Chapter 6
Recorded on August 1, 2068, in Staten Island.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, this is M. E., and today I am talking with S. Addams for the oral history documentation project about the New York Commune. It is August 1, 2068. We are at the teenagers’ crèche of the St. George Commune in Staten Island, New York. Hello S.
S. Addams: Hello.
O’Brien: Are you from Staten Island?
Addams: Yes, I’ve been here my whole life.
O’Brien: Oh, wow. You are old enough you must have lived through the fifties, that cult.
Addams: That’s right. That cult.
O’Brien: I hope we get into all that. How about we start with your first memory?
Addams: [Pause.] My mother had a blue-and-white plaid apron. She was holding me. We were under a cherry tree. It was blooming. We were in the courtyard of the compound where I grew up. I was looking at the blue sky. She was watching the other kids play, but her arms were around me. She was so soft. It was warm, being held by her. Actually, I think it was a cold day, or cold for the spring. But it was warm being close to her. I felt her breathing. I could see the color of the apron, the sky, I could hear my sisters laughing. I felt … I guess I felt safe? I don’t know. The pink leaves of the cherry tree were falling gently. I was small. I don’t know how old, a toddler I guess.… That’s a messed-up question.
O’Brien: It is?
Addams: What if my first memory was something horrible?
O’Brien: [Pause.] Yeah, I hear you. Tell us about where we are right now.
Addams: Well, first we’re in Staten Island. [Laughs.] But more seriously, we are in the teenagers’ crèche. This is a cluster of apartments that is part of the larger complex of buildings that make up the St. George Commune. These apartments are so teenagers can get some limited autonomy from adult authority. Teenagers can come here to hang out or even move in here for periods of time. Those who move here are given more independence, but also more responsibility for making sure the place is tolerable, and making sure that everyone is mostly safe. At the very least they are responsible for making sure no one is brutalizing anyone else. The average stay, for those that choose to move here, is about four months. It gets a bit overwhelming for many, that much socializing and, well, disorganization. I’ll be frank, it’s chaotic here. Currently, the crèche has six residents, and takes up four apartments, which is this entire floor. It gets bigger or smaller depending on how many people are living here. Right now, the kids’ thing is gaming. Everyone is probably zonked out on the enormous couch they have next door.
O’Brien: What is your role?
Addams: I am the adult liaison to the crèche. It’s a tricky position. Mostly I try to get the kids to talk to me, at least enough so that I have a decent idea of their mental health. The idea of the crèche, or this one at least, is that kids can find their own limits when given the chance. A lot of kids manage that.
O’Brien: I’m interested in this topic, how kids grow up in the commune, their autonomy, how far that goes.
Addams: Yeah, it’s so important. Kids need both support and space to figure things out, and the shape of that space needs to change and grow as the kid grows. For lots of kids in the commune, their primary connections are with their immediate family unit, with all the adults who have opted in as their parents and bibis and things. But then also the commune as a whole plays a role in their upbringing. There is usually a lot of fluidity in kids being able to move back and forth between their family’s immediate suite or house, and the surrounding community of the commune. Just eating together with the whole commune for three meals a day has a giant impact in expanding the child’s social connections from early on. Dozens of people get involved in making sure the kid is coming up okay, that the dynamics with their parents are healthy, and getting involved in teaching and helping the kid in many, many different ways.
But sometimes the dynamics between the immediate parents and the kid really break down, become locked into an antagonism, and that’s where we see the crèche come in. We think of the crèche as an alternative to running away completely. The kids can step away from their parental group, find more autonomy, but still be held and supported by the commune. Sometimes kids spin out more while living here, and the relative openness of the environment here is hard for some of them. When that happens, I try to support the kid in finding a better environment.
O’Brien: You sound very thoughtful in thinking through these kids’ experiences.
Addams: I used to live here myself. I moved here when I was eighteen. That was—that was ten years ago this month. I was … still kind of a kid in some ways, like I hadn’t really been able to fully grow up yet. So, the crèche was a bit in between being independent and being able to still be really lost, which was what I needed. I see that with some of the teenagers now, that in-between space that can be really confusing.
O’Brien: Did you grow up in a commune? You described that scene of your mother holding you. It sounds like you felt loved.
