truth-versus-lies/ch14-1e.md

CHAPTER XIV

I never knew my brother to have a girlfriend, or to go on dates, or to show any sexual interest in girls until, some time during his college years, my mother mentioned to me that he had a crush on a young woman named Linda Patrik whom he'd known in high school. I've already described (in Chapter IX, pp. 251-254) how in the early seventies he was attracted to a woman named Linda E. But apart from the two Lindas I don't believe he ever took even the first step toward a sexual relationship with any female. He never did develop an overt sexual involvement with Linda E.; nor was there any physical relationship between him and Linda Patrik before he reached his late twenties.

Until 1986 my brother never said anything to me about his relations with women and I never asked him about them. Intimate personal matters just were not discussed in our family. I won't attempt to explain his celibacy here, but will mention two facts. First, my brother's high aspirations seem to have extended to women: From certain remarks that he made I gathered that he did not consider a female attractive unless she was quite good-looking; yet he himself had neither the physical qualities nor the kind of personality that would have made him attractive to women (see Chapter IX, p. 251). Second, he apparently had a fairly serious hang-up about sex. I quote here in full a passage from one of his letters of which I quoted a part in Chapter IX:

"When your interference vis-a-vis Linda E touched off an explosion, I believe this is how I experienced everything (regardless of what your true motives might have been) - I saw you acting as a sort of surrogate super-ego in the matter of our parents' highly (though subtly) repressive attitudes toward sex. I suppose I felt that siblings ought to confederate in the struggle with their parents to assert sexual independence, and in that light I probably considered your letter to them as a serious betrayal, especially serious in that I felt we had both already been damaged by their repressive attitudes, so you ought to have known what the pain was like. What made things worse and more humiliating for me, is that I had already submitted to my conditioning - the inculcated repressions had already conquered my desires (perhaps luckily, all in all) and consequently I experienced the repression as pertaining not only to behavior, but as arousing guilt over the mere occurrence [sic] of sexual feelings." ¹

I answered:

"You assume that I, like you, have, or had, a major problem with guilt over sex. I was really astonished to find you misjudging me so badly. Of course I'm not free of shame over sex - I don't suppose anybody is in our society - but I never had enough shame over sex to feel that it was a serious problem. Actually, though I knew you were kinda prissy, I was surprized [sic] to learn that you had such a problem with sex guilt as you indicate in your letter. I never felt that our parents' attitudes toward sex were particularly repressive, neither explicitly, nor 'subtly' as you put it." ²

However that might have been, my brother told me nothing whatever about Linda Patrik. He never so much as mentioned her name to me before 1986, probably because he was afraid that I would make some negative comment about his relations with her. The little I knew about her I learned from my mother, from hearing my brother's end of a couple of brief telephone conversations that he'd had while we were both at our parents' house in 1978, and from some of Linda P.'s letters to him.

I found these letters one day during the early 1970's when, in my brother's absence, I was shoveling the garbage out of his dump in Great Falls. They were in a drawer, not lying out in the open, and I knew that he would not want me to read them, but I read them anyway. I do not like to have to confess to this, but I do confess to it, because I mean to tell the whole truth about the relations between my brother and me. As far as I can remember, it is the only thing I've ever done in regard to him that was clearly and definitely not fair play, a violation of trust, a breach of the unspoken rules that governed our relationship. Why did I do it? I was full of contempt for him, and when you have contempt for someone you tend to be disregardful of his rights. But contempt was no excuse for violating my brother's privacy, and, ever since, I've been uncomfortable about having read those letters.

The letters were not very informative, but they did make this much clear about Dave's relationship with Linda Patrik: He had a long-term crush on her; his relationship to her was servile; she didn't seem to have much interest in him as a male, but seemed to like using him as a shoulder to cry on, someone to unburden herself to. Meanwhile she carried on sexual relationships with other men, and my brother knew it, yet he kept mooning after her.

The next I heard of Linda Patrik was in 1978, when my brother and I were staying at our parents' house and he received a couple of phone calls from her. From his end of the conversation, it was evident only that she was inviting him to visit her and that he was accepting the invitation with alacrity. I asked no one any questions about Dave's relationship with Linda P., but my mother volunteered some very scanty information: It seemed that Linda was having some sort of trouble with her husband - a divorce may have been contemplated - and she had turned to Dave for comfort.

I heard not another word about Linda Patrik until my brother visited me in Montana in 1986. At that time I noticed a very large turquoise ring on his finger and asked him where he'd gotten it. He answered that Linda Patrik had given it to him, and that was the first time he ever mentioned her to me. He gave me no information about her, however, and from consideration for his privacy I did not ask for any. I heard no more about Ms. Patrik until three years later.

