Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories

by David Foster Wallace

  It soon came to pass that Codependae & Co., after much interface, settled on a vengeance vehicle. This was the Telephemically dethroned, parachuted, & highly vengeance-oriented Reggie Ecko of Venice, who’d suffered a massive self-esteem-displacement & had sold his house & tank of pedigreed carp & moved into a freebase fleabag in an infamous Venetian residency hotel known along the boardwalk as The Temple of Very Short Prayers, & was now spending all his time & contract settlement hitting the alkaloid pipe & drinking Crown Royal right out of the velvet bag & throwing darts at 8 × 10s of Agon M. Nar & watching incredibly massive amounts of late-night syndicated television, gnashing his increasingly discolored teeth &, like, totally embittered. A covertly active strategy went into effect. While the demiurge Erythema began to appear to Reggie Ecko in the mortal guise of Robert Vaughan hosting Hair Loss Update every night from 4 to 5 A.M. on Channel 13, & to work on him, Codependae herself began work on the heart, mind, & cojones of Agon M. Nar, insinuating herself into his 4–5 A.M. REM-stage as the Cerberian image of Tri-Stan’s three CEO Stanleys, ancient entertainment-kabalists who never left their video center & shared but a single large-screen CCTV monitor & remote between them. Under Codependae’s direction their images began to kibbitz at Nar’s psyche, & to Foretell. There are at this point long, long Ovidian lyrics about the vengeful Goddess’s CEO-mediated siren-songs to the oneirically impressionable A.M.N….so long in fact that Ovid’s copyed at a certain glossy organ ended up deleting major portions of the epiclete’s SIREN.SNG file. The thrust of what’s stetted, however, is that Cod.’s covert plan begins, alas, to unfold with all the dark logic of a genuine entertainment-market inspiration.

  This inspiration—the thesis Nar thought was his own, mortally, on awakening—appeared as inevitable as his Enhanced Love-Dumpling daughter’s own part in it. Now, Telephemus Studios & Tri-Stan Entertainment, consulting the cassocked vestals at the Oracle of Nielsen, God of Life Itself, were much vexed by the nascent spread of Cable Television & the geometric expansion of grainy syndication’s eternal return. Turner & ESP’s Network & Chicago’s Super 9 were then in utero. The industry was abuzz. It was said that Stasis Himself had personally placed shiny TelSat appliances in the star-chocked sky, with a per-use fee structure. It’s now 4–5 A.M. O verily must Tri-Stan get its foot in the door of Cable’s ground floor while there is still time, sings the three-headed siren; & Agon M. Nar, asleep & nystagmic, can feel the epiphanicity of what the three S.’s Foretell, the best of both possible worlds: no Sermonette, no Indian crying at litter, no anthem or flags or sign-off at the Close of the Broadcast Day, no Close of the Broadcast Day at all: instead, a 24-hr low-overhead loop of something so very archaic as to appear forward-looking, & not on any ‘cable’ but on & in the very air. The siren sings to Nar of oracular foresight, making the pitch with charts & pointer: Cable offers nothing new or improved & dies on the vine as hyperborean MHz TV expands to even the weeest of wee hours via black-and-white recycling. & not just recycled Hazel or I Married Joan, no, the callid & thrice-disguised C. did sing of the Ultimate Rerun, 100% echo: myth, classic & Classical myth: rich, ambiguous, archetypal, cosmological, polyvalent, susceptible of neverending renewal, ever fresh. The high-alto dreamsong was complex & mostly C#. Covert seeds were thus sowed by A.M.N.’s nightshade: a moebioid ticker-like loop that became its own REM mantra: ENDYMION PYRAMUS PHAETON MARPESSA EURYDICE LINUS THOR ESHU POLLUX THISBE BAAL EUROPA NIEBELUNGEN PSYCHE DEMETER ASMODEUS ENDYMION WALKÜRE PYRAMUS ETCETERA.

