by Joe Meno
One day, after Alan had been working at the supermarket for a number of months, a young woman and her two children were waiting in line to pay for their groceries. Alan was working the same checkout line, bagging, when he happened to see the mother slap her tiny son on his wrist. Alan grabbed the woman by the arm and began screaming at her. He refused to let her go until she apologized to both of her children. The woman became hysterical, which only made Alan more and more upset. The local police were quietly telephoned. They promptly arrived and Alan was arrested.
While Alan was being held in jail—waiting for his court appearance which had been scheduled for the following morning—he stole a paperclip from the public defender and cut a large gash in his right forearm. He claims he was not trying to commit suicide. He says that he was angry and only trying to get that anger out. A psychologist was appointed to his case and quickly diagnosed Alan with Residual Schizophrenia, but then changed his diagnosis to Severe Bipolar Disorder II after a three-hour interview.
Alan was only twenty-one. I was nineteen, a sophomore in college, away at school. I took a bus home right away and found both my parents sitting there in the dark, completely shocked. I tried to ask them what had happened but they were unable to speak. They just stared at the telephone, waiting for Alan to call them to say what was going to happen. Something important in them had been broken. Something precious had been impossibly fractured. None of us had any idea what to say or do. We sat at the dinner table silently, the television set the only sound in the room.
8
In 1979, on a routine flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., smoke began to rise from the rear cargo hold of an American Airlines flight; fearing the worst, the pilot made an emergency landing. It was then discovered that the Unabomber had placed an explosive device within the airplane’s cargo hold and that a poorly wired timing device was the only thing that had kept the plane from being instantly destroyed.
After his arrest, Alan was quickly remanded to our parents’ care. I was not much interested in getting involved; the sight of Alan, standing before the judge in a borrowed blue suit, terrified me. The suit was from the uncle who had died from complications due to diabetes. It made Alan look like a cadaver. I wanted to pretend that what had happened to him had not actually happened: I immediately went back to school, but then, for some reason, I stopped going to my classes. I partook of as many illegal substances as I could. I became self-centered and intolerable. I was sure that if Alan—who had always been stronger, tougher, better at dealing with the inherent difficulties of life—had gotten sick, then there would be no hope for me. I waited for something appalling, something overpowering and sharp to suddenly explode inside of me. I would lie in bed at night and hear my own heartbeat, imagining it was the sound of some kind of clock, something warning me of the precious few moments I had left before everything became sad and unfamiliar.
Back at home with Alan, my parents were also a little terrified. Alan had just begun the initial round of what was to become a long, unpredictable course of pharmacological therapy. First, he was put on a series of typical, then atypical, antipsychotic medications, then mood stabilizers, then anticonvulsants, each of which proved unsuccessful, until finally the right medication and the right dosage were achieved, nullifying his symptoms but leaving him listless, almost catatonic. (Alan’s latest prescription drug is lamotrigine. He has gained considerable weight because of this med, which is a real dilemma, since diabetes runs in the family, though he has little choice but to continue taking the medication, knowing that, sooner or later, his obesity will present severe complications.)
The first time I came back from college and saw Alan, I was in complete disbelief. It had been only a month or two after his arrest but his face was enormous now, completely round, covered in coarse brown and white hair. He ate an entire box of powdered donuts while I tried to talk to him. He was mostly silent, staring down at his hands, which were covered in white powdered sugar. When he finished eating, he stumbled back to his bed without muttering another word, then collapsed on top of his sheets. I stood there outside his bedroom door watching him sleep, wondering how much time remained before he lost control again, before he did something violent, before he hurt some other stranger, or worse, my mother or father. I knew that after their deaths, it would be up to me to take care of him. I wondered how much time remained before his problems took over again.
One night while I was back from college on a semester break, my parents went grocery shopping, leaving me alone with Alan at home for the first time since his symptoms had begun to develop. I didn’t know what to say to him then. The medications hadn’t been successful in stabilizing his mood and so I felt like he was a stranger, like he had become someone distant, someone unrecognizable. As we were watching television, it began to rain. For some reason, the sound of the rain made him incredibly anxious; he put his head on my shoulder and said he was afraid. He told me that the rain terrified him now. I think it was the first time Alan ever admitted he was frightened about anything to me, or at least the only time I could ever remember. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him that there was nothing to be afraid of. I told him it was only the rain. He told me he knew that God lived inside the rain. He thought God wanted to tell him something, but that he was too afraid to hear it. I tried to tell him there was nothing to worry about. I told him I was there with him and I wasn’t going to let anything happen. Alan asked me if I could hear God speaking. I said I thought so. We turned down the volume on the television and listened to the rain together. Each drop hit the windowpane behind us, each some sort of secret message: It was one of the few moments I could remember where Alan and I got along, where we weren’t fighting about something. I figured that Alan wasn’t really Alan anymore, that maybe the meds or the disease had made him someone else, someone more timid, someone I actually felt close to. I kept hoping that this would be it, that this would be as bad as it would ever get.
