THE CLEANSER
By Peter B. Wylie
By the time he was six or seven he knew was special. His parents were gone and the long series of foster parents had had only an inkling of his superior intelligence. But he didn't need them to tell him he was very, very smart. No more than he needed his overworked teachers to tell him. Besides, he was never in one school long enough for them to get to know him.
Maybe the teachers could see how fast he mastered reading and arithmetic and how bored he got waiting for the dullards to catch up. But those teachers, many of them dullards themselves, could not see his pantoscopic view of the world. He was a person of ideas and concepts that few of them would understand regardless of his gift at explaining things. And he enjoyed hiding those gifts from them. One day they would know. He was a patient boy.
Unlike so many children of superior intellect, he was not introverted and socially clumsy. Quite the opposite, he was outgoing and charming. People liked him. He won them over whether they were old or young, privileged or poor, smart or stupid. The flaw, even though he did not see it as one, was that he did not care one whit about these people. If something awful happened to them, he could appear to be devastated or sorry or empathic or whatever other appropriate emotion ought to be conveyed. But deep inside, he did not care. They were nothing to him. Eventually, He would be diagnosed as a sociopath.
But that day, if it ever came, was decades away. What mattered now, and as the years rolled along, was that his hollowness of feelings for people gave him huge advantage over them. It gave him freedom. He could do whatever he wanted to them – steal from them, humiliate them, even kill them – and never feel one lick of remorse or guilt or sorrow. He had been born without a conscience. And like a child with cerebral palsy who would never walk, he would never be cured. Nor did he want to be.
What he was born with was an acute sense of survival. It was as if a furnace fueled by an inexhaustible supply of fear burned within him. A fear of being found out, of being apprehended and punished for his bad acts.
Now and again, when he was on the verge of being caught, the fear would roar near out of control. He hated those times. For the most part, however, the fear comforted him. It helped free him to wreak his havoc. No. Havoc was the wrong word. Havoc implied a stupid sort of recklessness – like a predator with a reptile brain and no plan. And by the age of ten he had a plan. Not yet fully formed. But a plan that would become a grand design. He would become a "cleanser."
Unlike so many violent sociopaths, as a child the Cleanser had no interest in hurting animals. Quite the opposite, he admired them, particularly the predators. More than once he was transfixed by a cat that would crouch in such stillness that its prey could not distinguish it from a tree or a bush or a lawn chair. And then launch itself through the air to snag the unwitting sparrow in midflight. The cat was not a creature to be tortured and killed. It was something to study, to emulate.
People were a different matter. They would always be his prey. He learned quickly he could cause them great pain whenever he wanted. Once he witnessed a terrible accident at a street corner near his elementary school. A huge tractor trailer had t-boned a compact car. The occupant or occupants of the car were clearly dead. He calmly walked to a payphone, inserted a quarter, and dialed the number of the principal's office. Disguising his voice (he was good at that), he said, "I think one of our teachers was just killed on the corner of Trumbull and Elm. Someone should come." Then he hung up and walked home.
The next day the principal gathered all the students in the assembly hall. He talked about what a cruel joke one of them had played with the anonymous call. How much needless worry and disruption the student's thoughtless act had caused. As the Cleanser listened to the frumpy man drone on, he saddened his eyes, but inside he chortled. He even considered admitting to the act to see if he could convince the principal he truly believed he had seen a teacher in the crushed car, that he had meant well, but then had panicked. But why take the risk of failure when he already possessed such consummate confidence in his persuasive skills?
