only reason I trust myself to name it. I was born into that same building.
I preached at fourteen because I needed God to make my suffering into a story with a third act — a narrator larger than my father to confirm that the pain meant something, that I meant something. That is what a church is for: it is where you go when you cannot survive your own account of yourself and require a higher one to co-sign it. List went for the reason I went. The hunger was identical: tell me that what I did was not what I did. The difference between us is everything.
The mechanism is the same pew, the same appetite for absolution dressed as understanding.
So I would carry the documentary's insight one step further than it wished to travel. The banality is not a paradox to marvel at and set down. It is an instruction. Evil does not require the suspension of the ordinary; it requires only a sufficiently furnished room in which to forget — a kitchen, a ledger, a Sunday service, a country. We built such a room and called it the reasonable life, and each of us has waited out an afternoon inside it.
The question the episode cannot ask, because it needs List to remain other, is the only one worth the fire: what have you already decided was necessary, and whose face were you refusing to look at when you decided it?
