David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Q.

‘It’s a frame for butchers. Hang by the hind feet to bleed. It’s from the Hindu for leg. It never occurred to her to get up and try to run for it. A certain percentage of psychotics slice their victims’ Achilles tendons to hobble them and preclude running for it, perhaps he knew that was unnecessary with her, could feel her not resisting, not even considering resisting, using all her energy and focus to sustain the feeling of connection with his conflicted despair. She says now she felt terror but not her own. She could hear the sound of the mulatto finally extracting some kind of machete or bolo from the trunk, then a brief half-stagger as he tried to come back up along the length of the Cutlass to where she lay prone, and heard then the groan and sideways skid as he went to his knees in the gravel beside the car and was sick. Puked. Can you imagine. That he is now the one puking from terror. She says by this time something was aiding her and she was completely focused. That by this time she was focus itself, she had merged with connection itself. Her voice in the dark is uninflected without being flat — it’s matter-of-fact the way a bell is matter-of-fact. It feels as if she’s back there by the road. A type of scotopia. How in her altered state of heightened attention to everything around she says the clover smells like weak mint and the phlox like mown hay and she feels the way she and the clover and phlox and the dank verdure beneath the phlox and the mulatto retching into the gravel and even the contents of his stomach were all made of precisely the same thing and were connected by something far deeper and more elemental than what we limitedly call quote unquote love, what from her background’s perspective she calls connection, and that she could feel the psychotic fellow feeling the truth of this at the same time she did and she could feel the plummeting terror and infantile conflict this feeling of connection aroused in his soul and stated again without drama or self-consciousness that she too could feel this terror, not her own but his. That when he came to her with the bolo or machete and a hunting knife in his belt and now with some kind of ritualistic design or glyph like a samekh or palsied omicron drawn on his tenebrous brow in the blood or lipstick of a previous victim and turned her over into a rape-ready supine position in the gravel he was crying and chewing his lower lip like a frightened child, making small lost noises. And that she kept her eyes steadily on his as he raised her poncho and gauzy skirt and cut away her leotard and underthings and raped her, which given the kind of surreal sensuous clarity she was experiencing in her state of total focus imagine what this must have felt like for her, being raped in the gravel by a weeping psychotic whose knife’s butt jabs you on every thrust, and the sound of bees and meadow birds and the distant whisper of the interstate and his machete clanking dully on the stones on every thrust, she claiming it took no effort of will to hold him as he wept and gibbered as he raped her and stroking the back of his head and whispering small little consolatory syllables in a soothing maternal singsong. By this time I found that even though I was focused very intently on her story and the rape by the road my own mind and emotions were also whirling and making connections and associations, for instance it struck me that this behavior of hers during the rape was an unintentional but tactically ingenious way to in a way prevent it, or transfigure it, the rape, to transcend its being a vicious attack or violation, since if a woman as a rapist comes at her and savagely mounts her can somehow choose to give herself, sincerely and compassionately, she cannot be truly violated or raped, no? That through some sleight of hand of the psyche she was now giving herself instead of being quote taken by force, and that in this ingenious way, without resisting in any way, she had denied the rapist the ability to dominate and take. And, from gauging your expression, no I am not suggesting that this was the same as her asking for it or deciding she wanted it unquote, and no this does not keep the rape itself from being a crime. Nor had she in any way intended acquiescence or compassion as a tactic to empty the rape of its violating force, nor the focus and soul-connection themselves as tactics to cause in him conflict and pain and gibbering terror, so that at whatever point during the transfigured and sensuously acute rape she realized all this, saw the effects her focus and incredible feats of compassion and connection were having on his psychosis and soul and the pain they were in fact causing him, it became complex — her motive had been only to make it difficult for him to kill her and break the soul-connection, not to cause him agony, so that the moment her compassionate focus comprehended not just his soul but the effect of the compassionate focus itself on that soul it all became divided and doubly complex, an element of self-consciousness had been introduced and now was itself an object of focus, like some sort of diffraction or regress of self-consciousness and consciousness of self-consciousness. She didn’t talk about this division or regress in any but emotional terms. But it was going on — the division. And I was experiencing the same thing, listening. On one level my attention was intently focused on her voice and story. On another level I — it was as if my mind was having a garage sale. I kept flashing back to a weak joke during a freshman religion survey we all had to take as an undergrad: the mystic approaches the hot-dog stand and tells the vendor Make me one with everything. It wasn’t the sort of distracted division where I was both listening and not. I was listening both intellectually and emotionally. I — this religion survey was popular because the professor was so colorful and such a perfect stereotype example of the Sixties mentality, several times during the semester he returned to the point that distinctions between psychotic delusions and certain kinds of religious illuminations were very slight and esoteric and had used the analogy of the edge of a sharpened blade to convey the thinness of the line between the two, psychosis and revelation, and at the same time I was also remembering in near-hallucinatory detail that evening’s outdoor concert and festival and the configurations of people on the grass and blankets and the parade of lesbian folk singers on the poorly amplified stage, the very configuration of the clouds overhead and the foam in Tad’s cup and the smell of various conventional and nonaerosol insect repellents and Silverglade’s cologne and barbecued food and sunburned children and how when I’d first seen her seated foreshortened behind and between the legs of a vegetarian-kabob