Bandit

by Molly Brodak

  When she returned to the States, she moved back to Grand Rapids, but it was impossible to pick up her studies again. One semester in, she was failing all of her classes. A friend of hers advised her not to go back. She thought about what she wanted to do, where she’d like to be, and she decided she wanted to move to Baltimore to be with her Aunt Molly, the woman for whom I was named.

  “The first year,” she said, “I just shadowed her.” Just followed her around, modeling her, learning the adult world. Soon she got a job as an assistant in a home for mentally disabled children, and the reward of it encouraged her to finish her degree in clinical psychology. She went toward her own problems with an intense bravery and intelligence that humbles me, even now. She specialized in them, in order to help others.

  After twenty years of working in clinics and managing her own private practice, she left it. Addiction counseling, especially, is brutal—full of failure, managing relapses, deaths. She took a job without any intense emotional requirements: in the footwear department at REI. She outfitted adventurers with boots for mountain climbing in Kenya or canoeing the Au Sable River. It was a more pleasant and low-stakes way of continuing on as a therapist of sorts. Not in spite of it all—the betrayal, abuse, deceit—but because of it all, she still loved people. She gave them what she could—a little help, a little conversation, some good advice—then set them off.

  40

  Dad spent some of his seven-year prison term in Milan, Michigan, and the rest in Pennsylvania. I was probably about fifteen when my grandpa took me to visit him. My mom would not take me, and my sister did not want to go; she didn’t want to see him there. My grandpa had been trying to strike up an open communication with Dad. He’d been writing him letters, sending him books, hoping to get to the root of his choices, wanting to know why why why. Of course, inquiring this of the criminal himself assumes the criminal (1) has a reason and (2) is capable of articulating that reason. I had already given up my faith in these two concepts, but I was—we all were—curious to see what Grandpa could elicit from Dad.

  In every way my grandpa was different from my dad. Grandpa was so smart and good, so transparent and open; he liked to ask me about my life and talk about death and God and art. A Jewish migrant from Russia who fled with his family from their home to escape persecution, my grandpa was a hard worker, a voracious reader, and a deep thinker. He was a Marine, fought in the Philippines in WWII, married his only sweetheart and dedicated himself to her, and made a good, honest living as a salesman. He made a real life all of his family depended on, including me. He looked straight at me when he spoke. He was one of the few people I communicated with on any meaningful level as a teenager.

  It was winter, and we drove to Pennsylvania slowly. The night before our visit we went to see a movie in a tiny, empty theater. I can’t remember much about it but I am certain it was a disaster movie involving an earthquake or volcano, and I remember watching the actors running while computer-generated lava oozed over the streets of their town. I remember crying a little at that in the dark cold of the theater, wishing that would happen. I was in high school now, and I wasn’t seeing a therapist anymore, nor was I talking much to anyone. The appeal of total annihilation as a viable alternative to my current existence didn’t seem worrisome to me. Inwardly, I was as miserable as a teen could be. Outwardly, I was fine, didn’t care, didn’t care about anything.

  Over dinner that night at a Denny’s near our hotel Grandpa tried to draw me out. “Molly,” he started, “are you angry at your father?”

  I stopped poking at my food to look at him. He was smiling, patient. “No. Well. I mean, I am angry about what he did to my sister.”

  “… but you’re not angry about what he did to you? He did this to you, also, Molly, not just your sister. You talk like he’s only your sister’s father.”

  I drew my arms in. “No, because I already didn’t care about him. She cared. He was her world. He was never my world. He was nothing to me.”

  We let this utterance sit between us, both feeling how false it was. I regretted saying it, and felt old in that moment, too old for myself. “You know, Molly, you are allowed to be angry. He is your father. He abandoned you.”

  I looked at Grandpa: his kind brown eyes, his gentle smile radiating calm love. I wished so much he was my dad instead. I was jealous of my mom that she’d had him for a father—wise, understanding, caring, strong. I didn’t know at the time he’d failed to protect her, too.

  “No,” I said, trembling, tears in my eyes. Just no. That’s all I could manage. We left the conversation at the table and returned to the hotel in silence.

  The next day we pulled up to the prison, a long, low building, surrounded by fields of unmarred snow in all directions. Official as school. We filled out the forms, passed through the metal detector and into the visiting room.

  Up until that point I thought the room would be like it was in the movies—telephone stations with plexiglass partitions that mournful wives would press their palms to melodramatically. But this was not maximum security. Instead it was open, with long lunch tables with fixed stools exactly like the ones in the school cafeteria.

  I looked into the faces of the prisoners around the room, trying to recognize one of them. Some of them were sharing snack cakes or chips from the near-empty vending machine in the corner. The visitors were smiling and talking softly, with an uncanny pleasant sadness, as if today were some tragic holiday. Grandpa held my hand and pulled me toward an empty table, where we sat to wait for Dad to come out.

  He seemed so short and small, like a boy, when I saw him in his jumpsuit. He smiled and asked Grandpa about the trip, the weather, and they talked about adult things while I watched their faces quietly.

