I spent a week in Littleton, Colorado, in August 2000, trying to understand what had happened. I was doing a piece with a co-writer for a website, and a Littleton City Council member gave us a guided tour of the area. (He wouldn't take us to the school, so we dropped by on our own later and were on the receiving end of countless, and justified, scowls from students.) He took great pains to explain that Columbine was not, in fact, within Littleton city limits; the school just used the city in its mailing address, and journalists used it in their datelines. "Shame, people will always associate it with us," he said. "Just a misunderstanding, really."

I'm not sure what I was expecting; it seemed such unimaginable evil. I expected, while driving into the city, for the skies to part, for a plume of smoke to be permanently ensconced above the city. But it wasn't like that at all. It was just any other city, like any other place, like any other school.

Dave Cullen's book, which I interviewed him about for New York Magazine, for a story that I cull some of this curiosity, did the best it could to explain the unexplainable, but there's a chasm between normal human understanding and what happened there. Confronted with the lack of recognizable human logic, we have provided our own, to make us feel better, to profit, to justify the way we see the world. If we are Christian, the shooting showed the imperative of others sharing our faith. If we were unpopular in high school, it cast a light on the dangerous petri dish of public schooling. If we believe in gun control, it reflected the recklessness of the gun lobby and our country's frightening obsession with firearms.

But none of these things seemed to have anything to do with Columbine. It was just about two boys, stupid and vain, one dangerously charismatic, the other painfully awkward and tragically impressionable. Together, they decided that murdering as many people as possible was the only logical action; the book argues convincingly that the shock of their attack does not come from the fact that they killed thirteen people but that they didn't kill more. Had the propane bombs they'd planted in the cafeteria gone off as planned, sending surviving students streaming out into the school's parking lot where Eric and Dylan were waiting, they could have killed more than 500. Had not everything gone awry, in spite of their meticulous planning, they would have.

They, like most high-school kids, were motivated by nothing more than their own warped desires and limited worldview. Their sins were unforgivable but consistent with their tunneled perspective. In the wake of their murders, though, we could cop no such plea of ignorance. We should have known better. Columbine brought out the worst in everyone. The famed story of Cassie Bernall, the "She said yes" martyr supposedly killed because she professed her faith in God, was quickly debunked, but that didn't stop publishers--who knew about problems with the story long before publication--from rushing a book by Bernall's mom into production. (It sold over a million copies.) Cultural commentators from Jerry Falwell to Eddie Vedder took advantage of America's hysteria to shoehorn the incident into a promotion of their own agenda. At least twelve different films have been inspired by Columbine, each with its own interpretation--from Gus Van Sant's "They were into violent video games ... and secretly gay!" in Elephant to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, which allowed Marilyn Manson to bemoan that he would have listened to Eric and Dylan, "and that's what no one did." Everybody had something to say, even though none of them had the slightest idea what they were talking about.

And none of us really know, or can. Dave Cullen comes as close as possible. But I wonder: What do The Columbine Tapes - which few people have seen, which Cullen has seen only clips - explain? Can they tell us anything? I guess if I have one question for Cullen, in the wake of his breathtaking book, it's this: Does he want to see those tapes? Will they tell him anything more? Should we want to see them? I will confess a certain morbid fascination. I want to see them. But why? Am I looking for answers where I won't find them? Am I falling prey to exactly what Cullen debunks so clearly, the notion that there's some sort of explanation?

I want answers. I know I won't find them. But I want them, nevertheless. I can't stop looking for them.