Now, seeing Rekia’s name, I was filled with the dread of ’34. I set my phone down on the coffee table and called no one back.
Instead, I turned on the TV.
The channel was still on CNN from that morning, but no longer with images of the mousy Warren Hamby with his hand on the Bible. Instead, police cars, yellow tape, and ambulances stretched around a dumpy office building with a sign for TOTAL SYSTEMS, INC. There was no question, no mystery, the chyron said it alclass="underline" KATE MORRIS, TWELVE OTHERS KILLED BY GUNMAN IN STATEN ISLAND OFFICE.
I vividly remember my first thought: Okay. It’s finally over.
I’d spent so many years terrified for her. I’d carried this anticipation of violence until the day I left Oregon, and I didn’t realize how that dread had continued to fester in every waking and dreaming moment of my life. Now this gunman had put an end to it. The worst had come. My nightmare was realized. My breathing grew shallower. I began to feel faint, and I turned off the TV. Moniza called. Her name and picture pulsed with the vibration of the phone. I left it on the coffee table and wandered out of the living room. I remember stopping to stare at the big wooden mallard on an end table. Moniza had picked it up while antiquing. Unlike Kate, who never cared at all about decorating a living space, Moniza’s hobby was perfecting our house. I often teased her about her love for this ugly wooden duck. I’d spoken to Kate only twice after I left Oregon, both times by text. Then in ’36 she sent me a short email to tell me how happy she was for me and Mo. And now Kate is gone.
I walked out to the porch and down to our garden where we’d built a wire fence to protect our patch of beans, cauliflower, and tomatoes from deer and raccoons.
Finally, I fell to one knee. I clutched the damp earth as the understanding of what had happened coursed through me, again and again. Like being electrocuted.
“Oh my god,” I whispered. I sank to my butt in the dirt. I began to sob, clutching my arms and rocking, still unable to draw enough air. The porch door clapped as Dizzy pushed through it to follow me, and I remembered how she’d looked at Kate when we saw her in the rescue shelter, and Kate had asked the lady if she shed, and I joked the dog couldn’t possibly shed as much as her. Then I was hit with a wall of our years together in D.C., how I’d find strands of her hair in every conceivable corner and surface of the apartment and how we slept in that creaky queen bed she’d found on Craigslist and how during Covid we’d taught ourselves to make vegan pizza and after the 9:30 Club reopened we would go there every weekend, no matter what, and thrash around to every undiscovered band, all the arguments and sex and debates and meals and movies and trails we hiked and promises we made, and after I left, how fucking impossible and painful it had been to move past her, to admit that I could not continue to love her or I’d have this grief exploding in my chest all day every day for the rest of my life—it all swept over me.
Dizzy came to me and blinked her old milky eyes. I gripped my dog around her neck while she pushed her snout into my cheek like she knew exactly what had happened. Then I was screaming. Begging for this not to be real. Wanting and willing to give anything, anything at all, to have Kate back.
The day after Kate’s murder, I demanded Moniza fly home from New York because I feared for her life. She had, after all, written one of the seminal pieces on Kate, had helped launch her into the upper strata of deified, vilified clickbait celebrity. I don’t recall much about that first night or even the week following the news. I was caught between wanting to demonstrate to Moniza that she was my wife, my priority, my love, and this heartbreak and guilt that obscured everything, that turned the world to misremembered fog. I barely heard what people said when they spoke. My whole family came to our house in Raleigh, which was a terrible idea. I overheard Cara tell her husband once, “She was a con artist. She played three-card monte with Matt like he was a tourist who’s never seen the game before.” We were mourning someone whom my family grew to dislike and lobby against, whom my father detested by the time we broke up. After a night, I asked them all to leave.
Sonja emailed me with the details of the funeral in Oregon. Moniza thought I should go. I wrote Sonja back and told her how sorry I was, but I couldn’t. To this day, I’m not sure if I regret it or not. Months later, I watched the service online, Holly Pietrus undertaking the impossible task of eulogizing Kate.
“Like so many martyrs, Kate was killed for the changes she demanded.”
Her voice was searing and strong. I marveled at what a different woman Holly seemed from the one I’d met in New York when her father was detained and she looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There was no hesitation or fear in her now. She was saying this with the country gripped by a harrowing crisis, stores running out of food, extremist groups murdering people with impunity, would-be dictators promising bloodshed. “What Kate always believed”—Holly clutched her chest—“what she got me to believe, what she got millions—if not billions—of people to believe, is that what we’re dreaming of? It’s already here in our world.”
When she finished, the camera cut to Sonja and Earl Morris, and I was shocked to see them standing together over the infant redwood where their daughter was buried. I’d never seen them together before, but there was Earl, his hair now mostly white, and Sonja was practically holding him upright as he wept. I suddenly felt so deeply for him. I thought of how he must have seen the world, born in the midsixties in hostile and hyper-conservative Arizona, all the abuse and racism he’d likely endured growing up at the intersection of three cultures, only to then watch his daughter move effortlessly through those spaces that wouldn’t have him, which he knew to be vicious and unforgiving. And in the end, of course, he’d been right. Those forces had come for her. Earl held on to Sonja and bawled so hard his whole body shook.
As the weeks went by and details came to light, I couldn’t help but read about the man who’d done this, David Joseph Madison, a forty-five-year-old former rideshare driver who lost his livelihood to automated cars, who had several hard drives full of material on Kate: every interview, op-ed, think piece, tweet, deepfake porn video, and the VR sex xpere. He also had a trove of his own maps and musings on her movements over the years, a detailed timeline of her travels. He had a fan fiction novel. His apartment in Macon was apparently covered in images of her. He had previous charges of domestic violence and his social media was rotten with nasty sentiments about a multitude of women in public life. He looked like any white guy drifting into middle age without much to show for himself: a severe face on a rail-thin frame, tight, beady eyes, greasy black hair parted in the middle and tucked behind each ear, a vacant stare in whatever DMV photo the media procured. Like many mass murderers of his time, he’d bought his assault rifle online and fit it with a 3D-printed bump stock. He’d used old-fashioned bullets, so he actually missed quite a bit, which was how four people had survived. None of the other dead in that Staten Island office received as much time in the spotlight, including Liza, Kate yet again soaking up much of the attention while they receded to history’s endnotes. It gave me deranged amusement to think of Liza snarking about this outcome the way I knew she would: Oh, I see, even in death I’m the workhorse and she’s the show horse. Rude.
Naturally, the conspiracy theories erupted. Those who knew Madison—an ex-girlfriend, a brother, his parents, a few drinking buddies—did not recall him ever mentioning Kate as a locus of interest. He seemed to have no ties to militia groups or other right-wing organizations and did not vote in ’32 or ’36. His politics remained hazy at best, his Slapdish worlde revolving entirely around video games. Theories held that he was a patsy, that he’d been dispatched or programmed by Vic Love or The Pastor or the CIA or the APL. Many on the right were sure that 6Degrees had set the gears in motion, that Kate was a convenient soft-target test run for the August 15 attacks. The one thing that has always stuck with me is the testimony of the surviving security guard from the Staten Island offices, Lennox Hudson. He told authorities that Madison apologized to him before pulling the trigger. “He didn’t look like a man who wanted to kill,” he testified. “He looked like a man sick with himself. Nervous and afraid and alone.”