Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

CHURCH NOT MADE WITH HANDS

ART

Drawn lids one screen of skin, dreampaintings move across Day’s colored dark. Tonight, in a lapse unfluttered by time, he travels what seems to be back. Shrinking, smoother, loses his belly and faint acne scars. Bird-boned gangle; bowl haircut and cup-handle ears; skin sucks hair, nose recedes into face; he swaddles in his pants and then curls, pink and mute and smaller until he feels himself split into something that wriggles and something that spins. Nothing stretches tight across everything else. A black point rotates. The point breaks open, jagged. His soul sails toward one color.

Birds, gray light. Day opens one eye. He is lying half off the bed Sarah breathes in. He sees the windows parallelograms, from the angle.

Day stands at a square window with a cup of something hot. A dead Cezanne does this August sunrise in any-angled smears of clouded red, a blue that darkles. A Berkshire’s shadow retreats toward one blunt nipple: fire.

Sarah comes awake at the slightest touch. They lie open-eyed and silent, brightening under a sheet. Doves work the morning, sound from the belly. The sheet’s printed pattern fades from Sarah’s skin.

Sarah pins her hair for morning mass. Day packs another case for Esther. Dresses himself. He fails to find a shoe. On the big bed’s edge, one shoe on, he watches cotton dust rotate through the butteryellow columns of a morning that gets later.

BLACK ART

That day he buys them a janitor’s broom. He sweeps rainwater off the tarp over Sarah’s pool.

That night Sarah stays with Esther. Touches metal all night. Day sleeps alone.

Day stands at a black window in Sarah’s bedroom. Over Massachusetts the sky is smeared with stars. The stars move slowly across the glass.

That day he goes to Esther with Sarah. Esther’s bed’s steel gleams in the bright room. Esther smiles dully as Day reads about giants.

“I am a giant,” he reads: “I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footprints are counties, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds.”

“I am a giant,” Esther tries to say.

Sarah, allergic, sneezes.

Day: “Yes.”

BLACK AND WHITE

‘All true art is music’ (a different teacher). ‘The visual arts are but one corner of true music’s allcomprising room’ (ibid.)

Music discloses itself as a relation between one key and two notes locked by the key in dance. Rhythm. And in Day’s blown predreams, too, music consumes all law: what is most solid discloses itself here as rhythms, nothing but. Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before.

The cleric appears tonight in monochrome and collar.

Bless me

Do you take this woman Sarah

To be my

How long

For I have

since your last confession to a body with the power to absolve. Confession need

As I those who have swimmed against me

not entail absolution, lay bare, confession in the absence of awareness of sin,

Bless me father for there can be no awareness of sin without awareness of transgression without awareness of limit

Full of Grace

no such animal. Pray together for a revelation of limit

Red clouds in Warhol’s coffee

arrange in yourself an awareness of.

ONE COLOR

That day he is back at work’s first week. Sunlight reverses HEALTH pink through the windshield’s sticker. Day drives the county car past a factory.

“Habla Espanol?” Eric Yang asks from the passenger’s side.

Smoke from a smokestack hangs jagged as Day nods his head.

“You wanted to be shown ropes,” Yang says. His eyes are closed as he rotates. “I’ll show you a rope. Habla?”

“Yes,” Day says. “Hablo.”

They drive past homes.

Eric Yang’s special talent is the mental rotation of three-dimensional objects.

“This case speaks only Spanish,” Yang says. “Lady’s son got himself killed last month. In their apartment. Nasty. Sixteen. Gang thing, drug thing. Big area of the kid’s blood on her kitchen floor.”

They drive past hard hats and jackhammers.

“She says it’s all she’s got left of him!” Yang shouts. “She won’t let us clean it up. She says it’s him,” he says.

Mental rotation is Yang’s hobby. He is a certified counselor and caseworker.

“Your job today,” Yang twirls an imaginary rope, lassoes something mental on the dashboard, “is to get her to draw him. Even just the blood. Ndiawar said he didn’t care which. Just so she has a picture he said. So we can maybe clean up the blood.”

