drones on.
His name is Jones—his professional name, that is—and he was trained as a physician—a neurologist, in fact—so he knows every nerve in the human body. Early on, even as a boy, he was fascinated by the phenomenon of pain. What was it? How did it register in the brain? Could the brain be chemically influenced to block the perception of pain, and if so, did pain exist independent of the perception?
Somewhat similar to the old conundrum about a tree falling in the forest with no one present to hear it—if pain occurred and the brain did not perceive it, was it still pain? In any case, his early work all involved the reduction or elimination of pain; noble effort, truly, but as he continued his research, he could not help but notice that, on the visceral as opposed to the intellectual level, he was likewise interested in the infliction of pain.
He first observed in a sexual manifestation (as is so often the case, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Daniels?) that he began to take pleasure from pain. Not his own, of course, but other people’s. At first, he found willing participants among the submissive, masochistic community, women who found that the endorphin release triggered by mild to moderate pain allowed or enhanced orgasmic pleasure. This was the perfect symbiotic relationship, as the infliction of said pain produced intense physical sensations for him.
Boone feels the van take a sharp right.
Alas, these sensations, similar to drug or alcohol use, were subject to a similar effect of diminishing returns; it would take a higher and higher degree of pain to produce an ever-lessening, unsatisfactory result, and he soon ran out of partners willing to endure that level of suffering. He turned to prostitutes, of course—fortunately there are any number of brothels, especially in Europe, that specialize in sadism—and this proved satisfactory for several years until his addiction required ever-increasing dosages and he became unwelcome at even the most tolerant of establishments. He found the answer in Asia and Africa for some time, where the desperation of poverty provided subjects for sale, but, alas, one is not made of money.
Boone feels the rattle of an unpaved road beneath him. Wherever they’re going, they must be nearly there, and he feels real fear, feels himself start to tremble.
It therefore became necessary to make his avocation a vocation, if Mr. Daniels would forgive the cliché, and he was pleasantly surprised to find a large number of clients eager, in fact, to retain his services at a more than reasonable fee.
It was the perfect match of personality to profession, of expertise to exigency. It has provided him with moderate wealth, material comfort, international travel, and pure physical pleasure beyond the imagination of those bound by the strictures of mundane morality. That is the reward, Mr. Daniels, for those rare individuals willing to confront and acknowledge their true natures and live their lives based on that hard-acquired self-realization. Once he’d endured the agonies of self-hatred and recrimination, he fairly burst into the rarefied aether of pure action.
He goes on and on.
War stories.
The rebel soldiers in the Congo, the diamond dealers in Burkina Faso, the Communist nun in Guatemala, the kidnappers in Columbia, the female student in Argentina whose cries for mercy produced . . .
The van slows down and comes to a stop.
“Ah, well. Now the drug cartels . . . the drug cartels are a boon to business. A guarantee of full employment, if you will. Their conflicts, rivalries, power struggles—the sheer intensity and duration of their hatreds, the uninformed barbarism of their rough-hewn viciousness—produce a demand for pain that is apparently limitless. It is a seller’s market.
“The geologist, Mr. Schering, was a disappointment. A simple ‘hit,’ as they called it, for it had to be disguised as something else, as you know, Mr. Daniels.
“But Mr. Blasingame . . . Ahhhhh! The bones in the foot, as perhaps you know, are keenly sensitive . . . acutely, shall we say, sensitive to pain . . . and the application of a simple blunt-force object such as a hammer produced an impressive reaction. Snapping his digits was a second-act amusement, a superfluous frisson when you consider the denouement, the sawing off of his hands without benefit of anesthesia. A bit Sharia law, admittedly, but it’s what the Mexicans wanted: sending a message, pour encourager les autres sort of thing. The look of sheer incredulity on his face was delightful.
“There are, you know, some people in this world of