Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories

by David Foster Wallace

  Almost everyone in line for the board watches the ladder. Older boys watch older girls’ bottoms as they go up. The bottoms are in soft thin cloth, tight nylon stretch. The good bottoms move up the ladder like pendulums in liquid, a gentle uncrackable code. The girls’ legs make you think of deer. Look bored.

  Look out past it. Look across. You can see so well. Your mother is in her deck chair, reading, squinting, her face tilted up to get light on her cheeks. She hasn’t looked to see where you are. She sips something sweet out of a bright can. Your father is on his big stomach, back like the hint of a hump of a whale, shoulders curling with animal spirals, skin oiled and soaked red-brown with too much sun. Your towel is hanging off your chair and a corner of the cloth now moves—your mother hit it as she waved away a sweat bee that likes what she has in the can. The bee is back right away, seeming to hang motionless over the can in a sweet blur. Your towel is one big face of Yogi Bear.

  At some point there has gotten to be more line behind you than in front of you. Now no one in front except three on the slender ladder. The woman right before you is on the low rungs, looking up, wearing a tight black nylon suit that is all one piece. She climbs. From above there is a rumble, then a great falling, then a plume and the tank reheals. Now two on the ladder. The pool rules say one on the ladder at a time, but the guard never shouts about it. The guard makes the real rules by shouting or not shouting.

  This woman above you should not wear a suit as tight as the suit she is wearing. She is as old as your mother, and as big. She is too big and too white. Her suit is full of her. The backs of her thighs are squeezed by the suit and look like cheese. Her legs have abrupt little squiggles of cold blue shattered vein under the white skin, as if something were broken, hurt, in her legs. Her legs look like they hurt to be squeezed, full of curled Arabic lines of cold broken blue. Her legs make you feel like your own legs hurt.

  The rungs are very thin. It’s unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced in slick wet Safe-T felt. You taste metal from the smell of wet iron in shadow. Each rung presses into the bottoms of your feet and dents them. The dents feel deep and they hurt. You feel heavy. How the big woman over you must feel. The handrails along the ladder’s sides are also very thin. It’s like you might not hold on. You’ve got to hope the woman holds on, too. And of course it looked like fewer rungs from far away. You are not stupid.

  Get halfway up, up in the open, big woman placed above you, a solid bald muscular man on the ladder underneath your feet. The board is still high overhead, invisible from here. But it rumbles and makes a heavy flapping sound, and a boy you can see for a few contained feet through the thin rungs falls in a flash of a line, a knee held to his chest, doing a splasher. There is a huge exclamation point of foam up into your field of sight, then scattered claps into a great fizzing. Then the silent sound of the tank healing to new blue all over again.

  More thin rungs. Hold on tight. The radio is loudest here, one speaker at ear-level over a concrete locker room entrance. A cool dank whiff of the locker room inside. Grab the iron bars tight and twist and look down behind you and you can see people buying snacks and refreshments below. You can see down into it: the clean white top of the vendor’s cap, tubs of ice cream, steaming brass freezers, scuba tanks of soft drink syrup, snakes of soda hose, bulging boxes of salty popcorn kept hot in the sun. Now that you’re overhead you can see the whole thing.

  There’s wind. It’s windier the higher you get. The wind is thin; through the shadow it’s cold on your wet skin. On the ladder in the shadow your skin looks very white. The wind makes a thin whistle in your ears. Four more rungs to the top of the tower. The rungs hurt your feet. They are thin and let you know just how much you weigh. You have real weight on the ladder. The ground wants you back.

  Now you can see just over the top of the ladder. You can see the board. The woman is there. There are two ridges of red, hurt-looking callus on the backs of her ankles. She stands at the start of the board, your eyes on her ankles. Now you’re up above the tower’s shadow. The solid man under you is looking through the rungs into the contained space the woman’s fall will pass through.

  She pauses for just that beat of a pause. There’s nothing slow about it at all. It makes you cold. In no time she’s at the end of the board, up, down on it, it bends low like it doesn’t want her. Then it nods and flaps and throws her violently up and out, her arms opening out to inscribe that circle, and gone. She disappears in a dark blink. And there’s time before you hear the hit below.

  Listen. It does not seem good, the way she disappears into a time that passes before she sounds. Like a stone down a well. But you think she did not think so. She was part of a rhythm that excludes thinking. And now you have made yourself part of it, too. The rhythm seems blind. Like ants. Like a machine.

  You decide this needs to be thought about. It may, after all, be all right to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself. Not when not thinking turns out to be wrong. At some point the wrongnesses have piled up blind: pretend-boredom, weight, thin rungs, hurt feet, space cut into laddered parts that melt together only in a disappearance that takes time. The wind on the ladder not what anyone would have expected. The way the board protrudes from shadow into light and you can’t see past the end. When it all turns out to be different you should get to think. It should be required.

  The ladder is full beneath you. Stacked up, everyone a few rungs apart. The ladder is fed by a solid line that stretches back and curves into the dark of the tower’s canted shadow. People’s arms are crossed in the line. Those on the ladder’s feet hurt and they are all looking up. It is a machine that moves only forward.

