by Vera Kurian
“I’m okay—I prefer to face in that direction.” We helped each other unpack, yammering on in the way girls do, deciding what should go where as I assessed her. I decided she was more of a positive than a negative addition. She was pretty, funny, and seemed laid-back—not someone who would snoop through my computer or raise an eyebrow if I brought a guy home. After we put our stuff away we went into the noisy hallway to meet more people. There was more talk of going out.
I was impatient. I knew this was the right thing to be doing—forming alliances, making a good impression—but I wanted to get things going. It was August 24, the start of Freshman Orientation, sixty days until October 23. This was a date I had carefully selected—it gave me enough time to maneuver, but more importantly there was going to be a massive protest in DC that day, centering on the National Mall. It was a convergence of several different demonstrations: a pro-free speech rally, an anti-racism rally that was protesting the pro-free speech rally, a pro-impeachment rally, and a March for the Earth demonstration. Based on social media postings, Airbnb rentals in the city, and bus ticket sales, pundits were predicting that the convergence of political fervor was going to lead to a turnout that would tax every city resource. The timing was auspicious. The news had previously covered how such massive events often led to cell phone networks being overburdened. The police would have their hands full with protestors and skirmishes breaking out, as they have had for the past few years. It was going to be chaos.
It was the perfect day to kill Will Bachman.
2
Here is what I know about Will Bachman.
He lives at 1530 Marion Street NW, exactly 1,675 feet from my dorm. The nearest police station to his house is a five-minute drive away. The house is a rowhouse, attached on either side to other rowhouses. The first-floor windows and front door have iron bars welded over them. Within the past year, there have been thirty-three violent crimes near that house, most of which were armed robberies.
Here is what I’ve derived from any number of his online accounts.
Will Bachman is in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity—SAE—whose frat house is a few blocks away. His roommate is Cordy, also in SAE. Will Bachman is a junior majoring in political science and deciding if he wants to minor in econ. He’s on the lacrosse team, but also likes swimming. I used to swim with him when we were kids. He likes house music and smoking weed. He owns a black Volkswagen Jetta that some asshole dinged in the parking lot of the Giant supermarket. He reads the Drudge Report and thinks that all snowflakes need to be melted. He has a mother who wears pearls and volunteers for the Red Cross and a younger brother. They live at 235 Hopper Street, Toms River, NJ, 08754.
I would guess Will shops at the Giant in Shaw, because that’s where his car was dinged and he also reported that the closest Safeway to 1530 Marion Street was “filled with cunts who never get the line moving.” I know he frequents Buttercream Bakery because he posted about getting his tenth coffee for free. He once lost his cell phone between P and S Streets on 14th Street, stumbling home drunk, so it was probable he often hung out in that vicinity. He did not like to go east of 7th Street because of “the locals.” There was a muffin shop with a direct line of sight of Will’s front door. The sort of place where you could camp out with a cup of coffee for a few hours and no one would notice that you were staring at the house across the street, scheming.
I would estimate that Will Bachman is about six-one. Adams has a decent lacrosse team, so he’s no doubt athletic and physically stronger than me—this is something I should never forget. He has thick blond hair and a thin upper lip. He prefers to wear polo shirts and khakis. He wears a white necklace made from small seashells.
His friends are a predictable array of frat bros and lacrosse players: mostly white, faces flushed with beer, pointing at things in bleary pictures. They drink beer and have themed parties and sail on boats in the Potomac River. It isn’t a party until someone is hospitalized with alcohol poisoning. #YOLO
There’s Cordy, who posts a lot about video games and the NFL. Cordy and his girlfriend, Miranda Yee, appear to be on and off again, but when they are on again, he often sleeps at her apartment in Dupont Circle and not at home, leaving Will alone. Also part of the crew is Mike Arie, also on the lacrosse team and a member of SAE. Mike appears in pictures with an array of girls on his arm sticking their tongues out. This is the sort of girl I could easily be, someone who could slip in and out of someone’s life unnoticed. Will, Cordy, and Mike have recently attended an event thrown by someone named Charles Portmont. Charles is also in SAE and his Instagram is clogged with posts of people partying. One of the latest showed Will and his friends dressed in white, attending a fundraiser. A quick internet search shows that Charles Portmont’s father, Luke Portmont, is the Virginia state chairman for the Republican National Committee. The event included lobsters and craft cocktails. #ClassicCharles.
Will Bachman does not have a girlfriend because bros before hos and because never trust a skank.
Will Bachman probably does not have a gun because of the strict gun control laws in DC.
Will Bachman posts enough about his classes that any intelligent person such as myself could easily figure out his schedule. The hashtag #SAElife is used often enough that one could tell what the brothers are up to on any particular weekend. Where they’re going, and who with, and how inebriated they’ll be.
Will Bachman drinks too much and hangs out with people who don’t look after him.
Will Bachman has made some mistakes.
Will Bachman has sixty days to live.
