Sociopath

by Patric Gagne

Social media confirms my existence as a happy mommy and loving partner whose posts are borderline narcissistic.

I’m highly manipulative. I don’t care what other people think. I’m not interested in morals. I’m not interested, period.

You, too, could be one of the estimated fifteen million people in America believed to be sociopaths.

Most of the time, I felt nothing. So I did “bad” things to make the nothingness go away. It was like a compulsion.

I would have described this compulsion as a pressure, a sort of tension building in my head.

I didn’t understand that the human brain has evolved to function empathically, or that the stress of living without natural access to feeling is believed to be one of the causes of compulsive acts of violence and destructive behavior.

stress associated with inner conflict is believed to subconsciously compel sociopaths to behave destructively.

It was luck that I was born into a world where I would be afforded almost every privilege imaginable.

I was sorry. But I was sorry I had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because I had hurt anyone.

I didn’t want to hurt her. At the same time, I knew it would make me relax.

I was prepared to “accidentally” shove both Syd and her sister down the stairs, if needed.

I rubbed my feet together underneath the blankets like a cricket.

Telling the truth about these uncertainties sounded like a good idea in theory, but in practice I found it often made things worse. I could never tell what information was going to cause a negative reaction.

I was emotionally disconnected but also stressed and somewhat disoriented. It was like I was losing my mind, and I just wanted to be alone.

I knew that I never wanted to see her again. I figured this message should have been clear after I locked her outside my house in the dead of night. But evidently I needed to send a more direct message.

We carried pencil boxes back then. Mine was pink with Hello Kitty characters and full of sharpened yellow #2s. I grabbed one, stood up, and jammed it into the side of her head.

But now—with that one violent act—all traces of pressure were eradicated. Not just gone but replaced by a deep sense of peace.

Then she looked at me as if I was a stranger. It paralyzed me, that look.

Suddenly, I was furious with myself for telling the truth. It hadn’t helped anyone “understand.” If anything, it had made everyone more confused, including me.

I crawled into bed and wished I had someone I could hurt, so I could feel the way I did after stabbing Syd.

“Be sorry!” I hissed. I continued to claw at my skin and clench my jaw, willing remorse with all my might.

The smell of chocolate cakes was so strong and sweet, just like my mom.

He didn’t specifically explain why, but his tone reminded me of when Dad would insist on covering our eyes during “sexy” parts of movies.

“The men in this prison?” Bobby added. “I’d say eighty percent are sociopaths.” It was the first time I’d heard the word. “Oh,” I said again. “What’s a sociopath?”

I gazed at the inmates below. There had to be hundreds of men there. That the only thing separating them from us were five middle-aged guards positively blew my mind.

frustrating. I may as well just lie, too, then, I thought more than once, since I get in trouble either way.

I’d been told that ferrets were unpopular pets because of their odor, but I loved the way Baby smelled. Her earthy scent reminded me of books in the public library.

Then I scooped up the ferret and dropped her into my knapsack. Baby sprawled into a long stretch. “You ready?” I asked her. “Let’s go!”

The perennial county-fair favorite is a spinning ride that offers no seat belts or even seats. Riders are pinned to the wall through centrifugal force.

All around me the home was pulsing, aghast at having been violated, yet I was calm in its center, at peace and in control.

I was like a blond, ferret-toting Wednesday Addams, leisurely repelling everyone in my path.

He was great at things like math and music, but he had a learning disability that made it difficult for him to interpret letters. He’d been assigned a special instructor who worked with him until he got better at it.

Some feelings came naturally to me, like anger and happiness. But other emotions weren’t so easy. Empathy and guilt, embarrassment and jealousy were like a language I couldn’t speak or understand.

What this teacher was doing was wrong. She was hurting a kid using emotion. Worse, she was enjoying it.

It was the first time I realized that fear couldn’t be used against me. It wasn’t that I was immune to it, per se, just that mine was muted. I understood this wasn’t the case for most kids. While my classmates lived in constant terror of Mrs. Ravenel, I was never intimidated by her antics.

I was content to follow my own rules and live with impunity.

I hated the beach. I hoped we wouldn’t be there long. The last time we’d gone, a stranger had come up to me and exposed his penis while everyone else was swimming.

Remembering Ice Castles, I’d pretended to be blind and acted disoriented until he seemed genuinely disturbed and wandered away.

What separates someone like me from someone like them?

It was the claustrophobia that arose anytime I became aware I wasn’t feeling what others expected me to be feeling.

Her body, once delightful and spirited, now seemed bereft of meaning. It was like an old item of clothing that had been left behind, or one of the millions of empty seashells scattered on the beach. I felt strangely calm about it.

You can do anything you want, said the voice in my head.

I was keenly and eerily alert. I had a serious problem that needed an immediate solution.

Enough was enough. I was done with it. Bad behavior, good behavior, honesty, lies; none of it mattered. Everything got me in trouble.

Blood pumped fiercely through my veins as I walked down the hall. It galvanized me. I had loved the confrontation.

“I’m not bad,” Jessica Rabbit says. “I’m just drawn that way.” I could relate. I, too, was just drawn that way.

If I can’t get the pressure under control, what will happen next?

It was a freedom unlike any other. In an instant all the pressure was gone. In its place I felt calm. I felt high. And this time, no one was bleeding.

The girls started banging on the door and screaming. I listened to them with detached interest.

The juxtaposition between the intense peace in which I’d only just been immersed and the messy scene unraveling in the hallway rendered me uncharacteristically careless.