A teenage killer’s brain

Tragedies of immense scale seem to mess with our ability to distinguish space from time. “After Hiro­shima,” we say, as though the city no longer exists. Place becomes past tense. Spaces where trauma occurred are erased by the trauma itself.

Before April 20, 1999, Columbine was an unincorporated area west of Little­ton, Colorado. After Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their high school and murdered 13 people, wounded 24 others, and killed themselves, the word slipped from location to event. Grieve for the place—Newtown, Charles­ton, San Bernadino, Orlando—that makes sense to our ears when paired with before and after.

Columbine does not appear in the title of Sue Klebold’s memoir; her publisher knew that her last name would suffice. There were school shootings before Columbine and deadlier ones after, but Columbine remains a reference point. “I will spend the rest of my life reconciling the reality of the child I knew with what he did,” Klebold writes, and her book discloses both the son she knew and the son she didn’t.