Approaching the Rubicon

Assurance that the biographical facts of Ryan's story were true provided no certainty that the bizarre story of a fifteen year term of imprisonment was also true. He could still be a 23 year old guy living with his parents and older brother, and still be lying through his keyboard about the pathological isolation he described. He could be inventing the weird story he was now telling, just as he admittedly invented the perfectly normal stories of his experiences of college life and gradual withdrawal from a somewhat stressful home life.

With no certain access to facts, I turned instead to opinion and presented what I knew to half a dozen or so shrinks in the extended family. I learned that storeys like the one at hand were very rare, but were not beyond belief. However, all of the pros warned me to stear clear of it. I think the underlying core of these opinions was that the chances were high that I could do no good, but also high that I could wind up wounded by any sort of attempted intervention.

And, while not excluding the possibility that Ryan was telling the truth, the general inclination was to assume it was a fantasy.

The strongest professional argument I heard was that the hardest part to believe involved the role of the father, Lars. The mother, Lorna, was depicted as a mad woman, but Lars was not seem mad. Nevertheless, acceptance of the story required acceptance of a pater familias well enough connected to the world to work at a paying mechanic's job still willing to passively permit his wife to suck the blood from his two sons over a fifteen year stretch of time. That seemed to strain credulity past the breaking point.

I was warned, too, about the psychopathology of impostors. Ryan might be displaying a variant of the "Munchhausen syndrome". One overhanging word was "sociopath."

A psychopath has no capacity to comprehend what other people are feeling or thinking in fact. They are cut off from reality. A sociopath, on the other hand, understands 'reality' well enough to use it. A sociopath has an effective understanding of others' feelings, and delights in manipulating that understanding in order to manipulate. The sociopath is indifferent to the pain he may cause by his ability to control. Ryan, it was suggested to me, might be spinning a wild, new yarn for no better purpose than the pleasure of tricking me into believing him.

By this time, however, I had been regularly chatting with Ryan for half a year or so, and practicing law for nearly have a century or so and was reasonably confident of my ability to sense deceit. And, -- what if in fact he were telling the truth. What if Ryan and his brother really were more or less enslaved?

I tried to ease my way into an intervention. I started by urging Ryan to declare, as a given, that he simply had to start going to the nearby town library once a week, and, while there, on his own, renting a Post Office box so he could have physical contact with the outside world without coming through his mother's mail slot. However, this idea turned out to be too daring for the boy to do. Further, as I didn't discover for a while, Ryan was a listener and a blogger, but not a reader of books. A library held no mystic vibrations he could hear.

Some more dramatic and decisive step had to be formulated and acted out.