by Joe Meno
Alan, by seventh grade, had devised a system of physical abuse that rivaled the brutal torments of the early Mongols. His tortures had been uninspired during our early, formative years—the usual ear-flick, the full and half nelson, the crotch-punch—but by seventh grade his brutal imagination bloomed in full. When he would tackle me, then sit on top of my head and exhaust flatulence directly onto my face, when he would smack both of my ears at the same time so that a faint ringing could be heard for days, when he would pin my shoulders to the floor with his knees and spit into my mouth—forced open by his enormous hands—I knew he was right. There was no appropriate word to describe his predilection for inflicting this kind of harm, other than a certain, outdated kind of brilliance.
4
The Unabomber went to Evergreen Park Community High School: He finished his education there two full years early, as a sophomore.
In his sophomore year, my brother Alan got a girl from Evergreen Park High School pregnant. I found this out when he asked to borrow two hundred dollars from me. It was just after dinner one night, and while I was finishing up my geometry homework, Alan knocked on my bedroom door and stepped inside before I even permitted him to enter. Alan looked like he had a fever or something—his forehead was ringed with sweat—and, more than anything, what struck me was how scared he seemed. The mustache he was trying to grow glistened with perspiration. That was the year Alan started working out, I think. He had bought a weight bench at a garage sale and would spend hours down in the basement, pumping iron and listening to Journey. He had gotten pretty muscular and pretty scary pretty quick. But on his face at that moment was an expression of fear and doubt, an expression he had so often forced me to wear while he held me under the unforgiving, chlorinated water of the public pool or while I struggled in the throes of one of his Neanderthal headlocks. In Alan’s eyes that night was the quiet look of someone else, someone unfamiliar, someone much weaker.
Alan did not actually ask me if he could borrow the money. He said, “I need two hundred dollars,” and then pointed at my piggy bank with one large finger.
“What for?” I asked, instinctively pulling the wizard-shaped bank into a safe cradle against my chest. In that moment I wondered why Alan didn’t have money of his own when he was almost two full years older than me. Why, when I was fourteen and he was sixteen, was he asking to borrow money from me, money I had worked for two years saving up—washing dishes at a Greek restaurant on Friday and Saturday nights, cutting lawns during the spring, summer, and fall, shoveling walkways during the winter—money that totaled just a little more than two hundred dollars, which was going toward the priceless Fantastic Four #48, the first appearance of the Silver Surfer, a comic book that sat behind the counter at the comic book store on 95th Street, safe behind plastic, promised to be in mint condition, with the price tag of $275? Why wasn’t my older brother embarrassed to have to come groveling to his younger, more fastidious brother—a situation which the younger brother, in that moment, wondered how to best exploit? What kind of older brother/younger brother dynamic was this? Good questions, all of them. You will have to ask Alan yourself if you want any answers.
Because Alan simply repeated, “I need that money now.”
“I’m not just going to give it to you,” I told him. “I have to know you’re gonna repay me.”
“You’ll get it back,” he said.
“Well, I have to know what it’s going toward.”
“I told you, I need it.”
“Well, you can’t have it. Not unless you tell me what it’s for.”
In that next moment, I saw something else in my brother’s face I could barely recognize. It looked like he was going to cry—his eyes were small and watery, his chin lowered, his mouth became a crooked line framing an unspoken question. He closed the bedroom door and sat down on the bed, lowering his face into his large, inhuman-sized hands. Then he began to moan, like some unknown wild animal, like something waiting to be put to death. He made a sound unlike any I had ever heard before, the sound of crushing, total defeat.
“I just need it,” he repeated, and then, before I could ask again, he said, “It’s for a girl I know.”
“A girl?” Something turned in me then, something small and superior and jealous.
“I did it, okay? I got a girl pregnant. I need the money to take care of it,” he murmured, his face still buried behind his clenched fists.
“What?” I whispered. “You what?”
But Alan didn’t answer. He just said, “I need that two hundred dollars right now,” then stood, towering over me. Were we not young Catholics then? Didn’t we both escort our mother to church each and every week? What kind of favor was this to ask a brother, younger by nearly two years, someone who preferred the company of the characters of Tolkien and H.G. Wells? I decided I ought to take the moral high ground in this moment, though I didn’t know that was what I was doing at the time. It was how all the adults behaved who I admired—superheroes, parents on situation comedies, math teachers, wizards in serialized novels. Alan looked at me, his face large and menacing, his lips still quivering like he was going to cry, though by then I knew he wouldn’t.
“You got a girl pregnant?” I whispered, and he nodded once, then said: “Are you going to give me the money or not?”
I couldn’t actually believe it, or I could, but not that he was telling me—me, of all people. In my mind, and I don’t know why exactly, I thought getting a girl pregnant, someone you weren’t married to, someone you didn’t actually love— love in the strictest, most traditional Judeo-Christian fantasy novel sense—was just about the worst thing you could do. I told him this. I told him that I thought he was turning out to be a real asshole. He told me he thought I was not a big shot just because I was in honors classes now. I told him I did think I was a big shot. I told him that one day soon this big shot was going to save up enough money to buy a car and drive far away from Evergreen Park and only come back one day to see it burn. I have no idea why I thought my neighborhood would one day be in flames. It was an ongoing fantasy, however, which I helplessly clung to for years and years afterwards.
