Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  Sarah pins her hair for morning mass. Day packs another case for Esther. Dresses himself. He fails to find a shoe. On the big bed’s edge, one shoe on, he watches cotton dust rotate through the butteryellow columns of a morning that gets later.

  BLACK ART

  That day he buys them a janitor’s broom. He sweeps rainwater off the tarp over Sarah’s pool.

  That night Sarah stays with Esther. Touches metal all night. Day sleeps alone.

  Day stands at a black window in Sarah’s bedroom. Over Massachusetts the sky is smeared with stars. The stars move slowly across the glass.

  That day he goes to Esther with Sarah. Esther’s bed’s steel gleams in the bright room. Esther smiles dully as Day reads about giants.

  “I am a giant,” he reads: “I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footprints are counties, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds.”

  “I am a giant,” Esther tries to say.

  Sarah, allergic, sneezes.

  Day: “Yes.”

  BLACK AND WHITE

  ‘All true art is music’ (a different teacher). ‘The visual arts are but one corner of true music’s allcomprising room’ (ibid.)

  Music discloses itself as a relation between one key and two notes locked by the key in dance. Rhythm. And in Day’s blown predreams, too, music consumes all law: what is most solid discloses itself here as rhythms, nothing but. Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before.

  The cleric appears tonight in monochrome and collar.

  Bless me

  Do you take this woman Sarah

  To be my

  How long

  For I have

  since your last confession to a body with the power to absolve. Confession need

  As I those who have swimmed against me

  not entail absolution, lay bare, confession in the absence of awareness of sin,

  Bless me father for there can be no awareness of sin without awareness of transgression without awareness of limit

  Full of Grace

  no such animal. Pray together for a revelation of limit

  Red clouds in Warhol’s coffee

  arrange in yourself an awareness of.

  ONE COLOR

  That day he is back at work’s first week. Sunlight reverses HEALTH pink through the windshield’s sticker. Day drives the county car past a factory.

  “Habla Espanol?” Eric Yang asks from the passenger’s side.

  Smoke from a smokestack hangs jagged as Day nods his head.

  “You wanted to be shown ropes,” Yang says. His eyes are closed as he rotates. “I’ll show you a rope. Habla?”

  “Yes,” Day says. “Hablo.”

  They drive past homes.

  Eric Yang’s special talent is the mental rotation of three-dimensional objects.

  “This case speaks only Spanish,” Yang says. “Lady’s son got himself killed last month. In their apartment. Nasty. Sixteen. Gang thing, drug thing. Big area of the kid’s blood on her kitchen floor.”

  They drive past hard hats and jackhammers.

  “She says it’s all she’s got left of him!” Yang shouts. “She won’t let us clean it up. She says it’s him,” he says.

  Mental rotation is Yang’s hobby. He is a certified counselor and caseworker.

  “Your job today,” Yang twirls an imaginary rope, lassoes something mental on the dashboard, “is to get her to draw him. Even just the blood. Ndiawar said he didn’t care which. Just so she has a picture he said. So we can maybe clean up the blood.”

  In the rearview, past himself, Day can see his case of supplies on the back seat. It’s not supposed to be in the sun.

  “Make her draw him,” Yang says, releasing a rope Day can’t see. Yang closes his eyes again. “I’m going to try to rotate this month’s phone bill.”

  Day passes a white van. Its windows are tinted. Saucers of rust on the side.

  “Today we see the poor lady who loves blood and the rich man who begs for time.”

  “Old teacher of mine. I told Ndiawar.” Day checks his left. “Art teacher in a former life.”

  “The nuisance in the public, Ndiawar calls him,” Yang says. He furrows, concentrating. “I’m rotating the duty log. We’re going to go right by him. He’s right on the way. But he’s not first on the log.” “He was a teacher of mine,” Day says again. “I had him in school.” “We go by the log.” “He influenced me. My work.”

  They pass a dry lot.

  ART

  Tonight, at the window, under stars that refuse to move, Day nearly makes it and dreampaints awake.