  Dad was talking about us girls now, as if I weren’t there. He didn’t look at my eyes, even when he did turn to talk to me.

  “Hi Dad,” I remember saying, as if I had been invisible during the entire first half of the conversation. I kept a smile on as he asked me general questions about my life, like nothing at all was wrong, like we weren’t in a prison but at home, on the couch.

  When all of his questions about who was in what grade and who liked what subjects and who better not be dating yet were answered, Dad sighed heavily and said nothing for a while. Grandpa brought a paperback book out of his leather coat pocket and handed it to Dad, who turned it over calmly to the guard who’d rushed over to inspect it. The guard took the book back to his station and passed some small electronic device over it and then returned it, a little annoyed. Grandpa was holding back, I could tell. It was supposed to be just a nice visit, nothing too serious, I reasoned. Soon we ran out of unimportant things to say.

  “If I did it, it was an out-of-body experience,” I heard Dad say when Grandpa asked him what he thought about the crimes. The sentence sank on us. All three of us looked at the floor. No one said anything else after that.

  The sunny photomural of a woodland scene on the wall I had been glancing at all during the visit, I learned, was a backdrop for photos. An inmate squeezed hard the two young boys he was having his picture taken with, and they laughed and squealed in mock pain. It was heartbreaking to me, the photomural, that fake forest. I watched the other kids line up with their dads for photos. Very young kids seemed happy, oblivious, but the older kids were sad. I watched their eyes when the camera flashed. Their inmate dads smiled proudly. The kids were hurt, under their smiles. I looked at my grandpa and my dad and thought about myself. I was hurt too, I decided. I wanted to scream it to both of them, to the whole prison. Instead, I smiled, and put on my coat, and hugged Dad goodbye.

  Outside, we walked back to the car, along a perfectly shoveled path scattered with salt grinding underfoot. For sure, I thought, that would be the last time I’d ever do that. He’d get out of prison, and this part of my life would be over, and I’d never have to visit my dad in prison ever again. Before we split paths to either side of the car I turned and hugged my grandpa hard without sayin
g anything.

  41

  Most people who go to prison, about 90 percent, get out. Consider that for a moment.

  If it’s true that most people get out, what kind of place should prison be? It shouldn’t be a machine that people pass through and come out worse on the other side. Ideally, it should be a place that teaches you how to never return there.

  And when your loved one is in there, you are so certain he is learning this lesson. He says he is learning this lesson. He appears to be learning this lesson. I can’t speak for other people’s experience with prisons, but I can tell you that this lesson was lost on my dad.

  In my favorite childhood movie, The Point, an animated hippie hero’s journey from the seventies, featuring a soundtrack by Harry Nilsson that my mom pressed on to us, the pivotal scene of the main character’s banishment to the wilderness never elicited the correct emotion in me. The boy is banished from his pointed town, in which everything has a literal and metaphorical “point,” because he has a round head, no point. Of course the wild world outside of the pointed town is rich and interesting and of course at the end he returns to the pointed town wise and triumphant, which causes, for some reason, everything there to lose its point. It seemed obvious that for this freak, this round-headed boy, being banished from his hometown of pointed people and pointed things ought to be taken as a reward not a punishment. Why was exile always framed as a punishment? Not only did the boy get to escape all of those horribly judgmental people, he became activated in banishment—challenged, strengthened, enlightened.

  The message, as it always is presented, is that banishing a transgressor for some grave wrongdoing—sending him to prison—is the worst punishment short of death. The message is crucially prosocial in a culture that thrives on regulated cooperation. It didn’t resonate with me because I already felt alone, I suppose, and some kind of formal release would have seemed like a blessing. How I felt staying on the Amish farm. Living on the other end of this, though, as a person left behind by someone banished to prison, I started to see another angle.

  Typical social connections to family, friends, coworkers, even strangers, which keep an average person afloat, have some other purpose for the sociopath. Not some other purpose, rather the same purpose—just intensified one thousandfold. Instead of benefiting from mutual respect and concern, always with an eye toward fairness and responsibility, the sociopath takes from the network but doesn’t give. He cheats.

  And the cheater relies, fundamentally, on the honesty of everyone else. He skates over these networks to dissemble, manipulate, or to just take whatever benefits him. His rewards, at no cost, are enormous. His receiving these rewards is especially painful for noncheaters to observe. It makes sense that there is not only formal punishment for cheating, but social shaming as well, which can be a hugely powerful motivator against cheating.

  In prison, the cheater has no access to his quarry. In theory. The theory fails when the quarry is his family.

  42

  “MOLLY.”

  The secretary hollered my name from within the glass cube of the principal’s office waiting room, out into the hall where I was sitting between one boy with a bleeding nose and another boy with a DIY tattoo of half a smiley face he’d just punctured into himself in the bathroom with a safety pin and Bic pen.

  Moving from middle school to high school, I’d transferred from regular visits with the school counselor to regular visits with the principal. She looked up at me from over her glasses when I entered her office, then looked back down, and remained looking at the papers on her desk or writing while she spoke to me.

