by Noah Hawley
So we began to plot our escape. We fantasized about where we might go—London, Paris, Rome. I’d had invitations to work abroad in the past, and we believed, rightly or wrongly, that Europe would offer us our only real opportunity for anonymity and rebirth. But when push came to shove we found ourselves unable to abandon the country in which we had lived our lives, even though it had abandoned us. Fran grew up in Denver. Her family still lived there. A move to Colorado made sense. When the idea first came up, I nodded soberly, trying not to betray the surge of excitement that went through me. Danny’s prison was in Florence, just an hour drive. But I didn’t say that. Instead, I let Fran bring it up, holding the fact out like a carrot, as she tried to convince me that a move to rural Colorado was truly the best thing for both of us.
So we boxed the dishes and filled cardboard wardrobes with our East Coast fashions. We packed our books and sporting equipment. We took our paintings off the wall, our framed photographs (art and family), and wrapped them in plastic. We paid for insurance. We counted our boxes. Fran and I took a trip to Colorado in late November and found a house—a two-story craftsman on a quiet hillside with a view of the Rockies. All that was left was to move.
A strange thing happened to me, however, as we boxed up our past. The more of our things we packed, the less of them I wanted. Fran came into the bedroom one evening and found me stuffing my clothes into trash bags.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I don’t want it,” I said. “Any of it. Out with the old.”
I told her that if we were going to be moving, changing our lives, then I wanted to change, too. Reinvent myself. So into black, triple-strength leaf bags went my Connecticut doctor’s suits, my chinos and linen shirts, my docksides and John Varvatos T-shirts. When they were full, I put the trash bags in the car and drove them to Goodwill. Let someone else wear them. Let someone else walk around disguised as me. I would give the world the slip. Into trash bags went my aftershave, my designer skin lotions. Anything with a scent. Anything that had defined me, the old me, the me I had decided to leave behind.
The next day I went down to the barbershop and told them to cut my hair short. I watched as the barber ran his clippers over my head, watched my hundred-dollar, salon-cut hair fall to the floor in clumps. With it went my identity. Looking in the mirror afterward I did not see the prosperous New York doctor, that leader of men. I saw a chastened man, vulnerable, exposed. The hair that remained was mostly gray. The lines around my eyes had deepened, a newfound weight pulling at my face. It was disturbing for me to see the years of life that defeat had added to my face, but it was the truth. And I needed the truth right now. It felt important somehow to understand just where I stood.
I had been an overconfident man, smug even, and because of this I had overestimated the control I had over the world. The man who stared back at me now did not look smug. He looked scared. He was fifty years old. He had suffered a stunning, last-minute reversal.
He was running out of time.
And so, seven months after two shots rang out in a packed California theater, my family became a Colorado family, mountain people, nature lovers hungry to start again. The week we arrived, Alex and Wally celebrated their eleventh birthdays. Fran and I bought them snowboards, with the hope that this would help them assimilate. In our minds, we saw our sons becoming mountain rats, suntanned mini-jocks, trailing their fingertips in fresh white powder, as they crisscrossed the slopes in a lazy S. Colorado would be a return to a life of innocence, healthy and carefree.
Children. My sons would be children again.
The day after their birthdays, they started at a new school. Aside from an early rough patch, they fit in quickly. I think they appreciated the return to normalcy. It was a relief to have homework to complete and tests to study for. They liked the grounding nature of soccer practices and Little League tryouts. They made friends. Wally quickly fell for a Mexican American girl two grades ahead, and suffered the inevitable psychic pain of unrequited love.
Fran made a good show of meeting the neighbors, of bulk-store shopping and planning weekend discovery excursions into the Rockies and down to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. We spent time with her family, aunts and cousins, who embraced us openly, despite the obvious taint we carried. This was our de facto witness-protection program. With people we met, we adopted a friendly but subtle distance. We built a social life of barbecues and card nights, PTA meetings and bake sales.
