The Fix

The Boogeyman: Alive, Well, and Closer Than You Think.

A riddle:
There was a girl who went to a funeral.
There she met a boy that she really liked.
She did not get his phone number.
Two days later she killed her mother.
Why?

How many people do you know?  Think about it a second.  Fifty?  One hundred?  More?  Or let’s do it this way.  How many people have you ever known?  Think about all of the college courses you’ve taken, the various jobs and obligations, pinning you shoulder to shoulder with people who may or may not have become your friends.  Perhaps you were hard pressed ten minutes after the meeting to remember some of their names.  That’s fine.  You connected.  Let’s come to a round number just for fun.  How about two thousand people?  Sound good?  Good.  Twenty of them were certifiably psychopaths of the Ted Bundy variety.  Eighty of them were sociopathic enough to raise red flags in a psychiatry appointment.  

History is littered with lives ruined by the sociopath.  We remember their names without much prompting.  Jeffrey Dahmer.  John Wayne Gacy.  Maybe you have been around long enough to remember Charles Whitman and his perch in the Texas clock tower. Some sociopaths have stood the test of time, leaving a mark so indelible that lore has been built up around them, like Vlad the Impaler, Al Capone, Lizzie Borden, Genghis Khan, or Lady Bathory.  We remember these people and some romanticized version of what they did, but what is it that made them the embodiment of evil?  Or more accurately, what does it mean to be a sociopath, and why should you care?

Sociopaths (or psychopaths if you prefer. The terms are interchangeable) lack empathy.  They have no emotional connection to other people or living things.  In a word, they lack love, even for themselves.  Other people are things; they are objects to manipulate and use and then discard once that usefulness is exhausted.  It is not a choice for a sociopath to care.  They are simply incapable.  Imagine it: your life without love and connection to other people, without the joy of having a puppy lick your face, the sadness of losing a loved one, or the elation of that first kiss.  Hard to do, isn’t it?  Well imagine this:  Sociopaths think your empathy is just as hard to imagine.  They think it’s silly.  For them it’s impossible.

The lack of empathy is just one of the things that make them stick out and captivate our interest.  One in one hundred people could remove you from the planet and not lose a wink of sleep over it.  One in twenty-five people score pretty high on the psychopath test.  Do you know twenty-five people?  I do, and after reading the test and a few books on the topic, I could think of more than one person that was suspect.  Let’s take a look at the test to get a better idea of what we’re talking about. 

The Test

• glib and superficial charm
• grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self
• need for stimulation
• pathological lying
• cunning and manipulativeness
• lack of remorse or guilt
• shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness)
• callousness and lack of empathy
• parasitic lifestyle
• poor behavioral controls
• sexual promiscuity
• early behavior problems
• lack of realistic  long-term goals
• impulsivity
• irresponsibility
• failure to accept responsibility for own actions
• many short-term marital relationships
• juvenile delinquency
• revocation of conditional release
• criminal versatility

These criteria are from the Hare Psychological Checklist.  It’s scored on a point system.  Score high enough and you raise red flags.  Score really high and you are likely a threat to society.  These high scorers are your neighbors, friends, colleagues, and if you are unlucky enough they are your loved ones.  After reading this list, I’m sure you can think of at least one or two suspect people that you have known, or worse yet know. 

So we have the basic definition, but why should you care?  There is, of course, the precautionary tale of “buyer beware,” and if they seem too good to be true they probably are, but as a writer how does this information benefit you?  The answer is that history is also littered with literary characters pulled straight from the worst that humanity has to offer: the sociopath.  Many of those characters are based on real people, but the acts are rarely as awful as the real thing.  Remember Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter?  He’s based on Robert John Maudsley, one of Great Britain’s most notorious and ruthless killers. Buffalo Bill, also from Silence of the Lambs, would surely fit the profile.  Most of us know that Dracula is really just Vlad the Impaler.  There is Sherlock Holmes, a high-functioning sociopath, and his nemesis Moriarty. Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey fits more than one of the attributes of the list.  Alexander DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange is most certainly certifiable.  O’Brien from 1984 is to this day chilling.  Fernand Mondego from The Count of Monte Cristo just makes me mad. And the list goes on and on and on. These characters fascinate us.  They keep us up at night, safe in our beds and grateful that it was only a story.  They live long after the final page and become the boogeyman for otherwise rational adults.

