The Other Side of Desire (3 page)

Something of the linebacker lingered in his body, in the barrel-like build, though all had been layered and softened by years. As a sophomore, he’d won a research stipend in psychology, and he never played competitive football again. But the eagerness and energy that impelled him to try out for the team still radiated from his broad shoulders and from the scalp of his round head through his thin, closely cropped hair.

He might have been related to Jacob; they might even have been brothers: both men were short and wide and compressed in the neck, stubby. Both had full cheeks that were beginning to fall toward their crisp shirt collars. Jacob’s head, too, was covered minimally in well-trimmed hair; a warm energy emanated from both their skulls. And even their voices shared a slightly high pitch and faint scratchiness.

Yet there were differences that added up to something unmistakable. Berlin’s body was more solid, his face more firm. His entire presence held a combination of sensitivity and stubborn, quiescent embattlement, while Jacob’s spoke of caring but not an immovable core. It was as though they had been carried together in the same womb, but that some prenatal event, some seemingly insignificant but unequal firing of hormones or brief jarring of the amniotic sac, had routed Jacob’s life toward the precarious and Berlin’s toward strength.

BERLIN
liked to consider human erotic life from the vantage of a Martian scientist gazing down at Earth. “He would see that a lot of different sexual interests exist within the people who live on this planet. He would note people attracted to adults of the opposite gender and people attracted to adults of the same gender and a percentage of people on Earth attracted to children and people attracted to all sorts of other things and aroused by all sorts of behaviors, but the Martian scientist would simply observe these Earthly desires and define their differences, with no judgment or value attached to them.”

He had worked with Jeffrey Dahmer, who’d killed seventeen boys and young men, copulating with and cannibalizing the dead bodies. He had testified at trial that Dahmer was afflicted with necrophilia, that he was nearly incapable of becoming aroused with a living person. Berlin had spent time, too, with Michael Ross, who’d confessed to raping and strangling to death eight girls and young women. After two decades of investigations and trials and appeals, Ross wanted to die. He’d told his lawyers to stop filing briefs and arguing on his behalf, to surrender, and as execution approached Berlin hoped that the prisoner would allow him to visit, to say good-bye, perhaps to be there for him in his last moments.

Ross was, by Berlin’s diagnosis, a sexual sadist. “God or nature put sex into each of us,” Berlin said, as we sat on the ornate red chairs in one corner of his expansive office. “If we don’t eat, we die. If we stop having sex, we perish as a species. We are talking about a powerful, biologically based appetite. And if that drive gets aimed in the wrong direction it still wants to be satisfied. You know, sleep is another biologically based drive—you could promise yourself all you want that you’re not going to give in to that craving for sleep, but let me tell you, eventually you’re going to. That’s the struggle some people are having sexually.”

And that was the way he saw even a case so extreme: that here was a man for whom sexual release depended on inflicting terror and torture, a man who had, in effect, restrained himself except for those eight times, those eight acts of primal gratification—such a tiny fraction of the number that most adults seek and find.

“Ultimately,” Berlin went on, thinking about the period of the killings, “there was a man in there struggling to do right. He says he tried to talk himself out of leaving the house, fought with himself not to leave, so he wouldn’t kill. People want not to believe this. People can’t deal with the humanity within a man like Ross. He never wanted to be this kind of person. We can all say, ‘Well, he should have turned himself in.’ But
people
,” Berlin’s voice rose as he addressed an invisible outraged throng, “let’s take even something as simple as getting a traffic ticket. You don’t say to the policeman, ‘Oh, and by the way, I do speed frequently.’ And you don’t turn yourself in for something that will get you executed. What he would tell himself is, ‘I’m never going to do it again, and if I turn myself in it doesn’t bring back the people who are dead.’”

