Fear requires a definite object of which one is afraid, Harry typed, the letters appearing one by one--click, click, click--on the paper, as his two index fingers pecked away in a robotic chicken dance.

Sitting alone in his dorm room--alone on the whole floor--blissfully immersed in the construction of his final paper for the human psychology course he would be taking next semester, Harry smiled. It was Christmas break and everyone else, including his roommate, had gone home. He would, too, in a few days, after he had completed the paper that wouldn’t be due for months. “Stay a step ahead,” Harry’s father had preached to his two sons, Harry being the younger. “The respected and successful man is always one step ahead.” Until then, quiet--wonderful, melodious, work all night--silence. He read the words back; fear requires a definite object of which one is afraid.

“No shit, Sigmund,” he said aloud. Sliding out the pencil hooked over his ear, Harry scribbled the bibliographic reference on the pad of paper lying next to his typewriter, giving the renowned psychologist credit for the opening line of his essay on what can make normal, rational human beings act in abnormal, irrational ways. He would type the footnote in later, along with the dozens of other quotes from his boy, Freud, that he knew he was going to use. Happily writing the thesis that had been formulating in his head since junior high, Harry had no idea it was 3:07 a.m. He was in the zone and everything else would have to wait, including his Christmas presents.

The bogeyman, Harry thought, now there’s an object of fear. When Harry was seven, his older brother Dontrell and he would camp out in the backyard during the steamy Southern California summers in a pup tent that their father had bought from an army surplus store. It was made of heavy, green canvas and got so hot inside they had to cut flaps out of the top so they wouldn’t suffocate. Since it wasn’t waterproof anyway, they didn’t worry about rain getting in. They would tell ghost stories all night, Dontrell especially fond of bogeymen-themed recitals that he knew scared the daylights out of his little brother. One especially hazy night, thunder booming off in the distance, Harry was dreaming that his face was bleeding black leeches from his nose and mouth. As his flesh disappeared beneath the blanket of slime, he awoke with a start to find several long, fat earthworms wiggling across his face. Spooked, he sat up in his sleeping bag and quickly brushed them off, staring unbelievingly at the fish bait now snaking and squirming in his lap. Before he could think, heavy raindrops began drumming atop his head, only not raindrops, his trembling hands would find, but worms--at least chopped up pieces of worms--with black and blue guts spilling out all over his bed-headed hair. Harry shrieked. He then looked up to see a horde of worms oozing from the flaps above him, dangling like strands of brown spaghetti. He shrieked again, a blood curdling scream this time, that he prayed would wake his brother and, hopefully, his father and mother sleeping in the house only yards away from the tent.

“Dontrell!” he yelled. “Wake up!” It was then that he noticed the open entry flap and the weak glow of the porch light illuminating his brother’s empty sleeping bag. Dontrell was gone--eaten by the worms--his frenzied mind told him.

Dontrell!” he howled again. He began to hyperventilate, his breaths coming short and fast, everything before his horrified eyes spinning wildly. And the worms were falling harder from the sky now, covering his head, dripping down his face as if his brains were exploding like lava.

Harry began to cry, terrified whimpers, as he shuffled on his behind deeper into the tent.  He tried to burrow into his sleeping bag, but his weight was holding it down, preventing his escape into its protective cotton membrane. Then, suddenly, he heard a thud and there at the mouth of tent he saw a pale, white, undeniably human skull. And it was staring right back at him.

Harry’s eye lids peeled back, his jaw fell. A second passed and then another, an eternity in a terrified boy’s mind.

“Dontrell!” he screamed over and over, a blind panic seizing his body and rendering it worthless.

“Boo!” Dontrell suddenly snapped, his amused face tilting in through the tent opening.