Addams: [Pause.] I had a lot of siblings. Nine of them … My mother ran the house. It was a big job. Constant cooking, tons of cleaning, taking care of guests, managing the education of my sisters and me. She was working all the time. There were always people around. I was never alone growing up. It was like the commune in that way.
O’Brien: Like the commune? I think I am missing some context. What sort of living arrangement was this?
Addams: I grew up in the compound of the Church Fathers. The—what did you call us?—“that cult.” My father was on the elder council … You don’t know what to ask.
O’Brien: You were describing your household? Saying it was quite busy?
Addams: It wasn’t just us kids. My mother would host all these formal dinners for the Church Fathers. She eventually had a staff to help with the cooking and cleaning, but I kind of felt like we were on our own when I was little. My older sisters ended up taking care of us. We all worked a lot. We spent a lot of time together. A lot of my memories growing up were relating to my father as this far-off person that I was in awe of, that I was afraid of, that I loved. But my actual life was generally spending all my time working with my sisters. My brothers started going to church school, but the girls never left the house.
O’Brien: What year were you born? To give us some context.
Addams: I was born in 2040.
O’Brien: And your gender? How do you identify now? How did it fit into that dynamic then?
Addams: They treated me as one of the girls. Now I don’t have a gender. I didn’t then either, but I guess that was a secret.
O’Brien: Did you have a lot of secrets?
Addams: So many. Our compound was filled with them. Tucked into every nook, in every apron pocket. We all had secrets. I don’t think I would have survived without them. [Long pause.] I try to tell people about what the Church Fathers were like. I mean, some things everyone knows. The mass sterilization of nonbelievers. Locking people up in those cages along the ferry platforms, starving them to death, displaying them like trophies, or zoo animals. These people governed through hate and fear. But for those of us in the heart of all of it, there was a whole other life inside the main compound. I know it’s hard for people to actually imagine. We had zero contact with the outside world. They would designate three young people, mostly boys, to act as secretaries. They would handle our social media presence, and the correspondence the Church Fathers kept up with other sects elsewhere. But if you weren’t a secretary, you were cut off. I never saw a computer screen until I was twelve. Never touched a phone. Another group would handle the warehouse, the shipping out of books and Christian supplies. They had to use computers at work to communicate with customers or to print out shipping labels, but outside of work—no contact. Do you know the history of the Fathers?
O’Brien: Not in great detail. Would you tell us?
Addams: Well, they took over Staten Island for real in 2053, but the Church Fathers were a thing for two decades before that. Buying property, building out this business selling Christian merchandise internationally. They became the biggest landlord on Staten Island. The church was founded as a breakaway faction from a Pentecostal sect. The big focus was on gender. The world had been consumed by satanic gender ideology, they said. It had destroyed the family, destroyed the nation. The only way back, first to civilization and then to God’s Kingdom, was through reimposing the rightful order.
O’Brien: They sound terrifying.
Addams: Yeah. Okay … So, their power grew all through the forties. Staten Island has always been the most conservative borough. The borough president was a sympathizer, a lot of the local cops had joined. I think society was falling apart all across the board, and the Church Fathers offered this vision of stability. With the disease, and hunger, and everything, they very publicly said they could hold things together and they were more or less telling the truth. So, before the takeover they had become the most powerful force in the borough. A lot of the borough’s bigger landlords ended up joining, and more and more they had a lockdown on the rental market. They started refusing housing to same-sex couples, or to people on this list of aborters, or to trans people. Landowners and business owners that lived in Staten Island, and some from around the region too, more and more got behind the Fathers as a way of trying to navigate the many crises going down. I didn’t know any of these class dynamics at the time, but I tried to study them later. Capitalists took a lot of different strategies in the chaos. Many fled the city or went up in orbitals. Others got behind what was happening here in Staten Island, like to make a fort against the onslaught and chaos of it all.
O’Brien: Can you tell us about the takeover?
