Before the evening lecture, with Felix at his lab, Rachel browsed the third-floor stacks and found the three books she’d wanted: Interviews with Violent Criminals, Criminal Sociopaths, and, The Criminally Deviant.
As she emerged from the stacks, she saw the man at a Xerox machine.
He peered up to see her as he snatched sheets of paper the machine spat into the paper tray.
He lifted the top of the copier and yanked a book from under it, tucked the book under his arm.
Rachel walked over to him.
“Research?” she said.
He nodded, secreted the book in a canvas bag at his feet. She’d startled him; his breath was short. She made him nervous. Is that why he was so quiet? Was he not confident and assured after all, but shy? She could not figure him out.
“You too?” he said. He nodded at her books in her arms.
“Killing time in the stacks before a lecture.”
“An art lost to the iPhone. What do you have there?”
“It’s of no real consequence to anyone but me,” she said in a rush of sarcasm that immediately made her blush.
The man did not seem to notice Rachel had parroted his earlier words.
“And to the professor who’ll read your paper, I imagine,” the man said. He cocked his head at the books. “Why the interest in violence?”
“It’s private,” Rachel said. She felt awkward now. The reason she’d picked these books was private, painful. “Why your interest in the criminally deviant?”
“My interests aren’t in the criminally deviant.”
“I got a glimpse of your book on the street and—”
“I’m interested in the sexually ‘deviant.’”
“Oh,” Rachel said.
“Your look is exactly why I didn’t share earlier, despite your prying.”
“I didn’t pry.”
“Of course you pried. Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought him back. Or her. It underpins my research. Curiosity. And lies. Denial of self truths. But. You don’t have to lie to me. I’m a stranger. Lie to family and friends, but no need to lie to me because I don’t care what your bent is. The premise of my research is that we lie about what we are most curious about, sexually and otherwise, to friends and families, ourselves. We let shame or fear or judgment keep us from being honest about our true nature. Our fantasies. Our desires. We don’t dare share them. We cling to them so tightly out of fear of judgment that they become anchors that prevent us from being our truest selves.”
Rachel’s blood warmed, both with uneasiness and a certain freedom. No one had ever spoken to her like this. She would have been repulsed if this man had pressed these views on her, but he hadn’t. She’d prodded him.
“In fact” he said, “what is called deviant is being revealed more and more as the norm. What adults do for pleasure that has long been labeled taboo is far more ‘normal’ than the prurient suppose.”
Rachel did have certain . . . scenarios she’d never shared with Felix. With anyone. She worried what he’d think, that he’d see her differently. So she forgot about them. Tried to.
“This liberation is due to what I call ready exposure to the possible. As a boy I had to hunt for my father’s Hustler issues to sneak a glimpse of what life offered. Now? Now, you can type in any taste and up comes video of whatever you want to see, acted out for your pleasure. No generation before has had that . . . luxury. Still, we view in private, ashamed. I bet you haven’t shared your deepest desire with your boyfriend out of fear of it driving wedge between you, convinced yourself your desires aren’t worth upsetting the status quo. Guess what? He’s doing the same. Keeping his secrets secret. Not sharing. Imagine if you two both just shared.”
Rachel swallowed. The stranger’s candor teased her curiosity, as if she were walking down a hotel hallway and heard certain hedonistic sounds as she passed an open door. Did she walk past without a peek? Could she resist?
How could she fault him for telling her what she had asked to hear? Yet how could she have expected to hear this? No one spoke this way to strangers. The man was right. Once or twice, out of curiosity, Rachel had searched online to sate her curiosity, and not been disappointed. Fueled was more like it.
Again, as she had before, she had the sensation she was about to step out onto a high wire.
The stranger stuffed his printed copies into the canvas bag then slung the bag over his shoulder. “I’ve wasted your time,” he said. “Good luck with your research. Fascinating in its own right.”
“I’ll see you around,” Rachel said.
“I doubt that. I stopped in town on a whim. Though I may stay for dinner. Is there a place to get a bite, besides the coffee shop, in town?”
“The Wild Panther Inn,” Rachel said. “They have a pub thing going on. Great comfort food. I was going to grab a bite there later.” She actually had no such plans, but she was hungry for one of their burgers now that she thought about it.
“Join me,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“I understand.” He started to walk away again.
“I have a lecture I need to go to later,” Rachel said.
“I understand.”
“Maybe,” she said, “you could give me a lift? They’ve got great burgers and I’m starving. I’ll grab one to go, and shuttle back up.”