The Uncomfortable Death of Dory H. Scott

There is a scene, in a film of recent fame, during which our antagonist shines a teasing light on the origin of his malaise (incidentally, an incumbent desire to rule the known world). The madman opens his bruised heart to reveal that his father used to go about making “outrageous claims - like he invented the question mark”; he offers a biography that suggests a man not easily impressed, and perhaps not adept at discerning, even, between impressive and ridiculous. It is left to the viewer to determine how softly one might weigh this revelation against the dark balance of our madman’s considerable accounts.

The point, at least for one Dory H. Scott, is that we cannot really ever understand the actual nature of cause and effect. Nor, for that matter, can we be trusted to ascertain the importance of any single action - not even with the advantage of time, or hindsight, as we call it. The human mind, for all its deft and incalculable workings, is easily confused and led astray. Truly, it is a common human propensity that we often attribute significance where it is unnecessary, or undeserved, while happenings of great import, on the other hand, elude our recognition.

It is equally true that while we cling to the illusions of self-direction and manifest destiny, our lives are always on the brink of hazard - only a short series of unknowable formulae removed from chaos.

Great thinkers of past and present have wrestled with this conundrum; it has been attached countless explication: notably, the American sociologist Robert K. Merton, rising to prominence in the 1950s, developed his theory of unintended consequences, in which he outlined the phenomena of unexpected benefits and unexpected drawbacks. Merton’s work borrowed heavily from the ideas put forth first by the Scotsman Adam Smith, and the later-born, but no less illumined John Locke, in an effort to describe what some now flippantly lament as Murphy’s Law (this notion that when it matters most, when it is absolutely inconvenient, even the best-laid plans will face unforeseen disaster). But it is Merton’s third category of unintended consequences - perverse results - that brings us to Dory H. Scott’s fantastic story.

But before we delve into the lurid details of Dory’s final moments, let us take pause to reflect on the man himself, lest we appear curious only of the grim and shocking minutia of his end. For, as it happens, Dory was a man quite like most other men; his existence was defined alternately by careful routine and moderate abandon - the pendulum of most temperaments, really; he had friends, people for whom he cared, and who, in turn, cared for him; he had few enemies, and fewer still of cunning or guile, so he persisted with them, largely untroubled. In short, Dory H. Scott put his proverbial pants on one leg at a time, as they say. 

In light of the rather common aspects of this biography, the sensible reader might be forgiven for inclining toward doubt regarding the veracity of this particular story’s subject. But let me assure even the most sensible among you, this account is free of invention, and unmarked by exaggeration - both of these being as unnecessary to this story as a hat might be to a goose.

It would be a mistake, similarly, to try and attribute moral significance to Dory’s case. More and more this narrator has noticed eruptions of karmic subscription to explain the occurrence of especially good things happening for people, or especially bad things befalling them. This narrator’s own spiritual aesthetic aside, (there is simply no place for it in this story), the recent popularization of ancient Eastern processes - of reciprocity and comeuppance, for example - seem rather too glibly attached to any act, whether wholly breathtaking, utterly menacing, or plainly drab.

If, as it turns out, we are being held to account, and in some remote corner of an ethereal office-space the ledger clacks incessantly without mercy or malice, well then, in that case, we will have to reconsider Dory’s case entirely. Until then, however, we must forgo the present urge to see Dory’s shocking finale as anything more or less than a bit of bad luck.

On this note, it may interest the curious reader to know that Dory considered himself to be luckier than most. This opinion was afforded considerable sway by enduring personal habits, such as rescuing even the most diminutive of currencies from a fate of utter irrelevancy - see a penny, pick it up…you get the idea. (Incidentally, Dory eschewed contributing his found wealth toward his at large allowance, being of the opinion that one could make available from found tender either the good fortune, figuratively, or the comparatively meagre fortune, literally, but not both. Had he happened to have come across a Brinks truck, abandoned and awaiting his claim, presumably he would have recalibrated this distinction - but he did not, and so amongst Dory’s properties upon his death was a Peek Freans biscuit-tin stuffed with unspent good fortune, in the amount of two hundred and thirty-six dollars, twelve cents.)

In the same vein of superstition, finding himself at the business end of a black cat’s path, Dory would announce the innocence of his intentions, and politely wait for the cat to make up its own mind about things. It is a seldom advertised fact about black cats in general that they honour the same right of way protocols that govern traffic roundabouts in most major European city-centres - a fact that escaped Dory’s observance, and a small irony, given the sensational nature of his demise.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Dory was a man of enduring habit - a truth that did little, sadly, to prolong his life, but that perhaps does further pique our appetite for not altogether inadmissible biographical bric-a-brac.

