Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (30 page)

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.’

Q.

‘Just that it’s widely acknowledged that a primary reason your prototypical sex killer rapes and kills is that he regards rape and murder as his only viable means of establishing some kind of meaningful connection with his victim. That this is a basic human need. I mean some sort of connection of course. But also frightening and easily susceptible to delusion and psychosis. It is his twisted way of having a, quote, relationship. Conventional relationships terrify him. But with a victim, raping and torturing and killing, the sexual psychotic is able to forge a sort of quote unquote connection via his ability to make her feel intense fear and pain, while his exultant sensation of total Godlike control over her—what she feels, whether she feels, breathes, lives—this allows him some margin of safety in the relationship.’

Q.

‘Simply that this is what first seemed somehow ingenious in her tactics, however daffy the terms—that it addressed the psychotic’s core weakness, his grotesque shyness as it were, the terror that any conventional, soul-exposing connection with another human being will threaten him with engulfment and/or obliteration, in other words that
he
will become the victim. That in his cosmology it is either feed or be food—God how lonely, do you feel it?—but that the brute control he and his sharp implement hold over her very life and death allow the mulatto to feel that here he is in a hundred percent total control of the relationship and thus that the connection he so desperately craves will not expose or engulf or obliterate him. Nor is this of course all that substantively different from a man sizing up an attractive girl and approaching her and artfully deploying just the right rhetoric and pushing the right buttons to induce her to come home with him, never once saying anything or touching her in any way that isn’t completely gentle and pleasurable and seemingly respectful, leading her gently and respectfully to his satin-sheeted bed and in the light of the moon making exquisitely attentive love to her and making her come over and over until she’s quote begging for mercy and is totally under his emotional control and feels that she and he must be deeply and unseverably connected for the evening to have been this perfect and mutually respectful and fulfilling and then lighting her cigarettes and engaging in an hour or two of pseudo-intimate postcoital chitchat in his wrecked bed and seeming very close and content when what he really wants is to be in some absolutely antipodal spot from wherever she is from now on and is thinking about how to give her a special disconnected telephone number and never contacting her again. And that an all too obvious part of the reason for his cold and mercenary and maybe somewhat victimizing behavior is that the potential profundity of the very connection he has worked so hard to make her feel terrifies him. I know I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already decided you know. With your slim chilly smile. You’re not the only one who can read people, you know. He’s a fool because he thinks he’s made a fool of her, you’re thinking. Like he got away with something. The satyrosaurian sybaritic heterosapien male, the type you short-haired catamenial braburners can see coming a mile away. And pathetic. He’s a predator, you believe, and he too thinks he’s a predator, but
he’s
the really frightened one,
he’s
the one running.’

Q.

‘I am inviting you to consider that it isn’t the
motivation
that’s the psychotic part. The permutation is simply the psychotic one of substituting rape, murder, and mind-shattering terror for exquisite lovemaking and giving a false number whose falseness isn’t so immediately evident that it will unnecessarily hurt someone’s feelings and cause you discomfort.’

Q.

‘And please be aware that I’m quite familiar with the typology behind these bland little expressions of yours, the affectless little questions. I know what an excursus is and I know what a dry wit is. Do not think you are getting out of me things or admissions I’m unaware of. Just consider the possibility that I understand more than you think. Though if you’d like another I’ll buy you another no problem.’

Q.

‘All right. Once more, slowly. That literally killing instead of merely running is the killer’s psychotically literal way of resolving the conflict between his need for connection and his terror of being in any way connected. Especially, yes, to a woman, connecting with a woman, whom the vast majority of sexual psychotics do hate and fear, often due to twisted relations with the mother as a child. The psychotic sex killer is thus often quote symbolically killing the mother, whom he hates and fears but of course cannot literally kill because he is still enmeshed in the infantile belief that without her love he will somehow die. The psychotic’s relation to her is one of both terrified hatred and terror and desperate pining need. He finds this conflict unendurable and must thus symbolically resolve it through psychotic sex crimes.’

Q.

‘Her delivery had little or no—she seemed simply to relate what had happened without commenting one way or the other, or reacting. Although nor was she dissociated or monotonous. There was a disingen—an equanimity about her, a sense of residence in herself or a type of artlessness that did, does, that resembled a type of intent concentration. This I had noticed at the park when I first saw her and came and crouched down beside her, since a high degree of unself-conscious attention and concentration is not exactly standard issue for a gorgeous Granola Cruncher on a wool blanket sitting contra—’

Q.

