Five Biographies of Ted Kaczynski

Robert G. Penner

Ted Kaczynski is an Irish convict in 19th century Van Diemen’s Land, transported to the Antipodes for stealing coal. Assigned to a work gang clearing land for farmers, he flees into the wilderness. There is a price on his head of one hundred guineas. He is pursued for months, maybe years, by soldiers and armed settlers. Occasionally Aboriginal Tasmanians help him. They show him what berries he can eat, what leaves and tubers. In the evenings, by his small fire, he uses kangaroo blood to write lists of seeds and flowers on a scrap of paper. Every night he dreams he has settled a parcel of land. In the dream he turns the black earth with a spade. Raises children with a beloved partner and workmate. In his dream he falls asleep and has another dream: skeletal bodies on the side of the road; tuberous skulls; carts filled with corpses instead of turnips, instead of potatoes.

Ted Kaczynski is a hermit in a cabin. He is building bombs. Making lists. Watching contrails. Reading feminist histories of the Neolithic. He goes for walks in the woods. In the trees. Among the birds and flowers. No one waits for him the forest. In the valleys. He is all alone. Who am I? he thinks. Who am I? Am I Ted Kaczynski or the dream of Ted Kaczynski? He finds an empty spacesuit in the woods. Half buried. One arm free, stars and stripes on the shoulder, heavy glove resting on the ground like it is resting on a bar. The spherical helmet with its gold face shield is tilted up. He peers down into the face shield and sees a reflection of his face: haggard, long, bearded. The image is warped by the curve of the face shield into something that looks like it is going down a drain. He puts his hands over his ears and makes his mouth into an O so that in the reflection he looks exactly like that painting The Scream. He returns to his cabin, but it is gone. The clearing in which it stood is overgrown. Nothing is there. Not even ruins. Not even a geometric depression in the forest floor. Not even an old tin can. He walks for days. There is no food. He is scared to eat the berries he finds but he knows he will eat them eventually. He knows he will eventually eat leaves and grass and boil tree bark to make soup. He knows he will eventually die of starvation but until then he has nowhere to lay his head. It starts to rain. He is cold and shakes uncontrollably. He cannot sleep. He cannot rest. Was the space suit a dream? Was the cabin? Were the contrails? He is dying.

Ted Kaczynski is a ghost haunting a cell at ADX Florence. They had found his dead body on the bunk, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot on the floor. One of the guards took the book to sell on eBay. After the body was wheeled to the infirmary the custodial staff scrubbed and scrubbed but they couldn’t get the smell of lilacs out of the room. Now the prisoners they transfer into the cell go mad and then die. The ghost of Ted Kaczynski keeps appearing and shouting at people “Who doesn’t want a second chance? Who doesn’t want a mulligan? Who doesn’t want to try again?” He shouts at terrorists and child killers. Political prisoners. They go mad and die. Mold and mildew grow aggressively in all eight corners. During the night the walls of the cell start crumbling. Disintegrating. Holes appear through which the prisoners can see the serene Rockies. Wild rose and mountain lupine. During the day the custodial staff patch up the holes. One night a hole becomes so big a prisoner escapes: Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. They look for him but never find him. He is presumed dead in the wilderness. Ferns sprout from the cement floor of the haunted cell, growing in mere hours to heights of six feet. Seven feet. Eight. Huge green leaves unscroll under the fluorescent lights. Dragonflies appear. Mushroom. Orchids. Moss. Scurrying things. The warden has had enough and orders the cell filled in with concrete blocks and permanently sealed.

Ted Kaczynski is an idea. Up in the Appalachians they’re shooting judges and blowing up government buildings. Dams are destroyed. They set fire to coal trucks. Shoot the drivers. Leave them in ditches with notes pinned to their shirts and hoodies. The notes always consist of a single word: Collaborator. Up in the Appalachians there are kids living in camps. College kids that have given up on the future. Working kids that left their dead-end jobs. They are living in camps hidden in the trees. They read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto out loud to each other. His prison notebooks. His lists. They admire his holy suffering. Desire it for themselves. Journalists sneak through the police cordons to interview them. They write sarcastic stories about nostalgia and romance. They warn the kids: the army is coming. Police. Drones. The air will be alive with drones. It will be seething. You have to go, they tell the kids. You have to flee. They’re going to kill you all. They’ll kill you too, the kids tell the journalists. We’re journalists, say the journalists. We’re just here to record the facts. Tell the story. They need us to sort it all out. They’ll kill us all, say the kids, and let God decide who are the goats and who are the sheeple.
Ted Kaczynski is a billionaire on Mars. He is all alone. On the entirety of the planet there is only Ted Kaczynski. Even though he finds poetry boring he reads Byron. He thinks frequently of his former wives. Most frequently the second. He thinks about how angry she was when he bought The Death of Sardanapalus from the French government and had it installed in their dining room. It was huge. Over ten feet high and twelve feet across. She complained about it so frequently she ruined their marriage. She hated looking at Sardanapalus, at the bodies of his concubines, at the soldier drawing the knife across a woman’s throat. Ted Kaczynski thinks about The Death of Sardanapalus and his second wife and he masturbates. Everyone else is dead. He is the last human. He wants to masturbate outside in the sun, in the thin air, feel the radiation passing through his body. He wants to plant a potato in the sterile Martian soil just as Matt Damon did. He imagines the civilizations that will emerge on Mars when the AI finally figures out how to clone him. He thinks of Sardanapalus again and grows turgid. He thinks of colonial law. Terra nullius. He thinks about growing potatoes on the moon. It is nice to be alone on Mars knowing everything else is gone. It is nice to be alone and masturbate.

Robert G. Penner lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms – including “Elementary Satellite Two” as William Squirrel in Sundog Lit. His second novel The Dark King Swallows the World is forthcoming with Radiant Press. He can be found on Twitter at @billsquirrell and on Instagram at @robertgpenner.

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