Addams: The Church Fathers were on pretty good terms with the NYPD, which through the forties was pretty much the only force that mattered around here. For a century, Staten Island was where a lot of cops chose to live, because it’s more suburban than the rest of New York City. The Fathers always had this vision of theocratic rule and had all these fantasies about taking over Albany or Washington. That didn’t really pan out. As things unraveled, they decided they could make do with Staten Island. A lot of the cops were up fighting in the Bronx, but the Fathers had some loyalists in command positions down here. I mean, when they put up that giant cross at the ferry terminal and no one took it down, that was a sign to a lot of people that something had changed. Soon they shut down the bridges and the ferry and later they cut off the Internet. That was around the time the NYPD also went after the Internet, I think. It didn’t really work anywhere else, but here on the Island it was all dead. Then the Fathers had this mad creepy recorded message calling every cell phone on the Island, telling people they were now subject to “God’s law.” They had this paramilitary force run by ex-cops, going house to house. They called it the Brave Sons. Mostly they rounded up gender nonconforming people and same-sex couples. They never told me exactly what happened to them. This stuff ended up in the news, you must have seen it.
O’Brien: Sounds like a tough scene to be assigned female.
Addams: You could put it that way.… Some pretty horrific things happened to women. Especially young women. I don’t feel comfortable talking about details.… But the whole thing was built around child sexual abuse.
O’Brien: You definitely don’t have to share anything you don’t want to.
Addams: I’ve had so much trauma therapy, you wouldn’t believe.… It was part of Church Father doctrine, the authority of the Patriarch was absolute. I don’t like to get graphic. It doesn’t help anyone at this point. But there was so much violence.… I’ve gotten to share exactly what happened to me where I needed to. But I’ll tell you that I grew up a tight bundle of rage.… While it was happening, while the Fathers were in power, the trauma started—I don’t know how to say it—it started taking over our bodies.
O’Brien: What do you mean?
Addams: Young women in the Church had really unraveled. Before the takeover, there were just a few secrets here or there, you know. Whispers. But there were … medical problems. The girls in the Church, a lot of us, dealt with these physical symptoms that couldn’t be explained. Girls who experienced paralysis, like me. Girls who stopped talking for months, or years. Like our bodies objected, but we were all still true believers. Like something in us refused, even as we were still loyal.
O’Brien: Do you know why?
Addams: Why the paralysis or why the loyalty? The paralysis was trauma, I’ve come to realize. It used to be called hysteria. An intense inner conflict that sometimes takes over the body—the loyalty is harder to make sense of. People saw that things were getting bad everywhere else, and remembered what the pandemic had been like. And like I said, everyone was taken care of in a way. And the sexual violence, the public mutilations of aborters, and the murders I think broke something inside of the young women.…
O’Brien: Why did most people go along with it?
Addams: The Church worked because everything else was collapsing. And they managed to keep people alive when others couldn’t. It was a cross-class operation, I guess I’d say. From a bare staying-alive standpoint, many people’s lives got better under the Fathers’ rule. If you weren’t targeted, the Fathers ran better government than what had come before. Their core leadership, including my father, were all major landowners of the NYC area. They ran all these businesses around Staten Island, and a few in Lower Manhattan, that the men would work at. When no one else on the outside had jobs, every man in the Church had work. Every member of the Church had a home. Every member of the Church was cared for. They made sure the residents of Staten Island got enough food and basic medical care. When the famines were so bad everywhere else, we always ate together. In a weird way it was kind of a protocommune. You know, we’d eat together and pray together. So, I guess that’s why so many people stayed, both in the Church and others continuing to live in the borough. By the time the torture and stuff really got out of control everyone already felt locked in and with nowhere else to go.
O’Brien: Were you a believer?
Addams: Oh, definitely. One hundred percent. Even with my secrets. I really believed I was exercising God’s divine will to save the world from the consuming demonic fires of communism and feminism. Like that’s literally how I would have said it. It made the rage do all sorts of weird fec. Like, I lost motor control over my legs for a year when I was eight and no one knew what caused it. I think it was all my rage, but also wanting to stay a believer. Those two wishes battled it out in my body and I was the casualty. Later I became a secretary, and I was charged with arguing with nonbelievers on Ours.
O’Brien: Could you say what Ours was?
Addams: Oh, Ours was a big social media platform, just a mainstream commercial thing that grew out of a few prior social media companies merging. We used to proselytize on it. So, I directed all my rage against Church enemies in these trollslam campaigns I would help coordinate … I had a limp from when my legs were paralyzed. It stayed with me up until I was eighteen or so.
O’Brien: Church enemies?
Addams: Trans people, mostly.
O’Brien: Ah.
Addams: Yeah, talk about a mindfuck.
O’Brien: How did you end up a secretary?
