Bandit (19 page)

I
t’s the day after Thanksgiving and I forgot to write to him. I log into CorrLinks and check my inbox. No new messages from him in the past month. I try to find the last email exchange we had but it’s all empty: the messages are only archived for thirty days, then they disappear.

I write to him as I’d write to a penpal—distanced, a little uncertain, with a plain dullness I know is shaped by the self-conscious awareness that someone screens these messages before he reads them, even though their content is never more than polite and bloodlessly broad life updates.

“How’s the new job? Is it interesting?” I ask. I remember he told me he upgraded from a job rolling silverware in the kitchen to a “computer job” for two dollars a day—previewing patent applications and rejecting them if incomplete. “I got a new cat. She’s kind of shy but funny, with one white spot
right on her chest. Her name’s Jupiter.” I feel like I’m talking to a child. “Hope you are staying warm there!”

I eat lunch, grade papers, go for a walk, check back for a response, spurred by nagging and totally pointless guilt. No response. Over seventy now, with failing kidneys; I sometimes wonder if he’ll make it to his release date. Or even to another email.

The day passes. I try to forget about him. Then, I do forget about him. Days slip by, weeks, and I just forget all about him, as I always do.

Almost a month later I receive a Christmas card from his girlfriend.

“Merry Christmas Molly—you’re a doll!” it says. Below her signature is his, pressed on by a stamp she had made. Enclosed is a check for three hundred dollars, also with his “signature” stamped on it.

A
ddictions separate people from each other. The ones forsaken by their loved ones’ addictions are abandoned, without access. If it is a disease, then it is treatable. If it is merely a choice, then it is a moral problem, and the behavior ought to be met with punishment, imprisonment, or worse—traditional corrective actions. I know the enlightened, scientific view of addiction as a disease has softened the stigma of addiction from moral depravity into almost a mental disability. And perhaps it is for some. This doesn’t match up right with Dad.

The logic of addiction as a disease looks like this: faced with choices, people choose options or behaviors that are in their best interests. Since addictions are self-destructive, choosing that behavior, especially over and over, must be involuntary. If it is involuntary and destructive, it is a disease. The
addict can’t
learn
to get better, or be punished into recovery; he is a victim.

But people voluntarily choosing self-destructive behavior is ordinary. It is so ordinary to me, so regular, that it seems extraordinary to observe any consistently self-advancing actions in anyone for very long, let alone a lifetime. Perhaps that says something about my life. It shouldn’t be rare to find a person taking absolutely good care of him or herself every single day. I think of myself as a good steward of my own self: my brain, my heart, and my body. But not always. Not every day. Not even every year. I choose awful things and actions. Repeatedly, even.

And small actions touch off other particular actions and events. The little blunders, dumb moves, accidents, the delays and distractions: a turn, a click. Lives build like so.

A poor choice is easier to make when the timescale is small and immediate. If I think of eating a small candy bar today against the range of other things I have eaten today, it doesn’t seem so bad, fine even, against the salads and good snacks. But if I think of all the candy I have eaten all week, I think again. Gambling is the same. It is easy to not zoom out and see all the money at once, all the loss together. There’s only
this hand.
There’s only
tonight.
The little loss is OK. It’s manageable. Recoverable maybe. The global loss is forgotten, and when considered, a hard perspective to maintain against the losses to be recovered and the pressing mood of the day and the ache of the now-you, which feels like the only you when you want something. A whole life of gambling would
never be chosen as optimal, or even fun or good. But a night of gambling is often just that.

Did he not learn? He mostly lost at gambling. He mostly chose wrong. Over and over. Why can’t I see him, then, as a helpless addict? I honestly ask myself. I think sometimes I just didn’t know him enough, not like my sister or my mom did. But I think that’s just fear. I did know him, as well as anyone did. My version of him is as true as every version he gave anyone. There are only versions.

I see this meaning that he had a stable internal locus of control. Those with an external locus of control blame circumstances for their troubles, pray to God for change, await good luck, sink into victimhood at bad breaks, passively react to their lives instead of acting them out. The internal locus types believe in their own control, sometimes to the point of delusion, but generally don’t blame others for their faults or successes, tend to not believe in fate, and force the world they want into existence, for better or worse. Most probably fall somewhere between the two extremes.

It seems as if criminals, once confronted with their crimes, almost universally blame external factors for their behavior, and my dad did just that in both his first and second trials. It was the war, it was PTSD, it was addiction, and anxiety from childhood. The causes were always so remote. The more remote, the less he could be expected to have control over them. It is a strategy for absolution of responsibility.

Of course, criminals do often have sad stories of abuse or trauma that certainly do imprint their psyches for all time,
like many noncriminals do too, but what seems to be a strong tendency to identify external loci of control is a hoax. It seems as if it is just the thing to say when one is caught. A criminal like my dad, a liar, has the most certain internal locus of control out of anyone; it is upon this that he relied unconditionally. A liar convinces himself first. That’s the hardest part. But if it works, then convincing others becomes easy. Manipulation is opportunism in its fullest realization: it is directing that erases itself, even to the director. An opportunist is not waiting for conditions to align for the crime to work, he is making the crime work in conditions as they are. The circumstances of
self
change to fit. That is power.

I could never understand, even after having played, how any reasonable person could consider gambling, especially blackjack, as a winnable game. It looked like a closed situation to me: the house has the edge. But some inlet must be discovered, or more like manufactured, when a person feels intense self-control, especially one who looks for risks. It is a way to pry open any action that seems closed. Perhaps especially the actions that seem most sensibly closed, like a table game at a casino, which for the average player is unwinnable in the long run. Or, a bank full of secured, private money. A marriage, a family. Fixed things, things closed to interlopers, things he uprooted for himself.

