His name was Thomas Munk; he was fifty years old and was a Harvard-educated mathematician, the son of a well-to-do family of Polish immigrants. He had no criminal record, and his political ties were unknown. They’d arrested him in a remote, forested area in the mountains of Montana. He lived in isolation, in a rudimentary cabin that he’d built himself, six meters square, with no electricity, no running water, and no phone line, thirty miles from the nearest town, on the side of Route 223.
Parker had spent several days going through Munk’s past and his writings. With the office inactive due to the blazing New York summer, with the efficient new assistant who kept him up to date online and could reach him on his cell phone (the intercom, Parker called it), he’d taken advantage of his free time to put together a report on Munk for me and close the investigation.
“Detectives no longer solve cases, but we can tell stories,” he said later.
The two Munk sons were born in consecutive years, 1942 (Thomas) and 1943 (Peter), when their parents settled down for good in Chicago. The photo of the brothers in their high school yearbook showed two boys with birdlike faces, American-style haircuts and weary smiles. Hardworking and eager, simple of heart, with no traces of their European origins, the two brothers grew up in the fifties, when the culture of this country was, according to Parker, at once wonderful and appalling. They’re children of the Cold War, of the expansion of the automobile, of TV and rock ’n’ roll. Tom was the genius in the family, and his brother was to live in his shadow even though he became a fairly well-known writer and published several stories in the little reviews that circulated in the Village, aided by the success of Kerouac and the Beat Generation.
Thomas Munk decided on Harvard, maybe because his father thought it was the only American university that his friends in Warsaw would know. In 1958—at age sixteen—he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began his academic career. In fact, he received the largest scholarship of any sophomore student in Harvard’s history.
He was “morally serious,” a solitary, pedantic, shy young man who never adapted to the rigid rules of the Ivy League. While his fellow students were going to class looking dapper in their Brooks Brothers suits and neckties bearing the colors of the university’s exclusive alpha beta phi clubs, Tom Munk was one of the first students to attend undergraduate classes at Harvard in jeans, a black T-shirt, and basketball shoes, as if he was a working-class American boy from Pennsylvania. In the winter he added a blue peacoat and a knit wool cap, the kind that only black men in the Boston projects were wearing back then.
He went to parties and dances but would sit by himself on the sidelines to drink beer and watch the Barnard butterflies fluttering around with their golden tresses and short skirts and making out in the corners with crude upper-class boys from Princeton and Yale. There was an entire brood of American girls with lovely legs and blossoming breasts who lost their virginity quickly and deliberately in the period from the end of the Korean War until the beginning of the Vietnam War. They looked like a forward platoon in the new women’s liberation army, and the boys called the girls The Viet Cong, according to Parker, surely thinking of his beloved Betty and the redhead she’d been, she too, of course, a veteran of war from Vassar.
Amanda, a beautiful “chick” in those days, recollected to the press that she’d traveled with Munk on a vacation to Canada in the summer of 1963. “What he liked most about me,” she stated, “was how I used to read novels and stories out loud, ones that ‘said something about the human condition.’” One night, as they lay stretched out on the tile floor of their hotel room to stave off the heat, she was reading a story about a shepherd who wore a black veil over his face, and Tom fell asleep. Amanda went on reading but soon began to forget about the story and switched to thinking aloud about the dormitory where she lived, the communal refrigerator padlocked shut and all the cartons of milk with their owner’s names written on them (Grete, Maria), and when she finally shifted to turn off the lamp, Tom opened his eyes and stared at her.
“You never blink,” she had said to him.
“No, not if I can help it,” he said.
He never lied; throughout his life he remained faithful to the criteria of truth that ruled the logic to which he devoted his efforts. According to his mathematical intuition, true concepts were real objects, not just forms of thought. He said as much during a class in his second year at Harvard, and the professor, John Maxell, one of the main references in the world of analytic philosophy in the United States, invited him to consider a proposition: At this moment there isn’t a cat in this room. When Munk refused to accept this description, the old professor bent down laboriously to look under each of the desks of the fifteen students who were participating in the seminar; his joints creaked, but this effort was intended to illustrate the effort that it cost to find evidence. While Maxell was verifying whether or not there was an animal in the room, Munk remained impassive, standing by the blackboard at the front of the room. “I haven’t found one,” Maxell said from the back of the room, breathing heavily, and Tom responded that, based on what he’d learned in Maxell’s classes about Leibniz, this demonstrated only that experience could not verify the presence of a cat in one possible world (but not in all of them).
On hearing this, Tom’s classmates whistled and stamped their feet in scorn while he smiled and traced circles, opening wider and wider, to show the alternate versions of the truth under different conditions. Because experience was insufficient, it was necessary to create theoretical fictions, exemplum fictum.
“For example, the possibility of an invisible cat existing in this room depends on the reality that we presuppose.”
And that, when viewed today, was his earliest approach to the decision that would lead him to become the most wanted criminal in United States history.
Thomas Munk’s health seemed “precarious,” and he always gave the impression of “being at risk.” He didn’t listen to anyone except for his brother, who would often come to visit and spend several days with him, talking in his room or at a bar or walking along the banks of the Charles River.
The people who knew him back then were defending him, and their testimonies, along with the stories of his time as a student, reinforced the feeling of incredulity that everyone felt when confronted with his actions. How could that young man have turned into a terrorist? He wasn’t a radical loser, as Enzensberger would characterize terrorists some years later, and he wasn’t a social outcast or a marginalized person but a young, successful North American man; nor was he a religious fanatic or a Marxist.