  Awakening thus in fugues & paroxysms, Agon M. Nar did thereupon consult mediated Oracles, offer leveraged tribute to images of Nielsen & Stasis, & sacrifice two whole humidors of Davidoff 9'' Deluxes upon the offering-pyre of Emmē, Winged Goddess of Victory. There was much market research. Finally, journeying personally to the uniscreened video center of Stan 1–3 & (aided by charts & pointer) pitching his epiphany to the big boys, Agon M. Nar found Tri-Stan & S.&D.’s Executive ICOP well pleased. Codependae kept intercepting emergency calls to Stasis’s pager.

  & so it came to pass that, on the same week Sissee Nar’s nose was Enhanced into eternal aquilinity, Nar & Tri-Stan’s much-ballyhooed Satyr-Nymph Network was born & licensed for analog broadcast. In brief, S-NN comprised an ingeniously simple 24-hr low-overhead loop of mythopoeia mined at 10¢/$1 from the loded stockrooms of the BBC’s toga’d & grape-leafy mythophilic period 1961–7. Here the prefeminist epiclete Ovid the O. usurps & dithyrambicizes—without credit or tribute—the historian Dirk of Fresno’s account of S-NN’s philosophy, Codependae’s invidious dreamsong, Agon M. Nar’s oneirically inspired bid to launch the greatest kabal network of all BC time—the Satyr-Nymph Network: ‘… basically an ingeniously simple 24-hr interspliced loop of mythopoeia harvested from the gravid stockrooms of the BBC’s antically antique ’60s & targeted at that uneasily neoclassical demographic class that already consumed reruns without even chewing. This lonely & insomniac audience found the invariant sameness of S-NN’s circuit of British b/w mythic skits—serial legends of e.g. Endymion & Pyramus & Phaeton & Baal & Marpessa & surreally cockney Niebelungs—good: reliable, familiar, hypnotic, & delicious as the taste of their own mouths. For Agon M. Nar, this appetite for repetitive echo spelled divine inspiration—in the words of statistical microecon, autogenerative Demand. For not only did S-NN feed at the syndicated trough of viewers’ hunger for familiarity, but the familiarity fed the mythopoeia that fed the market: double-blind polls revealed that in a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness, omniscience, immortality, a spark of the vicarious Divine.

  ‘… that A.M.N., when deep asleep, heeding the song of a jaundiced Goddess with three gray heads & one Curtis Mathes remote, began actually to believe he could explain the very nation on whose left shoulder he moved & shook. There existed today, the three sham-Stans sang, an untapped national market for myth. History was dead. Linearity was a cul de sac. Novelty was old news. The national I was now about flux & eternal return. Difference in sameness. “Creativity”—see for instance Nar’s recombinant own—now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C# siren Foretold, this would itself be acknowledged, this apotheosis of static flux, & be itself put to the cynical use of just what it acknowledged, like a funnel that falls through itself. “Soon, myths about myths” was the sirens’ prophecy & long-range proposal. TV shows about TV shows. Polls about the reliability of surveys. Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation’s terrible shamefaced hunger & need: translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing, inside the wooden belly of parodic camp.

  ‘I.e., the Medium would handle the Message’s P.R.

  ‘& for the wise & clever Agon M. Nar, it had already begun. This process. For of course Codependae was doing to Agon M. Nar what Agon M. Nar’s S-NN would do to the fluorescent BC market, viz. convincing him that those most bivalent of pharmaka, double-edged gifts so terribly precious & so heavy on the heart that a thousand sleepless weeping years couldn’t even start to make good their price… persuading A.M.N. & USA that the unearnable gifts of inspiration were naught but the products of his own mortal genius, through recombination. Agon M. Nar was invited, in unseen short, to imitate a God. To re-present history. To let’s say for instance combine the fall of Lucifer & the ascension of Aepytus into a Dynasty-type parable about the patricide of Cronos. Oprah as Isis, Sigurd as JFK. & all in fun, is the thing. Keep it light, self-mocking, Codependae sings in Nar’s tri-Stanley’d dreamvoice. Let the heroes tell their “own story,” & their confabulation of myth with fact & Classical with post-Enlightened will reveal meaning & compel market-share. & there can be young upscale ads infinitum, hip paeans to Bacchus & Helen & ultrabuff Thor. & the revenues from the campy old BBC loops can then be plowed back into deliberately cheap & stagy S-NN/Telephemic myth-reproductions, which “
original” remakes can then themselves be run over & over, really late at night, say from 4 to 5 A.M., laser-aimed at those sleepless pre-Cable repetiphiles who can’t but get stoned just watching.

