Firestarter(29)

"Your brother," Cap murmured, "sounds like a true prince among men."

"Better a small red place on the boy's hand than a child in the burn unit, wetpacked, with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body," Wanless said grimly.

"Better still to put the matches out of the child's reach."

"Can you put Charlene McGee's matches out of her reach?" Wanless asked.

Cap nodded slowly. "You have a point of a sort, but-"

"Ask yourself this, Captain Hollister: how must it have been for Andrew and Victoria McGee when this child was an infant? After they begin to make the necessary connection? The bottle is late. The baby cries. At the same time, one of the stuffed animals right there in the crib with her bursts into smoky flame. There is a mess in the diaper. The baby cries. A moment later the dirty clothes in the hamper begin to burn spontaneously. You have the records, Captain Hollister; you know how it was in that house. A fire extinguisher and a smoke detector in every single room. And once it was her hair, Captain Hollister; they came into her room and found her standing in her crib and screaming and her hair was on fire."

"Yes," Cap said, "it must have made them goddam nervous."

"So," Wanless said, "they toilet-trained her... and they fire-trained her."

"Fire-training," Cap mused.

"Which is only to say that, like my brother and his boy Freddy, they made a complex. You have quoted me that analogy, Captain Hollister, so let us examine it for a moment. What is toilet-training? It is making a complex, pure and simple." And suddenly astonishingly, the old man's voice climbed to a high, wavering treble, the voice of a woman scolding a baby. Cap looked on with disgusted astonishment.

"You bad baby!" Wanless cried. "Look what you've done! It's nasty, baby, see how nasty it is? It's nasty to do it in your pants! Do grown-ups do it in their pants? Do it on the pot, baby, on the pot."

"Please," Cap said, pained.

"It is the making of a complex," Wanless said. "Toilet-training is accomplished by focusing the child's attention on his own eliminatory processes in a way we would consider unhealthy if the object of fixation were something different. How strong is the complex inculcated in the child, you might ask? Richard Damon of the University of Washington asked himself this question and made an experiment to find out. He advertised for fifty student volunteers. He filled them up with water and soda and milk until they all badly needed to urinate. After a certain set time had passed, he told them they could go... if they went in their pants."

"That's disgusting!" Cap said loudly. He was shocked and sickened. That wasn't an experiment; it was an exercise in degeneracy.

"See how well the complex has set in your own psyche," Wanless said quietly. "You did not think it was so disgusting when you were twenty months old. Then, when you had to go, you went. You would have gone sitting on the pope's lap if someone had set you there and you had to go. The point of the Damon experiment, Captain Hollister, is this: most of them couldn't. They understood that the ordinary rules of behavior had been set aside, at least for the course of the experiment; they were each alone in quarters at least as private as the ordinary bathroom... but fully eighty-eight percent of them just couldn't. No matter how strong the physical need was, the complex instilled by their parents was stronger."

"This is nothing but pointless wandering," Cap said curtly.

"No, it isn't. I want you to consider the parallels between toilet-training and fire-training... and the one significant difference, which is the quantum leap between the urgency of accomplishing the former and the latter. If the child toilet-trains slowly, what are the consequences? Minor unpleasantness. His rooms smells if not constantly aired. The mamma is chained to her washing machine. The cleaners may have to be called in to shampoo the carpet after the job is finally done. At the very worst, the baby may have a constant diaper rash, and that will only happen if the baby's skin is very sensitive or if the mamma is a sloven about keeping him clean. But the consequences to a child who can make fire..."

His eyes glittered. The left side of his mouth sneered. "My estimation of the McGees as parents is very high," Wanless said. "Somehow they got her through it. I would imagine they began the job long before parents usually begin the toilet-training process; perhaps even before she was able to crawl. 'Baby mustn't! Baby hurt herself! No, no, no! Bad girl! Bad girl! Ba-ad girl!'"

"But your own computer suggests by its readouts that she is overcoming her complex, Captain Hollister. She is in an enviable position to do it. She is young, and the complex has not had a chance to set in a bed of years until it becomes like cement. And she has her father with her! Do you realize the significance of that simple fact? No, you do not. The father is the authority figure. He holds the psychic reins of every fixation in the female child. Oral, anal, genital; behind each, like a shadowy figure standing behind a curtain, is the father authority figure. To the girl-child he is Moses; the laws are his laws, handed down she knows not how, but his to enforce. He is perhaps the only person on earth who can remove this block. Our complexes, Captain Hollister, always give us the most agony and psychic distress when those who have inculcated them die and pass beyond argument... and mercy."

Cap glanced at his watch and saw that Wanless had been in here almost forty minutes. It felt like hours. "Are you almost done? I have another appointment-"