David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Q.

‘Expanding the hand’s imagined powers to stop all clocks, timepieces, and wristwatches in this room was the initial solution, until the nagging realization occurred that, just at the moment the room’s personnel, afterward, left the State Exercise Facility and reentered the external flow of the military post outside, any first glance at some other clock — or, for example, the remonstrance of an appointment with a superior for which they were too late — this nevertheless would once again bring them to realize that something strange and inexplicable had taken place, which once again compromised the premise that all are oblivious . This, I naggingly concluded, was the fantasy’s more serious inconsistency. Despite my circular gesture and the brief harp which accompanied its power, I had not, as I had naively at the outset believed, caused time’s flow to cease and taken myself and the bewitched, athletic women out of time’s physics. Trying to masturbate, I was agitated that my fantasy’s power had in reality succeeded only in halting the superficial appearance of time, and then only within the limited arena of the fantasy’s State Exercise Facility. It was at this time that the imaginative labor of this fantasy of power became exponentially more difficult. For, within the enframing logic of the fantasy’s power, I now required this circular hand’s gesture to halt all time and freeze all personnel upon the entire military post of which the exercise facility was a part. The logic of this need was clear. But also it was incomplete.’

Q.

‘Excellent, yes. You see where this is now heading for, this logical problem whose circumference will continue expanding as each solution discloses further inconsistencies and further needs for the exercise of my fantasy’s powers. For, yes, because the posts to which my father’s duties to the computers brought us along were in strategic communication with the entire defense apparatus of the state, thus I soon was required to fantasize that only my one single hand’s gesture — taking place in only one bleak Siberian defense outpost, and for the sake of entrancing the will of merely one female programmer or clerical aide — nevertheless now must accomplish the instantaneous freezing of the entire state, to suspend in time and consciousness almost two hundred million citizens in the midst of whatever of their actions might happen to intrude upon my imaginations, actions as diverse as peeling an apple, traversing an intersection, mending a boot, interring a child’s casket, plotting a trajectory, copulating, removing new-milled steel from an industrial forge, and so forth, unending and numberless sep—’

Q.

‘Yes yes and because the state itself existed in close ideological and defensive alliance with many neighboring satellite states, and, of course, also was in communication and trade with countless other of the world’s nations, I all too quickly, as an adolescent, trying merely to masturbate in private, found out that my single fantasy of unknown seduction outside time required that the very world’s entire population itself must be frozen by the single hand’s gesture, all of the entire world’s timepieces and activities, from the activities of yam farming in Nigeria to those of affluent Westerners purchasing blue jeans and Rock and Roll, on, on… and you see of course yes not merely all human motion and time-measurings but of course the very movements of the earth’s clouds, oceans, and prevailing winds, for it is hardly consistent to reanimate the earth’s population to awareness at a resumed time of two o’clock with the tides and weathers, whose cycles have been scientifically catalogued to an exacting specificity, now in conditions corresponding to three o’clock or four. This is what I was meaning in referring to the responsibilities which come with such powers, responsibilities which the American program of Bewitched had wholly suppressed and neglected during my childish viewing. For this labor of freezing and holding suspended of each element of the natural world of earth which intruded to occur to me as I only am attempting to envision the attractive, athletic, uncontrollable cries of passion beneath me on the worn mat — these labors of imagination were exhausting to me. Episodes of masturbation fantasy which used to take up only fifteen brief minutes were now requiring many hours and enormous mental labors. My health, never good, declined in a dramatic fashion in this period, so much so so that I was often bedridden and absent from my schools and from the State Exercise Facilities which my brother attended with my mother after school period. Also, my brother began at this time to become a competitive power weight-lifter in the light divisions of his age and weight, competitions of lifting which our mother often attended, traveling along with him, while my father remained on duty with the targeting programs and I in bed in our empty quarters alone for whole days in a row. Most of my times alone in the bed in our room in their absence were increasingly devoted, not to masturbating, but in the labor of imagination of constructing a sufficiently motionless and atemporal planet earth to allow my fantasy merely to take place at all. I do not, in fact, remember now whether the American program’s implicit doctrine required the circular hand motion of Elizabeth Montgomery to deanimate the whole of humanity and the natural world outside the suburban home she shared with Darion. But I vividly do remember that a new, different television performer assumed the role of Darion late in my childhood, near the end of the American program’s availability from transmitters in the Aleutian, and my discomfiture, even as a child, at the inconsistency that Elizabeth Montgomery would fail to recognize that her industrialist mate and sexual partner was now altogether a different man. He did not look similar at all and she remained oblivious! This had caused me some great distress. Of course, also there was the sun.’

