David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

… Ovid’s point finally being that Ecko of Venice & the T.V.S.P. decides that he can ‘attain’ Sissee Nar only in the unionized melt that is death’s good night. Both Robert Vaughan & the high-alto sirens affirm this decision as meet & good (Codependae calling him ‘ esse ’).

Codependae then elects to afflict Agon M. Nar with the following dream. A.M.N.’s Pac 10 daughters Leigh & Coleptic are being held hostage by some extremely serious militant CA Hispanics who threaten to hang them by their own lustrous locks if Nar doesn’t complete the single telemarketing labor they demand: he is to find a hypnotic avatar of the ancient-Greek Narcissus & air him, i.e. broadcast his irresistible image over & over, in order to entrance the Anglos of medieval CA into the glazed narcosis that will make them easy pickings for lean hungry barbarians from the Latin south. Their voices on Nar’s cellular are highalto. Agon M. goes as usual to seek counsel at Tri-Stan’s videonic HQ, but the three antique Stans can’t concentrate on his trouble: they have only one of everything among them, & when two or more of them have to visit the exec washroom at the same time there’s always a hell of a row about time & trade, & A. Nar, in that aphasiac frustration so common to nightmares, can’t make himself heard through the Empedoclean squabble over porcelain & part. Finally a mysterious pockmarked Hispanic custodian does that psst thing from the doorway — without context or explanation, he informs Nar that he has consulted the Oracle of Stasis & that the ortolan-entrails have Foretold that Agon M. Nar will never be able in time to find a qualified male Narcissus II (no modern man, even in the much-Enhanced fluorescent basin, being divine-looking enough to hold the rapt gaze of demographic millions), but that a bona fide female Narcissus-grade object will, ironically, be found by Nar no farther away than his own neocolonial home’s bassinet or the cover of last week’s Guide: yes his Love-Dumpling, esse, his Leettle Preenciss, who will, however, the custodian says the $88.95 entrails Foretell in no uncertain terms, herself prove to be the cause of Nar’s own personal doom — vanishing then with an eerie & not all that Hispanic or even masculine laugh. Nevertheless, properly freaked by the prophecy, the still-dreaming Nar (yes this is all still in the dream, on which Codependae has spared no effort or expense) the still-dreaming A.M.N. remands Sissee’s new Norse reproduction to the purgatory of a permanent 4–5 A.M. slot, when even 24-hr-loop demographics are grim. Yet fatalistically alas, for this weeest-hour slot is also the slot when all the really seriously insomniac drug freaks & neurasthenics & flameouts & lunatic stalker-type S-NN fans tune faithfully in; & no fewer than about 400 different lunatic stalkertype fans start stalking his narcoBrynhildic baby, sometimes actually bumping into one another in mid-stalk outside Sissee’s S-NN dressing room; & but eventually in the dream one of the stalkers finally accomplishes his mission, & she dies in a hail of laser-scoped semiautomatic gas-tipped bullets; & even though in the dream’s remainder Agon M. Nar himself doesn’t get killed off (so the carbuncular custodian’s prophecy isn’t fulfilled within the dream itself) A.M.N. feels so horrible & benighted by REM-cycle’s end that he’s pretty sure when he wakes up at 5 A.M. that if the dream’s epilogue hadn’t been preempted by his Hispanic houseboy’s gentle prod Nar would also have bought it just from sheer Laiusian grief & guilt.

The point being that Agon M. Nar is colossally frightened & upset by the dream (BC programming executives tending to place great importance on oneiromancy), & he immediately suspends prereproduction on the Siegfried thing & pages Sissee Nar & beseeches her to return to & secret herself in her Venice beach house & keep a very low & window-avoiding profile for a while… which Sissee immediately does, because she’s pretty much passivity in motion & does whatever A.M.N. tells her, & also because she has an extremely small ego from never once having seen herself in a mirror. Except alas, it’s child’s play for the natively Venetian Reggie Ecko — who’s now pawned his Trinitron & bought an AK-47 from an auto-weapon stand right on Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey — to find out exactly where the unlisted Sissee lives: her sleeping face is burned into CA’s consciousness, & he has only to flash a glossy 4 × 5 around Venice’s various health clubs & silicon wholesalers to have babes & dudes alike immediately recognize the image as of the unlisted S-NN girl who’s living low-profile just over a certain set of dunes.

& so Reggie Ecko, adorned in finest Alfani & light-denying glasses, & suffering mightily from coke-bugs & general desiderative frenzy, journeys forthwith to Sissee’s off-violet beach house &, after checking all the windows’ drawn shades & repeatedly shaking the sand out of his loafers & ringing the Cyndi Lauper doorchime, booms the door & bursts the pathetically naive safety-chain, & Sissee’s in there innocently passing the time with Walkman & a Buns of Steel aerobics tape; &, as best forensic authorities could later determine, Ecko — crashing in & seeing Sissee Nar not only upright & awake but in what looked for all the world like vigorous purposive motion — for a brief too-human moment hesitated to open up & actually fire, & Sissee had a moment’s chance to run for her life & escape the fatal stalker-type tribute, except apparently she’d happened to catch a doubled glimpse of herself in the mirrored sunglasses Ecko wore to protect his rheumy Romantic retinae from the horrific light of the 3-D day, & Sissee was apparently just, like, totally transfixed by her own human image, literally frozen by what’s got to have been the revelation of her Enhanced & trans-human charms in the first mirror of any sort she had ever gazed into, & apparently she was standing there so utterly static & passive & affectless w/ shock that Ecko’s heart retumesced with doomed unendurable ur-Romantic C #-aria-type love once more, flooding his ravaged CNS so utterly that he suddenly came to/departed from himself again & ventilated Sissee Nar, liberally, then somehow shot himself not once but three times in the head.

… w/ the tragicomic irony here being that Ecko’s wacko & retrograde Romantic dream of union with Sissee in death turned out to come true . For S. Nar & Ecko were recombinantly joined in just precisely the 2-D world he’d Foreseen as their only possible union. For the syndicated vehicles Donahue! & Entertainment Tonight & its many avatars like Oprah & Geraldo! & A Current Affair & Inside Edition & Unsolved Mysteries & Sally Jessy! & Solved But Still Really Interesting Mysteries paid lavish & repetitive tribute to the now-tragic epic of Sissee Nar’s cometic rise & Reggie Ecko’s fall at the hands of Sissee’s father & the father’s epiphanic & Laiusian dreams & Sissee’s paralysis in the mirror of Ecko’s lenses & high-caliber ventilation & gruesome death with her Walkman still on & urging the first police on the scene to Flex That Fundament & Ecko’s mysterious triballistic suicide & subsequently discovered Crayola diary. & the very most famous Varietae photo of an unconscious Endymionic Sissee & a photo of Reggie Ecko jet-skiing with Ricardo Montalban back when he’d moved & shaken at Tri-Stan’s apex — these two images kept getting juxtaposed on-screen & placed side by side behind the commentators’ variform heads; & the Enquirer even did the job right & spliced the negatives together & claimed they’d been lovers all along, Ecko & Sissee, with a fetish for cross-dressing & watersports…& so fan/lover & star/object really were, in a sort of cynically campy but still contemporarily deep & mythic way, united, melded in death, in 2-D, in tales & on screens.