I pointed to the window. “My father worked in the state building across the mall. My mother used to take us kids to have lunch with him.”
I walked around the conference table to the window and craned my head toward Capitol Park. “We used to run around on that lawn.” The three of us chasing one another, my mother on a bench lost in a book. “I had a job one summer in my father’s office as a messenger.” I remembered running back and forth between these buildings, proudly carrying my big brown envelope. He must have paid me out of his own pocket. For all I know the envelopes were empty.
The young assistant smiled at me in that tolerant, desperate way my kids did when they hoped they didn’t have to listen to me much longer.
“So what do I do?” I asked.
Relieved, she showed me where to sit at the large table. She gave me a legal pad and some pencils. Bobby’s diaries had been photocopied and also transcribed.
“I’ll be here if you have any questions.” She sat at the far end of the table, and got down to whatever she was working on. I was suddenly irritated. I didn’t want to be watched. I eyed her surreptitiously but she never looked up.
I was overly warm, restless. I took two Advil from my purse and swallowed them with water from my plastic bottle, my fingers already shredding the label. I hadn’t even been there ten minutes.
The night before Sara had told me not to come here. “Leave the diaries alone,” she said. “Trust me, you’ll regret reading them.”
“Regret is the only sure feeling I have,” I’d answered.
I opened a page. My brother’s writing filled all the white space on the paper, his handwriting cramped, minuscule. When I looked closer, I saw dates. Entries ended and began on the same line without space between them. His letters from Guatemala had looked just like that. He’s trying to save paper, my mother had declared, in a way that made me feel I wasted it.
The airless scrawl was nearly impossible to read. I reached for the thick binder holding the transcription. Bobby wrote about growing his own food. He measured his potatoes, his carrots, for length and circumference, fought garden pests and birds. He had a hole in his cabin floor where he stored his vegetables in the earth. He tried to be a vegetarian, but he’d trapped and eaten a rabbit that was destroying his garden.
My mind drifted. I remembered Bobby at our refrigerator, hanging on the door, staring inside, my mother telling him to shut it. “There’s never anything to eat,” he said, slamming the door.
“Yeah,” I’d echoed in solidarity.
“Let’s go, squirt,” he said.
I’d burnished that memory, my big brother buying me a hamburger at a drugstore soda fountain, a boy who couldn’t make himself a peanut butter sandwich.
In the diaries, my brother obsessed over his health. His stomach gave him trouble. No intestinal detail was too minor to be recorded. It seemed we both shared a tendency toward heart flutters and headaches. Bobby thought of buying a blood pressure monitor but the price was exorbitant. The young woman looked up when I laughed. I was tempted to try to explain to her the ludicrousness of my brother fretting about his blood pressure while he built bombs.
His cabin didn’t have plumbing, so he built an outhouse and hauled water from an outdoor pump. There was no electricity. If his cabin had been in the city, it would have been a cardboard box on a vacant lot. What fable would we have told ourselves about Bobby then? That he worked with the homeless?
He wrote that he was unspeakably lonely, that he detested his parents. Our parents. He said that Father had accused of him being a sicko.
He wishes me dead because I am an affront to his tidy life, the effete liberal values he embraces to compensate for his lack of personal power … He is a lackey for the system and a bully at home. He uses his fists and would kill me if he thought he could get away with it.
His fists? I closed my eyes against the awful words on the page and the sense that I was falling. Who was this bully of a father Bobby claimed to know? Not mine. Sara had tried to warn me, but I’d walked right into this. I took a sip of water from my bottle, forced my eyes to read.
Although Mother is smarter, she accepts the role of hausfrau. Denied an outlet for her mind, she’s focused on controlling mine … She claims I might feel better if I saw a psychologist. She fakes naïveté but she knows full well: the only purpose of psychology and psychiatry is to control people … She tries to control me by sending money that I have to accept because she knows I have no income, no other way to finance my work.
Finance his work. His bombs. What if she hadn’t sent the money? Would seven people be alive today?