******

At about the same time (September, 1989) that my brother sent me his last exercise in rationalization in justification of 'The Conjurer's Stone" (FL #3 99), he sent me also his rewritten version of that story, and with it a letter in which, among other things, he said:

"I'm returning to Schenectady on Oct. 8 to undertake the experiment of living with Linda. I've been in love with her for more than 20 years, so much so that no other woman has ever seriously interested me ... [T]his is a very happy time in my life. So wish me luck." ³

At this point I decided I'd had about enough of my jackass of a brother, so I wrote him an irritable letter in which I told him I didn't want to hear from him any more - unless he ever found himself in serious trouble and needed my help, in which case I would do what I could for him. Here is how my brother has described this letter to the media:

"In 1989, David told his brother he had a relationship with Linda and had decided to go to Schenectady, N.Y. to be with her. He also said he expected to marry her. [False. Neither FL #400 nor any other letter of my brother's in 1989 made any mention of a possible marriage with Linda Patrik. ⁴]

"'At that time he decided to end his relationship with me, end communicating with me,' David said. 'It was an extremely angry, total surprise to me. He tended to view me as someone who was easily manipulated by others and for some reason he had gotten the notion that Linda was a manipulating female who was using me.' The accusation seemed particularly bizarre, David said, because 'he has never met her to my knowledge.'

"One interpretation of his brother's letter, he said, might be that Ted was disappointed that he would give up the lifestyle they had shared. 'It may have been just terrible for him to think I would rejoin society,' David said. 'I think it goes deeper than that.'

"David said the letter contained 'a long litany' of his presumed faults but it added that 'he did care about me' and said that 'I was throwing away my life.'

"By marrying?" he was asked.

"'Sure.'" ⁵

*

"In 1989, Theodore Kaczynski reacted angrily when David wrote to Ted and told him he was planning to marry Linda Patrik, a philosophy professor at Union College in Schenectady. ... Ted had never met Patrik but said she was manipulative." ⁶

*

"LESLIE STAHL:... And Ted blamed David for deserting him, by falling for Linda.

"MIKE WALLACE: He was devastated when he learned that you were happy with Linda, and that you, of all things, married Linda.

"DAVID KACZYNSKI: It was entirely unexpected. He had never met Linda. And I got a letter that was pages and pages and pages long, full of criticisms of Linda, criticisms of me. It was as if I had somehow betrayed him." ⁷

*

"Nearly 10 years ago [sic], Ted wrote his brother a venomous letter stating, in capital letters, that he never wanted to see or hear from David 'or any other member of our family' again. He was angry because his brother was getting married." ⁸

Actually, the fact that my brother was going to live with Linda Patrik was only one among several reasons why I broke off with him. My letter was nearly fourteen pages long, and only four of those pages dealt with Dave's relations with Linda Patrik. Also, the letter nowhere describes Linda as "manipulative."

Apparently Dave or (more likely) Linda destroyed my letter. But maybe my brother would have been more careful in describing this letter if he'd known that I'd kept a copy of it. This was a carbon copy, so there is no question of any errors of transcription. Since the letter is significant, I reproduce all of it here. The first part refers to another story my brother had sent me that was loosely based on one of Juan's tales.

Dear Dave:

As for 'Ernesto and the Widow' ⁹ - This is a style of story-telling that I dislike. On the other hand, there must be a lot of people who like that kind of story-telling, since that style is much in vogue nowadays [among intellectuals]. I only read the story once, and while reading it I was in a state of irritation at you for reasons that will be explained below; moreover, I was continually interrupting my reading to write comments in the margins. Thus, I was less able to judge how the story flows along than I would have been under other circumstances. Moreover I am, naturally, less sensitive to differences in a form of writing that I dislike than I would be in a form of writing in which I take an interest. So I'm not sure if I can judge the story well. But, for whatever it may be worth, my reaction to the story is as follows.

"Here and there I noticed places where words were used amateurishly or not quite correctly. But apart from that I thought it was a good story - for those who like that type of writing, but not for me. If the little awkward places I mentioned were cleared up, I see no particular reason why the story couldn't be published. But, while I felt pretty sure you ought to be able to find a publisher for the stories that stuck closer to the material you had from Juan, I don't know whether you could find a publisher for stories like Ernesto and the Widow. The difference is that, while the stories that followed Juan's material had a note of authenticity - something on the order of folkloric material - 'Ernesto and the Widow' is obviously a made-up story, merely inspired by an incident you heard from Juan. Of course there are thousands or millions of people in America who want to write fiction and they all think they have something original to say, so there is an abundance of stories offered - far more than anyone wants to read. But there are not so many people who can offer authentic stories from a peasant culture. That's why I think your stories that stick closer to Juan's material - with their note of authenticity - have a much better chance of being published than 'Ernesto and the Widow', which just doesn't fit into the same category.

"As for the reason why you've never been able to get anything published, I can only say this:

"The story titled 'The Raid', which you sent me some time ago struck me as hopelessly amateurish - both in the details of language and the general outline of the story. If that story is typical of your previous writing, then it's obvious why no one wants to publish your stuff - it's just plain bad, by anyone's standard. 'Ernesto and the Widow' is such a vast improvement over 'The Raid' that the difference seems incomprehensible. If your previous writing resembles 'Ernesto and the Widow' rather than 'The Raid', then I suppose that your failure to get anything published is due either to the fact that, as I mentioned, there are more would-be writers than there are readers, or else to the fact that here and there in your writing there appear little awkwardnesses or amateurish constructions. What you need is someone to criticize the details of your language (as I did with 'The Conjurer's Stone') to induce you to develop literary craftsmanship." ¹⁰

I now feel embarrassed at having spoken as favorably as I did of "Ernesto and the Widow." I don't have a copy of it now, but I remember it as crap - it simply repelled me. However, it was of a genre - one might call it "modern" - that repels most readers anyway and is attractive only to a small minority of literary highbrows. Since I couldn't pretend to understand that kind of literature, I gave my brother the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the story was an adequate specimen of its type, apart from the defects of detail that I mentioned. I would have done better to tell Dave simply that I didn't understand the story and leave it at that, but I suppose my desire to make him feel good was competing with the contempt and irritation that led me to make very cutting remarks at various other places in the letter. Here again my conflicting feelings toward my brother are evident.

