Another Life (30 page)

* * *

P
hoenix may have a world-class airport, but its idea of a high-end hotel came up a bit short. I only had a carry-on, and we were inside my “suite” in a few minutes.
Joel’s presence immediately turned the place into his office. We each took an easy chair, nothing but artificially chilled air between us.
The shades were drawn. The only light was a floor lamp in one corner.
I talked and talked. Only realized I’d been at it for so long when I rotated my neck to crack the adhesions loose and got a glance at my watch.
I stopped then.
Joel was quiet for a little bit before: “How’s that been working out for you?”
“Huh?”
“Your construct.”
“Look, Doc—”
“You’re not any kind of ‘sociopath,’” he said. Not offering a diagnosis, stating a fact. “Oh, you fit the DSM criteria: failure to conform to social norms, disregard for the rights of others, multiple arrests, deceitfulness, early-onset aggression, lack of remorse. But none of that is very persuasive. In fact, most of it’s meaningless.
“‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’ is what they call it now. The key word is ‘personality.’ And personality doesn’t tell you much about anyone; only behavior does. A man’s personality might be obnoxious, for example. But that wouldn’t necessarily stop him from being honest.
“For a man like you, lying isn’t a ‘personality,’ it’s a tool. You use it for your work, but it’s not who you are. Same thing with aggression. The only thing provable about you is a lifetime of criminal conduct. You want a diagnosis, try ‘outlaw.’”
I looked at him, said nothing.
“Nothing complicated there,” he went on. “Self-explanatory, really. You live outside the law. You support yourself by crime. You don’t experience guilt as a normal person might. In fact, you find some forms of aggression to be fulfilling, at least temporarily so. You’re filled with a rage that you…eventually…learned to control. Not because you wanted to be a better person; because you wanted to be a more skillful criminal.”
“That still sounds like—”
“The entire concept of sociopathy is simply our profession’s refusal to acknowledge that some people are actually evil. It’s not a ‘personality disorder’ to be a thief…or even to feel no guilt about being one. Those ‘criteria’ I cited before? They could fit a not-too-bright thug, or a highly sophisticated predator. A chronic shoplifter, or a serial killer. ‘Sociopath’ is just a label…and it’s so overbroad that it’s lost all meaning.
“If we were to actually use the term diagnostically, we would say a sociopath is a person who lacks the fundamental human quality that prevents the entire species from reversing evolution. That quality is empathy. Not faking it,
feeling
it. No true sociopath is capable of caring what happens to anyone other than himself. He feels only his
own
pain. That’s not you. It’s never been you.”
“I wanted to be—”
“No, you didn’t,” Joel said, cutting me off. “You
thought
you wanted to be. Right?”
“I just knew I didn’t want to be—”
“Don’t say ‘afraid,’” he cautioned me. “Some people
do
lose the capacity to experience fear, but that’s because they’ve gone numb. Permanently anaesthetized.
That’s
what you wanted. What you thought you wanted. Not to feel. Not to feel
anything.
“Everyone knows a kid’s feelings can be hurt real easily—that’s why emotional abuse probably causes more long-term damage than any other. But when you were a child, you didn’t make those fine distinctions. You had it all figured out, didn’t you? Feelings hurt.
All
feelings.
Any
feelings. To you, ‘feelings’ and ‘hurt’ meant the same thing.
“You told me once about a man named Wesley, your brother, you said. Actually, he was the outlaw ideal, wasn’t he? Someone might be able to
kill
him, but no one could ever
hurt
him—isn’t that what you told me?”
“It was true,” I told him.
“No,” he said, his voice bench-pressing the sadness off his chest, so the word came out like an expired breath. “If it was true, why did he ever protect you?”
“I never knew. He was just—”
Joel leaned forward, drawing me into the secret he was sharing. “I’ve met every kind of human horror you can imagine. I don’t mean horrors done to humans; I mean humans who
were
horrors. Genuine psychopaths, if you like that label better. And you know the one thing they
always
had in common?”
I didn’t answer.
“You thought ‘child abuse,’ didn’t you?” he said. “But then you threw that out immediately, because you’ve known too many people who were abused as children who
didn’t