In the rearview, past himself, Day can see his case of supplies on the back seat. It’s not supposed to be in the sun.

“Make her draw him,” Yang says, releasing a rope Day can’t see. Yang closes his eyes again. “I’m going to try to rotate this month’s phone bill.”

Day passes a white van. Its windows are tinted. Saucers of rust on the side.

“Today we see the poor lady who loves blood and the rich man who begs for time.”

“Old teacher of mine. I told Ndiawar.” Day checks his left. “Art teacher in a former life.”

“The nuisance in the public, Ndiawar calls him,” Yang says. He furrows, concentrating. “I’m rotating the duty log. We’re going to go right by him. He’s right on the way. But he’s not first on the log.” “He was a teacher of mine,” Day says again. “I had him in school.” “We go by the log.” “He influenced me. My work.”

They pass a dry lot.

ART

Tonight, at the window, under stars that refuse to move, Day nearly makes it and dreampaints awake.

He paints it so that he’s standing on the pool’s baggy tarpaulin when he rises into the lunchtime sky. He ascends without weight, neither pulled from above nor pushed from below, one perfect line to a point in the sky overhead. Mountains sit blunt, humidity curls in the valleys like gauze. Holyoke and then Springfield and Chicopee and Longmeadow and Hadley are dull misshapen coins.

Day rises into the sky. The air gets more and more blue. Something in the sky blinks, and he’s gone.

“Colors,” he says to the screen’s black lattice.

The screen breathes mint.

“She complains I turn colors in my sleep,” Day says.

“Something understands,” breathes the screen, “surely.”

Knees sore, Day jangles pockets with his hands. So many coins.

TWO COLORS

Blue-eyed behind his County Mental Health Director’s desk, Dr. Ndiawar is a darkly bald man of vague alien status. He likes to make a steeple with his hands and to look at it while he speaks.

“You paint,” he says. “As a student, there was sculpture. You took psychology.” He looks up. “In large amounts? You speak languages?”

Day’s slow nod produces a dot of reflected office light on Ndiawar’s scalp. Day births the dot and kills it. The Director’s desk is large and strangely clean. Day’s c.v. looks tiny against its expanse.

“There are doubts,” Ndiawar says, “which I have in my mind.” He broadens the hands’ angle slightly. “There is not money in it.”

Day gives the dot two brief lives.

“However you state there are independent means, through marriage, for you.”

“And shows,” Day says quietly. “Sales.” A scarlet lie.

“You sell art you make in the past, you have stated,” Ndiawar says. Eric Yang is tall, late twenties, with long hair and muddy eyes that close and open instead of blink.

Day shakes Yang’s hand. “How do you do.”

“Surprisingly well.”

Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. “Your new art therapy person,” he says to Yang.

Yang looks Day in the eye. “Look, man,” he says. “I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.”

“You and you, part-time, become a field team who travel crossward throughout the county and environs,” Ndiawar reads to Day from something prepared. Both hands hold the page. “Yang is senior as, together, you visit the shut-ins. The very badly off. The no room for them here.”

“It’s a talent I have,” Yang says, combing his bangs with four fingers. “I close my eyes and form a perfect detailed image of any object. From any angle. Then I rotate it.”

“You visit the prepared log’s schedule of shut-ins,” Ndiawar reads. “Yang, who is senior, counsels these badly off people, while you encourage, through skill, them to express disordered feelings through artistic acts.”

“I can see textures and imperfections and the play of light and shadow on the objects I rotate, too,” Yang says. He is making small hand gestures that do not seem to signify anything in particular. “It’s a very private talent.” He looks to Ndiawar. “I just want to be up front with the guy.”

Dr. Ndiawar ignores Yang. “Influencing them to direct aberrant or dysfunctioning affect onto things which they artistically make,” he reads in a monotone. “On objects which cannot be harmed. This is a fieldmodel of intervention. Such as clay, which as an object is good.”

