The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg (2 page)

Introduction

The following text is organized chronologically. Through interviews, letters, and journal entries, it covers Mr. Theodore Rimberg's life beginning one year ago, until August 22 of this year, two weeks after the accident.

My conversation with Mr. Rimberg begins two days after the accident, August 10, subsequent to my discovery of a backpack filled with his writings (spiral notebooks, the wire bindings replaced by yarn) at a Motel 6 outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mr. Rimberg and I spent several hours every day for the next twelve days reviewing his letters and journal entries, reading them aloud, discussing the circumstances of his life at the time of their writing, and in general exploring his story and its connection to the accident. To create the overall narrative, I have inserted typed copies of the letters and journals between transcript sections at the point in the interview during which we read them aloud.

Final Note

Because of the length of the transcript and the speed with which I wanted to deliver the documentation to your offices, I asked my assistant to transcribe only his writings and his responses to my questions. Neither my questions nor my commentary are part of the record. I do have audio of the conversations, should you want to hear my portion. I apologize if the results of this decision prove confusing.

—Fr. Barry McGinn

August 27, 2005

Section I

Minneapolis

Day One (August 10, 2005):
Transcript 1

Note: Only Mr. Rimberg's responses were transcribed.

Yes. Ready. Go ahead, sir.

Okay, Father Barry it is.

I'm sorry, Father Barry. I don't remember who you are exactly. I remember you being around . . . was it yesterday?

Okay. Good. That was yesterday. I've been taking a lot of painkillers.

What do you want to know? I mean . . . I don't remember the accident. I can't help you with . . . I don't remember . . .

I'm sorry, you're more interested in
the rest
? Can you be—

You have my . . . Where did you get my backpack?

Letter 1
August 18, 2004

Dear Jesus,

I am drunk. I think I just got rich. My dad never came through for me in life, but looks like he's trying to make it up.

Not a chance. Not gonna work, Dad! Too late!

My wife took my kids, Jesus. She left me. My goddamn girlfriend left me, too! My job is nowhere, horror, dumbassed, dry eyes always dizzy at a damn computer. I don't care! I just don't care! I am drunk. Just peed in the yard! What do you think of that?

Here's hi-larious. Here's FUNNY. I'm going to commit suicide. Kill MySelf. I've thought about it for a long time and it is a great choice. Why not?

Are you laughing?

I'm not sad. Never felt better, which maybe you'd think would put me back in business (the life business). Wrong, Jesus!

I'm gonna do it. Why wouldn't I? Name a reason.

T. Rimberg

Day One:
Transcript 2

You have my permission to record.

I wrote to Jesus because I was drunk, I think.

Yes. I'm breathing. I'm glad you have my backpack. I'd be very worried if I thought it was still at the motel.

Okay. My name is Theodore Rimberg. Call me T. I don't know. That's what people have always called me. I'm used to it.

Date of birth, August 19, 1969. My permanent address is in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But I haven't really lived there for . . . I've been in Poland, mostly, for the last year. Now I am recuperating in a hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin, after . . . an accident?

No sir . . . Father. I'm not Catholic. My wife, Mary Sheridan, grew up Catholic. My mother grew up Catholic, too. My dad—well, he lived as a Catholic during World War II. He was just a kid.

Yes, that's correct. Mary Sheridan is my
ex
-wife. I'm divorced.

Three children. A twelve-year-old boy and twin ten-year-old girls.

I wrote to . . . everybody. I don't know. One day, about a year ago, I started writing and I couldn't stop for months. My dad wrote stuff, too.

Yes. Dad is important. He was Jewish. I don't know why I wrote to Jesus. . . .

Because Dad inspired this. I got this . . . money. He's the reason I went to Europe.

Dad left when I was a kid, actually.

I was a tiny . . . I was a nine-year-old having heart attacks.

Letter 2
August 19, 2004

Dear David my “brother,”

I just tried calling. What in the hell is going on? You're never home or you don't pick up the phone. Aren't you home at two a.m.? I need to talk to you. I have some important news.

Shh. Listen.

Herbie, the Love Bug
is a seriously fucked-up movie.

That's the truth. I hadn't seen
Herbie
since we were kids, David. Didn't we love it? I remember playing Herbie, running through ditches at Grandma's, honking, “spinning” our wheels in the gravel, pretending to do VW Bug wheelies, all in fast motion.

