Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories

  [PAUSE]

  THE FATHER: Rare that she left us alone in a room together, though. His mother. A reluctance. I’m convinced she did not know why. Some instinctive unease, intuition. She believed he and I loved one another in the strained stilted way of fathers and sons and that this was why we had so little to say to one another. She believed the love was unspoken and so intense that it made us awkward. Used gently to chide me in bed about what she called my ‘awkwardness’ with the boy. She rarely left a room, believed she had somehow to mediate between us, the strained circuit. Even when I taught him—taught him sums she contrived ways to sit at the table, to—she felt she had to protect us both. It broke—oh—broke my—oh oh bloody Christ please ring it the—

  [PAUSE for technician’s removal of ileostomy pouch and skin barrier; FATHER’s evacuation of digestive gases; catheter suction of edemic particulates; moderate dyspnea; R.N. remarks re fatigue and recommends truncation of visit; FATHER’s outburst at R.N., technician, Charge Nurse]

  THE FATHER: That she died without knowing my heart. Without the entirety of union we had promised one another before God and Church and her parents and my mother and brother standing with me. Out of love. It was, Father. Our marriage a lie and she did not know, never knew I was so alone. That I slunk through our life in silence and alone. My decision, to spare her. Out of love. God how I loved her. Such silence. I was weak. Bloody awful, pathetic, tragic that weakn—for the truth might have brought her to me; I might somehow have shown him to her. His true gift, what he was really about. Slight chance, granted. Long odds. Never able. I was too weak to risk causing her pain, a pain which would have been on his behalf. She orbited him, I her. My hatred of him made me weak. I came to know myself: I am weak. Deficient. Disgusted now by my own deficiency. Pathetic specimen. No backbone. Nor has he a backbone either, none, but requires none, a new species, needn’t stand: others support him. Ingenious weakness. World owes him love. His gift that the world somehow believes it as well. Why? Why does he pay no price for his weakness? Under what possible scheme is this just? Who gave him my life? By what fiat? Because and he will, he will come to me today, here, later. Pay his respects, press my hand, play his solicitous part. Fresh flowers, girls’ construction-paper cards. Genius of him. Has not missed a day I’ve been here. Lying here. Only he and I know why. Bring them here to see me. Loving son the staff all say, lovely family, how lucky, so very much to be grateful. Blessings. Brings his girls, holds them up for me to see whole. Above the rails. Stem to stern. Ship to shore. He calls them his apples. He may be in transit this very—even as we speak. Fit diminutive. ‘Apples.’ He devours people. Drains. Thank you for hearing this. Devoured my life and left me to my. I am loathsome, lying here. Good of you to listen. Charitable. Sister, I require a favor. I wish to try to—to find the strength. I am dying, I know it. One can feel it coming you know, know it’s on its way. Oddly familiar the feeling. An old old friend come to pay his. I require a favor from you. I’ll not say an indulgence. A boon. Listen. Soon he will come, and with him he will bring the delightful girl who married him and adores him and cocks her head when he delights her and adores him and weeps shamelessly at the sight of me here lying here in these webs of tubes, and the two girls he makes such a faultless show of loving—‘Apple of my eye’—and who adore him. Adore him. You see the lie lives on. If I am weak it will outlive me. We shall see whether I have the backbone to cause the girl pain, who believes she does love him. To be judged a bad man. When I do. Bitter spiteful old man. I am weak enough to hope in part it’s taken for delirium. This is how weak a man I am. That her loving me and choosing and marrying me and having her child by me might well have been her mistake. I am dying, he impending, I have one more chance—the truth, to speak it aloud, to expose him, sunder the thrall, shift the scales, warn the innocents he’s taken in. To sacrifice their opinion of me to the truth, out of love for those blameless children. If you saw the way he looked at them, his little apples, with that eye, the smug triumph, the weak lid peeled back to expose the—never doubting he deserves this joy. Taking joy as his due no matter the. They will be here soon standing here. Holding my hand as you are. What time is it? What time do you have? He is in transit even now, I feel it. He will look down again at me today on this bed, between these rails, entubed, incontinent, foul, wracked, struggling even to breathe, and his face’s intrinsic vacancy will again disguise to all eyes but mine the exultation in his eyes, both the eyes, seeing me like this. And he will not even know he exults, he is that blind to himself, he himself believes the lie. This is the real affront. This is his coup de théâtre. That he too is taken in, that he too believes he loves me, believes he loves. For him, too, I would do it. Say it. Break the spell he’s cast over even himself. That is true evil, not even to know one is evil, no? Save his soul you could say. Perhaps. Had I the spine. Velleity. Could find the steel. Shall set one free, no? Is that not promised Father? For say unto you verily. Yes? Forgive me, for I. Sister, I wish to make my peace. To close the circuit. To deliver it into the room’s air: that I know what he is. That he disgusts me and desp—repels me and that I despise him and that his birth was a blot, unbearable. Perhaps yes even yes to raise both arms as I—the black joke my now suffocating here as he must know he should have so long ago in that rocket I paid for without—

  [PAUSE]

  THE FATHER: God, Aeschylus. The Oresteia: Aeschylus. His doorway, picking at himself in translation. Aeschylus, not Sophocles. Pathetic.

