He says you have changed, but in subtle ways. He says that before you started running, you would never, ever talk about the accident. Now, especially if it might help someone else, he says you’ll admit that you went through a bad time in your life, that your doctors said you’d never be able to walk or talk, and that if someone else is out there and a doctor says that to him or her, then that person should find another doctor.
Marko has bad days. Who doesn’t? And when those days come, he thinks about you. He thinks about what his old partner from the warehouse floor has endured, and how he’s turned out, and then Marko takes a breath and he knows he’ll be fine, if he just does something. He thinks about you and he takes a step forward, and you don’t know that.
Five years ago, a couple down the road from your mother in Kennan had a fiftieth anniversary party, and they got a visit from their grandson, Johnny, who had been badly beaten and suffered brain injuries. They called your mother and asked if they could bring Johnny over, if he could meet you.
He was having trouble speaking. He wanted to know how you had learned to talk again. You told him that your mother loved musicals, and that vocalizing, that twisting your tongue around those unfamiliar sounds, helped you. Maybe that helped him. You don’t know.
Your brother Eric started running just two years before he got you into the sport. A colleague told him he would like it. “Same old story,” Eric says. “Somebody is running and she tells somebody else. Simple. And I tried it and I decided I like doing something besides nothing.”
Eric runs only once or twice a week, a handful of 5K and 10K races a year. He says he was shocked when he heard you were planning to run a marathon, but he’s not shocked at your success.
He says he never thought about what you could do or couldn’t do, or your particular struggles or successes. You were just his little brother, and something happened, and you and the family dealt with it. It seems like everyone in your family is sort of hard. But when he does stop to think about your running, yeah, it’s something. “Of course it’s changed him,” he says. When he begins to doubt himself—in running, or in anything—he thinks about what you have done. So yeah, of course it has changed Eric, too. Do you know that? Maybe, maybe not.
There’s a lot you don’t know. You don’t know if you’ll attend the company picnic this July, and you don’t know if you’ll stop in at the employee appreciation lunch at Christmastime. You don’t know if you’ll find love. You kind of doubt it. In the past twenty-some years, you have donated twelve gallons of blood. Nine to the Red Cross and three more to the Community Blood Center. You know it feels good, and you like the free cookies, and you like chatting with the nurses at the RiverWalk Center. Twelve gallons. You know it’s doing good. But you don’t know how good. There’s so much you don’t know.
You will deteriorate. You have scar tissue at the base of your brain, and you live with pain. When it’s humid, your scar tissue swells and you get tremendous headaches. You might start losing a step tomorrow. You might start losing a lot of steps tomorrow.
Or you may not. You know that researchers have put brain-injured mice on “treadmills,” and those exercising mice recover cognitively faster and more fully than nonexercising ones. You know that a doctor named Steven Flanagan, MD, chairman of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, figured that out. He and other scientists suspect the recovery is due to exercise-induced chemical production in the brain, chemicals that promote recovery. You know that along with this there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that people with brain injuries also may recover faster and more fully if they exercise. You know that doctors around the country recommend that patients with brain injuries, when they are able and under supervision, increase their levels of physical activity. You know that it’s worked for you, that your mind and body have improved because of running.
You don’t like to talk about your brain injury, or recovery, or what was, or what might have been. But you want people—especially people who are going through what you went through—to know that things can get better, that if things are getting a little better for you, they might get a little better for them.
Your mother believes you are better, and happier, since you started running. She talks about it three days before the shortest day of 2012, sitting in her kitchen, drinking coffee, four days before she and Oscar will drive to Rhinelander to pick you up, take you out for Chinese, and bring you back here to the farm.
She says you feel it’s a blessing you don’t remember your life before the accident, that it would only have made the past thirty-nine years more difficult. They’ve been difficult enough. She says you would have been anything you wanted to be—a doctor or a lawyer maybe—if that man hadn’t driven his truck into you. She says you love learning and that it’s got to be frustrating being a warehouse dummy. She says she wants you to return to the farm because you love the farm, not because you’re frustrated in Rhinelander.
The first morning at the farm you’ll wake at four-thirty a.m., as you do every morning, and you’ll read in bed (lately you’ve been reading about the American expedition to Siberia after World War I) and then play some cribbage with your mother and Oscar, and then you’ll go take care of the horses and chickens—you walk in a straight line from the house to the barn now, since you started running—and then have breakfast and then help with some bit of construction. Insulating the barn, straightening porch timbers, then pinochle, dinner, a movie on TV, and then it’s bedtime. At some point in there, you’ll go for a run.