During his years at Harvard, Tom developed an interest in sports and music. He went to Boston Red Sox baseball games with his brother and stayed in his room all day listening to “Take This Hammer” and other country songs by East Coast proletarian musicians, especially Woody Guthrie, the kind who played in roadside bars and concert halls for families from the towns of Pennsylvania. They also frequented a bar called The Bear, a bohemian stronghold in Boston, and all of this seemed to contribute to his learning, like he was an outsider who knew nothing about the culture of the country and had to learn everything by mimicking the locals he lived around and their way of life. For his brother, Peter, it was natural to follow his generation’s path of proletarian experience and authentic living, but Tom looked like an undercover agent because his serious expression and grim smile never wavered, even if he was tapping his foot to the beat of a song by Hank Williams or Johnny Cash.
One evening he met a girl at one of those dance halls around the port in Boston. She was a skinny blonde from a family of New York professionals who was studying at Vassar and wore a tartan skirt with a large safety pin fastened below and black stockings. They went to the drive-in theater, played Scrabble, went to motels and made love in the afternoon heat. The girl was very happy with her life and loved him, though she did notice he was a bit strange and rather absentminded.
One summer they went to live in a house in the country and she took a surprise trip to visit her parents, but when she returned, she realized that Tom hadn’t noticed her absence. “Ah, you were gone,” he said, when he saw her come in at midnight with her bag and a T-shirt as a gift.
It was in that moment she decided that Tom wasn’t for her, the woman stated to the media; she always thought he was a wonderful boy, who deserved the best of luck, but he was just too wrapped up in his own mental life. They’d drifted apart peaceably, and the woman, whose name wasn’t released, stated that she sometimes used to receive postcards from Tom with greetings and very specific questions. She showed one to the reporter from the New Sun: “When we went to the Aquarium in Massachusetts, were you wearing a yellow rubber jacket? Please let me know, it’s a very important detail,” he’d written. He was investigating the precision of memories, it seemed, and was working on something he called uncertain memory and the unforgettable images of events we’ve never actually experienced.
He was concentrating on a series of experiments intended to devise a theory of choice. What were the conditions necessary to infer the truth? As an example, he posed the issue of how many children Lady Macbeth had, a problem that Shakespeare’s play didn’t resolve. He considered the matter to be a hypothetical case, the same as any other uncertain fact of real life. After a couple of weeks working on fuzzy sets, he came up with a hypothetical solution (“they had three children”) based on what he called the uncertain decision. With that project (Lady Macbeth’s Children, or the Theorem of Uncertain Series), he was the first undergraduate student—after Noam Chomsky—to succeed in having his junior thesis considered a contribution to the field and published in a specialized journal of high academic standing. It became a national reference point in the promising science of hardware programming. He was eighteen years old, and the publication of the paper was considered sufficient qualification for him to advance directly to his doctorate. In fact, he became a graduate student at Harvard before he even applied and almost didn’t realize that his status had changed until they invited him to live in the graduate college residence on the campus at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Concentration on theory imposes a complete detachment from worldly affairs, resulting in an exclusion from all social distraction or exchange. Thomas Munk extended that theoretical asceticism to all aspects of his academic life: he published sparsely and succinctly and did not accept invitations to lectures or conferences.
Malcolm Anderson, his thesis adviser, urged him not to wait until he had solved every problem before writing his dissertation, because that ideal moment would never come. This advice provoked a violent explosion of rage from Tom, because he was determined to produce either a perfect work or nothing. They explained to him that he’d never be able to graduate or work in education unless he could make up his mind and write imperfect things. All of that made him more furious still and he ran out of the office but returned two hours later, downcast, and asked Anderson to please not break off their relationship even if he was disappointing him.
That night, as he told one of his peers at the time, he was so discouraged that he decided to call his brother and ask him to come pick him up. Peter took him to New York, and on the way they got into a bitter argument, so violent that the highway police stopped them because they were driving with the interior lights of the car turned on. They looked like two mannequins in a lit-up display window, and they had to explain to the officer in detail what they’d been arguing about (the Vietnam War) so that he’d let them go. “Don’t argue while you’re driving,” the patroller advised them. In fact, it was there, in the police station of an obscure town on the way from Boston to New York, that he started to develop his theory on pronominal series. “I think: but the other does not believe me” was one of his premises. Every pronominal sequence (I/you/we/they) presupposed a distinct reality and a different system of belief.
When he published his thesis, he received the Fields Medal, the highest distinction a mathematician can aspire to. He was twenty-five.
“He’s passionate, profound, intense, and domineering. He possesses a kind of purity that isn’t matched by anyone else I’ve known. Thomas Munk is perhaps the most perfect example of genius such as we conceive of it,” his thesis adviser declared.
Many believe that Anderson, number one in his field, was so surpassed by that shadowy student of Polish origins that he retired from the university that very year and shut himself up in his house by the sea in Boston Bay, fenced in with electric wires, and emerged only once to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics and then to present himself as the main witness for the defense in the case that was being prepared against Munk at the time.
“When he was down,” said Anderson, “there was something about him that made him seem like a fool, a confused but friendly young man, who talked in a muddled way and stammered as if he was lost in his own digressions or was unhinged, but when he was in good form he was dazzling, brilliant, unyielding; in thought, he was a hare no winged Achilles could catch.”
This statement from his adviser was one of the arguments that Thomas Munk’s family was using to plead insanity, trying to alter the charges of the case and thus avoid the death penalty.
In 1967, Munk accepted a position as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Mathematics, which at that time was the most prestigious in the country.
Some analysts indicated that it was in California where Tom discovered anti-technological philosophy and started to dream of escaping into the wilderness. Maybe he decided to teach at Berkeley as a way to view the growing anti-capitalist movements up close and to observe the actions of anarchist groups in San Francisco Bay.
“He was extraordinary as a professor,” said Mike Uberman, a prominent researcher at MIT, “even though he was often absent when his headaches acted up or because he’d gone on one of his obligatory nighttime walks and gotten lost until well into the morning, which meant he wouldn’t make it to class. We suffered from headaches as well, as if the intensity of thought was accompanied by an experience in the walls of the skull.”
