Intensity

People are usually looking for infants to mold in their own image. But I was such a beautiful boy, Chyna, an almost ethereally beautiful boy. Can you believe that?"
        "Yes."
        "People want beautiful children. Beautiful children with nice smiles. I was sweet-tempered and charming. By then I'd learned to hide better among all you hypocrites. I'd never again be caught with a bloody kitten or a dead grandmother."
        "But who… who would adopt you after what you did?"
        "What I did was expunged from my record, of course. I was just the littlest boy, after all. Chyna, you wouldn't expect my whole life to be ruined just because of one mistake? Psychiatrists and social workers were the grease in my wheels, and I will always be beholden to them for their sweet, earnest desire to believe."
        "Your adoptive parents didn't know?"
        "They knew that I'd been traumatized by the death of my parents in a fire, that the trauma had led to counseling, and that I needed to be watched for signs of depression. They wanted so badly to make my life better, to prevent depression from ever touching me again."
        "What happened to them?"
        "We lived there in Chicago two years, and then we moved here to Oregon. I let them live for quite a while, and I let them pretend to love me. Why not? They enjoyed their delusions so much. But then, after I graduated from college, I was twenty years old and needed more money than I had, so there had to be another dreadful accident, another fire in the night. But it was eleven long years since the fire that took my real mom and dad, and half a continent away. No social workers had seen me in years, and there were no files about my horrible mistake with Grandma, so no connections were ever made."
        They sat in silence.
        After a while he tapped the plate in front of her. "Eat, eat," he cajoled. "I'll be eating at a diner myself. Sorry I can't keep you company."
        "I believe you," she said.
        "What?"
        "That you were never abused."
        "Though that runs against everything you've been taught. Good girl, Chyna. You know the truth when you hear it. Maybe there's hope for you yet."
        "There's no understanding you," she said, though she was talking more to herself than to him.
        "Of course there is. I'm just in touch with my reptilian nature, Chyna. It's in all of us. We all evolved from that slimy, legged fish that first crawled out of the sea. The reptile consciousness… it's still in all of us, but most of you struggle so hard to hide it from yourselves, to convince yourselves that you're something cleaner and better than what you really are. The irony is, if you'd just for once acknowledge your reptile nature, you'd find the freedom and the happiness that you're all so frantic to achieve and never do."
        He tapped the plate again, and then the glass of water. He got up and tucked his chair under the table.
        "That conversation wasn't quite as you expected, was it, Chyna?"
        "No."
        "You were expecting me to equivocate, to whine on about being a victim, to indulge in elaborately structured self-delusions, to spit up some tale of warping incest. You wanted to believe your clever probing might expose a secret religious fanaticism, bring revelations that I hear godly voices in my head. You didn't expect it to be this straightforward. This honest ."
        He went to the door between the kitchen and the living room, and then turned to look at her. "I'm not unique, Chyna. The world is filled with the likes of me-most are just less free. You know where I think a lot of my type wind up?"
        In spite of herself, she asked, "Where?"
        "In politics. Imagine having the power to start wars, Chyna. How gratifying that would be. Of course, in public life, one would generally have to forgo the pleasure of getting right down in the wet of it, hands dirty with all the wonderful fluids. One would have to be satisfied with the thrill of sending thousands to their deaths, remote destruction. But I believe I could adapt to that. And there would always be photos from the war zone, reports, all as graphic as one requested. And never a danger of apprehension . More amazing-they build monuments to you. You can bomb a small country into oblivion, and dinners are given in your honor. You can kill thirty-four children in a religious community, crush them with tanks, burn them alive, claim they