  “That is to say,” the covert Codependae spells it out behind A.M. Nar’s multichart pitch to the three ancient Stanleys whose guise she’d used to dybbuk Nar in the first place, composing thus her own insidious loop, unseen, “that S-NN will purvey myth & compel -share by purveying myth about the transmogrification of ‘timeless’ myth into contemporary campimage. A whole new kind of ritual narrative, neither Old Comic nor New Tragic—the sit-trag. Pure Legend: about itself, legend, theft, repetition, eternal return, self-regeneration as loss as self-regeneration. A kind of cosmic outtake, Gods flubbing lines, cracking up, mugging at cameras.” Etcetera.’

  All this according to Dirk of Fresno.

  & the Satyr-Nymph Network came to be, is the rub. Three palsied liver-spotted thumbs were raised before resuming the eternal struggle for the Stans’ one remote. S-NN was run up the E-M flagpole. & lo. Sine production costs or satellitic overhead but very much cum an Olympian advertising budget, S-NN kicked much 24-hr ass. The BBC’s resuscitated situation-tragedies were instant syndication classics on the order of Rascals & Caesar/Coca. Obscure BBC contract players from the R.S.C.’s minor leagues, now well into their thespian senescence, enjoyed cult followings & sudden endorsement cachet. A muffler company put a toothless cockney Midas under lifetime contract & so did prosper; a bald & trifocal’d Samson did health-club spots; etc. Everyone was winning. TriStan became an even more proud member of the Sturm & Drang Family of E.F.C.’s; Agon M. Nar received an honorary Emmē & was wisely & cleverly humble about it; Sissee Nar continued to Enhance, tan, aerobicize, flourish, & consort; Reggie Ecko of Venice bounced in & out of detox facilities, returning ever to his high-N pipe & velvet Crown & Temple of Very Short Prayers & Trinitron to await, via the hirsutely groomed Robert Vaughan, the transformation of his benthic ire into narrative meaning.

  At about this point Codependae & Carie & Erythema sat back to watch Nature, incited further by the brunch-rhetoric of Codep., take her place at the retributive helm.

  Alas, we no longer get to say ‘alas’ with a straight face, but ‘alas’ used, according to legend, to be what you said in great stoic sorrow over tragedies ineluctable, over the blackly implacable telos of Nature’s flawed unfolding. So alas: for given Sissee Nar’s Deighted pulchritude & her modest, mirror-denying grace under technical beauty’s great pressure, & given her own prescient father’s position & prestige & marketing vision, plus his devotion to his Little Princess (not to mention his twin investments in both the Satyr-Nymph Network & the aesthetic technē of Herm (‘A.’) D. MD), it was both naturally & tragically ineluctable that one Sissee Nar, aspiring thespian, would, before two Nielsenial Sweeps had marked the seasons’ circuit, audition & screen-test & survive two callbacks for & yes finally land a starring role in the very first ever original S-NN/Tri-Stan mythic reproduction. This was a recombinant update of Endymion, one of the most popular of the stagy old BBC sandal-fests. The reproduction, Beach Blanket Endymion, not only came in under its shoe-string budget, but its prime-time debut nearly threatened the slot-supremacy of NBC’s roughly eighty, a thirtysomething knockoff about flappers & hepcats struggling to find both themselves & sustained continence in a modern nursing-care context.