The letter continued:

"The question is whether you are capable of profiting from such criticism. It seems doubtful. It seems that your vanity prevents you from making any suggested changes except on inessential ¹¹ points - and sometimes even on minor points it prevents you from making changes. Here are two examples from your revised version of The Conjurer's Stone'. First, on p. 1, the phrase 'descend to the street on strutting claws.' Leave aside the fact that I think the metaphore [sic ¹²] is hackneyed. As I carefully explained in my last letter, the sentence is illogical because the buzzards don't descend on their claws, they descend on their wings. This is just the kind of amateurish linguistic blunder that will discourage an editor from publishing your stuff. It is not an arguable point. The sentence is clearly and plainly illogical, there is no conceivable literary motive for introducing that kind of illogic at this point, and any competent editor would agree that it is simply an amateurish blunder. If you felt you had to retain the 'strutting' claws metaphor you could have done so by reconstructing the sentence to eliminate the illogic. ¹³ I carefully explained in my last letter what was wrong with the sentence, yet you let it stand.

"Second. On the last page ¹⁴ you have: 'some of the others began laughing so hard it looked like they might hurt themselves'. As I explained carefully in a previous letter, ¹⁵ this sentence is grammatically incorrect because 'like' is not a conjunction. ¹⁶ To make the sentence correct you have to replace 'like' by 'as if'. There is no conceivable literary motive for using the incorrect 'like' instead of the correct 'as if'. Yet you let the sentence stand.

"I can see no motive for your leaving these two incorrect sentences in their original form except stubborn vanity - vanity of the most puerile kind." ¹⁷

This last remark was unnecessarily cruel. Lots of people would show as much vanity-motivated resistance to changing something they'd done as my brother did.

"To argue about metaphors - whether they are hackneyed or not, appropriate or not, etc. - is reasonable, since after all that is a matter of taste. But I suppose you can understand why I get frustrated and irritated when you ignore my corrections of clear-cut and unarguable errors of logic or grammar.

"Even when it comes to metaphors - your defence of your metaphors and similes (in an earlier letter) irritated me because - while one can reasonably argue about those metaphors - your arguments were simply silly. You explained all these meanings that these metaphors were supposed to convey - meanings that no one but you would ever guess at or even sense intuitively.

"Of course, you have the right to write anything you damn well please. But I'm not going to criticize your work any more because, as I've just explained, I find your reactions frustrating and irritating. I do feel that you've got something good there in your re-tellings of Juan's stories, and I would really be very pleased on your account if you could get them published. I would moreover be willing to spend considerable time criticizing the details of your style if it weren't for the fact that, when you ignore my corrections of clear-cut, unarguable flaws, it just seems futile, and it's too irritating and frustrating.

"More than that. This has been building up for a long time. It's not just this business of the stories. I find you insufferably irritating in general. You're certainly not the type of personality I would choose for a friend - I just happened to get stuck with you as a brother. As you know, I have tender feelings toward you, but that's just because you're my brother and because of old ties going all the way back to childhood.

"Some of your letters are a pleasure to read, but, just as often, they irritate me and make me conscious of an unbridgeable gulf between you and me. It's not so much a difference of attitudes or ideology - in some respects our attitudes are pretty similar - as a difference of personality. The ideological differences are largely a reflection of the personality differences. You use verbal formulations to satisfy your emotional needs, very often to protect your ego [here, ego = self-esteem], and you frequently insist on verbal formulations that are meaningless (or at least, whose meanings you don't try to analyze) or contrary to reality, or simply ludicrous. I use verbal formulations in a reasonably honest attempt to describe reality. I am so constituted that I find it difficult to listen to your nonsense without arguing against it. So when you write me some of your silly 'ideas' (as you choose to call them) I am faced with a choice: either I restrain myself and make no reply, which is frustrating, or, what is more frustrating, I permit myself to be drawn into writing you one of these interminable letters in which I explain my point of view in detail - though it is absolutely futile, because I know by this time that, wherever your ego is involved, you are absolutely impervious to reason and will resort to the most far-fetched rationalizations to avoid having to make any concession.