  He paints it so that he’s standing on the pool’s baggy tarpaulin when he rises into the lunchtime sky. He ascends without weight, neither pulled from above nor pushed from below, one perfect line to a point in the sky overhead. Mountains sit blunt, humidity curls in the valleys like gauze. Holyoke and then Springfield and Chicopee and Longmeadow and Hadley are dull misshapen coins.

  Day rises into the sky. The air gets more and more blue. Something in the sky blinks, and he’s gone.

  “Colors,” he says to the screen’s black lattice.

  The screen breathes mint.

  “She complains I turn colors in my sleep,” Day says.

  “Something understands,” breathes the screen, “surely.”

  Knees sore, Day jangles pockets with his hands. So many coins.

  TWO COLORS

  Blue-eyed behind his County Mental Health Director’s desk, Dr. Ndiawar is a darkly bald man of vague alien status. He likes to make a steeple with his hands and to look at it while he speaks.

  “You paint,” he says. “As a student, there was sculpture. You took psychology.” He looks up. “In large amounts? You speak languages?”

  Day’s slow nod produces a dot of reflected office light on Ndiawar’s scalp. Day births the dot and kills it. The Director’s desk is large and strangely clean. Day’s c.v. looks tiny against its expanse.

  “There are doubts,” Ndiawar says, “which I have in my mind.” He broadens the hands’ angle slightly. “There is not money in it.”

  Day gives the dot two brief lives.

  “However you state there are independent means, through marriage, for you.”

  “And shows,” Day says quietly. “Sales.” A scarlet lie.

  “You sell art you make in the past, you have stated,” Ndiawar says. Eric Yang is tall, late twenties, with long hair and muddy eyes that close and open instead of blink.

  Day shakes Yang’s hand. “How do you do.”

  “Surprisingly well.”

  Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. “Your new art therapy person,” he says to Yang.

  Yang looks Day in the eye. “Look, man,” he says. “I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.”

  “You and you, part-time, become a field team who travel crossward throughout the county and environs,” Ndiawar reads to Day from something prepared. Both hands hold the page. “Yang is senior as, together, you visit the shut-ins. The very badly off. The no room for them here.”

  “It’s a talent I have,” Yang says, combing his bangs with four fingers. “I close my eyes and form a perfect detailed image of any object. From any angle. Then I rotate it.”

  “You visit the prepared log’s schedule of shut-ins,” Ndiawar reads. “Yang, who is senior, counsels these badly off people, while you encourage, through skill, them to express disordered feelings through artistic acts.”

  “I can see textures and imperfections and the play of light and shadow on the objects I rotate, too,” Yang says. He is making small hand gestures that do not seem to signify anything in particular. “It’s a very private talent.” He looks to Ndiawar. “I just want to be up front with the guy.”

  Dr. Ndiawar ignores Yang. “Influencing them to direct aberrant or dysfunctioning affect onto things which they artistically make,” he reads in a monotone. “On objects which cannot be harmed. Th
is is a fieldmodel of intervention. Such as clay, which as an object is good.”

  “I’m practically an MD,” Yang says, tamping a cigarette on his knuckle.

  The steeple reappears as Ndiawar leans back. “Yang is a caseworker who consumes medication. However he is cheap, and has in that chest of his a good heart…”

  Yang stares at the Director. “What medication?”

  “… which goes out toward others.”

  Day stands. “I need to know when I start.”

  Ndiawar extends both hands. “Buy clay.”

  Sarah walks Day to the pool on the night before Esther gets hurt. She asks Day to touch water that’s lit from below by lamps in the tile. He can see the center drain and what it does to the water around it. The water is so blue it even feels blue, he says.

  She asks him to immerse himself in the shallow end.

  Day and Sarah have sex in the shallow end of Sarah’s childhood home’s blue pool. Sarah around him is warm water in cold water. Day has his orgasm inside her. The drain outlet slaps and gurgles. Sarah begins to have her orgasm, her lids flutter, Day tries with wet fingers to hold her lids open, she hanging on to him, back ramming against the tiled side with a rhythmic lisping sound, whispering, “Oh.”

