What is morally right and just is a matter of common sense of justice and fairness. For Aristotle, justice means giving people what they deserve. But what is a person’s rightful due?
When I was a law student staying at the International House of Sydney University in the early eighties , I answered an ad asking for a Chinese speaking interpreter. A barrister had needed a translator to accompany him for a visit to a Chinese client who was in jail on a charge in abetting a crime. The man was involved in a brawl where a person had been killed. A fight broke out in Chinatown and the man could have fled the scene but he had stayed behind to fight along with the others. The counsel asked him why. He answered , ‘ji hay’. In Cantonese. He meant 義氣 Yiqi in Mandarin. Two characters form such a composite word that could encompass meanings such as brotherhood, comradeship, loyalty righteousness and justice.
In I have some questions for you by Rebecca Makkai, when Bodie Kane, a successful film professor and podcaster is invited to teach a two-week course in Granby School, a New Hampshire boarding school where she spent four miserable years, instead of let sleeping dogs lie, she is inevitably drawn to the murder case of her former roommate, Thalia Keith.
For her class, Bodie has included the case in a long list of possible podcast topics relating to the history of this boarding school. One of Bodie’s students picks it up and wants to create a miniseries on the death of Thalia Keith. She was ambivalent at first, and unwittingly , as she
revisits the incident that happened in 1995 when she was in her senior year , she begins to question its apparent flaws and the very likely wrong conviction of Omar Evans, an athletic trainer at the school. Questions have been raised by the public about the conviction of Omar Evans, the school’s athletic trainer who was Black.
The story takes place in 2018 and 2022 and Bodie looks into the past through new lens of time. There were five hundred students on campus, there were dozens of faculty and Omar was the only suspect because he was alone in the same building where Thalia died. After being questioned for over fifteen hours without a lawyer present, Omar was coerced into signing a confession so the State could solve the case, but he could not recant what has been said.
I have some questions for you tackles questions about the media, the law, gender, race, and class. It talks about the harassment that Bodie and her other female friends experience in school. Bodie remembers those formative years of hers and there was this music teacher, Mr Bloch whose conduct might have been questionable but she was then young to think about how he could be linked to her roommate’s murder. Bodie had preferred not to sing and so she became the backstage girl, the tech kid to help Mr Bloch with whom she could feel free to stop by just to talk shop. Because the teacher was new, she found herself in the odd position of explaining things to him.
The story is narrated in Bodie’s voice, and she has an imaginary conversation with Mr Dennis Bloch.
‘ Because you were new and I’d at least seen Follies the previous fall, I found myself in the odd position of explaining things to you. I saw it as my choice, the way we talked as friends. I was the one who teased you. I was the one filling you in on relevant theatre gossip ; who couldn’t memorize lines, who used to date and shouldn’t be onstage together, who was likely to miss rehearsals.‘
‘ But things looked different in 2018. We were, all of us, casting a sharp eye back on the men who’d hired us, mentored us, pulled us into coat closets. I had to consider now that perhaps you were skilled at subtly eroding boundaries, making adolescent girls feel like adults.‘
The adult Bodie now reminds herself, ‘ the fact that you didn’t cross boundaries with me doesn’t mean you didn’t do it with girls less guarded, less wrapped in barbed wire.’
Bodie remembers this:
‘ More than once, before the curtain rose on opening night of a show , you looked at me and said, ” You hold my career in your hands.’
During the second Follies they worked together, Mr Bloch said:
‘I’m talking about more important things. Directing. Writing . Aren’t you into film? I don’t think you’re destined to be a backstage girl. I think you’ll wind up in charge of it all.’
She can now see how that might have made a certain kind of kid fall in love with Mr Bloch. Thankfully for her, she got something completely different from it .She had a new vision of herself, and a sense of possibility. ‘Ultimately a career.’
Bodie had a tragic past. When she was eight, Ace, her fifteen year old brother accidentally killed their dad who was running a failing bar. Her mother was mid breakdown and let some Mormon missionaries into their house. When she was eleven, Ace, high on more than one thing either jumped off the roof of a shoe store or fell off. Her mother finally lost it. They were then taken care of by a wealthy Mormon couple, the Robesons, and she was subsequently sent to Granby where her tuition fee and room and board and books were paid by the Robesons.
Bodie muses,
‘Here is what I want to say to you:
When I was still raw and unformed, everyone failed me. No one was permanent. Back home there were people with good parts to them, but one the whole, they couldn’t be relied on. By fourteen, my bitten understanding was that I could rely on myself and only myself. So here I was in a place that looked nothing like home, and I was an island. You were one of the only people who saw me as that — as an island -and made me feel good about it .
We’re meant to reject the selves we were at fourteen, meant to grow and learn. That college therapist worked so hard to convince me to trust, to find people I could rely on, to believe they wouldn’t vanish on me. ‘
Thalia was a junior transfer. For straight boys at that age, it’s less about the girl than the competition. As the new girl, she became the object of collective interest.
‘A Thalia-specific bingo card started making the rounds of the boys’ dorm bathrooms, a sheet on which they could initial squares that said things like touched outside clothes or under clothes above waste(this spelling error gleefully reported to me by Geoff Richler ), or asked out, or fucked. The only initials he believed, Geoff said, were the five guys who claimed to have already asked her in September to homecoming. But I saw what was happening – boys running up to Thalia and poking her arm so they could sign the outside-clothes square. Thalia laughed so confidently that she managed to own the joke, laughed so beautifully and so well that it was clear to anyone watching that these boys were her friends whether or not they’d ever spoken to her. She laughed like someone who’d known them for years. An “Oh,Marco, that’s how you’ve always been” laugh when – did she even know that was Marco Washington running up to stroke her hair?‘
Thalia and Bodie were roommates but they were not close. Now that Bodie and the others are looking to re-open the case, there are other suspects such as Thalia’s boyfriend, Robbie and Mr Bloch. Had the investigators asked Bodie questions about her roommate’s love life or the planner that the victim had kept , she could have offered some information. Their focus was entirely on whether she knew anything about the night she died. After they graduated, Omar Evans was convicted and the part of the evidence against him was Thalia’s alleged statements about some older guy and now there is a free Omar site. A motion for retrial finally took place in March of 2022. Some of the former students are now testifying. A Youtuber, Dane Rubra ‘had fixated most recently on the theory of both Robbie and Thalia leaving their dorms in the middle of the night to drink, Thalia’s time of death being incorrect, Robbie having a ‘roid rage issue‘.
Through the flashbacks, you get that most of the kids at the boarding school were entitled, the boys were misogynist and the girls mean. Bodie was a misfit and is damaged due to the banters and harassment that she had encountered. She has since got rid of excess weight and is now successful and attractive in her forties. She also has the ability to re-evaluate the validity of the memory of her own and collectively. Will there be a retrial? Will justice prevail or as Bodie responds to her school friend, Mike Stiles:
‘The wheels of justice came off the wagon a long time ago.’
Mr Evans will need new evidence that would upend the case and that this was evidence his original lawyers should have found – it is indeed a long shot.
The novel is 435 pages long. Rebecca Makai’s prose is descriptive and her observations insightful.I have some questions for you by Rebecca Makkai is a page-turner and a timely read.
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