“I’m practically an MD,” Yang says, tamping a cigarette on his knuckle.

The steeple reappears as Ndiawar leans back. “Yang is a caseworker who consumes medication. However he is cheap, and has in that chest of his a good heart…”

Yang stares at the Director. “What medication?”

“… which goes out toward others.”

Day stands. “I need to know when I start.”

Ndiawar extends both hands. “Buy clay.”

Sarah walks Day to the pool on the night before Esther gets hurt. She asks Day to touch water that’s lit from below by lamps in the tile. He can see the center drain and what it does to the water around it. The water is so blue it even feels blue, he says.

She asks him to immerse himself in the shallow end.

Day and Sarah have sex in the shallow end of Sarah’s childhood home’s blue pool. Sarah around him is warm water in cold water. Day has his orgasm inside her. The drain outlet slaps and gurgles. Sarah begins to have her orgasm, her lids flutter, Day tries with wet fingers to hold her lids open, she hanging on to him, back ramming against the tiled side with a rhythmic lisping sound, whispering, “Oh.”

FOUR COLORS

“I don’t know who Soutine is,” Yang says as they drive away from the home of the lady who speaks only Spanish. “You thought it looked like Soutine?”

The car’s color is a noncolor, neither brown nor green. Day’s seen nothing like it. He wipes sweat from his face. “It did.” His supply case is in the back under a steel bucket. A mophandle rattles against the bucket. Sarah paid for the case and supplies.

Yang hits the dashboard’s top. The air conditioner grinds out a smell of must. The car’s heat is intense.

“Do the phone bill,” Day says, falling in behind a city bus hairy with spraypaint. The bus’s fumes are sweet.

Yang rolls down his window and lights a cigarette. The sunlight makes his exhalation pale.

“Ndiawar told me about your wife’s little girl. I’m sorry about that crack about a vacation your first week here. I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

Day can see Yang’s profile out of the corner. “I’ve always liked the blue of a phone bill.”

The air conditioner begins to work against its own smell.

Yang has very black hair and a thin wool tie and eyes the color of trout. He closes them. “Now I’ve got the phone bill folded into a triangle. But one side doesn’t quite come down and meet the base. But it’s still a triangle. An order-in-chaos type of thing.”

Day sees something yellow by the road.

“Eric?”

“The bill’s got a tiny rip in the right leg of the triangle,” Yang says, “and it’s for sixty dollars. The rip is tiny and white and sort of hairy. That must be the paper’s fibers or something.”

Day guns to pass a pickup full of chickens. A spray of corn and feathers.

“I’m rotating the rip out of sight,” Yang whispers. The side of his face breaks into crescents. “Now there’s nothing but phone-bill blue.”

There’s a horn and the tug of a swerve.

Yang opens his eyes. “Whoa.”

“Sorry.”

They drive past some dark buildings with no glass in the windows. A dirty boy throws a tennis ball at a wall.

“I hope they,” Yang is saying.

“What?”

“Catch the drunk driver.”

Day looks over at Yang.

Yang looks at him. “The one who hit your little girl.”

“What driver?”

“I just hope they catch the bastard.”

Day looks at the windshield. “Esther had an accident in the pool.”

“You guys have a pool?”

“My wife does. There was an accident. Esther got hurt.”

“Ndiawar told me she got hit.”

“The drain outlet got blocked. The drain’s suction sucked her under.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“She was under a long time.”

“Am I sorry.”

“I can’t swim.”

“Jesus.”

“I could see her very clearly. The pool’s very clear.”

“Ndiawar said you said the driver was drunk.”

“She’s still in the hospital. There’s going to be brain damage.”

Yang is looking at him. “Should you even be here today?”

Day cranes to see street signs. They’re stopped at a light. “Which way.”

Yang looks at the log book attached to the visor. Its rubber band was once green. Points.

