The Case of
the Immoral Monster
by
Guy Hasson
I only remember my mistakes.
All my success in public life
has turned me into some kind of a legend in the eyes of the people, and given
me an aura of perfection. So let me
make this clear: Success in my field is achieved by breaking new ground, by
changing your way of thinking. You can
only do that by learning that your current way of thinking is incorrect. And so those who had achieved success are
those who had discovered that they had been wrong.
During my many decades of
public activity, I’ve been inside the heads of ordinary men and women and
learned that there is no such thing as an ordinary man or woman. I have been inside the minds of murderers,
rapists, lunatics, and had even been inside the heads of a few non–humans. And so I have been a murderer, a
rapist, a lunatic, and even abandoned my humanity for a few seconds.
I think the one or two pieces
of truth I’ve garnered from my clients should be shared. And so I’ve finally decided to buy one of
those Dict–a–Word machines, and am talking into a stupid, little microphone,
watching my words appear on the screen.
The microphone is small.
Supposedly to make things comfortable.
It would be comfortable if I didn’t have to talk to a piece of lifeless,
unthinking metal. It is torture for a
telepath to talk to something which does not even have a mind that resonates
back. Infernal, lifeless, little
machine.
Maybe it was a mistake to buy
it. If it is, I’ll learn of it
later. It will prove to be a harmless
mistake in a life of less than harmless mistakes.
My first mistakes were all
committed at the expense of my hapless first client.
I was just fresh out of my
internship, and had opened my first office.
There was nothing in it except huge boxes. I hadn’t even had time yet to look for a secretary. But I had a shiny new sign on the door:
‘Jennifer Parks, Md., Psychiatrist, Telepath.’
I was twenty-five-years-old, a brash, little brat, certain I knew it
all, my head swollen with the praise of my superior talent. Besides, how hard could it be? I could get into people’s minds, find the
trouble, and fix it by simple, telepathic manipulation. My hair was still red at the time, the white
mane which would become my trademark in my days of fame was still far in the
future.
With my office a
complete shambles, my first client stepped through the door, and hoped I had
time for him. He was young,
twenty-four-years-old, very white, very blond, very well dressed.
“I need help, Doctor
Parks. If you don’t help me, my
marriage’ll be over.”
I was shocked that someone
had actually come seeking me out. Not
that I didn’t deserve it – it’s just that no one could possibly have heard of
me. “How did you get my name?”
He told me Professor
Brown–Friedman, my favorite teacher, was an old friend of the family. She had recommended me, despite my
inexperience, telling them I am the most talented and intelligent student she’d
had. I tried to be humble when he told
me this. I was not successful. Stupidity at work.
We waded through the boxes,
as I apologized for the mess and explained that I had just moved. We went into my office. I asked him to sit on the couch, gave him
some coffee, sat behind my desk (still wrapped in nylons), and asked him what
the problem was.
“Wouldn’t it be simpler just
to scan me?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I put on the
condescending air of a lecturer.
“Another person’s mind is like a jungle. If you don’t know your way, you get lost in less than a second. In fact, you’ll drown.” (Mixing my jungle
metaphor with a water metaphor. Oh,
well.) “I need to hear you speak, first, to get a general map of what I’m going
to find. Afterwards, I will slowly go
in – with your permission, of course – and, as you think of the things you told
me about, I will slowly find safe entrances into your mind, common grounds,
until I will be able to easily find my way within your thoughts.”
The lecture over, he told me
his tale. His name was Donald Claremont
III (his real name, for the sake of privacy, I’ll keep a secret), an nth
generation heir to a rich, powerful and devout Catholic family. From as far back as he could remember, his
mother and father had told him to be moral.
They had told him of Hell and of the punishment that awaits all
sinners. They had taken him to Sunday
school, to church, to friends who spoke of the same things. He had believed. And he had been afraid.
He had never had a desire to act meanly toward others, but his desire to
stay out of Hell, to be liked in the eyes of God – that had become a major
concern which had only grown more powerful as the years passed.
But somewhere during the
eleventh grade, he had met new friends, had seen new things, and his belief in
God had been shaken. Eventually, he had
left his religious beliefs behind. The
process had been slow and had taken years.
It had culminated in his being secure enough in his disbelief and in his
new convictions that he had faced his parents.
The following few months had consisted mostly of bickering. But things were better now. His parents had come to some kind of peace
with his new beliefs, mainly because he was still as morally upstanding as he
had always been.
“You see, Doctor Parks, I
believe in being kind, I believe in the commandments that say Don’t kill, Don’t
steal, Be kind to your parents, and so on.
