There was an attack on Alan Hunter, a prominent scientist from Yale who’d been educated at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and was working on a secret project, guarded by the state. Poorly dressed, oblivious to all academic protocols, married and divorced several times, he lived in a bunker protected by several national security systems. One of his acolytes stated that he had driven Hunter to his house that evening and had seen him reach the door of his residence guarded by a secret service agent who died instantly when two plastic explosives went off in the entrance. The blast wave flung Hunter back against the large oak in the garden, lodging him in the hundred-year-old tree’s jagged lower branches, which crushed him like the blades of a mill. He passed away two hours later, having suffered multiple traumatic injuries and internal hemorrhaging.
Munk numbered the attacks, expecting to reach one hundred. He didn’t wish to approach his victims personally but killed from a distance, never touching them; he considered them functions of the system, individuals carrying out tasks that were destined to destroy all that was human in society. He used information that was available in any more-or-less decent public library, read research reports that were available online and, on that basis, planned his targets.
4
During that time, his brother received a letter in which Tom asked him to come and visit before the snow blocked the way to his dwelling in the woods once more.
Peter traveled for two days before arriving in Montana, and he felt happy when, turning down a narrow, steep road among the trees that led toward the reservoir, he came into a clearing and saw Thomas on one side, scraping mud from the blade of a hoe with a hunting knife.
Dressed in torn jeans and mid-length boots, with a plaid flannel shirt, he looked like a local farmer or lumberjack. They watched each other in the dim evening light, and there was an excitement and a delight as well, as if everything they’d lived through together lingered on in each reunion.
The surprise for Peter was that Tom now had a parrot. A yellow and disagreeable creature, which stared at them sideways with a single eye from its wooden cage. “Yes,” Munk said, “her name is Daisy. So now you can’t say I never talk to anyone.”
And when she heard him talking about her, so to speak, the parrot hopped nervously on the wire and squawked furiously: “Who came, Tom, who is here?” And when Munk and his brother started to move away, the parrot hopped up again and went on squawking in her old embittered voice: “I want to go to the hotel, Tom, let’s go to the hotel now, Tom,” in a cracked, deranged voice.
His brother had turned into a hunter-gatherer and a philosopher in the style of Diogenes, Peter said. His closest neighbor was five miles away, and Munk would swim naked in a nearby lake on summer afternoons.
When the newspapers published Munk’s manifesto, everyone in the nation devoted themselves to reading it, except for Peter, his brother. “Since he’s a writer, he doesn’t read…” said Parker, “he only writes!” One afternoon, just two weeks later, during a short-story workshop at Columbia while they were discussing Tim O’Brien’s accounts of war, one of his students claimed that Recycler had a much better style than any of the war writers they’d been reading in the course.
That night, Peter, after dinner, now at home, sat down in front of his computer screen to read the text online. It seemed to him that it said a few fair things and some other rather naive ones, but midway through reading he was held up by an expression, a refrain (You can’t eat your cake and have it too), repeated twice, a twist on an old colloquial turn of phrase that his brother habitually used.
He called a friend, Patricia Connolly, who knew them both, and repeated the phrase. “Thomas? It can’t be,” she said, to calm him down. “Of course it can’t,” he said, and in that moment he was certain that his brother was the author of the manifesto.
Then he went up into the attic of the house, and, under the slanted roof of “la chambre de bonne” (as he’d called that loft in his autobiographical story My Brother and I, published in the New Yorker), among the nostalgic childhood objects piled around the place—The Magic Brain, the Meccano set, the catcher’s glove signed by Billy Sullivan, the Yankees pennant, a row of old sneakers lined up chronologically—he found, in one of the drawers, along with photocopies, documents, and photographs, the original typescript of the essay “Nature Disrupted” that Thomas had sent to Harper’s in 1975, which the magazine had sent back to him without publishing. Two paragraphs from the work were repeated verbatim in the manifesto.
Sitting among those familiar objects, Peter felt that he must do something. There was almost no light, the windows reflected the shadows of trees, and, in that darkness, he went back to thinking that, if Tom was the terrorist, his life was ruined.
He loved his brother more than anyone else in the world, but in order to halt the insane wave of crimes he’d have to sacrifice him, and he would.
When Peter, with a cadaverous air, filled in his mother about the situation, she went over to her husband, who was still in recovery, and took him by the hand. Don’t worry, Jerzy, she
