The Fly Wins | Chapter 4

September 2025: Home

"Dad, sit down. Stop working. You're sick. Get some rest."

That was Alyssa, late September 2025, backpack half-zipped and already talking to me like the parent.

"Okay, I promise. Have a great day at school."

"DAD!"

"So little faith, huh? I promise. No work. I get paid to talk about ethics, you know."

"I'll get a full report from Mom later," she said.

I made the promise knowing there was a good chance I would break it.

Twenty minutes later, Sandra came upstairs. I was on the couch, pretending to rest.

"It looks like you're working."

"What are you going to do, drop the dime on me?"

Usually she laughs at my foolish prison jokes. Not this time.

"Please, babe. Shut off your computer and watch television for the next 12 hours. Can you do it?"

"No, I can't."

"Please try."

"Fine."

I did what any normal sick person would do. I started Breaking Bad from the pilot. I skipped a season or two and plenty of episodes in between, then watched the final handful straight through.

By noon, I had also answered a few "quick emails."

Somewhere during this ridiculous day, I watched Fly twice.

Walter White is trapped in his laboratory, chasing a fly he can't kill. He spends the entire episode trying to control one tiny thing while everything important around him continues to fall apart.

I thought about a day 16 years earlier when I was also stuck in a room I couldn't leave.

Then I made my illness worse by writing about it.

A few hours later, I ran downstairs to tell Sandra my idea for Chapter 4. She thought I was sleeping.

"Big news," I said. "Walter White is trapped in the lab. I was trapped in the halfway house. That lockdown was when I read about Witold Pilecki, the man who volunteered to enter Auschwitz so the world would know what was happening. You want to hear it? I have three pages."

"Oh my God," was all she said.

By midnight, there was a blanket over me, cough drops on the table and a Dodgers game playing on another screen. My head hurt, but I still wanted to answer one more message.

June 4, 2009: Halfway-House Lockdown

At 4 a.m., I was dressed and ready.

I had figured out how to avoid the halfway-house showers; the prison showers were better. Most mornings, I left before dawn, ran five miles at Balboa Golf Course, showered at my mom's house and reached the Sotheby's office by 8 a.m.

That morning, a staff member's voice came over the intercom.

"Full, total lockdown until further notice. Return your phones to the front desk. You are not going to work today. Return to your room or face the consequences."

While walking back to my room, I heard the rumors. Gossip in custody moves faster than contraband.

Apparently, two residents had been caught with drugs. The rumor was that a staff member helped bring them inside. The same two men were also rumored to be sleeping with a female prisoner.

A guard ordered everyone back into their rooms. Food would be delivered at 6:30 a.m., noon and 5 p.m.

Thankfully, I had food in my locker: apples, granola, coffee, bread and one of those jars with peanut butter and grape jelly in the same container. Sam and Karen Pompeo had brought it all to me.

The punishment seemed odd. Then again, I had spent enough time in prison to know the rule: if one or two people screw up, everyone pays.

At Taft, a prisoner was caught having sex with his wife in the visiting room. Everyone lost visitation for a week.

Another prisoner refused to clean the microwaves after several warnings. Everyone lost the microwaves for two weeks.

One week for the sex. Two weeks for the microwaves.

The lockdown happened so quickly that residents couldn't call their employers. The halfway house was supposedly helping us transition back to work, but nobody was going to work that day.

More than 50 men and women started yelling from their rooms.

"Hey, Torta, let me go to work! I'll bring you back crazy snacks! Come on, Torta!"

Torta was the nickname residents used for one of the staff members.

"Say it again, and the Marshals will be here in minutes. I've got them on speed dial!" she yelled into the microphone.

Total silence.

"Okay," I said to myself. "Looks like I've got at least 24 hours here. What should I do?"

For about an hour, I sat on my bed.

My bunkie, John, stayed quiet through all of it. He had served 40 years, 35 of them in United States penitentiaries. This lockdown wasn't making his top thousand.

Eighteen months earlier, while waiting to be sentenced, I could not sit still. I paced, ate, smoked and waited for lawyers to call with more bad news.

Now I sat there.

