Chapter Two
I was 23 when Dad died.
In some ways, I guess that was good. You know, he didn’t suffer long. A year. It could have been, it could have been longer, he could have wasted away more – more viciously. But he didn’t. I mean, he could have also gone into remission, he could have lived, maybe. I ain’t a doctor, I guess, I don’t know. I can’t really trust my memories from back then, how much of them have been warped like an overused vinyl record by my replaying them over and over. I remember the doctor telling us there was reason to be optimistic, but maybe he was just saying to not lose hope and I’ve distorted that over the years into “Your dad’s probably gonna live”.
I never got a chance to go back to grad school. I think I probably could have reapplied and gotten in to the same schools – they’d taken me before, why not in the next application cycle? But I couldn’t. Same reason I couldn’t go in the first place – the medical debts.
I spent a long time crying. So did Mom, not that she ever let me or my brother see. I don’t think my brother cried. He was a pallbearer at the funeral, you know, in his uniform. Dark blue jacket, rows of ribbons on his chest, all dignified. All that military pride or stoicism or whatever, you know. He was saluting when they were draping that American flag over his coffin.
Oh, yeah, Dad got a military funeral. He was part of the Wyoming National Guard like my brother, I think he was there for four years or something. He said he was an admin clerk or something, my grandpa always gave him shit about that. You know, there was a man in my family in combat in every American war, all the way back to the Revolution, at least according to the family tale, then Dad broke the chain, at least until my brother barely made it into the end of the War on Terror and saved us from the displeasure of ten generations of Eversmanns. Eversmenn, I guess.
But anyway, that’s also why Dad didn’t go to the VA or anything – National Guard don’t get veterans benefits, except for funerals I guess. VA could have probably saved his life, and for free, too, but.
Anyway.
We were all just adrift, I don’t know. People talk about families coming together in tragedy, that didn’t really happen for us. It feels like we were all just kind of near each other, and we weren’t talking. Or anything. Mom was – no, we all were – it was like…
Just I don’t know. I cried in the shower, mostly. Sound hides the sobbing, the water washes away the tears. Then you wipe off the mirror and put on your makeup and no one can tell that you were crying. I think Mom cried at night, mostly. I could hear her sometimes, and you know, I knocked on her door once and it just went silent. She was too proud to let us see her cry. And my brother, I don’t know. He had finished his police officer qualifications while dad was sick, so he was gone a lot. My husband – boyfriend at the time – was actually closer with my brother than I was, I think. I guess my brother probably always wanted an older brother.
So we were just kind of drifting along, all of us with the same feelings, the same grief, but not able to come together. Like ice floating down a creek, I guess, smacking into the same rocks, into each other sometimes, but then bouncing away and floating on.
Here, I prompted Ms. Eversmann to continue after an extended silence.
It’s funny, you know, when the FBI and the Secret Service caught up with me, there was a lot of interrogation after I got out of the hospital. Looking for accomplices, all that. It’s funny, like they didn’t think a woman could do all this on her own. My lawyer, Katie Wilkens, she was there at every interrogation right from the start, so she did all the talking. You know, first thing I did when I woke up in the hospital was ask for counsel. Had that drilled into me by my brother – he’s a Wyoming state trooper – never talk to cops, first thing you do is ask for a lawyer, no matter what. So she did all the talking. But man, the interrogations were so – I don’t know, infuriating. The way they acted, how condescending they were.
The main interrogator was Special Agent in Charge Danic, this asshole with this constant superior expression. He had this weird way of inhaling, like he always breathed like his nose was a vacuum cleaner or something, like he was afraid that if he didn’t scoop up all the oxygen as quickly as he could, everyone else would take it. He wasn’t fat or anything, big, but like a linebacker. I don’t think it was because he had a problem with his heart or anything. God, he used so much legalese and as many ten-dollar words as he could find, I think he must have spent every break in the interrogation behind that mirrored glass reading a thesaurus.
I guess the FBI figured I was just some yokel from Wyoming, a degree in math from what they saw as a second-rate university, right? Someone he could shock and awe or something. Or maybe Danic figured they could provoke me, get a rise, you know, where I’d start talking despite my lawyer being there. Arrogant fucker. Obviously, I planned it all and did it all alone. I wouldn’t have succeeded if I hadn’t.