But because they’re right, not because God said so. I will be and am a very moral man,
but not because I believe in God. God
doesn’t exist; we invented Him. I know
that, now. I’m certain. But there’s still a very powerful part of me
that is afraid of the punishment!
It’s been driven into me for so long that it’s chiseled into my
mind. Not even my lack of belief in God
has shaken my fear of punishment.
“I want you to yank that
nonsense about Hell and damnation out of my mind, Doctor! Just yank it out and free me of it!”
“Why?” I asked calmly. “A
part of you still believes, obviously.
It would be unethical of me to change your religious beliefs for
you. You need more time. Maybe the process will be completed, or
maybe it will reverse itself.”
“No, no, it can’t reverse
itself! It mustn’t!” He yelled with
such sudden force that I realized that there must be more to his problem than
he had revealed.
“Why?”
“Because it’s taken control
of my marriage. And if you don’t tear
what’s left of my belief out of my head, my marriage will be ruined. I love my wife, Dr. Parks. I can’t let religion ruin it.”
“What has one thing got to do
with the other?”
He was silent for a few
seconds, wriggling uncomfortably on the sofa. “Can’t you just read my
thoughts?”
“Not yet. Not if you can tell me.”
“Please. Don’t make me say it.”
“Look, if I’m going to treat
you, I will eventually be inside your head.
I’ll share your most private thoughts, your secrets, everything. Being shy with me is absurd. Now, what is it that’s really bothering
you?”
For an entire minute he
struggled with himself, trying to force himself to say the words. Finally, word by word, he got it out. “Sex,” he said. “Sex is the problem. Sex is bad.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What do
you mean?”
“Ever since I was eleven or
so, Father James kept drilling it into our heads: Sex is bad! Sex is bad!
Sex is bad! Sex is immoral, and
if you do it before the wedding, you will burn in Hell!”
Donald Claremont III had
heard it and had believed it. So, while
his friends had been cavorting, he had stayed at home. While they had experimented, he had only
fantasized. Until, that is, the age of
twenty-two. With his belief in God
almost completely shaken, he had met Darlene.
He had fallen in love, and so had she.
He had courted her for a while.
They had talked, they had gotten closer, they had touched.
And then the trouble had
started.
Every time he had touched
her, something in him had screamed that sex was bad. That he was bad.
Even admitting to me that he was attracted to her pained him, as if now
he had exposed his immorality, his ‘sins’.
Telling himself that there
was nothing wrong with it had not helped.
Telling himself that everyone did it had not helped. Telling himself that everything he had been
taught was wrong had not helped. Every
time he had gotten physical with her, he had immediately become certain that
she would realize that he was ‘an immoral monster’ and leave him. Her reassurances had not helped,
either. And so he couldn’t have sex
with her.
They had wanted each other so
much that they had decided to solve the problem by marrying and having sex
after the marriage. They had wanted to
get married anyway, so why not ‘save themselves’ for marriage? It had been agreed. And after a few months they were married.
But the problem had not gone
away. In fact, it had worsened. He had still felt himself a sinner, still
certain Darlene would leave him.
Knowing, though, that what he felt did not fit the facts, he had forced
himself to override the panic and to have sex with his wife. He had hoped that his mind would learn from
his body, and that the fear would go away once it saw that Darlene did not
leave him. But it did not help. With every sexual experience, the problem
had grown more acute.
Donald Claremont III hated
himself for believing what he had been told.
He hated himself for not being able to overcome his feelings and his
education. He hated himself for not
being in control of his own thoughts.
He had exhausted himself trying to convince himself that there was
nothing wrong with having sex with one’s wife.
Nothing helped.
“It’s ridiculous!!” Donald
yelled. Even without scanning him,
waves of angst and frustration overwhelmed me.
Donald was clearly a bit of a ‘control–freak’, and the fact that his own
mind would not bow to his own logic brought him close to madness. His mind was illogical. Which meant, for him, that he was not in
control of his own mind. “This isn’t
healthy! Not even the pious feel like
this! But I still feel it! I still believe the nonsense I was taught as
a kid!”
Darlene had begun to take it
personally. She loved Donald. But obviously he did not feel the same. This had to do with her and not with him,
she believed. If he was really
attracted to her, he would have been able to overcome this silliness.
“It’s not her, Doctor Parks,”
he said. “She’s the most incredible
woman I have ever known. I can’t lose
her. And I can’t convince her that it’s
not because I’m not attracted to her.