I'm very serious, David. Listen: It's a fucked-up movie.

Three days ago, I received
Herbie, the Love Bug
in the mail from Netflix. Had to be an accident. Never would have rented it. Charlie and the girls (my kids—you remember them?) like that new-style Disney crap (thanks to their mother) (no offense—I know you hold Mary in high regard), and I tried to show them
The Shaggy D.A.
last year and they were bored, pissing around, poking each other within ten minutes, paying no attention at all to
The Shaggy D.A.
You know why?
The Shaggy D.A.
contains no oversaturated colors or big-breasted mermaids to boil their desensitized brain chemicals. So
Herbie, the Love Bug
? I wouldn't have rented it.

But there it was,
Herbie, the Love Bug
, when I picked up the mail on Monday. And I was excited. It's my thirty-fifth birthday today. (You might remember?) Getting
Herbie
was like getting a birthday present a couple of days early. “This is just what I need,” I said, “a little fun.” But I was too beat after work to watch it, so I slept (poorly) and the next morning, Tuesday morning, I called in sick to work, cooked a big breakfast, brewed some coffee, and sat down to watch, totally psyched to walk down memory lane and ready to get cheered up.

Not a chance. Fucked up!

The truth:
Herbie, the Love Bug,
if you look past all the slapstick, hyperspeed racing scene, is a story about the need for sentient beings to be acknowledged, understood by their loved ones. There's this surreal montage, after Jim Douglas (Herbie's owner) buys a different, ostensibly faster, race car to replace Herbie, in which Herbie drives alone, dejected, through the wet and hazy streets of nighttime San Francisco (very noir) and haphazardly, as if drunk, weaves into a Chinese parade in Chinatown—amidst weird marching band music and muted firecracker explosions and dancing paper dragons—and finally moves ghostlike through wisps of yellow curling fog onto the Golden Gate Bridge, where he attempts to commit suicide by jumping over the railing (this is a VW Bug, remember). Luckily for the viewer, assuming the viewer is made of more hopeful stuff than me, Jim Douglas shows up in the nick of time to save Herbie (who actually ends up saving Jim as Jim's rescue attempt ends with him dangling from Herbie's bumper over San Francisco Bay).

But I am not that kind of viewer. I found myself cheering for Herbie's suicide attempt, David. The anthropomorphization of the VW Bug sank in deep for me, me being made of hopeless stuff, and I felt wholly in tune with the Bug's feelings of abandonment, his feelings of being misunderstood. Herbie didn't have a context in which to understand himself anymore—he was so alone—and since I live in the real world and not in a fictional one in which society accepts and eventually embraces the uncharacterizable (e.g., a skittish part-Jew who grew up underachieving in a small midwestern town who falls in love with not his wife), the impossible to label (e.g., a VW Bug with a heart, eyes, enormous desires), I felt the most appropriate and true-to-life ending of the story would be Herbie's successful annulment of his bitter, misbegotten life. And I'd started to think so only a third of the way through the actual movie.

And it was at that moment I began to seriously consider the annulment of my own (though I've had more serious fodder for suicidal thoughts in the last two days), a little more than a third of the way through my own actual life.

There you have it.

I'd like to discuss, so I'm sorry I'll be dead when you get this. You should rent
Herbie
anyway and see what you think.

You're not so bad, David. But you should answer your phone.

T.

P.S. Don't let Jared and Will watch
Herbie.
It's too much. You want to keep your boys off drugs, don't you? And if you're depressed yourself, don't do it.

Day One:
Transcript 3

David? I really don't like my brother . . . I mean didn't. Then. Peace . . . Peace . . .

That's a meditation to help me be peaceful. It doesn't work.

I don't think so. I wasn't so weird as a kid. I just never felt . . . in my skin. And I was sick. After Dad left, I developed a heart condition, which was . . . not diagnosable. I thought I was dying when I was nine. But I got along okay with other kids.

No, David didn't receive a package from Dad. Only me.

When I got the package? I thought it was a joke, maybe. Where would my dad get all that money?

He was a diamond salesman, but . . . I don't think he ever sold much. We lived in the middle of nowhere. There was no market.

Why are you asking me this stuff?

Southwestern Wisconsin. Dad said the location gave him easy access to Milwaukee, Chicago, Green Bay, Minneapolis, Des Moines. But I can't imagine he really . . . There were no four-lane highways to these places. It was a tiny town. I think he was hiding.