9
After the events involving American Airlines flight 444, the FBI developed the code name UNABOM (UNiversity and Airline BOMber) and began pursuing the Unabomber’s case. In the end, Theodore Kaczynski was charged with the unlawful detonation of sixteen explosives.
Alan has been arrested three more times since the first incident. The second was for attempted assault, the third for attempted assault, and the last one was for shoplifting. In the Chicago Ridge Shopping Mall a few years ago, just before his thirty-fifth birthday, Alan tried to steal a telescope. He took the display model under his arm and walked out through the front entrance. It was during a highly manic phase. He had suddenly become obsessed with astronomy, specifically the shapes of animals like Ursa Major and Leo the Lion in the sky. Again, he believed there was some connection between God and nature, this time in the animal patterns of celestial lights. As Alan hurried out with the telescope under his arm, a security guard spotted him and detained him in the parking lot, and then the local police were called, and soon enough Alan was arrested a fourth time. He was observed and re-diagnosed by a state physician as having a personality disorder, and then that diagnosis was overturned by a second court-appointed doctor at this third trial when his Severe Bipolar Disorder II diagnosis was reinstated. Because of his ongoing medical condition and because he is generally very quiet, very shy, the judges in court are always unwilling to sentence Alan too harshly. They will threaten to send him to a state institution but will once again remand him to my parents’ custody, unsure what else to do. I will go to court with my father and my brother, also unsure what we should be doing to help him.
We do not tell my mother when Alan gets arrested. My father and I do whatever we can to keep the stress of Alan’s condition from wrecking her any more than it already has. The truth is that she’s the biggest victim, the one who’s really been destroyed by this. She’s the one I’m most worried about. She’s the one who now, at the age of sixty-four, cares for him every day, a grown man who is as unsure and as volatile as an impuls
ive child. She’s the one he yells at. She’s the one who he begs, asking to borrow the car for an hour and when he returns, of course, he has wrecked it. She’s the one who, most often, has to be alone with him. Her gray hair is always uncombed now. Her hands always look like they are shaking.
10
In 1995, the Unabomber demanded that his 35,000-word manifesto be published. The manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, claims that the “Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.”
I think now how much I used to envy Alan. I envied everything about him, everything: the way he looked—tall, well-built, handsome—the way he could talk to anyone, his strength, his charm, his sense of humor, how sincere he could be, sitting there in church, staring down at his hands at the times when I thought he might be actually praying. And now. And now. Now I am lucky if, when I see him, he is a fraction of himself. Now he will be on some new severe medication which will make his voice sound tired and slow. “I wrecked the car again yesterday,” he might say. “It’s these new meds. I keep falling asleep. I blacked out while I was driving. I wrecked Mom’s station wagon. I’m not sure what happened. I hit a couple of parked cars. I actually hit six of them. I sideswiped them all. I’m okay, though. Don’t worry.” Or sometimes, sometimes he will leave a long message on my voicemail, something like: “This is Alan. I want to talk to you about something important. I want to talk to you about leopards. Do you know anything about leopards? They’re amazing creatures, Pete. Amazing. Think about this: A leopard can run almost forty miles per hour. It can leap more than twenty feet horizontally, and ten feet vertically. It’s also a very good swimmer, Pete. Leopards are probably the greatest animal ever born to this planet. And now they’re being hunted for their skins all over Africa and Asia. They’re killing them, Pete. They look out at the world with the eyes of God, Pete, and we’re killing them.”
Alan has tried writing some of this stuff down. He made a book for me a few years ago for my birthday, with drawings he had done. Because of the meds, his drawings are loose and wobbly and look like they’ve been scribbled by a child. My favorite one shows a litter of leopard cubs; all of them have long black eyelashes and they are sleeping high in a jungle tree in a blue basinet, with a string of zzzzzzzz’s rising from their tired pink mouths. For some reason, a few of the baby leopards have wings, like angels, I guess. This is a perfect portrait of who Alan is now, I think. On the back cover of the little book he made, there is his name, Alan, again and again in what appears to be different handwriting. I asked Alan what it was all about and he said it was just practice. He said he had begun to forget who he was and so was practicing writing his name to try to help him remember.
11
When the Unabomber’s manifesto was finally published in the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 19, 1995, the man’s younger brother, David, immediately recognized his older brother’s writing style and notified the authorities.
I do feel like I have betrayed my brother. I do not know what to do for him. I do not know how to help him anymore. Not too long ago when I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, I was happy to see that Alan had shaved his beard. He looked like he was trying to take care of himself. The first couple of days went well. But then, for some reason, he decided to stop taking his medication because he did not like how slow it made him feel. My mother tried to talk him into taking the meds but he wouldn’t. He said he felt like he couldn’t enjoy himself and he was sick of not enjoying himself. Things were okay for a couple of days, but by the end of the week, the day after Thanksgiving, Alan began to have a reoccurrence of his symptoms. He started yelling at my parents before he finally stormed out of the house.
