Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  Q.

  ‘This may appear so outlandish, of course, from the perspective of how little logic is in envisioning a sickly youth causing sexual desire with only a hand’s motion. I have really no answer for this. The hand’s supernatural power was perhaps the fantasy’s First Premise or aksioma, itself unquestioned, from which all else then must rationally derive and cohere. Here, you must say I think First Premise. And all must cohere from this, for I was the son of a great figure of state science, thus if once a logical inconsistency in the fantasy’s setting occurred to me, it demanded a resolution consistent with the enframing logic of the hand’s powers, and I was responsible for this. If not, I found myself distracted by nagging thoughts of the inconsistency, and was unable to masturbate. This is following for you? By this I am saying, what began only as a childish fantasy of unlimited power became a series of problems, complications, inconsistencies, and the responsibilities to erect working, internally consistent solutions to these. It was these responsibilities which swiftly expanded to become too insupportable even within fantasy to permit me ever to exercise again true power of any type, hence placing me in the circumstances which you see all too plainly here.’

  Q.

  ‘The true problem begins for me in soon recognizing that the State Exercise Facility is in truth public, open to all those of the post’s personnel with proper documentation desiring to exercise; therefore, some person at any time could with ease stride into the facility in the midst of the hand’s seduction, witnessing this copulation amidst a surreal scene of frozen, insensate athletics. To me this was not acceptable.’

  Q.

  ‘Not because of so much anxiety at being caught or exposed, which had been the concerns of Elizabeth Montgomery in the program, but for myself more because this represented a loose thread in the tapestry of power which the masturbation fantasy, of course, represented. It seemed ridiculous that I, whose circular hand’s gesture’s power over the facility’s physics and sexuality was so total, should suffer interruption at the hands of any random military person who wanders in from outside wishing to perform calisthenics. This was the first-stage indication that the metaphysical powers of my hand were, though supernatural, nevertheless too limited. A yet more serious inconsistency occurred to me soon in the fantasy, as well. For the immobile, oblivious personnel of the exercise room—when the woman of my choice under my power and myself had now satiated one another, and dressed, and returned to our two positions across the wide facility from one another, with she, her, recalling now of the interval now only a vague but powerful erotic attraction toward the pale boy reading across the room, which would permit the sexual relation to occur again at whatever future time I would choose, and I then performed the reversed second hand gesture which permitted time and conscious motion in the facility to again begin—the now resumed personnel in the midst of their exercises would, I realized, merely by glancing at their wristwatches, then they would be made aware that an inexplicable amount of time had passed. They would, therefore, be, in truth, not truly oblivious that something unusual had occurred. For instance, both my brother and our mother wore Pobyeda wristwatches. All witnesses were not truly oblivious. This inconsistency was unacceptable in the fantasy’s logic of total power, and soon made successful masturbation to envisioning it impossible. Here you must say distraction. But it was more, yes?’

  Q.

  ‘Expanding the hand’s imagined powers to stop all clocks, timepieces, and wristwatches in this room was the initial solution, until the nagging realization occurred that, just at the moment the room’s personnel, afterward, left the State Exercise Facility and reentered the external flow of the military post outside, any first glance at some other clock—or, for example, the remonstrance of an appointment with a superior for which they were too late—this nevertheless would once again bring them to realize that something strange and inexplicable had taken place, which once again compromised the premise that all are oblivious. This, I naggingly concluded, was the fantasy’s more serious inconsistency. Despite my circular gesture and the brief harp which accompanied its power, I had not, as I had naively at the outset believed, caused time’s flow to cease and taken myself and the bewitched, athletic women out of time’s physics. Trying to masturbate, I was agitated that my fantasy’s power had in reality succeeded only in halting the superficial appearance of time, and then only within the limited arena of the fantasy’s State Exercise Facility. It was at this time that the imaginative labor of this fantasy of power became exponentially more difficult. For, within the enframing logic of the fantasy’s power, I now required this circular hand’s gesture to halt all time and freeze all personnel upon the entire military post of which the exercise facility was a part. The logic of this need was clear. But also it was incomplete.’

  Q.

  ‘Excellent, yes. You see where this is now heading for, this logical problem whose circumference will continue expanding as each solution discloses further inconsistencies and further needs for the exercise of my fantasy’s powers. For, yes, because the posts to which my father’s duties to the computers brought us along were in strategic communication with the entire defense apparatus of the state, thus I soon was required to fantasize that only my one single hand’s gesture—taking place in only one bleak Siberian defense outpost, and for the sake of entrancing the will of merely one female programmer or clerical aide—nevertheless now must accomplish the instantaneous freezing of the entire state, to suspend in time and consciousness almost two hundred million citizens in the midst of whatever of their actions might happen to intrude upon my imaginations, actions as diverse as peeling an apple, traversing an intersection, mending a boot, interring a child’s casket, plotting a trajectory, copulating, removing new-milled steel from an industrial forge, and so forth, unending and numberless sep—’

  Q.

