Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  “Just one.”

  “There exists no right to accost, disturb, or solicit the innocent.” Yang has no shadow.

  “One minute,” says the art professor in the weighted painting. “Surely you can spare one minute.”

  “The venue plus the solicitation is going to equal confinement, Sir,” Yang says.

  “To accost and force to look at—these passersby are the innocents, tell him.”

  “I’ll take any time you can spare. Name your time.”

  “To be a shut-in once more. Ask him if he liked it. Remind him of the term conditional release.”

  “A vacuum is one thing,” Yang says, looking briefly over his shoulder in signal to Day. “Just not on the streets.” Even though Day is not behind him.

  The Director is replacing the memo in a cardboard portfolio. A hint of the steeple as he surveys the field. The Jesuit’s eyes never leave his easel’s square. Because the canvas is the viewer’s point of access to the dream-painting, the as it were window onto the scene, his eyes are thus on Day’s, a tiny dead seeded globe between them. The perspective makes no sense. Ndiawar’s headless shadow is now over Day, over the white seeded ball, he sees. “Skills are required,” Ndiawar says, “badly.”

  A mind of its own.

  Day’s own breath breaks the ball apart.

  LIMIT

  Esther’s head is wrapped in gauze. Day’s head is inclined over a page. Sarah’s head is in the pastor’s lap in the room’s bright corner. The room is white. The cleric’s head is thrown back, eyes on the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah’s head says to the black lap. “The phone. The outlet. The drain. The suction. She turns white and he turns colors. I apologize.”

  “Though giants,” Day is reading aloud. “Though giants come in just one size, they come in many forms. There are the Greek Cyclops and the French Pantagruel and the American Bunyan. There are wide and multi-cultural cycles that have giants as columns of flame, as clouds with legs, as mountains that walk inverted while the whole world sleeps.”

  “No, I apologize,” says the pastor’s head. A white hand strokes Sarah’s pinned hair.

  “There are red-hot giants, warm giants,” Day reads. “There are also cold giants. These are forms. One form of cold giant is described in cycles as a mile-high skeleton made all of colored glass. The glass giant lives in a forest that is pure white with frost.”

  “Cold giants.”

  “After you,” Sarah whispers, opening the door to Esther’s room.

  “It is this forest’s master.”

  The head above black and white smiles. “After you.”

  “The glass giant’s stride is a mile across. All day every day it strides. It never stops. It cannot rest. For it lives in fear of its frozen forest ever melting. This fear keeps it striding every minute.”

  “Won’t sleep,” Esther says.

  “Yes never sleeping, the glass giant strides through the white forest, its stride a mile across, day and night, and the heat of its stride melts the forest behind it.”

  Esther tries to smile at the closing door. Her gauze is spotless. “The rainbow.”

  “Yes.” Day shows the picture. “The melted forest rains, and the glass giant is the rainbow. This is the cycle.”

  “Melted are rain.”

  Sarah sneezes, muffled, out in the hall. Day waits for the cleric to say it.

  CLOSE THEM

  “Time your breathing,” the desiccant and truly old former Jesuit instructs him. Yang and Ndiawar stand in the foam at the edge of the field’s blue sea.

  “Breathe air,” the art professor says, pantomiming the stroke. “Spit water. A rhythm. In. Out.”

  Day imitates the stroke.

  Eric Yang closes his eyes. “The rip in the bill is back.”

  The dreampainting of the teacher in ceaseless prayer stands nailed to the weighted display. The wind rises; dandelions snow up around them. Bees work the field’s yellow against a growing blue.

  “Breathe in from above. Breathe out from below,” the old man instructs. “The crawl.”

  The dry field is an island. The blue water all around is peppered white with dry islands. Esther lies on a thin clean steel bed on the next island. Water moves in the channel between them.

  Day imitates the stroke. His pronated hands bat down white seed. A plant has sprouted in no time. Its spire already reaches Day’s knees.

  Yang speaks to Ndiawar about the texture of the mental bill. Ndiawar complains to Yang that his one best church leaves no hand free to open the door. The symbolism of the interchange is unmistakable.

