The Human Stain

Walking alone to my car after Faunia's funeral, I still had no way of knowing who at the college might have had the turn of mind to conjure up the clytemnestra posting—the most diabolical of art forms, the on-line art form, because of its anonymity—nor could I have any idea of what somebody, anybody, might next come up with to disseminate anonymously. All I knew for sure was that the germs of malice were unleashed, and where Coleman's conduct was concerned, there was no absurdity out of which someone wasn't going to try to make indignant sense. An epidemic had broken out in Athena—that's how my thinking went in the immediate aftermath of his death—and what was to contain the epidemic's spreading?

It was there. The pathogens were out there. In the ether. In the universal hard drive, everlasting and undeletable, the sign of the viciousness of the human creature.

Everybody was writing Spooks now—everybody, as yet, except me.

I am going to ask you to think [the fac.discuss posting began] about things that are not pleasant to think about.

Not just about the violent death of an innocent woman of thirty-four, which is awful enough, but of the circumstances particular to the horror and of the man who, almost artistically, contrived those circumstances to complete his cycle of revenge against Athena College and his former colleagues.

Some of you may know that in the hours before Coleman Silk staged this murder-suicide—for that is what this man enacted on the highway by driving off the road and through the guardrail and into the river that night—he had forcefully broken into a faculty office in Barton Hall, ransacked the papers, and sent out as e-mail a communication written purportedly by a faculty member and designed to jeopardize her position. The harm he did to her and to the college was negligible. But informing that childishly spiteful act of burglary and forgery was the same resolve, the same animus, which later in the evening—having been monstrously intensified—inspired him simultaneously to kill himself while murdering in cold blood a college custodial worker whom he had cynically enticed, some months earlier, to service him sexually.

Imagine, if you will, the plight of this woman, a runaway at the age of fourteen, whose education had ended in the second year of high school and who, for the rest of her brief life, was functionally illiterate. Imagine her contending with the wiles of a retired university professor who, in his sixteen years as the most autocratic of faculty deans, wielded more power at Athena than the president of the college. What chance did she have to resist his superior force? And having yielded to him, having found herself enslaved by a perverse manly strength far exceeding her own, what chance could she possibly have had to fathom the vengeful purposes for which her hard-worked body was to be utilized by him, first in life and then in death?

Of all the ruthless men by whom she was successively tyrannized, of all the violent, reckless, ruthless, insatiable men who had tormented, battered, and broken her, there was none whose purpose could have been so twisted by the enmity of the unforgiving as the man who had a score to settle with Athena College and so took one of the college's own upon whom to wreak his vengeance, and in the most palpable manner he could devise. On her flesh. On her limbs. On her genitals. On her womb. The violating abortion into which she was forced by him earlier this year-and which precipitated her attempt at suicide—is only one of who knows how many assaults perpetrated upon the ravaged terrain of her physical being. We know by now of the awful tableau at the murder scene, of the pornographic posture in which he had arranged for Faunia to meet her death, the better to register, in a single, indelible image, her bondage, her subservience (by extension, the bondage and subservience of the college community) to his enraged contempt. We know—we are beginning to know, as the horrifying facts trickle out from the police investigation-that not all the bruise marks on Faunia's mangled body resulted from damage inflicted in the fatal accident, cataclysmic as that was. There were patches of discoloration discovered by the coroner on her buttocks and thighs that had nothing to do with the impact of the crash, contusions that had been administered, some time before the accident, by very different means: either by a blunt instrument or a human fist.