By the time he was six or seven he knew he was special. His parents were gone and the long series of foster parents had had only an inkling of his superior intelligence. But he didn’t need them to tell him he was very, very smart. No more than he needed his overworked teachers to tell him. Besides, he was never in one school long enough for them to get to know him.

Maybe the teachers could see how fast he mastered reading and arithmetic and how bored he got waiting for the dullards to catch up. But those teachers, many of them dullards themselves, could not see his pantoscopic view of the world. He was a person of ideas and concepts that few of them would understand regardless of his gift at explaining things. And he enjoyed hiding those gifts from them. One day they would know. He was a patient boy.

Unlike so many children of superior intellect, he was not introverted and socially clumsy. Quite the opposite, he was outgoing and charming. People liked him. He won them over whether they were old or young, privileged or poor, smart or stupid. The flaw, even though he did not see it as one, was that he did not care one whit about these people. If something awful happened to them, he could appear to be devastated or sorry or empathic or whatever other appropriate emotion ought to be conveyed. But deep inside, he did not care. They were nothing to him. Eventually, he would be diagnosed as a sociopath.

But that day, if it ever came, was decades away. What mattered now, and as the years rolled along, was that his hollowness of feelings for people gave him huge advantage over them. It gave him freedom. He could do whatever he wanted to them – steal from them, humiliate them, even kill them – and never feel one lick of remorse or guilt or sorrow. He had been born without a conscience. And like a child with cerebral palsy who would never walk, he would never be cured. Nor did he want to be.

What he was born with was an acute sense of survival. It was as if a furnace fueled by an inexhaustible supply of fear burned within him. A fear of being found out, of being apprehended and punished for his bad acts.

Now and again, when he was on the verge of being caught, the fear would roar near out of control. He hated those times. For the most part, however, the fear comforted him. It helped free him to wreak his havoc. No. Havoc was the wrong word. Havoc implied a stupid sort of recklessness – like a predator with a reptile brain and no plan. And by the age of ten he had a plan. Not yet fully formed. But a plan that would become a grand design. He would become a “cleanser.”

Unlike so many violent sociopaths, as a child the Cleanser had no interest in hurting animals. Quite the opposite, he admired them, particularly the predators. More than once he was transfixed by a cat that would crouch in such stillness that its prey could not distinguish it from a tree or a bush or a lawn chair. And then launch itself through the air to snag the unwitting sparrow in midflight. The cat was not a creature to be tortured and killed. It was something to study, to emulate.

People were a different matter. They would always be his prey. He learned quickly he could cause them great pain whenever he wanted. Once he witnessed a terrible accident at a street corner near his elementary school. A huge tractor trailer had t-boned a compact car. The occupant or occupants of the car were clearly dead. He calmly walked to a payphone, inserted a quarter, and dialed the number of the principal’s office. Disguising his voice (he was good at that), he said, “I think one of our teachers was just killed on the corner of Trumbull and Elm. Someone should come.” Then he hung up and walked home.

The next day the principal gathered all the students in the assembly hall. He talked about what a cruel joke one of them had played with the anonymous call. How much needless worry and disruption the student’s thoughtless act had caused. As the Cleanser listened to the frumpy man drone on, he saddened his eyes, but inside he chortled. He even considered admitting to the act to see if he could convince the principal he truly believed he had seen a teacher in the crushed car, that he had meant well, but then had panicked. But why take the risk of failure when he already possessed such consummate confidence in his persuasive skills?

As soon as he was eleven and old enough to walk into libraries without the hovering attention of an adult, he began devouring books. He started with the ones high school students were assigned but rarely read – Shakespeare’s plays, Dickens’ novels, Plato’s Republic, and Homer’s two great works were a few of his choices.

He made sure to never check out anything that might raise an eyebrow – like Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  All the libraries were becoming computerized. Electronic records were footprints he didn’t wish to leave. Besides, he could read and retain over 2,000 words a minute. One time barely more than 20 minutes passed between his removing and replacing Catcher in the Rye deep in the stacks as he stood absorbing Holden Caulfield’s words.

In the works of fiction it was the twisted characters that most caught his attention. The slithering Iago who could destroy both Othello and Desdemona with deftly uttered innuendo. Captain Ahab and his relentless pursuit of the great white whale. In works that described real world people, he marveled at what Hitler and Stalin had accomplished as cleansers.

More importantly, he saw himself as every bit the equal of these characters – actual or created. Maybe “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” would halt him before he had matched their feats, but not if his drive and talents had their say.

By the time he was 13 he knew he would need certain credentials to best do the work that was his destiny. That would mean escaping the world of foster homes and mediocre public schools. He would need to join the ranks of privileged young men and women whose families had already propelled them towards prestigious careers in the law or medicine or public life.

Had he consulted the adults in his world, they might or might not have been encouraging. But he didn’t need their help. With some cursory research he identified the headmasters of five highly regarded New England preparatory schools. He wrote each one a letter saying he had been orphaned at a young age, had lived in a series of foster homes, and it was time for him to embark on a quality education. He would need a full scholarship including room and board and a caring family to stay with on long holidays and summer vacations.

He was required to take a few tests that he found laughably easy. And he had had to write a few essays that were thoughtful and elegant. All but one of the schools offered him what he wanted. He chose the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut that John F. Kennedy had attended in the 30’s. The three others in Northern New England had winters too long and cold and were too far from the magic of New York City.

Barely 14 he entered Choate as a junior, two to three years younger than his classmates. At first they held him at arm’s length. He didn’t have their breeding, and he was far more intelligent than even the brightest of them. But he didn’t flaunt his brilliance. Plus he was an athlete. By Thanksgiving he was under the firm protection of beefy offensive linemen who loved to block for him as he picked his way downfield through a maze of flatfooted linebackers and defensive corners.

