The Costume of a Fact

When something terrible happens, we reach for one of two boxes. The person was a monster — there were signs, there always are, and if we look hard enough we’ll find them. Or the person was ordinary and something in them broke, an inexplicable flip, a good man gone wrong. After the Cumbria shootings in 2010, the tabloids ran the first play at full speed: a twenty-year-old theft, some trips to Thailand, a habit of griping about money, all of it assembled into a portrait of a man who was always a bit dodgy. The fellow cab drivers who took those same trips and killed no one did not make the portrait. They couldn’t. They were evidence for the wrong box. This is the move worth slowing down on, because almost everyone makes it and almost no one notices the order of operations. The box comes first. The evidence is recruited afterward, to fit. We tell ourselves we are reasoning from clues to a conclusion; we are mostly reasoning backward, from a conclusion we needed, to whichever clues will…