David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“Close the eyes which are in your head,” comes Ndiawar’s wooden echo.

Yang faces the nave. “Close them.”

Barrel vaults darkle above the rose. The window reverses all normal disclosure — everything solid is here black, all that is light is brilliant color. Day, on the inbreath, can see its shape. The color tapers up from the window, narrows to a refracting spike, its tip a dark point. Something in white revolves around it.

Day crawlstrokes for the pointed tip, ascending without weight.

The defrocked professor of art puts Day’s waterproof watch on the altar. Kneels to it, blaspheming.

Esther floats gauzed in the dark point atop the sharpshaped color of the red rose window. Day sees the point through the wet starred curtain his arms have drawn. The air’s blue looks black, he swims through the curtain, stars rain upward from his arms’ strokes. He pantomimes the crawl-stroke through the stars. He can see her clearly, revolving.

“Don’t look!”

And again it is when he looks below him that he fails. Wanting only to see whence he’d risen. The merest second — less — it takes for it all to come down. It starts at the apsis. East rushes west and the west’s facade can’t take it, crumbling. The walls seem to shrug as they come down on themselves. The black point on the red spike cracks open. Esther spins wriggling between its jagged halves, falling toward the rose window even as the window tilts. It’s all photo-clear. Yang says Whoa. The buttress bows outward and shears. Her fall takes time. Her body rotates slowly through the air, trails a gauze comet. The rose rushes up at her. A mile-high man could catch and cup her among the falling stars; the gauze would follow. It is Day’s failed breath that turns him blue. The blood-colored pane holds the mother inside, awaiting the child to set her free.

There is the sound of impact at a great glass height: terrible, multihued.

ROTATE

The sky is an eye.

The dusk and the dawn are the blood that feeds the eye.

The night is the eye’s drawn lid.

Each day the lid again comes open, disclosing blood, and the blue iris of a prone giant.

RECONSTRUCTED TRANSCRIPT OF

MR. WALTER D. (“WALT”) DELASANDRO JR.’S

PARENTS’ MARRIAGE’S END, MAY 1956

“Don’t love you no more.”

“Right back at you.”

“Divorce your ass.”

“Suits me.”

“Except now what about the doublewide.”

“I get the truck is all I know.”

“You’re saying I get the doublewide you get the truck.”

“All I’m saying is that truck out there’s mine.”

“Then what about the boy.”

“For the truck you mean?”

“You mean you’d want him?”

“You mean otherwise?”

“I’m asking are you saying you’d want him.”

“You’re saying you’d want him then.”

“Look I get the doublewide you get the truck we flip for the boy.”

“That’s what you’re saying?”

“Right here and now we flip for him.”

“Let’s see it.”

“For Christ’s sake it’s just a quarter.”

“Just let’s see it.”

“Jesus here then.”

“All right then.”

“I flip you call?”

“Hows about you flip I call?”

“Quit screwing around.”

B.I. #59 04-98

HAROLD R. AND PHYLLIS N. ENGMAN INSTITUTE FOR CONTINUING CARE

EASTCHESTER NY

‘As a child, I watched a great deal of American television. No matter of where my father was being posted, it seemed always that American television was available, with its glorious and powerful women performers. Perhaps this was one more advantage of the importance of my father’s work to the defenses of the state, for we had privileges and lived comfortably. The television program I most preferred then was to watch Bewitched, featuring the American performer Elizabeth Montgomery. It was as a child, while watching this television program, that I experienced my first erotic sensations. It was not for several years, until late in my adolescence, that I was able, however, to trace my sensations and fantasies backward to these episodes of Bewitched and my experiences as the viewer when the protagonist, Elizabeth Montgomery, would perform a circular motion with her hand, accompanied by the sound of a zither or harp, and produce a supernatural effect in which all motion ceased and all the television program’s other characters suddenly were frozen in mid-gesture and were oblivious and rigid, lacking all animation. In these instances time itself appeared to cease, leaving Elizabeth Montgomery free alone to maneuver at her will. Elizabeth Montgomery employed this circular gesture within the program only as a desperate resort to help save her industrialist husband, Darion, from the political disasters which would come if she were exposed as a sorcerer, a frequent threat in the episodes. The program of Bewitched was poorly dubbed, and many details of the narratives I, at my age, did not understand. Yet my fascinations were attached to this great power to freeze the time of the program in its tracks, and to render all the other witnesses frozen and oblivious while she went about her rescue tactics among living statues whom she could again reanimate with the circular gesture when the circumstances called for this. Years later, I began, like many adolescent boys, to masturbate, creating erotic fantasies of my own construction in my imagination as I did so. I was a weak, unathletic, and somewhat sickly adolescent, a scholarly and dreamy youth more like my father, of nervous constitution and little confidence or social outgoingness in those years. It is little wonder that I sought compensation for these weaknesses in erotic fantasies in which I possessed supernatural powers over the women of my choosing in these fantasies. Linked heavily to this childhood program of Bewitched, these masturbation fantasies’ connection to this television program were unknown to me. I had forgotten this. Yet, I learned too well the insupportable responsibilities which come along with power, responsibilities whose awesomeness I have since learned to decline in my adult life since arriving here, which is a story for another time. These masturbation fantasies took their setting from the settings of our actual existences during these times, which were located at the many different military posts to which my father, a great mathematician, brought us, his family, along. My brother and I, separated in age by less than one year, were nevertheless dissimilar in most things. Often, my masturbation fantasies took their settings from the State Exercise Facilities which my mother, a former competitive athlete in youth, religiously attended, exercising enthusiastically each afternoon no matter of where my father’s duties brought us to live for that time. Willingly accompanying her to these facilities on most afternoons of our lives was my brother, an athletic and vigorous person, and often myself as well, at first with reluctance and direct force, and then, as my erotic reveries set there evolved and became more complex and powerful, with a willingness born of reasons of my own. By custom, I was permitted to bring my science books, and sat reading quietly upon a padded bench in a corner of the State Exercise Facility while my brother and mother performed their exercises. For purposes of envisioning, you may imagine these State Exercise Facilities as your nation’s health spa of today, although the equipment used there was less varied and maintained, and an air of heightened security and seriousness was due to the military posts to which the facilities were attached for the uses of personnel. And the athletic clothing of women at the State Exercise Facilities was very different from today, constituting full suits of canvas with belts and straps of leather not unlike this, which was far less revealing than today’s exercise clothing and leaving more to the mind’s eye. Now I will describe the fantasy which evolved at these facilities as a youth and became my masturbation fantasy of those years. You are not offended by this word, masturbate?