  The art teacher has backstroked away from the fluttered growth of the black plant. Day flails in the pollen, trying to establish a rhythm.

  Sarah floats supine in the channel before Esther’s island. Then the plant’s shadow shuts down the light. The shadow is the biggest thing Day has ever seen. Its facade heaves out of sight, summons the prefix bronto-. The ground booms under the weight of a buttress. The buttress curves upward out of sight toward the facade. A rose window glints at the sky’s upper limit. The easel falls over. The doors of the thing have come out of nowhere, writhing like lips. It rushes at them.

  “Help!” Esther calls, very faint, before the picture’s church takes them inside. Day hears the distant groan of continued growth. The unconstructed church is dim, lit only through colored glass. Its doors have rushed on behind them, out of sight.

  The rose window continues to rise. It is round and red. Refracting spikes radiate. Inside the window a sad woman tries to smile her way out of the glass.

  Day still pantomimes the crawl, the only stroke he knows.

  The window lets light through and nothing else, colors it.

  “Close the eyes which are in your head,” comes Ndiawar’s wooden echo.

  Yang faces the nave. “Close them.”

  Barrel vaults darkle above the rose. The window reverses all normal disclosure—everything solid is here black, all that is light is brilliant color. Day, on the inbreath, can see its shape. The color tapers up from the window, narrows to a refracting spike, its tip a dark point. Something in white revolves around it.

  Day crawlstrokes for the pointed tip, ascending without weight.

  The defrocked professor of art puts Day’s waterproof watch on the altar. Kneels to it, blaspheming.

  Esther floats gauzed in the dark point atop the sharpshaped color of the red rose window. Day sees the point through the wet starred curtain his arms have drawn. The air’s blue looks black, he swims through the curtain, stars rain upward from his arms’ strokes. He pantomimes the crawl-stroke through the stars. He can see her clearly, revolving.

  “Don’t look!”

  And again it is when he looks below him that he fails. Wanting only to see whence he’d risen. The merest second—less—it takes for it all to come down. It starts at the apsis. East rushes west and the west’s facade can’t take it, crumbling. The walls seem to shrug as they come down on themselves. The black point on the red spike cracks open. Esther spins wriggling between its jagged halves, falling toward the rose window even as the window tilts. It’s all photo-clear. Yang says Whoa. The buttress bows outward and shears. Her fall takes time. Her body rotates slowly through the air, trails a gauze comet. The rose rushes up at her. A mile-high man could catch and cup her among the falling stars; the gauze would follow. It is Day’s failed breath that turns him blue. The blood-colored pane holds the mother inside, awaiting the child to set her free.

  There is the sound of impact at a great glass height: terrible, multihued.

  ROTATE

  The sky is an eye.

  The dusk and the dawn are the blood that feeds the eye.

  The night is the eye’s drawn lid.

  Each day the lid again comes open, disclosing blood, and the blue iris of a prone giant.

  YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE POROUSNESS OF CERTAIN BORDERS (VI)

  RECONSTRUCTED TRANSCRIPT OF

  MR. WALTER D. (“
WALT”) DELASANDRO JR.’S

  PARENTS’ MARRIAGE’S END, MAY 1956

  “Don’t love you no more.”

  “Right back at you.”

  “Divorce your ass.”

  “Suits me.”

  “Except now what about the doublewide.”

  “I get the truck is all I know.”

  “You’re saying I get the doublewide you get the truck.”

  “All I’m saying is that truck out there’s mine.”

  “Then what about the boy.”

  “For the truck you mean?”

  “You mean you’d want him?”

  “You mean otherwise?”

  “I’m asking are you saying you’d want him.”

  “You’re saying you’d want him then.”

  “Look I get the doublewide you get the truck we flip for the boy.”

  “That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Right here and now we flip for him.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  “For Christ’s sake it’s just a quarter.”

  “Just let’s see it.”

  “Jesus here then.”

  “All right then.”

  “I flip you call?”

  “Hows about you flip I call?”

