"Exactly."
"I think it's interesting," he said, "that you used the word 'compulsions.' That kind of removes the issue of responsibility."
"But I'm taking responsibility," I said. "I'm trying to stop it."
"You are," he said, "and that's very admirable, but you started this whole conversation by saying that 'fate' wants you you to be a serial killer. If you tell yourself that it's your destiny to become a serial killer, then aren't you really just dodging reponsibility by passing the blame to fate?"
"I say 'fate,'" I explained, "because this goes way beyond some simple behavioral quirks. There are some aspects of my life that I can't control, and they can only be explained by fate."
"Such as?"
"I'm named after a serial killer," I said. "John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three people in Chicago and buried most of them in the crawl space under his house."
"Your parents didn't name you after John Wayne Gacy," said Neblin. "Believe it or not, I specifically asked your mom about it."
"You did?"
"I'm smarter than I look," he said. "But you need to remember that one coincidental link to a serial killer is a not a destiny."
"My dad's name is Sam," I said. "That makes me the Son of Sam—a serial killer in New York who said his dog told him to kill."
"So you have coincidental links to two serial killers," he said. "That's a little odd, I admit, but I'm still not seeing a cosmic conspiracy against you."
"My last name is 'Cleaver,'" I said. "How many people do you know who are named after two serial killers and a murder weapon?"
Dr. Neblin shifted in his chair, tapping his pen against his paper. This, I knew, meant that he was trying to think. "John," he said after a moment, "I'd like to know what kinds of things scare you, specifically, so let's pull back and look at what you said earlier. What are some of your rules?"
"I told you about watching people," I said. "That's a big one.
I love watching people, but I know that if I watch one person ' for too long, I'll start to get too interested in them—I'll want to follow them, watch where they go, see who they talk to, and find out what makes them tick. A few years ago, I realized that I was actually stalking a' girl at school—literally following her around everywhere. That kind of thing can go too far in a hurry, so I made a rule: If I watch one person for too long, I then ignore them for a whole week."
Neblin nodded, but didn't interrupt. I was glad he didn't ask me the girl's name, because even talking about her like this felt like breaking my rule again.
"Then I have a rule about animals," I said. "You remember what I did to the gopher."
Neblin smiled nervously. "The gopher certainly doesn't."
His nervous jokes were getting lamer.
"That wasn't the only time," I said. "My dad used to set traps in our garden for gophers and moles and stuff, and my job every morning was to go out and check them and bash anything that wasn't dead yet with a shovel. When I was seven I started to cut them open, to see what they looked like on the inside, but after I started studying serial killers I stopped doing that. Have you heard about the MacDonald triad?"
"Three traits shared by ninety-five percent of serial killers," said Dr. Neblin. "Bed-wetting, pyromania, and animal cruelty.
You do, I admit, have all three."
"I discovered that when I was eight," I said. "What really got to me was not the fact that animal cruelty could predict violent behavior—it's that up until I read about it, I never thought that it was wrong. I was killing animals and taking them apart, and I had all the emotional reaction of a kid playing with Legos. It's like they weren't real to me—they were just toys to play with. Things."
"If you didn't feel that it was wrong," asked Dr. Neblin, "why did you stop?"
"Because that's when I first realized that I was different from other people," I said. "Here was something that I did all the time, and thought nothing of it, and it turns out the rest of the world thinks it's completely reprehensible. That's when I knew I needed to change, so I started making rules. The first one was; Don't mess with animals."
"Don't kill them?"
"Don't do anything to them," I said. "I won't have a pet, I won't pet a dog on the street, and I don't even like to go into a house where someone has an animal. I avoid any situation that might lead me back to doing something I know I shouldn't do."
Neblin looked at me for a moment. "Any others?" he asked.
"If I ever feel like hurting someone," I said, "I give them a compliment. If someone's really bugging me, until I hate them so much I start to imagine myself killing them, I say something nice and smile really big. It forces me to think nice thoughts instead of bad ones, and it usually makes them go away."