Eventually there was another agent who they traded off the good cop, bad cop, with. This lady, I think she said she was from Portland, Eileen Wu. She seemed nice, which I guess is the whole point of the good cop. She always had her eyes open real wide, like she was permanently startled. That sounds like a hard life, doesn’t it? Always being startled, I mean.
I remember the one thing that surprised me was that she looked at me, and she asked me, “Why’d you do it?”
Obviously, I didn’t answer that either. I let Katie do all the talking for me. But man, the way she asked it, it was like I’d personally hurt her. What do you think an FBI Agent makes? Seventy, eighty grand a year? Maybe by the time they retire, they’re making something like six figures?
And she was upset because I’d killed a few parasites who make her annual salary in an hour? People who own eight different houses and have housekeepers at all of them keeping them nice just in case they decide they want to live in a different state, one weekend out of the year?
You wanna know why I did it? Liberty and justice for all. How long have we been trying to reform healthcare in the United States? What about corporate law? We’re a nation of the free and we handed all that freedom to the goddamned executives. Every attempt at reform’s been undone by politicians being paid a pittance by the corporations protecting their profits. Actually, progress has been unmade in that time period. Worker rights? Consumer protection? FDR and the New Deal literally built that idealized era people always talk about in the fifties, and ever since then it’s gone backwards, since Reagan.
Yeah, yeah, people will dismiss that as commie bullshit. They’ll say to just work hard, keep your head down, and you’ll achieve that American dream. But you know something? Trickle-down economics ain’t real. And hell, how is the notion not insulting to working-class folks? How did so many buy into it? Even the name, trickle-down, is an insult to us. You know what trickle-down economics is? It’s the executives getting pure, distilled water, and the rest of us getting the drops trickling down the side of the toilet when they’re finished pissing. That’s what the corporations sold us in the seventies and eighties.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame the corporations. They’re just doing what they’re meant to do. They can’t help it. You don’t get mad at a pig for trying to eat everything it can get its greedy little snout into, you don’t get mad at a bull for trying to buck a man off its back. That’s just instinct. And a corporation’s instinct is just gonna be to try to make as much money as possible and buy off politicians to let it take advantage of people. You stop a bull, you stop a pig by building fences, so that its instincts result in something good, not destruction. You want to do that for a corporation? Those fences are laws, systemic barriers, safeguards. You can turn that profit-seeking instinct into something good for society, but only if you get that fence up.
But it’s hell of a lot harder to build a fence around a bull that’s constantly charging you. And that’s what the corporations did. Actually, we managed to get the fences up, and then the bulls talked and bribed the politicians into ripping the fences down back in the last four decades. And now there’s a lot of them, giant bulls running around, trampling over our society, locking horns with each other, and there’s no way to rebuild that pen anymore.
I should be clear here, because I think this is important. Why assassination? Why violence? Why not pick up a sign and go marching, why not try to organize some sort of resistance? People shake their heads at me, you know, they think I ain’t a reasonable person. And I talked a bit about it just now, but I kind of danced around it, you know. So let me be crystal clear.
I chose violence because I believe that it was the only effective option left for resistance. There were other options, and every scenario I could imagine led to nothing. Why? They think they’ve won. They’ve managed to beat us down, you know. You beat a dog enough, it quits fighting, right? You break its spirit. The dog forgets it can bite. And our nation, what do we have? Occupy Wall Street, you remember that? How quickly did that fall apart? Lasted two months, what change did we see?
They’ve managed to corrupt information. The corporate media. The firehose of information they blast you with, enough so that you can never really pay attention to one thing for very long, pinning you in with algorithmic newsfeeds to amplify particular messages: bow, give in, this is how things are. The suits, men like Blaise and the others who we’ll get to – they made it hard to sustain any popular movement, they learned from Civil Rights and the labor unions and all the last two centuries, they’ve been using it to hone their ability to turn the rage of the working man towards ourselves.
And there is one clear way to cut through all that. All their distractions, to force everyone to see clearly what hides behind the veils they’ve put up, to cleave through all the ambient noise they put up to muffle any discussion of what they do.