"A good example occurred a few years ago when I ventured to suggest that your friend Joel might have schizophrenia. I don't know whether that suggestion was right or wrong, but the point is that your reaction to it was irrational. You tend to take any criticism of your friends, from me, as an assault on your ego. In this case you also took my suggestions as an attack on your ideology; even though I was careful to frame my arguments as tactfully as possible and in such a way as to avoid offending your ideology. Of course you got your back up and became absolutely insufferable. Later, when you came to visit me, in reference to schizophrenic children who see the floor heaving and tossing under them, you said, 'maybe the floor really is heaving... ¹⁸ .' Of course you don't really believe this - you just make that statement to confirm an ideology designed to satisfy your emotional needs. Where your ego and your ideology aren't at stake, you taken an entirely different point of view. Thus, during that same visit, you mentioned Nora's case. There - since no friend of yours was involved and your ego and ideology weren't at stake - you unhesitatingly accepted the existence of schizophrenia, the undesirability of it, and the fact that drugs can bring a schizophrenic back to perception of reality. You also added, 'Gee, I hope we haven't got anything like that'. If you really believed that the hallucinations of a schizophrenic were as real as the perceptions of a sane person, why would you 'hope we haven't got anything like that'?

"I refrained from pointing out the obvious contradictions in your expressed views because by that time I knew that it was hopeless to try to reason with you on that subject - you would never under any circumstances make any concession. I find that kind of thing thoroughly contemptible and insufferably irritating - though in the majority of cases I refrain from showing my irritation, since it would accomplish nothing anyway.

"This has just happened too many times. If you don't irritate or disgust me in one way then you do so in another. I've just had enough of it. My tolerance for irritation was low to begin with, and the older I get, the less I can tolerate irritation.

"And now, to top off my disgust, you're going to leave the desert and shack up with this woman who's been keeping you on a string for the last 20 years. You write, 'I've been in love with her for more than 20 years, so much so that no other woman has ever seriously interested me.' You forgot to add the qualification, 'except Linda E.' But leaving that aside, I would say that love is one thing and grovelling servitude is another. Judging from the comparatively little that I know of the case, it seems clear that this woman has just been exploiting you. I recall that one time when I was helping you clean out your apartment in Great Falls, I picked a letter out of the garbage on your table and started reading aloud: 'Dear Linda, Of course it was a blow to learn that you may be falling in love with someone... .' ¹⁸ You got mad and snatched the letter out of my hand." ¹⁹

The reader will notice that I did not tell my brother here that I had once read several of Linda P.'s letters that I had found in a drawer. I would have been ashamed to confess to that.

My letter continues:

"But it's pretty clear what was going on there. She knew you were stuck on her and she knew that she wasn't much attracted to you as a male. Under the circumstances, the decent thing to do would have been to simply cut off all relations with you. In that case you probably would have forgotten about her eventually and would have found someone else. But she found it more expedient to keep you on a string - to keep hold of your affections while her affections wandered elsewhere. Women like passive, gentle males - but they don't typically consider them desirable as lovers. Especially when they are younger, women are attracted sexually by dominant, virile males. But they like to have a shoulder to cry on - some gentle, affectionate person to whom they can turn for emotional support. There's nothing evil in that - but in using you for that purpose, knowing that you were in love with her and that her love was going to go elsewhere, Linda Patrik was exploiting you. She must have realized that it would be painful and humiliating for you when she unburdened herself to you about her love affairs, yet apparently she did so anyway, to judge from that letter.

"When she got married, I can just imagine her husband's amusement when she told him about 'this poor sap who's been in love with me for years, and still is, even though I am marrying you.' Then when her marriage broke up, the first thing she did was run to you for a shoulder to cry on. And you accepted that. Don't you have any self-respect at all? Apparently not. It's just too despicable.

"So now, after having kept you around as a kind of spare tire for the last 20 years, she's finally ready to shack up with you. Maybe because she's getting older and can't so readily find sex partners any more, maybe for some other reason. Does she love you? I venture to doubt it. I'll bet you're the one who is making all the concessions and sacrifices. Thus you're going up to live with her in Schenectady and she's not going down to live with you in Texas. It's safe to say that you two will be adopting her life-style and not your life-style." ²⁰

I was reasonably sure that Linda Patrik's life-style was more-or-less conventional middle class, since I recalled that my mother had told me in 1978 that Linda was a professional woman, though I didn't know what her profession was. It turned out that was right. Linda Patrik's life-style is essentially conventional middle-class, in spite of certain gestures toward nonconformity on her part (such as her Buddhist religion and of her sexual promiscuity) - quirks that are easily accommodated by modem American middle-class values.

The letter continued:

"If you want to find out whether she loves you, try this: Ask her to make some major concessions to your life-style and preferences. For example, ask her to live with you in Alpine. This would be a reasonable compromise, because in Alpine she would have most of the urban conveniences to which she is presumably addicted, yet you would be close to the desert. If she says yes, then probably she really cares about you. If she refuses to consider the possibility of moving down to Texas, or of making any other major concessions to your life-style, then clearly she doesn't love you but is merely using you as a convenience.

"The idea here is not actually to extract concessions from her. For instance, if she agreed to live in Alpine, you could then, if you wanted to, be generous, change your mind, and say, 'No, let's live in Schenectady after all.' The idea of asking for concessions is simply to find out whether she really cares about you or whether she is just exploiting you and wants to have everything on her own terms.