During that time his brother Peter was deployed and spent eighteen months in Vietnam, and when he came back from the war he was addicted to opium. Tom had been excused from service for medical reasons, and his brother went to war convinced that it was the greatest experience a writer could aspire to, until he landed there on the battlefield. Then he changed his mind, but it was already too late.
When Peter returned, Tom was waiting for him at the airport and saw him coming, dressed in his light brown uniform, carrying a blue bag that held all of his belongings, a strapping, burly young man with a scar that gave him a surly and stern expression. It was then, according to Peter, that his brother started to talk about the decision to change his life. He couldn’t stand the academic world; he felt smothered. Slowly, Peter’s experience in war moved into the background, and the conversation pivoted around Tom’s goals and his choice to live in isolation, dedicated to his research. He would distance himself from the world for a few years in order to delve further into his work on mathematical philosophy and also so that his way of life would operate directly on his thinking. “I’ve realized,” he said, as his brother recounted, “that idealism and materialism overlap in the sense that it’s only possible to master the world by turning your back on it.”
“The truth overlapped so little with empirical reality,” he later said, “that the only way to preserve your sanity was to move away from everything.” He wanted to isolate himself and prove whether he was capable of realizing a truly meaningful project.
They went to a bar on the side of the highway to eat and drink beer. The place was decorated with the heads of big game animals on the log walls of the room. Tom wasn’t against animal death; he wasn’t a vegetarian or a pacifist, the opposite of Peter, who’d returned from Vietnam with a strong tendency toward passivity and Eastern mysticism, as though eating nothing but vegetables allowed him to forget the ravaged bodies of his companions who had died in the war.
Sometime after that, Thomas Munk abandoned his academic career, as though untimely decisions were part of his personal agenda. He wrote to the chair announcing his resignation, a letter we’ve all read in the newspapers. Peter thought that his brother was attempting to unite culture and life, thought and experience. A whole generation was trying to do the same thing, abandoning conventional ways of life as a means to reach the truth.
After resigning from the university, Tom dedicated himself to traveling around the United States by car, and he’d send his brother a postcard now and then. He mailed them from different points along his way, usually through drugstores’ postal services. (Photo: A motel in the desert, and on the back, written in his nearsighted handwriting: “When I got to the hotel I had to spend thirty or thirty-five minutes removing insects from the windshield and the engine grille.”) He was going up Route 22 and randomly stopping in towns that lay outside the area of the highway. (Photo: A small town. “Around here everyone makes their living off beekeeping. All you can see are white boxes with screens and people with masks and yellow suits like astronauts.”) He even made it to Mexico and went around asking if he could buy a little ranch or a farm. (Photo: The Consul’s house in Cuernavaca. “Everyone here is talking about the massacre of students that happened three years ago in Tlatelolco.”) Then he crossed the border, heading north toward Canada, and took Highway 68 as far as the Great Lakes, asking around wherever he went about the kind of jobs there were and where he could get a remote piece of land. (Photo: An iguana in the middle of the road. “Someone stole my suitcase at a gas station. I have several bars of soap from the motel, a towel with tar stains, two red Clairefontaine notebooks, an AC electric razor, and a toothbrush.”) He let his brother know his most private reasoning in a letter he wrote while in a hotel in Oklahoma (a carbon copy of it is preserved in his files), in which it is possible to detect a certain slightly upset tone. “Night of November 3rd to 4th, on the way from Colorado, a hotel that has a typewriter, they gave me a warm welcome. I found a piece of land that’s very amenable to my purposes, close to the large reservoir in the next state over.” The photo showed a forest that covered the side of a mountain, extending through a valley and up to the bank of a large river.
The woods in Montana stretch for hundreds of miles among valleys, hills, and high mountains. An uninhabited area with harsh winters and long summers. Traditionally, it was the territory of fur traders and gold prospectors who often took to the hills and roamed for months like wild animals.
Thomas Munk arrived there on an uncertain date in the mid-seventies. One afternoon he showed up in the town of Jefferson, saying he was a surveyor and wanted to do some long-term research on the property. He seemed like a peaceable man who wanted to live a secluded life, like so many in this country.
“There are hundreds of desperate people who move away from the world and go back to a natural life,” according to Parker; “it’s a national epidemic, going to the frontier, seeking peace and empty pastures. My fellow citizens can be divided into the ones who furiously expand cities, producing cars and paving thousands of miles with asphalt, and the ones who go off to pasture and live in contact with nature. Between them will be the final battle of the war that started between the redskins of the mesa and the palefaces who came in from the cities.” Later there were hippie communes and then environmentalists who distanced themselves from civilization and lived in isolation. Those enraged children of nature believed their lives were mutilated and disfigured and their social experience was horrifying, and they were convinced that a new culture could be born in isolation, rejecting the urban multitudes.
First he built a wooden cabin, following the model of the one Thoreau had built in Walden, and he quickly adapted to life in solitude. He’d cut down a clearing in the woods and plowed a plot of land, fifty by fifty. He made a clay oven and an outhouse behind the cabin and dug a well to draw water with a hand pump. He built a woodshed and started gathering wood in autumn to make it through the winter.
During the day he’d go out to hunt and fish and look after his crops and his animals and keep the cave where he stored his provisions well-ventilated and dry. In the evening he’d return to his cabin and, once night fell, devote himself to studying and reading under the still light of a lantern. The only way to live in extreme isolation was to follow certain fixed habits. He divided his life into autonomous sequences, which obeyed the calm and stillness of changes in nature. The question wasn’t how to think about life but rather how to live in order to think.
During that time he began to write his Diary. He never set aside his work or his speculations on mathematics and logic, but his readings and writings extended into wider and wider registers. If you examined his library, it was impossible to imagine the direction in which he was carrying out his research (among his books, for example, he had Argentina, sociedad de masas by Torcuato Di Tella), nor indeed what relationship existed between his work and his militant actions.