‘Well still, though, it’s not exactly what one would call esoteric is it since it’s so much in the air, common knowledge about childhood’s connection to adult sex crimes in popular culture these days. Turn on the news for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t exactly take a von Braun to connect problems with connecting with women to problems in the childhood relation to the mother. It’s all in the air.’

Q.

‘That it was a titanic struggle, she said, in the Cutlass, heading deeper into the secluded area, because whenever for a moment her terror bested her or she for any reason lost her intense focus on the mulatto, even for a moment, the effect on the connection was obvious—his profile relaxing into its grin and his right eye again going empty and dead as he recrudesced and began once again to singsong psychotically about the implements in his trunk and what he had in store for her once he found the ideal secluded spot, and she could tell that in the wavering of the soul-connection he was automatically reverting to resolving his connectionary conflicts in the only way he knew. And I clearly remember her saying that by this time, whenever she succumbed and lost focus for a moment and his eye and face reverted to creepy psychotic unconflicted glee, she was surprised to find herself feeling no longer paralyzing terror for herself but a nearly heartbreaking sadness for him, the psychotic mulatto. And I’ll say that it was at roughly this point in listening to the story, still nude in bed, that I began to admit to myself that not only was it a remarkable postcoital anecdote but that this was, in certain ways, rather a remarkable woman, and that I felt a bit sad or wistful that I had not noticed this type of remarkability in her when I had first been attracted to her in the park. This was while the mulatto has meanwhile spotted a site that meets his criteria and has pulled crunchingly over in the gravel by the side of the secluded area’s road and asks her, somewhat apologetically or ambivalently it seems, to get out of the Cutlass and to lie prone on the ground and to lace her hands behind her head in the position of both police arrests and gangland executions, a well-known position obviously and no doubt chosen for its associations and intended to emphasize both the ideas of punitive custody and of violent death. She does not hesitate or beg. She had long since decided that she must not give in to the temptation to beg or plead or protest or in any way appear to resist him. She was rolling all her dice on these daffy-sounding beliefs in connection and nobility and compassion as more fundamental and primary components of soul than psychosis or evil. I note that these beliefs seem far less canned or flaccid when someone appears willing to stake their life on them. This was as he orders her to lie prone in the roadside gravel while he goes back to the trunk to browse through his collection of torture implements. She says by this time she could feel very clearly that her acerose focus’s connective powers were being aided by spiritual resources far greater than her own, because even though she was in a prone position and her face and eyes were in the clover or phlox in the gravel by the car and her eyes tightly shut she could feel the soul-connection holding and even strengthening between herself and the mulatto, she could hear the conflict and disorientation in the sex offender’s footsteps as he went to the Cutlass’s trunk. She was experiencing a whole new depth of focus. I was listening to her very intently. It wasn’t suspense. Lying there helpless and connected, she says her senses had taken on the nearly unbearable acuity we associate with drugs or extreme meditative states. She could distinguish lilac and shattercane’s scents from phlox and lambs’-quarter, the watery mint of first-growth clover. Wearing a corbeau leotard beneath a kind of loose-waisted cotton dirndl and on one wrist a great many bracelets of pinchbeck copper. She could decoct from the smell of the gravel in her face the dank verdure of the spring soil beneath the gravel and distinguish the press and shape of each piece of gravel against her face and large breasts through the leotard’s top, the angle of the sun on the top of her spine and the slight swirl in the intermittent breeze that blew from left to right across the light film of sweat on her neck. In other words what one might call an almost hallucinatory accentuation of detail, the way in some nightmares you remember the precise shape of every blade of grass in your father’s lawn on the day your mother left him and took you to live at her sister’s. Many of the cheap bracelets had been gifts apparently. She could hear the largo tick of the cooling auto and bees and bluebottle flies and stridulating crickets at the distant treeline, the same volute breeze in those trees she could feel at her back, and birds—imagine the temptation to despair in the sound of carefree birds and insects only yards from where you lay trussed for the gambrel—of tentative steps and breathing amid the clank of implements whose very shapes could be envisioned from the sounds they made against one another when stirred by a conflicted hand. The cotton of her dirndl skirt that light sheer unrefined cotton that’s almost gauze.’

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—’