"But if I know you, you probably won't even have the nerve to ask her to live in Alpine. I can pretty well guess who the dominant member of that couple is going to be. It's just disgusting. Let me know your neck size - I'd like to get you a dog collar next Christmas. I recall your negative opinions about Jeanne's selfishness in her relationship with [K. H. En.] and I wonder whether your own case is going to be any better. You thought Jeanne was selfish because [K. H.] wanted to stay in Chicago, Jeanne wanted to go to Texas, so of course it was a foregone conclusion that they would go to Texas. How does this differ from your case? At least Jeanne didn't keep [K. H.] on a string for 20 years before marrying him.

"The only thing I've really respected in you has been your life in the desert. I especially remember how you returned that beautifully-made spear-point to its original resting place out of respect for the people who made it, and how you crossed the Rio Grande with Juan and shared his risks and hardships. So now you're going to leave all that just because this female has finally decided to permit you to become her personal property, and I presume that you will now be adopting a more-or-less conventional middle-class life-style. While you're at it, why don't you take a few courses and learn to be an accountant? Or better - why don't you go to law school? I've always felt that if a thing is worth doing, then it's worth doing right, so as long as you're selling out you may as well go all the way and become a lawyer.

"Be all that as it may, I've just been disgusted and irritated by you too damn many times. I just can't take all that crap any more. So from now on, I am just going to cease corresponding with you altogether, and I'll thank you not to send me any letters of any kind. There's no question of ill will here - it's just that I can't any longer take the frequent irritations that I have from you. You probably don't realize how often I've restrained myself in the face of your irritating traits. That's the reason for the present outburst of irritation in response to relatively minor irritants; as I said, it's been building up for a long time. Time after time, after receiving a particularly asinine letter from you I've told myself that I ought to cut off correspondence with you, but then I've always softened again. But now I just can't take any more. I realize that it's partly my fault. It's true that you're a fatuous ass and that our personalities are incompatible, but it's also true that my tolerance for irritation is unusually low. I suppose that one reason why you get me so upset may be the fact that I do care about you. When my neighbor [Butch Gehring] down here chatters along idiotically like the jerk that he is, I just listen noncommittally to his nonsense and then forget it. But when you speak or act like a fool, I find it hard to be indifferent.

"You're still my little brother (unworthy though you are of that honor) and you still have my loyalty, and I'm ready to help you if I can whenever you may be in serious need. But, as I said, I'm not going to write you any more, and I don't want to receive any letters from you either. If you send me any letters I'll just throw them in the stove unread. Except: if something really important comes up, you can write to me and get my attention as follows: On the envelope, draw a straight, heavy line under the stamp (or stamps). If you send me a letter with this marking, I will know that it is something particularly important and will read the letter. But don't cry wolf by putting this marking on an envelope that contains an unimportant letter. If you do so, then I will no longer regard the marking, and you'll have no way of getting in touch with me if something important comes up. As to what I consider important: If you're seriously ill, that's important; if our parents croak, that's important; If you're in any kind of serious trouble and need my help, that's important; and so forth. On the other hand, if you want to justify to me your ideas about writing, that's not important; if you want to explain your relations with Linda Patrik, that's not important; and so forth.

"I realize that, not knowing very much about the case, I may possibly be wrong about your relations with Linda P. (though I'm probably right), and I don't doubt that you could be induced to withdraw your threat (contained in your last letter) to send me some of your goofball ideas on language and literature ²¹ (the last thing I want to hear from you), but it wouldn't really matter, because if it's not one thing then it's another. If you don't irritate me in this way then you irritate me in that way.

"So let's just call it quits, for the indefinite future."

"But remember - you still have my love and loyalty, and if you're ever in serious need of my help, you can call on me.

"- Ted" ²²

The letter shows clearly the conflict between my contempt for my brother, on the one hand, and my affection for him, on the other.

As for Dave's claim that I broke off with him "for getting married," the letter speaks for itself. I will only add that I had actually been hoping that he would get married - to someone who was not in tune with mainstream middle-class values - so that I could have had a niece or nephew.

Did I predict accurately the kind of relationship that Dave would have with Linda? I was right on the nose. Well, no, I wasn't right on the nose - the reality turned out to be even worse than I'd expected.

Investigators who have conducted extensive interviews with Dave and Linda have found that she is unmistakably the dominant partner. In fact, at least one investigator went so far as to say that Dave is "utterly dependent" on Linda psychologically. My brother himself told this investigator that ever since his early teens he has regarded Linda as "sacred" (his word). Linda stated that in high school she and other girls had never thought of Dave as a potential lover - he was only a friend. She never thought of him as a potential lover until he was about twenty-seven or twenty- eight years old. ²³ That would correspond to 1977 or 1978.

In Chapter XV we shall see that under Linda's influence Dave's attitudes and behavior have been completely transformed.

