Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories

by David Foster Wallace

  [PAUSE for FATHER’s attempted pantomime of holding object spread before face]

  THE FATHER: I am recalling now just one in un—something, a tantrum over something or other after dinner one evening. I did not want him eating in our living room. Not unreasonable I think. The dining room was for eating; I had explained to him the etymology and sense of ‘dining room.’ The living room, where I reserved for myself but half an hour with the newspaper after dinner—and there he was, suddenly there before me, on the new carpet, eating his candy in the living room. Was I unreasonable? He had received the candy as his reward for eating the healthy dinner I had worked to buy for him and she had worked to prepare for him—feel it? the judgment, disgust? that one is never to say such a thing, to mention that one paid, that one’s limited resources had been devoted to—that would be selfish, no? a bad parent, no? niggardly? selfish? And yet I had, had paid for the little colored chocolate candies, candies which here he stood upending the little bag to be able to get all of the candy into that mouth at once, never one by one, always all the sweets all at once, as much as fast as possible regardless of spillage, hence my gritted smile and carefully gentle reminder of the etymology of ‘dining room’ and far less a command than—mindful of her reaction, always—request that, please, no candy in the—and with his mouth crammed with candy and chewing at it even as the tantrum began, puling and stamping his feet and shrieking now at the top of his lungs in the living room even as his mouth was filled with chocolate, that open red mouth filled with mashed candy which mixed with his spittle and as he howled overran his lip as he howled and stamped up and down and running down his chin and shirt, and peering timidly over the top of the paper held like a shield as I sat willing myself to remain in the chair and say nothing and watching now his mother down on one knee trying to wipe the chocolate drool off his chin as he screamed at her and batted the napkin away. Who could look on this and not be appalled? Who could—where was it determined that this sort of thing is acceptable, that such a creature must be not only tolerated no but soothed, actually placated as she was on her knees doing, tenderly, in gross contradiction to the unacceptability of what was going on. What sort of madness is this? That I can hear the soft little singsong tones she used to try to soothe him—for what?—as she patiently brings the napkin back again and again as he bats it away and screams that he hates her. I do not exaggerate; he said this: hates her. Hates her? Her? Down on one knee, pretending she hears nothing, that it’s nothing, cranky, long day, that—what bewitchment lay behind this patience? What human being could remain on her knees wiping drool caused by his, his violation of a simple and reasonable prohibition against just this very sort of disgusting mess in the room in which we sought only to live? What chasm of insanity lay between us? What was this creature? Why did we go on like this? How could I be in any way culpable for lifting the evening paper to try to obscure this scene? It was either look away or kill him where he stood. How does doing what must be done to control my—how is this equal to my being remote or ungiving unquote or heaven forfend ‘cruel’? Cruel to that? Why is ‘cruel’ applied only to those who pay for the little chocolates he spews onto the shirtfront you paid for to dribble onto the carpet you paid for and grinds under the shoes you paid for as he stamps up and down in fury at your mild request that he take reasonable steps to avert precisely the sort of mess he is causing? Am I the only one to whom this makes no sense? Is revolted, appalled? Why is even to speak of such revulsion not allowed? Who made this rule? Why was it I who must be seen and not heard? Whence this inversion of my own upbringing? What unthinkable discipline would my own father have—

  [PAUSE for episode of dyspnea, blennorrhagia]