For the truth is that well before he succumbed to the great bodily insult that put his name, however briefly, on the lips and in the ears of the rubbernecking crowd, Dory had long laboured under the impression that while things were inarguably happening to him, precious few things were happening because of him. Accordingly, what Dory desired more than anything was a modicum of control. All around him Dory saw grand and important people doing grand and important things - the very fabric of time and space seemed to part obligingly as they moved through the world, and they cast a shimmering ripple in their wake. Buy, sell, keep, change - these, and many more, were the verbs of men and women of action. These people went about saying “look what I have done”, in the off-chance that one had yet to notice. Dory recognized that he was not one of these people. Of course, he ought not to have been so sure - his penultimate act, if nothing else, could easily be construed as a superb triumph of will. 

Finally, I will take the precursive step of answering to the charges of misdiagnosis and misinformation that will surely come from those readers who find themselves interminably unable to accept the occurrence of spectacular rarities. (Charles Dickens, distinguished and admired as he was, found himself employed in precisely this defense, famously (read: scandalously) rebutting against accusations of sensationalism, and worse. The watchdogs of The Academy charged that the Master of English Literature was pandering to a comparably low denomination, eliciting fear and worry over the possibility that this same manner of death attributed to his character - fictional though he was - might actually constitute a legitimate worry for any one of the good, real people of nineteenth-century England.

In support of his creative liberty, Dickens produced a litany of documented cases - the most recent describing an unfortunate ne’er-do-well from County Cork, whose remains were eventually discovered by neighbours, many of whom admitted to having been lured to the dead man’s simple dwelling under the spell of a not at all unpleasant, if heady, aroma. One can only imagine the ghastly reactions, and self-loathing, once the gory truth was laid bare.

Were the Great Author alive today, he would surely take no small vindication in the continuing evidence of his fiction.)

This is all very interesting, you say, but what of Dory H.Scott? What of his fate? (And if only Dory had grasped the inescapable, true nature of fate, perhaps…well, he didn’t, so it remains for us to recount the grisly consequence.)

On a rather ordinary Friday afternoon, having yet shaken the ill smog of another thankless work week that shadowed nearly behind him, Dory found himself at a desperately familiar crossroads. Traffic, both pedestrian and mechanical, moved blithely past him. It seemed to Dory, again, that the people around him were travelling with purpose, while he was simply undertaking the requisite steps that would deliver him from Point A - of which he despaired - to Point B - of which he was coming to despair more and more.

This narrator could hypothesize at length (as indeed he has, in private) on the precise complaint that drove Dory to invoke such a drastic measure of rebellion on a day that was very much like any other, but there is little evidence, in fact, of the proverbial, back-breaking straw. 

Witnesses, of which there were a great many - it being at the peak of commuter delirium - recall that Dory did not respond to the green light (an invitation to exercise the relative safety of the cross-walk that he would certainly have been intimate with after so many years of urban navigation). Some admitted to pushing brusquely past him, even issuing brief but pointed condemnations over their shoulders at the inconvenience of his remaining prone in the midst of their urgent transit.

Others, more imaginatively recounted that Dory was murmuring breathlessly in a strange, rapid tongue. Rumours of terrorism quickly gained traction with the eager press; even less savoury, suggestions of satanism and Dory’s clandestine dedication to the Black Arts abounded in the tabloids for weeks afterward. But these reports were specious and self-serving, and only indict a society become insensate to slander and slight.

What we do know, is that on the corner of Granville and 12th, precisely five minutes before six o’clock on a warm, but not hot, early evening, Dory H. Scott burst into flames, to the horror and threat of many in his immediate proximity, and I am sad to report, to the inconvenience of still others, who were heard to remark that “some idiot” had lit himself on fire and brought an already irritable homeward hoard to a standstill.

It bears noting that of the 81 mobile devices employed during the first frantic moments of Dory’s combustion, no fewer than 79 of these served no greater purpose than to record the terrible spectacle through 1080p hi-definition video capture. A scant two good samaritans thought it more appropriate - the incident seeming of adequate concern to Dory’s welfare, at the very least - that they exercised their capacity to immediately contact the relevant authorities.

The social commentary that abounded post-haste missed the mark entirely. Dory had sought control where there was none to be had - an entirely too metaphysical explanation for such a visceral happening. Of course, the suggestion that Dory purposefully willed incineration at his own hand - unless we are quite mistaken about his person - is absurd. Yet the subsequent inquests discerned no accelerants, and precious little informed conjecture surfaced as to the actual cause of this perverse result.

This narrator, impartial though he is, cannot help but wonder whether the truth has been hushed from the public record, for surely it speaks to a dramatic occasion of utter extremity - either of defiance or despair - and of a man who lost his place in the world, never to find it back.