3
Leonard opened the door and welcomed Chloe Sevre inside. “I’m Dr. Wyman, the program director, but you can call me Leonard.” The girl came inside, her eyes casting about his office curiously. “Sit wherever you like,” he said, gesturing to the variety of chairs that faced his desk. She was about five-five with clear skin, a bit on the pale side. Large blue eyes. She wore leggings and an oversize tunic, her dark brown hair in a ponytail. She looked younger than eighteen, or at least she did right now. He had seen other versions of her on her social media. Dramatic makeup and little dresses and high heels. Her accounts were carefully curated, the “spontaneous” and “carefree” shots much too perfect to be either.
She selected a large armchair and tucked her legs under her. “Does this just work like a normal therapy session?” she asked.
“More or less, although we do work on your diagnosis and teach you methods of dealing with it. How has your first week been so far?”
“A blur,” she said, bringing her hand up to her mouth to nibble at a nail. “I’ve been meeting so many people I can hardly keep their names straight. I got all the classes I wanted, though.”
“Did you make any friends?”
She nodded. “My roommate is cool, and there are some kids in my hall. We went dancing. You haven’t sent any quizzes yet, right?”
“They’re not quizzes, they’re logs. No right answer, just a record of what you’re feeling at that particular moment.”
Chloe nodded, her eyes scanning the volumes on the shelf behind him. “When will I meet the others?”
“It’s not a playgroup!” he joked.
She pointed to her watch. “Do you use this with the university police or something? To know where we are?”
Leonard had to answer the question carefully. “Of course not. Chloe, it’s not illegal to have this diagnosis.”
She shrugged, sullen. “People act like we’re monsters. My old guidance counselor, my mom.”
“You’re not a monster.”
“Then why did you diagnose me with something worse than what they gave me in high school?”
“Psychopathy is not ‘worse’ than Antisocial Personality Disorder—they’re different, and people unfortunately use the terms interchangeably. I think you, along with many others, are part of that subset that got diagno
sed with ASPD when it should have been psychopathy, which I’m not convinced is a ‘personality disorder’ in our classical understanding of the word. Unfortunately, the word psychopath has been tainted with a stain of criminality, mainly because one of the foundational researchers on the topic—Robert Hare—started and focused his research on criminals. I’d like for us to reclaim the term as something more useful.”
“So you don’t think I’m dangerous?”
Leonard was used to his patients arriving with a misunderstanding about their diagnosis, probably half informed by lurid police procedurals and horror movies. Most had been diagnosed and referred to him by clinicians who were in over their heads, but only a select few were appropriate for the Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study. They had to be young, they had to be smart and they had to be willing to try. “That’s a popular misconception. My own estimate is that about two or three percent of the American population is psychopathic—can you imagine the chaos if they were all dangerous? I’m unusual compared to most clinicians—well, for one, because I study it while so few do, but also because I don’t view it as that different from other biologically based disorders, like schizophrenia.”
“Like a mental illness, then.” She said it flatly, as if displeased.
“Okay, then, let’s say it’s more like a biologically based limited capacity to understand and feel the full range of human emotion or manage impulse control.”
“You make it sound like dyslexia or something. My mom says it’s pathological selfishness.”
“I wouldn’t use the word pathological. You lack empathy because of the way your brain functions. Because you don’t feel fear the same way, you end up seeking excitement. There’s this affective dimension to the disease—the lack of empathy, manipulativeness, superficial charm and an antisocial dimension—that is the part more associated with criminality. Impulse control, attraction to risky behavior and the like. But much of it ties back to biology.”
“If it’s biological, why can’t you just give me a drug?”
“That’s the perennial American question, isn’t it? There’s never been a successful protocol for treading psychopathy. I’m hoping to change that, and how people see the disease. And the nomenclature—any time there’s a mentally ill serial killer or a mass shooter, everyone calls them a psychopath.”
“But don’t a lot of us end up in prison?” she countered. She didn’t defer to him right away. That said something interesting about her. She was testing him.
“Prison is disproportionately populated with psychopaths but that says more about a lack of impulse control than anything else. Most psychopaths don’t end up in prison and, with the right direction, can lead productive lives without destroying the relationships around them.”
“What if they don’t get the right direction? What if they don’t think there’s anything wrong with them?”
“If they can’t figure out how to live in the world on their own, yes, they can make bad decisions and end up in prison, or they take advantage of one person after another until they have to skip town and end up alone.”
She chewed her lower lip. “And you think I won’t end up that way?”
“I’m sure of it. You have excellent grades, which shows that you do have impulse control when you want it. You had friends and extracurriculars and no criminal record.”
“That’s only because I never got caught,” she joked. She, like many psychopaths, had an easy confidence around her. None of the awkwardness one often saw in young adults, still gawky in their own bodies. “What’s the difference, then, between a psychopath like me and the ones that end up on death row because they have a collection of heads?”
“Well, for one, they lack your skills of evasion,” he joked, and she laughed loudly. “It’s not something you need to worry about—people like that often have a constellation of other issues. Traumatic brain injuries as kids, a tendency toward sadism. But you can lack empathy without being sadistic.”