Addams: I don’t know. I was really smart. They wouldn’t teach the girls anything. I taught myself to read. It wasn’t banned so long as we were only reading Church materials. But I asked so many questions and I pieced stuff together really fast. I made my brothers explain to me the theological training they got. I soaked up anything I could get a hold of. Another mother in the compound, her name was Eleanor, had previously been a high school teacher. Like, a public school teacher. Whenever I finished my work, I’d try to go find her and make her tell me stuff.
O’Brien: What kind of stuff?
Addams: Reading and writing. Typing, but, like, on a typewriter. American history. She was a believer, but she at least knew about slavery and colonization.
O’Brien: What were the race politics of the Church Fathers?
Addams: They mostly … ignored it? Like there were several Latino families and one Black family. We had a lot of connections with similar evangelical communities across Latin America. Their thing was mostly about gender.
O’Brien: Are you saying they weren’t white supremacists? Like, do you know what the experience of the Black family was like?
Addams: Yeah, it was—I guess it was complicated. We railed against what we called racialist and antiwhite versions of American history, so I would never have learned about slavery and such if it wasn’t for Eleanor. But also, the Church Fathers spent a lot of time developing pamphlets, vids, and online messaging to circulate in Black Southern evangelical churches and trying to recruit racial minorities. I worked on that as a secretary and was told how important it was to “build inroads” with the minorities. That’s the term the Fathers used. But, I think when people showed up—people who weren’t white—their actual experiences were not great. I didn’t totally understand it when I was growing up. But I think everyone who joined had to remake themselves in the image of the Fathers, and the core of that—at the core of that—it was definitely whiteness, like the values and way of being that the Fathers saw as normal and proper. Even if they never said so. My wife pushed me on this later, we argued about it for a while and she kind of convinced me it was different than I had imagined.…
One part of the racial dynamics of the Fathers I actually did think about at the time, because it ended up having a big impact on my work assignments. As the Fathers were coming to power, white liberals, white queers, white feminists, they all got out. They all fled Staten Island. Black people with more resources got out too. But a lot of the people remaining either shared the general perspective of the Church Fathers, or they were working-class Black people. So, when the violence started against queers and such, a lot of the people in their videos, they were Black people, Black queer people, Black trans people, Black women. I think that kind of stalled out the recruitment efforts I was assigned to. Black evangelicals were kind of turned off by the images we were putting out, so I couldn’t really do my job making inroads. So, they reassigned me to trollslam trans people on Ours.
O’Brien: How did you come to doubt it all?
Addams: Arguing on Ours. I’ve learned since that there was a whole campaign to target me. I had no clue at the time. I found myself in frequent arguments with this girl who kept changing profiles so we couldn’t trollslam her. But when we’d start arguing I’d recognize her right away. She was smart, and she had some help. I don’t know what she saw in me. But we argued it out, argued about everything. She was a Christian, but a really different kind. Like liberation theology stuff. She knew her stuff, knew the Bible, inside and out. I was appointed to be a secretary in 2055. I was fifteen, I think. I was in the role until the end. So, for those three years I was arguing with her all the time. It was a slow process, but I think she de-indoctrinated me. She certainly helped break open my thinking.
O’Brien: She sounds remarkable. Are you in touch?
Addams: Um. Yeah. We got married.
O’Brien: Was she from Staten Island?
Addams: Yeah, it turns out she was. She got out during the takeover and didn’t come back until the Fathers fell. She went to Newark.
O’Brien: That sounds very romantic.
Addams: [Pause.] It’s very hard. I am not very good at relationships. Not very good at being emotionally open.… Not very good at having a body.… I am glad I have her, but I wish I was better at it all.
O’Brien: It sounds like you love her.
Addams: I don’t know. I don’t—I’m not very good at saying that sort of thing.
O’Brien: I notice you don’t use her name. Can you tell us something you like about her?
Addams: We live here together, share a room. I always wake up before her. I watch the sunlight come in the windows, and when it hits her face, it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. She opens her eyes, and looks at me, and every morning I totally melt inside, and everything feels possible. The sludge worm I always feel in my chest dissolves and I feel sane and have hope for a moment. I feel a bit of that every time she looks at me.
O’Brien: That is beautiful.
Addams: [Pause.] Could we talk about something else?
O’Brien: Sure. I am trying to make sense of the position of women in the Church Fathers. You talked about there being a lot of violence, a lot of fear. But I hear something else too, like, in how you talk about your sisters. Like, there was a care there you kind of miss?