Bullets travel faster than sound.
Did I expect a dead CEO here and a dead President there to change something, like they were Atlas, holding up the whole corporate system? No. They’re a nice reminder to the CEOs and the politicians that they’re accountable to a population that has more guns than there are people, but no. What I wanted, what I want, is for the nation to sit up, to look clearly at the precipice, and to remember who our enemy is. It ain’t each other. And together – you know, ten million Americans in the streets with those signs, with those megaphones, calling for change…well, we needed a catalyst, something to get people to put those voices on the streets.
Bullets travel faster than sound.
So yeah, violence is the last resort for us as thinking, reasoning, moral Americans – and it should be. But when you have no other choice, when your back’s against the wall…
Look, let me ask you something earnestly: is there a difference between a thief breaking into your home with a gun or some corporate executive with your family in his sights and a pen in hand? ‘Cause from where I’m sitting, at least you can reason with the thief. You give that corporate executive everything you got, he’ll take it, realize your family ain’t worth nothing anymore, and then discard them all the same.
And the funny thing is, I don’t think it’s enough. I hope it is, I hope my example will be enough to shock things, to dismantle the cancer choking the life out of our system, to get a successful surgery in to stymie the bleeding. I pray to God that it is, that the people remember we have power, that we stand up together and demand accountability, demand human dignity, demand that we live up to our country’s ideals. Fairness, equality, liberty and justice for all. For all, not just the fucking oligarchs. That the suits will suddenly remember that their own survival hinges on our mercy. That the politicians will remember that their job is to serve the people and the Constitution of the United States.
But you know, I’m betting it won’t be. They ain’t gonna learn a thing. And then my example serves a second lesson, to the rest of us in the poor, exhausted, huddled masses: when those bulls are running around smashing everything and you can’t fence them in anymore, you can always just shoot them.
Bullets travel faster than sound.
Ms. Eversmann here lapsed into silence for some time before I prompted her.
Sorry. Yeah, during the interrogations they asked me all kinds of things, over and over. Danic was mostly interested in accomplices. You know, did I have someone giving me intelligence from the President’s staff. He said it like that, like Jameson was still the President and not just a private citizen. If I had been put up to it by the Chinese or the Russians, like I’d turn on my own country like some traitor or something. Funny, you know? They never looked twice at Jameson, even when his family members were getting payments from the Russians and the Saudis, or when he mishandled classified information that somehow ended up in Russian hands, but when a woman demonstrates even the slightest competency, it’s ‘You must be a traitor who had help from foreign spies!’
But you know what, it wasn’t hard. At all. Maybe that terrified them more than anything else, the realization that there’s three hundred million other Americans who could just as easily do what I did. All I had to do was be patient and methodical. I guess I did have one advantage, in that I grew up in Wyoming, so I already knew how to shoot, but it’s not like that’s a hard thing to learn how to do. And maybe they needed me to have been a foreign agent or something, so they could lie to their bosses: “Yes, I can keep you safe.”
I guess I’ll start with Stephen Blaise. Might as well go in chronological order. But before I get to him, I really ought to say that there was a decade between my daddy dying and Blaise’s death. Know why?
Because I was a good citizen. I worked myself to the bone, threw myself back into the oil industry and all that to pay off the debts. We sold our house. I moved in with my boyfriend, now husband. Mom moved into a fucking trailer park to make things work. My brother spent more hours working for the state police each week than he did with his family or even for himself, counting sleeping. He joined the Army, too, Wyoming National Guard for the extra couple hundred a month for weekend work and the tuition assistance to help with his student loans so that money could go towards the hospital bills instead.
And I guess we just moved on as we did all that. You know, we faced it the way Americans do, we rolled our sleeves up and we fought our way through. My brother started a family. I started a family, too. That’s my regret, really my only regret, that this has all blown back on my husband and our daughter.
My family? No, look – I respect you. Honestly, that’s why I said yeah to letting you interview me and not any of the other journalists. I feel like you were the only reporter I ever read in all that time who ever – you know, who ever had real integrity. None of the fake eulogies or the trying to paint corrupt, evil people in a good light, but also not trying to tear them down, make them out to be demons like a lot of people did.
