JONATHAN FLETCHER

Bomb

The same year we move to San Antonio, an anonymous individual, known then only as the Unabomber, mails an untraceable package to a computer repair store in Salt Lake City. According to the survivor, Gary Wright, what looks like a piece of wood lays near the front tire of one of his employee’s cars. Protruding nails are visible. When he goes to move the package, he is tossed in the air, his body two hundred shards of shrapnel denser. At the time, I’m only four. I haven’t yet heard the name Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski. Or the term domestic terrorism. I don’t know yet that bombs can be sent through the mail. To me, every package looks like a potential gift-wrapped present. I’ve never seen anything explode, just milk pour out all over the floor. So much for the cereal I had been trying to make by myself. I don’t yet know the anxiety you feel every afternoon when checking our mail. Or the things you look for before opening a package. A return address. Excessive postage. Misspelled words. Tape for seal.

On April 3rd, 1996, when the Unabomber is finally apprehended, your fingers, which have until then tightened whenever checking the lid to our stone mailbox, relax. As does the rest of America. No longer are Kaczynski’s fingers free to fashion bombs from fishing wires and nails. Instead, his wrists will be cuffed. In 1998, he will plead guilty. At ADX Florence, he will be imprisoned, where he will share a cell block with Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, Ramzi Yousef, and Eric Rudolph. On June 11th, 2023, through undisclosed means, he will take his life. During that same period, I will finish grade school and high school; begin college; isolate myself from classmates, professors, friends, and family; take an involuntary leave of absence after a hospitalization, return home, work a variety of a minimum-wage jobs, finish my bachelor’s degree, and commence a graduate program in creative writing out of state. Compared to Kaczynski’s education and early career (matriculation at Harvard at sixteen, doctorate from Michigan, assistant professorship at Berkeley by twenty-five) mine is not that impressive. Though I could blame my struggles on mental illness, that doesn’t seem fair or right. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by a forensic psychiatrist, Kaczynski rejects an insanity plea, pleading guilty to all the federal charges against him. He will later attempt to withdraw that plea. While I no longer blame myself for my diagnosis, I also choose to not wield it as an excuse. It will take me years to learn to do precisely that. The patience you show me during that time is both amazing and enviable. Well-aware that I don’t deserve it, I try to be compassionate to others, the opposite of who the Unabomber was, what he was. Whenever I feel like I don’t want to live for myself anymore, I choose to live for you instead.

According to Wanda Kaczynksi, the mother of the Unabomber, the nine-month-old Ted was diagnosed with hives and consequently isolated from her for a week. Haunted by the notion that such a separation could have traumatized her son and adversely rewired him (he reportedly cried and reached out for her) Mrs. Kaczynski asks herself what, if anything, she could’ve done differently. Why, she wonders, did he forfeit a tenure-track position at Berkeley for a one-room log cabin in Montana in 1971, no electricity or running water available? Where, she asks, did all the rage he typed into his 35,000-word manifesto originate? (Though I write on a regular basis, I’ve never produced anything that long. Or that hateful.) I wonder whether you, too, question what you could have done differently. When you greeted me at Lima’s maternity hospital, did you anticipate years’ worth of medication, hours of psychotherapy, starts and fits at several colleges, delayed independence of a grown son? I wonder what ultimately scared you more—the Unabomber’s packages or the nine-month-old me (packaged in clear plastic, underneath warm lights, wired like a bomb). Though uncertain what kind of person I’d turn out to be (or how that would reflect on your parenting) you gently reached into the ports, cradled me with gloved hands. Compared to you, I was small and fragile. No timer ticking, love the only fuse.