Q.
‘—to finish, that you’d feel the alternating pulls of hysteria and dissociation and bargaining for your life in the way of foxholes or simply to blank catatonically out and retreat into the roar in your mind of the ramifying idea that your whole seemingly random and somewhat flaccid and self-indulgent but nevertheless comparatively blameless life had somehow been connected all along in a terminal chain that has somehow justified or somehow connected, causally, to lead you inevitably to this terminal unreal point, your life’s quote unquote point, its as it were sharp point or tip, and that canned clichés such as fear seized me or this is something that only happens to other people or even moment of truth now take on a horrendous neural resonance and vitality when—’
Q.
‘Not of—just being left narratively alone in the self-sufficiency of her narrative aspect to contemplate just how little-kid-level scared you’d be, how much you’d resent and despise this sick twisted shit beside you ranting whom you’d kill without hesitation if you could while but at the same time feeling involuntarily the very highest respect, almost a deference—the sheer agential power of one who could make you feel this frightened, that he could bring you to this point simply by wishing it and now can, if he wished, take you past it, past yourself, turn you into a grisly discovery, brutal sex slaying, and the feeling that you’d do absolutely anything or say or trade anything to persuade him simply to settle for rape and then let you go, or even torture, even willing to bring to the bargaining table a bit of nonlethal torture if only he’d settle for hurting you and choose then for whatever reason to drive off and leave you hurt and breathing in the weeds and sobbing at the sky and traumatized beyond all recovery instead of as nothing, yes it’s a cliché but this is to be all? this was to be the end? and at the hands of someone who probably didn’t even finish Manual Arts High School and had nothing like a recognizable soul or capacity for empathy with anyone else, a blind ugly force like gravity or a rabid dog, and yet it was he who wished it to happen and who possessed the power and certainly the tools to make it happen, tools he names in a maddening singsong about knives and wives and scythes and dolls and awls, adzes and mattocks and other implements whose names she did not recognize but even so they even sounded like just what—’
Q.
‘Yes and a good deal of the anecdote’s medial part’s rising action detailed this interior struggle between giving in to hysterical fear and maintaining the level-headedness to focus her concentration on the situation and to figure out something ingenious and persuasive to say to the sexual psychotic as he’s driving deeper into the secluded area and looking ominously around for a propitious site and becoming more and more openly raveled and psychotic and alternately grinning and ranting and invoking God and the memory of his brutally slain mother and gripping the Cutlass’s steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles are gray.’
Q.
‘That’s right, the psychopath is also a mulatto, although with aquiline and almost femininely delicate features, a fact that she has omitted or held back for a good portion of the anecdote. She said it hadn’t struck her as important. In today’s climate one wouldn’t want to critique too harshly the idea of someone with a body like that getting into a strange automobile with a mulatto. In a way you have to applaud the broad-mindedness. I didn’t at the time of the anecdote really even notice that she’d omitted the ethnic detail for so long, but there’s something to applaud there as well, you’d have to concede, though if you—’
Q.
