David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

FOUR WINDOWS

And now in the starlit painting’s third istoria the priest is truly old. Teacher in a former life. He kneels in the brittle field at the limit of an industrial park. His palms are together in an attitude of antique piety: a patron’s pose. Day, who’s failed twice, is somewhat outside the threesided figure the field’s other figures form. Cicadas scream in the dry weeds. The weeds a dead yellow and their shadows’ lengths and angles make no sense; the August sun has a mind of its own.

“One faces…,” Ndiawar of the blinding head reads from a prepared memo in the sun. Yang shields his cigarette from a breeze.

“… confinement as a natural consequence of behaving in manners which, toward others, are aberrant,” Ndiawar reads.

The small white planet on a stalk Day sees is a dandelion gone to seed.

Yang sits tangent to the knelt shadow with his legs crossed, smoking. His T-shirt says ASK ME ABOUT MY INVISIBLE ENEMIES. He combs at himself with a hand. “It’s a question of venue, Sir,” he says. “Out here like this, it becomes a public question. Am I right Dr. Ndiawar.”

“Inform him a community of other persons is no vacuum.”

“You’re not in a vacuum here, Sir,” Yang says.

“Rights exist in a state of tension. Rights necessarily tense.” Ndiawar is skimming.

Yang buries a butt. “Here’s the thing, Sir, Father if I may. You want to pray to a picture of yourself praying, that is okay. That is fine. That is your right. Except just not where other people have to watch you do it. Other people with their own rights to not have to see it against their will, which disturbs them. Isn’t that pretty reasonable?”

Day is watching the exchange over his lollipop of snow. The canvas stands nailed to a weighted easel in the field. Its quadrate shadow distorted. The former Jesuit teacher of art kneels, in the painting.

“One faces”—Ndiawar—“additional confinement as a consequence of standing publicly on streets’ corners to ask passersby for the gift of minutes from their day.”

“Just one.”

“There exists no right to accost, disturb, or solicit the innocent.” Yang has no shadow.

“One minute,” says the art professor in the weighted painting. “Surely you can spare one minute.”

“The venue plus the solicitation is going to equal confinement, Sir,” Yang says.

“To accost and force to look at — these passersby are the innocents, tell him.”

“I’ll take any time you can spare. Name your time.”

“To be a shut-in once more. Ask him if he liked it. Remind him of the term conditional release.”

“A vacuum is one thing,” Yang says, looking briefly over his shoulder in signal to Day. “Just not on the streets.” Even though Day is not behind him.

The Director is replacing the memo in a cardboard portfolio. A hint of the steeple as he surveys the field. The Jesuit’s eyes never leave his easel’s square. Because the canvas is the viewer’s point of access to the dream-painting, the as it were window onto the scene, his eyes are thus on Day’s, a tiny dead seeded globe between them. The perspective makes no sense. Ndiawar’s headless shadow is now over Day, over the white seeded ball, he sees. “Skills are required,” Ndiawar says, “badly.”

A mind of its own.

Day’s own breath breaks the ball apart.

LIMIT

Esther’s head is wrapped in gauze. Day’s head is inclined over a page. Sarah’s head is in the pastor’s lap in the room’s bright corner. The room is white. The cleric’s head is thrown back, eyes on the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah’s head says to the black lap. “The phone. The outlet. The drain. The suction. She turns white and he turns colors. I apologize.”

“Though giants,” Day is reading aloud. “Though giants come in just one size, they come in many forms. There are the Greek Cyclops and the French Pantagruel and the American Bunyan. There are wide and multi-cultural cycles that have giants as columns of flame, as clouds with legs, as mountains that walk inverted while the whole world sleeps.”

“No, I apologize,” says the pastor’s head. A white hand strokes Sarah’s pinned hair.

“There are red-hot giants, warm giants,” Day reads. “There are also cold giants. These are forms. One form of cold giant is described in cycles as a mile-high skeleton made all of colored glass. The glass giant lives in a forest that is pure white with frost.”

“Cold giants.”

“After you,” Sarah whispers, opening the door to Esther’s room.

“It is this forest’s master.”

The head above black and white smiles. “After you .”

“The glass giant’s stride is a mile across. All day every day it strides. It never stops. It cannot rest. For it lives in fear of its frozen forest ever melting. This fear keeps it striding every minute.”

“Won’t sleep,” Esther says.

“Yes never sleeping, the glass giant strides through the white forest, its stride a mile across, day and night, and the heat of its stride melts the forest behind it.”

Esther tries to smile at the closing door. Her gauze is spotless. “The rainbow.”

“Yes.” Day shows the picture. “The melted forest rains, and the glass giant is the rainbow. This is the cycle.”

“Melted are rain.”

Sarah sneezes, muffled, out in the hall. Day waits for the cleric to say it.

CLOSE THEM

“Time your breathing,” the desiccant and truly old former Jesuit instructs him. Yang and Ndiawar stand in the foam at the edge of the field’s blue sea.

“Breathe air,” the art professor says, pantomiming the stroke. “Spit water. A rhythm. In. Out.”

Day imitates the stroke.

Eric Yang closes his eyes. “The rip in the bill is back.”

The dreampainting of the teacher in ceaseless prayer stands nailed to the weighted display. The wind rises; dandelions snow up around them. Bees work the field’s yellow against a growing blue.

“Breathe in from above. Breathe out from below,” the old man instructs. “The crawl.”

The dry field is an island. The blue water all around is peppered white with dry islands. Esther lies on a thin clean steel bed on the next island. Water moves in the channel between them.

Day imitates the stroke. His pronated hands bat down white seed. A plant has sprouted in no time. Its spire already reaches Day’s knees.

Yang speaks to Ndiawar about the texture of the mental bill. Ndiawar complains to Yang that his one best church leaves no hand free to open the door. The symbolism of the interchange is unmistakable.

The art teacher has backstroked away from the fluttered growth of the black plant. Day flails in the pollen, trying to establish a rhythm.

Sarah floats supine in the channel before Esther’s island. Then the plant’s shadow shuts down the light. The shadow is the biggest thing Day has ever seen. Its facade heaves out of sight, summons the prefix bronto-. The ground booms under the weight of a buttress. The buttress curves upward out of sight toward the facade. A rose window glints at the sky’s upper limit. The easel falls over. The doors of the thing have come out of nowhere, writhing like lips. It rushes at them.

“Help!” Esther calls, very faint, before the picture’s church takes them inside. Day hears the distant groan of continued growth. The unconstructed church is dim, lit only through colored glass. Its doors have rushed on behind them, out of sight.

The rose window continues to rise. It is round and red. Refracting spikes radiate. Inside the window a sad woman tries to smile her way out of the glass.

Day still pantomimes the crawl, the only stroke he knows.

The window lets light through and nothing else, colors it.