“Colin wanted me to understand something about the things he felt. You heard him say that he was glad when he killed Leikman. That’s not quite correct. By then the consequences of the act were moving in on him. He only glimpsed the unconscious relief that rose to the surface later. He felt something else: the residue of the sick thrill he’d had at the prospect of killing a man. The fight took less than two minutes, as he reconstructed it. When he saw that the one sure escape from the consequences of hitting Leikman was in killing him, the thrill, the morbid, twisted thrill, was in him, like that, as fast as the thought. He wanted me to understand that. It was the key to his despair. He killed Leikman because it would satisfy him, no matter what he could see intellectually about the meaning or the penalties for doing murder. He made me understand that he knew in advance that killing Leikman would be difficult, that he would have to hit him time after time, literally beat the life out of him, and that the result would be the horrible scene that you found—remember, Colin looked at it, too. But before, while the fight was still on, while he was in the act of murder, he wouldn’t let himself think of all that. If anything, running away from the thought made him act faster and more decisively.

“It was the logical extension, he said, of the homosexual acts. After the experience in California, he knew all there was to know about homosexual ‘love.’ The anticipatory thrill—the sick thrill, he called it again and again—overrode every deliberative, intellectual consideration, every image of it he could—or wanted to—call up in advance. It couldn’t stop him. I asked him once, only once, if there weren’t some emotional satisfaction in relating to another human being. He said no. It was a sordid, furtive negotiation, an exercise in animalism, thoroughly devoid of feeling. And he believed that all homosexuals really knew it. Still, the anticipation, the sick thrill—a rare, supreme kind of pleasure, he called it, too—drove him on. There was pleasure, pure pleasure, in doing the thing he hated most.”

Leland asked, “Would you believe me if I said that I don’t know if I understand that? I just don’t know.”