“Just give me the money,” he said, quickly losing his patience.
“On one condition,” I told him.
“What?”
I know he could have ripped the piggy bank out of my hands if he really wanted to. But instead, he stood there, glaring down at me, waiting for an answer.
“I want to see her,” I told him.
“Who?”
“The girl.”
“What?” His face screwed up in a knot of total disbelief. This was an expression I was more familiar with—one where his heavy eyebrows threatened to climb the thick ledge of his forehead. It was an expression he wore all the time—watching any television program that wasn’t a cartoon, trying to teach me how to shoot a free throw, staring at me from across the dinner table with disgust while I told my parents about the goings-on of the Science and Math Club.
“I want to see her,” I repeated.
I do not know now why I wanted to see what this girl looked like, only that, at that moment, it was something I know I needed to do. Maybe it was only spite, something that harsh and small and simple. Maybe I thought it would be a grave humiliation equal to the thousands and thousands of embarrassments he had thrust upon me. Maybe, just maybe, I thought that if I could force my brother to let me see the girl he had accidentally impregnated, if I could disgrace him in such an obvious way, then somehow we would temporarily be even.
“No way,” he said, suddenly sure of himself once again.
“Then you can’t have the money.”
“You little shit. I could break both your hands right now.”
“All I have to do is call for Mom. That’s all I have to do.”
“Why do you even care?” he hissed, exasperated. “What do you want to see her for?”
“That’s the only condition I have.”
He sat back down on the be
d, then a few seconds later stood up and said, “You could’ve been cool about this. You could have but you had to … you had to try and be a dick.”
“One condition,” I repeated, looking down at the carpeted floor. “That’s all I have.”
He stood by the bedroom door and asked, “Why the fuck are you doing this to me?”
“I’m not doing anything to you,” I mumbled, imagining myself as someone older, someone much more wise. “You did this to yourself.”
“This is the reason nobody likes you,” he said blankly, then closed the door behind him.
One hour later, as I stared at the conglomeration of numbers and shapes on my dull math homework, playing the argument over and over in my head, Alan opened the door without asking and said, “Okay, dickweed, let’s go.”
Alan had inherited a crummy Ford Escort from our uncle, a diabetic who lost both his legs to the disease. Because Alan was older, the car automatically became his. I tried to argue that this was a terrible mistake, that by grades or by merit the car ought to have been mine, even though I was only fourteen at the time. My parents, kind enough to hear me out, still disagreed. The car, like almost everything in the world, would be Alan’s first.
We backed out of the driveway and turned down 99th Street, Alan silent, a worn-out Doors cassette playing loudly on the stereo. I listened in amazement; the vulgar, sexual psychedelic thrum of the Doors frightened me for some reason. It was music that belonged to my brother and other kids with peach-fuzz mustaches, kids who wore their dads’ army jackets, kids who laughed at me because my brother had told them I still collected action figures, which I did, action figures which were bound in their bright cardboard backing, never to be opened or touched. I stared out the passenger’s side window of the Escort then, imagining the dotty face of the poor girl he had abused, the face of some street urchin from the illustrated comics of Charles Dickens. The familiar corners and blocks flew past, as I dreamed of the girl’s quiet, upturned face—her willowy victim’s body trembling beneath my brother’s hulking shape. I knew he did not love her. I knew she did not love him. I knew he had lied to her to get her to give in. I would glance at the girl’s shamed face and see what brute strength, what twenty-inch biceps, what vigorous male charm had taken and ruined. And I would finally stop envying all my brother ever had.
When we reached Kedzie Avenue, Alan switched the radio off, and without looking at me, said, “You don’t talk to her, you understand? You stand there like the little dickweed you are and you don’t say a word.”
I nodded, then resumed staring out the window. I didn’t say anything when he took a left on Kedzie, then sped past the White Hen convenience store, past our childhood doctor’s office, past the tiny barber shop where we both got our hair cut. Just before 95th Street, Alan silently pulled into the parking lot of Dairy Queen, shut off the engine, and nodded, motioning with his eyes toward the red-and-white rectangular building, a giant plastic soft-serve ice cream cone rising from its angular roof. Alan threw open the driver’s side door, then walked toward the glass windows, not glancing back to see if I was following. I was. But without certainty. I had lost my nerve. I was afraid the girl, whoever she was, would look at me and laugh, that because she was a girl, and because she had done what she had done with Alan, she would somehow be able to see me for what I was, a miserable, unhappy wretch, who at the age of fifteen pretended to see movies he had actually never seen, pretended to understand books he could barely read, who wished more than anything to be as strong, to be as sure of himself, to be as truly appealing as his older brother, a brute who did not deserve what had been given to him. I stood by the curb, my back to the glass windows of the Dairy Queen, terrified to look the girl in the face. But I could see that Alan was talking to her now, a tiny, unremarkable girl with blond hair, wearing the red-and-white hat of the Dairy Queen establishment. They were whispering something to each other and they were quietly holding hands. I glanced again and was surprised to see that the girl was wearing glasses. I had never pictured Alan ever going for a girl with glasses.
