Confessions of a Sociopath (32 page)

I am terrible about breaking up with people. Once I lose interest in someone, I usually prefer to string them along until they leave me alone of their own accord. I would rather have the inconvenience of this than the possibility of an emotional scene. I don’t really understand when people get emotional about things, and I can’t stand it when people cry in response to something I have said or done. I feel like it is such a cheap shot, particularly since if they know me at all, they should understand that I am not going to be able to deal with those emotions. It’s like expecting someone confined to a wheelchair to walk up the stairs, or maybe being mad at your child for not being the gender you wanted him or her to be. As one of my blog readers put it, “All emotionally stunted people get
frustrated with overly emotional people. It’s like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand.” In fact, one of the only surefire ways to make me upset/angry is to cry when in a confrontation with me. So, because I want to avoid the loss of control and damage that can be done when I am upset or angry, along with wanting generally to avoid unnecessary unpleasantness, I try to avoid an emotionally charged dissolution to a relationship.

Most psychologists think that sociopaths cannot love, but that theory seems silly to me. Just because it is a different kind of love, more calculating and self-aware, doesn’t negate its existence. This misconception springs from some illusion that the capacity to love is a form of goodness—that one’s love constitutes an unadulterated gift that arises out of selflessness rather than selfishness. But I do not believe this is true.

For example, most people do not have children for the benefit of those children. You cannot give to that which does not exist—that which would never risk torture, illness, or heartache had you not brought it into being. But when I see my sister unable to resist smiling in the company of her shiny-blond, rosy-cheeked toddler, I can imagine no greater love. I, too, am overrun with feelings of love for this tiny, just-formed being, knowing that there are genetic landscapes written into my heart that make it so. She’s endlessly charming to me. Her mere existence in the world pulls chemical levers and pushes enzymatic buttons that produce in me immense joy. Generosity and affection are simply its symptoms and side effects. Evolutionary biologists have long puzzled over the adaptation for love and its attendant expressions of generosity and kindness, theorizing that altruism ensures the survival of genes through one’s kin. So-called inclusive fitness theory basically holds that you are willing to be altruistic to another person in
proportion to the advantage it will give your own genes in survival. In other words, you share half of your genes with your siblings, so you should be more willing to help them than, say, your cousin or even your nephew. This theory, however, has lately been the subject of much controversy, as some scientists have begun to challenge the theory on the basis that the math doesn’t add up. Still, for whatever reason it pleases me to promote my niece’s existence. It behooves me to give to her whatever I can to induce pleasure in her, which infects me with a glittering, light-filled happiness. Mirth, ecstasy, whatever you want to call it. We all want this for ourselves. Sociopaths, too.

When I was in my early twenties, I learned to love a girl named Ann who had beautiful eyes and soft overgrown hair that covered her face. She was a musician. She played one of those unpopular nerdy instruments that never garner any glory or fame, but she played it beautifully. For a time in my life, my skin crawled and my body ached when I was away from her for any stretch of time: a few hours of not being able to lazily brush my fingers against her skin, a weekend of not feeling her even breath in my presence—unbearable. I felt like she was the first person who really saw me, and that allowed me to trust her in a way that I had never managed to trust a person before.

We met on a music tour together, but she didn’t pay much attention to me until she noticed me messing with a damaged person in the group—another musician, with red hair, moderate skill, and clear psychological problems. Ann wasn’t mad, only curious. To me that was a sign that she was susceptible to me—reacting with curiosity where most would react with judgment. I asked her why we weren’t friends, knowing she would appreciate directness as a sign of honesty and courage. She was charmed. “There’s no reason why we aren’t friends.”

We spent the next three and a half weeks together. This
was in the midst of my ostracization, when the other students in my program had decided to have nothing to do with me after I had read that girl’s diary. I hadn’t realized how lonely I had been, how much I missed connecting with other people. I tried to be around her as much as I could, so much so that her friends got concerned, asking her if I was bothering her, wondering why such a good person as herself would allow such a bad person as me to keep her acquaintance. When we rode on buses together for long trips, I would sleep with my head in her lap. It was such peace. It was as if I had found a port in a storm that had been raging for so long I did not know what it felt like to sail in fair weather or to touch my feet on solid, unshaking ground. From the comfort of land, I could see how wet and cold I had been, how bereft of human contact, how sick—and I never wanted to be those things again. I cannot describe those first days and weeks with Ann without feeling an acute pain. Loneliness is never as awful as its immediate aftermath, because at the time, you are so occupied with enduring it that you can’t bear to comprehend its awfulness.

Ann saw me as a broken thing, a thing to be fixed. And in a lot of ways, she did fix me. She taught me that there were more sustainable ways of meeting my needs and that self-control was a prerequisite to them. Before her, I had been so impulsive. I used to just leave and hope things worked out. I walked in front of cars to make them stop. I traveled with no money. I hit people. Things often didn’t work out. Watching Ann live her life, I realized that it was okay to consider the future—that living without thought of it ensured nothing but discomfort. And I wondered why I had lived in discomfort for so long.

Part of it was that Ann sold me on forever. She said we would always love each other and that she would make sure of it. I had never heard anyone speak so certainly about
something so inherently uncertain. I didn’t believe her, but she saw my thoughts and replied, “No, I mean it. Even if you killed my mother. I’m not saying that you should kill my mother, of course, because you really shouldn’t. But if you did kill my mother, I would be very angry and very sad, but I would still love you and I wouldn’t leave you.”

It was so absurd that it seemed true. I trusted her, and I had never trusted anyone. Unlike anyone I had ever known, she told me she didn’t want to be shielded from my thoughts, listening for hours to my megalomaniacal rants about “ruining people” and other hobbies. It was so refreshing to not have to wear a mask, but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Part of me wanted to test her tolerance, maybe even prove her wrong about always loving me. I kept confessing sin after sin, but she never recoiled. I was so used to the opposite reaction from people. I had, in fact, just been severely socially sanctioned for something as small as stealing a diary. Ann didn’t think I was a monster for these things, or perhaps she did but professed her love to me anyway.