The worst of it is that everything I have learned about Linda Patrik tends to show that she is completely self-centered, and probably ruthless. While I had guessed correctly (more from my knowledge of my brother's character than from the little I knew about Linda) that Dave would fall under the domination of his wife, I had no idea that she would be as selfish as Linda Patrik seems to be. ²⁴

Linda, moreover, appears to have fairly serious mental problems. She's been under treatment by her psychiatrist, Dr. Mitchell, at least since 1991, and, reportedly when she was in Paris prior to my arrest and saw newspaper accounts about the Unabomber, she sometimes felt that they were directed at her personally. ²⁵

Linda Patrik was a physically attractive woman who, as a professor of philosophy, occupied a position of fairly high status. Why would she take up with a man like my brother, an unsuccessful would-be writer who had neither good looks, nor virility, nor status, nor, seemingly, anything else that would recommend him to a woman of that type? It is easy to arrive at a plausible guess: She wanted someone whom she could control completely, and from that point of view my brother was ideal. (And, by the way, she doesn't have to be "manipulative" in order to control him. She can just tell him right out what she wants.)

Why, on the other hand, did my brother choose to put himself in servitude to her? Clearly it was an expression of his lifelong tendency to place himself in a position of subordination, to seek someone to look up to and follow, to become dependent. It's easy to see why he didn't find me satisfactory as an object for adulation: I didn't respect his dependence - I wanted him to be independent. Often during my teens, and occasionally in adulthood when I lost my temper, I made my contempt for him all too obvious. Partly for that reason, partly because our parents valued me more than they did him, and partly because of the difference between our respective personalities, he had been gnawed all his life by a resentful sense of inferiority to me. Perhaps equally important, he didn't choose his subordination to me. As his big brother, I had been imposed on him by chance.

In contrast, Linda Patrik was an object of adulation that my brother chose himself. Furthermore - and this would be very important for Dave's self-esteem - she probably has a certain degree of reciprocal dependence on him, in that she leans on him for a sense of physical security, as is suggested by the following extracts from my mother's letters:

"Linda is in Greece to teach philosophy. However, when war broke out, classes were cancelled at American University, and she was told to stay put by the American Embassy for the time being because it was too dangerous for Americans to fly out at this time. Americans were asked not to go about much and not to congregate in groups for fear they would become targets for terrorists." ²⁶

"Dave says she sounds stressed in her phone calls to him, and he's thinking of flying out to join her. (The college will pay his plane fare.)" ²⁷

"Dave... [is] in Greece right now... ." ²⁸

Of course, if there had been a terrorist attack, Dave could have done nothing to protect Linda - he has no fighting skills of any kind - but it must have made him feel like a man for a change to have a woman lean on him for a sense of security.

It is easy to form a plausible hypothesis as to the reason why Linda and Dave showed my letters to their psychiatrist; why they tried to persuade a doctor in Missoula to refer me to a psychiatrist, and even discussed the possibility of having me committed to an institution. Knowing Dave, I can be quite sure that he showed Linda my letter (FL #401) in which I argued that she was exploiting him. That letter must have aroused her resentment - all the more because what I wrote was true. The behind-my-back machinations about psychiatrists and mental institutions would have been her way of retaliating against me, and also of driving a wedge between my brother and me so as to eliminate me as a possible rival for his loyalty. Dave would have gone along with her schemes not only because of her dominance over him, but also because of his own deep resentment of me.

The truth is that, all his life, my brother's relationship with me has been bad for him. He probably would have had problems with his self-esteem in any case owing to the inconsistency between his high aspirations and his limited capacity for disciplined effort, but those problems must have been greatly exacerbated by the contrast between himself and his older brother - not to mention his older brother's cutting criticisms. It would have been better for us both if I had broken off my connection with him at the earliest possible date.

******

I suspect it was Dave's relationship with Linda that enabled him to fulfill an ambition that he had nursed for two decades: He finally got one of his stories published. "El Cibolo", by David Kaczynski, appeared in the Colorado Writer's Forum ²⁹ in the fall of 1990. It seems to me to be a professional-quality piece of work, free of any serious blunders of the kind that mar my brother's earlier stories - or those of them that I've seen. The most likely explanation that I can think of for this sudden improvement in his literary craftsmanship is that Linda criticized the writing for him, pointing out the flaws in his use of language and helping him to correct them. He certainly would have been much more ready to accept such criticisms from her than from me. By helping my brother in this way to get one of his stories published, she would have strengthened her hold over him.

Personally I did not care for the plot of "El Cibolo," but I liked very much the way my brother described the protagonist's relationship with the wild country he lived in and with the people who inhabited it. So on the whole I thought it was a good story. I wrote to my mother to that effect, and suggested that she might pass my favorable comments on to Dave. ³⁰

The story is interesting for what it perhaps suggests about my brother's psychology. I gather that it is based at least in part on real historical events. ("Other writers have described how El Cibolo made his escape." ³¹) Nevertheless, an author's choice of subject, the way he handles it, and what he decides to emphasize tell us something about the way his mind works.