My brother turned to me and said something, but I shrugged it off and hurried back to the car just then, quickly slamming the passenger door behind me. From my seat, I could see my brother still standing there, talking to a shadow behind a pane of opaque glass, and what was in his eyes, what was in his face, was unlike anything I had ever glimpsed before anywhere—not on television, or in film, in comic books, or in the expressions of my parents or teachers. From the gentle way his mouth parted as he spoke, from the slightness of his eyes, from the way he held one of the girl’s fingers in his large hand, grasping it as if it was the most precious thing in the world, I knew then that he was truly in love. I knew then how I would never hold hands with a girl in that way, not any time soon, or maybe not ever. I sat there in the passenger seat and momentarily accepted that it had been my fault that I had become so miserable.
Later that evening, I gave Alan the two hundred dollars he had asked for. He paid it back to me in full the following week. By then, he had begun using and selling drugs pretty regularly.
5
The Unabomber went to Harvard when he was seventeen years old.
When my brother was seventeen and I was fifteen, we wrestled on the front lawn the day before Christmas Eve. He had made both my mother and father cry, telling them he would kill himself if they would not let him enlist in the army. I could no longer stand the look of his face. His eyes were dark and electric, his face lean and sharp. While he had his back to me, standing on our front porch smoking, shouting at my parents that he was through with them and through with God and through with everything, I jumped onto his back. He got me in a headlock before I remembered that he would always, always be stronger than me.
Just a few weeks earlier, Alan had been expelled from St. Rita’s for being intoxicated in school. He had taken a number of Seconals and brought a pair of nunchuks to his biology class, which he was desperately failing. I don’t know what he had planned to do with the nunchuks, because he collapsed beside his desk before anything happened, lying there on the tile floor, unhappily smiling.
6
The Unabomber graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. His specialty was geometric function theory; he earned his degree by solving a single math problem his professors could not solve. He was then hired as an assistant professor in the mathematics department of the University of California at Berkeley.
Alan didn’t ever go to college. He did try to get his GED at Moraine Valley Community College, but after one semester he decided “it’s a lot of dumb kids acting like smart assholes” and so he quit. He thought that all of his teachers had it out for him. He truly believed there was an actual secret network of some kind—a network which all teachers in the world shared; he believed that his previous teachers from high school had asked his current teachers at community college to try their best to fail him.
Alan and I had pretty much stopped speaking to each other by then.
I was finishing up my senior year in high school and I didn’t want to consider Alan’s problems too. Alan was twenty and had become totally erratic. He had lost a lot of weight and was skinny and always sweaty. He had punched a number of holes in his bedroom walls—eleven altogether. He tried to cover these holes up with posters of jungle cats or torn pages from National Geographic. He began to use drugs more and more frequently—drugs like PCP and cocaine. He would come to dinner only wearing dirty white underwear. He would be high when I found him staring at the television at all hours. He refused to get a job or leave the house. Finally, my parents decided that Alan needed to find a place of his own. He got so upset at the suggestion that he began sobbing right at the dinner table. He threw his plate on the floor and ran upstairs to his room where he locked the door. He would not open it for the next two days, not until my mother promised that he did not have to move out.
Looking back now, it is clear to all of us tha
t this is when Alan first began getting sick. But it was so hard to tell—his symptoms and his personality had silently begun to overlap, and no one could get close enough to see what was actually happening.
7
After leaving the University of California at Berkeley, without explanation, the Unabomber’s first explosive device was sent to a Northwestern University professor named Buckley Crist in May of 1978. The device, hidden within a brown paper package, was left in a parking lot with Crist’s return address written on it. The package was found and promptly brought to Crist. When Crist received the package, he noticed that the address was not written in his own handwriting and so he contacted a Northwestern University campus policeman by the name of Terry Marker. Marker opened the package and it immediately exploded.
Alan had finally got a job working at MenuMart supermarket on 95th Street; he would bag groceries and corral the shopping carts which were left stranded all around the parking lot. His hair was long and dark brown and shaggy. He had grown a scruffy beard and now his fingernails were always black and dirty. At work, he would often get in trouble for saying odd things to the customers as he placed their purchases within the safe confines of their paper or plastic bags. Alan had become obsessed with the idea of God. He believed God was present in nature, that He resided within the trees and animals and moving rivers and streams of the natural world, and that modern progress, which obstructed or destroyed the natural world, was actually killing God. He would say these things to the supermarket customers as he held their grapefruits, their Sloppy Joe mix, their loaves of bread, in his dirty white hands. He might then tell them everything he knew about jungle cats. “The leopard is the smallest member of the great cats and most closely resembles its cousin, the jaguar. Male leopards only actually weigh between eighty and 150 pounds. I believe the leopard is one of God’s finest creations and proof that He exists,” Alan would stutter. The customers of the MenuMart did not exactly appreciate or understand his comments, though his manager did state that Alan was the most efficient bagboy he had ever hired.