Now to be fair, not all sociopaths are bloodthirsty vampires, necrophiliacs, or home invaders.  Most are non-violent con artists making their way through the world just like you and me, or rather by using you and me.  They are politicians (yup, you probably voted for one or two.  Sociopaths are drawn to politics).  They teach college courses and ring up your groceries.  They are corporate raiders (remember Gordon Gekko?) and janitors.  They are even psychiatrists.  Sociopaths fill every station of life because they are as varied as any other segment of society.  Housewives and football coaches.  Preachers. Childcare providers and the children who blow up frogs (remember The Bad Seed, The Good Son, and The Omen?).  They can be all of these things, and they don’t care — not about your welfare or your child or your vote or that frog.  They are remorseless con artists who are good at it and come in all shapes and sizes — as do characters in the literary world

Do you need a sociopath in your story?  No, not necessarily, but sociopathic tendencies offer a great place to start for some really interesting plot developments.  Imagine a housewife with an abnormal appetite for money.  What is she willing to do?  How about a librarian who spends her time spreading rumors?  Or how about this:

Greg is a mechanic.  He’s especially smart and can spark up a conversation with just about anyone.  He has friends, but likes his quiet time.  His favorite food is tacos.  In the back of his house are oil drums filled with people parts.          

Alicia is a pretty fifteen year old and the head cheerleader at her high school.  On weekends she goes to local concerts with her friends.  Her car is on its last legs and needs some work, but she is kind of glad.  Alicia has a crush on Greg.

Read over the Hare Checklist (the PCL-R officially) and pick just one attribute, then apply it to a character you are developing.  Not enough?  Add another, and then keep going until you are happy with the person that is coming to life on the page.  Let those tendencies make the decisions and see where it goes.  If it gives you the creeps you are on the right track, because it will probably give me the creeps too.  And just when you think you have gone too far, read a detailed report of Jeffrey Dahmer’s or Ted Bundy’s activities.  I promise you haven’t gone too far, but I’ll bet the character you are brewing will be one for the ages.

One in one hundred people are sociopaths.  One in twenty-five are leaning heavily in that direction.  In the Greater New York City area there are no less than one hundred and ninety thousand sociopaths.  Look around.  You know them, and they are using or abusing you.  It’s time you started using them right back.  Write them down and see what they do.  I’m willing to bet you will be a bit surprised and maybe even a little startled.  If not then you aren’t close enough to reality.  And for the record, if you are feeling bad about using a person’s condition as a tool to further your literary masterpiece — don’t worry.  Remember, they don’t care if you live or die.  You can’t hurt them emotionally, but even if you could, would you care if you hurt Ted Bundy’s feelings?  I thought not.  Plus, if you’re feeling remorse I applaud you.  It mean’s you aren’t a sociopath. Congratulations.

We began with a riddle about a girl and a funeral.  It’s just a bit of fun, but it does show how a sociopath might think.  Hopefully you have a guess.  Here’s the answer:

She hoped the boy would come to her mother’s funeral so she could see him again and get his number.

So… Did you get it right?

Want to know more?  Here are a couple of recommended books.  Both are great, even if you don’t include a sociopath in your next work. 

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

—Alex Pucher

Image: Ted Bundy on trial.

I used to ride the bus to work…

I used to ride the bus to work every day. It took some getting used to after commuting in my beloved VW for years, but gas prices being what they were (and are) I got the hang of it. The initial shock was profound, though. People don’t always wash themselves. Sometimes they sneeze and the mist settles on your face. I heard my fair share of sly drug deals that weren’t nearly as sly as the dealer thought. Once I got over all of that, though, I became an observer. A fly on the wall. I vanished in my seat once I sat down, often with a book, but rarely actually reading it. People ignore readers. Readers are distracted by words. Under my cloak of reading-induced invisibility, I found that not all of us require a book to be distracted by words. Some of us, about one in one hundred, are distracted by words all day long. On my bus, the CT1, I happened to be in the right spot to watch such an individual day after day as he handled the words that played in his head and slipped from his tongue. On my bus was a schizophrenic.

