Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  … Ovid’s point finally being that Ecko of Venice & the T.V.S.P. decides that he can ‘attain’ Sissee Nar only in the unionized melt that is death’s good night. Both Robert Vaughan & the high-alto sirens affirm this decision as meet & good (Codependae calling him ‘esse’).

  Codependae then elects to afflict Agon M. Nar with the following dream. A.M.N.’s Pac 10 daughters Leigh & Coleptic are being held hostage by some extremely serious militant CA Hispanics who threaten to hang them by their own lustrous locks if Nar doesn’t complete the single telemarketing labor they demand: he is to find a hypnotic avatar of the ancient-Greek Narcissus & air him, i.e. broadcast his irresistible image over & over, in order to entrance the Anglos of medieval CA into the glazed narcosis that will make them easy pickings for lean hungry barbarians from the Latin south. Their voices on Nar’s cellular are highalto. Agon M. goes as usual to seek counsel at Tri-Stan’s videonic HQ, but the three antique Stans can’t concentrate on his trouble: they have only one of everything among them, & when two or more of them have to visit the exec washroom at the same time there’s always a hell of a row about time & trade, & A. Nar, in that aphasiac frustration so common to nightmares, can’t make himself heard through the Empedoclean squabble over porcelain & part. Finally a mysterious pockmarked Hispanic custodian does that psst thing from the doorway—without context or explanation, he informs Nar that he has consulted the Oracle of Stasis & that the ortolan-entrails have Foretold that Agon M. Nar will never be able in time to find a qualified male Narcissus II (no modern man, even in the much-Enhanced fluorescent basin, being divine-looking enough to hold the rapt gaze of demographic millions), but that a bona fide female Narcissus-grade object will, ironically, be found by Nar no farther away than his own neocolonial home’s bassinet or the cover of last week’s Guide: yes his Love-Dumpling, esse, his Leettle Preenciss, who will, however, the custodian says the $88.95 entrails Foretell in no uncertain terms, herself prove to be the cause of Nar’s own personal doom—vanishing then with an eerie & not all that Hispanic or even masculine laugh. Nevertheless, properly freaked by the prophecy, the still-dreaming Nar (yes this is all still in the dream, on which Codependae has spared no effort or expense) the still-dreaming A.M.N. remands Sissee’s new Norse reproduction to the purgatory of a permanent 4–5 A.M. slot, when even 24-hr-loop demographics are grim. Yet fatalistically alas, for this weeest-hour slot is also the slot when all the really seriously insomniac drug freaks & neurasthenics & flameouts & lunatic stalker-type S-NN fans tune faithfully in; & no fewer than about 400 different lunatic stalkertype fans start stalking his narcoBrynhildic baby, sometimes actually bumping into one another in mid-stalk outside Sissee’s S-NN dressing room; & but eventually in the dream one of the stalkers finally accomplishes his mission, & she dies in a hail of laser-scoped semiautomatic gas-tipped bullets; & even though in the dream’s remainder Agon M. Nar himself doesn’t get killed off (so the carbuncular custodian’s prophecy isn’t fulfilled within the dream itself) A.M.N. feels so horrible & benighted by REM-cycle’s end that he’s pretty sure when he wakes up at 5 A.M. that if the dream’s epilogue hadn’t been preempted by his Hispanic houseboy’s gentle prod Nar would also have bought it just from sheer Laiusian grief & guilt.

  The point being that Agon M. Nar is colossally frightened & upset by the dream (BC programming executives tending to place great importance on oneiromancy), & he immediately suspends prereproduction on the Siegfried thing & pages Sissee Nar & beseeches her to return to & secret herself in her Venice beach house & keep a very low & window-avoiding profile for a while… which Sissee immediately does, because she’s pretty much passivity in motion & does whatever A.M.N. tells her, & also because she has an extremely small ego from never once having seen herself in a mirror. Except alas, it’s child’s play for the natively Venetian Reggie Ecko—who’s now pawned his Trinitron & bought an AK-47 from an auto-weapon stand right on Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey—to find out exactly where the unlisted Sissee lives: her sleeping face is burned into CA’s consciousness, & he has only to flash a glossy 4 × 5 around Venice’s various health clubs & silicon wholesalers to have babes & dudes alike immediately recognize the image as of the unlisted S-NN girl who’s living low-profile just over a certain set of dunes.