I looked up, glanced around as if searching for accusing stares. I’d given Bobby money, too. Small checks for Christmas, his birthday, checks he never acknowledged but cashed. Enough for packing material, bus fare, detonator wires. Enough for the postage on the bomb that killed Olivia Trinidad.
The sweat of my fingers left marks on the page I turned. The goal of society, Bobby wrote, was obedience.
Children are conditioned into obedience by parents and schools. Those who are not obedient are separated from the others and sidelined into the ill or delinquent population … The mechanisms of control rob us of the self-esteem we need to create our own goals.
Obedience? Who did Bobby ever obey? Who was controlling him? Other anarchists? Or was it the demons in his own mind?
I flipped a few pages ahead to a rant about the post office. They’d raised the first-class rate to twenty-five cents. The purpose of which is not only to support the inefficiency of the post office but also to condition people to their own powerlessness. Two birds are killed with one stone, but the end result is dead birds.
What did Bobby care about the price of stamps? He never wrote anyone. But, of course, he sent packages, and every penny counted. He kept exact records. It cost five dollars and forty cents to mail a bomb to the Stanford scientist who had his arm and half his face blown off. Fourteen dollars for the hotel room in Sacramento where he mailed the package. Twenty-six dollars for bus fare. Food on the trip totaled three dollars and seventy-eight cents.
An awful metallic taste filled my mouth. I pressed a hand against my lips. Whatever impulse had brought me to this room and compelled me to read these words wasn’t healthy. I’d pushed Eric and my children away for this. A sane person would pick up her purse and run to her family. But I wasn’t that person. I was sick from missing them, sicker from what I was reading, but I couldn’t stop.
The most dangerous feature of modern techno-industrial society is its power to make people comfortable. Once comfort rather than survival becomes man’s objective, there is no end to the comfort he craves, not just physical but mental, moral, and emotional as well … The autonomous person is not a comfortable person, and autonomy is nearly impossible in a system that uses comfort as a controlling mechanism.
On the surface, my brother’s words made complete sense. Except the truth they told wasn’t the one he intended. All my life, I’d wanted comfort. I’d wanted love without loss. So had my mother. Even Sara, possibly my father. Because the truth about Bobby had been too painful, we’d chosen to substitute the pretty pictures in our heads for the reality we couldn’t face.
I skimmed pages looking for something I could stand reading. I stopped at a section about time. Before the breakdown of a day into hours or seasons into weeks, a man might have feared being eaten by a bear, but he did not fear death itself. Everyone cultivating his own patch of earth. No more worrying about cholesterol or paying for the kids’ college. The world he described had its appeal. Except he advocating killing people to get there.
In the bitter cold of an Idaho winter, Bobby wrote about California, a state built on the heedless rush for gold. And who got to profit from the gold buried in the mountains and rivers of the state? Not the indigenous population, not even the government in the name of the common good, but any asshole with a pick. Within twenty years of the Gold Rush, Bobby wrote, four-fifths of California’s Native American
population had been wiped out. It wasn’t enough just to kill off the Indians. The California legislature also authorized more than a million dollars to reimburse Indian killers for their expenses in getting the job done.
There was no California dream, he concluded, only a nightmare of avarice. The institutions of the state arose from the rape of the land and publicly subsidized mass murder. A state built on the annihilation of indigenous man and the despoiling of the planet serves as a template not just for the country but the world.
The California universities, too, were tainted from the start, he argued, and their goal had been to spread the contamination. While Stanford pioneered in the field of electronics research, Berkeley smashed the atom. One paved the way for the computer age, the other the nuclear, the semiconductor as destructive to mankind as the bomb. One obliterates with force, the other with information.
I rubbed my eyes. All those words without a single paragraph break had made them burn. I stared at the black-and-white patterns, not because the words made no sense, but because I understood them too well. Bobby and I were fifth-generation Californians. My father’s great-grandfather had come here for the gold, my mother’s for the land. My father was devoted to this state. The universities were his life’s work. My brother had built his philosophy out of the pathology of his own mind.