The property and the Ford truck were in his brother’s name, so he didn’t pay taxes, or use electricity or gas, or have a phone; he hadn’t wanted to fence in his land, and he would sometimes come across backpackers and groups of summer visitors camping in the mountains. He set traps like old hunters and then bartered in town with fox and rabbit pelts. He dedicated hours to observing the prey he wanted to hunt and wrote down the animals’ movements and changes of habit in his Diary so that he could trap them without difficulty. When he went out hunting in the woods, he never strayed more than three hours’ walk from his cabin. He moved inside a twenty-kilometer circle that he knew very well. He’d settle down in a shelter covered with branches near the central lake in order to monitor the animals that came there to drink. Wild rabbits, hares, ducks, sometimes a wolf or a bobcat.
One afternoon he saw a brown bear get into the water, approach a beehive that hung from a trunk, and poke a branch into it in order to eat the honey. It submerged itself under the water to knock away the bees overhead or kill them with its other paw, but it kept its eyes shut while eating so as not to be blinded by the stings. It took off suddenly, sort of galloping through the water and then opening a gap in the thicket.
“Erasing your tracks is something animals don’t know how to do.” That was the greatest difference between humans and beasts. “We,” he wrote in his Diary, “know how to clean up our trails, create false clues, mutate, become others. Civilization consists in that; our ability to pretend and to deceive has allowed us to construct culture.”
When the wind was blowing from the north, he’d go out fishing early in the morning. In the very clear water of the river, only stirring slightly in the wind that came down from the mountains, it was possible to see the trout holding steady against the current; he fished with a fly, fluttering the rod over the surface with short whipping motions, and saw the fish jump, hunting after the hook in the air.
Every once in a while he went into town; the residents helped him, and sometimes he’d ask for tools or seeds in exchange for doing small chores for them; he considered these economic agreements to be on the order of bartering—not credit or sale—and a form of solidarity among neighbors that had survived the forced transactions of industrial society.
Sometimes the old town sheriff would come and visit the cabin to talk with him. “He was the gentlest man I’ve ever known,” the sheriff stated. “He’d invite me over to eat grilled rabbit with roast potatoes and a dessert made from currants and the finest honey. We’d drink a few beers that I brought in the car, and I always remember those meals as the best I’ve ever had, though I’ve been to lunches and dinners with the town and state authorities.”
They looked like two cowboys eating outdoors, heating coffee over the campfire and listening to coyotes off in the distance. There was something about life in the outdoors that was very masculine, very North American, we might say—the man who abandons his obligations to live alone on the prairie or in the woods.
One afternoon he got caught in a downpour far from home and spent the next week with a fever, doing nothing but lying stretched out in bed, drinking tea with honey. Sometimes he went to the hospital in town and had them look at his bug bites and the state of his hands, which he cared for with the dedication of a pianist.
“We took long hikes,” the sheriff recounted, “we’d go out along the river and climb up to the peak of White Mountain so we could see the valley on the other side and the highways that crossed the next state over, heading toward the chaotic cities up north.” He never found out that the man was a famous mathematician but did have a feeling that his abstract knowledge was greater than that of any other person he’d met. “He was above all else a calm man,” said the sheriff. “There’s no doubt he committed the violent acts that they say he did, but he should be asked about his reasons, because he’s the best person I’ve met in all my years as a small-town cop,” he stated in the local newspaper.
In Jefferson, Tom started seeing Mary Ann, a waitress from a bar at the Route 66 junction. He told her his name was Sam Salinger, that he was a traveler, that he was married but his wife didn’t love him anymore. He told her about his projects and came closer to revealing the truth of his plans to her than to any other person. Society was unjust, it was cruel. He made her follow his reasoning, and she arrived at revelatory conclusions on her own. That, according to what Munk wrote in his Diary, was the confirmation that he’d fallen in love with the girl. Mary Ann came forward to give an impromptu testimony after recognizing him in the photographs as the young man whom she’d been intimate with for several months, and she kept referring back to one evening, when Tom, wrapped in a gray overcoat but naked underneath, had revealed to her that he was planning to abandon everything and travel to a cold place in Canada to start another life. How did that sound to her? Would she come with him and live near the ice caps? The girl told him she needed to think about it, but she decided to stop seeing him. She’d supposed he was an army deserter, since there were so many. She thought he was a strange man, very educated and thoughtful, who acted like he wanted to forget some crime or like he’d escaped from prison.
Sometimes, during the summer, Tom worked at the sawmill. A week or two to put together the money, in cash, that he would later use for his special purchases.
He’d even been employed as a teacher for several months at the school in town. He prepared for the classes with great dedication, as though seeking to get away from his cabin for a while, and sometimes he’d stay at Mrs. Ferguson’s guest house in order to be closer to the school. For the children, he translated—and this was surprising to me—the story “Juan Darién” by Horacio Quiroga, another man who’d withdrawn to live in the jungle and had built his own house and survived in difficult conditions with his wife and children, writing some of the finest short stories of all literature in the Spanish language. He used Quiroga’s story to illustrate the cruelty of civilization, the Latin root of which, he said in class, meant domestication, training, and taming.
He once encountered a deer, frozen in a clearing in the woods. At first he thought it was alive and observed it from a shelter among the bushes. Some wild animals stand motionless when they can no longer escape. From what he could tell, it had become separated from its herd. Deer crowded together in winter, but maybe this one had strayed or gotten lost. It looked like a perfect statue of a young deer, captured in the moment as it lifted its head to find its bearings with the sun.
Suddenly he remembered how happy his days had been in the past: waking up in a bed, putting his bare feet down onto carpet, taking a shower, making coffee, sitting down to work in his office at the university. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was a way of observing his past life as though he himself were a deer frozen under the ice.
