Martin averted, pushing aside the ever fresh anger. “All of these subroutines and personalities are laid on a foundation that is older than spoken language and culture and society. Some parts of the foundation are older than man. The iceberg is long frozen before the snow falls on the tip.”
“So we may have to investigate further, below personalities and agents and talents, to find the source of a deviance.”
“Not often,” Martin said. “Most human mental illness is based on surface trauma. Even in people with neurotransmitter and other maladjustments, the deep structures of the brain function properly. Defects are more likely to occur in regions of the mind brain structure that are newer, in evolutionary terms. Less perfected, less weeded out. However, some inherited deep defects are so subtle that they haven’t affected breeding potential, at least in our species…Standard evolutionary processes won’t remove those.”
“If Emanuel’s deviance is below the surface, can you find it, study it, and correct it?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Martin said. “But as I said, such fundamental deviance is rare.”
“So is mass murder. Have you ever diagnosed and corrected a mass murderer?”
“It was never my job to do therapy, actually,” Martin said. “I’m a researcher more than a clinician. I’ve talked with therapists who used my theories and some of my techniques on people who have killed…But never mass murderers. To my knowledge, no court judgment in the last ten years has allowed a mass murderer to be therapied and released.” Raphkind law and order. No rest for the truly wicked; neither death or health shall be offered them.
Albigoni returned to the slate. “Your second book, The Borderlands of the Mind, uses a lot of quotes from various sources to describe what you call the Country of the Mind. Yet you say the Country is different for each of us. If it’s so different, how can we recognize it as a place?”
“By tapping the mind at a level where the contents and structures are similar in all of us. The truly personal upper layers of the mind are not directly accessible, not right now, at any rate. The lower layers have different qualities, but they can be understood if we pass them through our own deep interpreters. That’s what the triplex probe does, under controlled conditions. Our conditions will be less controlled without the interfacing computer.”
“I still do not understand what is meant by Country of the Mind.”
“It is a region, an unceasing and coherent dreamstate, built up from genetic engrams, pre verbal impressions and all the contents of our lives. It is the alphabet and foundation on which we base all of our thinking and language, all our symbologies. Every thought, every personal action, is reflected in this region. All of our myths and religious symbols are based upon its common contents. All routines and subroutines, all personalities and talents and agents, all mental structures, are reflected in its features and occupants, or are reflections of them.”
“It is truly a countryside?”
“Something like a countryside or city or some other environment.”
“With buildings and trees, and people, and animals?”
“Of sorts. Yes.”
Albigoni frowned. “Like memories of buildings, and so on?”
“Not exactly. There may be analogies between the Country and the external world, but the external objects we see are put through several filters, selected by the mind for usefulness as symbols, as part of an overall mental language. Most of that language is fixed before we are three years old.”
Albigoni nodded, apparently satisfied. Lascal listened without expression. “And by inspecting Emanuel’s Country, you can tell us what might have motivated him to murder my daughter and the others.”
“I hope to,” Martin said. “Nothing is certain.”
“Nothing is certain but grief,” Albigoni said. “Paul, show Dr. Burke our materials on Emanuel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Martin followed Lascal out of the study and into a small media studio next door. “Please sit down,” Lascal said, pointing to a smoothly upholstered reclining chair. The chair was surrounded by black sound rods like the bottom half of a bird cage. Two small projectors on a black plate directly before the chair swiveled soundlessly as he sat, searching for the proper position of his eyes.
“Mr. Albigoni knew most of what you explained already,” Lascal told him quietly as the equipment adjusted itself for the presentation. “He just wanted to hear it in your own words. Helps him to digest what he’s read and seen.”
“Of course,” Martin said, taking a sudden dislike to Lascal. Smoothly professional, devotedly selfless; Albigoni could ask for no more subservient a lackey.
The Emanuel Goldsmith multi-media show began with an interview conducted in 2025 on an early LitVid net. Caption floating in simulated gold letters before him (the hallmark of Albigoni’s reference library): First LitVid Appearance/Following Publication of Second Book of Poems “Never Knowing Snow” October 10 2025 LVD6 5656A. Lascal explained the chair’s custom controls and left Martin alone in the room.
A young and handsome Goldsmith appeared before him, clear smooth mahogany skin, thick black hair sitting perfectly on a high forehead, broad nose and thin upper lip thinly mustached lower lip protuberant between pout and sensual, large liquid black eyes with cream colored sclera, long thin neck and prominent chin; twenty five years old almost a child of the century; dressed in black wool highneck sweater left sleeve rolled to show strong arm period fashion the roll containing an ID com box satellite linked, replacing the cigarette pack of seventy years earlier; youthful pleasant smile easy mannerisms at ease before the interviewer. Discussing his work ambitions goals. Voice thin but pleasant words accented Newh Yhawk with intrusions of midwest. Well informed, Goldsmith impressed the female interviewer with his suave equanimity, considering the fiery opinions expressed in his book, opinions on Africa:
“Can never be my home. It is only a home where my ghost will go when I die. A few blacks still think of a homeland there; they hate me because I know that is impossible. No African wants us; we’re too white.”
and America:
“I tell my brothers and sisters the financial struggle is won but not the political and cultural, certainly not the spiritual. We still have coffee skin in a power structure of cream no coffee. Our war is interior in America. We will never be at ease, not until the day comes when no one asks us how it is to be black, and no one comments on the black experience.”
and poetry:
“Poetry is dead and buried in a world of growing LitVid and illiteracy, vidiocy I’ve heard it called. Being dead, poetry has enormous freedom; being ignored, it can blossom like a rose in a manure heap. Poetry is risen. Poetry is the messiah of literature but the angel has not yet told anybody it is risen.”
and on selling over a quarter of a million copies in hardcover of his second book of poems:
“Charming and destructive. I have to watch this closely. Can’t let it go to my head. I am just the one black man per generation given a chance to speak aloud. As for being a poet, we are so many now, around the world, so closely linked, that any small enthusiasm of the masses looms large and can support the poet, the artist, if his needs are modest, as mine are.”
Martin moved on to lit details, words spilling in and around, names dates teachers all largely irrelevant, even material he would have thought private and buried, an early agency psych evaluation 2021—too early to be reliable—done as a lark apparently showing Goldsmith a rock steady headstrong youth with well controlled but detectable delusions of grandeur even messiahhood. Jung: Messiah is always connected with inferiority complex. But no evidence of that here.