vendor she was eating a supermarket apple with a small supermarket price sticker still affixed to it and that I’d watched her with a sort of detached amusement to see whether she would eat the price sticker without taking it off. It took him a long time to achieve release and she held him and gazed at him lovingly the entire time. If I had asked a you-type question such as did she really feel loving as the mulatto was raping her or was she merely conducting herself in a loving manner she would have gazed blankly at me and had no idea what I was talking about. I remembered weeping at movies about animals as a child, even though some of these animals were predators and hardly what you would consider sympathetic characters. On a different level this seemed connected to the way I had first noticed her indifference to basic hygiene at the community festival and had formed judgments and conclusions based solely on that. Just as I am watching you forming judgments based on the openings of things I’m describing that then prevent you from hearing the rest of what I try to describe. It’s due to her influence that this makes me sad for you instead of pissed off. And all this was going on simultaneously. I felt more and more sad. I smoked my first cigarette in two years. The moonlight had moved from her to me but I could still see her profile. A saucer-sized circle of fluid on the sheet had dried and vanished. You are the sort of auditor for whom rhetoricians designed the Exordium. From below in the gravel she subjects the psychotic mulatto to the well-known Female Gaze. And she describes his facial expression during the rape as the most heartbreaking thing of all. That it had been less an expression than a kind of anti-expression, empty of everything as she unpremeditatedly robbed him of the only way he’d ever found to connect. His eyes were holes in the world. She felt almost heartbroken, she said, as she realized that her focus and connection were inflicting far more pain on the psychotic than he could ever have inflicted upon her. This was how she described the division — a hole in the world. I began in the dark of our room to feel terrible sadness and fear. I felt as though there had been far more genuine emotion and connection in that anti-rape she suffered than in any of the so-called lovemaking I spent my time pursuing. Now I’m sure you know what I’m talking about now. Now we’re on your terra firma. The whole prototypical male syndrome. Eric Drag Sarah To Teepee By Hair. The well-known Privileging of the Subject. Don’t think I can’t speak your language. She finished in the dark and it was only in memory that I saw her clearly. The well-known Male Gaze. Her seated pose a protofeminine contraposto with one hip on a Nicaraguan blanket with a strong smell of unrefined wool to it with her trust me on this breathtaking legs sort of curled out to the side so her weight was on one arm stiff-armed out behind her and the other hand held the apple — am I describing this right? can you — the toile skirt, hair that nearly reached the blanket, the blanket dark green with yellow filigree and a kind of nauseous purple fringe, a linen singlet and vest of false buckskin, sandals in her rattan bag, bare feet with phenomenally dirty soles, dirty beyond belief, their nails like the nails of a laborer’s hands. Imagine being able to console someone as he weeps over what he’s doing to you as you console him. Is that wonderful, or sick? Have you ever heard of the couvade ? No perfume, the slight scent of some unrefined soap like those old cakes of deep-yellow laundry soap one’s aunt tried to — I realized I had never loved anyone. Isn’t that trite? Like a canned line? Do you see how open I’m being with you here? And who would go to the trouble of kabobing only vegetables? I had to respect her blanket’s boundary, on the approach. You do not just stroll up out of the blue and ask to share someone’s wool blanket. Boundaries are an important issue with this type. I assumed a sort of respectful squat just off its fringe with my weight on my knuckles so that my tie hung down straight between us like a counterweight. As we casually rapped and chatted and I deployed the pained-confession-of-true-motive tactic I watched her face and felt as though she knew just what I was doing and why and was both amused and responsive, I could tell she felt an immediate affinity between us, an aura of connection, and it’s sad to recall the way I viewed her acquiescence, the fact of her response, a little disappointed that she was so easy, her easiness was both disappointing and refreshing, that she was not one of these breathtaking girls who believe themselves to be too beautiful to approach and automatically see any man as a supplicant or libidinous goon, the chilly ones, and who require tactics of attrition rather than feigned affinity, an affinity that is heartbreakingly easy to feign, I have to say, if you know your female typologies. I can repeat that if you like, if you want to get it exact. Her description of the rape, certain logistics I’m omitting, was lengthy and detailed and rhetorically innocent. I felt more and more sad, hearing it, trying to imagine what she’d been able to pull off, and felt more and more sad that on our way out of the park I’d felt that tiny stab of disappointment, maybe even anger, wishing she’d been more of a challenge. That her will and wishes had opposed my own just a little more. This by the way is known as Werther’s Axiom, whereby quote The intensity of a desire D is inversely proportional to the ease of D’s gratification. Known also as Romance. And sadder and sadder that it had not once, it seemed — you’ll like this — not once occurred to me before what an empty way this was to come at women, then. Not evil or predatory or sexist — empty. To gaze and not see, to eat and not be full. Not just to feel but be empty. While meanwhile, within the narrative itself, she, still deep inside the psychotic whose penis is still inside her, glimpsing his palm’s thumb’s web as he tentatively attempted to stroke her own head in return, seeing the fresh cut and realizing it was his own blood the fellow had used for his forehead’s mark. Which was not a rune or glyph at all, I knew, but a simple circle, the Ur-void, the zero, that axiom of Romance we call also mathematics, pure logic, whereby one does not equal two and cannot. And that the quote rapist’s mocha color and aquiline features could well be brahminic instead of negroid. Aryan in other words. These and other details she withheld — she had no reason to trust me. And nor can I–I can’t for the life of me recall whether she ate the price sticker, nor what became of the apple at all, whether she discarded it or what. Terms like love and soul and redeem that I believed could be used only with quotation marks, exhausted clichés. Believe that I felt the mulatto’s fathomless sadness, then. I—’