David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Q.

‘Not of — just being left narratively alone in the self-sufficiency of her narrative aspect to contemplate just how little-kid-level scared you’d be, how much you’d resent and despise this sick twisted shit beside you ranting whom you’d kill without hesitation if you could while but at the same time feeling involuntarily the very highest respect, almost a deference — the sheer agential power of one who could make you feel this frightened, that he could bring you to this point simply by wishing it and now can, if he wished, take you past it, past yourself, turn you into a grisly discovery, brutal sex slaying, and the feeling that you’d do absolutely anything or say or trade anything to persuade him simply to settle for rape and then let you go, or even torture, even willing to bring to the bargaining table a bit of nonlethal torture if only he’d settle for hurting you and choose then for whatever reason to drive off and leave you hurt and breathing in the weeds and sobbing at the sky and traumatized beyond all recovery instead of as nothing, yes it’s a cliché but this is to be all ? this was to be the end ? and at the hands of someone who probably didn’t even finish Manual Arts High School and had nothing like a recognizable soul or capacity for empathy with anyone else, a blind ugly force like gravity or a rabid dog, and yet it was he who wished it to happen and who possessed the power and certainly the tools to make it happen, tools he names in a maddening singsong about knives and wives and scythes and dolls and awls, adzes and mattocks and other implements whose names she did not recognize but even so they even sounded like just what—’

Q.

‘Yes and a good deal of the anecdote’s medial part’s rising action detailed this interior struggle between giving in to hysterical fear and maintaining the level-headedness to focus her concentration on the situation and to figure out something ingenious and persuasive to say to the sexual psychotic as he’s driving deeper into the secluded area and looking ominously around for a propitious site and becoming more and more openly raveled and psychotic and alternately grinning and ranting and invoking God and the memory of his brutally slain mother and gripping the Cutlass’s steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles are gray.’

Q.

‘That’s right, the psychopath is also a mulatto, although with aquiline and almost femininely delicate features, a fact that she has omitted or held back for a good portion of the anecdote. She said it hadn’t struck her as important. In today’s climate one wouldn’t want to critique too harshly the idea of someone with a body like that getting into a strange automobile with a mulatto. In a way you have to applaud the broad-mindedness. I didn’t at the time of the anecdote really even notice that she’d omitted the ethnic detail for so long, but there’s something to applaud there as well, you’d have to concede, though if you—’

Q.

‘The crux being that despite the terror she is somehow able to think quickly on her feet and thinks it through and determines that her only chance of surviving this encounter is to establish a quote connection with the quote soul of the sexual psychopath as he’s driving them deeper into the woody secluded area looking for just the right spot to pull over and brutally have at her. That her objective is to focus very intently on the psychotic mulatto as an ensouled and beautiful albeit tormented person in his own right instead of merely as a threat to her or a force of evil or the incarnation of her personal death. Try to bracket any New Age goo in the terminology and focus on the tactical strategy itself if you can because I’m well aware that what she is about to describe is nothing but a variant of the stale old Love Will Conquer All bromide but for the moment bracket whatever contempt you might feel and try to see the more concrete ramifications of — in this situation in terms of what she has the courage and apparent conviction to actually attempt here, because she says she believes that sufficient love and focus can penetrate even psychosis and evil and establish a quote soul-connection, unquote, and that if the mulatto can be brought to feel even a minim of this alleged soul-connection there is some chance that he’ll be unable to follow through with actually killing her. Which is of course on a psychological level not all that implausible, since sexual psychopaths are well known to depersonalize their victims and liken them to objects or dolls, Its and not Thous so to speak, which is often their explanation for how they are able to inflict such unimaginable brutality on a human being, namely that they do not see them as human beings at all but merely as objects of the psychopath’s own needs and intentions. And yet love and empathy of this kind of connective magnitude demand quote unquote total focus, she said, and her terror and totally understandable concern for herself were at this point to say the least distracting in the extreme, so she realized that she was in for the most difficult and important battle of her life, she said, a battle that was to be engaged completely within herself and her own soul’s capacities, which idea by this time I found extremely interesting and captivating, particularly because she is so unaffected and seemingly sincere when battle of one’s life is usually such a neon indication of melodrama or manipulation of the listener, trying to bring him to the edge of his seat and so forth.’

Q.

‘I observe with interest that you are now interrupting me to ask the same questions I was interrupting her to ask, which is precisely the sort of convergence of—’

Q.

‘She said the best way to describe focus to a person who hadn’t undertaken what were apparently her denomination’s involved and time-consuming series of lessons and exercises was to envision focus as intense concentration further sharpened and intensified to a single sharp point, to envision a kind of needle of concentrated attention whose extreme thinness and fragility were also, of course, its capacity to penetrate, and but that the demands of excluding all extraneous concerns and keeping the needle thinly focused and sharply directed were extreme even under the best of circumstances, which these profoundly terrifying circumstances were of course not.’

Q.

‘Thus, in the car, under let’s keep in mind now enormous duress and pressure, she marshals her concentration. She stares directly into the sexual psychopath’s right eye — the eye that is accessible to her in his aquiline profile as he drives the Cutlass — and wills herself to keep her gaze directly on him at all times. She wills herself not to weep or plead but merely to use her penetrating focus to attempt to feel and empathize with the sex offender’s psychosis and rage and terror and psychic torment, and says she visualizes her focus piercing through the mulatto’s veil of psychosis and penetrating various strata of rage and terror and delusion to touch the beauty and nobility of the generic human soul beneath all the psychosis, forcing a nascent, compassion-based connection between their souls, and she focuses on the mulatto’s profile very intently and quietly tells him what she saw in his soul, which she insisted was the truth. It was the climactic struggle of her spiritual life, she said, what with all the under the circumstances perfectly understandable terror and loathing of the sex criminal that kept threatening to dilute her focus and break the connection. Yet at the same time the effects of her focus on the psychotic’s face were becoming obvious — when she was able to hold the focus and penetrate him and hold the soul-connection the mulatto at the wheel would gradually stop ranting and fall tensely silent, as if preoccupied, and his right profile would tense and tighten hypertonically and his dead right eye filling with anxiety and conflict at feeling the delicate beginnings of the sort of connection with another soul he had always both desired and always also feared in the very depths of his psyche, of course.’