Addams: Yeah, there was another side to it. Women cared for each other. Like, between siblings and aunties and mothers, there was a lot of love. There was terror and control, definitely, but also a lot of love. For many hours of every day, it was just women in the homes, and people formed very deep and very strong relationships. I think that was a huge part of what got us through. That didn't extend to any sort of solidarity with anyone outside, but it held us together for those of us who were on the inside.
O’Brien: Do you have an example of that kind of solidarity?
Addams: Like, … my father would go away for days at a time; he was a liaison with our lobby in DC. Sometimes he would take my older brothers with him, as part of their training. When he would, it would just be my sisters, and my mom, and my aunt, and a couple of younger boys, and it was so lovely. We would clean the house and pray in the morning, then all afternoon we would play these imagination games together, the sisters, but my mother would even join in sometimes. Like, we would pretend to be people on epic quests and roll dice and describe what happened.
O’Brien: Like Dungeons & Dragons?
Addams: That is Satan worship.
O’Brien: Oh—Are you joking?
Addams: Kind of … I mean, I have played that particular game since—the preteens here love it, especially now that they all have augs—but I can’t quite get over the sense that it is wrong.
O’Brien: Okay.
Addams: Yes, it was like Dungeons & Dragons. Only in biblical or medieval settings. Often set during the crusades. My sib—they were my sister back then—my sib Ezekiel would run the adventures, and all of us would play characters. On the crusades adventures, I would play this Knight Templar. Zeke is such a magnificent storyteller. Back then, he could make the whole room come alive. Or there were other ways we took care of each other. If Father was angry, all the girls would warn each other, and we would all know to be very quiet. Or, if one of the children was punished, Mother held them after so tight, and cared for them, and made sure they recovered, and wouldn’t leave their side all night. Or there was just a lot of laughing, like working in the garden together, or washing clothes in the laundry room, or preparing food in the kitchen with my sisters, and we would sing and laugh together. I remember my sister Mary had the most beautiful voice and sung all these old gospel songs that could bring me to tears. There was a lot of beauty, and a lot of love. What everyone remembers are those graphic, horrific images of the torture and cages that the Church Fathers posted on the Internet after the takeover, so it is hard to imagine that behind that there were moments of real love and joy. That love for each other—I think that’s part of what made this one incident such a big deal. At the time, I didn’t quite get how my sisters and other young women in the compound couldn’t identify with all the women in the cages, but really saw themselves in this one girl. Do you know this story?
O’Brien: I’m not sure.
Addams: This one incident really broke it all open. Sexual abuse was a thing—the rule of the father. But this one case was a big crisis point for the Church, and particularly for women. It was videotaped on a servant’s smuggled phone and then leaked. So, a bit embarrassing for the Church. It really horrified some people, of course, but exporting horrible imagery was a big part of how the Fathers maintained the fear. The girl died, which hadn’t happened before, at least that we know of, and the father ended up being expelled from leadership. I don’t know. For some reason we all identified with her, like all the women of the Church didn’t see her as this entirely different outside other. Maybe it was also just a breaking point, like a lot of stuff had been building up for a long time. These things are unpredictable. Something in all this just made a lot of women click over into realizing all their rage was actually directed towards the Fathers.
O’Brien: There was a massacre of some sort?
Addams: It was the night of July 31, 2058.… Thirty-two of the thirty-nine Church Father elders were murdered.
O’Brien: They were murdered?
Addams: Kitchen knives, mostly. Stabbed repeatedly or their throats slit. Two were murdered by guns. Nine were bludgeoned to death. But mostly knives.
O’Brien: This was done by their daughters? Or their wives? Or outsiders breaking into their houses?
Addams: Not outsiders.
O’Brien: Not outsiders.
Addams: No. None of the houses were broken into.
O’Brien: So, their family members. Or servants.
Addams: Mostly not servants. Maybe servants helped in one house.
O’Brien: That’s a lot of built-up rage.
Addams: Yeah.
O’Brien: This must have been very carefully planned.
Addams: It must have.
O’Brien: You aren’t going to tell me more about it?
Addams: I think it’s clear.…
O’Brien: Fair enough.… What do you want to talk about?