I’ve read, and can highly recommend, The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller, which recounts the struggles from onset to partial control of schizophrenia from someone who experienced it firsthand. I’ve watched documentaries and read articles. I know what they did to schizophrenics a few hundred years ago (and as recently as the 1960s), and I see people with clearly visible symptoms wasting the day away on a park bench. On the bus, in my obscurity, I watched the condition at a respectable distance for a significant amount of time. From external reactions, I saw a glimpse of what was going on internally. What did I find there? Words, just like the ones I wasn’t reading. I found words, happening in much the same way in his mind as they were happening in mine.

Above: St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Wall of room in Ward Retreat 1. Reproductions made by a patient, a disturbed case of dementia precox.

Now let’s take a look at words for a moment to put this into context. What is thought? Is it a picture of a bicycle? Yes. Is it a computation ingrained along some neural pathway from a long forgotten calculus class? Yes, that too. Most importantly for this conversation, though, it is words. We think in sentences, or fragments, or even individual letters at times, depending on the circumstance. Almost always, a thought that you have is your internal dialogue, a dialogue that has been buried deep inside you since you were very little and you were told “shhhhhhhhhhh” during quiet time, but you still needed that external dialogue to help you get that square block into the circular hole. Once it is buried through the practice of “shhhhhhhhhhh,” we largely forget about it. We all need internal dialogue to navigate our world, whether to type this sentence (I can hear myself if I think about it) or you are rebuilding an engine or replanting a hyacinth. We need that dialogue, and that dialogue is thought. 

Schizophrenics generally grow up just as you and I. They build an inner dialogue as they go, amassing thoughts and words without noticing the gears turning in their heads as they unfold the newspaper or put on their pants one leg at a time. And then one day, out of the blue, they are swept away by an unexplainable sense of euphoria and dazzling hope, or plummeted into a hell of agonizing paranoia, and without warning the voices start. The words creep out. Those voices, the ones that keep schizophrenics up for days on end and convince them that the TV is talking to them or that the neighbors (or fellow bus riders) are spying on them, are really just that inner dialogue that we all have. The difference, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, is the part of the brain that tells you “Shhhhhhh, these are internal voices” suddenly gets switched to “Listen up!! Someone is talking to you!” Schizophrenics, it would seem based on contemporary theory, are stuck listening to their thoughts, but can’t tell anymore that it’s just their inner dialogue.

The young man on the bus, we’ll call him Gary because that’s the word my mind attaches to him, was listening to the words rolling around in his head, just as I was as I sat thinking about him. Gary carried on conversations and spoke with his hands, sometimes laughing at or responding to conversations that other people were having – exactly as I would. Often the other passengers would respond to him, and I would wait patiently for the inevitable – slowly they would realize that Gary wasn’t speaking to them. Slowly, invariably, they would recoil and glance at the other passengers to make sure they were not the “crazy” ones. That was the word in their heads – crazy. As I watched Gary over the course of a few months, I quickly began questioning that defense. Was Gary that much different than the rest of us? Other than a thought switch being flipped in the permanent unfiltered position, was Gary any crazier than you or I? The answer, in short, is no. And then, as a writer, I wondered how access to those thoughts, in a much more controlled way, may offer some insight into myself, others, and the human condition as a whole, if only I would hear the words… and perhaps respond to them.

Those voices in your head, the same ones that pester and taunt and trouble a schizophrenic, are at your disposal if only you listen. You have fears that you quash. Don’t quash them. You long for things that society tells you are bad, so you shut it out of your mind. Let it in. You, me, and everybody you have ever known thinks things that you are afraid to look straight in the eye because of what it might mean, perhaps something that you don’t even want to admit to yourself about yourself. Write it.