  “Quit screwing around.”

  BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

  B.I. #59 04-98

  HAROLD R. AND PHYLLIS N. ENGMAN INSTITUTE FOR CONTINUING CARE

  EASTCHESTER NY

  ‘As a child, I watched a great deal of American television. No matter of where my father was being posted, it seemed always that American television was available, with its glorious and powerful women performers. Perhaps this was one more advantage of the importance of my father’s work to the defenses of the state, for we had privileges and lived comfortably. The television program I most preferred then was to watch Bewitched, featuring the American performer Elizabeth Montgomery. It was as a child, while watching this television program, that I experienced my first erotic sensations. It was not for several years, until late in my adolescence, that I was able, however, to trace my sensations and fantasies backward to these episodes of Bewitched and my experiences as the viewer when the protagonist, Elizabeth Montgomery, would perform a circular motion with her hand, accompanied by the sound of a zither or harp, and produce a supernatural effect in which all motion ceased and all the television program’s other characters suddenly were frozen in mid-gesture and were oblivious and rigid, lacking all animation. In these instances time itself appeared to cease, leaving Elizabeth Montgomery free alone to maneuver at her will. Elizabeth Montgomery employed this circular gesture within the program only as a desperate resort to help save her industrialist husband, Darion, from the political disasters which would come if she were exposed as a sorcerer, a frequent threat in the episodes. The program of Bewitched was poorly dubbed, and many details of the narratives I, at my age, did not understand. Yet my fascinations were attached to this great power to freeze the time of the program in its tracks, and to render all the other witnesses frozen and oblivious while she went about her rescue tactics among living statues whom she could again reanimate with the circular gesture when the circumstances called for this. Years later, I began, like many adolescent boys, to masturbate, creating erotic fantasies of my own construction in my imagination as I did so. I was a weak, unathletic, and somewhat sickly adolescent, a scholarly and dreamy youth more like my father, of nervous constitution and little confidence or social outgoingness in those years. It is little wonder that I sought compensation for these weaknesses in erotic fantasies in which I possessed supernatural powers over the women of my choosing in these fantasies. Linked heavily to this childhood program of Bewitched, these masturbation fantasies’ connection to this television program were unknown to me. I had forgotten this. Yet, I learned too well the insupportable responsibilities which come along with power, responsibilities whose awesomeness I have since learned to decline in my adult life since arriving here, which is a story for another time. These masturbation fantasies took their setting from the settings of our actual existences during these times, which were located at the many different military posts to which my father, a great mathematician, brought us, his family, along. My brother and I, separated in age by less than one year, were nevertheless dissimilar in most things. Often, my masturbation fantasies took their settings from the State Exercise Facilities which my mother, a former competitive athlete in youth, religiously attended, exercising enthusiastically each afternoon no matter of where my father’s duties brought us to live for that time. Willingly accompanying her to these facilities on most afternoons of our lives was my brother, an athletic and vigorous person, and often myself as well, at first with reluctance and direct force, and then, as my erotic reveries set there evolved and became more complex and powerful, with a willingness born of reasons of my own. By custom, I was permitted to bring my science books, and sat reading quietly upon a padded bench in a corner of the State Exercise Facility while my brother and mother performed their exercises. For purposes of envisioning, you may imagine these State Exercise Facilities as your nation’s health spa of today, although the equipment used there was less varied and maintained, and an air of heightened security and seriousness was due to the military posts to which the facilities were attached for the uses of personnel. And the athletic clothing of women at the State Exercise Facilities was very different from today, constituting full suits of canvas with belts and straps of leather not unlike this, which was far less revealing than today’s exercise clothing and leaving more to the mind’s eye. Now I will describe the fantasy which evolved at these facilities as a youth and became my masturbation fantasy of those years. You are not offended by this word, masturbate?

  Q.

  ‘And this is an adequate pronunciation of it?’

  Q.

