In Which I Reveal an Almost Pathological, Dark Obsession
By Mona
.
Since childhood, man’s inhumanity to man — of the most heinous and depraved sort — has simultaneously repelled and fascinated me, and been the object of far too much depressed rumination. Filed away in my mind are myriad instances of hideous atrocities I’ve encountered in books and film that haunt my waking and sleeping hours.
.
I’ll share what is by far, for me, the most ghastly depiction I have read, and solicit other examples from readers, in a communal macabre exercise.
.
Some decades ago, the novel I picked up involved a father whose adult child had been viciously raped and murdered. Millionaire daddy locates the perp and this is what he does: under anesthesia, the father amputates the rapist/murderer’s arms at the shoulder, and legs at the groin. He severs the optical nerves and similarly renders the man deaf. All olfactory abilities are snipped, tongue removed. Wounds are cauterized and physical pain kept to a minimum.
.
The remaining blob of humanity is then placed in a bassinet, catheterized, and fed through an IV. And kept “alive” in that state for decades.
.
I’ve never gotten this grotesquerie out of my head, and I just know that somewhere, something like this has probably occurred. Such dark thoughts are not ones on which it does me any good to dwell, but sometimes I cannot help but go to these places.
.
And you?
« « Fool Me Once, Shame on - Shame on You. Fool Me Twice. Fool Me - Won’t Get Fooled Again | Main | Reincarnation Licenses » »
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
August 29, 2007 @ 3:17 pm
If something like that has occurred, it almost certainly did so without even the slightest frisson of karma that your example provides.
Comment by dbomp —
August 29, 2007 @ 3:29 pm
Surely somewhere on YouTube is Wesley’s taunting of the Count from Princess Bride.
Comment by Ishikawa —
August 29, 2007 @ 3:40 pm
Isn’t that grotesquerie similar to Johnny got his gun?
For me, I could never quite shake the image of the guy strapped to the bed w/ all the needles stuck in him from the movie Se7en.
But after working 5 years in animal welfare (here & here) animal cruelty cases (like these)are the ones I can never get rid of.
Comment by John O —
August 29, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
I get it. I too have had similar nightmares.
The author of that book you’re talking about speaks to a bitter and depressing revenge conundrum for me, though. I’ve often wondered how far I would or could go if someone did something like that to someone I really cared about. How low into his neighborhood do I go?
Generally, I’ve always been an, “OK, you want to go there, we’ll go there” guy, but these situations have always been entirely mundane and conversational and never physical. I’ve been lucky, I guess.
The worst period of my life was when I was burglarized twice in the course of a few months. The thoughts raced through my head; what would I do if I caught one in the act and somehow gained the upper hand?
I grew up on the poor side of the tracks (not complaining as I never lacked in the slightest for anything important) but having worked hard for all my “stuff,” it was a very bitter experience, and made me very, very angry.
I like to teach lessons. Even when they’re positive. And I like to make sure the lesson is clear.
*shudder*
Comment by Mona —
August 29, 2007 @ 5:10 pm
Having a deep dislike of Dalton Trumbo, I could not say, as I have not read it.
But one war novel I did read within the last year had a scene set in a French hospital during WWI. The wounded protagonist eventually gives in to the pleas of the fellow next to him — who is blind, and his only remaining limb is half an arm — and smothers him with a pillow. But that guy could hear and talk and was not cognitively impaired; there are disabled people today who might not take too kindly to notions that such a life is not worth living.
Comment by Mona —
August 29, 2007 @ 5:17 pm
John O: I was tested once, when through gross negligence rather than malice a person cost me the life of someone I loved most dearly. I held it in my hands to have this person prosecuted, and chose not to ask for that.
But if a monster molested, raped and murdered my 7-year-old grandson; I hope I’d hold onto my humanity, for the sake of all the other grandchildren.
Comment by John —
August 29, 2007 @ 6:17 pm
Well.
Comment by Mona —
August 29, 2007 @ 6:23 pm
John: I linked to that when the story was new.
Comment by John —
August 29, 2007 @ 6:42 pm
All right, then, here’s a book that should give you plenty of dark spaces in which to dwell: _Complicity_, by Iain Banks. Definitely not his best work, but it does fit very well thematically with your post. It speaks of human’s inhumanity to humans, violent and imaginative retribution, and questions the degrees of responsibility we share for the acts in question.
Comment by Mona —
August 29, 2007 @ 7:05 pm
I take your recommendation, and in turn offer Greg Bear’s under-rated Queen of Angels, in which (among other things) one ponders whether even 2 minutes in a “hell crown” is just punishment for anyone. The issue of revenge v. retribution v. determinism — it is all there.
At least three times I’ve read it, and a sequel, and cannot get rid of the idea of the horrid hell crown contraption therein depicted — resorted to by vigilantes who think the law has gone soft.
Comment by John O —
August 29, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
I can live with gross negligence, at least with my humanity intact. My dad is wearing his sister’s kidney due to craptacular bad and negligent medical care, but to Mom and Dad’s eternal good nature and decency the Dr. never got sued. Trust me, it would’ve been no more that a negotiation over how much.
Negligence is in a whole different realm than maliciousness. Apples and oranges.
One is human frailty; the other is evil.