  & both Focus Groups & mail confirmed it: Ms. Sissee Nar, in the SNN original repro, was a phenom. It was, yes, nonpositive that she could not act, & that her unEnhanceable voice was like nails on a slate. But these flaws were not fatal. For Sissee Nar’s title role, opposite the contemporary logos-legend Vanna of the White Hands as the lunar Selene in this somewhat Sapphic redux of a well-known minimyth, called only for catatonia. Sissee turned out to be a natural. Forever asleep on Mt. Latmus’s rather incongruous beach, she had only to lie there, cross-dressed, Enhanced, & immortally desirable; her antinatural beauty was enough. She was poetry in stasis. Despite a slight tendency toward palpebral twitching, her closed eyes had a magic. Long-jaded viewers were rapt, Vanna’s show stolen, critics indulgent, & sponsors all but manic. Stasis even taped the thing, up at home. Sissee Nar got a Guide cover & a Varietae profile. She became, as B.B.E. ran like clockwork every 23 hrs, a high-RF light in the small-screen firmament, albeit somewhat typecast: for Tri-Stan’s F.G.-respondents did attest with one voice that they loved Sissee for, not despite, her eerie enactment of the vegetative state. Her morphean passivity touched a chivalric nerve, apparently. A market for large-r Romance. Classic-minded viewers yearned for a maiden comatose, gloriously unconscious—for who is yet more remote & unattainable & thus desirable than the oblivious? Dirk of Fresno’s own editorial here is that there seems to be something death-tending at the very heart of all Romance (‘… that every love story is also [a] ghost story…’) & that Sissee Nar’s voluptuous recumbency spoke to this black thanaticism in the contemporary erotic Geist. Whatever the source of Sissee’s unconscious allure, the industry found it good, & thus recombinable. An ‘original’ S-NN reshuffling of the Norse myth of Siegfried, with Sissee as a narcoleptic Brynhild, was rushed into reproduction. Dyspeptic men in worsted blends journeyed far by air to feel both Nars out re merchandising tie-ins, for the Official Sissee Nar Doll—gloriously devoid of all function—seemed a Natural.

  Safe to say that even the wise, clever, worldly & level-headed Agon M. Nar was extremely well pleased.

  Alas, too well pleased. For prominent among the rapt red-eyed faithful who tuned in to watch Sissee as Endymion lie there desirably couchant as Selene ministered Sapphically to h/her over & over & over in the weeest of broadcast hours was the vexed & malevolent Reggie Ecko of Venice, late of Tri-Stan & Recombinant eparchy, more recently of obscurity & the B. Ford Clinic, & even more recently of the Erythemic Robert Vaughan’s sibylant & Iagian late-night campaign. Erythema’s visitations had gotten progressively more effective: after many liters & quarterounces & very short prayers over glass pipe & flame, diplomatic relations between R. Ecko & reality had pretty much broken down. & it so happened to be on the early morning of his pharmacological sanity’s tether’s frayed & final end, alas, that Ecko first laid eyes on Sissee Nar’s androsupine performance in S-NN’s Beach Blanket Endymion, the self-same hour of which saw also Nature & Codependae, cross-dressed & adhesively whiskered, now insinuate themselves into his cloacal room as respectively a Domino’s deliveryman & an assertive associate of a certain chemical creditor known only as ‘Javier J.’…& as the littoral Endymion so gloriously failed to unfold they began to work on his psyche in earnest—as too, oblivious, did Sissee Nar, there on the Trinitron’s screen.

  Both Ovid the Obtuse & his usually reliable Hollinshed D. of F. leave obscure the dramatic question whether Ecko of Venice fell addled head over snakeskin heels in Romantic love with the comatose 2-D image of Sissee Nar because of the parthenopic blandishments of N. & C., or because of the Dionysian febrility associated with chronic ingestion of C17H21NO4, or because he was just plain addled & at tether’s end, or whether it was because the formerly high-profile Reggie Ecko had fallen into corporate invisibility & saw in Sissee Nar the apotheosis of commercial image; or whether on the other hand it was just one of those large-r Romantic love-at-initial-reception things, the stuff of chivalric myth, the Tristian/Lancelotian fuck-it-all plunge, the Sicilian thunderbolt, the Wagnerian Liebestod. It does not much matter. What matters, alas, is what this eros wrought.