  [PAUSE]

  THE FATHER: Nails on men are repellent. Keep them short and keep them clean. That is my motto.

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

  THE FATHER: Now and now I have made it. My confession. To you merciful Sisters of Mercy. Not, not that I despised him. For if you knew him. If you saw what I saw you’d have smothered him with the pillow long ago believe me. My confession is that damnable weakness and misguided love send me to heaven without having spoken the truth. The forbidden truth. No one even says aloud that you are not to say it. Te judice. If only I could. Oh how I despise the loss of my strength! If you knew this hurt—how it—but do not weep. Weep not. Do not weep. Not for me. I do not deserve—why are you crying? Don’t you dare pity me. What I need from—pity is not what I need from you. Not why. Far from—do stop it, don’t want to see it. Stop.

  YOU [cruelly]: But Father it’s me. Your own son. All of us, standing here, loving you so.

  THE FATHER: Father good and because I do I do do need something from you. Father, listen. It must not win. This evil. You are—you’ve heard the truth now. Good of you. Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request. Pastoral service. Mercy. As you love truth, as God the—for I confess: I will say nothing. I know myself and it is too late. Not in me. Mere fantasy to think. For even now he is in transit, bearing gifts. His apples to hold out to me whole. Wishful thinking, to raise myself up Lazarus-like with vile and loathsome truth for all to—where is my bell? That they will gather about the bed and his weak eye will fall upon me in the midst of his wife’s uxorious prattle. He will have a child in his arms. His eye will meet mine and his wet red wet labial lip curl invisibly in secret acknowledgment between he and I and I will try and try and fail to raise my arms and break the spell with my last breath, to depose—expose him, rebuke the evil he long ago used her to make me help him erect. Father judicat orbis. Never have I ever begged before. Down on one knee now for—do not forsake me. I beg you. Despise him for me. On my account. Promise you’ll carry it. It must outlive all this. Of myself I am weak bear my burden save your servant te judice for thine is—not—

  [PAUSE for severe dyspnea; sterilization and partial anesthesis of dextral orbit; Code for attending MD]

  THE FATHER: Not consign me. Be my bell. Unworthy life for all thee. Beg. Not to die in this appalling silence. This charged and pregnant vacuum all around. This wet and open sucking hole beneath that eye. That terrib
le eye impending. Such silence.

  SUICIDE AS A SORT OF PRESENT

  There was once a mother who had a very hard time indeed, emotionally, inside.

  As she remembered it, she had always had a hard time, even as a child. She remembered few of her childhood’s specifics, but what she could remember were feelings of self-loathing, terror, and despair that seemed to have been with her always.

  From an objective perspective, it would not be inaccurate to say that this mother-to-be had had some very heavy psychic shit laid on her as a little girl, and that some of this shit qualified as parental abuse. Her childhood had not been as bad as some, but it had been no picnic. All this, while accurate, would not be to the point.

  The point is that, from as early an age as she could recall, this mother-to-be loathed herself. She viewed everything in life with apprehension, as if every occasion or opportunity were some sort of dreadfully important exam for which she had been too lazy or stupid to prepare properly. It felt as if a perfect score on each such exam was necessary in order to avert some shattering punishment. 1 She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

  The mother-to-be knew perfectly well, from an early age, that this constant horrible pressure she felt was an internal pressure. That it was not anyone else’s fault. Thus she loathed herself even more. Her expectations of herself were of utter perfection, and each time she fell short of perfection she was filled with an unbearable plunging despair that threatened to shatter her like a cheap mirror. 2 These very high expectations applied to every department of the future mother’s life, particularly those departments which involved others’ approval or disapproval. She was thus, in childhood and adolescence, viewed as bright, attractive, popular, impressive; she was commended and approved. Peers appeared to envy her energy, drive, appearance, intelligence, disposition, and unfailing consideration for the needs and feelings of others 3 ; she had few close friends. Throughout her adolescence, authorities such as teachers, employers, troop leaders, pastors, and F.S.A. Faculty Advisers commented that the young mother-in-waiting ‘seem[ed] to have very, very high expectations of [her]self,’ and while these comments were often delivered in a spirit of gentle concern or reproof, there was no failing to discern in them that slight unmistakable note of approval—of an authority’s detached, objective judgment and decision to approve—and at any rate the future mother felt (for the moment) approved. And felt seen: her standards were high. She took a sort of abject pride in her mercilessness toward herself. 4

  By the time she was grown up, it would be accurate to say that the mother-to-be was having a very hard interior time of it indeed.