On one of my first passes from the halfway house, I had purchased several used books. Work had taken over since leaving Taft, and the books were collecting dust in my locker. One of them was Fighting Auschwitz by Józef Garliński, published in 1975.

For the first time since transferring from Taft on May 20, I had nowhere to go. Nobody to call. No law office to walk into. No work.

I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and opened the book.

Fighting Auschwitz

A few pages in, I thought I had found a typo.

The book said a Polish officer named Witold Pilecki had volunteered to enter Auschwitz.

Volunteered.

I read it again.

Pilecki was a husband and the father of two children. He agreed to be arrested so he could enter a concentration camp, organize resistance and send information to the outside world.

Even though John rarely spoke, I needed to tell him.

"John, this guy volunteered to go to a concentration camp," I said.

He nodded once.

"Yup."

"Apparently he wanted to see what was happening firsthand."

John didn't answer. He had returned to his book.

Pilecki spent nearly three years inside Auschwitz. Prisoners were stripped, beaten and reduced to numbers. People around him died from disease, starvation and execution.

Inside the camp, he helped organize a resistance network. Members shared food, hid medicine and collected information. Reports were smuggled to the Polish underground and eventually reached the Allies.

Then he escaped.

After the war, Poland traded one dictatorship for another. The communist government arrested Pilecki in 1947, accused him of espionage, tortured him and put him through a staged trial. In 1948, he was executed with a shot to the back of his head.

After his death sentence was announced, Pilecki said:

"I've been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy than fear."

I stopped reading.

This man had volunteered to enter Auschwitz, knowing he might never come home, because he wanted the world to know what was happening.

"How could someone purposely walk into hell?" I said, mostly to myself.

I still can't comprehend it.

I looked around the halfway-house room. A few hours earlier, I had been irritated because I could not go to work or use my phone. After reading about Pilecki, my complaint felt ridiculous.

I'm not comparing 388 days in a federal prison camp to what Pilecki endured. That would be like comparing my seven-year-old son's baseball skills to Shohei Ohtani.

Before prison, I read quickly and remembered almost nothing. Michael changed the way I approached reading. He asked what I had learned, why I chose the book and what I intended to do with the information. Those questions irritated me in the beginning because I usually didn't have an answer.

Sitting in the halfway house with Fighting Auschwitz, I did not need Michael to ask.

I kept reading.

Around 3 p.m., I finished the book.

John never said anything else about Pilecki. That was John. One "yup" was plenty.

When the lockdown ended the next morning, I left the book on my bunk and went back to work.

Fly

Sixteen years later, I was sick on my couch with Breaking Bad paused, cough drops on the table and my laptop open.

Earlier that day, I had found Fighting Auschwitz in my office.

In 2009, forced stillness gave me time to read it. In 2025, I had the freedom to rest and refused to do it.

That was the part Sandra noticed.

Around midnight, she walked into the room. Fly was still paused on the screen.

"You're still up?" she asked.

"Almost done. Just finishing this chapter."

She looked at the laptop, the open book and the tea on the table.

"You wrote about resting all day, and you haven't stopped since."

She was right.

"Back then you didn't have a choice," she said. "Now you could rest, but you won't."

Then she went to bed.

I stayed on the couch.

For years, I had described waking early, writing and working while other people slept as discipline. Much of the time it was. Sometimes it was my inability to leave anything alone.

I knew I should close the laptop. I also wanted to finish the paragraph explaining why people should close the laptop.

That's the type of person my family lives with.

Tomorrow, Alyssa would ask whether I rested. She already knew the answer.

I shut the laptop and sat there for a few minutes.

I had spent the day writing about something I had once learned during a lockdown: there are times when sitting still is the better decision.

I didn't live it that day.

The fly won.

Chapter 4 Reflection Journal

Pilecki used confinement to report what others could not see. What did a period of forced stillness allow you to notice?

Sixteen years later, I had the freedom to rest and refused to use it. What did you practice during a crisis that no longer serves you in the same way?

I called my behavior discipline. Sandra and Alyssa saw a sick man who would not close his laptop. What name would your family give to the habit you are proudest of?