“Oh,” she said, averting her eyes to stare out the window, frowning. “What if that’s me, though? What if my mom dropped me when I was a baby and I hit my head?”
“There are a lot of factors that make people end up that way. Have you ever wanted to hurt someone else physically?”
“I mean, it’s a trick question. Everyone gets mad sometimes, and you think, God, I’d like to slap them!”
“But you’ve never wanted to hurt someone, really hurt them, just so you could watch them be in pain?”
She shrugged, chewing at her nail again. “Only in my imagination.”
“Have you ever hurt or killed an animal?”
“No,” she said.
Not what your mother told me, he thought, silently making a note of the exact time. She had said it with such a straight face, no hesitation. He would check with the data from her smartwatch later, checking to see if her pulse had changed. It was hardly a lie detector—not as if he believed in those, anyhow—but the physiological intricacies of psychopaths had long fascinated him.
“I just want a regular life. I want to be a doctor and have a boyfriend and lots of friends and maybe a vlog.”
“And many people like you do just that. You’ve probably met a few in your day-to-day life—journalists, doctors, teachers, even CEOs.”
She smiled shyly. Leonard was reminded of why he loved his job—the possibilities. “So I could still become a doctor?”
“As long as you learn and practice the techniques we teach you, and follow the law, why not? You can be anything.”
4
Andre headed downstairs to leave a plastic bin of his stuff by the front door, the smell of waffles hitting him. Normally the smell made him hungry, but this morning a ball of nervousness sat in his stomach. He and his mother had formed a habit his last two years of high school: he would get up early so he could eat breakfast with her before he headed to school and she went to work. He liked this private time between him and his mother. His father often worked night shifts, and it wasn’t like Isaiah, Andre’s brother, ever got up before noon.
“You have everything?” she asked as he entered the kitchen. She was wearing the light blue scrubs she wore for work and pouring him a glass of juice.
“I think so, and I’ll come back when I need to,” he said, sitting down. His parents had assumed that they would be helping him move, but Andre had begged them off, saying there was no need for a big to-do when they lived in Brookland, in the northeast quadrant of DC, and John Adams University was only a half an hour bus ride away. The disappointment they had expressed at not getting to help him move in had made him want to die inside, but it was really critical that his parents spend as little time as possible at Adams, so he had played it off as if they would embarrass him.
They ate breakfast, watching the news on the small TV in the kitchen, which was showing hurricane flooding in North Carolina. This, followed by a story about nuclear weapons, was enough to elicit a disapproving noise from his mother. “Andre, you better graduate before the world ends.” They laughed, a little bitterly, the helpless way people had been in the past few years of school shootings and politicians screaming at each other.
After breakfast, Andre picked up his bin and walked out with his mother, where they would part ways for separate bus stops. She stopped to hug him. His mother was thin—all the Jensens were thin—no matter what she ate she never gained weight. Her thinness worried him, as if it correlated with bad health, but her hugs were fierce. “You sure you don’t need help? I can take off from work...” Andre shook his head. “Text me when you get there,” she said, as if he was going across the ocean.
Andre nodded, then headed for the bus stop. The houses on Lawrence Street were mostly detached, small single-family homes with carefully kept yards. Andre’s house, like most on his street, had a front porch where people often gathered to socialize.
He boarded the bus a
nd sat down, resting the plastic bin in his lap. He took a deep breath. Okay, he thought as the bus began to lumber forward, I got this far, so the rest will be fine.
The bus rolled to a stop, then gave its pneumatic wheeze as it lowered to accommodate whoever it was who couldn’t make the steps. A short woman boarded and when Andre saw her he raised a hand to wave. Ms. Baker went to his mother’s church and had much to say about everything.
“Andre Jensen,” she crooned as she sat in the seat across the aisle from him. Clearly she saw the bin filled with fresh notebooks at the top, clothes on the bottom. “Off to college? What are you majoring in?”
“I haven’t even had a class yet!”
“You have to have some idea these days.”
“Journalism, I guess.” He felt a little silly saying it—two years ago the idea of getting into college had seemed like a pipe dream.
“Well, you better bring home the A’s!” Ms. Baker gave his shoulder an affectionate pat and settled down to her knitting; above the soft clacking sound of her needles, Andre wondered what she would report back to the church ladies about him. Just about everyone in the neighborhood had opinions about the Jensens. A middle-class family that had been buffeted by a bizarre tragedy. But the Jensens soldiered on, a family of five now a family of four. This was the great act they all put on—waffles for breakfast, much commotion over Andre’s heading off to college—a smile stretched tight across a chasm of sadness. Kiara should have been the first in their family to go to college.
The bus trundled forward, crossing 13th Street. He tried not to think about Kiara, but like the nub on the inside of his cheek he chewed sometimes, he kept returning to it painfully. He had been twelve that day when his mom had shown up at school in her scrubs to pull him out of class. She never missed work, so he knew something had happened. As they walked down the street, toward home, she explained. “Your sister had an asthma attack.”
