On April 16, 2007, a young man who had been one of my students the previous semester walked into a building on campus armed with a 9mm Glock 19 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, chained the doors closed behind him, and proceeded to murder everyone who came into his line of vision. By the time he shot himself in the head, with police finally breaking through the chained doors, thirty-three people were dead and seventeen more were wounded. Within hours after these events, editors and news people, friends and colleagues began asking me to talk about what had happened. They wanted, or hoped for, some insight into the carnage, some way of understanding what would drive this particular young man to this particularly horrifying massacre. They thought, reasonably, since I had written about violence in much of my fiction, I might have something to say about this act of real violence, committed by a real person, someone I had known as my student. I didn’t then, and I don’t now know what to say about the murders at Virginia Tech on Four-Sixteen.

I grew up in Brooklyn, on Ainslie Street, in Williamsburg, in the basement apartment of a house owned by my grandmother. Once, while sitting with my twin sister in front of the television in that apartment, the door behind us splintered off its hinges as something crashed into it from outside. Then there was screaming when my mother swooped down and lifted us from the floor as the door flew open. Before my mother carried us into the bathroom and locked the door, I caught a glimpse of my uncle as he barged into the room, fists readied for my father who was charging toward him from the kitchen.

These were two men who loved each other. I don’t know what the fight was about.

April 11, 2008. I’m thinking of a news story about a father who came home from work expecting to find his house empty and then shot and killed his teenage daughter, who was in her bedroom, cutting school. She hid in her closet when he came in. He heard a noise and got out his gun. In my memory of the news story, the daughter’s last words were “I love you.” He had gone into her room, pulled open her closet door, and shot the figure hiding behind clothes. I can’t recall how long ago I heard this story, and I’m not sure about the details, so I go to Google and enter “father shoots daughter” in the search field. I get 339 hits. Many are recent news about a father who shot his daughter after finding her on Facebook. These are some of the others:

• Father Shoots Daughter, Himself (03/24/2008)
• abc11.com: Father shoots daughter and cousin, 12-year-old cousin . . .
• Father Shoots Daughter for Being Too Fat NAAFA Newsletter September 1989,

Curious now, I go back to Google and type in “father shoots son.” I get 255,000 hits. These are just a few:

• Father Shoots Son in Face—San Antonio News Story—KSAT San Antonio (02/15/2008)
• Father Shoots Son After Xbox Dispute, Cops Say (02/07/2008)
• Father shoots son instead of burglar (04/09/2008)
• Father shoots Son After Argument Over Money—from TBO.com

I type in “husband shoots wife.” 275,000 hits. “Man shoots woman.” 325,000 hits. “Woman killed in shooting.” 702,000 hits. “Man killed in shooting.” 1,710,000 hits.

More than once, in a rage, my father intentionally crashed his car into another vehicle. The crash I remember happened on Christmas Eve, when I was a child. The moment of the crash and the moments immediately after the crash are vivid. My father and mother are in the front. We pull up in front of our apartment in Brooklyn. It’s late and there’s no place to park. I’m sleepy and warm stretched out on the floorboards behind the back seat—in those days before seatbelts were required. My older sisters are sitting in the back with my sleeping twin. The car stops in front of our home. My father has told the neighbors that the parking spot on the street in front of our house belongs to us. He reasons that his family owns the house and that ownership includes the parking spot in front of it. Others apparently don’t agree, as our next-door neighbor’s car is parked there. My father says something under his breath in Italian. My mother says something back, also in Italian. Then our car lurches forward into the parked car, and the next thing I know I’m in the front seat, in my mother’s arms, and I’m surrounded again by shouting.

Those days, the days of my childhood, there was a lot of shouting. My father was a house painter, a good-looking man of average height, with a broad chest and muscular arms and shoulders. He was a powerful man. I once saw him rip the shirt off the back of a local kid, a hoodlum all the young kids feared. I don’t recall much of the incident, just a single image, vivid, of the kid trying to run away as my father grabbed him by the back of the collar and kicked him in the ass as if he were punting a football. Just that snapshot: my father’s right foot extended, making contact, his left hand grasping the collar of a white shirt while the guy is running away, his shirt ripping off his back. Kids shouting. Neighbors shouting.

Mostly, I remember images, moments:

An ironing board set up in the kitchen, in front of the sink. A pile of dishes on one end of the ironing board and my father smashing them one a time, hurling them to the floor, each time with a leap. He jumps up and as his feet come off the ground he hurls a plate, held in both hands, to the floor. He’s shouting. My mother is somewhere not in the picture, shouting.

I’m a child sitting on my butt in front of the open refrigerator while my mother holds an ice pack to my eye. My father has just knocked me across the room and my eye is rapidly swelling. My mother shouting. My father watching, his eyes hard but with a hint of worry over what he might have done.

I’m a teenager sitting at the kitchen table. My twin sister has just started her first job working a cash register and someone conned her with an old scam that involved breaking a twenty. My father is at the head of the table, as always, and he listens with disgust to my sister’s story and then picks up a full pitcher of lemonade from the table and hurls it at the wall over her head. The pitcher shatters and my sister’s blouse is soaked. Much shouting. Much screaming.