I felt for Gary as I spied on him from my perch. His life must be confusing, so confusing that some schizophrenics don’t last too long, ending up in an institution or taking their own lives in a desperate attempt to stop those endless, tiring words. From my seat in that bus, I gained a better understanding of what it was to no longer be in control of the characters in your mind that you’ve collected over the years, and for that I will always remember and have limitless sympathy for Gary and everyone like him. But I took away something about myself as well. I learned to really listen to what was going on upstairs. Those voices, those words, are the ones that we should be writing with. They’re already in there and ready-made, so instead of suppressing them, what would happen if we let them fully speak? Where would they take us? What would they say? Some of it, surely, will be uncomfortable, but for all of the discomfort and ugliness there must be an equal amount of poignancy and endearment. There’s a wealth of voices and words, stored and cataloged for as many years as you’ve been alive, waiting to be rewritten as characters and a plot in a book that someone will pretend to be reading on a bus as they sit and spy on the other passengers. And you never know. Perhaps one day I will be holding that book. Perhaps I will be spying on you.

—Alex Pucher

Would you like to know more about these ideas? Click on the hyperlinks within the blog.

And of course, check out The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125424.The_Quiet_Room

See you on the bus…

Bumps in the Night

Presently my soul grew stronger, hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is, I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, taping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you.” Here I opened wide the door, —
Darkness there, and nothing more. —Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

When I was about 30, I lived alone in a house with a dog and a cat.  The neighborhood wasn’t anyplace I would want to raise kids, but it was safe enough that I didn’t lose sleep over home invaders wielding shotguns or police checkpoints as an effort to eliminate the unsavory element of prostitution.  In short, I slept soundly.  Baby sleep.

One ordinary night after studying and reading, I laid down for slumber with sunrise only a few short hours away.  As I lay drifting with my head beneath the open window and the cool night air seeping in, I was rudely awakened by SCRAAAAAAAAAAPE! across the window sill outside.  I shot out of bed, alarming the dog, and glared out the window at the would-be intruder or ferocious rodent of unusual size.  The same gentle breeze that had been whisking me away into la-la land was moving the branches with serene elegance.  Despite the lack of moon or flood lighting, it was clear that the random motions of a tree or branch or twig against the glass created a sound that thrilled my half-conscious brain.  I checked with the dog to see if he was concerned, only to find him looking longingly at me to lay back down so he could return to sleep.  “Only the wind…” I told him, but perhaps said it more for myself.  Only the wind…

A week later it happened again, but this time no wind.  I dressed minimally, grabbed my flashlight and the noticeably unconcerned dog, and ran outback in order to catch the culprit red-handed.  I hadn’t considered what I was gong to do when I found the intruder, but I followed Poe’s advise and “let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.”  Needless to say, there was no intruder or beast.  In fact, there was no twig or branch against the window, and apparently from the placement of the shrubbery, there never had been.  But something had been there.  Something woke me from sleepy twilight and scared the wits out of me.  Standing in my backyard in my unmentionables with a flashlight and an unamused dog, I told myself once again that it must have been the wind.  “It must be.”

Finally, the next week I had a witness when my girlfriend slept over.  As I relaxed… BANG! outside in the still of the night.  I looked over at Jane, resting but awake, and she didn’t budge.

“Didn’t you hear that?” I asked, slightly shaken.
“Hear what?”
“That bang at the window?  You didn’t hear that?”
“No?” she said with a tinge of irritation.  “You should get some sleep.”

But I couldn’t.  It was then that I realized the source of my midnight treks into the backyard and hours of puzzled pondering.  I looked out the window to confirm what I already knew.  There was nothing there.

The sounds, those scrapes and bangs and bumps in the night, were all in my head, and had been as real as fireworks on the Fourth of July.

For weeks I was afraid to sleep.  I was afraid of those moments of drift.  I knew enough about schizophrenia to know that it often appeared out of nowhere one day and that was that – delusions and hallucinations “forever more.”  I did research and study.  I had to find out that I was okay, and luckily that turned out to be the case, but I learned quite a bit about the way brains operate.  I learned that I was going to be okay, as long as I was prepared for the occasional unexplainable bump in the night.

