(The exercise of imagining possible worlds or alternative societies is a constant in utopian thought, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone—except by accident or by chance—to imagine several simultaneous personal lives, radically different from one other, and then be capable of living them.)
“I’ve sought to express my thoughts by means of direct action. Are you taking notes?” He looked at me as though waking up and smiled. “But then what is it you’re looking for here?”
“I’m a friend of Ida Brown’s.” He remained impassive; he wasn’t someone who could be caught off guard by such tricks. “I have a photo,” I said, and placed it on the table. He studied it carefully. A smiling girl and a shy young man. Did he remember her? “She was a graduate student at Berkeley. She died in an accident. Did you know her?”
He had known her, yes, a long time ago, he said. And had he continued to see her? He had seen her, yes, a couple of times, later on. She was a friend, he could trust her. We agreed on that, like two strangers who’re surprised to find out that they’ve loved the same woman. But he said nothing of the kind, I must be imagining it, for there was no confidence between us, and the only point of contact was that, when I said the name Ida Brown, we started speaking in Spanish and immediately the guard who was with us turned on a red light.
“Don’t pay attention to him. It will take them longer to decipher what they record, but Menéndez will understand us, and he’s the only one who could have any interest in this conversation, and if you’re here it’s because he permitted it,” he said. “That Mexican is trying to understand… the mystery of the criminal personality,” he said, sarcastically. “He’s a dog who can’t catch a horsefly and only feels its sting. And he jumps. He snaps in the air, barks in the night. Can a dog understand a horsefly?”
According to Munk, the FBI was gathering evidence, consulting with experts, using their scientific laboratories, their labyrinthine archives interconnected with all the police files in the world, casting the net to trap the fish, but, in the end, they would resolve—whatever they resolved—through torture, blackmail, betrayal.
“My brother, for example, is worse than my parrot Daisy; at least she doesn’t know what she’s saying. They gave him a million dollars in recompense and swore to him that they would not string me up from a tree.”
He seemed to be speaking for his own benefit, indifferent to the sympathy or antipathy of whoever was listening to him, thanks to the habit he’d acquired of thinking out loud in the solitude of the woods, like a hermit in the desert who speaks of his visions. I don’t believe I’m reproducing his words faithfully, as I wrote them down when I returned to the hotel, some hours later, but a few of his phrases are in my notes and I’ve tried to convey the sense of what he expressed that day.
“For my theorem on choice,” he said, “I won the Fields Medal. As soon as I received the prize money, I abandoned everything, and that was my point of departure.” They’d given him the medal for his advances in the logic of choice. According to him, it was about experimenting with possible lives and fictional lives. In both cases, we’re immersed in a world that is like the real world, immersed as if we are in the real world. The key is that fictional universes—in contrast to possible worlds—are incomplete (that’s why we can never know what Marlow did after he finished telling the story of Lord Jim). Munk had set out to politically complete certain unresolved plots and to act accordingly. He preferred to begin from an existing plot. That was all he said about his reading of Conrad’s novels.
In the beginning, he’d planned to write each alternative series of his life in a different notebook: but then he recognized that the interest lay in their intersections. So as not to compromise anyone, several pages of his Diary were encoded, written with a system of rolling codes, of his own invention, which changed according to the hour of the day! At three in the afternoon the words meant one thing, but by midnight they already had another meaning.
He knew that the FBI technicians had been forced to turn to the NSA, and the NSA cryptographers had tried to turn to the Russians, but the Russians were devoted to deciphering the codes for the secret accounts of former Communist Party leaders in Switzerland and didn’t want to collaborate on anything as superfluous as deciphering the diaries of an ex-mathematician.
“The Russians have lost everything, but they’ve preserved their disdain for the North Americans, and in that sense I am Russian as well.”
“But don’t think I never think about the ones who die,” he said then. “They’re the same as me, I could have been one of them. Great scientists, perfect scoundrels, sensitive men. John Kline loved birds. James Korda, a theologian, had a lover who couldn’t express his pain because he didn’t want to expose him. Leon Singer was a socialist all his life, which led to problems in his academic career. Aaron Lowden couldn’t endure exile. They were naïve, and, because of their private ambition, which they called a love of science, they advanced, destroying everything in their way, like bulldozers