The following summer he got a job as a gardener’s helper on a massive estate on Shippan Point in Stamford. One day the gardener had told him to throw hedge clippings and other detritus over the seawall that separated the manicured lawn from Long Island Sound. There they would either rot and form compost, or be carried away by the tides. Within an hour the pile had grown to a large mound that disturbed his sense of neatness and order. Like so many things he saw around him, the mound was something to be done away with – obliterated.

Without asking the gardener, he went to the shed where the lawnmowers were stored. He took a five gallon gas can with a spout and lugged it to the seawall. He hefted the can over the wall and thoroughly doused the mound. Standing on the wall, he struck a match.

First came the sound. Like a huge bed sheet being shaken out. Then the invisible force punched him back off the wall. It took him a few seconds to regain his senses as he slowly raised himself off the lawn and felt the pain on his forehead where his eyebrows had been singed. Another boy might have cried out in anguish. Not the Cleanser. He smiled as he gazed at the black smoke drift up from the mound and then westward towards the adjacent estate. There would be complaints from the neighbors and harsh words from the gardener. Not to worry. He knew just the right mix of contrition and apology to quell their opprobrium and win their sympathy. He would claim he had learned his lesson, and he would be forgiven.

What he had really learned was something they would never suspect. He had learned what a wonder gasoline was. No longer was it the clear liquid whose odor made him pinch his nostrils when he got too close to it. No. Though it might appear as harmless as water, he now knew the sudden and lethal force with which it could strike. It had his respect. He was already conjuring ways he could fit it into his plans.

The first chance to test his idea came a few months later during the long Columbus Day weekend. Ten boys in his history class had taken a school van to Manhattan on Saturday morning with a young teacher who was substantively competent, but inept when it came to discipline. Once they were all checked into their midtown hotel, the teacher gave them a list of museums they could visit with the assignment to take notes for writing an essay when they returned to Wallingford.

The Cleanser headed north with two other boys to see the Museum of Natural History. Once ensconced in the rambling structure, he had had no problem slipping away and taking the subway to a seedy station south of Houston Street. When he had emerged on the street, a glance told him that the Bowery could be even more bountiful than he had hoped. He darted back into the station and caught up with his peers less than 30 minutes later. They seemed unaware he hadn’t been with them the whole time.

The teacher had made sure they were all in their rooms by ten o’clock. His roommate, one of the huge football players who watched out for him, was snoring loudly by 11 o’clock. The Cleanser lay under the covers wearing a black sweat suit he had begun using for pajamas as the coolness of fall arrived.

He stayed in bed for three hours without dozing off. If the professional assassins he had read about could stand in small closets for 15 hours waiting for their targets to return home, he could surely lie soundlessly, quieting his mind.

When the red digits on the bedside table clock showed 2:30 A.M., he slithered out of bed with a black watch cap pulled down over his ears. Out in the hall he headed for the stairwell. When he had descended to the door entering on to the brightly lit lobby, he opened it a crack and waited for a raucous group of 20 something’s to come in from the street. The clerk at the reception desk was too busy fending off the group’s protests about the bar being closed to notice him slide out through the revolving doors.

He could have taken the subway. But why chance being noticed by cops or fare kiosk attendants when a trot through dark side streets would get him there almost as quickly and in near obscurity?

Even though he had thought it out, now came the part most laden with risk: getting the gas. First he needed a container. In the Bowery that was easy. Trash was strewn everywhere. He quickly found a half empty plastic bleach bottle that would hold a gallon. More than enough for his purposes. Getting the gas would be tricky. It took about 20 minutes to see the right person. A huge SUV had pulled into the all night station he had been watching from across the avenue under a burned out streetlight. Out stepped a huge black man who strode to the pump, inserted his card, and was soon standing watching his low mileage guzzler inhale its fuel. The Cleanser approached the man in a way that he could be seen from a distance. He scuffled along with the white bleach bottle held against his chest with both hands.

“What do you want?” said the voice that sounded like it had come from the bottom of a barrel.

“Our car is out of gas,” he said squeakily with his head down in apparent embarrassment.

“Give it to me,” said the man as he reached out a massive hand.

“Now go away,” he said after filling the bottle with fingers surprisingly nimble for someone so big.

“I will tell my mother of your kindness,” he said as he screwed the cap on the bottle, but the man had already turned his back.

It was now approaching that hour of the morning he had read about in so many books: 4 A.M. Whether military generals, SWAT team captains, or criminal gang leaders, they all chose it for the time of their attacks if they could. Most people were now in deep slumber and at their most vulnerable.

The Cleanser had found a side street feeding off into alleys littered with homeless men and women unconscious, or barely so. But alleys were fraught with risks, like getting trapped and then stabbed or shot or captured by the police. He needed a thoroughfare that would offer multiple routes of escape. Haight Street offered him exactly what he needed.

It took him but five minutes to find his target. Four, possibly five, men whose bodies were piled on or next to each other. Their discordant snoring and the stench of urine and feces and stale wine made him want to both chuckle and vomit. Dim light. A long break in any traffic. No pedestrians. Perfect. He uncapped the bleach bottle and began to carefully spill the gas onto the disgusting mound. Now to strike the match. That was all that stood between now and what would become an inferno of screams and unspeakable pain.

But he didn’t strike the match. He just floated away into the darkness. Was it fear that made him desist? Of course. But it wasn’t cowardice. It was a fear that told him that the risks slightly outweighed the pleasure he would receive from the conflagration and the devastation that would ensue. It was a simple as that, that and the knowledge that he had learned much from the experience. It had prepared him for the next time.