I know, of course, the latest research suggesting evil originates in a particular part of the brain. Near the hippocampus, some say, beneath the memory center, in the old lizard part of the mind. In a neurological space where everything we pretend to be, ail our mores, disappear like stray thoughts into the abyss. Where the whisperings of the neocortex no longer matter and the blood impulses take over. But how does this happen? By what mechanisms? Under which conditions? Such questions are at the heart of every criminal case, I suspect, if not everything we do, and they were on my mind then, as I went once again to the Correctional Facility, to the little room with the plastic chairs and the panic button on the wall. I enjoyed my work. Though my role was a subversive one in many ways, and there were quite a few who did not like me—the prosecutors, the cops, the jailers—I enjoyed it nonetheless. Like all work, it was a form of self-exploration, but at the same time it gave me refuge from my self, and refuge, too, from my personal life, from certain things looming on the horizon of which I was aware—but there was a part of me (as there often is, I suppose) that did not want to acknowledge such concerns.