VERY HIGH

The brushstrokes of the best-dreamt work, too, are visible as rhythms. This day’s painting discloses its rhythms against a terrain in which light is susceptible to the influences of the wind. This is a wind that blows hard and inconstant across the school’s campus, whistles against the De Chirico belltower from which it has scoured all shadow. This is a terrain in which there are alternating lulls and gusts of light. In which open spaces flash like diseased nerves and bent trees hang with a viscous aura that settles to set the grass on willemite fire, in which windrows of light pile up against fencebottoms, walls, and undulate and glow. The belltower’s sharp edges shiver gusts into spectra. Tall boys in blazers move knifelike through a parting shine with sketchbooks held eye-level; their shadows flee before them. The scintillant winds lull and gather, seem to coil, then brawl and whistle and strobe and strike to break faint pink through the Hall of Art’s rose window. Day’s sketched notes light up. On the machinelit screens at the front, two slides of the same thing project the frail and palmate shadow of the art professor at the podium, a dry old Jesuit hissing his s’s into the illwired mike, reading a lecture to a hall half full of boys. His shadow is insectile against Vermeer’s colored Delft as he feels at his eyes.

The withered priest reads his lecture about Vermeer and limpidity and luminosity and about light as attachment/vestment to objects’ contour. Died 1675. Obscure in his time you see for painted very few. But now we know do we not, ahm. Blue-yellow hues predominate as against ahm shall we say de Hooch. The students wear blue blazers. Unparalleled representation light serves subtly to glorify God. Ahm, though some might say blaspheme. You see. Do you not see it. A notoriously dull lecturer. An immortality conferred upon implicit in the viewer. Do you ahm see it. ‘The beautiful terrible stillness of Delft’ in the seminal phrase of. The hall is dark behind Day’s glowing row. The boys are permitted some personal expression in choice of necktie. The irreal evenness of focus which transforms the painting into what glass in glass’s fondest dreams might wish to be. ‘Windows onto interiors in which all conflicts have been resolved’ in the much-referenced words of. All lit and rendered razor-clear you see and ahm. It meets TuTh after lunch and mail call. Resolving conflict, both organic and divine. Flesh and spirit. Day hears an envelope ripped open. The viewer sees as God sees, in other ahm. Lit up throughout time you see. Past time. Someone snaps gum. Whispered laughter somewhere up in a rear row. The hall is dimly lit. A boy off to Day’s left groans and thrashes in a deep sleep. The teacher is, it is true, wholly dry, out of it, unalive. The boy next to Day is taking a deep interest in that part of his wrist which surrounds his watch.

The art professor is a sixty-year-old virgin in black and white who reads in a monotone about how one Dutchman’s particular brushstrokes kill death and time in Delft. Well-barbered heads turn obliquely to see the angle of the clock’s flashing hands. The notorious eternity of the Jesuit’s lectures. The clock is against the back wall, between windows with theater shades that bump the glass with each gust.

Thin blotchy Day can see how it’s the angle of the bright breeze against the screen that makes the wet face atop the priest’s lit shadow glow. Big jelly tears shine above the old man’s typed lecture. Day watches a teardrop move into another teardrop on the art teacher’s cheek. The professor reads on about the use of four-colored hue in the river’s sun’s reflection in Delft, Holland. The two drops merge, pick up speed along the jaw, head for the text.

FOUR WINDOWS

And now in the starlit painting’s third istoria the priest is truly old. Teacher in a former life. He kneels in the brittle field at the limit of an industrial park. His palms are together in an attitude of antique piety: a patron’s pose. Day, who’s failed twice, is somewhat outside the threesided figure the field’s other figures form. Cicadas scream in the dry weeds. The weeds a dead yellow and their shadows’ lengths and angles make no sense; the August sun has a mind of its own.

“One faces…,” Ndiawar of the blinding head reads from a prepared memo in the sun. Yang shields his cigarette from a breeze.

“… confinement as a natural consequence of behaving in manners which, toward others, are aberrant,” Ndiawar reads.

The small white planet on a stalk Day sees is a dandelion gone to seed.