  “Mrs. Higgs says you were doing needlepoint in AP English instead of participating and you refused to put it away when she asked you to.”

  “Yup. A tableau. Vase of hydrangeas,” I said. I gave it to Mrs. Higgs at the end of the year. The principal remained stoic, writing something on a notepad.

  “Explain that to me.”

  “She’s making us read Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park? It pisses me off that she thinks this is AP English material. I even asked her if I could read something else, and she said no, so whatever. I tried.”

  The principal looked up to glance at the book I held in my lap. The Revolt of the Masses, by José Ortega y Gasset. She sighed heavily. “Have you ever read the Tao Te Ching?”

  I shook my head. “It’s in the library. Where you always are.” I nodded. “Don’t forget that you are in high school, Molly.” I laughed with some disdain. She continued, “If you want to get through this, you’ve got to go with the flow. For now. It will be easier on you, and hopefully I’ll see less of you in here.” The advice disheartened me, as advice to “just give in” always does when offered to young idealists. “You have to go to gym class, you have to read Jurassic Park, you have to stop correcting the grammar in Mr. Kasprzak’s study guides, you have to stop working ahead in your Chem I book so that you’ll have to start paying attention to lectures and stop getting sent down here for writing poetry during class.”

  I am certain I rolled my eyes. “Or I will have to call your parents in here,” she added.

  “Yeah, you go ahead and do that. Please do that.”

  I meant it sarcastically at the time, but see how much I meant it.

  I don’t think my teachers knew I loved them. I just wanted them to do better. I wanted to test them because I couldn’t test my own parents, a mundane emotional drama enacted in high schools as often as any other. I turned to testing myself in the library, tearing through the poetry section, then the odd names in fiction: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. In my head I slowly practiced the syllables of their names in case I was ever asked what I spent all of my time doing.

  I didn’t get the chance to say their names out loud, nor did I get to hear anyone else speak them, not for years anyway.

  I didn’t talk to anyone about what I was reading or writing. Then I stopped reading novels. Too many families in novels.

  I didn’t like to see people caring about their families, or insisting that their private family story should be meaningful to others. I’d given up on books and movies in which any character primarily concerned him or herself with wistfulness or anger or adoration or fear or envy or desire or disgust or regret or bitterness or plain love toward a brother or sister or mother or father. I hated stories of wonderful mothers or fathers especially.

  And regular stories couldn’t fool me anymore. I felt their falseness. Their rounded, finite arcs, tidy rise and fall, buttressing values, their little lessons, like solved equations. Insulting. I’d look up from a book, or away from a movie, and see the world again—its mutant patchwork, invalid formulas, no arcs—and feel akin. I started to read only nonfiction: honest history, deep science. Plain subjects, but not understood. At home in tangles of chemistry formulas, mute images of anatomy, senselessness, empty action of animals, clouds, the plates of earth shifting. The bloodless categorization of geology textbooks: metamorphic, sedimentary, igneous. The textbooks trusted me to learn the names of everything and to fix the equations. I loved them for that. I didn’t love what stories asked me to do: to join, to hope, to trust. Those books, the novels, felt like propaganda.

  I fossilized my idea of family with cold logic, and left it. At some point in my high school reading life I told myself that my family members were just people I happened to be related to, nothing more. It was utterly random that I emerged from this lineage and not another—my appearance among these particular people didn’t mean anything special, and whatever bonds of affection existed among us were forged merely out of a combination of obligation, hormonal chemistry, and an unthinking survival imperative. I didn’t choose them and they didn’t choose me, so it couldn’t be love. I left love as a concept and moved toward anything else—science, philosophy, art.

  I just wanted something genuine, some real ideas, some challenge; I wanted to read the opposite advice the principal had given to me: don’t go with the flow, don’t give in, reach. The library did no
t, in fact, have the Tao Te Ching, so I drifted to the philosophy section and picked the shortest book I could find: Ecce Homo by Nietzsche.

  Without any real understanding of this man’s story or what he’d written before, the book ruffled me open with how bleakly funny it was. I didn’t know books could be like that, alternately insightful and proudly psychotic, loose with ingratitude toward his whole field and most of his influences, Socrates to Schopenhauer. The ridicule of chapter titles alone (“Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books”) jolted me into a private adoration for black, very black humor, intentional or not (I hadn’t yet learned about his reported descent into madness, during which this book was written). I clearly saw the parody: skewering the egocentric genre of the memoir, which, as far as I could tell, allowed entrance only to those who’d suffered some preciously interesting trauma and survived inexplicably only to inflict on the rest of us smug and simplistic platitudes from their hard-won moralism; or those who’d achieved something grand, like becoming vice president, often just out of luck, selfishness, and privilege dressed to look like honest hard work.

  From there I read more Nietzsche, then Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, whatever philosophy they had, slowly reading, then rereading the chapters with a dictionary on my left, but without context I often settled on the spells the sounds made alone, their strangeness and patter, like chew-songs on my brain.