I don't know who he was hiding from.

I almost fell down. It was August, really hot on the front step. And I opened the mailbox . . . and there was the package . . . I ripped it open right away, because it looked so odd. It had foreign stamps, Swiss stamps . . . and I never got anything interesting at my mom's house.

Yes, I lived at Mom's alone.

My divorce was final in April. Mom went to the home in April, too.

Yes, I suppose that was lucky. Are you making a joke?

It wasn't the money so much . . . I really couldn't believe the check was real. It was . . . in the package . . . I hadn't seen Dad, you know, since 1979 . . . hadn't even heard from him . . . and there was his old man face. Pictures in Europe. I'd been to Antwerp once, too. Not with him. I recognized it a little.

One of the letters mentioned the money. It said something like, “Enjoy your inheritance, Theodore.” You have the letters, right? See, the letters were from Dad. But an inheritance implied that he was dead.

It did strike me. I received the package in August and the letters were—are—the letters are all dated December. Dated four months in the future.

It's right here—here. This one caught my eye, especially. December 7. I'm Theodore. Dad never called me T.

Um, sure. I'll read it.

Dear Theodore,

I wish you a Happy Hanukkah. A long time ago our ancestors, the Maccabees, began a rebellion to push foreigners out of Jerusalem (they weren't nice foreigners—they ran the place tough and were really mad at the Jews for failing to assimilate into Hellenistic culture). We killed lots of people, including many Jews who did not agree with us, and we got back our temple and we burned some oil that lasted eight days when it really shouldn't have. It was a miracle! The Maccabees, our forebears, they saved Judaism, but their brutality knew no bounds. All this violence at the center of a religious celebration? So strange, Theodore. But, not so strange if you think for two seconds.

December 7 was the first day of Hanukkah last year. My original plan when I read them was to kill myself on December 7.

No. Not revenge, exactly. I was sincere . . . in that I was . . . down in the dumps. I really wanted to die. Well, I didn't want to live. I mean, I was pretty unfocused about suicide—the actual act . . . at that point. I didn't get focused until . . . But I was . . . you know, my wife and kids . . . and I'd had an affair with this—this—and my job . . . and the money gave me . . . maybe revenge, okay. Except I didn't know who against.

Letter 3
August 19, 2004—
11:13 in the goddamn night.

Dear Dad,

I'm drunk off my ass! Happy? Happy Birthday me.

Second night in a row drunk. Okay?

You're dead, aren't you? Still, I'm writing you, you son-of-a-bitch. (No offense dead Grandma whom I never knew, if you're listening.) Where did you get this money, Dad? Why did you give it to me now? Where did you go? Mom could've used it, Dad. She's gone completely idiot from a disease that's eating her brain! Thank you so much. I live in her house, as you must know, since you sent this to my address. Mom's not home, Dad. She's in a nursing home, Dad. Do you know how the hell much she struggled with money after you bolted, Dad? And why give me the wad? Is there more? Did you give any to David? I just got off the phone with David and he didn't mention any surprise inheritance. He told me to stop calling. (Apparently I left ten messages on his machine in ten minutes.) He said it was too late to be calling. He called me a drunk! He's an asshole. David will not see a dime of this wad, and I hope he didn't get his own chunk. This is my money, Dad.

But, goddamn, I don't want your dirty money. Dirty Dirty Dirty.

What do you think about this? I'm going to use it to kill myself! I'm going to hire a sherpa and go up Mount Everest with the Wad and tie it all around my body and JUMP!

You don't believe me? How about a Hanukkah cliff dive? I'm going to do it. Check out the papers, because it's going to be a mess.

Thanks an ass-load, Dad! Abandoner. See you in hell, if it exists.

Your son,

T.

Day One:
Transcript 4

I'm not feeling very well. Could I lie down, Father? It's kind of hard to . . .

I'm very, very confused right now.

The coughing? Yeah. Yeah. My lungs are killing me.

No, not from the accident. I've had a pneumonia thing . . . for a long time.

I don't think the doctors exactly know what to do about it all, Father.

Sure, I'll call you Barry.

Maybe we can talk more tomorrow.

Okay. I'll do that. Sleep sounds good. See you tomorrow, Barry.

Thank you.