Where did the sounds come from?  Why was this happening at all?  How common and universal was this experience?  The answers turned out to be quite shocking.  Over the course of time and experience, I started to consider what use these quirks and quivers of the human mind could be, particularly to the struggling writer.  Those answers, coupled with a few real world examples, are what we are going to delve into over the next few blogs.  We’re going to take a close look at schizophrenia, so close in fact that you may not see the way you think in quite the same way ever again.  Then we’re going to dive into the mind of the sociopath, a condition which stems from everything that’s swimming around in your head right now.  Finally, from the knowledge we explore together, we’ll find ways to put these anomolies to good use.  The hope is that we can search out the harshest of mental deviations, only to come out on the other side with some really interesting fodder for our fictional cannons.

In the meantime, rest up.  Enjoy those good nights of sleep.  Listen, though, for the bumps in the night.  There’s a good possibility that not all of them are really there.  Sometimes there really is “darkness there, and nothing more.”

Image: Nancy Drew silhouette used with permission by Jenn Fisher of Nancy Drew Sleuth.

—Alex Pucher

FINAL DOOM

(Above) Photo by Alex Pucher.

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.” —Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum

What are you going to do when the oil runs out? Peculiar question, isn’t it? It’s valid, though, so think about it a moment.  Think about your job, how you get there, the food you eat (or are eating right now) and the energy required to grow and transport it to your plate.  Think, for a second, about almost every single thing you come in contact with on a daily basis.  Did you touch plastic today?  Yes, you did.  It’s oil.  Did you brush your teeth?   Oil.  Drive on a road? Wear clothes?  Watch TV?  Should I go on?  It’s a long list, and it’s all oil – all of it – in different refined mixtures.  I’m not the first, by far, to recognize the limits to black gold. In 1956, M. King Hubbert famously offered his “Peak” and prediction of the end of oil as we know it.  Thus far he has proved to be startlingly correct.  And Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of United Arab Emirates, knew to wonder about the other side of the oil peak, and then properly prepared his country for that day – which did indeed come.

More recently, an author of both fiction and non-fiction books took up the task of asking that same question: What will we do when the oil runs out? James Howard Kunstler is the creative force behind The Long Emergency, which is a non-fiction examination of our near future based on the worlds’ over consumption of resources. He took the knowledge he gained and transformed it into a fictional account of what we (yes, you and I) and our children face fairly soon.  World Made By Hand, set in upstate New York in a future that has memories very relevant to our present, follows the daily lives of ordinary people struggling to make it in a world where the modern conveniences of electricity, hospitals, and luxury sports sedans no longer play a part.  Gardens are no longer a pastime; they are a necessity.  Sickness is no longer cured; it’s endured, and the once familiar staple of life that people die comes back with a vengeance as the natural carrying capacity of Earth is rediscovered at somewhere around a billion people  And then there’s the place, their world, cut off from the rest of the planet and left to fend for itself without the threads that keep the world we know moving.

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DOOM: Part Two

(Above) The fastest possible way to dig out a new, and enormous, lake.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” —Albert Einstein

Where were you the morning of September 11, 2001? I know where I was. I was getting ready for work, buttoning up my shirt, tying my shoes, and drinking coffee. Then I was glued to the TV along with the rest of the world, watching towers fall and a plane ram the side of The Pentagon. My thoughts shifted to my father, who was at that moment somewhere in D.C., hopefully making his way out alive. For several agonizing hours I didn’t know where he was. I took the day off of work, unable and unwilling to focus on anything else. All I knew was that two great American cities were essentially on fire. Would there be more? Was this just the beginning? Then the call came. Dad was fine. The world started spinning again. I got lucky that day. Even after that call, though, the world was still smoking and holes in the ground in three separate states were proof that something had gone hideously wrong. The question everyone asked at that point was simple and primal, as an animal waiting to see if the predator had finally given up— Is that it? What if that wasn’t it? What would we have done if the world hadn’t started spinning again on that mild September morning?

To answer that question, we must first take a step back into the past.

In October of 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. At fifty megatons, Tzar Bomba was capable of causing third-degree burns at sixty miles away, and broke window panes at five hundred miles from ground zero. The seismic shock of the explosion was recorded in the United States, thousands of miles from the detonation site, and the shock wave was registered even on its third pass around the globe. The crater, created from a detonation altitude of 2.5 miles, can still be seen from space (see above image from Google Maps).

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