  ‘In the fantasy which I am describing, I would envision myself on such an afternoon at the State Exercise Facilities, and, as I masturbated, I envision myself gazing out across the floor of vigorous exercises to let my gaze fall upon an attractive, sensual, but vigorous and athletic and so highly concentrated on her exercises as to appear unfriendly woman, often resembling many of the attractive, vigorous, humorless young women of the military or civilian atomic engineering services who possessed access to these facilities and exercised with the same forbidding seriousness and intensity as my mother and my brother, who spent long periods of their time often hurling a heavy leather medicine ball between them with extreme force. But in my masturbation fantasy, the supernatural power of my gaze would rattle the chosen woman’s attention, and she would look up from her piece of exercise equipment, gazing around the facility for the source of the irresistible erotic power which had penetrated her consciousness, finally her gaze locating me in my corner across the activity-filled room, such that the object of my gaze and I locked both eyes in a gaze of strong erotic attraction to which the remainder of the vigorously exercising personnel in the room were oblivious. For you see, in the masturbation fantasy I possess a supernatural power, a power of the mind, of which the origin and mechanics are never elaborated, remaining mysterious even to I who possess this secret power and can employ it at my will, a power through which a certain expressive, highly concentrated gaze on my part, directed at the woman who was the object of it, renders her irresistibly attracted toward me. The sexual component of the fantasy, as I masturbate, proceeds to depict this chosen woman and myself copulating in variations of sexual frenzy upon an exercise mat in the room’s center. There is little more to these components of this fantasy, which are sexual and adolescent and, in retrospect, somewhat average, I now realize. I have not yet explained the origins of the American program of Bewitched of my early youth for these fantasies of seduction. Nor of the great secondary power which I also possess in the masturbation fantasy, the supernatural power to halt time and magically to freeze all other of the room’s exercisers in their tracks with a covert circular motion of my hand, to caus
e all motion and activity in the State Exercise Facility to cease. You must envision these: heavily muscled missile officers held motionless beneath the barbell of a lift, wrestling navigators frozen complexly together, computer technicians’ whirling jump ropes frozen into parabolas of all angle, and the medicine ball hanging frozen between the outstretched arms of my brother and my mother. They and all other witnesses in the exercise room are rendered with but one gesture of my will petrified and insensate, such that the attractive, bewitched, overpowered woman of my choice and myself only remain animated and aware in this dim wooden room with its odors of liniment and unwashed sweating in which now all time has ceased—the seduction occurs outside of the time and movement of the most very basic physics—and as I beckon her to me with a powerful gaze and perhaps as well a slight circular motion of just one finger, and she, overpowered with erotic attraction, comes toward me, I also in turn arise from my bench in the corner and come also toward her as well, until, as in a formal minuet, the woman of the fantasy and I both meet together upon the exercise mat at the room’s exact center, she removing the straps of her heavy clothing with a frenzy of sexual mania while my schoolboy’s uniform is removed with a more controlled and amused deliberation, forcing her to wait in an agony of erotic need. To compress the matters, then there is copulation in varied indistinct positions and ways among the many other petrified, unseeing figures for whom I have stopped time with my hand’s great power. Of course, it is here you may observe this linkage with the program of Bewitched of my childhood sensations. For this additional power, within the fantasy, to freeze living bodies and halt time in the State Exercise Facility, which began merely as a logistical contrivance, became swiftly I think the primary fuel source of the entire masturbation fantasy, a masturbation fantasy which was, as any onlooker can easily be able to tell, a fantasy much more of power than merely of copulation. By this I am saying that envisioning my own great powers—over citizens’ wills and motion, over the flowing of time, the frozen obliviousness of witnesses, over whether my brother and my mother even may move the robust bodies of which they were so justly proud and vain—soon these formed the true nucleus of the fantasy’s power, and it was, unknown to me, to fantasies of this power that I was more truly masturbating. I understand this now. In my youth I did not. I knew, as an adolescent, only that the sustaining of this fantasy of overpowering seduction and copulation required some strict logical plausibility. I am saying in order to masturbate successfully, the scene required a rational logic by which copulation with this exercising woman is plausible in the public of the State Exercise Facility. I was responsible to this logic.’