Yang sits tangent to the knelt shadow with his legs crossed, smoking. His T-shirt says ASK ME ABOUT MY INVISIBLE ENEMIES. He combs at himself with a hand. “It’s a question of venue, Sir,” he says. “Out here like this, it becomes a public question. Am I right Dr. Ndiawar.”

“Inform him a community of other persons is no vacuum.”

“You’re not in a vacuum here, Sir,” Yang says.

“Rights exist in a state of tension. Rights necessarily tense.” Ndiawar is skimming.

Yang buries a butt. “Here’s the thing, Sir, Father if I may. You want to pray to a picture of yourself praying, that is okay. That is fine. That is your right. Except just not where other people have to watch you do it. Other people with their own rights to not have to see it against their will, which disturbs them. Isn’t that pretty reasonable?”

Day is watching the exchange over his lollipop of snow. The canvas stands nailed to a weighted easel in the field. Its quadrate shadow distorted. The former Jesuit teacher of art kneels, in the painting.

“One faces”—Ndiawar—“additional confinement as a consequence of standing publicly on streets’ corners to ask passersby for the gift of minutes from their day.”

“Just one.”

“There exists no right to accost, disturb, or solicit the innocent.” Yang has no shadow.

“One minute,” says the art professor in the weighted painting. “Surely you can spare one minute.”

“The venue plus the solicitation is going to equal confinement, Sir,” Yang says.

“To accost and force to look at — these passersby are the innocents, tell him.”

“I’ll take any time you can spare. Name your time.”

“To be a shut-in once more. Ask him if he liked it. Remind him of the term conditional release.”

“A vacuum is one thing,” Yang says, looking briefly over his shoulder in signal to Day. “Just not on the streets.” Even though Day is not behind him.

The Director is replacing the memo in a cardboard portfolio. A hint of the steeple as he surveys the field. The Jesuit’s eyes never leave his easel’s square. Because the canvas is the viewer’s point of access to the dream-painting, the as it were window onto the scene, his eyes are thus on Day’s, a tiny dead seeded globe between them. The perspective makes no sense. Ndiawar’s headless shadow is now over Day, over the white seeded ball, he sees. “Skills are required,” Ndiawar says, “badly.”

A mind of its own.

Day’s own breath breaks the ball apart.

LIMIT

Esther’s head is wrapped in gauze. Day’s head is inclined over a page. Sarah’s head is in the pastor’s lap in the room’s bright corner. The room is white. The cleric’s head is thrown back, eyes on the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah’s head says to the black lap. “The phone. The outlet. The drain. The suction. She turns white and he turns colors. I apologize.”

“Though giants,” Day is reading aloud. “Though giants come in just one size, they come in many forms. There are the Greek Cyclops and the French Pantagruel and the American Bunyan. There are wide and multi-cultural cycles that have giants as columns of flame, as clouds with legs, as mountains that walk inverted while the whole world sleeps.”

“No, I apologize,” says the pastor’s head. A white hand strokes Sarah’s pinned hair.

“There are red-hot giants, warm giants,” Day reads. “There are also cold giants. These are forms. One form of cold giant is described in cycles as a mile-high skeleton made all of colored glass. The glass giant lives in a forest that is pure white with frost.”

“Cold giants.”

“After you,” Sarah whispers, opening the door to Esther’s room.

“It is this forest’s master.”

The head above black and white smiles. “After you.”

“The glass giant’s stride is a mile across. All day every day it strides. It never stops. It cannot rest. For it lives in fear of its frozen forest ever melting. This fear keeps it striding every minute.”

“Won’t sleep,” Esther says.

“Yes never sleeping, the glass giant strides through the white forest, its stride a mile across, day and night, and the heat of its stride melts the forest behind it.”

Esther tries to smile at the closing door. Her gauze is spotless. “The rainbow.”

“Yes.” Day shows the picture. “The melted forest rains, and the glass giant is the rainbow. This is the cycle.”

“Melted are rain.”