For God’s sakes, I can’t even bring myself to touch her anymore! It’s like there’s a knot inside my head,”
and he bent his fingers in the direction of his skull, as if trying to reach
the knot and extricate it, “and I can’t untie it. It’s stupid, it’s ridiculous, but it’s still there! Have you ever seen anything like it? I mean, I really believe in my head, in my thoughts,
that I’m moral. I understand that what
I do is not wrong. But something deep
inside me keeps shouting that I’m immoral!
I don’t know why it’s still in there, but the more I try to touch it,
the harder I try to explain to myself that I am not immoral, the harder it
resists, the more it yells, the worse my belief that I am immoral gets. Rip that part out of me, Doctor! Just tear it out of me! Tear out my education!”
There was silence for a
minute. I looked at him, while silently
doing a superficial read of his mind.
Besides his need to control himself, it was plain that the main trait of
this man was his harmlessness: he meant no harm to anyone and, in fact, feared
being the cause of harm to others. What
society would consider a nice, moral man.
“Mr. Claremont,” I said
finally, “my methods are... extreme.
And very intrusive.”
“I don’t care.”
I could see that he didn’t,
but I gave him the full warning anyway.
“I’ll get inside your head. I’ll
share your thoughts, your feelings, your secrets.”
“Anything to get the nonsense
out of my head. Just get in there and
yank out everything that has to do with religion.”
“That’s not how it’s
done. What I will do is go as
deep as I can. I’ll ask you to imagine
you are having sex with your wife and wait until the immorality comes in. I’ll then try to trace it to its
origin. If I find what I’m looking for,
and there’s a good chance that I won’t—”
“Try.”
“Changing things in your mind
might have unforeseeable consequences.”
“Doctor Parks, I came here
half certain that you might cause me some brain damage. I’ll take whatever risks there are. Just get the nonsense out of my head!”
“Sign the release form and I
will.”
**********
It is one of the basics I’d
been taught in school that the people we consider to be immoral do not usually
think themselves immoral. They have
their own logic and their own justifications for the actions they perform. At best, they know that they are immoral in
the eyes of others, but they would not have acted the way they had acted if
they had not had inner justifications.
My teachers had warned me that I will face people I consider despicable
and then go into their minds and see saints.
Not because they are saints, but because they consider themselves to be
so. Morality and immorality are
entirely subjective as far as a telepath is concerned. Here in front of me was the opposite case. A ‘moral’ man (according to society) truly
considering himself to be immoral.
I knew what lay ahead of
me. I had been a good student. What I was going to find was not ‘the
church’ or Father James’ sermons.
Somewhere along the line, he believed what he had been told. He had made a ‘connection’, something his
head considered a ‘logical’ connection, putting together on the one hand the
emotional baggage of immorality, and the concept of ‘sex’ on the other. And so, whenever his head thinks
‘sex,’ it immediately thrusts the full emotional weight of ‘immorality’ on
him. As a result, for all practical
purposes, in his mind the two had become one.
We shrinks call this a ‘logic–circuit’.
It’s supposedly borrowed from electronics, in which one can ‘close a circuit’. Only when the logic–circuit is closed do we
have a complex. What I planned to do
was find this logic–circuit and disconnect it.
He would retain his memories, and he would retain the emotional ability
to feel immoral, but this emotional weight would not come when he thought about
attraction or sex. He would recall
everything he’d been told by the church, but he would not blame himself for his
sexual nature.
I entered his mind.
**********
A large part of my mind now
saw what he saw, imagined what he imagined, thought as he thought. But I was more in control than he was. I could manipulate his thoughts, force him
to go one path and not another. But,
more importantly, I had a wider understanding of the nature of his thoughts.
I began by telepathically
forcing him to recall him and his wife in bed together. How strange it was to see sex from the other
side of the gender fence. I saw it from
his eyes, smelled what he smelled, desired as he desired. What he had said was true: he was deeply in
love with his wife. Attraction overtook
him, overpowering him. He acted upon
it, caressing her. Immediately, he
pulled his hand away.
Why? – I inserted the
thought into his mind.
Immediate answer: She’ll
leave me.
Don’t lie to me! – I
thrust his answer aside and concentrated on what was behind it. He hedged. It was too late. The real
answer was gone. I took control of his
imagination and put his hand back where it had been. Again, he tried to take it away.
I didn’t let him. His head
seemed to contract, aching, under a massive ball of unbearable pain.
What is the nature of this pressure? – I checked.
It’s wrong, it’s wrong,
it’s wrong! Something screamed
inside him.
I attached myself to that voice and sought its origin. It was a twisted path, filled with misleading trails and misleading blocks he had put on through time.
Progress was slow. I had to force him to imagine time and time again yet another intimate moment. Every time, after a short while, the pain returned. Every time, Donald’s thoughts had run away, despite my insistence.
