David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

BLACK ART

That day he buys them a janitor’s broom. He sweeps rainwater off the tarp over Sarah’s pool.

That night Sarah stays with Esther. Touches metal all night. Day sleeps alone.

Day stands at a black window in Sarah’s bedroom. Over Massachusetts the sky is smeared with stars. The stars move slowly across the glass.

That day he goes to Esther with Sarah. Esther’s bed’s steel gleams in the bright room. Esther smiles dully as Day reads about giants.

“I am a giant,” he reads: “I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footprints are counties, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds.”

“I am a giant,” Esther tries to say.

Sarah, allergic, sneezes.

Day: “Yes.”

BLACK AND WHITE

‘All true art is music’ (a different teacher). ‘The visual arts are but one corner of true music’s allcomprising room’ (ibid.)

Music discloses itself as a relation between one key and two notes locked by the key in dance. Rhythm. And in Day’s blown predreams, too, music consumes all law: what is most solid discloses itself here as rhythms, nothing but. Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before.

The cleric appears tonight in monochrome and collar.

Bless me

Do you take this woman Sarah

To be my

How long

For I have

since your last confession to a body with the power to absolve. Confession need

As I those who have swimmed against me

not entail absolution, lay bare, confession in the absence of awareness of sin,

Bless me father for there can be no awareness of sin without awareness of transgression without awareness of limit

Full of Grace

no such animal. Pray together for a revelation of limit

Red clouds in Warhol’s coffee

arrange in yourself an awareness of.

ONE COLOR

That day he is back at work’s first week. Sunlight reverses HEALTH pink through the windshield’s sticker. Day drives the county car past a factory.

“Habla Espanol?” Eric Yang asks from the passenger’s side.

Smoke from a smokestack hangs jagged as Day nods his head.

“You wanted to be shown ropes,” Yang says. His eyes are closed as he rotates. “I’ll show you a rope. Habla?”

“Yes,” Day says. “Hablo.”

They drive past homes.

Eric Yang’s special talent is the mental rotation of three-dimensional objects.

“This case speaks only Spanish,” Yang says. “Lady’s son got himself killed last month. In their apartment. Nasty. Sixteen. Gang thing, drug thing. Big area of the kid’s blood on her kitchen floor.”

They drive past hard hats and jackhammers.

“She says it’s all she’s got left of him!” Yang shouts. “She won’t let us clean it up. She says it’s him,” he says.

Mental rotation is Yang’s hobby. He is a certified counselor and caseworker.

“Your job today,” Yang twirls an imaginary rope, lassoes something mental on the dashboard, “is to get her to draw him. Even just the blood. Ndiawar said he didn’t care which. Just so she has a picture he said. So we can maybe clean up the blood.”

In the rearview, past himself, Day can see his case of supplies on the back seat. It’s not supposed to be in the sun.

“Make her draw him,” Yang says, releasing a rope Day can’t see. Yang closes his eyes again. “I’m going to try to rotate this month’s phone bill.”

Day passes a white van. Its windows are tinted. Saucers of rust on the side.

“Today we see the poor lady who loves blood and the rich man who begs for time.”

“Old teacher of mine. I told Ndiawar.” Day checks his left. “Art teacher in a former life.”

“The nuisance in the public, Ndiawar calls him,” Yang says. He furrows, concentrating. “I’m rotating the duty log. We’re going to go right by him. He’s right on the way. But he’s not first on the log.” “He was a teacher of mine,” Day says again. “I had him in school.” “We go by the log.” “He influenced me. My work.”

They pass a dry lot.

ART

Tonight, at the window, under stars that refuse to move, Day nearly makes it and dreampaints awake.

He paints it so that he’s standing on the pool’s baggy tarpaulin when he rises into the lunchtime sky. He ascends without weight, neither pulled from above nor pushed from below, one perfect line to a point in the sky overhead. Mountains sit blunt, humidity curls in the valleys like gauze. Holyoke and then Springfield and Chicopee and Longmeadow and Hadley are dull misshapen coins.

Day rises into the sky. The air gets more and more blue. Something in the sky blinks, and he’s gone.

“Colors,” he says to the screen’s black lattice.

The screen breathes mint.

“She complains I turn colors in my sleep,” Day says.

“Something understands,” breathes the screen, “surely.”

Knees sore, Day jangles pockets with his hands. So many coins.

TWO COLORS

Blue-eyed behind his County Mental Health Director’s desk, Dr. Ndiawar is a darkly bald man of vague alien status. He likes to make a steeple with his hands and to look at it while he speaks.

“You paint,” he says. “As a student, there was sculpture. You took psychology.” He looks up. “In large amounts? You speak languages?”

Day’s slow nod produces a dot of reflected office light on Ndiawar’s scalp. Day births the dot and kills it. The Director’s desk is large and strangely clean. Day’s c.v. looks tiny against its expanse.

“There are doubts,” Ndiawar says, “which I have in my mind.” He broadens the hands’ angle slightly. “There is not money in it.”

Day gives the dot two brief lives.

“However you state there are independent means, through marriage, for you.”

“And shows,” Day says quietly. “Sales.” A scarlet lie.

“You sell art you make in the past, you have stated,” Ndiawar says. Eric Yang is tall, late twenties, with long hair and muddy eyes that close and open instead of blink.

Day shakes Yang’s hand. “How do you do.”

“Surprisingly well.”

Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. “Your new art therapy person,” he says to Yang.

Yang looks Day in the eye. “Look, man,” he says. “I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.”

“You and you, part-time, become a field team who travel crossward throughout the county and environs,” Ndiawar reads to Day from something prepared. Both hands hold the page. “Yang is senior as, together, you visit the shut-ins. The very badly off. The no room for them here.”

“It’s a talent I have,” Yang says, combing his bangs with four fingers. “I close my eyes and form a perfect detailed image of any object. From any angle. Then I rotate it.”

“You visit the prepared log’s schedule of shut-ins,” Ndiawar reads. “Yang, who is senior, counsels these badly off people, while you encourage, through skill, them to express disordered feelings through artistic acts.”

“I can see textures and imperfections and the play of light and shadow on the objects I rotate, too,” Yang says. He is making small hand gestures that do not seem to signify anything in particular. “It’s a very private talent.” He looks to Ndiawar. “I just want to be up front with the guy.”

Dr. Ndiawar ignores Yang. “Influencing them to direct aberrant or dysfunctioning affect onto things which they artistically make,” he reads in a monotone. “On objects which cannot be harmed. This is a fieldmodel of intervention. Such as clay, which as an object is good.”

“I’m practically an MD,” Yang says, tamping a cigarette on his knuckle.