  ‘Yes yes and because the state itself existed in close ideological and defensive alliance with many neighboring satellite states, and, of course, also was in communication and trade with countless other of the world’s nations, I all too quickly, as an adolescent, trying merely to masturbate in private, found out that my single fantasy of unknown seduction outside time required that the very world’s entire population itself must be frozen by the single hand’s gesture, all of the entire world’s timepieces and activities, from the activities of yam farming in Nigeria to those of affluent Westerners purchasing blue jeans and Rock and Roll, on, on… and you see of course yes not merely all human motion and time-measurings but of course the very movements of the earth’s clouds, oceans, and prevailing winds, for it is hardly consistent to reanimate the earth’s population to awareness at a resumed time of two o’clock with the tides and weathers, whose cycles have been scientifically catalogued to an exacting specificity, now in conditions corresponding to three o’clock or four. This is what I was meaning in referring to the responsibilities which come with such powers, responsibilities which the American program of Bewitched had wholly suppressed and neglected during my childish viewing. For this labor of freezing and holding suspended of each element of the natural world of earth which intruded to occur to me as I only am attempting to envision the attractive, athletic, uncontrollable cries of passion beneath me on the worn mat—these labors of imagination were exhausting to me. Episodes of masturbation fantasy which used to take up only fifteen brief minutes were now requiring many hours and enormous mental labors. My health, never good, declined in a dramatic fashion in this period, so much so so that I was often bedridden and absent from my schools and from the State Exercise Facilities which my brother attended with my mother after school period. Also, my brother began at this time to become a competitive power weight-lifter in the light divisions of his age and weight, competitions of lifting which our mother often attended, traveling along with him, while my father remained on duty with the targeting programs and I in bed in our empty quarters alone for whole days in a row. Most of my times alone in the bed in our room in their absence we
re increasingly devoted, not to masturbating, but in the labor of imagination of constructing a sufficiently motionless and atemporal planet earth to allow my fantasy merely to take place at all. I do not, in fact, remember now whether the American program’s implicit doctrine required the circular hand motion of Elizabeth Montgomery to deanimate the whole of humanity and the natural world outside the suburban home she shared with Darion. But I vividly do remember that a new, different television performer assumed the role of Darion late in my childhood, near the end of the American program’s availability from transmitters in the Aleutian, and my discomfiture, even as a child, at the inconsistency that Elizabeth Montgomery would fail to recognize that her industrialist mate and sexual partner was now altogether a different man. He did not look similar at all and she remained oblivious! This had caused me some great distress. Of course, also there was the sun.’

  Q.