‘The crux being that despite the terror she is somehow able to think quickly on her feet and thinks it through and determines that her only chance of surviving this encounter is to establish a quote connection with the quote soul of the sexual psychopath as he’s driving them deeper into the woody secluded area looking for just the right spot to pull over and brutally have at her. That her objective is to focus very intently on the psychotic mulatto as an ensouled and beautiful albeit tormented person in his own right instead of merely as a threat to her or a force of evil or the incarnation of her personal death. Try to bracket any New Age goo in the terminology and focus on the tactical strategy itself if you can because I’m well aware that what she is about to describe is nothing but a variant of the stale old Love Will Conquer All bromide but for the moment bracket whatever contempt you might feel and try to see the more concrete ramifications of—in this situation in terms of what she has the courage and apparent conviction to actually attempt here, because she says she believes that sufficient love and focus can penetrate even psychosis and evil and establish a quote soul-connection, unquote, and that if the mulatto can be brought to feel even a minim of this alleged soul-connection there is some chance that he’ll be unable to follow through with actually killing her. Which is of course on a psychological level not all that implausible, since sexual psychopaths are well known to depersonalize their victims and liken them to objects or dolls, Its and not Thous so to speak, which is often their explanation for how they are able to inflict such unimaginable brutality on a human being, namely that they do not see them as human beings at all but merely as objects of the psychopath’s own needs and intentions. And yet love and empathy of this kind of connective magnitude demand quote unquote total focus, she said, and her terror and totally understandable concern for herself were at this point to say the least distracting in the extreme, so she realized that she was in for the most difficult and important battle of her life, she said, a battle that was to be engaged completely within herself and her own soul’s capacities, which idea by this time I found extremely interesting and captivating, particularly because she is so unaffected and seemingly sincere when battle of one’s life is usually such a neon indication of melodrama or manipulation of the listener, trying to bring him to the edge of his seat and so forth.’
Q.
‘I observe with interest that you are now interrupting me to ask the same questions I was interrupting her to ask, which is precisely the sort of convergence of—’
Q.
‘She said the best way to describe focus to a person who hadn’t undertaken what were apparently her denomination’s involved and time-consuming series of lessons and exercises was to envision focus as intense concentration further sharpened and intensified to a single sharp point, to envision a kind of needle of concentrated attention whose extreme thinness and fragility were also, of course, its capacity to penetrate, and but that the demands of excluding all extraneous concerns and keeping the needle thinly focused and sharply directed were extreme even under the best of circumstances, which these profoundly terrifying circumstances were of course not.’
Q.
‘Thus, in the car, under let’s keep in mind now enormous duress and pressure, she marshals her concentration. She stares directly into the sexual psychopath’s right eye—the eye that is accessible to her in his aquiline profile as he drives the Cutlass—and wills herself to keep her gaze directly on him at all times. She wills herself not to weep or plead but merely to use her penetrating focus to attempt to feel and empathize with the sex offender’s psychosis and rage and terror and psychic torment, and says she visualizes her focus piercing through the mulatto’s veil of psychosis and penetrating various strata of rage and terror and delusion to touch the beauty and nobility of the generic human soul beneath all the psychosis, forcing a nascent, compassion-based connection between their souls, and she focuses on the mulatto’s profile very intently and quietly tells him what she saw in his soul, which she insisted was the truth. It was the climactic struggle of her spiritual life, she said, what with all the under the circumstances perfectly understandable terror and loathing of the sex criminal that kept threatening to dilute her focus and break the connection. Yet at the same time the effects of her focus on the psychotic’s face were becoming obvious—when she was able to hold the focus and penetrate him and hold the soul-connection the mulatto at the wheel would gradually stop ranting and fall tensely silent, as if preoccupied, and his r
ight profile would tense and tighten hypertonically and his dead right eye filling with anxiety and conflict at feeling the delicate beginnings of the sort of connection with another soul he had always both desired and always also feared in the very depths of his psyche, of course.’
Q.
‘Just that it’s widely acknowledged that a primary reason your prototypical sex killer rapes and kills is that he regards rape and murder as his only viable means of establishing some kind of meaningful connection with his victim. That this is a basic human need. I mean some sort of connection of course. But also frightening and easily susceptible to delusion and psychosis. It is his twisted way of having a, quote, relationship. Conventional relationships terrify him. But with a victim, raping and torturing and killing, the sexual psychotic is able to forge a sort of quote unquote connection via his ability to make her feel intense fear and pain, while his exultant sensation of total Godlike control over her—what she feels, whether she feels, breathes, lives—this allows him some margin of safety in the relationship.’
Q.