  Climb up onto the tower’s tongue. The board turns out to be long. As long as the time you stand there. Time slows. It thickens around you as your heart gets more and more beats out of every second, every movement in the system of the pool below.

  The board is long. From where you stand it seems to stretch off into nothing. It’s going to send you someplace which its own length keeps you from seeing, which seems wrong to submit to without even thinking.

  Looked at another way, the same board is just a long thin flat thing covered with a rough white plastic stuff. The white surface is very rough and is freckled and lined with a pale watered red that is nevertheless still red and not yet pink—drops of old pool water that are catching the light of the late sun over sharp mountains. The rough white stuff of the board is wet. And cold. Your feet are hurt from the thin rungs and have a great ability to feel. They feel your weight. There are handrails running above the beginning of the board. They are not like the ladder’s handrails just were. They are thick and set very low, so you almost have to bend over to hold on to them. They are just for show, no one holds them. Holding on takes time and alters the rhythm of the machine.

  It is a long cold rough white plastic or fiberglass board, veined with the sad near-pink color of bad candy.

  But at the end of the white board, the edge, where you’ll come down with your weight to make it send you off, there are two areas of darkness. Two flat shadows in the broad light. Two vague black ovals. The end of the board has two dirty spots.

  They are from all the people who’ve gone before you. Your feet as you stand here are tender and dented, hurt by the rough wet surface, and you see that the two dark spots are from people’s skin. They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight. More people than you could count without losing track. The weight and abrasion of their disappearance leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind, bits and shards and curls of skin that dirty and darken and tan as they lie tiny and smeared in the sun at the end of the board. They pile up and get smeared and mixed together. They darken in two circles.

  No time is passing outside you at all. It is amazing. The late ballet below is slow motion, the overbroad movements of mimes in blue jelly. If you wanted you could really stay here forever, vibrating inside so f
ast you float motionless in time, like a bee over something sweet.

  But they should clean the board. Anybody who thought about it for even a second would see that they should clean the end of the board of people’s skin, of two black collections of what’s left of before, spots that from back here look like eyes, like blind and cross-eyed eyes.

  Where you are now is still and quiet. Wind radio shouting splashing not here. No time and no real sound but your blood squeaking in your head.

  Overhead here means sight and smell. The smells are intimate, newly clear. The smell of bleach’s special flower, but out of it other things rise to you like a weed’s seeded snow. You smell deep yellow popcorn. Sweet tan oil like hot coconut. Either hot dogs or corn dogs. A thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper cups. And the special smell of tons of water coming off tons of skin, rising like steam off a new bath. Animal heat. From overhead it is more real than anything.

  Look at it. You can see the whole complicated thing, blue and white and brown and white, soaked in a watery spangle of deepening red. Everybody. This is what people call a view. And you knew that from below you wouldn’t look nearly so high overhead. You see now how high overhead you are. You knew from down there no one could tell.

  He says it behind you, his eyes on your ankles, the solid bald man, Hey kid. They want to know. Do your plans up here involve the whole day or what exactly is the story. Hey kid are you okay.

  There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

  Hey kid he says Hey kid are you okay.

  Metal flowers bloom on your tongue. No more time for thinking. Now that there is time you don’t have time.

  Hey.

  Slowly now, out across everything, there’s a watching that spreads like hit water’s rings. Watch it spread out from the ladder. Your sighted sister and her thin white pack, pointing. Your mother looks to the shallows where you used to be, then makes a visor of her hand. The whale stirs and jiggles. The guard looks up, the girl around his leg looks up, he reaches for his horn.

  Forever below is rough deck, snacks, thin metal music, down where you once used to be; the line is solid and has no reverse gear; and the water, of course, is only soft when you’re inside it. Look down. Now it moves in the sun, full of hard coins of light that shimmer red as they stretch away into a mist that is your own sweet salt. The coins crack into new moons, long shards of light from the hearts of sad stars. The square tank is a cold blue sheet. Cold is just a kind of hard. A kind of blind. You have been taken off guard. Happy Birthday. Did you think it over. Yes and no. Hey kid.

  Two black spots, violence, and disappear into a well of time. Height is not the problem. It all changes when you get back down. When you hit, with your weight.

  So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

  The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.

  The board will nod and you will go, and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Step into the skin and disappear.

  Hello.

  BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

  B.I. #14 08-96

  ST. DAVIDS PA

  ‘It’s cost me every sexual relationship I ever had. I don’t know why I do it. I’m not a political person, I don’t consider myself. I’m not one of these America First, read the newspaper, will Buchanan get the nod people. I’ll be doing it with some girl, it doesn’t matter who. It’s when I start to come. That it happens. I’m not a Democrat. I don’t even vote. I freaked out about it one time and called a radio show about it, a doctor on the radio, anonymously, and he diagnosed it as the uncontrolled yelling of involuntary words or phrases, frequently insulting or scatological, which is coprolalia is the official term. Except when I start to come and always start yelling it it’s not insulting, it’s not obscene, it’s always the same thing, and it’s always so weird but I don’t think insulting. I think it’s just weird. And uncontrolled. It’s like it comes out the same way the spooge comes out, it feels like that. I don’t know what it’s about and I can’t help it.’