In the nanosecond of shock that followed, Harry could actually feel his bladder muscles collapse and then, to his mounting embarrassment, the warmth of his fright creeping slowly into his lap. But just that quickly, anger seized control and he crawled like a rampant sand crab out of the tent, leapt to his feet and tore after his sniggering brother, conspicuously-stained boxer shorts and all. Their father tore the two of them apart in the kitchen before Harry could exact his revenge--a knuckle sandwich with a side of noogie fries.

Harry wanted desperately to return the favor one day to his brother--the bogeyman--but had yet to come upon the right opportunity. “When you least expect it,” he would remind Dontrell when the two were home on breaks from school, “that’s when I’ll strike.” And though he hadn’t evened the score yet, Harry could still smile about that night. It had become the turning point in his life.

After securing a dry pair of shorts and calming his pounding heart, Harry began to wonder how his brother had pulled it off; how he’d gotten the hundreds and hundreds of worms to cooperate; where he’d gotten what turned out to be a real human skull. And after he’d pieced together the puzzle, he found that the bogeyman had lost his bite. He wasn’t afraid anymore. Harry liked that feeling, he liked it a lot--it sure beat the hell out of being scared. His action had conquered his fear--the very basis of the thesis he was now composing. A few days after that night, Harry Olsen decided he was going to be a detective, the best one Los Angeles had ever seen.

Pulling a weighty dictionary from the shelf that sat next to the desk beneath his upper bunk bed, Harry began searching for the word fear.

A feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence or imminence of danger, he read. “Ain’t that the truth,” he said, glancing at the picture of his family he kept on his desk and remembering the night of the worms, as it came to be known. His brother was the tall, grinning one in the middle surrounded by parents and cousins. “Isn’t that the truth,” he heard his mother’s voice saying. “The word is isn’t, Harry.”

He then grabbed an equally massive thesaurus from the same shelf, flipped to a page he had already dog-eared and on a second notepad began jotting down synonyms that he could then sprinkle strategically throughout his paper. Apprehension, cowardice, dismay, distress, foreboding, fright, horror, panic, terror…the list went on and on, Harry filling the page with two columns of words.

Fear, Harry believed, was one of the strongest human motivators. And, like his boy, Freud, he was convinced that early childhood experiences (like the night of the worms) played a major role in not only the level of fear one carried into adulthood, but the explanation for its very existence--it occurred outside of one’s control or it was created from within. Did the bogeyman really exist and resemble his brother Dontrell or was it just a figment of an out-of-control imagination? By disarming his brother’s attempt to convince him otherwise that perilous night, Harry had chosen the latter path, deciding to let fear serve as a teacher instead of a burden. With his fingers poised at the keyboard, his thoughts shuffling through choices for his next paragraph, Harry felt a twinge of sympathy for those in the world without the ability to reason through it the way he had.

Midway thru the third page, Harry was ready to stroke Sigmund again. The experiences of a person's first five years, he slowly pecked out, exercise a determining effect on one’s life, which nothing later can withstand. What children have experienced and have not understood need never be remembered by them except in dreams. But at some later time they will break into their life with obsessional impulses, govern their actions, and decide their sympathies and antipathies.

It could dictate your life, the future law enforcement officer thought, steamroll you into a life of crime or make you want to become a detective.

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” Harry then said, smiling. “My man was not into just sex and penis envy. He understood people; got up in their heads and poked around.”

Excited over the way his composition was evolving, Harry continued until well past sunrise, hypothesizing on the decline of the traditional family unit and its link to the rise in criminal behavior, lamenting on childhood trauma and its role in the life of murderers and rapists, until finally his complaining stomach persuaded him it was time for a break and breakfast. He rose from his desk and stretched his stiff muscular limbs, very satisfied with his progress, thinking that perhaps he might still get home in time for his parents annual Christmas Eve party, provided he could catch a flight west.

Striding over the icy remnants of a Nor’easter that had smothered the New England coast a few days before, his favorite diner just coming into view, Harry pulled the wool collar of his jacket tight to his chin not knowing that it would be thirty years before he came face-to-face with a true living and breathing example of his theory. Only not exactly the way he had written it.