About two blocks away, a woman named Theresa Howard was unloading her groceries from her car. Her daughter Amanda, a toddler, was in the passenger seat of their large black SUV, waiting to be unbuckled. For a variety of reasons, Alan has always been suspicious of black cars, especially SUVs. Something about their size intimidates him. He walked up to the car and immediately began to attack the parked vehicle. He pounded on the tinted windows with his large fists. He hit Mrs. Howard in the face a number of times, perhaps up to seven. She says she tried to keep Alan away from her daughter by scratching at his face. Mrs. Howard then found her cell phone and called the police. By the time the authorities arrived, Alan had crawled under the car and was unwilling to speak. One of the police officers had to use a stun gun to incapacitate him. The woman, Mrs. Howard, knew my mother from church and so she decided not to press charges. The damage to her vehicle was limited to a broken window and a side mirror, which my father paid to have replaced, but something had changed in my dad. He said he had stopped being able to trust that Alan could take care of himself. He said he could not trust that Alan would not hurt himself or someone else.
A few days later, my mother and father decided we needed to place Alan in an institution, at least until his symptoms stabilized. My father says it was the hardest thing he ever had to do in his life. My part was pretty simple: I was the one who had to drive my brother. What I did then was probably the worst thing I have done to anybody: I told Alan we were going for a ride, and when he asked where, I told them that a new zoo had been opened and that we were going to go visit it. I suddenly remembered who he was, that he was my older brother, and that what I was going to do to him—put him in the care of vigilant though unfamiliar strangers—was the thing Alan most feared. It was about a half hour drive to the facility, south down the interstate; Alan seemed content to play with the radio and watch the other cars fly past. I kept thinking of what I should be saying to him, how I should be preparing him, but I couldn’t speak. When I saw the exit for the facility, I almost drove past it. I had the idea that we could just keep driving, that I could take care of him and things might be okay, but then, as I’ve done again and again in my life, I took the easy way out. I exited on 159th Street and drove the few miles down the pastoral highway to the enormous gray facility. By the time we were at the gates, I think Alan knew what was happening, but he didn’t bother to resist. He didn’t make a sound. I drove up to the main entrance and two orderlies in gray-and-white uniforms helped Alan from the car. My parents were there already, filling out the paperwork. It was the first institution Alan had ever been in, even though he had been diagnosed with Severe Bipolar Disorder II nearly ten years earlier. For some reason, my parents were proud of this, that they had tried for so long to help him on their own, that, unlike me, they thought with love and understanding they would be able to cure him. But by then I guess we had all given up. I don’t think my brother will ever turn back into who he was; I don’t even know if I want him to anymore. I don’t know what I’d say to him if he did. How are you? Do you remember us? What have you been thinking all this time? Where have you been?
12
The Unabomber is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in ADX Florence, the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He is prisoner number 04475-046. He can be written at:
Theodore John Kaczynski
04475-046
U.S. Penitentiary Max
P.O. Box 8500
Florence, CO 81226-8500
After my brother had spent four months in the facility near my parents’ house, my father changed his mind and signed him out. With the facility’s help, Alan was placed in a group home on the north side of the city. He has been in and out of group homes and low-income housing for the last five years. The phone number I last had for him no longer works. I keep reminding myself to ask my mom for his new number, but I haven’t. Every so often, every week or so, Alan will call my mom t
o check in. If he forgets to call, she automatically assumes the worst, that he is in jail or dead. Sooner or later he will call though. He will say he has been too depressed to talk to anybody.
To be honest, the last time I saw Alan was seven months ago. At that point, he had gotten a part-time job at a shoe store, reshelving the merchandise. He was shaving and taking a bath every day. His face almost looked the way it did when he was a teenager, when there was the subtle expression of both confidence and mischief in his darkly handsome eyes. When I think of him now, though, I don’t picture his face the way it is. What I see is from a memory, from a moment when he must have been eleven or twelve years old and we were both in our backyard and it was summertime and I was drawing in a coloring book and he was there in the green grass and he didn’t know I was watching him. He was crawling around on all fours; he was practicing being a lion or a tiger or more probably a leopard and he was growling to himself, stalking the shadow of a bird, and he didn’t see me staring at him and I think my mother was there, looking at us from an upstairs window, watching us both and gently smiling, and what I remember most is that all of us were happy then with who we were at that moment; at that moment, all of us were quietly happy.
illustration by
Steph Davidson
Art school is boring so Audrey wears a space helmet around: It is kind of pretentious but so what.
A secret: Audrey does not know any Velvet Underground songs but still she wears their T-shirt. It is black and Audrey’s hair is black. She is very short with big brown eyes, what boys would call cute, but she doesn’t think of herself as being pretty because she was a geek in high school.