Collecting
I had always thought the urge to collect was a specifically human trait. Something left over as you’ve evolved out of caves and into studio apartments. But I’ve had to change my opinion on that recently.
I’d never noticed before, but many of my colleagues are collectors of sorts. Instead of trinkets, stamps or copies of memorial plates of famous paintings, they tend to collect stories, and memories of people they’d never meet, but knew better than their parents. I hadn’t realised the parallel before, until I was assigned to work on the case of someone who could have turned out to be a serial killer.
Beyond the total asshole is a more extreme kind of person, in short, the mad. Mad people are a very difficult challenge, and for the most part, they have a dedicated team who take care of all the mad people, but occasionally they have to farm out the work for short contracts to us regular folks. So for a fortnight I was caring for someone who could have turned out a very different person. As it turned out he became a stamp collector, and he was obsessed with his stamps. Each stamp had a history, and a story, and each was treated with reverence and care. He was actually quite easy to look after for the most part, he lived alone, and traded his stamps on eBay, so needed very little moral guidance.
But what made me think was a brief paragraph in his case history.
“Subject is an obsessive collector, and shows unnatural interest in stories and histories. We are slightly afraid he will end up obsessing over, and collecting people’s stories. A suitable outlet must be found for this urge, before the logical next step.” Once I’d found this note I had to ask what the next logical step actually was. I asked one of the people who had been handling this case, apparently, it’s serial killer.
I hadn’t thought of collecting people’s stories before. I’ve got a couple of filing cabinets with a thousand or so stories in each sitting just behind my desk. It turns out I’d been a collector all along, but I’d always thought it was just record keeping.
I wonder just how thin the line between guardian angel and serial killer actually is.