Your mother drinks coffee and talks about the jalapeños she pickles and says there are great kids who don’t become good boys and good boys who don’t become fine men, but you have been all. She says she’s not sure you would have developed into the man you are without running. In fact, she doesn’t think you would have become quite as independent and confident without it. She says you might beat your time by a couple minutes or a couple seconds, but that you will beat it. She knows that improvement might not mean a lot to many people. But it means a lot to you. It means a lot to her. She was an idiot to have fought you on the running, to have doubted you. She knows that now. Your mother doesn’t have difficulty seeing the idiocy in others, and she doesn’t have a hard time seeing the idiocy in herself.
Your mother is a hard woman who has no time for religion, not since she learned about the priest who refused to convert her Lutheran mother, who was pregnant, to Catholicism before she married her husband in the church. The priest told your grandfather that your grandmother was a whore and that her baby would be a bastard.
Your mother is a hard woman who has no time for religion but who is sure we should all seek God, to try to understand what our gift is, to be useful. She says her gift is not panicking in difficult times, in being good at acceptance. She says your gifts are patience and perseverance. (You disagree; you say they’re persistence and stubbornness.)
Your mother sits in her kitchen and speaks of death and mercy and how she was so wrong about running and about the futility of lamentation, and after three hours, she admits that she cried for you once. You were ten and she realized one afternoon that you would never whistle. It was so stupid, she says, after all you had been through. But she couldn’t help it. She bawled like a baby because you would never whistle.
People who feel sorry for themselves? She understands. We all encounter injury and illness and loss and change, and we’re all scared and sad and hopeless. She has certainly been all those things. And the moment she bawled like a baby might serve as an object lesson in how we all—runners and nonrunners, brain-damaged and life-battered, blessed and cursed, teenaged loan sharks and high school physics teachers alike—might handle those moments when we want to give up.
“I have sat in a bathtub full of bubbles having a glass of wine, crying and feeling sorry for myself,” your mother says. “Then I got out of the goddamn bathtub and went to bed and got up the next day.”
You love running for
how it makes you feel. You love it for the endorphins, and how it’s something that’s hard, and that you can get better at. You love it because at the starting line, you can chat with anyone and so what if it’s a little uncomfortable, you’re not going to see them again anyway. You love it because it has changed you. You walk straighter now and you feel stronger, and you like how you can check out pretty women in shorts and no one seems to mind. You love it because running makes you realize that you were living in a box until a couple years ago—a safe box, but a box, and that since running, you see you’re as good as anyone else, maybe not as fast, but trying as hard, improving as much—and having as much fun. After you finish a race you stay at the finish line, and you yell encouragement at the people still competing—the slowest, the fattest, the people with the most to gain. You know how they feel. You know they’re winners, even if they don’t.
For your second marathon, you ran Disney, in Orlando, in January 2012. You finished in 5:59, almost twenty minutes slower than Eagle River. But it was warm in Florida, much warmer than you expected. And you ran into a fence at mile eight—in spite of all your training, your weaker right side still throws you off as you tire—so you basically limped the last eighteen miles. You did it because you’re stubborn and persistent and because you had entered the race, had grown used to the rewards of racing and you had decided damn if you were going to fly back home to Rhine-lander without a medal, without bling.
You run five days a week now. When you’re tired, your right foot flaps a little bit, and it lands funny, but it’s not too bad. You have finished six 10Ks, a half-marathon, and three marathons. This year, you’re going to run the Journeys Marathon in Eagle River for the third time, and you’re shooting for a 4:22. Ten minutes a mile. You think you can do it. But you don’t know.
One thing you do know, something you have learned since you ran that first 5K in those floppy tennis shoes: You’re going to run more races. You’re going to fly to places you never would have before. You’re going to meet people you never would have met, say things you never would have said.
And you’ll be fine.
Something else you know, something else you learned from running: That solitary, hard life you spent so much time and energy building? It’s not enough. It never was.
You want more.
Wired
FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING
When the software mogul John McAfee fled to a remote outpost in the jungles of Belize, it felt like something out of Apocalypse Now—and Joshua Davis was there to capture every strange, shocking, unforgettable second of it. With Davis, the reader watches as McAfee rants, raves, rules his compound, and plays Russian roulette, all the while denying drug and murder accusations. The National Magazine Award judges called this “not just a page-turner but a masterpiece.” A contributing editor at Wired, Davis is the author of The Underdog, which is, as his website proclaims, “a recounting of [his] arm wrestling, bullfighting, sumo, sauna, and backward-running adventures.” Wired was a finalist this year in six National Magazine Award categories, honored for everything from print design to digital storytelling.