Berlin’s brown eyes glanced abruptly almost straight upward. Then he hunched forward, tight fists held half an inch from his lowered forehead. “I know this all must sound insane to the families of the victims, but to say that Michael Ross is evil just is not accurate, given my knowledge of sexual disorders and the impairment of both cognition and volition. Society can’t consider the complexity. You might read about a sexually sadistic serial killer, and the neighbors say, ‘Gee, we knew him, we can’t believe he’s someone who could do that. If you had a flat tire he was going to come over and help you change it.’ But the criminal behavior never was a reflection of the personality, the visible aspects of it—it was part of the privacy of the sexual makeup. You and I could sit next to each other, and I don’t ask you about your sexuality and you don’t ask me about mine, so if the only thing that makes me dangerous is what’s driving me sexually, you could be the next-door neighbor, you could be the wife, and never know. I had a patient, a serial rapist, who’d had a girlfriend he wanted to marry. But the urge to engage in coercive sex was so much stronger than the arousal by consenting sex that he would leave the consenting relationship to go out and engage in the coercive. And the girlfriend had no idea until he was arrested.”

On death row, with Berlin counseling and encouraging him, Ross had begun injections of Depo Lupron, an anti-androgen. For most patients, at a sufficient dose, the drug cuts the production of testosterone to the degree that desire is severely attenuated; the effect, though reversible if the drug is stopped, is known as chemical castration. Before taking “the medicine,” Berlin said, Ross was contrite about his crimes, but there was something robotic about his compunction. “He confessed everything, but he himself described that he knew how he should feel about what he’d done, and that the emotions simply wouldn’t well up inside. Intellectually he was sorry, intellectually he felt for the families, but he knew he should be overwhelmed.”

With the Lupron in his system, thwarted, compulsive lust was replaced by storms and floods of regret. It was as though desire, so rarely satisfied, had stymied everything else. Now, Berlin said, “He is no longer sitting in prison masturbating to fantasies about strangling someone.” The medication, in the psychiatrist’s mind, allowed the self to emerge, permitting Ross his own humanity. Sorrow drowned him. He couldn’t bear what he had done, couldn’t endure the thought of the mothers and fathers of the dead being put through more waiting, more testimony, more memory, so he had started the campaign to quicken his execution. With sex eliminated, Ross became who he truly was.

BERLIN
seemed, at times, to see Ross’s new resolve as proof that sex and the self existed in opposition. Erotic desire wasn’t the essence of the self; eros wasn’t even essential to the self; Freud was far in the past. In expunging the libido, Lupron had liberated Ross’s very being, his soul, and granted him excruciating guilt and the expiation of choosing death. It was at once a medical and religious vision, and Berlin was both a medical and religious man. The paraphilias were diseases, almost surely rooted in biology. He felt that the treatment he often prescribed—Depo Lupron or another anti-androgen, Depo Provera—was horribly imprecise. “It’s a club,” he said. The anti-androgens bludgeoned the hormonal foundation of desire rather than addressing specific aberrance. But he believed that, for now, until the brain was better understood and more delicate drugs were found, there was frequently no other choice. And once the medication spread through the system, redemption came quickly. The sexual sadist could become—purely—the good Samaritan who helped to change flat tires, and Michael Ross could become a man seeking his own sacrifice, asking to die for what he’d done.

“I pray to a god I cannot see; I depend on a god who may not be,” Berlin said, smiling a bit sheepishly. He attributed the line to a patient from long in the past; he could not remember who. But the words had always stayed with him, and had become a credo of his own. The moment of uneasiness, as he acknowledged his measure of belief, seemed to arise from a feeling of unbelonging, an awareness that both the strictly religious and the devoutly scientific would scorn his statement of faith, the religious because he was far too tentative and the scientific because he depended on anything at all that was beyond the reach of proof and disproof. “I want there to be a higher power. I don’t see that as a threat or alternative to science. I’m not going to be able to find a god, but as a human being I yearn. I desperately would like to believe, but if I’m really honest with myself, I’m just hoping that he’s there.”