"El Cibolo" must have been written well before Fall, 1990 (that is, at the latest, less than a year after my brother left the desert to live with Linda Patrik), and it is consistently antagonistic toward civilization, especially in its modern form:

"He couldn't...rescue the wilderness. ... Even without entertaining any precise image of the future (spared, mercifully, the sight of paved roads, fences, and power lines ³² infinitely dissecting the miracle of space)... ." ³³

The story also includes a generous dose of bloody revenge and gruesome violence, which my brother treats sympathetically:

"[T]he Apaches let fly their war whoops and the massacre began. It was one of those occasions when a victimized people got the upper hand just long enough to earn notoriety as the aggressor. ... [El Cibolo] cut down several lives with his own strong arm. His garments grew dark and shiny with blood... . El Cibolo found himself alone among the scattering of bloody and disfigured corpses. But his heart was tranquil... ." ³⁴

My brother is a vegetarian. When my parents visited me in the early 1980's, my father told me that Dave had become a vegetarian after a fishing trip during which he had gotten sick at the sight of a fish's death struggles. ³⁵ Even before he became a vegetarian my brother was always squeamish about eating meat. He told me on several occasions that he thought his aversion to meat went back to an incident in which, as a small boy, he had been frightened at the sight of chickens being cut up. When he visited me in Montana in 1986 he mentioned that he thought his vegetarianism might have something to do with the fear of death. ³⁶ Since I was busy with something else at the time, I did not pursue that conversational opening. Now I wish I had done so. It would have been interesting.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV

1. (Ca) FL #330, letter from David Kaczynski to me, late March or early April 1986, p. 10.

2. (Ca) FL #331, letter from me to David Kaczynski, April 16, 1986, p. 4.

3. (Ca) FL #400, letter from David Kaczynski to me, probably September 1989.

4. Dave did not marry Linda legally until July 14, 1990. (Gc) Marriage certificate of David Richard Kaczynski and Linda Ellen Patrik.

5. (Ha) NY Times Nat., May 26, 1996, p. 24, column 4.

6. (Hb) Washington Post, June 16, 1996, p. A21.

7. (He) 60 Minutes, September 15, 1996, Part One, pp. 8, 9.

8. (He) Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1997, p. A16.

9. I do not have a copy of "Ernesto and the Widow," since I sent my copy back to Dave with comments written in the margins. The story of Juan's on which "Ernesto and the Widow" is loosely based is in (Ca) FL #396B, letter from David Kaczynski to me, spring or summer of 1989.

10. (Ca) FL #401, letter from me to David Kaczynski, September or early October, 1989, copy from the cabin, pp. 1-3. Though most of this copy is carbon copy, it's possible that part of the first paragraph (through the word "circumstances") may not be carbon copy; because I may have begun writing the letter before it occurred to me to keep a copy of it; I then transcribed manually the part of the letter I had already written, applied carbon paper, and made the rest of the copy by that means. Also, on p. 8, the word "servitude" turned out nearly illegible on the carbon copy, hence was written in manually after the copy was finished.

11. Legibility of this word is poor; the reading "inessential" is open to question.

12. Not only is there a superfluous "e" stuck on the end of the word "metaphor," but the quoted phrase contains no metaphor.

13. As it stood in both the original and the revised version of (Mc) Story by David Kaczynski, "The Conjurer's Stone," p. 1, the relevant part of the sentence was:

    "...a few [buzzards] would descend to the street on strutting claws, tear morsels of food from garbage pails, and even peck like pigeons at dry tortilla crumbs... ."

    This could have been rewritten as:

    "...a few would descend to the street, where, on strutting claws, they would tear morsels of food from garbage pails, and even peck like pigeons at dry tortilla crumbs... ."

14. (Mc) Story by David Kaczynski, "The Conjurer's Stone," pp. 7, 8 of the original version, p. 6 of the revised version.

15. This letter, now lost, is the first one in which I commented on "The Conjurer's Stone."

16. "Like" is often used as a conjunction in colloquial English, but here its use as a conjunction jars the well-educated reader because the rest of "The Conjurer's Stone" is written in literary English.

17. (Ca) FL #401, letter from me to David Kaczynski, September or early October, 1989, copy from the cabin, pp. 3, 4.

18. The three dots are in the letter as I wrote it to Dave.

19. (Ca) FL #401, letter from me to David Kaczynski, September or early October, 1989, copy from the cabin, pp. 4-9.

20. Same, pp. 9, 10.

21. (Ca) FL #400, letter from David Kaczynski to me, probably September, 1989: "I'd like to pursue the discussion of language and literary issues... ."

22. (Ca) FL #401, letter from me to David Kaczynski, September or early October, 1989, copy from the cabin, pp. 10-14.

23. Investigator #2 gave me all of the information in this paragraph orally on September 3, 1996, and I wrote it down from memory on the following day, September 4. This is what I have now designated as (Qe) Investigator Note Number 2. On October 8, 1997, Investigator #2 confirmed orally and without qualification all of the information in this paragraph.

    (Qe) Investigator Note Number 4 (which was written on September 14, 1996 and records information that Investigator #2 gave me orally on September 13, 1996) states that according to Investigator #2 my brother is "totally dependent on his wife." (The quotation marks indicate that these are the words of Investigator #2.)