‘Simply that this is what first seemed somehow ingenious in her tactics, however daffy the terms—that it addressed the psychotic’s core weakness, his grotesque shyness as it were, the terror that any conventional, soul-exposing connection with another human being will threaten him with engulfment and/or obliteration, in other words that he will become the victim. That in his cosmology it is either feed or be food—God how lonely, do you feel it?—but that the brute control he and his sharp implement hold over her very life and death allow the mulatto to feel that here he is in a hundred percent total control of the relationship and thus that the connection he so desperately craves will not expose or engulf or obliterate him. Nor is this of course all that substantively different from a man sizing up an attractive girl and approaching her and artfully deploying just the right rhetoric and pushing the right buttons to induce her to come home with him, never once saying anything or touching her in any way that isn’t completely gentle and pleasurable and seemingly respectful, leading her gently and respectfully to his satin-sheeted bed and in the light of the moon making exquisitely attentive love to her and making her come over and over until she’s quote begging for mercy and is totally under his emotional control and feels that she and he must be deeply and unseverably connected for the evening to have been this perfect and mutually respectful and fulfilling and then lighting her cigarettes and engaging in an hour or two of pseudo-intimate postcoital chitchat in his wrecked bed and seeming very close and content when what he really wants is to be in some absolutely antipodal spot from wherever she is from now on and is thinking about how to give her a special disconnected telephone number and never contacting her again. And that an all too obvious part of the reason for his cold and mercenary and maybe somewhat victimizing behavior is that the potential profundity of the very connection he has worked so hard to make her feel terrifies him. I know I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already decided you know. With your slim chilly smile. You’re not the only one who can read people, you know. He’s a fool because he thinks he’s made a fool of her, you’re thinking. Like he got away with something. The satyrosaurian sybaritic heterosapien male, the type you short-haired catamenial braburners can see coming a mile away. And pathetic. He’s a predator, you believe, and he too thinks he’s a predator, but he’s the really frightened one, he’s the one running.’
Q.
‘I am inviting you to consider that it isn’t the motivation that’s the psychotic part. The permutation is simply the psychotic one of substituting rape, murder, and mind-shattering terror for exquisite lovemaking and giving a false number whose falseness isn’t so immediately evident that it will unnecessarily hurt someone’s feelings and cause you discomfort.’
Q.
‘And please be aware that I’m quite familiar with the typology behind these bland little expressions of yours, the affectless little questions. I know what an excursus is and I know what a dry wit is. Do not think you are getting out of me things or admissions I’m unaware of. Just consider the possibility that I understand more than you think. Though if you’d like another I’ll buy you another no problem.’
Q.
‘All right. Once more, slowly. That literally killing instead of merely running is the killer’s psychotically literal way of resolving the conflict between his need for connection and his terror of being in any way connected. Especially, yes, to a woman, connecting with a woman, whom the vast majority of sexual psychotics do hate and fear, often due to twisted relations with the mother as a child. The psychotic sex killer is thus often quote symbolically killing the mother, whom he hates and fears but of course cannot literally kill because he is still enmeshed in the infantile belief that without her love he will somehow die. The psychotic’s relation to her is one of both terrified hatred and terror and desperate pining need. He finds this conflict unendurable and must thus symbolically resolve it through psychotic sex crimes.’
Q.
‘Her delivery had little or no—she seemed simply to relate what had happened without commenting one way or the other, or reacting. Although nor was she dissociated or monotonous. There was a disingen—an equanimity about her, a sense of residence in herself or a type of artlessness that did, does, that resembled a type of intent concentration. This I had noticed at the park when I first saw her and came and crouched down beside her, since a high degree of unself-conscious attention and concentration is not exactly standard issue for a gorgeous Granola Cruncher on a wool blanket sitting contra—’
Q.
‘Well still, though, it’s not exactly what one would call esoteric is it since it’s so much in the air, common knowledge about childhood’s connection to adult sex crimes in popular culture these days. Turn on the news for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t exactly take a von Braun to connect problems with connecting with women to problems in the childhood relation to the mother. It’s all in the air.’
Q.