  & so Reggie Ecko, adorned in finest Alfani & light-denying glasses, & suffering mightily from coke-bugs & general desiderative frenzy, journeys forthwith to Sissee’s off-violet beach house &, after checking all the windows’ drawn shades & repeatedly shaking the sand out of his loafers & ringing the Cyndi Lauper doorchime, booms the door & bursts the pathetically naive safety-chain, & Sissee’s in there innocently passing the time with Walkman & a Buns of Steel aerobics tape; &, as best forensic authorities could later determine, Ecko—crashing in & seeing Sissee Nar not only upright & awake but in what looked for all the world like vigorous purposive motion—for a brief too-human moment hesitated to open up & actually fire, & Sissee had a moment’s chance to run for her life & escape the fatal stalker-type tribute, except apparently she’d happened to catch a doubled glimpse of herself in the mirrored sunglasses Ecko wore to protect his rheumy Romantic retinae from the horrific light of the 3-D day, & Sissee was apparently just, like, totally transfixed by her own human image, literally frozen by what’s got to have been the revelation of her Enhanced & trans-human charms in the first mirror of any sort she had ever gazed into, & apparently she was standing there so utterly static & passive & affectless w/ shock that Ecko’s heart retumesced with doomed unendurable ur-Romantic C#-aria-type love once more, flooding his ravaged CNS so utterly that he suddenly came to/departed from himself again & ventilated Sissee Nar, liberally, then somehow shot himself not once but three times in the head.

  … w/ the tragicomic irony here being that Ecko’s wacko & retrograde Romantic dream of union with Sissee in death turned out to come true. For S. Nar & Ecko were recombinantly joined in just precisely the 2-D world he’d Foreseen as their only possible union. For the syndicated vehicles Donahue! & Entertainment Tonight & its many avatars like Oprah & Geraldo! & A Current Affair & Inside Edition & Unsolved Mysteries & Sally Jessy! & Solved But Still Really Interesting Mysteries paid lavish & repetitive tribute to the now-tragic epic of Sissee Nar’s cometic rise & Reggie Ecko’s fall at the hands of Sissee’s father & the father’s epiphanic & Laiusian dreams & Sissee’s paralysis in the mirror of Ecko’s lenses & high-caliber ventilation & gruesome death with her Walkman still on & urging the first police on the scene to Flex That Fundament & Ecko’s mysterious triballistic suicide & subsequently discovered Crayola diary. & the very most famous Varietae photo of an unconscious Endymionic Sissee & a photo of Reggie Ecko jet-skiing with Ricardo Montalban back when he’d moved & shaken at Tri-Stan’s apex—these two images kept getting juxtaposed on-screen & placed side by side behind the commentators’ variform heads; & the Enquirer even did the job right & spliced the negatives together & claimed they’d been lovers all along, Ecko & Sissee, with a fetish for cross-dressing & watersports…& so fan/lover & star/object really were, in a sort of cynically campy but still contemporarily deep & mythic way, united, melded in death, in 2-D, in tales & on screens.

  & then when Ovid the Obtuse’s gregarious Rolfer happened to be discussing his own obsession with the celebrated case one day during a spinogravitational alignment, & saying (the Rolfer was) how it seemed a terribly insensitive & grisly thing to say but that Ecko & Sissee Nar looked, in 2-D juxtaposition, like just the sort of perfectly doomed couple that all good BC Americans of whatever erotic persuasion hear & read & fantasize Romantically about from the age of say Grimms’ Tales on… at this point Ovid the O. got the idea to turn the entire affair into this sort of ironically contemporary & self-conscious but still mythically resonant & highly lyrical entertainment-property. The fact that Agon M. Nar—now so peripetially devastated that he has in public cursed the Gods via Prepared Statement & has ceased all moving/shaking/recombining & has allowed S-NN to be surpassed in the Sweeps by a rank cable
imitator, Ted of Atlanta’s Hit or Myth Network—that Nar had had his attorneys tell Ovid the Obtuse that any unauthorized Sissee-lyric would constitute grounds for legal action deterred O. the O. not one iota. Seeking, as his lapidary soliciting abstract put it, to ‘… renew our abiding puzzlement at such suffering,’ Ovid proposed to reconstitute & present the story as a ‘… high-concept miscegenation-of-Romantic-archetypestype metamyth,’ a kind of hottub-swingers’ incest among Tristan & Narcissus & Echo & Isolde; & in the abstract he not only confirmed but did in fact plagiarize Dirk of Fresno’s theory that such were Stasis the P. Reception God’s grief at the demise of his mortal Flavor-of-the-Month & wrath at the lovesick ex-exec who’d 86’d her that he denied Reggie Ecko’s thrice-shot soul the peace of any sort of Underworld visa, that instead Stasis condemned Ecko’s ghost to haunt forever those most ultra of broadcast television’s UHF bandwidths, to abide there annoyingly & imperfectly juxtaposed with all figures & imbricately to overlap & mimic their on-screen movements as an irksome visual echo to help remind impressionable mortals that what we’re transfixed by is artificial & mediated by imperfect technē. (Like we didn’t already know. (Plus reception was nearly perfect on Cable by this time anyway.))

