Show of Evil

Woodward didn't respond to Vail's comment; he kept talking as if he was afraid he would lose his train of thought.

'What do you remember about the mind, Mr Vail? About the superego and the id?'

'Not much. The superego is like the monitor of our morals. The id is where all those repressed desires go.'

'Very succinct and relatively accurate, sir. When the wall between the id and the superego breaks down, the repressed desires become normal. Suddenly the idea of murder becomes normal. The mind is disordered - that's the disease - murder is just a symptom. In a manner of speaking, Roy was Aaron's id. Aaron repressed everything, Roy repressed nothing. If Aaron hated someone, Roy killed them.'

'A very convenient arrangement when you think about it,' said Vail.

'It's meant to be. That's one of the reasons human beings create other personalities, the pain becomes unbearable so they invent something to alleviate it. Look, Mr Vail -'

'Call me Martin, please.'

'Martin, I've been Aaron Stampler's shrink, confessor, friend, doctor - his only companion - for the last eight years. He was a classic mess when I came on board. Phobia, disassociation, my God, sir, Aaron had them all! He feared the dark, hated authority, distrusted his elders, dismissed his peers, was sexually confused.' Woodward stopped and shook his head. 'Did you ever hear him talk about what he called the hole, the coal mine his father forced him into?'

Vail nodded. 'The first time I ever interviewed him. Shaft number five, I'll never forget it. Creepy, crawling critters and demons.'

'What was that?'

'Creepy, crawling critters and demons. That's what he told me was waiting for him at the bottom of the shaft. That I do remember quite vividly.'

'That hole might very well be the symbol for everything in life that he dreaded. The dwelling place of his disobedient dreams. You see, when you look at Aaron, you see a madman. When I look at him, I see a person with a disease. And from the very first day I arrived, I regarded him as curable.'

Vail looked at him incredulously.

'Why do you find that hard to believe? You saved his life.'

'Couldn't let them kill the good guy just to get to the bad guy, Doctor.'

'Touche,' Woodward said with a laugh. Then his mood immediately became serious again. 'In point of fact, my entire professional attitude changed because of Aaron Stampler. The belief that mental illness is a disease of the mind that can be treated with talk therapy was losing credibility when I started working with him. The new thing, the new kid on the block, was biological psychiatry.'

'That's a mouthful,' Vail said, just to keep his hand in.

'Well, you know what they say, we in the medical profession can't say hello in less than five syllables.'

'And lawyers can't pronounce anything with more than one.'

'Ha! Very good, sir, very good, indeed.'

'You were talking about biological psychiatry.'

'Yes. It theorizes that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, that it can be medicated. So you had — still have - polarized viewpoints. Cure by talk or cure by pills. I was of the old school, a talker - old habits die hard, as they say - but I decided to go into the Stampler case with an open mind, to try everything and anything.'

Woodward waved his arms around, clicked off numbers on his fingers, closed his eyes, lifted his eyebrows as he rambled on.

'The list seemed endless at times. Thorazine, Prozac, Xanax, Valium, Zoloft, Halcion. We have bezodiazepines, which are addictive, and Haldol to treat hallucinations and delusions. There are antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, and I tried them all, every damn one that I felt was applicable. I tried behavioural therapy, recreational therapy, occupational therapy. I tried shock treatments…'

He stopped and lit his pipe again, each draw making a gurgling noise, and blew the smoke towards the blue sky.

'And I spent two hours a day, five days a week, for eight years with Aaron. Nobody, sir, nobody knows him as I do.'

Woodward began talking intimately about Aaron Stampler, a rambling discourse that brought back, in a rush, details that Vail had forgot. Woodward described Stampler as a misplaced child who had grown into a gifted but frustrated young intellectual, his accomplishments scorned