The Alienist - Caleb Carr [130]
I shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Rotten, I guess.”
“Perhaps. But in all likelihood you would not feel that it was extraordinary. Put it this way—if I say the word ‘mother’ to you, your mind will immediately run through a set of unconscious but entirely familiar associations based on experience. So will mine. And both of our sets of associations will doubtless be a mixture of the good and the bad, as will almost any person’s. But how many people will have a set of associations as uniformly negative as we know Jesse Pomeroy’s to be? Indeed, in Jesse’s case we can go beyond the limited concept of mother to the notion of humanity generally. Say the word ‘people’ to him and his mind leaps only to images of humiliation and pain, as routinely as if I were to say ‘train’ to you and you were to answer ‘movement.’”
“Is that what you meant when you told Lasky that Pomeroy was enjoying the beating he was getting?”
“It was. You may have noticed that Jesse deliberately constructed that entire event. It’s not hard to see why. Throughout his childhood he was surrounded by tormentors, and for the last twenty years virtually the only people he’s come into contact with have been men like Lasky. His experiences, both in prison and out, cause him to believe that interaction with his own species can only be adversarial and violent—he even compares himself empathetically to an animal in a menagerie. Such is his reality. That he will be beaten and berated, given his current circumstances, he knows; all he can do is attempt to set the terms of that abuse, to manipulate the participants into their actions as he once manipulated the children he tortured and killed. It’s the only kind of power or satisfaction—the only method of ensuring his psychic survival—he’s ever known, and he therefore employs it.”
As I smoked and struggled with this idea, I began to pace the deck. “But isn’t there something—well, something inside of him, inside of any person that would object to that kind of a situation? I mean, wouldn’t there be sadness or despair, even about his own mother? The desire to be loved, at least? Isn’t every child born with—”
“Be careful, Moore,” Kreizler warned as he lit a cigarette of his own. “You’re about to suggest that we’re born with specific a priori concepts of need and desire—an understandable thought, perhaps, were there any evidence to support it. The organism knows one drive from the beginning—survival. And yes, for most of us, that drive is somehow intimately bound up with the notion of a mother. But were our experiences terribly different—if the concept of mother suggested frustration and finally danger, rather than sustenance and nurturing—the instinct for survival would cause us to structure our outlook differently. Jesse Pomeroy experienced this. I now believe our killer did, too.” Laszlo drew heavily on his cigarette. “I can thank Pomeroy, for that. Meyer, as well. But most of all, I must thank Sara. And I intend to do so.”
Kreizler was true to that declaration. At one of the small towns we passed through on our way back to Grand Central he asked the station attendant if it would be possible to send what he assured the man was an urgent wire ahead to New York. The attendant agreed and Kreizler wrote out the message, which ordered Sara to meet us at Delmonico’s at eleven o’clock. Laszlo and I had no time to change for dinner once we reached the city, but Charlie Delmonico had seen us in far worse shape in our time, and when