I’m older, in my twenties. I’m kneeling by the couch in our Long Island home, next to my father, who’s a few weeks away from dying of cancer. We’re sharing a cigarette. He takes a drag and hands the cigarette to me and then he talks a bit while I take a drag. We go back and forth like that. My sisters are playing a game in the kitchen. He says, of my sisters, “I love to hear them laughing.”

That Christmas Eve in Brooklyn, the night he crashed into a neighbor’s car, we were returning from his mother’s house where there’d been a big fight again, with Johnny, the brother who’d smashed through our front door. They were close, those two, and always fighting. In the living room of my grandmother’s house a dozen relatives restrained Johnny on one side of the room, and Joe, my father on the other. Shouting. Lots of shouting. My memory is that the fight happened at my grandmother’s, and we all drove home, and then my father crashed the car into a neighbor’s car. But I can’t be sure about the fight at my grandmother’s. There were a lot of fights at my grandmother’s. I remember the car crashing into the car with certainty. I remember flying into the front seat and winding up in my mother’s arms as a neighbor came out of the front door of her apartment screaming and grasping a fork in her upraised hand as if it were a knife. She ran down a stoop toward my father. I saw more neighbors rushing out of their apartments and more shouting as big snow flakes fall in a flurry over Ainslie Street, onto the pavement and the houses, our neighbors all out up and down the block, shouting.

I was seventeen my first time. It was a warm spring night at the end of April, and I was a senior in high school. We were living on Long Island then, in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. I climbed out my bedroom window and walked about three miles in the late-night suburban silence, a little after 3 A.M., a weekday night. I walked along the deserted main road for most of the journey, before turning onto the dark, unlighted, woods-bracketed road that led into my girlfriend’s upscale development. Where I lived, houses were fairly close together—nice houses, but row upon row of them. Where she lived, the houses were what we’d call now McMansions, lots of space around them, lots of landscaping, long driveways. I remember the walk through that neighborhood clearly, even now, some forty years later, because the streets were so dark, the only illumination coming from porch lights or the various versions of nighttime exterior lighting. I was alone in the world, my blood humming, walking through the night for miles to my girlfriend’s house, where we had made plans to meet. She was supposed to leave a ladder leaning against the garden shed in her backyard. I was supposed to quietly move the ladder to her bedroom window, which she would leave open a crack. Quiet was a key word, since her father was in the military and we definitely did not want to wake him. Her parents slept in a room down the hall from her.

You’re probably expecting something to go wrong at this point, as usually happens in such a story. But, no, the plan worked. I walked to her house, crossed her front yard to a gate that opened into her backyard, where I found a ladder leaning against the shed, moved it gingerly to her open bedroom window, crept quietly into her room where she was waiting, and got into bed with her.

Things went as planned that night, but since then I’ve occasionally thought . . . what if? Her father was a military guy with, as I recall it, a drinking problem. What if he had been up that night, for whatever reason? What if he had been looking out his study window and seen someone walking along the road at 3:30 in the morning, then stop at his house and cross his lawn into his back yard? What if he had armed himself and crept out into the yard only to see the figure of a man climbing a ladder into his daughter’s bedroom window? Or what if he had been drinking that night and he had found me with his daughter? I broke into the man’s house. I went to bed with his sixteen-year old daughter.

When you’re seventeen, the “what-ifs” don’t really register.

This is a summary of “The Instruments of Peace,” one of my short stories: A man, fearful of the violence in his own heart, turns his back on a violent upbringing on the streets of Brooklyn, only to find himself, as a grown man and the father of a teenage daughter named Amy, harboring Chad, a young criminal, on the farm he mangages in upstate New York. When he learns that two killers are coming for Chad, whom he has reason himself to hate at that point in the story, he considers letting them kill the boy, but again rejects violence and warns him. He leaves the farm for the evening, expecting Chad to run from the killers, but when he returns he finds that Chad has brutally murdered the two men and left their bodies in a stall with HM, a fractious race horse. This is the ending of the story, as he walks out of the barn after having found the battered and bloody bodies:

I made my way toward my house, as if moving to a place of safety, a place where I could rest and figure things out. I touched my face and felt that both my hands were slick with still-wet blood—and for a moment then I must have lost my mind because I stood there in that field thinking I had murdered them, those two kids in HM’s stall, those boys who were only Chad’s age if not even younger. It lasted a second or two, that belief, that knowledge that I was the murderer, before I solved the equation and understood that the bars of the stall must have been bloody and I got blood on my hands when I gripped them. But it lingered, that sense that I was the murderer. I was shaken. I struggled across the pasture toward the house, surrounded by the peace of dark mountains and fields, knowing only that I needed to get cleaned up before Amy saw me. I didn’t want to frighten her. I didn’t want her to see me with blood all over my face and hands. I didn’t want her to wonder who I was.