I figure you’ll do the same thing with me. Just – being honest with everyone. But that’s also why I don’t really wanna talk about my family. I ain’t gonna say much about them through all this, because after I’m found guilty – you know, I want them to be able to live their lives. As best as they can.
Okay, got that? What matters is that in that gap, I went right back to work for the oil companies. Four years later, Jameson – we’ll get to him later – he started a trade war with China and Canada and Mexico and everyone else he saw and got a bunch of us laid off. He blamed it on the other party, of course. That was a real stressful time because I’d been back from maternity leave for about two weeks, and you know, we had our daughter, suddenly we were down to one income.
Nobody was really hiring at the time, not in Wyoming, and we couldn’t up and move – we didn’t have enough saved to just go haring off to another state, and anyway, my husband wanted to stay in Wyoming where our family was and everything. And he especially didn’t want to move to California or Washington, and that’s where I would’ve been applying to jobs, it’s where all the data analysis and math jobs were.
Things got desperate for a little while, I won’t lie. It’s funny. I have a hard time saying this.
Guess it’s just my pride. You know, no one – there’s just this shame. Let me just take a second to figure out how to say it. My husband will be embarrassed about this, too. No, I shouldn’t talk about it in detail.
All I’ll say is that we had to ask for help. There, I said it. It’s funny, you know? If it were any one of my friends, I would tell them there’s no shame in it, that they should use everything that can help them. But when it came to me, suddenly, you know, you just don’t know how to do it. How to unbend your pride enough to ask for help. But we had a daughter. So we had to.
I managed to get a job at a gas station. It was part-time and the hours were inconsistent. I looked for other jobs when I wasn’t working there. And we were worried about our daughter, too. My husband was working during the day. I did the math, and it made more sense for me to stay home during the day and to mostly work nights, so we didn’t have to pay for a daycare.
So I was taking care of her during the day, and then he had her in some of the evenings when I was at the gas station. I got into the habit of picking my lip when I couldn’t find anything permanent that paid enough. Used to pick it raw and bloody, and then I couldn’t stop biting at it, you know? Like the soft, pillowy part of your lower lip, I’d rip the skin off and then I’d just bite at the wound and blood would go gushing into my mouth. I guess I still do it when I’m stressed.
Okay, I’ll just say it. I drove down to Denver a couple times, to visit food banks. Fuck, I hate saying that. Like we couldn’t support our daughter. My husband worked this logistics job for the local meat packing plant, managing their freight schedule on the trains and the trucks. He made forty thousand a year at that job. We had rent. Student loan payments. Auto insurance and the auto loan payments. Renter’s insurance. We were helping my mom with the medical debt after Dad died. Utilities.
I know, this is what everyone in America has to pay for. We weren’t unique. Everyone else all managed it, why couldn’t we? That was, you know, what was going through my head. My brother loaned us some money, too, and that was – you know, he had a wife, she was pregnant, he worked so much overtime for the state police. We applied for food stamps. You know how humiliating it is, to apply for food stamps? Jesus. I wore a scarf and sunglasses and drove to Denver for the food bank, because I didn’t want anyone recognizing me. I cried in the parking lot for ten minutes before I went into the food bank.
My husband quit smoking, to try to save some money with the cigarettes, so he was on edge, always stressed out and irritable. We argued a lot. I picked my lip bloody every night, cried at the gas station when no one was there. Cried in the shower a lot. Cried on the phone when my brother said he was sending me a couple grand. I cried all the time. I can’t even tell you, I’m about to start crying now, thinking about it. How fucking helpless I felt, how humiliated and worthless. Felt like we were just…like an old drum, on the verge of splitting open, still being beaten away.
Then my old boss Paul called me out of the blue. He was a good man, always told me that I should reapply to grad school, go get my PhD, although he kept telling me I should do it in physics or applied math, not pure math. Offered to write me rec letters, all that. Anyway, he’d been the only person I knew who didn’t get laid off. This was about three months after the layoffs, when things were really getting desperate, and offered me another job working for the same company, but at headquarters, down in Texas.
