John Burley - The Absence of Mercy

It had. Something else had taken the place of those vacant stares. And the question before her was, What now? She asked herself whether she should confront him, and if so, how. Should he be punished? Perhaps punishment was too mild a response. Should he be hospitalized? What does a parent, or a physician for that matter, do with a… with a sociopath? For that was what she was dealing with here, wasn’t it? Normal people do not nail animals inside of a Tupperware container to watch them die. What’s more, normal people do not do something like that and just walk away when it’s over without shame or guilt, without hiding the evidence.

She allowed the analytical part of her brain to work it through. Medical school had provided her with enough basic knowledge of psychiatry to know that sociopaths—the more correct term these days was antisocial personality disorder—are essentially unaffected by all attempts at treatment. The fundamental problem was that they lacked the basic human ability to identify with others. They were unable to mentally place themselves in the position of another creature, be that a person or an animal. It wasn’t that they necessarily didn’t understand right from wrong; it was simply that they lacked the ability to care. Eating an apple and torturing an animal carried with them the same level of unrest within the conscience: none. In fact, it was as if the conscience—the ability to care about right and wrong—were anatomically absent from the brain. The same was true for the absence of mercy—not because mercy was something such individuals chose to withhold, but because it was a faculty they simply did not possess. The condition couldn’t be medicated away or repaired by psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, any more than those treatments might be expected to regenerate an absent arm or leg in an amputee. Over the centuries, medical treatment had become quite adept at fixing parts of the body that were broken: a shattered bone, or even a shattered mind; but it had never been very good at creating something, especially something as amorphous as a conscience, in situations where it never existed in the first place.

Likewise, from a rational point of view, the idea of punishing her child for this atrocity seemed somewhat pointless. Perhaps punishment would at least teach him that every action has its consequences. But if he had no ability to appreciate that the action was wrong, reprimand was unlikely to keep it from happening again.

What other options did that leave? Sending her son somewhere to be locked away? Following him around every moment of every day to ensure that this sort of thing—or worse—never happened again? Impossible. She sat in the grass, legs crossed in front of her and arms wrapped protectively around her knees. She sat there for a long time, some ten yards from the dead wood rat in its plastic cell, and searched herself for an answer. It wasn’t a situation she’d ever imagined encountering, and now that it was here she had no idea what to do with it. She could still smell the stench of the thing: its furry body bloated and rotting in the sun, tiny feet torn apart and matted with blood from useless attempts to claw its way out. She felt another hitch in her stomach and turned to the side to retch once again. This time nothing came. She had emptied herself completely.

She wiped her mouth with the back of one dirt-grimed hand and stared at the container nailed to the board with its respective cloud of flies. The sight of it repulsed her, made her want to distance herself from it as much as possible. And yet, she realized now that it was also a part of her. She owned it as much as her son did, for wasn’t there an inseparable connection between mother and child? From the moment of conception, the two are linked by body and blood, and that visceral intimacy continues well beyond childbirth. It becomes a part of who you are, as indissoluble as the color of your skin or the tempo of your heart. She was vaguely aware that it was somehow different for fathers, who seemed to be able to disconnect themselves at times from the lives of their children, or at least to compartmentalize their thoughts and feelings in accordance with their various duties and responsibilities. She’d never been able to accomplish that degree of mental separation. She was a mother above all else, and for better or worse, she felt inherently tied to the lives of her children. She had difficulty describing it any more clearly than that, but understood it perfectly and without reservation. And what it meant was that the thing in the container was hers as much as it was Thomas’s. And now she was responsible for taking care of it.

She got up, crossed the yard, entered the house, and retrieved a pair of latex exam gloves from the modest supply of medical equipment she kept on the upper shelf of her bedroom closet. She wished for a mask to cover her mouth and nose, but lacking that, she grabbed a bottle of Vicks from the bathroom medicine cabinet and smeared a generous amount of the vaporizing gel on the skin between her upper lip and nose, then covered her lower face with a handkerchief that she knotted behind her head. She returned to the shed and grabbed two large, black heavy-duty garbage bags that Ben kept for the disposal of raked leaves and other yard debris. Then, quickly, before she could think about it further, she walked around to the rear of the shed, snatched the contraption off the ground—it was heavier than she’d anticipated, although she preferred not to think about why—and tossed it into the open bag. Angry flies zipped around her head, but she did not pause this time to swat them away. Instead, she wound the opening of the bag around itself several times, tied it with an overhand knot, dropped this bag into the next with her discarded gloves, and repeated the process.

She walked with her ( What was it? Discovery? Prize? Package of shame? ) to the Saab parked in the driveway out front, popped the trunk, lowered the thing in, and slammed the lid closed again against the smell that still seemed to permeate through the tightly bound, double-bagged plastic cocoon. She barely remembered the twenty-minute drive to the local dump, barely remembered tossing it into the gaping mouth of excavated earth, and barely remembered standing there for a moment, watching it from above. She did recall, all too well, that after a few watchful moments, the bag appeared to move, just slightly, as if she had been mistaken and the thing inside was not quite dead yet. That had been enough for her. She turned quickly, showing it her back, and drove home in a cold sweat that clung to her body for the remainder of the day, even after a hot shower and fresh clothes. Weeks later, despite all of her efforts to eradicate the smell, the car still seemed to stink of the thing, although Ben never took notice. Perhaps it was only an olfactory memory. If so, she owned that, too.

The next time she saw Thomas, she said nothing about the incident. In fact, she found herself avoiding him. She wondered whether he’d gone looking for the animal, found it missing, and had realized she must’ve discovered it. She also wondered if he cared, and she imagined that, most likely, he did not.

A week later, she encountered Thomas alone in his room, lying on his bed and listening to music on his headphones. The bedroom door had been closed. Susan was carrying a basket of laundry in her arms. She rested the basket on one thigh, knocked lightly on the door, and when there was no answer, opened the door and entered the bedroom, assuming it was vacant.

When she saw that he was there, she paused in the doorway, not wanting to go farther inside, not wanting to be alone with him, even for the few seconds it would take to leave the clothes on his dresser. More than the encounter itself, she was disturbed by the realization that she was so uncomfortable in his presence. No matter what he has done, she reasoned with herself, I am still his mother . That role hadn’t ended that day behind the tool shed, and although her discovery had forced her to see her son as something different from what she’d previously perceived him to be, the basic dynamic of their relationship hadn’t changed. Had it? No, she decided. He was still her child, after all, and she had an obligation to look after him. How to fulfill that duty under the current circumstances was something she had yet to figure out, but the responsibility was there, the same as if he’d been born with cerebral palsy or mental retardation.