‘That it was a titanic struggle, she said, in the Cutlass, heading deeper into the secluded area, because whenever for a moment her terror bested her or she for any reason lost her intense focus on the mulatto, even for a moment, the effect on the connection was obvious—his profile relaxing into its grin and his right eye again going empty and dead as he recrudesced and began once again to singsong psychotically about the implements in his trunk and what he had in store for her once he found the ideal secluded spot, and she could tell that in the wavering of the soul-connection he was automatically reverting to resolving his connectionary conflicts in the only way he knew. And I clearly remember her saying that by this time, whenever she succumbed and lost focus for a moment and his eye and face reverted to creepy psychotic unconflicted glee, she was surprised to find herself feeling no longer paralyzing terror for herself but a nearly heartbreaking sadness for him, the psychotic mulatto. And I’ll say that it was at roughly this point in listening to the story, still nude in bed, that I began to admit to myself that not only was it a remarkable postcoital anecdote but that this was, in certain ways, rather a remarkable woman, and that I felt a bit sad or wistful that I had not noticed this type of remarkability in her when I had first been attracted to her in the park. This was while the mulatto has meanwhile spotted a site that meets his criteria and has pulled crunchingly over in the gravel by the side of the secluded area’s road and asks her, somewhat apologetically or ambivalently it seems, to get out of the Cutlass and to lie prone on the ground and to lace her hands behind her head in the position of both police arrests and gangland executions, a well-known position obviously and no doubt chosen for its associations and intended to emphasize both the ideas of punitive custody and of violent death. She does not hesitate or beg. She had long since decided that she must not give in to the temptation to beg or plead or protest or in any way appear to resist him. She was rolling all her dice on these daffy-sounding beliefs in connection and nobility and compassion as more fundamental and primary compo
nents of soul than psychosis or evil. I note that these beliefs seem far less canned or flaccid when someone appears willing to stake their life on them. This was as he orders her to lie prone in the roadside gravel while he goes back to the trunk to browse through his collection of torture implements. She says by this time she could feel very clearly that her acerose focus’s connective powers were being aided by spiritual resources far greater than her own, because even though she was in a prone position and her face and eyes were in the clover or phlox in the gravel by the car and her eyes tightly shut she could feel the soul-connection holding and even strengthening between herself and the mulatto, she could hear the conflict and disorientation in the sex offender’s footsteps as he went to the Cutlass’s trunk. She was experiencing a whole new depth of focus. I was listening to her very intently. It wasn’t suspense. Lying there helpless and connected, she says her senses had taken on the nearly unbearable acuity we associate with drugs or extreme meditative states. She could distinguish lilac and shattercane’s scents from phlox and lambs’-quarter, the watery mint of first-growth clover. Wearing a corbeau leotard beneath a kind of loose-waisted cotton dirndl and on one wrist a great many bracelets of pinchbeck copper. She could decoct from the smell of the gravel in her face the dank verdure of the spring soil beneath the gravel and distinguish the press and shape of each piece of gravel against her face and large breasts through the leotard’s top, the angle of the sun on the top of her spine and the slight swirl in the intermittent breeze that blew from left to right across the light film of sweat on her neck. In other words what one might call an almost hallucinatory accentuation of detail, the way in some nightmares you remember the precise shape of every blade of grass in your father’s lawn on the day your mother left him and took you to live at her sister’s. Many of the cheap bracelets had been gifts apparently. She could hear the largo tick of the cooling auto and bees and bluebottle flies and stridulating crickets at the distant treeline, the same volute breeze in those trees she could feel at her back, and birds—imagine the temptation to despair in the sound of carefree birds and insects only yards from where you lay trussed for the gambrel—of tentative steps and breathing amid the clank of implements whose very shapes could be envisioned from the sounds they made against one another when stirred by a conflicted hand. The cotton of her dirndl skirt that light sheer unrefined cotton that’s almost gauze.’
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories Page 28
