Q.
‘I observe with interest that you are now interrupting me to ask the same questions I was interrupting her to ask, which is precisely the sort of convergence of—’
Q.
‘She said the best way to describe focus to a person who hadn’t undertaken what were apparently her denomination’s involved and time-consuming series of lessons and exercises was to envision focus as intense concentration further sharpened and intensified to a single sharp point, to envision a kind of needle of concentrated attention whose extreme thinness and fragility were also, of course, its capacity to penetrate, and but that the demands of excluding all extraneous concerns and keeping the needle thinly focused and sharply directed were extreme even under the best of circumstances, which these profoundly terrifying circumstances were of course not.’
Q.
‘Thus, in the car, under let’s keep in mind now enormous duress and pressure, she marshals her concentration. She stares directly into the sexual psychopath’s right eye — the eye that is accessible to her in his aquiline profile as he drives the Cutlass — and wills herself to keep her gaze directly on him at all times. She wills herself not to weep or plead but merely to use her penetrating focus to attempt to feel and empathize with the sex offender’s psychosis and rage and terror and psychic torment, and says she visualizes her focus piercing through the mulatto’s veil of psychosis and penetrating various strata of rage and terror and delusion to touch the beauty and nobility of the generic human soul beneath all the psychosis, forcing a nascent, compassion-based connection between their souls, and she focuses on the mulatto’s profile very intently and quietly tells him what she saw in his soul, which she insisted was the truth. It was the climactic struggle of her spiritual life, she said, what with all the under the circumstances perfectly understandable terror and loathing of the sex criminal that kept threatening to dilute her focus and break the connection. Yet at the same time the effects of her focus on the psychotic’s face were becoming obvious — when she was able to hold the focus and penetrate him and hold the soul-connection the mulatto at the wheel would gradually stop ranting and fall tensely silent, as if preoccupied, and his right profile would tense and tighten hypertonically and his dead right eye filling with anxiety and conflict at feeling the delicate beginnings of the sort of connection with another soul he had always both desired and always also feared in the very depths of his psyche, of course.’
Q.
‘Just that it’s widely acknowledged that a primary reason your prototypical sex killer rapes and kills is that he regards rape and murder as his only viable means of establishing some kind of meaningful connection with his victim. That this is a basic human need. I mean some sort of connection of course. But also frightening and easily susceptible to delusion and psychosis. It is his twisted way of having a, quote, relationship. Conventional relationships terrify him. But with a victim, raping and torturing and killing, the sexual psychotic is able to forge a sort of quote unquote connection via his ability to make her feel intense fear and pain, while his exultant sensation of total Godlike control over her — what she feels, whether she feels, breathes, lives — this allows him some margin of safety in the relationship.’
Q.
‘Simply that this is what first seemed somehow ingenious in her tactics, however daffy the terms — that it addressed the psychotic’s core weakness, his grotesque shyness as it were, the terror that any conventional, soul-exposing connection with another human being will threaten him with engulfment and/or obliteration, in other words that he will become the victim. That in his cosmology it is either feed or be food — God how lonely, do you feel it? — but that the brute control he and his sharp implement hold over her very life and death allow the mulatto to feel that here he is in a hundred percent total control of the relationship and thus that the connection he so desperately craves will not expose or engulf or obliterate him. Nor is this of course all that substantively different from a man sizing up an attractive girl and approaching her and artfully deploying just the right rhetoric and pushing the right buttons to induce her to come home with him, never once saying anything or touching her in any way that isn’t completely gentle and pleasurable and seemingly respectful, leading her gently and respectfully to his satin-sheeted bed and in the light of the moon making exquisitely attentive love to her and making her come over and over until she’s quote begging for mercy and is totally under his emotional control and feels that she and he must be deeply and unseverably connected for the evening to have been this perfect and mutually respectful and fulfilling and then lighting her cigarettes and engaging in an hour or two of pseudo-intimate postcoital chitchat in his wrecked bed and seeming very close and content when what he really wants is to be in some absolutely antipodal spot from wherever she is from now on and is thinking about how to give her a special disconnected telephone number and never contacting her again. And that an all too obvious part of the reason for his cold and mercenary and maybe somewhat victimizing behavior is that the potential profundity of the very connection he has worked so hard to make her feel terrifies him. I know I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already decided you know. With your slim chilly smile. You’re not the only one who can read people, you know. He’s a fool because he thinks he’s made a fool of her, you’re thinking. Like he got away with something. The satyrosaurian sybaritic heterosapien male, the type you short-haired catamenial braburners can see coming a mile away. And pathetic. He’s a predator, you believe, and he too thinks he’s a predator, but he’s the really frightened one, he’s the one running.’
Q.
‘I am inviting you to consider that it isn’t the motivation that’s the psychotic part. The permutation is simply the psychotic one of substituting rape, murder, and mind-shattering terror for exquisite lovemaking and giving a false number whose falseness isn’t so immediately evident that it will unnecessarily hurt someone’s feelings and cause you discomfort.’
Q.
‘And please be aware that I’m quite familiar with the typology behind these bland little expressions of yours, the affectless little questions. I know what an excursus is and I know what a dry wit is. Do not think you are getting out of me things or admissions I’m unaware of. Just consider the possibility that I understand more than you think. Though if you’d like another I’ll buy you another no problem.’