Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (29 page)

Q.

‘Something about his aspect, eyes, the quote energy field in the car—she said she instantly knew in the depths of her soul that the fellow’s intention was to brutally rape, torture, and kill her, she said. And I believed her here, that one can intuitively pick up on the epiphenomena of danger, sense psychosis in someone’s aspect—you needn’t buy into energy fields or ESP to accept mortal intuition. Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she’s telling the story, reliving it, she’s naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they’re full of additives and unsafe—unsafe as she’s sitting there
chain-smoking,
which was so patently irrational that I couldn’t even bring—yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she’s moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window—all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged. And long hair spilling all over, more than—beautiful lustrous hair that makes you understand why women use conditioner. Tad’s boon companion Silverglade telling me she looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around and asking how long estrus lasts in her species and droll ho ho. My memory is more verbal than visual, I’m afraid. It’s on the sixth floor and my bedroom gets stuffy, she treated the fan like cold water and closed her eyes when it hit her. And by the time the psychotic fellow in question exits into the secluded area and finally comes straight out and indicates what his true intentions are—apparently detailing certain specific plans and procedures and implements—she’s not the least bit surprised, she said she’d known the kind of hideously twisted soul-energy she’d gotten into the car into, the kind of pitiless and unappeasable psychotic he was and what sort of interaction they were headed for in this secluded area, and concluding that she was going to become just another grisly discovery for some amateur botanist a few days hence unless she could focus her way into the sort of profound soul-connection that would make it difficult for the fellow to murder her. These were her words, this was the sort of pseudo-abstract terminology she—and yet at the same time I was now captivated enough by the anecdote to simply accept the terminology as a kind of foreign language without trying to judge it or press for clarification, I just decided to presume that
focus
was her obscure denomination’s euphemism for prayer, and that in a desperate situation like this who really was in any position to judge what would be a sound response to the sort of shock and terror she must be feeling, who could say with any certainty whether prayer wouldn’t be appropriate. Foxholes and atheists and so on. What I remember best is that by this time it was, for the first time, taking much less effort to listen to her—she had an unexpected ability to recount it in such a way as to deflect attention from herself and displace maximum attention onto the anecdote itself. I have to confess that it was the first time I did not find her one bit dull. Care for another?’

Q.

‘That she was not melodramatic about it, the anecdote, telling me, nor affecting an unnatural calm the way some people affect an unnatural nonchalance about narrating an incident that is meant to heighten their story’s drama and/or make them appear nonchalant and sophisticated, one or the other of which is often the most annoying part of listening to certain types of beautiful women structure a story or anecdote—that they are used to high levels of people’s attention, and need to feel that they control it, always trying to control the precise type and degree of your attention instead of simply trusting that you are paying the appropriate degree of attention. I’m sure you yourself have noticed this in very attractive women, that paying attention to them makes them immediately begin to pose, even if their pose is the affected nonchalance they affect to portray themselves as unposed. It becomes dull very quickly. But she was, or seemed, oddly unposed for someone this attractive and with this dramatic a story to tell. It struck me, listening. She seemed truly poseless in relating it, open to attention but not solicitous—nor contemptuous of the attention, or affecting disdain or contempt, which I hate. Some beautiful women, something wrong with their voice, some squeakiness or lack of inflection or a laugh like a machine gun and you flee in horror. Her speaking voice is a neutral alto without squeak or that long drawled
O
or vague air of nasal complaint that—also mercifully light on the
likes
and
you knows
that can make you chew the inside of your cheek with this type. Nor did she giggle. Her laugh was fully adult, full, good to hear. And that this was my first hint of sadness or melancholy, as I listened with increasing attention to the anecdote, that the qualities I found myself admiring in her narration of the anecdote were some of the same qualities about her I’d been contemptuous of when I’d first picked her up in the park.’

Q.

‘Chief among them—and I mean this without irony—that she seemed, quote,
sincere
in a way that may in fact have been smug naiveté but was nevertheless attractive and very powerful in the context of listening to her encounter with the psychopath, in that I found it helped me focus almost entirely on the anecdote itself and thus helped me imagine in an almost terrifyingly vividly realistic way just what it must have
felt
like for her, for anyone, finding yourself through nothing but coincidence heading into a secluded woody area in the company of a dark man in a dungaree vest who says he is your own death incarnate and who is alternately smiling with psychotic cheer and ranting and apparently gets his first wave of jollies by singing creepily about the various sharp implements he has in the Cutlass’s trunk and detailing what he’s used them to do to others and now plans in exquisite detail to do to you. It was tribute to the—her odd affectless sincerity that I found myself hearing expressions like
fear gripping her soul,
unquote, as less as televisual clichés or melodrama but as sincere if not particularly artful attempts simply to describe what it must have felt like, the feelings of shock and unreality alternating with waves of pure terror, the sheer emotional
violence
of this magnitude of fear, the temptation to retreat into catatonia or shock or the delusion—yield to the seduction of the idea, riding deeper into the secluded area, that there must be some sort of mistake, that something as simple and random as getting into a 1987 maroon Cutlass with a bad muffler that just happened to be the first car to pull over to the side of a random interstate could not possibly result in the death not of some abstract other person but your own personal death, and at the hands of someone whose reasons have absolutely nothing to do with you or the content of your character, as if everything you’d ever been told about the relationship between character and intention and outcome had been a rank fiction from start to—’

Q.

‘—to finish, that you’d feel the alternating pulls of hysteria and dissociation and bargaining for your life in the way of foxholes or simply to blank catatonically out and retreat into the roar in your mind of the ramifying idea that your whole seemingly random and somewhat flaccid and self-indulgent but nevertheless comparatively blameless life had somehow been connected all along in a terminal chain that has somehow justified or somehow connected, causally, to lead you inevitably to this terminal unreal point, your life’s quote unquote
point,
its as it were sharp point or tip, and that canned clichés such as
fear seized me
or
this is something that only happens to other people
or even
moment of truth
now take on a horrendous neural resonance and vitality when—’

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.’