In public I refrained from mentioning my previous marriage. I glossed over where we had come from, saying we had lived all over the East Coast. To new friends, we embraced the lie that our family was no bigger than what they could see. The trips we took to ADMAX were done in secret, the family rising before dawn and piling into the Jeep. If asked, we lied and said we were taking advantage of the early spring, using day trips to familiarize ourselves with our new terrain. In truth, we snuck forty miles south, through increasingly desolate country. In silence, mostly, but sometimes listening to classic rock on the radio. Daniel had become our secret weight, the pariah we carried in our hearts.
We adapted wordlessly to the prison rituals, the metal detectors and redundant security checks, the waiting area filled with men, women, and children of all races. We endured the judgmental stares of the guards, looks that implied we were responsible for the crimes of our loved ones. And if not responsible, then at least contaminated by them. The stares suggested that we, too, should be incarcerated. None of this surprised me. America was a country that believed that crime was who a person was, not just what they did. In this light there could be no such thing as rehabilitation, only punishment. And part of that punishment was, inevitably, the ostracism and conviction of a convict’s family.
So we waited in the lines, and endured invasive searches. We accepted the insults and withering looks. We did this so we could sit in a narrow cubicle facing five inches of tempered Plexiglas. We did it so we could pick up a germ-ridden telephone handset and talk to our kin.
Ironically, ADMAX had been good for Daniel. He had gained fifteen pounds. The color had returned to his cheeks. He told us he had been reading a lot, classics mostly, Tolstoy, Pushkin. He said a girl he knew in Austin had turned him on to Russian novelists. He liked their scope and emotionality. Though we asked repeatedly, he never talked about what it was like to be locked up in a seven by twelve room twenty-three hours a day after having spent so much time on the road. He never complained about the epic awfulness of the food or the disdainful treatment he received from the guards. In fact, he never complained at all. He said he had discovered that he liked the solitude. It was what had attracted him to life on the road in the first place.
Transience had given my son a necessary level of separation from the world, knowing he was only in a place for a short time, that he could only ever get so close to someone. He told us that he had enjoyed the endless hours spent alone in his yellow Honda. He said he liked walking the streets of a town he did not know, filled with people he would never meet. He saw the human need to socialize as a weakness. It was a moment of rare confession, and when pressed to explain, he changed the subject.
During the week, we were a normal nuclear family with after-school activities to organize and dinner parties to plan. We talked about replacing screen doors and having the HVAC serviced. During the week we watched prime-time television and tried to keep up with our reading. We separated our household trash from our recyclables and packed lawn clippings into biodegradable paper sacks. On Thursdays I dragged the Toters to the bottom of the driveway and left energy drinks for the garbagemen. I had become a friend to workingmen everywhere, the kind of person who chatted about hardware to men in Velcroed weight belts at Home Depot or talked sports with auto mechanics. It was my disguise. During the week my family was invisible in our normalcy. It was on those weekends that our true identities came out.
We visited Daniel twice a month, making the hour drive early Saturday morning. Round-trip, the whole excursion took fi
ve hours, door to door. We always stopped at the same Starbucks for coffee, the same Shell station to use the restrooms. We made sure we were home by two in time for soccer practice.
On these visits I stuck to safe topics—the new house, how the kids were doing in school. Danny seemed relieved. Each visit lasted no more than twenty minutes, just enough time for small talk. Danny showed us a joke book he’d found in the prison library. Every time he tried out new material on the kids. The jokes were mostly groaners—off-color tales of farmers and their daughters—but the kids loved them and would deconstruct each joke in the car on the ride home.
I watched my family during these visits and wondered: Is this really our lives now? I was amazed that the human animal could, over time, come to define any situation, no matter how unnatural, as normal.
I watched them and I worried. I looked at my two young sons. How would this experience affect them? I looked for signs of permanent scarring, of behavior that might give an early warning of long-term damage. Looking at my boys through the prism of Daniel’s life, I could not help but analyze every word they said in anger, every sullen mood, every negative action. I was desperate to protect them, desperate not to miss any warning signs, the way I had missed them with Danny.