It took me an hour to reach the base of the path. The preachings of his parish priest were at
the root of everything. The Sunday school
sessions, the church. Speeches of Hell
and immorality. The logical circuits
within his mind became unmistakable to me.
There were three such major points. Each in a different sermon. Father James was a very charismatic
figure. A born leader. A born preacher. Amazingly convincing.
Carefully, I disconnected
Father James’ words from the emotional weight Donald attached to them. I tried to create no other damage save that.
But I was not through. The major points diverged to dozens of
smaller ones. Imagine many small
corollaries which had developed over time: kissing is immoral; looking at
women’s bodies is immoral, etc. One by
one, I undid the seams, relieving one small logic–circuit after another.
After four hours, Mr.
Claremont was rid of his religious beliefs.
God’s morality and immorality, as far as he was considered, were
gone. Everything he had been taught
that had to do with this, he no longer believed. The influence of the church was gone.
The treatment was over. Donald Claremont III was cured. I sent him home.
**********
But he was not cured.
He came back three days
later, his face haggard, his mind radiating even greater distress than before.
I brought him into my office
and had him sit down. “Tell me everything.”
“In the beginning, everything
was great. When I touched her, the
thought immediately sprang to mind: It’s a sin, it’s bad. But then it died down and vanished into
nothing. And so one by one, all my
usual thoughts, everything Father James had ever told me, surfaced, then fell
on dead ears. Soon the bad thoughts
stopped coming altogether, like they gave up or something. The weight was suddenly off my
shoulders! Everything was great!! You did an amazing job!! I was strong, I knew what I wanted. And it was right! It wasn’t a sin at all! Finally, Darlene and I had a night without
me worrying all the time that she’ll leave me.
“But the next day, it came
back.”
“It came back? It couldn’t have come back!” I was
indignant. “I cut all your ties to the
church and the belief in everything they told you about sins and punishment and
sex.”
“I know. But there’s other stuff in there, just as
strong. It’s not just the church. It’s my parents, too. It was hidden before, because the church was
an easy target. But ever since I was
eleven, it’s been inculcated into me by my parents, too: Sex is bad. Don’t do it. Sex is bad. It’s a
sin. It’s bad. And, damn me, I believed them. I still believe them. And as much as I try to convince myself
otherwise – my conviction that it’s wrong just gets stronger.
“And now, every time I come
closer to Darlene, it comes back, as powerful as it ever was. It wasn’t the church. It was never the church. The church just reinforced the ideas I’ve gotten
from my parents. I was a good boy. I believed my parents. I was too good a boy. I let them control my thoughts.
“And now it sits on my head,
a three-ton boulder, and it won’t move.
I feel like a moron asking you to take out by force something my parents
told me. But for some reason I took all
this sex and immorality stuff more seriously than most people. Get it out of me, Doctor Parks. Please.
Rip it out of me.”
**********
There was a reason it took a
day for the parents’ influence to ‘kick in’.
The phenomenon has a long Latin name.
I won’t bore you with it. You
may have heard of it, though, in the vernacular: the Rubber Band Effect.
Imagine your mind as a rubber
band, held between two fingers. When
everything’s ‘normal’, it’s tight and straight between the fingers. But when there’s a ‘complex’ of any sort,
there’s pressure created in one direction, and so the rubber band is stretched
in that direction. Now suppose I
relieved part of the complex, by applying a ‘force’ in the opposite
direction. The rubber band then snaps
in the other direction, overshooting the middle and ending up not ‘cured’ but
‘overly cured’. The person feels
high. The person feels not only as if
the complex has been totally defeated, but as if the opposite of the complex is
now true. But the truth is that, if the
complex were truly solved, the rubber band would not overshoot, it would simply
not be active in either direction, and the person would be in a ‘neutral’
place, not in the opposite place.
There’s a reason it
overshoots. It’s kind of like
physics. Force only exists when there’s
a counter–force. So long as the Rubber
Band Effect is in effect, so long as the rubber band is suddenly stretched in
the other direction, the problem is not solved. Something is pushing towards the positive, true. But it’s pushing because there’s another
force, a negative force, still pushing in the opposite direction. The positive force is pushing against
the negative force. The negative force
just got hit, so it’s weak, and the positive is victorious. But give it a day, it’ll get its bearings. Natural status is rest, not a positive or a
negative state.
This is kind of like
overcompensation – except that overcompensation is a person’s ineffective way
of dealing with a complex, and the Rubber Band Effect occurs when some of the
pressure of a complex is relieved. It
is used as a ‘tell’ for us telepath–shrinks, as a warning sign. If someone appears to be ‘more than cured’,
appears to genuinely overcompensate in the other direction, then s/he is not
cured at all.