The oil companies wanted to apply artificial intelligence to the oil fields – finding deposits, calculating profitability, that kind of thing. They hired me right off, I had a solid history with the company, Paul vouched for me. I did know machine learning, pretty damn well, for the record, but I know that ain’t why I was hired. It was because I happened to know the right person. So we survived. Because I happened to know the right person.
Fuck, I wish I had a cigarette right now. They don’t let you have tobacco in here, guess jails are all tobacco-free these days. Big Tobacco must hate that.
The job I got was a good one – we didn’t even have to move or anything even though I was technically working in Houston, I just worked from home and joined meetings via internet calls. It paid well enough, although because I only had a bachelor’s degree and they’d only even offered me the job in the first place because of Paul’s recommendation, they didn’t pay me nearly as much as any other machine learning developer would have been making. My husband got a promotion a little while after, and we were out of the woods.
We rebuilt our savings – you know, we had an emergency fund that had been wiped out in all of about a fucking month – and we stabilized, got used to having two incomes again and having some stability. Paid my brother back, and that felt good. It felt like we got things back on track, and things got good enough after a while that we could seriously start thinking about buying a house, upgrading our lives. You know, we were doing pretty well for the times.
And then we got another bill. Medical.
Yeah.
It turned out that ACHC had fucked us again, now this time because of some bureaucratic mix-up where we never got told that there was more charges that we hadn’t paid off. And it had been building, and building interest, and then they’d sold our debt to some Chinese corporation and now the debt collectors had come knocking. And we were still legally obligated, you know? Well, legally only my mom was, but that meant my brother and I were, too. You don’t turn your back on family.
The timing, you know, was just as shitty as you can imagine. We had two cars. A daughter. We’d just bought a house on a fifteen-year mortgage. Expensive one, we’d done our research and gone for the best one in our price range that we could find. Good school district, not far from work for my husband, good daycare nearby – not that we needed it for long, since Mom started living with us, too. She’d retired from ACHC and – you know, I just insisted. Wanted her out of that fucking trailer park as she was getting older. Took weeks to talk her around, had to make her feel like she’d be doing us a favor, you know – need someone to look after our daughter, help with all that stuff. She relaxed most of the time, but she also helped cook or clean when she was in the mood, just helped around the house.
Man, our house, it’s a real pretty house, painted this shade of robin’s-egg blue, real gentle but also vibrant at the same time. I know that sounds like an oxymoron but that’s what it was like, I guess it’s a little more faded these days. There’s this big backyard for our little girl to play, a lot of room for our cats. If you’re curious, they’re both pound cats. No, I have no idea what their breed is. Does anyone ever know what their cat breed is? I mean, yeah, I guess there’s like some purebred ones but like – come on, let’s be real. One’s orange and one’s gray.
Orange one’s dumber than a pile of rocks, gray one’s smart as a whip – she can open doors, it drives us crazy – and she bullies him all over the place. He’s happy to just do whatever she makes him do. His name’s Hellboy – my husband named him after a bull that nearly killed him before he stopped riding. Yeah, I don’t know. Men. The white one’s named Pooteeweet. I know, shocking, right, you wouldn’t expect me to have liked Slaughterhouse-Five given my later hobbies. Felt bad for her because my daughter called her Poo for the first year or so. I laughed for hours the first time I saw her eyes light up when Teeweet came around the corner, you know the way cats do, her tail up in that question mark, and my daughter stumbles to her feet with this big grin on her face, nearly falls over, then screams “Poo!” at the top of her lungs. Should’ve seen Teeweet’s face, I swear that cat understood and got offended, stalked off in a huff. That’s when I started calling her Teeweet instead of Pootee, but it was too late.
Yeah, my daughter loves them, used to chase them around and try to pull their tails. Oh, don’t worry, she grew out of that eventually, with a lot of encouragement from us. They never minded too much anyway, they adored her from the day we brought her home. Even if she pulled their tails or played rough, even so, they always cuddled with her at night, nuzzled up right next to her under the blankets. Honestly, they loved her from the moment I first got pregnant – they used to cuddle on my baby bump whenever I was laying down or sitting, just purr for hours. I think they knew I was pregnant before I even did, they got super protective of me about a week or two before I realized that I might be pregnant. I guess that’s another regret for me, I miss seeing them.
I guess I have a lot more regrets than I thought.