Dan's Descent

Dan's Descent

There is a little insignificant village close to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where when you walk down its main road after sunset and look to your left after passing the towns church, you will see a large, wooden house. And the first floor window shows a glance into a cozy living room. One day, the room's fireplace bathed the room in a warm, yellow light. And if you had been inside that living room, rather than outside in the thunderstorm that was going on all evening, you would now remember conversations that had started off as gossip, but were then advancing into ever darker territory as the night grew older. 

A female voice initiated one of these advancements: "You know the little cabin, just about 200 meters into the woods behind their house? That's where the little Dan always used to go. The Seiders own quite a bit of those woods actually. Little Dan was able to build the cabin himself, at the age of 16. Oh, what a driven fellow he was, such an awful tragedy." A male voice intercepts: "Ah, don't pity him. The Seiders were a wealthy family, he had everything one could dream of handed to him like a damn toddler." The fathers response showed he wasn't impressed at all by his wife's empathy. " His daughter asks: "Didn't his teachers notice him missing? And why didn't his parents intervene?" Her mother responds: "Well he never went to his hideout for for long, you know. Usually for an afternoon, maybe a night for his more elaborate.. ideas." "And his parents?" "They knew about it. His life had obviously derailed, well they didn't know - but they felt it. I mean publicly he was said to have some obscure, non-infectious disease. But as a parent, you notice such a process. And obscure it surely was. And of course it would be nice if you could just tune it out, and trick yourself into a mental refuge on an island of ignorance. But when your son physically deteriorates, and starts having those wounds… you want to help them of course, and so they did." Again, the father intercepted: "Your mother only tells you half the story, though. Why do you think he created his own cabin out there in the woods? After a while, it became way to much for his parents' pride to handle. When he started acquiring those metal instruments.. His parents started getting paralyzed, like a deer in the headlights. Like a prey animal, that decides that fighting a threat is hopeless. His activities were too much for them to even acknowledge." The mother's gaze darkened, and she nodded in agreement and defeat: "They had to hide him." "And he went there every day?", the son asked. "Almost every day after school. Oh the things he made his poor soul endure, so horrible. And his family was so nice to him. He really had all the money, all the safety and opportunities in the world. " The father completes his wife's thought: "And he didn't value it one bit, he threw his body away like an expired piece of meat." 

That whole time, grandpa had not said a word. The topic had stirred thoughts inside of him, and he was only listening with one ear, looking out the window into the woods. Their house was not far from the Seiders' property, but too far to see it through the trees and the rain. And while it was still raining like in the start of the night, the wind had become less violent and the thunder had stopped.

"If only the parents had intervened, he could have survived. He was only 19...". "And prolong his "art" even longer?", the Father interrupts his wife again: "I think this village has had enough of his work. 3 years are plenty." "How can you say such a thing?", the mother responds. "You know its true. His life was pure horror. He designed it as such, with all his passion. His goal was to create an existence optimized for pain. And once again, they did everything they could. They fed him well, they sent him to a good school, they bought him nice clothes, everything. He doomed himself. Threw his body down the drain, quite literally actually if you think about the time.. ". "Please, stop scaring the kids", the mother interrupted. ". "I'm not scared" the daughter responds. 

Now grandpa had turned his gaze back into the center of the family circle. "Do you want to know something that scares me?" He said. He had always had a very serious look on his face. He had a life of trouble behind him, and the difficulties he had faced had made him deeply philosophical at times. His movements and words were slow, not just from physical age. And when he started speaking, the atmosphere in the room instantly started to get a hostile taste. The topic stopped being fun gossip and became deeply personal. The mood shifted similar to how the response of an animal to a predator shifts with increasing level of threat, from fearfully and excited to paralyzing panic. The old man revealed running away as futile. 

"What scares me isn't some masochistic maniac chasing a high through pain, or chasing attention, or help, or the relieve of death, or whatever it may be. His suffering was quick, and extreme. He must have drawn a good amount of enjoyment out of the times he wasn't in his torture chamber. When I think of horror, and of suffering, I think of something more slow, and persistent. It may creep up on you and you barely notice something is off. And you know that the consequences won't be washed away by time in an instance. Imagine a different man. He is also a masochistic performance artist. But he doesn't want to cut his suffering short. He loves his life, and he wants to maximize his total suffering over his whole life. So instead of causing direct pain to himself, he just cripples himself step by step over the course of many years. Maybe he works on impairing his hearing by shooting guns until he can barely hear anything but a ringing in his ears, which makes it hard to sleep, and hard to hold conversations with friends, or even just to think straight. Or he uses UV light to cloud his eyesight. Now even with glasses he cannot see the stars anymore, that he used to love so much. He cripples 2 fingers on each of his hands, so that he cannot play piano anymore, and he can never live up to his ambitions. Maybe a leg too, forcing himself to a largely sedentary life. He moves to a town where he leads a life in a cabin just like Dan Seider's, but he is there permanently. He had made the world his cabin. Now he slowly starts changing. The lively passion he felt as a child disappears step by step. He ages in high speed. He realizes he has made a mistake. But he cannot stop it now. The damage he has done is permanent, and once his wounds will have vanished in the flow of time, so will his existence."

The rain had stopped now in this small village by Lunenburg, just like the lively conversation in the living room. Now it was just cold, and nothing else.