I spent hours talking to Fran about things we might do to minimize the damage. I suggested the boys stay home. I thought we should avoid exposing them to a prison environment.
But Fran said no. She thought the boys should see their brother. She thought they should understand that actions had consequences. That bad behavior was punished. So we continued to make the drive together as a family, listening to talk radio but rarely speaking ourselves.
Those afternoons Fran allowed me to take a few hours by myself, I would go to the golf course and spend two hours hitting balls at the driving range. I found the emptiness of the experience, the smooth, mechanical repetition, soothing. It felt good to escape into something physical, a thing that required no thought but real focus. When the first bucket of balls was empty I would buy a second. Around me, men in baseball caps used hybrid clubs for extra distance. Coeds took lessons from pros, giggling at double entendres. I set my feet, shifted my hips, settled in. Each ball I hit was a regret cast into the brush. I teed up, leveled my clubhead. I tried to stay loose, to empty my mind. I tried to let the club lift itself, to keep my left arm straight without thinking about keeping my left arm straight.
Afterward, I would drive into the mountains until I found a vista spot. I would park the car and stand among tourists looking into the far distance. I never got used to the overblown majesty of the mountains or to driving the curvy, narrow roads guarded by thin metal barriers. At first these sojourns were just a form of self-preservation, a way to satisfy my panicked need to keep moving, but I came to enjoy the drives. I came to enjoy pulling my car onto the rough, sloped shoulder and pissing into the dirt.
On weekdays I stood in front of a lecture hall filled with medical students. I talked about diseases of the nervous system. I explored the interconnectedness of things. I wore short-sleeve button-down shirts and Western-style slacks. My waist size had shrunk from thirty-six inches to the thirty-two I had been in med school. I kept my hair short. Every morning I did a hundred sit-ups, a dozen pull-ups. I started trail running, rising before dawn, driving to a nearby state park. I liked the feel of my pounding heart, the thrush of my heavy breath. Some days I came home red-faced, cheeks scratched by brush.
“There are no small details,” I told my students, “only small doctors.”
I could not watch movies or television shows where soldiers faced certain death to save their fallen brother without a lump forming in my throat. I could not watch buddy pictures or dramas where beloved characters died of slow wasting diseases. Themes of forgiveness and loyalty made me weep privately in the downstairs bathroom. The same was true of films where the hero keeps his word at any price or where the weak were protected and the frail rescued. My son was imprisoned in a federal prison, waiting to be executed. He was beyond my reach, and I was trying to figure out how to live with that.
So I set my feet and tested my iron. I practiced my short game, chopping down at the ball. I ran through browning bramble, jumped over tree roots and fallen branches. I drove the green-brown back roads of Colorado, past ranches and farms, past Holsteins and men on horseback. I cooked steaks on the backyard grill and made small talk with the neighbors. I took the kids to water parks and helped them build boxcars. I showed Alex how to throw a curveball. I took Wally to a florist so he could buy flowers for the girl he’d never have. Inside, I made him put back the roses and pick out something less obvious. I went on date nights with my wife. We ate at mediocre restaurants and saw blockbusters at the cineplex. I drove her to the impossible vistas I had discovered, and we leaned against the warm hood of the car, gazing out at the moon.
“I think we’re doing okay,” she said. And I nodded because that’s what I wanted her to believe. That was my job now, to protect my family from the truth, which was that I might never again be whole. This change of character had unexpected side effects. Out of the blue, our sex life reignited. The routine we had settled into in Connecticut, a brief foreplay of kissing and manual stimulation, leading quickly to the missionary position, was thrown out. We attacked each other now with recklessness. Before, sex had been a means to an end. Now it became a destination. Passion is, in many ways, a kind of violence—the only sanctioned means by which one spouse can attack the other—and, in this spirit, Fran and I found ourselves grappling with an often frightening ferocity. She clawed at me, bit my neck and shoulders. It was as if she had decided to use sex as a form of punishment. She would pin my arms to the bed and grind against me the way the ocean wears at the shoreline. In the depths of the night she expressed a newfound desire to penetrate me. For my part, I had lost the will to come. It was not that I was withholding my reward. It’s that I was often unable to climax. I felt nothing. As a result our sessions sprawled into the later hours. We would wrestle each other into exhaustion, collapsing winded and sore onto the bed.
