But still, even that much would be hard to explain naturally.
And so, as I walk the trail toward the river on the east side of the campus, that’s what I try to think of a way to do.
Pathology
Riah lay awake, alone, in bed.
She had a lot to think about after her visit to the R&D facility last night.
When she and Cyrus left, he’d refused to come over to her apartment and had gone home instead to the arms of his wife.
Riah wondered what explanation he’d given Helen for his unexpected arrival — especially since there weren’t any other flights that left for Atlanta last night after the one he’d told her he was going to take out of town — but Cyrus was an experienced liar and Riah was confident he’d found a way to be convincing.
Now as she repositioned her head on her pillow and stared at the wall, it occurred to her that she was disappointed — not that he hadn’t come over to sleep with her, but because his absence hampered her study about secrets and intimacy and love.
Actually, it might tell you something about love after all.
She rose from bed, gathered the toys she’d purchased for her “sleepover” with him. Perhaps she would need them later, it was hard to tell. After all, their relationship had reached a crossroads; she was aware of that, but she was still open to seeing what the future might bring, might teach her.
Carefully, she put everything away — the chocolate sauce in the cupboard, the handcuffs and other slightly more exotic, harder-to-obtain items in the closet.
She guessed that Cyrus had gone home rather than come to her place because the twins had pressed him to tell her about the research, and sleeping with his wife would’ve been his way of punishing his mistress for tagging along and putting him in that uncomfortable situation.
But fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it — Riah didn’t feel punished. As much as she wanted to, she didn’t know how to feel heartbroken or thankful or excited or sad or any of those other emotions normal people have.
No.
No shame. No guilt. No anxiety about the consequences of her choices.
And of course all of this troubled her because she knew what it meant; what her lack of a conscience and lack of empathy and lack of concern for other people, in addition to her remorselessness for her actions — she knew what all of this was indicative of.
A condition that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders described under the category “personality disorders.”
Admittedly, by themselves those traits might not have been enough to convince Riah of her condition, but when you took into account high intelligence and charismatic charm, the diagnosis was pretty clear.
Riah Colette was a psychopath.
Not a murderer, no.
But a psychopath nonetheless.
True, many people with her disorder were violent, but not all of them were. Some were lawyers, others were used car salesmen, businessmen, politicians, athletes. Usually psychopaths took up professions in which narcissism, self-promotion, and deception served as assets. Often, of course, that meant careers with high levels of competition.
All competition requires putting aside a certain degree of empathy and understanding toward those you’re trying to beat, so it made sense that people who lack a sense of moral accountability and compassion would be attracted to it. To compete is, essentially, to participate in an act of self-promotion. After all, how can you love, serve, and honor someone above yourself while you’re wholeheartedly trying to defeat him?
Attempting to assure someone else’s failure requires setting aside concern for his well-being, and to treat anyone that way requires a certain degree of psychopathology.
Once, Riah had been invited to a volleyball game between two Christian colleges. The fans on each side cheered when their team did well, but they also cheered when the girls on the other team made a mistake that put their own team ahead. Curious about this, Riah had asked the man who’d invited her, “Don’t Christians believe in supporting each other?”
“Of course.”
“So that doesn’t apply when a girl is wearing a different color jersey?”
She’d meant no offense by the question, but he’d studied her in a subtly judgmental way. “It’s just a game.”
“Aren’t you all part of God’s family?”
“God is our Father, so all believers are brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes.”
“Then why would you cheer when your sister misses the ball or fails to make a successful hit? Doesn’t she feel bad enough already after making a mistake in front of hundreds of people? Why would you celebrate her failure or add to her embarrassment or shame under any circumstance at all?”
He glared at Riah and, perhaps as a way of showing he didn’t buy into her reasoning, almost immediately joined the other fans around them in applauding when a girl from the other college missed a serve and put his team within one point of winning the game.
Riah had taken something away from that experience, something that might be an important insight into the way normal people think. Psychopathology is at least culturally pervasive enough to cause religious people to set aside some of their prophets’ and leaders’ most cherished values of selflessness, service, humility, and encouragement when they’re watching or participating in a sporting event.
Even though it didn’t make Riah sad exactly, it did confuse her. She could only imagine that if she were able to feel something as precious as compassion, she wouldn’t be willing to give it up so readily over something as inconsequential as watching a group of girls hit a ball back and forth over a net.
Honestly, when Riah saw things like that, she wondered if she wanted to be “normal” at all.
But of course, for her, all of this was not just an academic question or a cultural milieu. It went much deeper, because she knew that she was a true psychopath in every sense of the term.
Over the years she’d tried telling herself that she wasn’t like the psychopaths who kill, that she was different, that she could control her condition, master it even, and eventually learn to experience the emotional and experiential ups and downs that healthy, mentally well-adjusted people do.
She’d tried to convince herself that the difference between her and normal people was one merely of degree, not of kind, one that she could overcome with effort and understanding. But in the times when she was most honest with herself, she had to admit that the instinct to kill had burrowed inside her long ago.
The bird that she killed in front of her sister.
The other animals over the years when no one was looking.
The inexplicable curiosity she felt while watching things die.
And those nagging questions about what it would be like to take the life of another human being.
And so far all of her research into neurophysiology had failed to show her how she might change, how she might learn to control the urges she had.
Notwithstanding all she knew about the brain, its pleasure centers, the way it processed reality, and even taking into account direct brain-computer interfaces and ways to elicit muscle responses by exciting certain parts of the brain, she had not managed to find the answers she was looking for.
Riah walked into the kitchen and looked at the clock on the microwave.
Almost 8:30.
She was mostly in charge of her own schedule at RixoTray, as long as she checked in. Today she was supposed to be at work by ten and wasn’t sure now if she would be going in at all.