  FOUR COLORS

  “I don’t know who Soutine is,” Yang says as they drive away from the home of the lady who speaks only Spanish. “You thought it looked like Soutine?”

  The car’s color is a noncolor, neither brown nor green. Day’s seen nothing like it. He wipes sweat from his face. “It did.” His supply case is in the back under a steel bucket. A mophandle rattles against the bucket. Sarah paid for the case and supplies.

  Yang hits the dashboard’s top. The air conditioner grinds out a smell of must. The car’s heat is intense.

  “Do the phone bill,” Day says, falling in behind a city bus hairy with spraypaint. The bus’s fumes are sweet.

  Yang rolls down his window and lights a cigarette. The sunlight makes his exhalation pale.

  “Ndiawar told me about your wife’s little girl. I’m sorry about that crack about a vacation your first week here. I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

  Day can see Yang’s profile out of the corner. “I’ve always liked the blue of a phone bill.”

  The air conditioner begins to work against its own smell.

  Yang has very black hair and a thin wool tie and eyes the color of trout. He closes them. “Now I’ve got the phone bill folded into a triangle. But one side doesn’t quite come down and meet the base. But it’s still a triangle. An order-in-chaos type of thing.”

  Day sees something yellow by the road.

  “Eric?”

  “The bill’s got a tiny rip in the right leg of the triangle,” Yang says, “and it’s for sixty dollars. The rip is tiny and white and sort of hairy. That must be the paper’s fibers or something.”

  Day guns to pass a pickup full of chickens. A spray of corn and feathers.

  “I’m rotating the rip out of sight,” Yang whispers. The side of his face breaks into crescents. “Now there’s nothing but phone-bill blue.”

  There’s a horn and the tug of a swerve.

  Yang opens his eyes. “Whoa.”

  “Sorry.”

  They drive past some dark buildings with no glass in the windows. A dirty boy throws a tennis ball at a wall.

  “I hope they,” Yang is saying.

  “What?”

  “Catch the drunk driver.”

  Day looks over at Yang.

  Yang looks at him. “The one who hit your little girl.”

  “What driver?”

  “I just hope they catch the bastard.”

  Day looks at the windshield. “Esther had an accident in the pool.”

  “You guys have a pool?”

  “My wife does. There was an accident. Esther got hurt.”

  “Ndiawar told me she got hit.”

  “The drain outlet got blocked. The drain’s suction sucked her under.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “She was under a long time.”

  “Am I sorry.”

  “I can’t swim.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I could see her very clearly. The pool’s very clear.”

  “Ndiawar said you said the driver was drunk.”

  “She’s still in the hospital. There’s going to be brain damage.”

  Yang is looking at him. “Should you even be here today?”

  Day cranes to see street signs. They’re stopped at a light. “Which way.”

  Yang looks at the log book attached to the visor. Its rubber band was once green. Points.

  VERY HIGH

  The brushstrokes of the best-dreamt work, too, are visible as rhythms. This day’s painting discloses its rhythms against a terrain in which light is susceptible to the influences of the wind. This is a wind that blows hard and inconstant across the school’s campus, whistles against the De Chirico belltower from which it has scoured all shadow. This is a terrain in which there are alternating lulls and gusts of light. In which open spaces flash like diseased nerves and bent trees hang with a viscous aura that settles to set the grass on willemite fire, in which windrows of light pile up against fencebottoms, walls, and undulate and glow. The belltower’s sharp edges shiver gusts into spectra. Tall boys in blazers move knifelike through a parting shine with sketchbooks held eye-level; their shadows flee before them. The scintillant winds lull and gather, seem to coil, then brawl and whistle and strobe and strike to break faint pink through the Hall of Art’s rose window. Day’s sketched notes light up. On the machinelit screens at the front, two slides of the same thing project the frail and palmate shadow of the art professor at the podium, a dry old Jesuit hissing his s’s into the illwired mike, reading a lecture to a hall half full of boys. His shadow is insectile against Vermeer’s colored Delft as he feels at his eyes.