Bobby wrote that he would have preferred not to have to kill anyone, but the technological age has produced a toxic information overload that overwhelms the individual. He can no longer distinguish between the trivial and the vital, between manufactured and real desires. Under such circumstances, he wrote coolly, the only way to be heard, the only way for an important message to make a lasting impression, was for people to die.
I felt woozy, my face clammy. The person who had written these words wasn’t my brother. My brother was gone. Now there was only this killer.
The lasting impression Bobby wanted to make was not in the minds of ordinary people. It was on other radicals. The only way to bring down the system was through a sustained campaign of violence horrible enough to plunge society into chaos. An apocalypse, yes, but our earth would be saved and mankind would be freed to return to primeval liberty.
I’d hoped to uncover evidence of an insane mind, and I had. I’d also found the brutal logic of a terrorist.
chapter thirty-one
IN THE FOUR HOURS I spent reading Bobby’s diaries the weather had changed. By the time I got back to my mother’s place, I could smell the approaching storm. My mother and Sara were reading in the living room, Mother in her chair, Sara on the couch, two gray-haired women in half glasses. Maybe in all this, they’d found a kind of peace in each other’s company.
“You must have been chilly out there without a sweater,” my mother said.
“It’s beautiful out,” I countered. “You want to go for a walk, Sara?”
She shrugged, then got up slowly. We put on hooded sweatshirts.
“Valley weather,” Sara said after we’d walked in silence to the park in the center of the tract. She pointed up. “White clouds to the left, storm clouds to the right, and in the middle a sky that can’t make up its mind.”
We both put up our hoods. Sara lit a cigarette and inhaled as if there were nothing better than smoke filling your lungs in crisp, clean air.
“So how was your research? I assume that’s what you got me out here to talk about,” she said.
“You were right about the diaries,” I said, hugging my arms. “I shouldn’t have read them.”
She stopped, faced me. “How bad was it?”
“I was able to sit there, I was able to drive home,” I said. “Bobby had his reasons. He laid them out. Industrial society has polluted the earth and dehumanized mankind, so now he thinks it’s time for anarchist revolution.”
“That’s it? His big theory?”
“It gets better,” I said. “He’s had to focus his campaign because he’s only one person. He picked out California universities as a symbol of what he considers the tyranny of technology. He understands he’s a terrorist and that terrorism is effective. He wants to be heard and to inspire others to emulate him.”
“Oh, Lord,” Sara said, grinding her cigarette out on the lawn. She retrieved the butt, held it in her hand. “It’s all so sophomoric. I would have expected more of Bobby.”
“He’s paranoid about being controlled,” I said. “He thinks psychiatrists use drugs to control people who are depressed by their powerlessness, that technological society controls the rest of us with mindless entertainment and consumerism.”
“Do you think that’s why he keeps refusing to see us?” Sara asked. “That he’s afraid we’re out to control him in some way?”
“I don’t know. There’s not a word about either of us in his diaries. But there are pages of every mundane detail of building bombs, mailing them, even of building his fucking outhouse. Suffering a hangnail, sending a bomb—the tone is the same. It’s all flat, except for flashes of rage at Mom and Dad. You and I basically don’t exist.”
I looked to the sky, silently willing the rain to wait. “He hated Dad. He thinks Dad wanted to kill him. Actually kill, as in murder.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Sara said.
“Did Dad ever hit Bobby?”
“It’s hard to imagine,” she said quietly. “All I know is Dad was really disgusted with Bobby after he quit his job at Columbia. He thought Bobby threw his life away to live like a bum.” Sara withdrew into her sweatshirt. “Neither Mom nor Dad could ever accept that there was something wrong with Bobby. They had too much invested in him. Mom became his apologist, and Dad was so hurt by Bobby’s failure to be the son he wanted that he wrote him off.” She paused. “Do you think Time and the others were actually correct with their asinine pop psychology? That Bobby bombed universities to get back at Dad by attacking what he worked so hard for?”
