The landscape, she told me, was what Dalí saw outside the window of his single-room shack in Portlligat, a small fishing settlement in Spain. We were looking at the Mediterranean Sea and the Serra de Rodes mountain range, rendered hyper-realistically in order to ground the surreal story taking place on the shore. Over the years, I would think about that contrast in relation to the mundane realism that filled my day-to-day life while the story around me continued to unfold in horrific and inexplicable ways.
On Thursday, February 9, shortly before nine in the morning, I was forty minutes into a lecture on proposed reform efforts to the Florida grand jury at the same time a seventh grader named Kimberly Leach was giggling through a set of fifty jumping jacks in gym class at Lake City Junior High, about an hour and a half east of Tallahassee. Remembering that she had forgotten her prized denim purse in her homeroom class, she asked for permission to run back and retrieve it before the light rain turned heavy.
While I was scribbling down the difference between accusatorial and inquisitorial, Kimberly was rushing back to gym class with her purse tucked under her arm. While I was punctuating elect more responsible prosecutors with a question mark, Kimberly was turning to see who had called out to her to slow down before she slipped on the wet pavement. I likely raised my hand to answer the professor’s question about what organized-crime figureheads feared the most about grand juries （the promise of immunity from witnesses） at the same time Kimberly screamed. One of the teachers heard it from the second-floor ladies’ room, but she had started her period and was trying to get herself cleaned up and sorted. By the time she’d flushed and buckled her belt and gotten over to the window, there was nothing to see, and she thought perhaps it was just one of the middle schoolers dappy about the upcoming Valentine’s Day dance. Next door, they were gluing paper lace to paper hearts, threading them to make a party banner for the gym’s entrance, where the next day, Kimberly’s classmates would scuff up the floors dancing in their dress shoes.
The Persistence of Memory is most famous for its depiction of melting clocks, Denise told the crowd that day in the MoMA. Timepieces are meant to be sturdy, solid, orienting us in the world in a reliable, man-made way. But look, Pamela, she said, gesturing, see how Dalí’s clocks are soft and pliant? Time is illogical, subjective, was the interpretation. What feels like forever for one may feel like a blink of an eye for another, Denise said, laughing in this sort of astonished way.
It astonishes me too, that while I sat there in Eppes Hall, internally groaning for the professor to wrap it up—by a certain point, he was only echoing the arguments from the reading—Kimberly must have been wishing for a stay as The Defendant slowed to a stop alongside a rural dirt road deep within the Suwannee River State Park. He would have been terrifying to her from the moment she laid eyes on him. Gone were the head-to-toe tennis whites, the plummy voice, and the handicapped act, the pleas to compliant young women for help, which we’d been conditioned since birth to answer the same way he’d been conditioned since birth to expect a woman to take care of him. By the time he snatched his final and youngest victim, he was operating in a desperate and brazen state. I think often about the forces that allowed his abominable last act to occur, how, if not for the corrupt everyday men in the Colorado legislature insisting on The Defendant’s extradition for reasons other than justice, Kimberly Leach would be fifty-seven years old today. An age so young it is one year younger than Sandra Bullock.
At last the lecture came to a close, and then I was hurrying back to The House to meet the Coke delivery man, who had not received a copy of the new key and would not ever again. My trust in even those who deserved it had eroded. I had ten minutes to get there and back across campus for economic growth policy at Dodd Hall. I wanted time to slow down at the same time Kimberly was probably wishing it would speed up. When her body was finally found, the pathologist determined she had sustained a massive injury to her pelvic region before she died.
I imagine that as I hoofed it back across campus, checking the watch on my wrist, Kimberly and I were at last in sync with our experience of time. Feeling like there wasn’t nearly enough for all the things we had to do.
* * *
It would take another eight days for the casual two-knuckled rap on the door. Lunchtime on a Friday. I said a muffled hello to Detective Pickell and Sheriff Cruso through a peanut butter mouth. Their faces were pleasant but bordering on impatient.
“We left word for you,” Cruso said.