Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “Listen, brother,” I said. “I wouldn’t care if we could blast him from a spaceship, we can’t have it look like a shooter’s work. We’re building a skyscraper here. We leave out one lousy brick, the whole thing comes down.”

  “From what you say, there ain’t but one way,” the Prof said. Argument over.

  “But . . .” Michelle started, then stopped herself. We all looked at her, waiting. “I know you can read, baby,” she said to me. “But that doesn’t mean you can write.”

  “I don’t—”

  “My girl’s saying it like it is,” the Prof backed her. “Just ’cause you a wizard at catching lies, that don’t put you in the same class at telling them.”

  “Why would it be a lie?” I asked. Asked them all.

  “You have always said—”

  “I know, Mole. But how did I know?”

  Maybe for the first time, Clarence explained something to his father . . . by saying something to me: “The Beryl woman. Ever since her, you have been . . . different, mahn.”

  “Satchel Paige had it all wrong,” I said, looking at the Prof. “You look back, maybe somebody is chasing you. But if you never look back, how can you know?”

  “Ain’t no way you could—”

  “I know that door’s closed,” I said, admitting out loud that the truth of my childhood was beyond reach, forever. “And I’m not going back. Not even to find it, never mind open it. But what the Mole said was right: I always thought I knew. And now . . . now maybe I’m not so sure.”

  “That’s the truth to tell, honey,” Michelle said, reaching out to touch my hand.

  “First study, then teach,” Mama cautioned, pointing at her unreadable eyes.

  “I will,” I promised them all.

  “You recognize my voice?”

  “I might,” the man at the other end of the line said, “but I couldn’t put a name to it.”

  He wasn’t being cagey, he was saying he’d never told anyone about me. Joel Dryslan, Ph.D., didn’t get to be one of this country’s elite forensic psychologists by reading books; he’d learned a lot of his craft the same place I learned mine. He was a prison shrink for years before he became Chief of Forensic Services for the whole state. After a few years on that job, the climate in Albany caused him to call in sick . . . . He never came back to work.

  “It’s a permanent state of war in here,” he told me once. “We can sometimes negotiate temporary peace treaties, but the one war we’ll never win is Security versus Treatment. Some two-digit-IQ sadist can nullify any decision I make. And he’ll do it just to show who’s boss.”

  Today, Dryslan makes more in a few hours than he used to make in a month. He’s for hire, but he’s no whore. Pay him his price, and he’ll take a look for you. But you can’t tell him what to say after he does.

  That means hiring him before the other side does isn’t going to shield you, like with a lot of forensic “experts.” You know the kind I mean: The defense hires them, they’ll tell the jury the blood-spatter evidence proves the defendant’s wife must have jumped from the balcony into the empty swimming pool. But if the prosecution is quicker to write the check, that same evidence will prove she was thrown to her death.

  In some states, all you need to qualify as sane is to rote-repeat, “It is a sin to kill.” A lifelong history of psychiatric hospitalizations, complex conversations with the voices in your head, being on enough meds to open your own pharmacy—so what? Just throw in the “confession,” like the woman who told the cops she stuffed her baby in the oven “because Satan fears fire.”

  Then you bring in an expert guaranteed to label them all “sociopaths.” Translation: they’re not insane; they’re evil. And perfect candidates for the death penalty.

  Works the other way, too. You can buy an “expert” who’ll tell an enthralled jury how a human who raped babies for fun and made videos of it for profit was psychiatrically overwhelmed. The poor soul was suffering from a witch’s brew of personality disorders, depersonalization syndrome, and, of course, “pedophilia.” A tormented creature like him should never be sent to prison; what he needed was a highly specialized, tightly structured, secure treatment program. In fact, having researched the matter thoroughly, the expert even knew the perfect place—it had all the latest “modalities,” really tight security, and a recidivism rate lower than his morals.

  The defense summation would pound all this home, reminding the jurors that this treatment program wouldn’t cost the State a dime; the defendant’s family stood ready to defray all costs . . . and compensate the victims, too. Now, wasn’t that the best way to really protect society?

  Dryslan’s specialty was the effects of solitary confinement on mental health. He was enough of a realist to accept that some humans are too toxic to be at large, even inside a prison, but he’d been around cons long enough to understand that solitary confinement isn’t always about protecting the other inmates.

  I’d stumbled across him years ago, when I was hiding out in Oregon. I had to make money, so I took on some work. The trail I’d been following led to a teenage runaway trying to protect her younger sister. That teenager’s best friend turned out to be Dryslan’s daughter.

  The two were so close, they’d called themselves the Crow Girls, after the Maida and Zia characters in the magical books of Charles de Lint that so many young searchers adored.

  It ended like most of my work does. But not as ugly as what was going on before I stepped out of the night long enough to do the only good thing I’m good at.

  This time, my call was to a 520 area code, not a 503—it had only taken me a minute to locate Dryslan once the operator told me the first number I’d tried had been disconnected.

  Another new experience for me: looking for someone who wasn’t trying to hide.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said. “This has nothing to do with you or yours, past or present.”

  I could feel the change in him even as I spoke. Most people who cross paths with me share the same wish—that it never happens again.

  “Professionally?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s not something you could do—?”

  “Face-to-face, Doc. But anything else you want, any other conditions: you say it, you got it.”

  The flight to Phoenix was a nice, smooth non-stop. I’d always thought of Phoenix as kind of a small town. Maybe it was, but the airport was humongous.

  Walking out of baggage claim onto the sidewalk was like stepping out of a meat locker into the Sahara. An ancient, bleached-green BMW Z3 was just pulling up. I opened the door, climbed inside.

  Dryslan looked the same: broad-chested, with a gentle smile and empathetic eyes. His handshake conveyed just a hint of the wrestler he’d been in college.

  “Ever been to Phoenix before?” he said, by way of greeting.

  “Couple of times,” I told him.

  “Like it?”

  “Long as you don’t put the top down, I’ll probably like it fine. How old is this crate, anyway?”

  “You sound like the dealer every time I bring her in for service,” Joel said, grinning, still in love with his toy.

  And still driving with an urgency that was all about having fun, not being in a hurry.

  “My office is in my house,” he said, when we got on a main road.

  “I’ve got a hotel room,” I told him, handing him the paper with my reservation on it.

  I’d met his kids. Jenn was a beautiful girl, but so unselfconscious about it that she never fell into the role. A brilliant student, with a deeply caring heart, following her father’s path. His son, Mike, was tough enough to play rugby for entertainment, and walked around exuding a sincerity that even the best con man couldn’t hope to copy. He was in a top MBA program, after working for two years to get real-world experience. I didn’t care what business that kid ended up picking; I was ready to invest.

  “Protective” doesn’t get within a thousand miles of how Dryslan was about his
family, so I knew what telling me his office was in his home meant. I admired the way he found to get that across without hurting my feelings.

  That’s why I’d come. About those.

  Phoenix 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 vibra
ting 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.