To project one’s values onto the world itself, in order to function agreeably within it, is everyone’s life work; it is the criminal who takes no responsibility for anything
but
this. It is what Sartre called “bad faith,” unencumbering oneself of
effective messes, the trash that falls away from the missiles of the will. My dad’s crimes seem hopelessly reckless, especially in their repetition, so much so that I had decided when he robbed again, after seven years of living normally with his family, that he simply wanted to go back to jail. After all, it could not be a mistake; he could not have thought he would get away with it. It
looked
like a choice.

I see him making choices rather than mistakes probably because I have a similar internal locus of control. So does my sister. Generally it is empowering, certainly, but frustrating when error does happen, when self-discipline breaks down or unlucky events can’t be changed.

I don’t know. I don’t know if he is a sociopath. I do know he cheated at everything. He lied to everyone, kept us all away, and resisted every regular structure of civilization: work, family, entertainment, economics, love. If he thought he truly could get away with all the cheating, and an entire life of lying—and he did get away with it at first—then yes, there is something persistently demented in his thinking. But if he did it all, knowing the consequences, who and what he’d lose, and went ahead anyway—that seems like something else, like actual evil. The picture is really all of it at once. It is irreducible. And that seems true, truer than I am even saying here.

On a recent visit to my sister’s house I found myself in her basement, using the exercise equipment down there instead of going for a run just because it was so cold out, and I have lost my tolerance for cold since moving to the South. I wandered over to a corner of the room where I recognized
Dad’s tools and stuff from the garage of their last house. After his arrest, my sister just let the house go into foreclosure since it was so behind on the mortgage. And she seemed happy to abandon it. I was sort of surprised to find his stuff there then. The good tools made sense to keep, I guess, but some of these other things seemed weirder. It was all the stuff he’d taken from work. I started opening boxes and drawers.

Trays of hundreds of “wood-handled 2” paintbrushes, wrapped stacks of paper cups, small boxes of gold-wire braids and silver-wire braids, cut tacks, screw eyes, hook eyes, drill bits, silver washers and nuts, packs of dust masks, plastic S hooks, bags of black zip ties, green, red, blue, and yellow wall anchors, black screws, bags of flat silver triangles, coils of nylon rope, coils of snakelike hose, a bucket of white cotton gloves, hundreds of incredibly tiny light bulbs, twist ties, razor blades, metal hollow-handled paintbrushes, a box of tape rolls, and a box of small plastic boxes. An enormous hoard of little things. Stolen things. She kept them. Perhaps they’d be useful, like he thought they might be.

A
rtifacts, maybe, I needed artifacts to hold in my hands. I tore through my small apartment, emptying desk drawers and pulling boxes and photo albums from their shelves.
I have things he gave me,
I thought,
surely I do.

I found notebooks of poems, old planners, school papers, graded essays from college or even high school, printed with teachers’ praise that I could not part with. I found photos, small toys, childhood drawings: things everyone has.

Nothing from him, nothing. I sat on the floor and thought. Fresh out of prison, he bought me a used car, but I no longer have that. For one childhood birthday he gave me a porcelain figure of a blond woman in a blue dress, skirt spread out into a wavy cone, one arm holding a bouquet of flowers finished with blue rhinestones. It came with a little folded card printed with a birthstone rhyme, the one for March:

Her head had broken clean off once, and was glued back on. I don’t have that anymore either.

I tried, but couldn’t remember anything else. I don’t have anything from him. I don’t have any possessions of his, not even accidentally.

I only have the square photo of himself he’d inscribed and given to Mom …

… in which he is smiling so honestly. Which I had stolen.

C
leaning out my closet recently I found the big businesslike purse deep in a corner. It was worn now, and not as classy as I remembered it. In its only pocket, the clump of the three shoplifting tools.

I felt an old desire for something free, a present to myself.
And it’s so easy!
I thought. So, so easy, not like a risk at all.

I dressed up and took the purse to the mall, jacket over my arm, clicking the long corridors with that assured absorption, false, but convincing, and so easy to snap into again. I dallied at less-expensive stores,
like a real shopper even,
I thought, and walked into the one I’d been waiting for, the best store in the mall. The air was clean and still, and salesgirls smiled, pointed out the new arrivals. I drifted to the table of the just-in cashmere sweaters, my old favorites, so sharply folded and bright as Christmas presents under the perfect
store lights. I tossed over my arm a vivid blue, a baby pink, a salmon, and a striped, grabbed a suit jacket and jeans on my way to the fitting room, and met the girl there with a plain smile. I laid the items out on the stool in the tiny room. All of this was brought in just so I could have the vivid blue sweater. I knew the salesgirl didn’t even see it under the pile of other things on my arm as I brought it in.

I lifted it to my chest and looked at myself in the mirror. It was perfect, thick and soft as a dream blanket, in a blue that made my blood ache. My skin glowed next to it.

I opened the bottom of the sweater to cut out the sewn-in sensor tag on the inside seam and shoved the tag into the back pocket of the jeans I’d brought in. I pulled apart the clump of magnets, placing half on either side of the pin-tab sensor, but nothing.

No little clicks, no release. The magnets snapped back together and pinched my fingers cruelly hard.

The sensors were a new design: more plastic around the heart of its internal magnet, and in an odd teardrop shape that was difficult to keep the magnets around. They didn’t stick. Not at all. They just found each other and closed back together defiantly.

I looked at myself in the mirror again. I smiled, cheered her up. I dropped the sweater back into the pile of things I didn’t want, relieved.

I
see you, Dad.

You think no one can see you, as if the lights on you are out.

You know, you’re not wrong: the lights are out on all of us. We go on in our dark fogs. Unless someone else turns to look your way and lights the light.