His father didn't like him to cry. "Shut him up," he said. Instead of doing what most mothers would do, rocking him back and forth and telling him to hush she taught him to shut up. She didn't respond to him when he cried, she only responded to him when he was quiet. He wanted her to come to him, to change his diaper to feed him so he learned to keep quiet. And he learned that his cries meant nothing. He felt like an insignificant human being. Later she would send him to bed when he wasn't tired because Daddy was and didn't want any kid up making noise, reinforcing the idea that his needs and wants meant nothing.
"I like the color gray," he said once.
"Gray, I always thought gray was such a boring color," she said.
"I like rock music," he said.
"Rock is nothing but noisy garbage," she said.
"I felt sad when Henry died," he said.
"Oh he was an old man anyway," she said, dismissing his grief.
"I cleaned my room," he said.
"You wonderful child," she said.
"I got an A in math," he said.
"Excellent," she said.
So he learned that his feelings, wants, and desires meant nothing and that only personal accomplishments did. And his father fished.
"I want to play soccer," he told her.
"Daddy doesn't like soccer," she said. "Why don't you go fishing with Daddy?" So he learned again that his wants, his desires didn't matter. They never let him sign up for soccer but he went fishing all the time.

He was as handsome as a movie star and as empty inside as air. He was an honor student and he once caught a ten pound bass which he hung on the wall of his bedroom. His father loved to fish.
As an adult he even had trouble speaking about emotional things. He couldn't very well articulate what he wanted to say. That's because he was already dead. He had died as a child. He was a model employee. "He was sort of quiet but he'd always be on time and without fail he was here everyday. Never missed a day in years," his boss said. "Hardworker too." Accomplishments were everything, money was everything. That was what his mother taught him. And it wasn't so much your character that mattered but that shiny red sports car outside.

With different parents, ones who let him play soccer and ones who didn't belittle his tastes, ones who didn't force him to go to bed when he wasn't tired or eat when he wasn't hungry the defect in his brain might have been corrected. The very young brain is highly adaptable after all. But by his twenties it was too late. That's when he met Karla.

He met her at a work party. She was the one who initiated the relationship. He didn't have relationships, he had sex. Sex was the one area in life where he could feel a few moments pleasure in a sea of deadness. But she refused to let go. First of all he was the handsomest guy she had ever seen. And second of all, he was the handsomest guy she had ever seen. She had come from a torn family herself and wanted things to be better now. She worked with plants, she liked beauty and sunshine. Flowers never snapped at you, they were never mean. Except for the beautiful rose, which had thorns. And the girl of glossy sunshine never saw a fault with him. She never saw past his beauty to the thorns.  If he was bland she didn't notice. If his words were stumbled and forced, his grin plastic, she didn't care. He'll be mine one day she thought, and he was. He liked that she liked him for him. He had never had anyone like anyone for him before. So he married her. But she was just as cardboard as his mother, only nicer. Once they visited an inner city ghetto.
"Look at this shit, this ugliness," he said as they walked together, shortly after he asked her to marry him.
"What this place could use is a few flowers," she said. She said nothing about the hobos begging for money. Instead she made a face and said, "They stink."
A part of his reptilian brain said, Maybe they would like a few bucks for a sandwich. Then he remembered how no one ever cared if he himself was hungry and forgot about it.
Even after they were married and he gambled away their money and even after the time she found a note from someone named Janet in his pocket, a note describing how much she loved her husband, she did not leave him.
"Promise me you'll never do it again," she said.
"I promise," he said. What did he care though? Promises meant nothing to him. His father once promised him a car if he got a B or above in chemistry once. When he got a B plus, there never was any car.
And he realized he loved Janet. He loved Janet most of all because she was real. Janet didn't gloss things over. Janet listened to him. She didn't ignore his desires or think that flowers and hugs could make things all better. When he told her his likes and dislikes she accepted them. She didn't tell him his thoughts were ugly or wrong like his wife and mother had. And when he was with Janet, his defective frontal lobe became excited, electric, alive. He talked and talked to Janet. He called her everyday, in secret. He talked and talked to her and she just listened.

Then one day his father wanted him to go fishing with him so he agreed. Why shouldn't he? He never said no to his father. He hadn't been allowed to. If he disagreed, he was beaten. So he learned to get along, a plastic grin worn on his face. He left his cell phone at home that day. And his wife found it. She found messages and texts from Janet. And she was angry. She didn't remember that he was mostly a dead man and that he was technically insane. She didn't notice that he had poor impulse control, that he gambled away two thousand dollars in one night. Because of the defective frontal lobe, he had little control over his desires. He was seriously broken. She was just angry because he had broken his promise. And so she confronted the sociopath. She yelled and she screamed.
"You're never going to see her again, I'll be sure of that this time. I'm not letting you out of my sight," she said.
He panicked when she said that. Janet was the only person in his life who made him feel alive. If he couldn't be with her he'd be dead inside again. In his confused mind he thought, it is better that she die rather than I. I do not want to be dead again. My wife will kill me so I must protect myself. It is self defense. And so he grabbed a pillow from the couch and pressed it over her nose and mouth until she was as dead as he had ever been.
When she died, he felt nothing and that surprised him. The surprise was fleeting though, his impulsive, defective brain often allowed feelings to appear for a few seconds and then as if the pathway to neurons had short fused itself, the surprise was gone. The pathway to sorrow and remorse was completely broken. There was no pathway to those neurons, which had completely burnt out by the time he was seven years old and a clone of his father in a fishing hat. He wasn't the one who had killed her. It was really someone like his father who had killed her, he saw himself as an extension of his father, like an arm or a leg.  He wanted to play soccer but it didn't matter. He would want what his father wanted, he would be his father. So he felt no remorse because he felt someone else killed his wife. Not him at all, but his father. That's why he took no personal responsibility. And besides, she threatened to take away the only person who ever made him feel real, and in essence it was like she threatened to kill him because he felt it she took away Janet he'd be dead again.  It was his father then too who removed her body from the house and dumped it in the same lake where he had fished.

In the end Janet betrayed him. She heard that he was under suspicion  for the murder of his wife. News was everywhere. She figured if he had lied about not being married, he could lie about other things too. Janet's betrayal killed him even more. He expected to be with the only person who made him feel real but she wanted nothing more from him. If he hadn't killed his wife, if he just divorced her and went to Janet, maybe things would have been OK for him. Maybe Janet would reawaken his brain and help him become a more real person.

But it was too late for that. So he appeared in court truly dead. He didn't cry and he showed no emotion. He had trouble articulating and even lying. The part of his brain that formed words was also dead. That and the fact that police eventually discovered her body...And the rest of the forensic evidence, led to the jury's conviction. Guilty. And so the man who was born dead inside was ordered to be physically put to death by legal injection. Who did he think of as he died. The mother who raised him to be a non-feeling human being, the wife who glossed over the truth,  pretending things were rosy, the father who demanded he behave just like him, or the lover who listened to him, who made him feel real but in the end betrayed him? It didn't matter, those with well functioning frontal lobes condemned him and ordered him to death by lethal injection. His partially dead brain died fully as he was injected with the poison and his eyes closed for the last time.