Took an education.

When he was readying to leave the hospital, Scetirious had been made to do exercises—as in, some form of ritual participation meant to further a skill. They told him he was not like other people and had some quite basic skills to work on: things like empathy, compassion, the rest. In addition, he had been used to accepting his delusions simply; uncritically; “Despite everything else, Mr Jackson,” they counseled him, “you might still have ended up murdering few if any people had your mind been geared to the more complex.”

Scetirious remembered it very vividly—in fact, it was the solace of his early years of detention, then the ruth of his laters, to at any time close his eyes and conjure the times he’d felt through.

We hesitate to jump from our narrative here to recount what is meant by that curious term, through. It was Scetirious’s coining, after in seriatim interrogations then psychoanalyses and finally pointed questions had only elicited from him lumps of ill-meaning, wretched, shapeless, impulverizable stones about nucleus too fine for his tools to excavate; he closed his eyes in the chair with the stained upholstery, the square-section bar frame that rolled right in below his shoulder-blades: he had contemplated this myriad times, and separately considered whole classes of words: colors, sounds, belly-feelings; numbers, then; and to be richer, vectors; contravariant tensors; he mused to disinterested shrinks the difficulty he had incidentally fallen upon (oblivious, in his serial killer’s way, to its being the central concern of a professional segment) of rendering the internal state of a man into words. “What’s hard, Doc,” he tried to explain, “is the difference in textures.” At any rate, prepositions were last to be tried, and among them he found this word, through, admirably suited. The psychoanalysts started as if at the sound of a sprung trap. They asked about his mother, about the brooch he’d made her in grade school—“Did you pin it on her yourself?”—asked about darts and tunnels and pets and what else had he a desire to be through? “Besides with all these questions?” Scetirious loved to countermand. But it was infinitely more complicated than that, as the shrinks, who knew he decapitated his victims rather than stab them, and who later encouraged him to develop complications, to multiply occasions with the best rhetoricians, should have divined.

What he remembered about the times he was through, was the steady-ramifying tree of complications each throughness brought. Of which, those who don’t murder are inclined to ignore that certain variables confound an otherwise simple act past reasonable vexation—and they thought he was a simplistic brute!

He took an education, though; far better, it’s fair to say, than he has ever taken a punishment. He learned up to recitation that the world is barely reducible; they’d made it a tick in him, even when events were laid about straight as a landing strip, to crawl along the asphalt edge and lay about the minute inconformities of nature.

Thus: Scetirious’s inclination was to say, he disliked or hated Baines. He felt it as earnestly as he had felt through before; but earnestness, as a fastness of murderous insanity, he’d learned to distrust, and no sooner recognized its walls then girdled it and put it to siege.