My riff on the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago

Scorning an ordinary life, Martin F. (Dr. F. or simply Martin to his friends and colleagues)—lover of Celtic literature, busty women, cheap eatinghouses and Straussian opera—lived quixotically in pursuit of his ideals in an elsewhere far from the vulgarity of the commonplace, eluding prudence and practicality, spending his days brooding on scientific and business schemes, bathing in a sea of technological and entrepreneurial narcissism, exuberantly carrying out seemingly absurd experiments with little more than reason and imagination and embarking on a foolhardy commercial venture, entertaining illusions of attaining a moment of infinite emotional fulfillment, the achievement of a scientific discovery that would insure his place among the immortals of physics and simultaneously do good and net a profit in a bottled water swindle, inventing a method of extracting boundless energy from a glass of heavy water (with the aid of a car battery) by means of cold fusion, pushing hydrogen atoms so close together so that they would fuse into a single atom, releasing an abundance of energy in the process, reshaping our understanding of physics, and changing the course of civilization while, at the same time, landing a gold mine in arsenic-laden water . . . and now in a gray-walled prison cell no larger than a sizeable elevator, a single dim bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cord, lit day and night, scarcely sufficient to read by, Martin, living partly in a federal correctional institution and partly in his imagination, returned in far-flung reflection to the years before his incarceration, immersing himself in thoughts and memories—a mental aggregate suspended in a bounding main of cerebral ether—reaching backward and upward in time, that thread through narrow passageways of past joys, passions, and afflictions, obsessing on his years in the University of California’s forward-thinking nuclear fusion laboratory as co-grantee of a top-secret federal program code-named Water-World aimed at achieving nuclear fusion in a glass of water; aggrieved by his ill-starred association with his erstwhile co-grantee and cunning business associate, Stanley; agonizing over his fruitless professional quest for scientific recognition to say nothing of the stigma of financial washout; and haunted by his failed romantic liaison with Madeleine . . . then that “all-nameless hour” on the day that changed his life, 9:00 a.m., Saturday, September 4, 1976, when ten FBI agents, accompanied by four Santa Cruz police officers, appeared at the front door of his ocean view residence—said agents and officers awkwardly interrupting Martin’s gratifying encounter with an amply-endowed pornographic film star—to execute a search warrant issued by a magistrate judge based on probable cause that Martin (having absconded with, and retained in his beach house basement, documents relating to hush-hush nuclear fusion experiments in violation of The Espionage Act; engaged in a ludicrously sordid bottled-water business that violated the Clean Water Act; and might have been involved in the suspicious arsenic death of Madeleine, a one-time typist in his office) committed a shitload of felonies that would ultimately lead to a decades-long imprisonment, following a court case and subsequent appeals that continued for ten years, enslaved by his dependence on a team of five lawyers, traversing the road from prosperity to bankruptcy and financial ruin . . . then lying on his back, with his hands behind his head, habitually lapsing into sullen grievance, delving back to the beginnings of Nevada Springs, his tapped-out bottled water business, the now defunct enterprise drawing groundwater from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains (water that contained naturally occurring arsenic) (Stanley’s idea), using sand filters to reduce the concentration of arsenic so the water would meet federal drinking water standards (Stanley’s idea), back-flushing the filters with a sodium hydroxide solution, which generated thousands of gallons of arsenic-contaminated wastewater (Stanley’s idea), and discharging the arsenic-contaminated wastewater into a manmade pond, “the Arsenic Pond” (Stanley’s idea), landing Martin and Stanley in federal prison on, among other crimes, the charge of illegally storing and transporting arsenic-laced wastewater . . . now denuded of his dignity as well as his discretion to make choices, but fervidly invoking the resources of memory and nostalgia to shape an inner calm, the opera-intoxicated Martin, preserving some measure of personal freedom in defiance of the conditions of overwhelming government constraint, guarded his sanity by daily and systematically going through the orchestral score of Strauss’s final lyric drama, Capriccio—whose central trope weighs the relative merits of words and music, asking the question, “What is more important in opera, the lyrics or the melody? . . . and in these moments, Martin would reach under the mattress in his prison cell and retrieve a letter he had written to Madeleine years earlier, but never sent:

Dear Madeleine,

I often think of that day at the beach when I ran into you and we went to the movies afterward. I had a hard time getting up, because I was tired from the day before. While I was shaving, I wondered what I was going to do and I decided to go for a swim. There were lots of young people. In the water I ran into you. That was some time after you left our office. I’d had a thing for you at the time. You did too, I think. But you’d left soon afterwards and we didn’t have the time. I helped you onto a boat and as I did, I brushed against your breasts. I was still in the water when you were already lying flat on your stomach on the boat. You turned toward me. Your hair was in your eyes and you were laughing. I hoisted myself up next to you. It was nice, and, sort of joking around, I let my head fall back and rest on your stomach. You didn’t say anything so I left it there. I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold. On the back of my neck I could feel your heart beating softly. We lay on the boat for a long time, half asleep. When the sun got too hot, you dove off and I followed. I caught up with you, put my arm around your waist, and we swam together. You laughed the whole time. On the dock, while we were drying ourselves off, you said, ”I’m darker than you.” I asked you if you wanted to go to the movies that evening. You laughed again and told me there was a Woody Allen movie you’d like to see. The movie was funny in parts, but otherwise it was just too stupid. You had your leg pressed against mine. Do you remember? I was fondling your breasts. Toward the end of the show, I gave you a kiss, but not a good one. You came back to my place. When I woke up, you had gone. I remembered that it was Sunday.

I shall always think of you—always, Madeleine, always.

Yours,

Martin

P.S. The other day Stanley said to me, “Marty, what’s more important in water, the hydrogen or the oxygen? What a tool.