Re: sex on the moon - the amazing true story
Posted: 21 Nov 2016 11:25
Chapter 42
And for the next year, it was those letters that kept Thad sane. Through the flowery, sometimes clichéd, but always sincere missives, which he toiled over for days on end—writing and then scratching out words, phrases, sometimes entire pages—he was able to hold on to his sense of self way past what either he himself or jailhouse wisdom could have predicted. Those letters really were lifelines, even if they were entirely one-way. Thad was able to artificially keep alive the character he had created at NASA, the romantic, adventurous, fantasy persona that would never normally have been able to exist in a place like prison. He was surrounded by animals, but when he finally found a moment alone, holed up in his bunk or in a corner of the laundry room, or even on the toilet, he could go back to that place and become the person whom Rebecca had fallen in love with. He never got a response, not a letter or a message via his lawyer or any sort of phone call. But the letters he wrote were enough, because they allowed him back into that place where he was most powerful, his own mind. It was because of that inner strength that he was able to embark on what he would later see as a revolutionary journey—which began, really, as just an attempt at finding a way to keep busy in between letter-writing sessions. Leafing through the adult education manual that was given out to all inmates who had been in the federal system long enough to qualify for classroom privileges, he quickly realized that there wasn’t anything advanced enough for someone with his background. So instead of taking a class he was overqualified for, he decided that maybe there would be a way for him to share his own knowledge with others. He lobbied the warden and the heads of the adult education program, and he eventually received permission to teach an astronomy class—the first of its kind in the federal penitentiary—to any inmate who was interested in the stars.
The first day of class, Thad arrived at the small, windowless classroom not knowing what to expect. To his surprise, he found the place crowded; his notoriety as the guy behind the Moon Rock Heist had appealed to inmates who wanted to hear stories about NASA, spaceships, and often alien life. From the very beginning, Thad used the inmates’ eclectic interests to guide them into a more basic study of space and the unknown. Because they couldn’t exactly go outside at night to look through telescopes, he focused on the many theories behind the science of astronomy, and did his best to get the inmates excited about the mysteries of the universe—things like black holes, supernovas, and dark matter. He had only one requirement from his students. If they enjoyed his class, when they eventually got out of prison, they were each to send Thad one physics book—so he could continue studying the subject he had found the most challenging of his three college majors. Since, as a prisoner, he could only keep up to five books in his cell at one time, he had other inmates hold them for him, rotating through as many books as he could read, as quickly as he could get them. Week after week, month after month, he taught astronomy and spent his nights reading physics—and slowly he found himself focusing on the current state of quantum theory. It was a topic he had been introduced to back at Utah, before he’d distracted himself with other pursuits; given an almost infinite amount of time, and a pretty good collection of the current literature, he set out to devise his own new theory, to make better sense of the things that he found missing from the accepted liturgy. Some men found God in prison, others found themselves—but Thad threw himself into advanced physics, which led him to look at the world in a new way. He was intrigued by the fact that when physicists studied very small things—quanta the size of atoms—these objects were characterized by a certain level of indeterminacy. Stimulated by further readings on quantum mechanics, Thad began, in the simplest terms, to look at the world of these tiny particles—from their perspective. From a distance, the image of a Teletubby on a TV screen appeared continuous and fluid; the closer you got to the screen, the easier it was to see that in fact, the image was made up of tiny pixels
—but still, the pixels seemed part of a continuous whole, connected to one another on every side. But when you got even closer, so close that you were the size of one of those pixels—you realized that in fact, the pixels were not set into a static plane, or part of a continuous whole; they were individual units adrift in a sea of similarly tiny quanta. To describe these individual units correctly, and stirred by his readings on string theory, Thad began to learn that you needed to throw out the idea of four dimensions, and move to a more accurate theory involving eleven—nine of space, and two of time—and even formulated some ideas of his own. Thad’s prison astronomy students did not have the physics background to begin to understand a multidimensional way of looking at life, but the classroom sessions still became a passion for him, because it was a place where he could go to work out his ideas, and to inspire people to at least begin to fantasize about a world beyond the prison walls. As the months passed, Thad settled into his new routine, teaching, writing, and always reading—and despite where he was, despite his sentence, he began to carve out a life that he could tolerate. And he continued like that, complacent if not content—until the day that one of his cell mates approached him at the end of astronomy class to tell Thad that he’d received a sizable allotment of mail. Even so, Thad expected nothing more than a package filled with physics books, sent from an overly grateful ex-student. But as soon as he reached his cell door—he saw that it wasn’t books at all. To his utter shock, there, on his bunk, stacked together in a pile more than a foot and a half high, were all of the letters he had written to Rebecca. Posted but unopened, every one of them marked return to sender, address no longer valid. Thad stood there in the doorway to his cell, unable to breathe. Rebecca hadn’t read any of them. Either her sister had moved and left no forwarding address, or she had simply refused to send them along to Rebecca. Thad had been writing into a vacuum, pouring all his love and passion into nothing more than a cosmic black hole. Rebecca was gone, and he would probably never hear from her again.
And in that moment, the last connection to who he was before vanished, the last strings tying him to his old life severed, the persona he had built up through equal mixtures of hard work and fantasy emptied out of him, and he collapsed to the floor of his cell.