  & but one final & epexegetic ‘alas.’ For such proved to be the descantant Ovid’s love for reflecting on his own periphrastic theories about what made Agon M. Nar & Stasis & Codependae & the Satyr-Nymph Network & the popularization of timeless lies resonate aesthetically that he neglected to make any substantive mention of the fact that Sissee Nar had in fact been Skinnerianly raised to fear & avoid & religiously eschew all mirrors, any surface with reflective burnish, her wise & clever but somewhat Behaviorist father fearing that her image’s ever-Enhancing beauty would, seen, render her unattractively narcissistic, stoned on self-love; & Ovid neglected to reveal how the whole reason A.M.N. had chosen a comatose role for Sissee’s debut was so that her eyes could remain demurely shut during shooting & she could be spared any involutant glimpses of herself on monitors or tape, etc.; that if A.M.N.’d maybe let his Enhanced Love-Dumpling have one or two quick mithridatitic glimpses of herself in mirrors—thus letting her glean even some slim bit of an idea what Herm Deight MD’s aesthetic Enhancements had wrought—before at last Ecko of Venice’s reflective shades hove into her unprepared view, she’d not have been so transfixed & shocked by an image which actually she alone in all the fluorescent basin saw in truth as imperfect nay flawed & inadequately Enhanced & like totally gnarlyly mortal, & she might have been able to keep it psychically together enough to run like hell & escape the semiautomatic Wagnerian intentions of the lunatic UHF-ghost-to-be. So Ovid ended up having to stick all this narratively important background in right at the end, pretentiously referring to it as an ‘epexegesis,’ & the Acquiring Editor of the respected glossy organ he’d solicited was ill pleased, & the organ didn’t buy the thing after all, although Ted of Atlanta’s cable H.O.M.N. bought the rights to Ovid’s overall concept for one of those ‘Remembering Sissee’–type tribute-specials that lets you use a whole lot of public-domain footage over & over again under the rubric of Encomium; & even though ‘Remembering Sissee’ didn’t actually ever make it onto the wire (Hit or Myth was by then processing 660 myth-recombination concepts per diem), its Option Payment to Ovid was far from dishonoring, & between that & the respected glossy organ’s Kill Fee Ovid the Obtuse ended up making out okay on the whole thing; don’t you worry about Ovid.

  ON HIS DEATHBED, HOLDING YOUR HAND, THE ACCLAIMED NEW YOUNG OFF-BROADWAY PLAYWRIGHT’S FATHER BEGS A BOON

  THE FATHER: Listen: I did despise him. Do.

  [PAUSE for episode of ophthalmorrhagia; technician’s swab/flush of dextrocular orbit; change of bandage]