  Q.

  ‘“Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” Only way louder. As in really shouting it. Uncontrollably. I’m not even thinking it until it comes out and I hear it. “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” Only louder than that: “VICTORY—”’

  Q.

  ‘Well it totally freaks them out, what do you think? And I just about die of the embarrassment. I don’t ever know what to say. What do you say if you just shouted “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” right when you came?’

  Q.

  ‘It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if it wasn’t so totally fucking weird. If I had any clue about what it was about. You know?’

  Q….

  ‘God, now I’m embarrassed as hell.’

  Q.

  ‘But all there is is the once. That’s what I mean about it costing. I can tell how bad it freaks them out, and I get embarrassed and never call them again. Even if I try to explain. And it’s the ones that’ll act all understanding like they don’t care and it’s OK and they understand and it doesn’t matter that embarrass me the worst, because it’s so fucking weird to yell “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” when you’re shooting off that I can always tell they’re totally freaked out and just condescending down to me and pretending they understand, and those are the ones where actually I actually end up almost getting pissed off and don’t even feel embarrassed not calling them or totally avoiding them, the ones that say “I think I could love you anyway.”’

  B.I. #15 08-96

  MCI-BRIDGEWATER OBSERVATION & ASSESSMENT FACILITY BRIDGEWATER MA

  ‘It is a proclivity, and provided there’s minimal coercion and no real harm it’s essentially benign, I think you’ll have to agree. And that there are a surprisingly small number who require any coercion at all, be apprised.’

  Q.

  ‘From a psychological standpoint the origins appear obvious. Various therapists concur, I might add, here and elsewhere. So it’s all quite tidy.’

  Q.

  ‘Well, my own father was, you might say, a man who was by natural proclivity not a good man but who nevertheless tried diligently to be a good man. Temper and so forth.’

  Q.

  ‘I mean, it’s not as if I’m torturing them or burning them.’

  Q.

  ‘My father’s proclivity for rage, especially [unintelligible or distorted] the Emergency Room for the umpteenth time, afraid of his own temper and proclivity for domestic violence, this built over a period of time, and eventually he resorted, after a period of time and periods of unsuccessful counseling, to the practice of handcuffing his own wrists behind his back whenever he lost his temper with any of us. In the house. Domestically. Small domestic incidents that try one’s temper and so forth. This self-restraint eventually progressed over a period of time such that the more enraged he might become at any of us, the more coercively he began to restrain himself. Often the day would end with the poor man hog-tied on the living room floor, screaming furiously at us to put his goddamn motherfucking gag in. Whatever possible interest that bit of history might hold for anyone not privileged to have been there. Trying to get the gag in without getting bitten. But of course so now we can explain my proclivities and trace their origins and have everything tied up all nice and tight and tidy for you, can’t we.’

  B.I. #11 06-96

  VIENNA VA

  ‘All right, I am, okay, yes, but hang on a second, okay? I need you to try and understand this. Okay? Look. I know I’m moody. I know I’m kind of withdrawn sometimes. I know I’m hard to be in this with, okay? All right? But this every time I get moody or withdrawn you thinking I’m leaving or getting ready to ditch you—I can’t take it. Th
is thing of you being afraid all the time. It wears me out. It makes me feel like I have to, like, hide whatever mood I might be in because right away you’re going to think it’s about you and that I’m getting ready to ditch you and leave. You don’t trust me. You don’t. It’s not like I’m saying given our history I deserved a whole lot of trust right off the bat. But you still don’t at all. There’s like zero security no matter what I do. Okay? I said I’d promise I wouldn’t leave and you said you believed me that I was in this with you for the long haul this time, but you didn’t. Okay? Just admit it, all right? You don’t trust me. I’m on eggshells all the time. Do you see? I can’t keep going around reassuring you all the time.’

  Q.

  ‘No, I’m not saying this is reassuring. What this is is just trying to get you to see—okay, look, things ebb and flow, okay? Sometimes people are just more into it than other times. This is just how it is. But you can’t stand ebb. It feels like no ebb’s allowed. And I know that’s partly my fault, okay? I know the other times didn’t exactly make you feel secure. But I can’t change that, okay? But this is now. And now I feel like anytime I’d just rather not talk or get a little moody or withdrawn you think I’m plotting to ditch you. And that breaks my heart. Okay? It just breaks my heart. Maybe if I loved you a little less or cared about you less I could take it. But I can’t. So yes, that’s what the bags are, I’m leaving.’

  Q.

  ‘And I was—this is just how I was afraid you’d take it. I knew it, that you’d think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it’d be “See, you’re leaving after all when you promised you wouldn’t.” I knew it but I’m trying to explain anyway, okay? And I know you probably won’t understand this either, but—wait—just try to listen and maybe absorb this, okay? Ready? Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It’s because of them. Okay? Can you see that? It’s your fear I can’t take. It’s your distrust and fear I’ve been trying to fight. And I can’t anymore. I’m out of gas on it. If I loved you even a little less maybe I could take it. But this is killing me, this constant feeling that I’m always scaring you and never making you feel secure. Can you see that?’