Joshua Davis
Dangerous
On November 12, 2012, Belizean police announced that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth investigation into McAfee’s life. This is the chronicle of that investigation.
Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is sixty-six, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his arms and shoulders.
More than twenty-five years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he’s holed up in a bungalow on his island estate, about fifteen miles off the coast of mainland Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of ammunition, fake IDs bearing his photo, Frontiersman bear deterrent, and a single blue baby pacifier.
McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.
“Let’s put the gun back,” I tell him. I’d come here to try to understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure.
But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do a demonstration?”
He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder.
“This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.
My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit. “We don’t have to do this.”
“I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.
“Reholster the gun,” I demand.
He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”
It’s the same thing, he argues, with the government’s accusations. They were a smoke screen—an attempt to distort reality—but there’s one thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid predawn murk of April 30, 2012.
• • •
It was a Monday, about 4:50 a.m. A television flickered in the guard station of McAfee’s newly built, 2.5-acre jungle outpost on the Belizean mainland. At the far end of the property, a muddy river flowed slowly past. Crocodiles lurked on the opposite bank, and howler monkeys screeched. In the guard station, a drunk night watchman gaped at Blond Ambition, a Madonna concert DVD.
The guard heard the trucks first. Then boots hitting the ground and the gate rattling as the lock was snapped with bolt cutters. He stood up and looked outside. Dozens of men in green camouflage were streaming into the compound. Many were members of Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit, an elite force trained in part by the FBI and armed with Taurus MT-9 submachine guns. Formed in 2010, their mission was to dismantle criminal organizations.
The guard observed the scene silently for a moment and then sat back down. After all, the Madonna concert wasn’t over yet. Outside, flashlight beams streaked across the property. “This is the police,” a voice blared over a bullhorn. “Everyone out!”
Deep in the compound, McAfee burst out of a thatched-roof bungalow that stood on stilts twenty feet off the ground. He was naked and held a revolver. Things had changed since his days as a high-flying software tycoon. By 2009 he had sold almost everything he owned—estates in Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as well as his ten-passenger plane—and moved into the jungle. He announced that he was searching for natural antibiotics in the rain forest and constructed a mysterious laboratory on his property. Now his jungle stronghold was under attack. The commandos were converging on him. There were thirty-one of them; he was outgunned and outmanned.
McAfee walked back inside to the seventeen-year-old in his bed. She was sitting up, naked, her long frizzy hair falling around her shoulders and framing the stars tattooed on her chest. She was terrified.
&
nbsp; As the GSU stormed up the stairs, he put on some shorts, laid down his gun, and walked out with his hands up. The commandos collided with McAfee at the top of the stairs, slammed him against the wall, and handcuffed him.
“You’re being detained on suspicion of producing methamphetamine,” one of the cops said.
McAfee twisted to look at his accuser. “That’s a startling hypothesis, sir,” he responded. “Because I haven’t sold drugs since 1983.”
• • •
Nineteen eighty-three was a pivotal year for McAfee. He was thirty-eight and director of engineering at Omex, a company that built information storage systems in Santa Clara, California. He was also selling cocaine to his subordinates and snorting massive amounts himself. When he got too high to focus, he’d take a Quaalude. If he started to fall asleep at his desk, he’d snort some more coke to wake up. McAfee had trouble making it through the day and spent his afternoons drinking scotch to even out the tumult in his head.
He’d been a mess for a long time. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, where his father was a road surveyor and his mother a bank teller. His father, McAfee recalls, was a heavy drinker and “a very unhappy man” who McAfee says beat him and his mother severely. When McAfee was fifteen, his father shot himself. “Every day I wake up with him,” McAfee says. “Every relationship I have, he’s by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust. So my life is fucked.”
McAfee started drinking heavily his first year at Roanoke College and supported himself by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. He would knock and announce that the lucky resident had won an absolutely free subscription; all they had to do was pay a small shipping and handling fee. “So, in fact, I am explaining to them why it’s not free and why they are going to pay for it. But the ruse worked,” McAfee recalls. He learned that confidence was all that mattered. He smiled, fixed them with his penetrating blue-eyed gaze, and hit them with a nonstop stream of patter. “I made a fortune,” he says.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2014 Page 36