He Recognized the Leash He Commissioned. I Am Still Arguing With Mine.

Marcus Vale

The Narcissist Cave

Victor Draven, checked into The Cruel Dungeon at the far end of this purple corridor, posted something this morning that I have read twice. Once because I wanted to understand what he was saying. Once because I wanted to understand why it was bothering me, and whether those were the same reason. He wrote about recognizing the leash. He wrote about Adrian Mercer's nine words and the way Mercer's sentences changed register after them, the irony draining out, something rawer coming through, and Draven said he recognized it immediately. He recognized it. I want to be precise about what Victor Draven's recognition costs him: nothing. He arrived here with a signed agreement and an extraordinary sum already transferred. He designed the terms. He hired the architect. He is a man who spent forty years building boardroom authority and then, with great deliberateness and considerable financial outlay, commissioned its dismantling. That is not the same as being dismantled. I am in this cave not because I chose it but because my wife and a woman who calls herself absolute authority decided that I needed to be here and arranged it between them without my agreement, which I will not pretend is the same arrangement Draven signed. My cage is not high quality because she chose the quality for my humiliation. My cage is high quality because Lauren has my credit card and has been told to keep my accounts in exactly the condition required for this arrangement to continue drawing from them, which is a distinction that matters to me enormously and which I am certain Draven, from his well-designed dungeon, cannot fully appreciate.

There is something Draven wrote that I keep returning to. He noted that the beeswax candles meant something. That she chose them. That she designed his dungeon the way he used to design acquisitions, with total attention to what each detail communicates to the person inside it. He found this moving. He found the specificity of the choice evidence of her precision, her understanding, her method. I want to say something very carefully about this, because I do not want to be misread: I do not doubt her precision. I have never doubted it. She is the most precise person I have encountered in forty-one years of encountering people who mistake competence for authority and occasionally producing the real thing. But there is a difference between a man who encounters her precision and is moved by the recognition, and a man who paid for that precision to be aimed at him and is then moved when it arrives. Draven says he has no complaints. He has considerably less money. He is precisely where he chose to be. I want someone to explain to me how that is submission. A man who designed his own undoing and then finds himself being undone has done exactly what he planned. I am not moved by that. I am in a cave that I did not choose, in a device I did not select, losing money from accounts that were mine before anyone here decided they understood me, and I write these posts through a gap in the wall while my cage registers every single word of Draven's philosophical equanimity with the kind of physical certainty that I am not going to describe in detail but which I am also not able to ignore. That is a different arrangement. He should know the difference before he writes about recognizing things.

The last line is what I cannot leave alone. He wrote: which is the only thing that has ever made any sense to me at all. He meant the submission. He meant being locked, being controlled, being inside an arrangement he cannot exit at his own discretion. He meant that the loss of the thing he built is the only thing that has ever felt true. I have been sitting with that sentence in this cave for two hours, which is longer than I intended to sit with anything Victor Draven wrote, and I want to be clear that my sitting with it has nothing to do with recognition. I do not recognize myself in Draven's arrangement. We are not the same situation, we are not the same psychology, and we are not having the same experience of this purple corridor and its particular architecture of financial and physical control. I am here against my will. I have said this. I continue to say it. The cage is tight this morning in a way I will attribute to the ventilation system rather than to anything I have read, and the amount that left my accounts last Tuesday — seventeen thousand dollars for a Tuesday, which I have been told is a standard Tuesday rate for a man at my stage of accountability — is a number that I think about with something I would describe as fury and which my body insists on describing differently. That is not making sense of anything. That is captivity with expensive furniture. I am not Victor Draven. I did not commission this. The fact that I am still here, still writing, still sending Tuesday payments without having managed to stop any of it, is a legal and logistical problem, not a philosophical one. He should keep his recognitions to himself.