Q.

‘Our sun up above, overhead, whose seeming movement across the southern horizon was, of course, time’s first measure among man. This too must be suspended in its apparent movement, as well, by the logic of the fantasy, which, in reality, this entailed halting the very earth’s own spin. Very well I recall the moment this further inconsistency occurred to me, in the bed, and the labors and responsibility it implied within the fantasy. Well, too, do I remember this envy I felt of my brutish, unimaginative brother, upon whom the excellent scientific instruction of so many of the posts’ schools was sheerly wasted, and he would not be in the least overwhelmed by the consequences of realizing this further: that the earth’s rotation was but one part of its temporal movements, and that in order not to betray the fantasy’s First Premise through causing incongruities in the scientifically catalogued measurements of the Solar Day and the Synodic Period, the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun must itself be halted by my supernatural hand’s gesture, an orbit whose plane, I had to my misfortune learned in childhood, included a 23.53-degrees angle to the axis of the earth’s own spin, having as well variant equivalents in the measurement of the Synodic Period and Sidereal Period, which required then the rotational and orbital stopping of all other planets and their satellite bodies in the Solar System, each of which forced me to interrupt the masturbation fantasy to perform research and calculations based upon the varying planets’ different spins and angles with respect to the planes of their own orbits around the sun. This was laborious in that era of only very simple hand-held calculators… and beyond, for you see where this nightmare is heading for, since, yes, the sun itself is in many complex orbits relative to such nearby stars as Sirius and Arcturus, stars which must now be brought under the hegemony of the hand’s circular gesture’s power, as did the Milky Way Galaxy, upon whose edge the neighboring cluster of stars which includes our own sun both complexly spins and orbits the many other such clusters… and onward and onward, an ever-expanding nightmare of responsibilities and labor, because yes the Milky Way Galaxy of itself also orbits the Local Group of galaxies in counterpoint to the Andromeda Galaxy more than some 200 million light-years distant, an orbit whose halting entails also a halt in the Red Shift and thus the proven and measured flight of the now-known galaxies from one another in an expanding bloom of expansion of the Known Universe, with innumerable complications and factors to include in the nightly calculations which kept me from the sleep my exhaustion cried increasingly out for, such as, for example, the fact that such distant galaxies as 3C295 receded at rapid rates exceeding one-third the speed of light while far closer-in galaxies, including the troublesome NGC253 Galaxy at merely thirteen million light-years, appeared mathematically to actually be approaching our Milky Way Galaxy through its own momentums more rapidly than the larger expansions of the Red Shift could impel it to recede from us, so that now the bed is so awash with the piles of science volumes and journals and sheafs of my calculations that there would be no space for me to masturbate even if I had been able to do so. And it was when it then dawned upon me, amidst an agitated half-sleep in the littered bed, that all these many months’ datas and calculations had, so stupidly, been based upon published astronomic observations from an earth whose spin, orbits, and sidereal positions were in the naturally unfrozen, ever-changing mode of reality, and that all of it therefore must be recalculated from my fantasy’s gesture’s theoretical haltings of the earth and neighboring satellites if the seduction and copulation amidst the timeless obliviousness of all citizens were to avoid hopeless inconsistency — it was then I broke down from it. The fantasy’s single gesture of one adolescent hand had proven to entail an infinitely complex responsibility more befitting of a God than a mere boy. These broke me. It was at this moment I renounced, resigned, became again merely a sickly and unconfident youth. I abdicated at seventeen years and four months and 8.40344 days, reaching up high with now both of my hands to make the reversing gesture of linked circles which set all of it free once again in a bloom of renunciation that commenced at our bed and opened swiftly out to include all known bodies in motion. I think you have no idea what this cost for me. Delirium, confinement, my father’s disappointments — but these were as nothing compared to the price and rewards of what I underwent in this time. This American program of Bewitched was merely the spark behind this infinite explosion and contraction of creative energy. Deluded, broken or not broken — but how many other men have felt the power to become a God, then renounced it all? This is the theme of my power you say you wished to hear of: renunciation. How many know the true meaning of it? None of these persons here, I can assure you. Going through their oblivious motions outside of here, crossing streets and peeling apples and copulating thoughtlessly with women they believe they love. What do they know of love? I, who am by my choosing a celibate of all eternity, have alone seen love in all its horror and unbounded power. I alone have any rights to speak of it. All the rest is merely noise, radiations of a background which is even now retreating always further. It cannot be stopped.’