What Mr. Claremont described
was a classic Rubber Band Effect. He
was ‘over the top’ in the other direction for less than twenty-four hours,
before the true measure of forces (his parents’ influence) took hold again, and
the ‘rubber band’ stretched back in the direction of the complex.
Even as I calmly told him to
lie down and prepared him for the telepathic session, I mentally kicked myself
for having taken his word as to the origin of his problem, and not having
looked further inside his head for other reasons. I kicked myself for having been cocky, thinking he was cured, and
not following up as I should have, the next day, and the day after that. I would have spotted the Rubber Band Effect
immediately.
I vowed not to make the same
mistake twice. In seeking his parents’
tutelage, I’d look for other things as well, just in case he’d misdiagnosed
himself again. I didn’t want him to
come back.
I delved into his mind for
the second time.
**********
He was right. Everything traced back to his parents.
I traced each and every
logic–circuit – the juxtaposition of the emotion of blame, of feeling bad, the
fear of failing his parents (a powerful emotion within us all) and the logical,
cold concepts of sex, attraction, and so on.
The strong threads I was sure of, I cut. I cut neither the emotion nor the memory, simply the connection
between the two, the juxtaposition. I
cut nothing from his mind, simply ‘untied a few knots’.
Once all the massive knots
were ‘untied’, I looked around. Weaker
threads remained. If I didn’t cut them,
he would enjoy the benefits of the Rubber Band Effect once more, only to end up
a day or two later in the same place. I
untied the weak threads. It took a
while to trace them all. Eventually,
all but the weakest were gone.
I forced him to think of
being with his wife, thus forcing whatever resistance still existed within him
to the fore. I did this time and time
again, and among the weakest threads I had found things he had not told me
about.
Television, for one. And movies.
And theater. Especially comedies,
of all things. Sexual comedies in which
the male hero does everything he can to get a woman or two into bed. Not only did the rest of the characters
believe that his deeds (sex) were bad – a premise upon which most of these old
comedies depended – but the hero himself clearly believed it. The protagonist’s desires got the better of
him, but one of the reasons he was so nervous (which made the shows humorous,
of course) was that he knew ‘society’ found it unacceptable. Mr. Claremont identified with these emotions
because of the already existing emotional weight that his parents had given
him. Now that that weight was gone, it
was not difficult to remove these weak threads.
At the end of three hours, I
had mentally exhausted the poor man, forcing him into emotional battle after
emotional battle. I, myself, was pretty
exhausted, too. But I had been
thorough. There was no doubt now. The juxtapositions of attraction and sexual
deeds on one side and the emotions of guilt and immorality on the other were
disconnected.
I sent him home once
more. Cured, this time.
**********
But he was not cured.
He came back three days
later. His face was thin, his eyes
buried deep in their sockets, black bags hanging under them. He was as emotionally spent as he had been
when he had left the last time, as if he had not rested in the meantime.
Once more he told me that for
a day he had been fine. He had felt
cured. He was cured. He had felt even better than the good
feeling he had experienced after our first session. But that feeling had passed a day later, and things had become
even worse than before. He couldn’t
touch his wife, he couldn’t come close to her.
He couldn’t let her touch him for the fear that she would learn that he
was bad, that she would leave him.
“But why are you bad?” I
asked him. “Are you a sinner? Are you...?”
“I don’t know. No, it’s not my parents, and it’s not
God. I don’t know why I’m bad. But I am.
I am. I am. I am an immoral monster, and I can’t get over
the feeling that Darlene would learn this the second I touch her. I... physically... can’t approach her
anymore.”
“But why?” I persisted.
“I! Don’t! Know! I just am!
I’m a monster! I’m IMMORAL!” And
he broke down and cried, “I’m immoral!
I’m immoral! I’m immoral!” He screamed and wailed and grabbed his
head. It took me an hour to calm him
down enough to go into his head.
**********
This was my fault.
Time and time again I had let
him lead the way, let him tell me where the problems are. This time, he had told me nothing. He didn’t know where it was. This time, I would lead the investigation.
This time, I would get to the
root of the problem. My way.
**********
Whatever it was – it was well
hidden. It was so well hidden that even
Mr. Claremont himself had no idea what it was.
In his mind, the setting had
completely changed. The previous jungle
of associations to the priest, to his parents, was gone. Every thought led to this: Bad. Bad.
Bad. He was bad.
I made him imagine touching his wife, and a ball of pain flashed
and was gone: Bad, it’s bad, was the message I got, and the ball was
gone, having dropped an unbearable emotional weight behind it. As a result, Donald ran away and cowered in
a corner.
