Yesterday I got an email from a reader in Queens named Benny. Benny is a security guard in a hospital. Yesterday a man on a gurney came through escorted by a cop, and Benny accompanied them to radiology where the man’s head would be scanned. Benny took one look at the poor man and felt as if he were in a horror movie. The handle of a ten inch kitchen knife protruded from the man’s left eye-socket, with the finger grip toward the side of the head, as if someone had plunged it in with a pronated grip and left it there.

Benny asked the cop if they had caught the knifer. The cop pointed to the body and indicated that the man had stabbed himself. According to the cop this fellow was so upset over being out of work and not being able to find a job that he was out in a public place ranting and raving with this knife. When the police intervened he managed to slam the knife into his left eye with his right hand.

The radiology tech had this to say to Benny, “It severed everything. You can see that he is still alive, but he is done. The point traveled diagonally across to the other hemisphere and lodged a quarter of an inch from the back of the skull. I didn’t think people could do this, because of the flinch reflex.”

Benny, having read The Logic of Steel, asked me about this. I was able to give him the following information. An ancient roman doctor, Galen I think, tested an entire school of gladiators, thousands of them, to see if they would flinch when a blade was poked at their face. I cannot recall if the fighters who had not flinched numbered zero, one or two out of the thousands of professional swordsmen. The doctor concluded that the flinch reflex of the human being was nearly impossible to overcome through conditioning.

That poor fellow in Queens must have been suffering in a living hell, for him to crash the psychological and even physical barriers hard wired into us all to do what he did. The incident does give us a feel for the type of intense motivation that a person who picks up a large kitchen knife for whatever purpose, tends to have. You don’t see half-measures with butcher knives. Benny was really broken up over this. I just didn’t know what to say. I do think that this terrible story belongs here, in Harm City. I usually try to dress terrible things down with some humor. But something this bad needs to be told as straight as possible.

I would like to extent my sympathy to the man’s family and anyone else involved.

James, 7/13/13