Addams: It took maybe four hours for it to all come out the next day. Someone got the Internet back on. Everyone was used to these terrible images coming out of Staten Island. And here were the last of them: all the Church elders in blood-soaked beds.
O’Brien: What happened then?
Addams: It was a mess. A militia came in from Newark to help liberate us, and they ended up in months of shooting with the Brothers. It was supposed to be this moment of liberation, but it wasn’t that at all. Or maybe it was liberation, in some sort of way, but it felt awful. Like, everything fell apart. The pandemic even hit Staten Island again that winter. Like, the pandemic had been over for years, but it all came back. It felt like a failure.… I regretted it, sometimes. Like, we wanted the new world so badly, but when it finally came it didn’t feel like we were able to live in it.… It took a couple of years before the Church was finally routed and we started the first commune.
O’Brien: A militia came in from Newark?
Addams: Women. Women with guns. A militia that called themselves the Ida B. They had been seeing what was going on, and really wanted to get everyone out of those cages. I guess they were well organized in Newark. But that wasn’t really enough to sort it all out. Eventually we figured it out, but there was a lot of death, and a lot of confusion, and a lot of doubting if it was worth it or not.…
O’Brien: Could you say more about that? I think people could learn a lot from the experience of trying to rebuild Staten Island after all that.
Addams: [Long pause.] I don’t know. I don’t think it was the right thing for me to do this interview.
O’Brien: I’m really sorry to hear that. I see that this is really hard.
Addams: Damn cert.
O’Brien: We can stop. This isn’t meant to be retraumatizing. I know you all went through a lot.
Addams: [Long pause.] Can you explain this book? This thing you are doing?
O’Brien: Sure. Me and another interviewer, my friend and comrade Eman Abdelhadi, are talking to about fifty people. There will be a public archive, hosted by the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly. All the narrators played some role in helping to found the New York Commune. People share what they want from their own experiences, memories, and thoughts about the struggles since 2052 or so. About twenty interviews will end up in a tablet version of the book. As well, we will select probably about twelve interviews, and do a paper version.
Addams: Are you editing the interviews? Or writing commentary on them?
O’Brien: We might take out when people say “um” or “uh” or something. And we are writing a general introduction about how people talk about the revolution.… Do you want to stop the interview?
Addams: No, it’s okay. I am feeling a bit better. Not much better. But ask your next question.…
O’Brien: So, we got to the part about the militia coming in from Newark. Maybe jumping ahead, a bit? You transitioned, or came out, after that?
Addams: Yeah, I had to look around, but found these body jocks in the Philippines who designed me a custom set of nanos and sent them over on a clipper. It did what I wanted them to do in terms of degendering my body … I’ve had moments of feeling in my body, since then … But they are fleeting. It may take time. But I definitely like my body more now.
O’Brien: Did any other people from your former community transition?
Addams: Yeah, a lot of people, in all sorts of directions. We had a lot of catching up to do. Gender was breaking open all over the world; the Fathers were trying to hold it all back.
O’Brien: You moved to the teenager crèche at this commune, moved in here?
Addams: The teen crèche used to be in a little house down by the water, but yes. I was totally done having parents. I didn’t really move here to socialize with the other kids so much. I spent a lot of time alone that first year. Then I found a trauma therapist.
O’Brien: And your spouse?
Addams: Yes, and my spouse. When the Fathers finally fell she came and found me. She had always used a lot of different stock photos for her different profiles, with widely varying presentations, so I had no idea what she looked like. I had fantasies of course. She wasn’t like any of them—We didn’t get married until much later … We never really figured sex out. I was pretty messed up on that front—Maybe I will at some point.… I guess I’m like these kids in the crèche, still trying to figure it out. Listen, I think I need to stop this interview.
O’Brien: I understand. Thank you for talking with us today S. Anything else you want to add?
Addams: No, I think that should do it.… The world has gotten better.… But I don’t know how to catch up with it.… I have a therapist. I’m working on it. But it is very hard.
O’Brien: I’m sorry you are struggling S.… Can I ask a final question? What’s one thing you are looking forward to in the future?
Addams: Mars. I’m excited about the Mars colony ship.
O’Brien: I hear a lot of people are making the trek to Quito to see the launch.
Addams: We are taking one of the trains down to see it.
O’Brien: Thanks for talking with me.
Addams: Maybe in a couple more years I’ll feel ready to tell it all.
O’Brien: When you are ready.