Berlin affirmed what he could, proved what he could. The most depraved people were moral beings. With the aid of medicine, God, through a patient like Michael Ross, nearly came into view. Berlin worked with a necrophiliac who had a job at a funeral parlor; he treated a gynecologist voyeur. He welcomed uncountable pedophiles and child molesters into his office, invited them to his group therapy sessions, offered them—calmly urged upon them—medication. These, the most reviled of sex offenders, were the majority of his patients. Testifying in the state legislature, he fought against a mandatory reporting law that would require psychiatric professionals to notify the police if patients who came for treatment voluntarily, with no record of sexual offenses, confided incidents of abuse. Berlin didn’t want a law that would deter the undetected from approaching him for help. In this way, he guarded his role as confessor, his ability to redeem, his immersion in the chaos of eros.

From that chaos he needed refuge. A huge and majestic saltwater aquarium was mounted in his office, dominating the room, the brilliant colors of the fish overwhelming the deep red of the antique furniture. A sea apple, like a purple and yellow balloon with white tentacles sprouting from the top, migrated slowly, searching for invisible particles of food. A surgeonfish, its blue scales set off by streaks of ebony, glided above pink coral. A yellow tang darted around a flaming red angel. Cow-fish, with their strange horns and broad gray bellies, hovered above a crab, a clam. “Even that clam has an existence there,” Berlin said, at once marveling at the thought of a clam’s reality and laughing at his own wonderment. “And that sea apple—he moves to the front of the tank, where he can get the best nutrition. I don’t know what in nonhumans constitutes a feeling or thought, but it would be very presumptuous of us to believe we’re the only living entities capable of having some sort of subjective existence. To watch something like that, that almost looks like a balloon, and to see that it makes purposeful movements and has a life, it makes you think, it makes you wonder, and I find it very relaxing and very fascinating.”

He liked simply to sit and stare into the tank, and to imagine a world of subjective experience that included no torment. He was mesmerized, too, by the compatibility of the underwater beings, the coral and crabs, the lone clam and all the species of fish. “Everything in there is alive, there’s nothing artificial, and there’s a symbiotic way in which they all survive together.”

Within each creature, and for all of them combined, he perceived a tranquility denied to humans. “These species,” he added, “rarely mate in captivity.”

WHEN
Jacob arrived, Berlin gave him the “Multiphasic Sex Inventory” and the “Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory,” two long questionnaires designed to elicit a patient’s sexual preferences and his disorders of mind or mood. There were three hundred items on the sexual test, each requiring an answer of true or false: “Occasionally I think of things too bad to talk to others about…. I have exposed myself one hundred times…. It does not interest me to learn that a woman may not be wearing panties…. It would peak my interest to learn that a child is curious about sex…. I would like to be tied up and made to have sex.” And there were one hundred and seventy-five more on the multiaxial. With his labored reading, Jacob took several hours to get through. “I can remember one of the questions was about interest in animals,” he recalled. “And I’m thinking,
What?
That’s disgusting. That’s ridiculous. And then I thought, I’m a hypocrite.”

He felt a degree of comfort in Berlin’s mansion, partly because the façade bore no name, nothing to broadcast the perversions that brought people here; partly because he was now, for the first time in his life, ensconced within a world constructed for deviants like himself; and partly because he admired and trusted Berlin, though as Jacob struggled through the questionnaires the two men had scarcely talked. Jacob had formed an opinion based on the only thing he’d ever read about foot fetishism, a short article he’d come across in
Psychology Today
. The writer quoted Berlin saying that without attention to the feet the fetishist “usually can’t get aroused”—from these and a few other words, Jacob felt that the psychiatrist was able to stare into his soul. Soon he would think of Berlin “like a god.” And soon he would renounce going to synagogue, because he felt so betrayed by a god who could make him so alien. Berlin became his deity, soothingly Jewish, with a torah scroll sitting atop one of the bookcases in his office. The psychiatrist seemed all-knowing. He seemed unconditional in his forgiveness and sympathy. His mansion felt like Toronto, a haven.

Berlin reviewed the tests and called Jacob into his office to talk. Jacob showed him the copy he’d kept of the article from
Psychology Today
: an offering. The snow boots and socks and first memories of desire at the age of seven, the phone surveys taken sometimes several times in a day, the electric effect of the feet on the dashboard, the terror of late spring, the unendurable mortification—Jacob gave his history.