Thomas Munk was executed on August 2, 2005, ten years after his capture. The sentence was postponed several times because of appeals, inquiries, and new trials. A multitude pleaded on his behalf, but the court denied amnesty. Many years have now passed since that day, but I can remember certain details exactly. The electric chair painted yellow, in the center of a glass enclosure. Munk’s worn-out basketball shoes with their laces knotted and intertwined, and the sound of their rubber soles on the concrete floor. His mother was there with him, and the man in the white suit as well. The transmission over the prison’s closed-circuit system had been captured live on an internet stream.
My real name is Thomas Reginald Munk, not The Shadow, not Recycler, I’m not the intellectual killer the way they slandered me, the ones who uselessly pursued me for twenty years and only managed to capture me when my brother betrayed me.
Look at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lecture on ethics: “If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.” Ethics is that explosion. Yahweh was the first terrorist. In order to impose his Law, he devoted himself to destroying cities and killing Job’s children. Why else do you think Dostoevsky had the idea to turn Alyosha Karamazov, the aspiring saint, into a revolutionary?
The video of the execution was on YouTube for a while, but his mother appealed to the authorities and managed to have them take it down. For a few weeks it was replaced by the image of Munk receiving the Fields Medal, but that document too was lost in the seas of the Web.
It was Ida Brown who got me tied up in this story, and it’s for her that I’ve written this book. The memories remain fixed, like sheets of film. Her, dressed in her gray overcoat, a yellow scarf around her head, waiting in the entrance of the Hyatt. Standing by the bed as she took off her earrings and then began to undress. She had these white spots on her skin, a smooth and pale tattoo across her body. They were birthmarks, traces of the past, which made her more beautiful still.
“I’m dappled,” Ida smiled. “Can you see, pichón?” And she leaned forward to show me that ghostly pattern on her body. “My mother doesn’t have them, but my grandmother does, and my grandmother says we have an Inuit ancestor… Imagine, a woman in the whiteness of the Arctic. They never say their true first name, it’s a secret, they only reveal it when they feel they’re going to die.”
Two weeks after my visit with Munk, I returned to Buenos Aires. When I reached Ezeiza, my friend Junior was waiting for me in the airport, but that’s another story.