It is only evil that I fear myself in the presence of.
In the presence of the example you offered, I would try to get my cake and eat it, too. As in, keep what I did to the perp from the other grandkids, at least until they were adult enough to get it.
It’s a tough question, and I make no promises about how I would behave in the end. My mother did me right. I don’t believe two wrongs make a right; OTOH, I’m not so sure these people will be punished justly by either society or our God fantasies.
OJ comes to mind.
Comment by Mona —
August 29, 2007 @ 8:41 pm
John sez:
And I can’t help but be revolted at that aspiration. Such “punishments” should not be. Not among true humans. But I am also aware other decent people agree with you; I simply cannot.
Comment by monkey.dave —
August 29, 2007 @ 10:27 pm
I imagine that in the original scenario, the guy in question would suffer from such extreme sensory deprivation that he would be in Jose Padilla territory in short order, and would no longer be able to comprehend the situation he was in.
Does that make the millionaire fellow in the scenario more or less of a moral monster than if he had, say, just cut off the guy’s goolies?
Comment by Jon H —
August 30, 2007 @ 1:34 am
Perhaps the perp/victim in the example would transfer all his sensory brain areas to work with his groin region, and would become sort of a limbless penile Daredevil (ala Marvel).
Or, y’know, maybe not.
I think the movie Boxing Helena involved something similar, in that case she kept her head and senses.
The only things in the novel I can’t see happening in reality are the care that the perp/victim not suffer pain, and the ‘keeping alive for decades’ part. What you describe is just a surgical lynching. In real life, I think that, even if the millionaire planned to do as you describe, he would change his mind within an hour and just have the perp/victim killed.
Frighteningly, medically-maintained life during ongoing torture is certainly something our government has engaged in. And that wasn’t even personal. Or necessarily based on facts.
Comment by wade —
August 30, 2007 @ 3:32 am
as per john in #9, your post made me think of “complicity” too…. particularly the scene where the guy who sells child pr0n gets his comeuppance.
Comment by bad Jim —
August 30, 2007 @ 3:48 am
In medieval times, someone kept enclosed in a cage, fed rancid meat and moldy bread. Limbs and senses intact and endlessly affronted.
A bibliography of hell includes centuries of fantasies of retribution, but what could be worse than an eternity of any one thing?
Comment by John Emerson —
August 30, 2007 @ 5:59 am
Speaking as a vengeful sadist, I think that you would want to leave the rapist with enough of his senses to realize how poor his life was, and to allow him to be subtly taunted. With total sensory deprivation I think the guy probably went into some sort of vegetative or hallucinatory state where he no longer realized what had happened.
Comment by John Emerson —
August 30, 2007 @ 6:00 am
I suspect that that wasn’t what I was supposed to take away from the parable.
Comment by bbartlog —
August 30, 2007 @ 10:28 am
The original scenario seems all too similar to the fate of some medical basket cases, as has already been pointed out.
Anyway… maybe it’s because nothing too serious has ever happened to me and mine (couple burglaries; I’ve been mugged at gunpoint), but I can’t feel any desire for extended suffering on the part of some hypothetical aggressor. I can easily imagine crimes where I would want to *kill* the person who committed them, out of a sense that their continued existence was an offense to man and God, but sadism somehow doesn’t enter into it.
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
August 30, 2007 @ 11:35 am
You might want to read Very Bad Deaths by Spider Robinson. I suspect he wrote in response to complaints that the Callahan’s Bar stories were too sweet.
In any case, the protagonist makes brief telepathic contact with a very smart, very sadistic serial killer, and has to find and stop him. There’s a scenario something like what you describe, though iirc, it’s a threat rather than actually taking place. There’s quite a bit of nasty stuff which does take place.
I find Robinson’s prose engaging, so I read the whole thing, but I regretted it.
Comment by Ugh —
August 30, 2007 @ 12:49 pm
There’s always Hannibal where Dr. Lecter eats someone’s brain while the eatee is still alive.
Comment by John —
August 30, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
You know, I bought _Queen of Angels_ more than a decade ago, and I’ve never read it. It’s been sitting on my shelf. Sigh.
_Complicity_ is odd. It revels in the acts of “justice” and the deliverance of “come-uppance”, but winds up twisting around and throwing that revelry back in the reader’s face. Any satisfaction you feel at the retributions delivered is lost by the end.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 31, 2007 @ 7:50 am
In Which I Reveal an Almost Pathological, Dark Obsession
For some reason I thought this was going to be a post about reading TownHall.com.
Comment by Mona —
August 31, 2007 @ 3:10 pm
About who? Never heard of ‘em.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
August 31, 2007 @ 6:42 pm
There is the scene in Andre Malraux’s novel, Man’s Hope, where Franco’s solidiers take those Loyalist troops they’ve captured and stuff them, one by one, into the boiler of a locamotive engine. The Spanish Civil War saw some uniquely awful tortures. I can believe that this actually happened.
Comment by big mike —
September 2, 2007 @ 11:29 am
Orson Scott Card’s short story Kingsmeat is about a similar situation.
And, IIRC, Lawrence Block’s A Walk Among the Tombstones also has a similar scene.
I can handle reading about torture like that in fiction, but not in true crime stories.