  ‘Our sun up above, overhead, whose seeming movement across the southern horizon was, of course, time’s first measure among man. This too must be suspended in its apparent movement, as well, by the logic of the fantasy, which, in reality, this entailed halting the very earth’s own spin. Very well I recall the moment this further inconsistency occurred to me, in the bed, and the labors and responsibility it implied within the fantasy. Well, too, do I remember this envy I felt of my brutish, unimaginative brother, upon whom the excellent scientific instruction of so many of the posts’ schools was sheerly wasted, and he would not be in the least overwhelmed by the consequences of realizing this further: that the earth’s rotation was but one part of its temporal movements, and that in order not to betray the fantasy’s First Premise through causing incongruities in the scientifically catalogued measurements of the Solar Day and the Synodic Period, the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun must itself be halted by my supernatural hand’s gesture, an orbit whose plane, I had to my misfortune learned in childhood, included a 23.53-degrees angle to the axis of the earth’s own spin, having as well variant equivalents in the measurement of the Synodic Period and Sidereal Period, which required then the rotational and orbital stopping of all other planets and their satellite bodies in the Solar System, each of which forced me to interrupt the masturbation fantasy to perform research and calculations based upon the varying planets’ different spins and angles with respect to the planes of their own orbits around the sun. This was laborious in that era of only very simple hand-held calculators… and beyond, for you see where this nightmare is heading for, since, yes, the sun itself is in many complex orbits relative to such nearby stars as Sirius and Arcturus, stars which must now be brought under the hegemony of the hand’s circular gesture’s power, as did the Milky Way Galaxy, upon whose edge the neighboring cluster of stars which includes our own sun both complexly spins and orbits the many other such clusters… and onward and onward, an ever-expanding nightmare of responsibilities and labor, because yes the Milky Way Galaxy of itself also orbits the Local Group of galaxies in counterpoint to the Andromeda Galaxy more than some 200 million light-years distant, an orbit whose halting entails also a halt in the Red Shift and thus the proven and measured flight of the now-known galaxies from one another in an expanding bloom of expansion of the Known Universe, with innumerable complications and factors to include in the nightly calculations which kept me from the sleep my exhaustion cried increasingly out for, such as, for example, the fact that such distant galaxies as 3C295 receded at rapid rates exceeding one-third the speed of light while far closer-in galaxies, including the troublesome NGC253 Galaxy at merely thirteen million light-years, appeared mathematically to actually be approaching our Milky Way Galaxy through its own momentums more rapidly than the larger expansions of the Red Shift could impel it to recede from us, so that now the bed is so awash with the piles of science volumes and journals and sheafs of my calculations that there would be no space for me to masturbate even if I had been able to do so. And it was when it then dawned upon me, amidst an agitated half-sleep in the littered bed, that all these many months’ datas and calculations had, so stupidly, been based upon published astronomic observations from an earth whose spin, orbits, and sidereal positions were in the naturally unfrozen, ever-changing mode of reality, and that all of it therefore must be recalculated from my fantasy’s gesture’s theoretical haltings of the earth and neighboring satellites if the seduction and copulation amidst the timeless obliviousness of all citizens were to avoid hopeless inconsistency—it was then I broke down from it. The fantasy’s single gesture of one adolescent hand had proven to entail an infinitely complex responsibility more befitting of a God than a mere boy. These broke me. It was at this moment I renounced, resigned, became again merely a sickly and unconfident youth. I abdicated at seventeen years and four months and 8.40344 days, reaching up high with now both of my hands to make the reversing gesture of linked circles which set all of it free once again in a bloom of renunciation that commenced at our bed and opened swiftly out to include all known bodies in motion. I think you have no idea what this cost for me. Delirium, confinement, my father’s disappointments—but these were as nothing compared to the price and rewards of what I underwent in this time. This American program of Bewitched was merely the spark behind this infinite explosion and contraction of creative energy. Deluded, broken or not broken—but how many other men have felt the power to become a God, then renounced it all? This is the theme of my power you say you wished to hear of: renunciation. How many know the true meaning of it? None of these persons here, I can assure you. Going through their oblivious motions outside of here, crossing streets and peeling apples and copulating thoughtlessly with women they believe they love. What do they know of love? I, who am by my choosing a celibate of all eternity, have alone seen love in all its horror and unbounded power. I alone have any rights to speak of it. All the rest is merely noise, radiations of a background which is even now retreating always further. It cannot be stopped.’

  B.I. #72 08-98

  NORTH MIAMI BEACH FL

  ‘I love women. I really do. I love them. Everything about them. I can’t even describe it. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones, thin. From drop-dead to plain. To me, hey: all women are beautiful. Can’t get enough of them. Some of my best friends are women. I love to watch them move. I love how different they all are. I love how you can never understand them. I love love love them. I love to hear them giggle, the different little sounds. The way you just can’t keep them from shopping no matter what you do. I love it when they bat their eyes or pout or give you that little look. The way they look in heels. Their voice, their smell. Those teeny red bumps from shaving their legs. Their little dainty unmentionables and special little womanly products at the store. Everything about them drives me wild. When it comes to women I’m helpless. All they have to do is come into a room and I’m a goner. What would the world be without women? It’d—oh no not again behind you look out!’

  B.I. #28 02-97

  YPSILANTI MI [SIMULTANEOUS]

  K——:‘What does today’s woman want. That’s the big one.’

  E——:‘I agree. It’s the big one all right. It’s the what-do-you-call….’

  K——:‘Or put another way, what do today’s women think they want versus what do they really deep down want.’

  E——:‘Or what do they think they’re supposed to want.’

  Q.

  K——:‘From a male.’

  E——:‘From a guy.’

  K——:‘Sexually.’

  E——:‘In terms of the old mating dance.’

  K——:‘Whether it sounds Neanderthal or not, I’m still going to argue it’s the big one. Because the whole question’s become such a mess.’

  E——:‘You can say that again.’

  K——:‘Because now the modern woman has an unprecedented amount of contradictory stuff laid on her about what it is she’s supposed to want and how she’s expected to conduct herself sexually.’

  E——:‘The modern woman’s a mess of contradictions th
at they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.’

  K——:‘It’s what makes it so difficult to know what they want. Difficult but not impossible.’

  E——:‘Like take your classic Madonna-versus-whore contradiction. Good girl versus slut. The girl you respect and take home to meet Mom versus the girl you just fuck.’

  K——:‘Yet let’s not forget that overlayed atop this is the new feminist-slash-postfeminist expectation that women are sexual agents, too, just as men are. That it’s OK to be sexual, that it’s OK to whistle at a man’s ass and be aggressive and go after what you want. That it’s OK to fuck around. That for today’s woman it’s almost mandatory to fuck around.’

  E——:‘With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you fuck around.’

  K——:‘Do but don’t. A double bind.’

  E——:‘A paradox. Damned either way. The media perpetuates it.’

  K——:‘You can imagine the load of internal stress all this dumps on their psyches.’

  E——:‘Come a long way baby my ass.’