The Federal Correctional Institution in Victorville, California was built on a contaminated Superfund site, polluting the local water supply with industrial solvents and pesticides. The document goes on to describe Martin F., a prisoner at the facility who is obsessed with the scientific experiments and failed business ventures that led to his incarceration, as well as memories of his romantic relationship with Madeleine C. The summary ends with Martin retrieving an unsent letter he had written to Madeleine years ago, describing their time together at the beach.
The Federal Correctional Institution in Victorville, California was built on a contaminated Superfund site, polluting the local water supply with industrial solvents and pesticides. The document goes on to describe Martin F., a prisoner at the facility who is obsessed with the scientific experiments and failed business ventures that led to his incarceration, as well as memories of his romantic relationship with Madeleine C. The summary ends with Martin retrieving an unsent letter he had written to Madeleine years ago, describing their time together at the beach.
The Federal Correctional Institution in Victorville, California was built on a contaminated Superfund site, polluting the local water supply with industrial solvents and pesticides. The document goes on to describe Martin F., a prisoner at the facility who is obsessed with the scientific experiments and failed business ventures that led to his incarceration, as well as memories of his romantic relationship with Madeleine C. The summary ends with Martin retrieving an unsent letter he had written to Madeleine years ago, describing their time together at the beach.
The Federal Correctional Institution, Victorville is a medium-security United
States federal prison located in Victorville, California. It was built on a Superfund site, which has contaminated the region's water supply with industrial solvents like trichlorethylene, and pesticides like dieldrin and aldrin, and chemicals from jet fuel.
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 even as he embarked on a prodigally dubious 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 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, aspiring to land a gold mine in arsenic- laden water . . . and now, forsaking a transcendence that never arrived, surrounded by the gray walls of a 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, dwelling partly in a federal correctional institution and partly in his limpid fantastications, returned in far-flung reflection to the years before his incarceration, immersing himself in thoughts and images—a mental aggregate suspended in a bounding main of cerebral ether—that thread through obscure passageways in an unspeakable home lined with the residues of abandoned passions, 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 that endeavored to achieve nuclear fusion in a glass of water; aggrieved by his ill-starred association with Stanley P., a self- deceiving part-time hustler and Martin’s erstwhile co-grantee and conspiratorial business partner; 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 the red-haired Madeleine C. . . . 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 (and with bemused contempt) interrupting Martin’s gratifying encounter with an amply-endowed, fair-haired 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; operated 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, hitchhiking the road from prosperity to bankruptcy and financial ruin . . . then lying on his back, with his hands behind his head, once again lapsing into sullen grievance, delving through time to the beginnings of Walden Springs (his tapped-out bottled water business), the now defunct enterprise that—to highlight the incremental audacity of the ultimately unprofitable aquatic misadventure—drew groundwater from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains (water that contained naturally occurring arsenic) (Stanley’s idea), used sand filters to reduce the concentration of arsenic so the water would meet federal drinking water standards (Stanley’s idea), back-flushed the filters with a sodium hydroxide solution, which generated thousands of gallons of arsenic-contaminated wastewater (Stanley’s idea), and discharged said arsenic-contaminated wastewater into a manmade pond, “the Arsenic Pond” (Stanley’s idea), landing Martin and Stanley in federal prison on, among other crimes, a conviction on the charge of illegally storing and transporting arsenic-laced wastewater . . . and, presently, at this juncture, denuded of his dignity as well as his discretion to make choices, but fervidly invoking the resources of memory and nostalgia to shape a voluptuous inner calm (“the English say cawm”), 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 Capriccio, Strauss’s final lyric drama (which he knew by heart)—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, at this moment of tranquil disengagement, Martin reached under the narrow mattress resting on the prison-issue metal frame bed in the outershadow of his cell to retrieve and read a letter he had written to Madeleine years earlier, but had 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. 1/ I shall always think of you—always, Madeleine, always. Yours, Martin P.S. The other day Stanley said to me, “Marty, you know the story of the Englishman who asked the professor, ‘what’s more important in water, the hydrogen or the oxygen?’” What a tool.
___________________________ 1. The letter to Madeleine is a paraphrase of a passage from The Stranger by Albert Camus.