I tried again – but he was reluctant. I forced him. Whatever
this massive ball was, I had to trace it, or the problem would not be solved. I had to wait five to ten minutes until he
recovered enough to be able to take it again.
Once more, I forced him to imagine him being with his wife. The ball came and went so fast, I missed
it. But it hurt Donald so much that he
was incapable of approaching the thought that had brought the ball. It was a most effective form of self
punishment, striking where it hurt the most for only a split second. It was enough for Donald never to want to
return to that place.
And yet, I forced him. By the fifth time, I had a hint – the pain
was guilt. Sex was bad, not because of
any external reason, but because Donald himself, for a strange and as yet
unfathomable reason, believed it to be bad.
I mentally kicked myself
again. What a fool I had been! What an absolute moron, thinking that he
believed that sex was bad simply because his parents and his priest had told
him so, convincing as they may have been.
They had told him many, many things over the years. Some he had taken to heart and believed,
some not. Why? What was the difference? Obviously, he had absorbed and believed the
ones that had made the most sense to him and disregarded those that had
not. Which meant that he had absorbed
the idea that sex was bad from his parents and television and priest not
because he had no choice in the matter - but because it had made sense to some
logic circuit that had already existed within him. He had believed what they had said because he had already
believed it or had already been primed to believe it.
My foolishness had cost
Donald too much pain and, perhaps, had forced me to cut things I should not
have cut from his mind. They were not,
after all, at the bottom of what was wrong.
But I could not undo what I had done.
I still had no inkling what
the original logic-circuit was. The
wave of bad feeling was still the only path to the truth. Once every ten minutes I pressed his button
and watched the monster appear for a brief second. Each time it came so fast, delivering pain and disappearing,
before I had a chance to probe it. By
the eighth time, knowing, now, where exactly it would come and when, I stood
ready, in ambush, and made Donald imagine himself having sex again. It came.
And this time I gleaned something from it. It had sent a thought, accompanied with huge emotional
baggage. I only perceived a part of the
thought.
It’s just like— it
read and was gone.
Now, there was
something!
Just like what? – I
asked Donald.
No response.
Donald, just like what?
After an hour, I got my
answer. It was an incident in his past.
One day, when he was
thirteen-years-old, as he had walked back from school through a grove of trees
behind his home, he had seen something colorful underneath some garbage. Out of curiosity, he had moved aside the
refuse. It had been a magazine with pictures of naked women. He had immediately covered it with leaves
and had run home. But the next day, it
had still been there. And the day after
that, it had still been there.
Eventually, his curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he had
gathered enough courage to pick it up with no one else around and to leaf
through it. He had then put it down and
covered it with the garbage again.
He had wanted the
magazine. He had wanted to look at the
pictures. He had wanted to fantasize
and to do what boys do. But he had been
afraid to bring it home, in case his mother found it. And he had been afraid to keep it here, in case someone else
found it and threw it into the garbage.
And so he had put it in his bag, hidden it under some dirt at a spot
behind the gym at school, where hardly anyone ever goes.
For a month, he had gotten
into the habit of disappearing every so often, going to his hiding place, and
looking at the pictures. No one had
known. No one had ever seen him.
But then one day, just as he
had opened the magazine and had begun to unzip his pants, the principal
appeared and caught him. The shame, the
immense, unbearable shame he had felt was nothing compared to what happened
next. By the end of the day, the principal
had gathered all the students and in front of the entire school, berated Donald
Claremont, revealed Donald’s deeds, and castigated him and his wicked
urges. Donald stood in front of
everybody, his cheeks burning, hoping the ground would open up and swallow him.
During the next few months,
he could hear them laughing behind his back.
Poor Donald was humiliated and embarrassed beyond belief. All because of his ‘wicked’ desire.
In his mind, his desire was
the cause of embarrassment and ridicule.
This was why he was certain that if Darlene witnessed his sexual desire,
she would leave him. Sexual desire was
something bad – why else would he be forced to suffer such a colossal public
humiliation? Donald was a monster for
possessing such desires.
This was it! This had to be it!
The incident had never come
up in our talks, because Donald never made the conscious connection. He had thought the two incidents
separate. What did a magazine and
masturbation have to do with someone’s wife?
Obviously, it had. The
humiliation was so traumatic, so massive, that only a mention of it, in his
mind, would bring all the humiliation back, and he would distance himself from
whatever has brought on the incident.
All his mind had needed was an ‘It’s just like—’ and it would run and
hide, the massive block of humiliation falling on him all at once.