  The withered priest reads his lecture about Vermeer and limpidity and luminosity and about light as attachment/vestment to objects’ contour. Died 1675. Obscure in his time you see for painted very few. But now we know do we not, ahm. Blue-yellow hues predominate as against ahm shall we say de Hooch. The students wear blue blazers. Unparalleled representation light serves subtly to glorify God. Ahm, though some might say blaspheme. You see. Do you not see it. A notoriously dull lecturer. An immortality conferred upon implicit in the viewer. Do you ahm see it. ‘The beautiful terrible stillness of Delft’ in the seminal phrase of. The hall is dark behind Day’s glowing row. The boys are permitted some personal expression in choice of necktie. The irreal evenness of focus which transforms the painting into what glass in glass’s fondest dreams might wish to be. ‘Windows onto interiors in which all conflicts have been resolved’ in the much-referenced words of. All lit and rendered razor-clear you see and ahm. It meets TuTh after lunch and mail call. Resolving conflict, both organic and divine. Flesh and spirit. Day hears an envelope ripped open. The viewer sees as God sees, in other ahm. Lit up throughout time you see. Past time. Someone snaps gum. Whispered laughter somewhere up in a rear row. The hall is dimly lit. A boy off to Day’s left groans and thrashes in a deep sleep. The teacher is, it is true, wholly dry, out of it, unalive. The boy next to Day is taking a deep interest in that part of his wrist which surrounds his watch.

  The art professor is a sixty-year-old virgin in black and white who reads in a monotone about how one Dutchman’s particular brushstrokes kill death and time in Delft. Well-barbered heads turn obliquely to see the angle of the clock’s flashing hands. The notorious eternity of the Jesuit’s lectures. The clock is against the back wall, between windows with theater shades that bump the glass with each gust.

  Thin blotchy Day can see how it’s the angle of the bright breeze against the screen that makes the wet face atop the priest’s lit shadow glow. Big jelly tears shine above the old man’s typed lecture. Day watches a teardrop move into another teardrop on the art teacher’s cheek. The professor reads on about the use of four-colored hu
e in the river’s sun’s reflection in Delft, Holland. The two drops merge, pick up speed along the jaw, head for the text.

  FOUR WINDOWS

  And now in the starlit painting’s third istoria the priest is truly old. Teacher in a former life. He kneels in the brittle field at the limit of an industrial park. His palms are together in an attitude of antique piety: a patron’s pose. Day, who’s failed twice, is somewhat outside the threesided figure the field’s other figures form. Cicadas scream in the dry weeds. The weeds a dead yellow and their shadows’ lengths and angles make no sense; the August sun has a mind of its own.

  “One faces…,” Ndiawar of the blinding head reads from a prepared memo in the sun. Yang shields his cigarette from a breeze.

  “… confinement as a natural consequence of behaving in manners which, toward others, are aberrant,” Ndiawar reads.

  The small white planet on a stalk Day sees is a dandelion gone to seed.

  Yang sits tangent to the knelt shadow with his legs crossed, smoking. His T-shirt says ASK ME ABOUT MY INVISIBLE ENEMIES. He combs at himself with a hand. “It’s a question of venue, Sir,” he says. “Out here like this, it becomes a public question. Am I right Dr. Ndiawar.”

  “Inform him a community of other persons is no vacuum.”

  “You’re not in a vacuum here, Sir,” Yang says.

  “Rights exist in a state of tension. Rights necessarily tense.” Ndiawar is skimming.

  Yang buries a butt. “Here’s the thing, Sir, Father if I may. You want to pray to a picture of yourself praying, that is okay. That is fine. That is your right. Except just not where other people have to watch you do it. Other people with their own rights to not have to see it against their will, which disturbs them. Isn’t that pretty reasonable?”

  Day is watching the exchange over his lollipop of snow. The canvas stands nailed to a weighted easel in the field. Its quadrate shadow distorted. The former Jesuit teacher of art kneels, in the painting.

  “One faces”—Ndiawar—“additional confinement as a consequence of standing publicly on streets’ corners to ask passersby for the gift of minutes from their day.”