  THE FATHER: Why does no one tell you? Why do all regard it as a blessed event? There seems to be almost a conspiracy to keep you in the dark. Why does no one take you aside and tell you what is coming? Why not tell you the truth? That your life is to be forfeit? That you are expected now to give up everything and not only to receive no thanks but to expect none? Not one. To suspend the essential give-and-take you’d spent years learning was life and now want nothing? I tell you, worse than nothing: that you will have no more life that is yours? That all you wished for yourself you are now expected to wish for him instead? Whence this expectation? Does it sound reasonable to expect? Of a human being? To have nothing and wish nothing for you? That your entire human nature should somehow change, alter, as if magically, at the moment it emerges from her after causing her such pain and deforming her body so profoundly that ne—that she will herself somehow alter herself this way automatically, as if by magic, the instant he emerges, as if by some glandular bewitchment, but that you, who have not carried him or been joined by tubes, will remain, inside, as you have always been, yet be expected to change as well, drop everything, freely? Why does no one speak of it, this madness? That your failure to cast yourself away and change everything and be delirious with joy at—that this will be judged. Not just as a quote unquote parent but as a man. Your human worth. The prim smug look of those who would judge parents, judge them for not magically changing, not instantly ceding everything you’d wished for heretofore and—securus judicat orbis terrarum, Father. But Father are we really to believe it is so obvious and natural that no one feels even any need to tell you? Instinctive as blinking? Never think to warn you? It did not seem obvious to me, I can assure you. Have you ever actually seen an afterbirth? watch drop-jawed as it emerged and hit the floor, and what they do with it? No one told me I assure you. That one’s own wife might judge you deficient simply for remaining the man she married. Was I the only one not told? Why such silence when—

  [PAUSE for episode of dyspnea]

