The Fourth State of Matter

Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” was originally published in the print edition of The New Yorker on June 17, 1996. “The Fourth State of Matter” is a piece of creative nonfiction in the braided essay format focused on grief, loss, and shock due to proximity to the 1991 University of Iowa shooting in the space-physics department, where the author, Jo Ann Beard, worked as an editor for the department’s space-physics monthly publication. The essay probes and investigates the violent shooting perpetrated by Gang Lu, a disgruntled physics student in the department, against five colleagues before Lu died by suicide.

Born in Moline, Illinois, in 1955, Beard is a creative nonfiction writer, essayist, journalist, and novelist. Beard has won the Whiting Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Oprah Magazine, and Best American Essays, among others. Her books include The Boys of My Youth (1999), In Zanesville (2011), Festival Days (2021), and Cheri (2023). Beard teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

This study guide references the digital edition of this piece available on The New Yorker’s website.

Content Warning: This summary references gun violence and suicide.

Jo Ann Beard opens the essay with her aging collie waking her each night from a deep sleep to go outside. Waiting for her dog to finish her business, Beard looks out from the back of the house at the yard.

Squirrels “turn over in their sleep” (Paragraph 3); the sky reveals the Milky Way “like something erased on a blackboard” (Paragraph 3), along with a flashing Mars and a hidden Jupiter. These celestial images herald Beard’s professional life—she works with “space physicists” at the University of Iowa (Paragraph 3) who are central to this essay. Here, Beard plants the first seed of the fate that awaits her coworkers: “Guys whose own lives are like ticking alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet” (Paragraph 3). The dog interrupts this transcendent moment, waiting to be carried back into the house. The two return to bed, only for the collie to awaken Beard again in just a few hours.

Beard introduces another haunting figure, her “vanished husband” (Paragraph 6). Beard explains that squirrels are currently “living in the spare bedroom upstairs” where “the husband’s belongings are stored” (Paragraph 6), filled with old textbooks, thrifted suit coats, Rolling Stones T-shirts, and Halloween costumes. The squirrels, along with her elderly collie, who can no longer climb the stairs, have banished Beard to the first floor due to their nocturnal activity.

The essay oscillates between the collie and her recurring accidents, the husband via daily phone calls, and the squirrels behaving loudly each night.

Arriving at work, Beard checks her office phone’s answering machine and has three messages: one from a condescending scientist calling about the publication she manages and two from her “vanished husband” (Paragraph 6). Christopher (Chris) Goertz, professor, editor, international speaker, and leader of a theoretical-plasma-physics team of graduate students and research scientists, is Beard’s closest colleague and apparent boss in the department. Chris strides into the scene as Beard finishes listening to her messages, believing Beard’s outburst, “Damn it” (Paragraph 22), might be directed at him. The two converse briefly. Gang Lu, a graduate student, drops reports by the office.

Beard and Goertz soon discuss her ongoing marital tribulations. For the reader, Beard notes the series of gifts Goertz has brought her over the course of their friendship: “a small bronze box from Africa with an alligator embossed on the top, a big piece of amber from Poland with the wings of flies preserved inside it, and, once, a set of delicate, horrifying bracelets made from the hide of an elephant” (Paragraph 30). The images of these gifts begin to characterize Beard’s and Goertz’s relationship as stronger than that of just friendly coworkers.

Chris sits before a chalkboard and examines it, noticing a chalk drawing depicting him with a coffee cup (Paragraph 27). They discuss how it was drawn by multiple members of the office. Beard acknowledges that Chris allows her to work a nontraditional schedule.

Beard recounts that Goertz’s current obsession lies with “the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings” (Paragraph 31). Plasma is said to be the fourth state of matter. Beard redirects the conversation in what she describes as “a weak moment” toward her personal life, including her impending divorce and her ailing collie (Paragraph 34). Chris skips the husband to focus on why Beard hasn’t had the dog euthanized, suggesting, “You can decide how long she suffers” (Paragraph 38). These conversations of the collie’s imminent death continue to foreshadow the forthcoming deaths at the hands of Gang Lu, a graduate student in the department.

The narrative shifts to Beard’s home and her battle against the squirrels occupying her spare bedroom. Her friend Caroline, “an ex-beauty queen” who is particularly good with animals (Paragraph 41), arrives to help remove the squirrels from Beard’s spare bedroom. Outside of this physical aid, Caroline also counsels Beard about her dying dog and her husband’s borderline harassment: “You’re living with this crap?” (Paragraph 50), Caroline probes. Beard insists, “I need to call him back because he’s suffering” (Paragraph 53). Caroline shuts this down and proceeds to gear up with elbow-length leather gloves to begin the process of removing the squirrels. After she successfully does so, the two celebrate with a plate of nachos. Night begins to fall, and Caroline leaves. Even with the squirrels evicted from the home, Beard continues to sleep downstairs with the collie, and her two younger dogs nest in what had been the squirrel-occupied spare bedroom.

