The Alienist - Caleb Carr [70]
“Can the oscillation of a molecule be represented in consciousness side by side with a nervous shock, and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion, becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposition.”
“Give me your derringer, Sara,” I remember calling out when I first ran across that statement. “I’m going to shoot myself.” Why in the world should I have to understand such things, I wondered during that first week or so, when what I wanted to know was where, where was our murderer? Yet in time I came to see the point of such efforts. Take that particular Spencer quote, for example—I eventually grasped that the attempts of people like Spencer to interpret the activities of the mind as the complex effects of material motion within the human organism had failed. This failure had reinforced the inclination of younger alienists and psychologists like Kreizler and Adolf Meyer to view the origins of consciousness primarily in terms of formative childhood experience, and only secondarily in terms of pure physical function. That had real relevance, in terms of understanding that our killer’s path from birth to savagery had not been the random result of physical processes that we would have been powerless to chart but rather the product of conceivable events.
Nor were our studies designed to debunk or defame: While Spencer’s attempt to explain the origins and evolution of mental activity might have been wide of the mark, there was no arguing his belief that what most men consider their rationally selected actions are in fact idiosyncratic responses (again, established during the decisive experiences of childhood) that have grown strong enough, through repeated use, to overpower other urges and reactions—that have won, in other words, the mental battle for survival. Obviously, the person we sought had developed a profoundly violent set of such instincts; it was up to us to theorize what terrible series of experiences had confirmed such methods, in his mind, as the most reliable reaction to the challenges of life.
Yes, it soon became clear that we needed to know all this and more, much more, if we were going to have any hope of fully fleshing out our imaginary man. And as that truth sank in, we all began to study and read with greater determination and speed, trading thoughts and ideas at all hours of the day and night. Sara and I would often shout heady philosophy over crackling telephone lines at two in the morning, much to my grandmother’s despair, as we first groped and then more competently reached for greater knowledge. The rather remarkable fact that we were getting an extremely rapid education (the bulk of it was chewed and swallowed, if not completely digested, in the first ten days) was obscured by the practical task at hand, and by the attention we had to pay to whatever physical clues and methodical theories Marcus and Lucius Isaacson detected and devised. Not that there were many of these, in the beginning; we hadn’t had enough access to any of the crime scenes for that. (Take the Williamsburg Bridge tower, for example: by the time Marcus examined it, there was no hope of gaining any relevant fingerprints—the place was an outdoor construction site, tampered with every day by weather and workmen.) The knowledge that we needed more than what we had to build a detailed picture of the killer’s method only increased the morbidly expectant air in our headquarters. Though buried in our work, we were all aware that we were waiting for something to happen.
As March turned to April, it did. At 1:45 A.M. on a Saturday, I was dozing in my room at my grandmother’s house with my copy of