This incident made him prone
to all the things his parents and his priest had told him. What they had said had fit with the facts of
his deed, and so he had believed them easily, and they replaced the
connection since they gave an explanation.
A small thing in the back of
my mind bothered me – during the previous sessions, when I had been ‘yanking’
the ties to the church and to his parents – some of them had been believed
before he was fourteen, before this incident.
But the solution was so classic, so pat, so perfect, that I could not
doubt it. I ignored this thought,
thinking that perhaps he had made these connections retroactively, something I
would be unable to trace, and so I let it go.
Now that I knew of his past deeds,
he was certain that I thought him an immoral monster. This feeling was stronger than the one he’d had when he had
admitted to me that he was attracted to his wife.
Inside his mind, I showed him
the connection. ‘Do you see that what
you did was natural? Do you see that
the principal’s punishment was disproportionate? Do you see that it had been an attempt at discipline and had
nothing to do with morality? Can you
see that it had nothing to do with sex or your desire? A woman who wants to be with you and finds
you attractive would like you to be attracted to her. She would not run away.’
But Donald mentally rolled
himself into a ball like an armadillo, hiding himself inside, and cried, ‘No,
no, no, this is me, this is me! I am a
monster!!’ It took me two hours to
build a bridge of reason around this incident, a way of logically bypassing
it. I did not want to erase the
incident from his mind. Too many things
in his life had based themselves on that incident. Erasing it would cause much damage. And I did not want to instill my own
thoughts, my own logic into him. We
found the bridge of logic together, slowly but surely, and Donald was safe once
more, not a danger to humanity.
We were both exhausted from
this session. But Donald was finally
cured. He went home.
**********
But he was not cured.
He came back after a week,
his head between his shoulders, his eyes red.
He hadn’t slept in two days, had called in sick for the last three,
unable to work or eat.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“It’s back,” he said. “It’s back.” He shook his head. “I’ve been trying to find out what it is,
but I don’t have any idea – I just know that I’m a monster. This will never go away. I’ll never be cured. There’s no explanation for it. I just...
I’ll always be like this.”
I had him sit down and asked
him to tell me what happened. But there
was nothing to tell. Everything had
been great for a day, and then it came back.
“I’m a monster. A monster.
A monster.” he kept saying. “I’m sick.
This is incurable. Don’t even
try. I don’t think there’s a chance –
the only reason I came is because you always give me one day of happiness.”
I looked at him. There was despair in his eyes, but mostly
fatigue. He was constantly fighting
himself, pitting his thoughts against his feelings.
“I don’t blame you,” he said.
“You did everything I asked you and more.
I don’t blame you. I’m just
incurable.”
**********
But I did blame myself,
because I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was faced with something that could not possibly exist.
There are three kinds of
immorality. The first kind, and most
famous, is religious immorality, in which a person can commit an act that goes
against the dictates of his/her deities.
This wasn’t it. I’d eliminated
his remaining beliefs. The second kind
is societal immorality. Society
enforces a set of laws on its members.
Those who do not obey the laws are criminals and are set apart from
society (sometimes even by death). This
wasn’t it, either. Society has no
problem with a married couple having sex.
But though jaywalking or speeding is illegal in many places, it may not
be immoral to the person’s inner sense of morality. Which brings us to the third and last immorality: the personal
one. Each and every one of us is
constructed with his/her own set of inner morals which have nothing to do with
the other two. Some people believe it
is moral to kill the competition, some would only kill in self defense. Some people see no fault with lying, and
some see it as disgusting and unbearable.
It all comes down to the personal make up of one’s mind. Which brings us to telepathy.
We telepaths, we know the
truth. We have been inside the minds of
people, we know all their secrets, we see past the lies. We know that the third immorality does not
really exist. If a religious man
steals, it may go against the laws of his god, but he had a good reason to do what
he did, or he would not have done it.
People who do things and then regret it are usually socially insecure –
they are afraid of the social consequences they may suffer if they do wrong in
the eyes of others. People who do
things and then say they ‘don’t know’ why they did them lie to themselves as
well as to others. Again: we telepaths,
we know better. These people are,
usually, afraid to take responsibility for their deeds. But their deeds were justified in their eyes
at the time, or they would not have done them.
If a man steals money to treat his dying mother, then the treatment of
his dying mother comes first, morally, in his mind. If he gets a ‘kick’ out of stealing, then this kick is more
powerful within him than the regret at the damage done. The ‘kick’ is part of him, and he committed
the ‘sin’ to satisfy something within himself.