carry it on. Yes?”
I nodded.
Dryslan’s voice didn’t change volume, but it dropped an octave. “A psychopath isn’t a human being, he’s a facsimile of one. He looks like us; he talks like us. Most of the time, he even acts like us. But he can never
be
one of us. He can do anything humans do except for one: he can’t bond.
“This is what they all have in common, every single one: some variation of Attachment Disorder. They weren’t
allowed
to bond during the time our species is designed to have that occur. It’s simple; it’s sad…and it’s immutable. They never learned it when they should have—
could
have, in fact. But that’s not a capacity you can develop if you start too late.
“That last part’s only a guess, but it does seem axiomatic,” he said, ruefully. “Why would a psychopath
want
to develop empathy? It would only weigh him down.”
I closed my eyes, so that nothing I might see in his face would get in the way of what I’d come to hear.
“At some level they understand they were cheated out of something so valuable they don’t even know what to call it. They
all
know. Yeah, even the stupid ones. Forget that nonsense about them all being handsome, charming, and intelligent; that’s just a made-for-TV movie.”
“What if—?”
“But they’re only a tiny slice of the walking wounded,” he rolled right on over what I was going to say. “All abused children keep searching. Some cut themselves, so they can feel
something.
Some find substitutes, even if they’re only objects.”
The paperback collector
, flashed across the screen of my mind.
“Some convert abuse into proof of love,” he said, never changing his tone. “‘If he didn’t love me, he wouldn’t beat me.’ How many times have you heard that? But most of them, they just look for ways to stop the pain. Drugs, alcohol, a cult…Some actually
feel
the emptiness, as if it were a physical void inside themselves. It’s a list without end…human searching.”
“But
if
they’re searching, they’re not—”
“Yes!” he said, reaching out to smack my upper arm, like I’d just scored. “What saved you?”
“My family,” I answered, without a nanosecond of pause or a microdot of doubt.
“You’d die for them?”
“Don’t draw the line there,” killing that cliché as quickly as I’d kill anyone who ever so much as…
“Where, then?”
“There
is
no line,” I told him.
He didn’t blink. And came right back with the foundational truth: “Of course there isn’t. How could there be? Without them, there’s no
you.
”
I took it without a word, but he wasn’t done:
“You developed your whole life story off a blank birth certificate. Told it to yourself until it became unshakable truth. Your reality. But it never got
all
the way inside, did it?”
“I don’t under—”
“Your mother—the woman who gave birth to you—abandoned you. Didn’t want you. And you didn’t feel a thing, is that about right?”
“That’s not—”
“The hate didn’t come until later,” he said, untapped power vibrating under the gentleness of his voice. “You said it was your mother, but it was the State who raised you. Every hideous thing ever done to you, the State did that. But no crying for Baby Boy Burke. That’s for punks. Hate, that’s a
man’s
emotion. Who’d you learn that from, Wesley?”
“Wesley didn’t hate anyone.”
“Hate is a feeling,” he said. “And, in your mind, Wesley didn’t have any of those. But the truth is, that’s not what you wanted to be. Not a hired killer, not the famous ‘iceman’ Wesley was.
“You didn’t want to be afraid, I know. And you kept trying to find a way
there,
didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of me as a gang kid. Flying between rooftops; kneeling with my head on the subway tracks, train coming, knowing I
was
going to be the last one to jump. Spinning the cylinder on a revolver with all but one chamber empty as the next kid waited his turn…
But Dryslan saw through that. “The one sure thing about dying is that it stops the pain. But stopping where the pain
came
from—that’s where you needed your story.”
“I’ll never know if my…”
“Can’t even say the word, can you?”
“‘Mother’? A mother is what you do, not what you are.”
“And yours, all
she
did was run.”
“That’s right.”
“And maybe that’s true,” the doctor said. “But you don’t know. You
couldn’t
know. So you went with what worked. What got you numb.”
“I…”
“Your family, I never met them. But I can tell you this: some of the strongest bonds are between those who never stopped searching until they found what they needed to make them human.”
When I opened my eyes, he was saying, “If we get it in gear, we can still catch that return flight.”