Back at the office, Beard walks in on a conversation where her colleagues, including Chris and Chris’s best friend, Bob Smith, are “speaking in physics” and using the blackboard to illustrate their points in the form of “a curving blue arrow” and green “radiating chalk waves” (Paragraph 70). Gang Lu enters and “stiffly” talks to Chris while Bob puffs at his pipe (Paragraph 76). Linhua Shan knocks not long after and waits to speak with Chris.

The essay moves out of Beard’s consciousness for a moment and enters Gang Lu’s. The narration describes his resentment about Chris’s “glacial” bossiness, Bob’s condescension, and what he perceives as Beard’s dismissiveness of him (Paragraph 80), as well as his jealousy over Shan’s treatment as the department favorite. Beard also indicates a change in Lu’s behavior as he’s traded in nights at the computer lab for nights at the firing range.

The narration shifts back to Beard and her collie, who is increasingly fragile. This time, the collie has fallen down the stairs.

It’s Friday morning, and Beard does not have much of a to-do list. Beard draws the collie haunting her on the board with “‘X’s where her eyes should be” (Paragraph 84). Chris walks in on the artistic rendering and the two briefly discuss his mother’s visit from Germany. Given the slow afternoon, Beard decides to leave early, which Goertz agrees with, though not before Beard erases the disturbing “X”s over the eyes of the collie.

Linhua Shan feeds the computer data and plays a computer game of golf as Gang Lu crafts his suicide letter to his sister in China outlining his plans, including killing himself. He’s armed, a .38 caliber handgun and a .22-caliber revolver in his coat. As Beard departs the building she passes Lu. She tries to say hello, but he disregards her.

Lu opens fire in the office after Beard has left. Lu’s first victims are Chris, Linhua Shan, and Bob Smith, all in a conference room for their Friday afternoon theoretical-plasma-physics team meeting. Next is the department head, Dwight Nicholson, the administrator, Anne Cleary, and the only survivor, the student receptionist, Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, who is left paralyzed. Lu then takes his own life.

Beard is at home with the collie when she receives the news from coworker Mary, but the information is chaotic and unclear. Beard attempts to call Christopher Goertz at his home, but only reaches his mother, Ursula. Beard asks that Chris call as soon as he gets home. The phone rings again and it is Chris’s wife, who braces Beard for bad news, the first confirmations of death, but whose death and who caused the death continue to come in fractured and unclear.

Friends begin to flood Beard’s home to support her. The news is playing on the television nonstop, as the group channel surfs from CNN to local news reports. Still, no names are released. Friends and family call in from across the country, but Goertz is not among them. Nine o’clock is when the names are scheduled for release. Beard retreats to a small study for a bit of quiet in this chaos.

Soon, the news comes through the as-scheduled broadcast. The dead include Goertz, Lu, Nicholson, Shan, and Smith, but Lu is clearly identified as “the lone gunman” (Paragraph 119). Not named among these victims are Anne Cleary, the administrator, who later succumbs to her wounds, and Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, the department receptionist, who survives but is paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of her life. None of these public numbers account for Christopher Goertz’s mother, who ends up dying by suicide back in Germany over the grief of losing her son.

Beard escapes to the bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror, processing this reality. Beard’s friend Julene brings the declining collie in and together, Beard and her dog reenter the chaos of the house. More calls ring in, punctuated by a knock at the door. It’s the “vanished husband” (Paragraph 6), who hugs Beard and enters the home, sitting beside her on the sofa to “help [her] get through this” (Paragraph 124). The scene—watching television on a Friday night with her husband—is eerily familiar and yet extraordinary given what is on the television.

Later that night, Beard walks her “vanished husband” to his car (Paragraph 6), the last to leave the gathering of friends supporting Beard through the aftermath of this atrocity. Beard looks up at the sky and thinks, “The sky is full of dead men, drifting the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes” (Paragraph 126).

In the empty house, Beard returns to the familiar reality of the collie having again peed inside, but the news continues to flash her new reality to her in the form of a special report. Beard shuts off the television and descends to the basement for clean bedding, but notices the eerie silence, now deafening with the absence of squirrels.

The roles between Beard and her collie reverse, as Beard wakes the collie up from her disturbingly deep slumber. Beard doesn’t go back to sleep and instead positions herself waiting for dawn so she can see the planets and the stars, relishing the “pocket of silence,” “the plasmapause,” this “place of stillness” that is the middle of the night where “the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun” (Paragraph 131).

Beard holds out the pendant of amber encapsulating “[s]hards of fly wings” Goertz brought her from Poland (Paragraph 132). In this collapsing of earth and sky, Beard seems to supernaturally connect with Chris as she asks, “Like this?” and she receives a response: “Exactly” (Paragraph 133).