    In January or February of 1998, I asked Investigator #2 to confirm in writing the information in the paragraph of this book to which the present footnote refers. On February 18, 1998, he/she gave me pp. 1-11 of (Qc) Written Reports by Investigator #2, page 1 of which stated, "Dave is dependent on Linda psychologically. Dave told this investigator that since his teens he had regarded Linda as 'sacred'. Linda stated that in high school she and other girls had never thought of Dave as a potential lover. She never thought of him as a potential lover until he was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old." I pointed out to Investigator #2 that he/she had written merely that Dave was dependent, whereas he/she had earlier told me that Dave was utterly dependent. Investigator #2 agreed that the stronger statement was accurate, and inserted the word "utterly", so that his/her written report now reads, "Dave is utterly dependent on Linda psychologically."

24. (Ja) Mad Genius, p. 123 states:

"Iman Mafi, a sophomore student of Linda\'s, recalled one

day in class when they were discussing love, and Linda began telling her students about David. 'She said in their first year in college in two different cities, her husband [David] once left school to be with her. He basically blew off school and came to be with her and stayed for months. It was very romantic. They wanted to get married back then, and they finally did. She told us the story to show how deep their love was.'"

Since *Mad Genius* is riddled with major errors, it is

an open question whether Linda really said what Iman Mafi allegedly said she said. But if she did say it, then it doesn't speak well for her honesty. Dave no doubt wanted to marry her at that time, but she didn't want to marry him. As noted earlier in this chapter, by her own account she thought of Dave only as a friend and not as a potential lover until he was in his late twenties; and apart from what I learned of her love-life from her correspondence with Dave, she married someone else before she got around to marrying Dave at the age of forty. If she had had a "deep love" for him, she would have married him many years earlier.

Does she love Dave? My guess is that she loves him in the

same way that she loves her cats, or any other possessions that serve for her gratification.

25. (Qc) Written reports by Investigator #2, p. 2, provides the information about Linda's treatment by Dr. Mitchell. As for Linda's reaction to the newspapers, I remembered this statement as having been made either by Dr. K. or by an investigator during one of our meetings, but I did not write it down at the time. I made it item #11 on a list of items (included in (Qc)) that I asked Investigator #2 to confirm in January or February of 1998. Item #11 of my list reads: "When Linda was in Paris and saw newspaper accounts about the Unabomber, she sometimes felt that they were directed against her personally." In (Qc) Written Reports by Investigator #2, p. 2, Investigator #2 replied to Item #11 as follows: "Dr. K is unable to confirm the account of Linda in Paris. Dr. K recalls the story but did not write it down and therefore is unable to give a direct quote."

26. (Ca) FL #427, letter from my mother to me, January 19, 1991, p. 2.

27. (Ca) FL #429, letter from my mother to me, January 23, 1991, p. 4.

28. (Ca) FL #430, letter from my mother to me, January 30, 1991, p. 1.

29. (Mc) Story by David Kaczynski, "El Cibolo."

30. (Ca) FL #417, letter from me to my mother, December 11, 1990 (copy kept in the cabin; I do not have a complete copy of the mailed copy):

    "I've read Dave's story El Cibolo...if you like, you can pass on to him the following comments.

    "I thought El Cibolo was a good story. What I thought Dave did especially well was evoke the emotions involved in El Cibolo's relationship with the country in which he lived and with the people who occupied it. I was very favorably impressed by this, let us say, poetic aspect of the story. The plot, to me, was of little interest - merely a framework on which to hang the evocations of nature, etc. ...El Cibolo looks to me like a professional piece of work - I didn't detect in it any serious blunders of the kind that I found in Dave's other writings that I've seen.

    "Private to you Ma; you needn't pass the following on to Dave. Dave's earlier writings that I've seen were sprinkled here and there with linguistic blunders that, in my opinion (and, apparently in the opinion of editors to whom he sent his work) made them unpublishable. ...El Cibolo is comparatively free of such blunders, and is therefore such a vast and sudden improvement on Dave's earlier work that I can think of only one explanation, and that is that Dave has found some capable person to criticize his writing whose criticisms he is more willing to accept than he was mine. That person would very likely be his wife ... ." '-VWo

    I wrote that last paragraph because I had become aware that my mother was puffed up with pride over Dave's having gotten a story published, and, for reasons that by now should be obvious to the reader, I detested that kind of pride on her part. Because of that, and also because of old resentments, I wanted to puncture her vanity. I believe the paragraph to be accurate, of course, but my motive for writing it was to take my mother down a peg.

31. (Mc) "El Cibolo", p. 181.

32. After his marriage to Linda, my brother ran a power line to his cabin. See Chapter XV, Note 24.

33. (Mc) "El Cibolo", p. 185.

34. (Mc) "El Cibolo", pp. 182, 183.

35. I am depending mainly on memory here, but my memory has some support from (Ca) FL #220, letter from me to David Kaczynski, August 28, 1979, p. 1.

    "I agree with your decision about not fishing for pure 'sport.' As for vegetarianism - I would just mention one thing...Vitamin B-12... ."

    This suggests that, in a single letter, my brother had told me both of his decision to stop fishing and of his becoming a vegetarian.

36. Possibly relevant here is a remark that my brother made to me in 1984: "Do you remember how susceptible I used to be to imaginary fears?" (Ca) FL #283, letter from David Kaczynski to me, between January and May, 1984, p. 2. Dave was of course referring to his childhood.