He had obeyed his own, personal moral code. At the end of the day, people do what they do (or don’t do what
they don’t do) because they wanted to (or wanted not to as the case may
be). People are accountable only to
themselves and their inner sense of personal morality, even if they do not know
it. A rapist needs to rape, and it is
stronger than his other needs. Although
society, justly, does its best to make sure the rapist will not rape again (for
the preservation of same society), the most important thing at the time for the
rapist was to rape. If something else
was more important, more powerful, the rapist would not have raped. You can teach people morals that are not
their own, but you need discipline and threats to keep the people in line
exactly because the taught morals are not the personal morals. Punishment is there to preserve order in
society – not because the morality of that society is objectively right.
By definition, a personal
‘immorality’ would be something a person could never do. Even if a ‘moral’ person is forced to commit
what is to him terrible crimes – if, say, a family member is threatened – then,
in his/her own, moral code, preserving the life of his family member outranks
embezzling or whatever crime s/he was forced to do. If it didn’t, then that person would not have done it. It is impossible for us to be
personally immoral. It would require us
to do something we would never do. Telepaths know that true immorality does not
exist.
And yet here it was, in front
of my face. I had cleared Mr.
Claremont’s beliefs of the first two immoralities. All that was left was the third.
And the third was impossible.
True immorality cannot exist. To
believe himself immoral, Donald Claremont III had to have done something he,
personally, could not have done. That
was impossible.
And so to solve his problem,
I had to solve a logical impossibility.
Not knowing what I was going
to encounter, I delved into my first client’s mind for the fourth time.
**********
My first thought was that
there had been more incidents of sexual experimentation which he had repressed
even deeper than the previous one and that I had been negligent in not looking
for more. But there were none. The trauma had been his first experience,
and it had been enough, until he had met Darlene.
I forced him to imagine
having sex with his wife, and guilt surfaced out of nowhere. After many tries, I found nothing. The guilt seemed to be connected to nothing.
I tried another approach, to
see when the guilt began to haunt him.
Did he always feel like a monster?
I scanned his childhood. I went
through the clearest memories of the first grade, the second grade, and so
on. I quickly reached the sixth grade,
with no sign of trouble. The seventh
grade. The eighth grade and suddenly I
stopped cold. The guilt was there.
Where had it come from? I went back to the sixth grade and scanned
more carefully. Nothing.
I went back to the seventh
grade. Unclear. I concentrated on the sexual thoughts he
remembered from that time. There was a
girl he had liked, that was clear. He
had even imagined what it would be like to kiss her. Not that he had thought he would ever do something about it, but
he had still tried to imagine what it would be like...
And there it was.
No wonder he hadn’t seen
it! No wonder I couldn’t trace it! It had nothing to do with the church, with
his parents, with traumatic experience, or with any logical inferences from
mistakenly interpreted events. It had
to do with Donald’s nature!
So simple. So complicated. So well hidden.
Donald was afraid. Not of monsters in the dark, but of inner
monsters. There was something new
inside little Donald, powerful new desires, new deeds that begged to be
done. And so he was afraid that perhaps
there were sides to him that did not coincide with who he already was. Donald had always known exactly who he was. Until this came along, threatening to show a
new side to him, perhaps an ugly side, perhaps an uncontrollable side, a side
that might conflict with the already existing Donald. Deep inside, Donald had been terrified to discover that there was
another side to him, and Donald had not known what it was.
And here, finally, the puzzle
of immorality has been solved. Donald
believed there was a side to him that might not be Donald–like, that was
different and unknown, and so, under the telepathic definition, immoral. The only immorality truly possible for a
person is to do something s/he did not want to do, something that goes against
their nature. A logical
impossibility. Unless you believed
there were other parts to you, hidden parts, unknown parts which might conflict
with who and what you are. This was the
key to Donald’s ‘immorality’.
It was a skewed control
problem. Donald Claremont III had
always needed to be in control. And
here was a new, powerful, and unknown side to him. It threatened his control over himself. It threatened his definition of self. It threatened to hide a monster within him.
It had been right in front of
my eyes from the very first, and I had missed it.
Now that I knew what the
problem was, I solved it by slowly showing Donald inside that, now, with the
benefit of age and experience, he already knew every aspect of this ‘unknown
side’ of him. All the aspects were
covered, and, obviously, none of them conflicted with who Donald was. They were a natural part of him.
Donald was not a monster
after all. After two more hours of
careful telepathic treatment, he believed it.
I sent him home, but asked him to return every day, to monitor his
progress, in fear of the Rubber Band Effect.
But for once it was unnecessary.
This time he had truly been cured.
Donald Claremont III, my
first patient, my first mistake, my first great lesson. There would be many more patients, too many
mistakes, and not enough lessons. My
career had just begun. My greatest
mistakes were still to come.