Finally he began his experiments. The first was a trial, or what he called a trial, like someone running a test in a laboratory before the main research. He decided to select an anonymous target, so as not to run any risk. He left his cabin at dusk but first lit his lantern and calculated the time it would take to burn through its oil. As a precaution, he placed the lantern inside a tin pan on the table. If all went well it would last for six hours, and if someone passed by the house, they might imagine that he was working and, like so many times before, hadn’t opened the door because he didn’t want to be interrupted.
No one would see him get into his old pickup and drive up the road to the highway and then keep going until the exit that would take him to Durango. He wasn’t concerned about anything other than his goal (“I don’t think about anything other than the white line of the road and the trees passing”). He’d changed the license plate, put extensions on his shoes to obscure his footprints, and then headed south in disguise. Yet his state of mind wasn’t cool and calm but frenzied, tension turning into euphoria. How was he going to react? He’d spent years in isolation and now wanted to put himself to the test: “It isn’t that crime isolates us, rather we must first isolate ourselves in order to be able to commit the crime.”
He entered the city via the freeway from the north, and at that time of day there was a great deal of movement in the streets. The crowds disturbed him after so many months in solitude. He went over the bridge that crossed the highway and led to the main parking lot of the vast mall. He parked his truck in the staff area and got out resolutely with a parcel in his hand, and then he crouched down to check the wheels of the pickup and in the same motion left the bomb hidden under the engine of a red Honda. Then he calmly drove out of the parking lot and went as far as the edge of the exit road before turning to reenter the parking lot from the opposite end of the mall.
There were parked cars, shopping carts, white lines, signposts, and a gull that was pecking around among oil stains. It seemed to have lost its way, to have confused the gray sheen of the asphalt for the water’s surface. They could fly for miles and miles over the sea but never strayed this far from the coast unless they’d gone mad and lost their orientation. He could see it blundering about, its wings spread, its eyes red, its beak half-open with its little tongue poking out. No one seemed to notice it, and it moved clumsily among the parked cars and oil puddles and muddy remnants of snow on the pavement before finally taking flight and heading off toward the tall lights of nearby buildings.
Based on what he’d ascertained at the Best Computer Co. in Durango, the side door was the mandatory exit for the computer technicians and engineers. All of the large corporations repeated their structures and the functions of their workers, so that if you knew one building well then you knew all of the others. That was proof of the inner weakness of the system: in order to cut down on costs, they tended to repeat the formats and layouts of their facilities. The bathrooms, cash registers, shippers and checkers, packers, offices, and main doors were identical in every company building across every state in the United States. The same was true for hotels and supermarkets and bars that belonged to the same chain, for movie theaters and vast parking lots, and even for police precincts and the interior layouts of prisons. The fixed repetition of places and the functioning of the series allowed for a conservation of motion: it was as if the spatial arrangement had been designed so that a simultaneous, symmetrical multitude of employees and customers and security guards might move around comfortably, thus making it easy to guess what the ones who weren’t obeying those arrangements were doing and then to instantly locate them on the surveillance cameras.
Tom had a roster of technicians who worked at the laboratory in the basement. A group of engineers and former graduate students specializing in computation who’d slipped down the social ladder were now working as the anonymous employees of a large chain, giving instructions to customers about the complex updated machines that were sold in the stores of Best Computer Co.
It was only a few days until Christmas, and so the place was filled with clusters of families moving around the shopping area. Freezing night air entered the hall every time the glass doors slid open; cars came and went through the parking lot. The gull flew past, high above, and came back down to the concrete ground of the parking lot.
The woman in the green scarf approached the red Honda with a folder in her hand. She looked young and had on sunglasses in spite of the darkness; she was wearing a beige overcoat and a fur cap that covered her ears. She opened the car door, placed the folder on the back seat, and took off her jacket; under the light inside she looked like a doll in a box; when she sat down at the wheel and started the engine, there was a jolt, a small burst of light, and a bang.
An old man in a long gray cloak who was pushing a shopping cart paused in front of the car for a moment and then kept going, speeding up his pace. A woman leading a boy by the hand turned around and then walked off sideways, dragging her son, but didn’t stop either. The gull took flight with a swift beating of its wings and slid away into the darkness, toward the highway. A minute later everything went on as before.
What leaves the greatest impression on him is that he exits the mall, crosses the parking lot, gets into his car, drives slowly through the lit-up streets of the city, and no one knows that it was he who killed that woman.
At a talk at Harvard, Gödel described how, after constructing the theorem that would make him immortal, he spent the night traveling on the subway, thinking of how the lives of everyone there would change because of him, though no one yet knew it.
He recorded that first experiment in his Diary. A feeling of omnipotence, of having crossed some sacred line. He moved among people with a feeling of being invisible and unique.
His next attack was meant to prevent—or delay—the merging of digital and biological systems that would allow for retroactive DNA intervention on millions. Hanz Frinkly of the Minnesota Biological Lab was a tall German with a ruddy face and a large mustache, a kind and very effusive man who had survived a Russian concentration camp during the Second World War, which was where his “Stalin-style” mustache came from, he said. “I look at myself in the mirror, and the memory that I’ve outlived the Georgian makes me feel younger.” He was a widower and wanted to remake his life; he went running through the woods in the summer and in the winter jogged through the underground tunnels that spanned the campus, illuminated by artificial light.
That morning, his receptionist had left the day’s mail on the table for him. It would be better to look at it a bit later, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to check whether someone had written to him about his recent and extraordinary article published in the prestigious Science magazine. When he opened an envelope that had supposedly been sent to him by a colleague at MIT, a bomb exploded, gravely injuring him.