“I’m sure that’s in there,” I said. “Not that Bobby is capable of seeing it. If he were, we wouldn’t be here.”
Sara resumed walking, her head down. I kept pace with her.
“Mom never asked you to clean out the cabin in Gold Run, did she?”
Sara shrugged. “She never mentioned it.”
“No, she asked me. She knew I’d do just what she wanted without her having to spell it out. She wanted me to get rid of anything incriminating, and I did. I threw out a coded notebook of Bobby’s.”
Sara stopped to look at me. Then she laughed. “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. There’s enough evidence against him already.”
“That’s not my point.” I put my hand on her arm to keep her where she was. “It might not have been exactly conscious, but I knew what I was doing when I threw that notebook out. Before he even moved to Idaho, Bobby was keeping notebooks in code. I found one and threw it away. I was acting just like Mother.” I paused. “And like you.”
Sara looked quietly surprised. But I wasn’t going to let her retreat into her customary silence. I took a step closer to her. “When are you going to stop lying to me?”
“Come off it, Natalie, it’s getting really cold.”
But I couldn’t stop myself. “You read the manifesto months before I did. You must have suspected Bobby all along. But you couldn’t face what you might have to do. You let me do it.”
“What you did was run to Eric.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m no different from you. It took me two months to face up to the possibility that the Cal Bomber could be Bobby, and by that time Olivia Trinidad was dead.”
“You and I aren’t to blame for that,” Sara said.
“Yes we are,” I said. “Not for the bomb that killed her, not for what Bobby did. But for our cowardice. For our unwillingness to do anything about what was right in front of us. Until it was too late.”
She didn’t answer, but I knew she’d heard me. We walked back in silence, the rain falling at last.
*
I DROVE BACK to Berkeley the next day, and scr
ubbed the house as I never had before, chemicals filling my nose and brain. Eric phoned. He put Lilly on, then Julia. I longed for a complaint, a problem—a hurt finger would do—but they were like someone else’s children, polite, happy, and eager to get off the phone. Eric talked about blue skies and river rafting.
I stopped him. “Bobby did it,” I said. “He kept diaries. That’s why the government’s been so sure of itself.”
“I heard,” Eric said. “It’s all the over the news.”
“I’m giving an interview to the Sacramento Bee,” I said. “My mother’s PR adviser arranged it. I have to do it. Bobby’s going to be tried in Sacramento.”
He was silent. “I can’t stop you,” he said finally.
*
I WELCOMED another reporter into our home, but this time, I had no illusion that my brother was anything other than the Cal Bomber. His ruined mental state was now the only hope we had of saving him, and the point I had to get across.
“My brother’s writings are full of his concerns about mind control,” I said. “He lived in a tiny dirt shack that he barely left. He didn’t bathe. He thought my father wanted to kill him.” I told the reporter the government understood my brother was severely mentally ill. “They’re insisting on the death penalty for only one reason: they’re terrified of looking soft on terrorism.”
*
LILLY LAY bloodied and motionless in my arms, rubble surrounding us. I stroked her blackened legs, her bare feet, her lifeless hands, cradled her as if she’d just been born.
I groped the sheets, reached for Eric. But of course he wasn’t there. I’ll forget this nightmare, I thought, knowing I never would.
In the morning, I read an op-ed piece by the maimed Stanford professor, his angry response to my newspaper interview. He’d lost his arm, his eye, his ear, his good-looking face to one of Bobby’s bombs.
Still in my nightgown, I wrote to him, pleading for his understanding and his forgiveness. My brother wasn’t evil, but tragically ill.
I dressed, drove to the post office, then past it. I had no right to ask that professor for anything. Eric and the girls were in Glacier Park in Montana, in the wilderness Bobby claimed to have loved. I parked in downtown Oakland near an old coffee shop, and found a booth inside. I drank coffee, staring out the greasy window.
Golden State Page 18