And for the next year, it was those letters that kept Thad sane. Through the flowery, sometimes clichéd, but always sincere missives, which he toiled over for days on end—writing and then scratching out words, phrases, sometimes entire pages—he was able to hold on to his sense of self way past what either he himself or jailhouse wisdom could have predicted. Those letters really were lifelines, even if they were entirely one-way. Thad was able to artificially keep alive the character he had created at NASA, the romantic, adventurous, fantasy persona that would never normally have been able to exist in a place like prison. He was surrounded by animals, but when he finally found a moment alone, holed up in his bunk or in a corner of the laundry room, or even on the toilet, he could go back to that place and become the person whom Rebecca had fallen in love with. He never got a response, not a letter or a message via his lawyer or any sort of phone call. But the letters he wrote were enough, because they allowed him back into that place where he was most powerful, his own mind. It was because of that inner strength that he was able to embark on what he would later see as a revolutionary journey—which began, really, as just an attempt at finding a way to keep busy in between letter-writing sessions. Leafing through the adult education manual that was given out to all inmates who had been in the federal system long enough to qualify for classroom privileges, he quickly realized that there wasn’t anything advanced enough for someone with his background. So instead of taking a class he was overqualified for, he decided that maybe there would be a way for him to share his own knowledge with others. He lobbied the warden and the heads of the adult education program, and he eventually received permission to teach an astronomy class—the first of its kind in the federal penitentiary—to any inmate who was interested in the stars.
The first day of class, Thad arrived at the small, windowless classroom not knowing what to expect. To his surprise, he found the place crowded; his notoriety as the guy behind the Moon Rock Heist had appealed to inmates who wanted to hear stories about NASA, spaceships, and often alien life. From the very beginning, Thad used the inmates’ eclectic interests to guide them into a more basic study of space and the unknown. Because they couldn’t exactly go outside at night to look through telescopes, he focused on the many theories behind the science of astronomy, and did his best to get the inmates excited about the mysteries of the universe—things like black holes, supernovas, and dark matter. He had only one requirement from his students. If they enjoyed his class, when they eventually got out of prison, they were each to send Thad one physics book—so he could continue studying the subject he had found the most challenging of his three college majors. Since, as a prisoner, he could only keep up to five books in his cell at one time, he had other inmates hold them for him, rotating through as many books as he could read, as quickly as he could get them. Week after week, month after month, he taught astronomy and spent his nights reading physics—and slowly he found himself focusing on the current state of quantum theory. It was a topic he had been introduced to back at Utah, before he’d distracted himself with other pursuits; given an almost infinite amount of time, and a pretty good collection of the current literature, he set out to devise his own new theory, to make better sense of the things that he found missing from the accepted liturgy. Some men found God in prison, others found themselves—but Thad threw himself into advanced physics, which led him to look at the world in a new way. He was intrigued by the fact that when physicists studied very small things—quanta the size of atoms—these objects were characterized by a certain level of indeterminacy. Stimulated by further readings on quantum mechanics, Thad began, in the simplest terms, to look at the world of these tiny particles—from their perspective. From a distance, the image of a Teletubby on a TV screen appeared continuous and fluid; the closer you got to the screen, the easier it was to see that in fact, the image was made up of tiny pixels
—but still, the pixels seemed part of a continuous whole, connected to one another on every side. But when you got even closer, so close that you were the size of one of those pixels—you realized that in fact, the pixels were not set into a static plane, or part of a continuous whole; they were individual units adrift in a sea of similarly tiny quanta. To describe these individual units correctly, and stirred by his readings on string theory, Thad began to learn that you needed to throw out the idea of four dimensions, and move to a more accurate theory involving eleven—nine of space, and two of time—and even formulated some ideas of his own. Thad’s prison astronomy students did not have the physics background to begin to understand a multidimensional way of looking at life, but the classroom sessions still became a passion for him, because it was a place where he could go to work out his ideas, and to inspire people to at least begin to fantasize about a world beyond the prison walls. As the months passed, Thad settled into his new routine, teaching, writing, and always reading—and despite where he was, despite his sentence, he began to carve out a life that he could tolerate. And he continued like that, complacent if not content—until the day that one of his cell mates approached him at the end of astronomy class to tell Thad that he’d received a sizable allotment of mail. Even so, Thad expected nothing more than a package filled with physics books, sent from an overly grateful ex-student. But as soon as he reached his cell door—he saw that it wasn’t books at all. To his utter shock, there, on his bunk, stacked together in a pile more than a foot and a half high, were all of the letters he had written to Rebecca. Posted but unopened, every one of them marked return to sender, address no longer valid. Thad stood there in the doorway to his cell, unable to breathe. Rebecca hadn’t read any of them. Either her sister had moved and left no forwarding address, or she had simply refused to send them along to Rebecca. Thad had been writing into a vacuum, pouring all his love and passion into nothing more than a cosmic black hole. Rebecca was gone, and he would probably never hear from her again.
And in that moment, the last connection to who he was before vanished, the last strings tying him to his old life severed, the persona he had built up through equal mixtures of hard work and fantasy emptied out of him, and he collapsed to the floor of his cell.