The lesions had caused him cerebral damage, and ever since then, he’d been living shut away in a rehabilitation center on the outskirts of the university. From the windows he could observe young people crossing the park on their way to class, but this spectacle turned out to be so unbearable to him that he preferred to remain in his room with the door open, facing the hallway where other patients struggled by, propped up on crutches or gliding past in their metallic chairs.
The mathematician John Breedlove, who held the Peano professorship at the University of Chicago, went out early in the morning after breakfast wearing a surgical mask to stop him from breathing in the contaminated air because he was trying to avoid the spring sickness, which befell him more and more often due to so-called allergies that forced him to go to Memorial Hospital every April. He was on the point of finalizing his project on the unstable logic of information in open series and was afraid, in a superstitious and slightly ridiculous way, that an illness would prevent him from completing his calculations. He hadn’t accomplished any of the modest social obligations that a man of his age and status might be expected to have reached: he had never married, never had any children, but had instead dedicated his life to his career and felt well appreciated by his colleagues. The letter, which came to him in the 11 a.m. mail delivery, falsely sent by a mathematician from California whom he knew, exploded in his face and killed him instantly.
An engineering student (John Hauser) found a package under a chair in the computer lab in Cory Hall at the University of California and was killed when he picked it up. He was twenty-two years old, was married, had a daughter, and was an anti-Gulf War activist. Menéndez took it upon himself to deliver the news to the murdered boy’s wife, a young African American woman. She lived in a house with an open porch in the residential area of the ghetto, and when she saw the official car approaching, she took a while to open the door, though she was spying out through the shutters. Finally, when the woman opened the door and let him enter, Menéndez informed her of the accident and handed her the silver cross that the young man had worn on his chest. The girl, skinny and with fervent eyes, started trembling and stared at him fixedly, saying nothing. Menéndez stood there motionless for a while until the woman reacted and began cursing him as though he were the murderer.
There was an attack on Alan Hunter, a prominent scientist from Yale who’d been educated at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and was working on a secret project, guarded by the state. Poorly dressed, oblivious to all academic protocols, married and divorced several times, he lived in a bunker protected by several national security systems. One of his acolytes stated that he had driven Hunter to his house that evening and had seen him reach the door of his residence guarded by a secret service agent who died instantly when two plastic explosives went off in the entrance. The blast wave flung Hunter back against the large oak in the garden, lodging him in the hundred-year-old tree’s jagged lower branches, which crushed him like the blades of a mill. He passed away two hours later, having suffered multiple traumatic injuries and internal hemorrhaging.
Munk numbered the attacks, expecting to reach one hundred. He didn’t wish to approach his victims personally but killed from a distance, never touching them; he considered them functions of the system, individuals carrying out tasks that were destined to destroy all that was human in society. He used information that was available in any more-or-less decent public library, read research reports that were available online and, on that basis, planned his targets.
During that time, his brother received a letter in which Tom asked him to come and visit before the snow blocked the way to his dwelling in the woods once more.
Peter traveled for two days before arriving in Montana, and he felt happy when, turning down a narrow, steep road among the trees that led toward the reservoir, he came into a clearing and saw Thomas on one side, scraping mud from the blade of a hoe with a hunting knife.
Dressed in torn jeans and mid-length boots, with a plaid flannel shirt, he looked like a local farmer or lumberjack. They watched each other in the dim evening light, and there was an excitement and a delight as well, as if everything they’d lived through together lingered on in each reunion.
The surprise for Peter was that Tom now had a parrot. A yellow and disagreeable creature, which stared at them sideways with a single eye from its wooden cage. “Yes,” Munk said, “her name is Daisy. So now you can’t say I never talk to anyone.”
And when she heard him talking about her, so to speak, the parrot hopped nervously on the wire and squawked furiously: “Who came, Tom, who is here?” And when Munk and his brother started to move away, the parrot hopped up again and went on squawking in her old embittered voice: “I want to go to the hotel, Tom, let’s go to the hotel now, Tom,” in a cracked, deranged voice.
His brother had turned into a hunter-gatherer and a philosopher in the style of Diogenes, Peter said. His closest neighbor was five miles away, and Munk would swim naked in a nearby lake on summer afternoons.
When the newspapers published Munk’s manifesto, everyone in the nation devoted themselves to reading it, except for Peter, his brother. “Since he’s a writer, he doesn’t read…” said Parker, “he only writes!” One afternoon, just two weeks later, during a short-story workshop at Columbia while they were discussing Tim O’Brien’s accounts of war, one of his students claimed that Recycler had a much better style than any of the war writers they’d been reading in the course.
That night, Peter, after dinner, now at home, sat down in front of his computer screen to read the text online. It seemed to him that it said a few fair things and some other rather naive ones, but midway through reading he was held up by an expression, a refrain (You can’t eat your cake and have it too), repeated twice, a twist on an old colloquial turn of phrase that his brother habitually used.
He called a friend, Patricia Connolly, who knew them both, and repeated the phrase. “Thomas? It can’t be,” she said, to calm him down. “Of course it can’t,” he said, and in that moment he was certain that his brother was the author of the manifesto.
Then he went up into the attic of the house, and, under the slanted roof of “la chambre de bonne” (as he’d called that loft in his autobiographical story My Brother and I, published in the New Yorker), among the nostalgic childhood objects piled around the place—The Magic Brain, the Meccano set, the catcher’s glove signed by Billy Sullivan, the Yankees pennant, a row of old sneakers lined up chronologically—he found, in one of the drawers, along with photocopies, documents, and photographs, the original typescript of the essay “Nature Disrupted” that Thomas had sent to Harper’s in 1975, which the magazine had sent back to him without publishing. Two paragraphs from the work were repeated verbatim in the manifesto.
Sitting among those familiar objects, Peter felt that he must do something. There was almost no light, the windows reflected the shadows of trees, and, in that darkness, he went back to thinking that, if Tom was the terrorist, his life was ruined.