* * *

I
took my seat, slipped on the noise-canceling headphones I always carry on planes to discourage anyone from talking to me, and closed my eyes again.
I’d gone to see Dryslan for the same reason a power-punching cruiserweight prepping for a title fight would make sure he had a top-class middleweight as one of his sparring partners. I couldn’t let the decision go to the judges, and there was no rematch clause in the contract. So my job would be to cut down the ring.
If I could land one, I knew I could end it. But to do that, I had to keep my moves razor-honed. Play the role, and play it perfect.
I couldn’t think it; I had to
be
it.
As the plane touched down, so did I. I’d gone to Phoenix with questions, and I’d come back with answers.
Some
answers.
But, like Dryslan had reminded me, there’s some I’ll never know.

* * *

“W
hat difference would that make?”
“You already know,” I told Pryce. “This has to be one-on-one.”
“What if I could get you a simultaneous translator?” he countered. “Just like in the UN. You each put on headphones, it’s like you’re talking to each other in the same language.”
“No.”
“Because I told you she speaks English, or because you don’t want me to have access to—?”
“I’ve got no choice about that,” I said, “so what’s your problem? I need your people to make it happen. No matter how you get your part done, you’re going to set up a way for you to listen in.”
“Couldn’t you—?”
“No,” I cut him off, trying to get past the reflexive bargaining his kind always tries. “And I’m not putting any of my people in this, understand? Not to convince her, not to set up a meet, not to snatch her, not…
nothing.
That part’s yours. We’re not playing find-the-middle here. Say yes or say no.”
“Why can’t your—?”
“I don’t have a crystal ball. If she turns the wrong way, I have to be the only one she gets to turn
on.
”
He tried a bored-scornful face, watching mine. Finally said: “What makes you think she even
knows
anything? You think she hasn’t already been debriefed?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they went fucking total Guantánamo on her. But if I’m right, anything they did—anything they know
how
to do—they’d be wasting their time.”
“But you,
you’ve
got some magic you think will work?”
“You think so, too,” I slapped away his tsetse fly sarcasm. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.”
He tapped his fingertips lightly on the countertop. “You know I work alone.”
Nice try. “I know you don’t have partners,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”
“What’re the odds?”
“If I’m right, you’re a mortal lock for hero status. And whatever goes along with that.”
“And if you’re not?”
“Then the only way you stay out of a grave is to put me in one. And even if you managed that, you could end up in the plot next to me.” I laid it out, straight. “If I can’t pull this off, the best we can hope for is a lot of fires that have to be put out. And you’d better pray that the people who hired you think you’re the only one with a big enough hose to do it.”
“Sounds like a pass to me,” he said, hedging.
“Is that right? I don’t have to call to see your hand this time, Pryce. I know what you’re holding—you’ve been drawing dead since the flop. So you can either try and double-talk your bosses, or you can open the door for me. There’s no option three.”
I watched his eyes. Saw something I’d never seen on any of his faces before. Indecision.
“I
know
I can make it happen,” I took one last try. “But I need a way in to do it.”
“Do it
for
her? Or
to
her?”
“That’s yours; I already said that. You get me that one-on-one with her. Then it’s all on me.”
“You’re that confident?”
“I’ve got one card to play,” I told him, sending out the truth, hoping he could pick it up. “That card is me—and I’m the only one who can play it.”
“You know what happens if you’re wrong.”
“That doesn’t change anything.
Can’t
change anything. Like I said, I don’t know what you’re ready to bet, but I put down everything I had the minute I asked you to set up the meet with her, didn’t I? And that was
my
choice. I could have just fan-danced my way through some ‘investigation,’ told you I struck out, and walked away.”
“Then why
didn’t
you just let it play itself out?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “You already got paid. And not half in front, either—you’ve already collected it all. So what’s in this for you?”
“You’re not the one I have to answer that question for,” I told him.