Sarah sneezes, muffled, out in the hall. Day waits for the cleric to say it.

CLOSE THEM

“Time your breathing,” the desiccant and truly old former Jesuit instructs him. Yang and Ndiawar stand in the foam at the edge of the field’s blue sea.

“Breathe air,” the art professor says, pantomiming the stroke. “Spit water. A rhythm. In. Out.”

Day imitates the stroke.

Eric Yang closes his eyes. “The rip in the bill is back.”

The dreampainting of the teacher in ceaseless prayer stands nailed to the weighted display. The wind rises; dandelions snow up around them. Bees work the field’s yellow against a growing blue.

“Breathe in from above. Breathe out from below,” the old man instructs. “The crawl.”

The dry field is an island. The blue water all around is peppered white with dry islands. Esther lies on a thin clean steel bed on the next island. Water moves in the channel between them.

Day imitates the stroke. His pronated hands bat down white seed. A plant has sprouted in no time. Its spire already reaches Day’s knees.

Yang speaks to Ndiawar about the texture of the mental bill. Ndiawar complains to Yang that his one best church leaves no hand free to open the door. The symbolism of the interchange is unmistakable.

The art teacher has backstroked away from the fluttered growth of the black plant. Day flails in the pollen, trying to establish a rhythm.

Sarah floats supine in the channel before Esther’s island. Then the plant’s shadow shuts down the light. The shadow is the biggest thing Day has ever seen. Its facade heaves out of sight, summons the prefix bronto-. The ground booms under the weight of a buttress. The buttress curves upward out of sight toward the facade. A rose window glints at the sky’s upper limit. The easel falls over. The doors of the thing have come out of nowhere, writhing like lips. It rushes at them.

“Help!” Esther calls, very faint, before the picture’s church takes them inside. Day hears the distant groan of continued growth. The unconstructed church is dim, lit only through colored glass. Its doors have rushed on behind them, out of sight.

The rose window continues to rise. It is round and red. Refracting spikes radiate. Inside the window a sad woman tries to smile her way out of the glass.

Day still pantomimes the crawl, the only stroke he knows.

The window lets light through and nothing else, colors it.

“Close the eyes which are in your head,” comes Ndiawar’s wooden echo.

Yang faces the nave. “Close them.”

Barrel vaults darkle above the rose. The window reverses all normal disclosure — everything solid is here black, all that is light is brilliant color. Day, on the inbreath, can see its shape. The color tapers up from the window, narrows to a refracting spike, its tip a dark point. Something in white revolves around it.

Day crawlstrokes for the pointed tip, ascending without weight.

The defrocked professor of art puts Day’s waterproof watch on the altar. Kneels to it, blaspheming.

Esther floats gauzed in the dark point atop the sharpshaped color of the red rose window. Day sees the point through the wet starred curtain his arms have drawn. The air’s blue looks black, he swims through the curtain, stars rain upward from his arms’ strokes. He pantomimes the crawl-stroke through the stars. He can see her clearly, revolving.

“Don’t look!”

And again it is when he looks below him that he fails. Wanting only to see whence he’d risen. The merest second — less — it takes for it all to come down. It starts at the apsis. East rushes west and the west’s facade can’t take it, crumbling. The walls seem to shrug as they come down on themselves. The black point on the red spike cracks open. Esther spins wriggling between its jagged halves, falling toward the rose window even as the window tilts. It’s all photo-clear. Yang says Whoa. The buttress bows outward and shears. Her fall takes time. Her body rotates slowly through the air, trails a gauze comet. The rose rushes up at her. A mile-high man could catch and cup her among the falling stars; the gauze would follow. It is Day’s failed breath that turns him blue. The blood-colored pane holds the mother inside, awaiting the child to set her free.

There is the sound of impact at a great glass height: terrible, multihued.

ROTATE

The sky is an eye.

The dusk and the dawn are the blood that feeds the eye.

The night is the eye’s drawn lid.

Each day the lid again comes open, disclosing blood, and the blue iris of a prone giant.