He loved his brother more than anyone else in the world, but in order to halt the insane wave of crimes he’d have to sacrifice him, and he would.
When Peter, with a cadaverous air, filled in his mother about the situation, she went over to her husband, who was still in recovery, and took him by the hand. Don’t worry, Jerzy, she said, and then looked at her son and said, in an icy voice, in Polish:
“I would rather see you dead than know you were the one who gave away your brother.”
“The converts, the ex-communists, the ones who become disillusioned of their old convictions, they’re the real enfants terribles of contemporary politics,” Menéndez used to say, and when he saw Peter he realized that he was one of that breed.
“If Judas had been victorious, we wouldn’t have so many problems in Palestine,” Menéndez declared. According to him, Judas recognized that Christ had turned into a hardened, inflexible extremist and that violence would be the result of those subversive sermons by the one who called himself the Shepherd of mankind.
Menéndez’s men arrived in the town in groups, all under different pretexts, and set up in local hotels or in the houses of police officers around the area. They didn’t say who they were looking for, but early in the morning they entered the woods and patrolled the area near the valley.
Tom was going on with his life as usual and didn’t notice these strange movements. Only Daisy, the parrot, seemed frightened, and she squawked constantly (“Let’s go to the hotel, let’s go to the hotel, Tom”) and flapped around. Munk ended up covering her cage with a black cloth, but the parrot grew furious, and he had to take it off because she squawked even more emphatically under the rubbery fabric, in an incomprehensible but furious language.
Finally, on the night of June 18, the FBI agents approached the shack as though facing off against an armed gang. They always behaved that way; they never made a move until they had a ten-to-one advantage, and they always acted as though the suspects or subjects under surveillance were the kind of offenders ready to go down fighting (they used expressions like that). They slipped in among the trees, observing the light that flickered in the cabin; it wasn’t completely dark yet, and, as they silently waited to burst in, the parrot started to screech from the branch of a tree where her cage was hanging. “Who’s coming, Tom, who’s coming, Tom?” Munk poked his head out through the window and stood motionless for a time, while the special police snipers aimed at him through the telescopic scopes of their rifles. But Munk went back inside.
The sheriff approached the cabin and called at the door with two calm knocks, just as he always did. When Thomas Munk opened the door, the whole gang swarmed in and took him down as Menéndez walked in, triumphant. From the floor, where he’d been thrown by the Feds who were now holding him down, Tom raised his head.
“How did you find me?” he said.
“It was your brother,” Menéndez said, to break him down.
“So it wasn’t you.”
(“Two of a kind,” said Parker. “Each the best in his own style.”)
The cabin was clean, organized, with books on the walls and canisters of explosives on the top shelves. There were no weapons in sight. They went through the drawers, turning everything out, but what were they looking for? Meanwhile, Thomas Munk had sat at his worktable and, his hands and feet shackled, began reading a book on mathematical analysis.
Once they’d finished the inspection, astonished that this man, in this place, could have been capable of doing what he’d done, they forced him to stand up. But forced is just an expression. They gave him a signal, and Thomas Munk stood with the dignity and pride of a political prisoner.
What immediately circulated in the media and became the center of the debate was a singular confusion: How is this possible? How could this happen? It was no longer in the North American tradition of the lone killer who, in a sudden act, enters a bar and kills all of the customers because they’d refused to serve him an Irish coffee the night before, or the high school boy who shoots everyone who gets in his way because they’ve been calling him fat for the last three weeks and he’s failing gym class. Not even the supermarket employee who gets laid off and, since he can’t appeal to a union or support organization, goes up into a tower and kills everyone in a kind of private political violence. These events proliferate in the history of a society that has made its flag out of individualism and depoliticization. In this case it was a man from the elite who dedicated himself to carrying out violent acts systematically over the course of years, eluding the national persecutory machine of the FBI, for reasons that were not personal but rather political and ideological.
He acted on his own, a self-made man, expressing his culture’s values, a pure American, yet his private life expressed not the success but the failure of the system. The fact that he alone held the secret to his actions, that he’d never confided in anyone for years and years, was the most extraordinary but also the most North American part of the whole story. The people who’d known him were surprised and alarmed, and some rejected the possibility that the same peaceable man they used to spend time with could have turned into a terrorist and a murderer.
One night, Nina knocked on the glass of my window and sat down with me to watch the news on TV. It was very late, because of the time difference, when we saw Thomas Munk for the first time on ABC News. They were transferring him from prison to the courthouse, and he came out of the police van, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, his face bristly with unkempt stubble but showing a smile on his lips. He looked wild, a man of the woods, and when he saw the camera he raised his cuffed hands with one fist closed as if in a victorious salute. His ankles were chained together, and he moved clumsily as he entered the courtroom in Jefferson, where the preliminaries of the case were beginning, before he would be transferred to California’s federal courts in Sacramento.
“A man in ambush,” said Nina. Isolated from the world, fighting on his own. Hard to find anything like it in political history. He lived like Robinson for almost twenty years, maintaining his solitary war against global capitalism. In the cabin they found the Diary, partly written in Spanish and partly encoded, in which he recorded his life and kept detailed notes of his attacks.
The district attorney had requested the death penalty, and Thomas refused to follow the advice of the lawyers that his brother had hired from a prestigious New York firm, who expected him to plead insanity and seek protection under the corresponding legal provisions in order to avoid execution. Munk, however, had rejected that option and requested to conduct his own defense.