  THE FATHER: Did. Sometimes I did, no, literally could not bear the sight of him. Impetigo is a skin disorder. His scalp’s sores suppurated and formed a crust. The crust then turned yellow. A childhood skin disease. Condition of children. When he coughed it rained yellow crust. His bad eye wept constantly, a viscous stuff that has no name. His eyelashes at the breakfast his mother made would be clotted with a pale crust which someone would have to clean off with a swab while he writhed in complaint at being cleaned of repellent crust. About him hung a scent of spoilage, mildew. And she would nuzzle just to smell him. Nose running without cease or reason and caused small red raised sores on his nostrils and upper lip which then yielded more crust. Chronic ear infections meant not only a spike in the incidence of tantrums but an actual smell, a discharge whose odor I will spare you describing. Antibiotics. He was a veritable petri dish of infection and discharge and eruption and runoff, white as a root, blotched, moist, like something in a cellar. And yet all who saw him clasped their hands together and exclaimed. Beautiful child. Angel. Soulful. Delicate. Break such hearts. The word ‘beautiful’ was used. I would simply stand there—what could I say? My carefully pleased expression. But could they have seen that inhuman little puke-white face during an infection, an attack, a tantrum, the piggy malevolence of it, the truculent entitlement, the rapacity. The ugliness. ‘Barked about most lazar-like with vile’—the ugly truth. Mucus, pus, vomit, feces, diarrhea, urine, wax, sputum, varicolored crusts. These were his dowry to—the gifts he bore us. Thrashing in sleep or fever, clutching at the very air as if to pull it to him. And always there bedside she was, his, in thrall, bewitched, wiping and swabbing and stroking and tending, never a word of acknowledgment of the sheer horror of what he produced and expected her to wipe away. The endless thankless expectation. Never acknowledged. The girl I married would have reacted very, very differently to this creature, believe me. Treating her breasts as if they were his. Property. Her nipples the color of a skinned knee. Grasping, clutching. Making greedy sounds. Manhandling her. Snorting, wheezing. Absorbed wholly in his own sensations. Reflectionless. At home in his body as only one whose body is not his job can be at home. Filled with himself, right to the edges like a swollen pond. He was his body. I often could not look. Even the speed of his growth that first year—statistically unusual, the doctors remarked it—a rate that was weedy, aggressive, a willed imposition of self on space. That right eye’s sputtering forward thrust. Sometimes she would grimace at the weight of him, holding him, lifting, until she caught the brief grimace and wiped it away—I was sure I saw it—replaced at once with that expression of narcotic patience, abstract thrall, I several meters off, extrorse, trying not—

  [PAUSE for episode of dyspnea; technician’s application of tracheobronchial suction catheter]

  THE FATHER: Never learned to breathe is why. Awful of me to say, yes? And of course yes ironic, given—and she’d have died on the spot to hear me say it. But it is the truth. Some chronic asthma and a tendency to bronchitis, yes, but that is not what I—I mean nasal. Nothing structurally wrong with his nose. Paid several times to have it examined, probed, they all concurred, nose normal, most of the occlusion from simple disuse. Chronic disuse. The truth: he never bothered to learn. Through it. Why bother? Breathed through his mouth, which is of course easier in the short term, requires less effort, maximizes intake, get it all in at once. And does, my son, breathes to this very day through his slack and much-loved adult mouth, which consequently is always partly open, this mouth, slack and wet, and white bits of rancid froth collect at the corners and are of course too much trouble ever to check in a lavatory mirror and attend to discreetly in private and spare others the sight of the pellets of paste at the corners of his mouth, forcing everyone to say nothing and pretend they do not see. The equivalent of long, unclean or long nails on men, which I tirelessly tried to explain were in his own best interest to keep trimmed and clean. When I picture him it is always with his mouth partly open and lower lip wet and hanging and projecting outward far further than a lower lip ought, one eye dull with greed and the other’s palsied bulge. This sounds ugly? It was ugly. Blame the messenger. Do. Silence me. Say the word. Verily, Father, but whose ugliness? For is she—that he was a sickly child as a child who—always in bed with asthma or ears, constant b
ronchitis and upper flu, slight chronic asthma yes true but bed for days at a time when some sun and fresh air could not poss—ring for, hurts—he had a little silver bell by the rocket’s snout he’d ring, to summon her. Not a normal regular child’s bed but a catalogue bed, battleship gray they called Authentic Silvery Finish plus postage and handling with aerodynamic booster fins and snout, assembly required and the instructions practically Cyrillic and yes and whom do you suppose was expec—the little silver tinkle of the bell and she’d fly, fly to him, bending uncomfortably over the booster fins of the bed, cold iron fins, minist—it rang and rang.