She taught me how easy it is to give. I gave her as much as I could think to. I bought her boots and made her things to eat and drove her to the airport. I helped her move, rubbed her shoulders, and ran her errands. I finally understood the Mexican kid’s compulsion to give me shiny pencils or why people bother keeping pets.

It was a kind of puppy love. I was a kid and she was a kid, and we believed kid things. We reveled in finding each other, because our respective abilities to detect the specialness in each other made each of us feel all the more special. Ann loved seeing the good in someone so very bad. She loved loving someone whom the whole world wrongly thought was undeserving. Her earnest willingness to listen and to try to understand my
honest ill will made me think that I wasn’t able to hurt her, but of course I was.

Once we were in the car when we fought about something I forget now, and she began to cry. I got so angry at her. She knew that I do not respond to such emotional cues like crying. I felt betrayed, and something in me turned off. I pulled over and told her to get out. I remember reaching over her to unlock and open her door, feeling the precariousness of the city in the draft of outside air.

She screamed at me, “What is wrong with you?!”

This wounded me. I thought she knew.

“You’re going to leave your friend in the middle of a strange city?” she asked accusingly.

I didn’t understand what had happened. I didn’t understand what she was saying to me, but I understood that there was judgment in her voice. She was deciding whether I was a good or a bad person, and leaning toward bad. This was something I thought she would never do to me. I realized, after all, that she was not so different from everyone else. I could have left her there and hoped that she, too, would leave me forever so that I could throw away all of the feelings she had made me feel. As I looked blankly into her tear-stained face and she gasped for breath through her sobs, her clothes disheveled, as if her wretchedness had seeped into their fibers, it would have been easy to let her go.

“No, of course not. Can you close that door?” And she did.

I saw that I could hurt her, that she had to be taken care of if she were to continue loving me. But I saw something else. That she was just like everyone else made her crossing the divide to my corner of the world all the more valuable to me. It was not until then that I began to regard Ann as a person, a human being, rather than just a thing that healed me. And
if she was just a person, then maybe there were many other people whom I could learn to relate to as well as I did with Ann.

After I finished college, I went to live with Ann in the Midwest, a place that seemed so characterless it was as if it had been fashioned out of cardboard. My parents had kicked me out of the house. I don’t know why really, but I suspect that they thought I was a bad influence on my younger siblings—I had not yet achieved my current level of self-control and at that point in my life most of my interactions were dripping with raw antagonism. I had given up pursuing music seriously, so I spent my days doing odd jobs.

During this time I met a very sweet boy. His speaking voice was at least an octave lower than any other voice I had heard in my life, quietly rumbling below the din. Ann and I had an old dingy couch in our apartment, a dull rose color made duller by dust and wear. When I sat with him on it, his voice would vibrate through the cushions onto the skin on my back, touching me in an oddly corporeal way. I would have loved him less, maybe, if not for his voice. It was a sound that made me tremble.

In many ways I responded to him the way that I responded to music, asking him only to fulfill me with the nuances and complexities specific to his medium. He was a working-class boy. His sturdy military build combined with a fair-haired, blue-eyed innocence fed into common American delusions about the honor and purity of soldiers fighting for God and country. He had never gone to college or learned very much in school. He wasn’t smart and couldn’t understand math or law or any of the things that I had spent so much of my life learning. But one night the power went out in our neighborhood, leaving us in the pitch-black. I don’t remember if he kissed me or if I kissed him, but we kissed each other in the dark.

I was very happy then. I loved Ann because she understood
me. And I loved him because I understood him. I could not have loved him if I had not found her first, if she had not illuminated for me what it meant to love another person, to have a stake in their existence in the world. I went from him to Ann and back again, with my only goal in life to be happy and to make them happy. I was spoiled, to be exposed to love in this way, having all of my needs met by two people who didn’t believe in labels or boundaries for relationships. Neither of them expected anything that I was incapable of giving.

Ann is married now and has several children. We grew up together, and the friendship that began so desperately evolved into one of trusted consistency. The boy left me. I no longer yearn for either of them, having long been accustomed to their absence to the point where it is difficult for me now to remember how it was to feel that way about anybody. But both relationships were immensely rewarding—rewarding enough for me to finally see that long-term relationships could be worth the special effort I had to pay to cultivate and sustain them.

Still, I am not used to long-term relationships. I still have not managed to keep a romantic relationship going for longer than eight months, which is a problem because I am supposed to get married. It’s not just about familial pressure. It’s a religious commandment, as important as getting baptized. I have known this and have kept it on my list of things to do. My parents don’t mention it really anymore. They got married at twenty and twenty-three respectively. They find it hard to imagine someone well into her early thirties not having a family. My mother was twenty-six when she had me. I thought she was so old when she had my last sibling, a little caboose that came along when she was thirty-seven.

There have been instances in which I would have said yes to marriage. The intelligent Mormon sociopath lawyer, the
ruthless Mormon investment banker, the intelligent but gentle non-Mormon lawyer who is generously still footing the bill for his ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s private school. The beautiful Aspie. There was the midwestern boy whom I loved, I thought. It’s hard to remember now what that love felt like.

I might marry the current man. He has that sort of ambiguous attractiveness that seen from certain angles is Hollywood dreamy and from others reflects the usual sag of aging. His best look is four days of scruff, his hair a little longer than the high-and-tight he sports for his one weekend of National Guard service a month. (Military men are disproportionately attracted to me. Is it the perceived challenge? Or the promise of punishment if they aren’t diligent?)