The fact that he refused to seek protection due to insanity was considered, by the lawyers, to be proof of insanity. Only lunatics argue that they aren’t insane, because no one in their right mind is going to insist on their sanity. For Munk, on the other hand, this discussion of insanity couldn’t be a condition of the trial but rather its result. (“They are defining as an essence what should be the object of analysis,” he said.) Therefore, he asked that his writings and actions be the focus of the legal debate, not his character. No one is ever just a murderer or lunatic, but rather several things more, simultaneous or successive, whereas an action can indeed be defined by its own character, by its objectives and its consequences. He argued that the state wanted to declare him insane so that his political arguments would be discounted as ravings. His arguments and reasoning weren’t being considered, which was classic in the United States, where radical political motives were viewed as aberrations of personality. According to Munk, to diagnose him as a lunatic and prevent him from defending himself was to employ the techniques of Soviet psychiatry, which had always asserted that dissidents were lunatics because no one in their right mind would oppose the Soviet regime, a paradise that manifested the direction of history. The United States, now that it has triumphed in the Cold War, believes that it is Leibniz’s perfect world and that those who oppose it are in the wrong. “I’m not the one who invented violence; it existed before and will continue to exist. Or must only cases in which the violence has a political target be considered acts of insanity? In short, only those who oppose the system are insane; the rest are just criminals,” he said.
The general discussion centered most of all around the how (how Munk was able to do what he did), but not the why behind his doing it. They never asked those questions in cases of political acts (why did Oswald kill Kennedy?); they were only interested in the how (he was high up in an office building with a high-precision rifle), but once they finally asked the question as to the cause, the answer was always insanity.
Tom had refused to speak to his brother or his father and only agreed to receive his mother, the Polish pianist, as the media called her. She was a resolute and courageous woman who drew the repudiation of all the journalists commenting on the case because she spoke her mind and didn’t complain. He isn’t crazy, my son, even if his actions are incomprehensible. I want them to judge him and listen to him before they condemn his actions. She was the only one who appeared to understand him and to be on his side, and that was proof that something was wrong with her, so everyone insinuated that the eccentric and disturbed Polish pianist was the one truly responsible for her son’s condition. On her way out of their visits the mother never paused, and only once did she confront a reporter from NBC, who’d called Munk the monster from the forest.
“Do you know him? Did you speak with him?”
“His actions are enough for me.”
And her response couldn’t be heard over the hostile cries of onlookers who swore at her with hatred.
She visited him every day but in the end gave in, and, fearing her son would be sentenced to the death penalty, she too signed the declaration of insanity. From that moment onward her son refused to talk to or see her anymore. Munk refused to betray his principles in order to save his life. He had the constitutional right to defend himself unless he was declared insane, and his brother was in litigation to have him deemed incapable of handling his own defense.
In the background, outside the circle of journalists, lawyers, and onlookers who were happy to insult him and wave at the cameras, there was a small group of activists in front of the courthouse protesting against the death penalty. They were demanding a political trial for Munk rather than a criminal trial. They held up posters showing his face as a young university student, with slogans like Bush is the criminal. A lone protester, apart from everyone else, held up a poster on which he’d written Munk points the way. He was the first one the police dragged off to their vans.
At the beginning of August they would transfer Munk to Sacramento and the preliminaries of the trial would begin. The district attorney began the arguments and public opinion was in agreement with the allegations, but the specter of the death penalty, circling in the air, made the debate more serious.
In The Nation, one of the psychoanalysts who’d been summoned by the court said of Thomas Munk and his opinions: “His story is not only fascinating but illuminating and persuasive. Terrorists use ideas to justify appalling acts of violence but ideas alone do not create terrorists. Munk emerges not as a clinically insane person but as a brilliantly twisted, deluded, enraged, and evil man. The specialist shows how technological society is partly, but not wholly, to blame for the creation of a Munk.” An eminent legal scholar, Dr. Hamilton Jr., interviewed in The Village Voice, claimed that Munk’s reasoning was very well founded: “It makes logical, clear, solid arguments. In recent days I have met the man personally, and in our dealings there’s been no sign of mental illness. He’s lucid, rational, and calm. Now I certainly don’t endorse the murders he committed, but if you are studying ethics then it’s important to realize that there are many instances in which an individual can say, ‘yes, there is an ethically justified basis for killing.’ Governments are, in effect, arguing that killing is justified whenever they start a war. In both his manifesto, and in his letters to me, Mr. Munk is, in effect, doing the same thing. But can an individual stand up against the state?”
“The state, yes, the state,” said Nina. “They wouldn’t have found him if it weren’t for his brother’s betrayal. Isn’t it incredible?”
We were sitting in the living room at her house that afternoon. It was hot outside, and she’d turned on the air-conditioning. The fish were swimming in their circular bowl, and she stared at me with her calm blue eyes.
Can betrayal be praised? I would rather see you dead than know you were the one who gave away your brother, his mother had said. That was fine. Nothing justified betrayal. Was there nothing that justified betrayal? asked Nina, and then in a low voice she recited the verses by Anna Akhmatova:
They tortured: ‘‘Spill it, tell us what you know!’’
But not a single word or cry or moan
Gave her enemy anything to use.
Like his victims, Munk had managed to replace his emotions with his ideas, his compassion with his convictions. Like them, he never stole, kidnapped, or asked for money. He considered them functions of the system, individuals carrying out tasks that were destined to destroy all that was human in society. Like them, he was waiting for the incomprehensible to find its meaning in the future. Was there a meaning? Yes, because there was an order, because you had to be very ruthless to discover it in the midst of widespread confusion.
“In order to understand him, you’d have to have a conversation with him,” Nina said. Conversation, she said, as if he was a friend who could be asked to give an explanation. “Talk with that man,” she said later.
I stood up to leave. Nina was thinking of spending the summer in Europe, where one of her daughters lived.
“I’m going to miss you, dear,” she said.
We said goodbye in the garden of her house, which adjoined the garden of my own house, and so I walked through the fence and went up to my study and, from the window, once more watched her moving among the flowering plants (tulips, azaleas, bluebells) that had survived the winter thanks to her.
I had to meet Munk, but was it possible? I spent a couple of weeks turning the matter over until one day, in the middle of July, I found the argument that would justify my visit to the prison.