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

  THE FATHER: Bells of course employed throughout history to summon servants, domestics, an observation I kept to myself when she got him the bell. The official version was that the bell was to be used if he could not breathe, in lieu of calling out. It was to be an emergency bell. But he abused it. Whenever he was ill he continually rang the bell. Sometimes just to force her to come sit next to the bed. Her presence was demanded and off she went. Even in sleep, if the bell rang, however softly, slyly, sounding more like a wish than a ring, but she would hear it and be out of bed and off down the hall without even putting on her robe. The hall often cold. House poorly insulated and ferociously dear to heat. I, when I awoke, would take her her robe, slippers; she never thought of them. To see her arise still asleep at that maddening tinkle was to see mind-control at its most elemental. This was his genius: to need. The sleep he robbed her of, at will, daily, for years. Watching her face and body fall. Her body never had the chance to recover. Sometimes she looked like an old woman. Ghastly circles under her eyes. Legs swollen. He took years from her. And she’d have sworn she gave them freely. Sworn it. I’m not speaking now of my sleep, my life. He never thought of her except in reference to himself. This is the truth. I know him. If you had seen him at the funeral. As a child he—she’d hear the bell and without even coming fully awake pad off to the lavatory and turn on every faucet and fill the place with steam and sit for hours holding him on the commode in the steam while he slept—that he made her trade her own rest for his, night after—and that not only was all the hot water for all of us for the entire next morning exhausted but the constant steam then would infiltrate upstairs and everything was constantly sodden with his steam and in warm weathers came a rank odor of mold which she would have been appalled had I openly credited to him as its real source, his rocket and tinkle, all wood everywhere warping, wallpaper peeling off in sheets. The gifts he bestowed. That Christmas film—their joke was that he was giving angels wings each time. It was not that he was not sometimes truly ill, it would not be true to accuse him of—but he used it. The bell was only one of the more obvious—and she believed it was all her idea. To orbit him. To alter, cede herself. Vanish as a person. To become an abstraction: The Mother, Down On One Knee. This was life after he came—she orbits him, I chart her movements. That she could call him a blessing, the sun in her sky. She was no more the girl I’d married. And she never knew how I missed that girl, mourned her, how my heart went out to what she’d become. I was weak not to tell her the truth. Despised him. Couldn’t. This was the insidious part, the part I truly despised, that he ruled me, as well, despite my seeing through him. I could not help it. After he came some chasm lay between us. My voice could not carry across it. How often on so many late nights I would lean weakly in the doorway of the lavatory wiping steam from my spectacles with the belt of the robe and was so desperate to say it, to utter it: ‘What about us? Where had our lives gone? Why did this choking sucking thankless thing mean more than we? Who had decided that this should be so?’ Beg her to come out of it, snap out. In despair, weak, not utter—she would not have heard me. That is why not. Afraid that what she would hear would—hear only a bad father, deficient man, uncaring, selfish, and then the last of the freely chosen bonds between us would be severed. That she would choose. Weak. Oh I was doomed, knew it. My self-respect was a plaything in those clammy little hands as well. The genius of his weakness. Nietzsche had no idea. Ballocks all reason for—and this, this was my thank-you—free tickets? A black joke. Free he calls them? And airfare to come and applaud and shape my face’s grin to pretend with the rest of—this is my thank-you? Oh the endless sense of entitlement. Endless. That you understand eternal doom in all the late-night sickly hours forced in a one-buttock hunch on the booster’s bolted fin of the ridiculous rocket-shaped bed he cajoled her—more plaything than bed, impossible instructions on my knees with the wrong tool as he stood in my light—ironized fin no broader than a ham but I’m damned if I’ll kneel by that ill-assembled bed. My job to maintain the vaporizer and administer wet cloths and monitor the breathing and fever as he lay holding the bell while again she was off unrested out in the cold to the all-night druggist to hunch there on the booster-stage fin awash in the odor of mentholate gel and yawning and checking my watch and looking down at him resting with wet mouth agape and watching the chest make its diffident minimal effort of rising and falling while he through the flutter of that right lid staring without expression or making one acknowledgment of—rising then up out of an almost oneiric reverie to realize that I had been wishing it to cease, that chest, to still its sluggish movement under the Gemini comforter he demanded to have upon him at—dreaming of it falling still, stilled, the bell to cease its patrician tinkle, the last rattle of that weak and omnipotent chest, and yes I would then strike my own breast, crosswise thus—