  Malignly serenaded by Vaughan, Domino’s, & Latin creditor, plus of course no stranger to obsession since his corporate displacement & Lucifer-like fall into what had started as mere recreation, R. Ecko of Venice was ripe for metamorphosis into that most dread of the fluorescent basin’s BC monsters: the lunatic stalker-type fan. What little psyche did remain to him was in a twinkling consumed & possessed by the image of what he saw lying there passive on Latmus before him. He began to live all & only for the reappearance of Beach Blanket Endymion every morning at 4–5 PT, at th
e same time that he began to see the cathode screen itself as the dimensional barrier that prevented his 3-D union with Sissee Nar’s much-Enhanced 2-D image. He kept breaking his Sony in rages & then running out to buy another. Your standard lunatic love-hate thing. He wrote creepy unpunctuated letters to S-NN & Tri-Stan (red crayon), made supplicating/belligerent calls. The creepy letters he even more creepily signed ‘Your Actæon The Huntsman.’ He used his alkaloid plenty to lure & debrief those young Adoni with whom S. Nar’d consorted on her path to recombinant stardom. Plus he began keeping the rambling clinical diary expected of your classic stalker-type fan. In it he represents himself as an Errant Knight displaced from his proper place & time & embarked on your basic daemonic love-quest of chivalric Yore, yet also tormented by his post-Romantic awareness of the quest’s chimeracity: he knew full well his trans-dimensional love to be daemonic, unreal, puerile, compensatory, Wertherian—i.e. ‘about FICTION not FRICTION’ in his vulgate phrase—but he was helpless, driven, possessed, as if impotioned, & for this bewitchment he did blame both Nars, pater et filia duae: they had created, for him, in the Sissee of B.B.E., the Ultimate Erotic Object of the contemporary industry: ideally proportioned, aesthetically flawless, sartorially hermaphroditic, rapturously passive, &, most bewitching yet, in every way 2-D, dimensionally unattainable, ergo a blank screen for the agelessly projected fantasies of every man with a red car & shades & a ’tude behind which bulged a heart just starving to be allowed to buy w/o reservation into what it was far too late anymore to truly believe in. Reggie wrote that he’d hear, watching, Sissee sing, hear a waxproof C# threnody as her buxom shepherd lay moon-caressed in the fulgence of a cathode pulse. More bedazzlement—he knew her part to be silent but felt her unmoving ventriloquent lips to be moving in song, for R.E. of the Temple of V.S.P. alone; & only because he wanted it so. (Ovid takes a rhetorical moment to ponder: was this musical interface Erythemically inspired? Codependaent? Unreal? No matter?) Reggie Ecko records singing phogistic duets with the comatose TV image, &, with that flaccid figure, reaching the sorts of unimaginable passion-heights one reaches only with dolls & dreams—dreams of the unattainably-dead-in-life. Malignant divinities or no, Ecko’s was a flameout of the most classically Romantic sort: the agony of Sissee Nar’s unattainability was in him a fisher that netted all other pains & frustrations & vexations & terrors in his wine-dark psyche & presented the haul in one unendurable anamnetic load, capsizing him. & so Ecko freebased heart-bursting amounts of product & composed creepy Crayola poems & communed with C. & Co. & through their assuasions bought wholly into this whole trite & trendy medieval CA codependent-inner-child-dysfunctionality deal, this men-who-love-too-much-not-wisely-type thanaphiliacal thing where he believed not only that the passive 2-D Sissee Nar was the timeless & ideal object of his deepest longings but that this love was by nature unconsummatable in the merciless daylight of 3-D reality. (LA-area Alanon, by the by, would diagnose this a lethal combination of Grandiosity & the Pity Pot.)