  THE FATHER: I despised him from the first. I do not exaggerate. From the first moment they finally saw fit to let me in and I looked down and saw him already attached to her, already sucking away. Sucking at her, draining her, and her upturned face—she who had made her views on the sucking of body parts very plain, I can—her face, she had changed, become an abstraction, The Mother, her natal face enraptured, radiant, as if nothing invasive or grotesque were taking place. She had screamed on the table, screamed, and now where was that girl? I had never seen her look so—the current term is ‘out of it,’ no? Has anyone considered this phrase? what it really implies? In that instant I knew I despised him. There is no other word. Despicable. The whole affair from then on. The truth: I found it neither natural nor fulfilling nor beautiful nor fair. Think of me what you will. It is the truth. It was all disgusting. Ceaseless. The sensory assault. You cannot know. The incontinence. The vomit. The sheer smell. The noise. The theft of sleep. The selfishness, the appalling selfishness of the newborn, you have no idea. No one prepared us for any of it, for the sheer unpleasantness of it. The insane expense of pastel plastic things. The cloacal reek of the nursery. The endless laundry. The odors and constant noise. The disruption of any possible schedule. The slobber and terror and piercing shrieks. Like a needle those shrieks. Perhaps if someone had prepared, forewarned us. The endless reconfiguration of all schedules around him. Around his desires. He ruled from that crib, ruled from the first. Ruled her, reduced and remade her. Even as an infant the power he wielded! I learned the bottomless greed of him. Of my son. Of arrogance past imagining. The regal greed and thoughtless disorder and mindless cruelty—the literal thoughtlessness of him. Has anyone considered this phrase’s real import? Of the thoughtlessness with which he treated the world? The way he threw things aside and clutched at things, the way he broke things and just walked away. As a toddler. Terrible Twos indeed. I watched other children; I studied other children his age—something in him was different, missing. Psychotic, sociopathic. The grotesque lack of care for what we gave him. Believe me. You were of course forbidden to say ‘I paid for that! Treat that with care! Show some minim of respect for something outside yourself!’ No never that. Never that. You’d be a monster. What sort of parent asks for a moment’s
thought to whence things came? Never. Not a thought. I spent years drop-jawed with amazement, too appalled even to know what—noplace to speak of it. No one else even appeared to see it. Him. An essential disorder of character. An absence of whatever we mean by ‘human.’ A psychosis no one dares diagnose. No one says it—that you are to live for and serve a psychotic. No one mentions the abuse of power. No one mentions that there will be psychotic tantrums during which you will wish—even just his face, I did, I detested his face. A small soft moist face, not human. A circle of cheese with features like hasty pinches in some ghastly dough. Am—was I the only one? That an infant’s face is not in any way recognizable, not a human face—it’s true—then why do all clasp their hands and call it beauty? Why not simply admit to an ugliness that may well be outgrown? Why such—but the way from the beginning his eye—my son’s right eye—it protruded, subtly yes, slightly more than the left, and blinked in a palsied and overrapid way, like the sputter of a defective circuit. That fluttery blink. The subtle but once noticed never thenceforth ignorable bulge of that same eye. Its subtle but aggressive forward thrust. All was to be his, that eye betrayed the—a triumph in it, a glazed exultation. Pediatric term was ‘exophthalmic,’ supposedly harmless, correctable over time. I never told her what I knew: not correctable, not an accidental sign. That was the eye to look at, into it, if you wished to see what no one else wished to see or acknowledge. The mask’s only gap. Hear this. I loathed my child. I loathed the eye, the mouth, the lip, the pinched snout, the wet hanging lip. His very skin was an affliction. ‘Impetigo’ the term, chronic. The pediatricians could find no reason. The insurance a nightmare. I spent half my days on the phone with these people. Wearing a mask of concern to match hers. Never a word. A sickly child, weak and cheese-white, chronically congested. The suppurating sores of his chronic impetigo, the crust. The ruptured infections. ‘Suppuration’: the term means ooze. My son oozed, exuded, flaked, suppurated, dribbled from every quadrant. To whom does one speak of this? That he taught me to despise the body, what it is to have a body—to be disgusted, repulsed. Often I had to look away, duck outside, dart around corners. The absent thoughtless picking and scratching and probing and toying, bottomless narcissistic fascination with his own body. As if his extremities were the very world’s four corners. A slave to himself. An engine of mindless will. A reign of terror, trust me. The insane tantrums when his will was thwarted. When some gratification was denied or delayed. It was Kafkan—you were punished for protecting him from himself. ‘No, no, child, my son, I cannot allow you to thrust your hand into the vaporizer’s hot water, the blades of the window fan, do not drink that household solvent’—a tantrum. The insanity of it. You could not explain or reason. You could only walk away appalled. Will yourself not simply to let him the next time, not to smile and let him, ‘Have at that solvent, my son,’ learn the hard way. The whining and wheedling and tugging and towering rages. Not really psychotic, I came to see. Crazy like a fox. An agenda behind every outburst. ‘Too much excitement, overtired, cranky, feverish, needs a lie-down, just frustrated, just a long day’—the litany of her excuses for him. His endless emotional manipulation of her. The ceaselessness of it and her inhuman reaction: even when she recognized what he was up to she excused him, she was charmed by the nakedness of his insecurity, his what she called ‘need’ for her, what she called my son’s ‘need for reassurance.’ Need for reassurance? What reassurance? He never doubted. He knew it all belonged to him. He never doubted. As if it were due him. As if he deserved it. Insanity. Solipsism. He wanted it all. All I had, had had, never would. It never ended. Blind, reasonless appetite. I will say it: evil. There. I can imagine your face. But he was evil. And I alone seemed to know it. He afflicted me in a thousand ways and I could say nothing. My face fairly ached at day’s end from the control I was forced to exert over—even the slight note of complaint you could hear in his breathing. The bruised circles of restless appetite beneath his eyes. Exhalation a whimper. The two different eyes, the one terrible eye. The redness and flaccidity of his mouth and the way the lip was always wet no matter how much one wiped at it for him. An inherently moist child, always clammy, the scent of him vaguely fungal. The vacancy of his face when he became absorbed in some pleasure. The utter shamelessness of his greed. The sense of utter entitlement. How long it took us to teach him even a perfunctory thank-you. And he never meant it, and she did not mind. She would—never minded. She was his servant. Slave mentality. This was not the girl I asked to marry me. She was his slave and believed she knew only joy. He played with her as a cat does a toy mouse and she felt joy. Madness? Where was my wife? What was this creature she stroked as he sucked at her? Most of his childhood—memory of it—most renders down to seeing myself standing there some meters away, watching them in appalled amazement. Behind my dutiful smile. Too weak ever to speak out, to ask it. This was my life. This is the truth I’ve hidden. You are good to listen. More important than you know. To speak it. Te ju—judge me as you wish. No, do. I am dying—no, I know—bedridden, near blind, gutted, catarrh, dying, alone and in pain. Look at all these bloody tubes. A life of such silence. And this is my confession. Good of you. Not what you—it is not your forgiveness I—just to hear the truth. About him. That I despised him. There is no other word. Often I was forced to avert my eyes from him, look away. Hide. I discovered why fathers hold the evening paper as they do.