“That was incredible,” she would say. And I would agree because it was. Incredible that life had brought us to this place. Incredible that pleasure could feel so much like pain.
I was beginning to understand what my son meant when he talked about levels of detachment. I felt, at once, of a thing and outside it. Was this how Daniel felt as he traveled the country? Was this who Carter Allen Cash was? The unnameable other inside each one of us? The part of my son that felt alone? Unconnected?
I went in for my annual physical. The doctor was Indian, an internist who was recommended by the head of the university. Dr. Patel. He took my pulse, my blood pressure. A nurse drew blood. They ran an EKG and took a chest X-ray. When it was time I bent over and allowed him to check my prostate, grimacing at the cold intrusion of his finger. Afterward, in his office, he asked how I was feeling.
“Fine,” I told him.
“No aches or pains? Headaches?”
“No,” I told him.
“How about your digestion? Any heartburn or diarrhea?”
“Occasionally.”
“How’s your mood?”
“My mood?”
“Yes. Your outlook. Would you say you are feeling well?” I looked at him, a young man with his whole life ahead of him. There was a photo on his desk, Patel with a smiling wife, a baby in her arms. Was I feeling well? The question was absurd, and what’s more, I knew this man was incapable of understanding the answer. What did he know about anything?
“I feel fine,” I told him.
He nodded. This was good news.
“Okay,” he said. “We should get the test results back in a few days, but your EKG was good, prostate was normal.”
I stood and offered him my hand. He rose and shook.
“Thank you for your time,” I said.
The next morning I told Fran I was going to run some errands. I drove to a gun range outside town, parked the
Jeep in the shade. I told the clerk I wanted to rent a gun and buy a target. He showed me three shelves of revolvers and semiautomatics. I chose a 9-mm Smith & Wesson, then demonstrated that I knew how to disarm the weapon, ejecting a round and removing the clip. The clerk handed me a pair of headphones and some plastic goggles, then led me into the back. I followed him, carrying my pistol in a tray, clip out, along with a box of shells. The paper target, a simple bull’s-eye, I had rolled up under my arm. Inside the range, the clerk placed the tray on the narrow shelf and told me to return the weapon as it was, with the clip out.
There were three other men on the range, shooting targets. Through the headphones the sound of their shots was muffled but by no means quiet. I unrolled my paper target and clipped it to the line, then pressed a button near the shelf, sending the target gliding down the range. Next I opened the box of ammunition and slid eleven cold brass bullets into the clip, feeling a metallic click as they settled into place. My breathing was steady. My hands did not shake. I inserted the clip into the gun and chambered a round. My goggles were scratched but functional. I took a deep breath, let it out, then raised the gun and pointed it at the target.
My uncle had taken me shooting once when I was a boy. I remember the blood thrill of it, the way the pistol jumped in my hand like a living thing. It was that memory that sent me to the range several times during my college years, usually with one or two boys from my dorm. Once I started medical school, though, the allure of shooting wore off. During my surgical rotation I saw the damage a bullet could do to human tissue, witnessed the destructive mayhem of multiple gunshot wounds during a spin in the emergency room. After that there was no romance in guns anymore, no mystery. It had been three decades since I’d held one in my hand. It was heavy but balanced. I felt the wood of the grip against my palm. The air smelled of cordite and gunpowder. I thought of my son standing on a hilltop shooting cans. I pictured him on a motel-room floor, oiling the barrel of a store-bought weapon. I remembered the photo of Daniel that had been taken at Royce Hall, wild-eyed, gun in hand, a Secret Service agent squeezing his arm.