  When she became a mother, things became even harder. The mother’s expectations of her small child were also, it turned out, impossibly high. And every time the child fell short, her natural inclination was to loathe it. In other words, every time it (the child) threatened to compromise the high standards that were all the mother felt she really had, inside, the mother’s instinctive self-loathing tended to project itself outward and downward onto the child itself. This tendency was compounded by the fact that there existed only a very tiny and indistinct separation in the mother’s mind between her own identity and that of her small child. The child appeared in a sense to be the mother’s own reflection in a diminishing and deeply flawed mirror. Thus every time the child was rude, greedy, foul, dense, selfish, cruel, disobedient, lazy, foolish, willful, or childish, the mother’s deepest and most natural inclination was to loathe it.

  But she could not loathe it. No good mother can loathe her child or judge it or abuse it or wish it harm in any way. The mother knew this. And her standards for herself as a mother were, as one would expect, extremely high. It was thus that whenever she ‘slipped,’ ‘snapped,’ ‘lost her patience’ and expressed (or even felt) loathing (however brief) for the child, the mother was instantly plunged into such a chasm of self-recrimination and despair that she felt it just could not be borne. Hence the mother was at war. Her expectations were in fundamental conflict. It was a conflict in which she felt her very life was at stake: to fail to overcome her instinctive dissatisfaction with her child would result in a terrible, shattering punishment which she knew she herself would administer, inside. She was determined—desperate—to succeed, to satisfy her expectations of herself as a mother, no matter what it cost.

  From an objective perspective, the mother was wildly successful in her efforts at self-control. In her outward conduct toward the child, the mother was indefatigably loving, compassionate, empathetic, patient, warm, effusive, unconditional, and devoid of any apparent capacity to judge or disapprove or withhold love in any form. The more loathsome the child was, the more loving the mother required herself to be. Her conduct was, by any standard of what an outstanding mother might be expected to be, impeccable.

  In return, the small child, as it grew, loved the mother more than all other things in the world put together. If it had had the capacity to speak of itself truly somehow, the child would have said that it felt itself to be a very wicked, loathsome child who through some undeserved stroke of good fortune got to have the very best, most loving and patient and beautiful mother in the whole world.

  Inside, as the child grew, the mother was filled with self-loathing and despair. Surely, she felt, the fact that the child lied and cheated and terrorized neighborhood pets was her fault; surely the child was simply expressing for all the world to see her own grotesque and pathetic deficiencies as a mother. Thus, when the child stole his class’s UNICEF money or swung a cat by its tail and struck it repeatedly against the sharp corner of a brick home next door, she took the child’s grotesque deficiencies upon herself, rewarding the child’s tears and self-recriminations with an unconditionally loving forgiveness that made her seem to the child to be his lone refuge in a world of impossible expectations and merciless judgment and unending psychic shit. As he (the child) grew, the mother took all that was imperfect in him deep into herself and bore it all and thus absolved him, redeemed and renewed him, even as she added to her own inner fund of loathing.

  So it went, throughout his childhood and adolescence, such that, by the time the child was old enough to apply for various licenses and permits, the mother was almost entirely filled, deep inside, with loathing: loathing for herself, for the delinquent and unhappy child, for a world of impossible expectations and merciless judgment. She could not, of course, express any of this. And so the son—desperate, as are all children, to repay the perfect love we may expect only of mothers—expressed it all for her.

  BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

  B.I. #20 12-96

  NEW HAVEN CT

  ‘And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and very nearly killed.’

  Q.

  ‘Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who then drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.’

  Q.

  ‘Neither would I. Who would now, in an era when every—when psychotic serial killers have their own trading cards? I’m concerned in today’s climate to steer clear of any suggestion of anyone quote asking for it, let’s not even go there, but rest assured that it gives one pause about the capacities of judgment involved, or at the very least the naiveté—’

  Q.

  ‘Only that it was perhaps marginally less unbelievable in the context of her type, in that this was what one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you, in college where
one is often first exposed to social taxonomies we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction that im—’

  Q.

  ‘A large outdoor concert-dash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where—it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her proto-typical Cruncher morphology was evident right at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women—it is a less uncommon typology among educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on the blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.’