Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories

by David Foster Wallace

A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF POSTINDUSTRIAL LIFE When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Get out now and go past your parents, who are sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel means talking and talking means thinking. You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

You decide this needs to be thought about. It may, after all, be all right to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself. Not when not thinking turns out to be wrong. At some point the wrongnesses have piled up blind: pretend-boredom, weight, thin rungs, hurt feet, space cut into laddered parts that melt together only in a disappearance that takes time. The wind on the ladder not what anyone would have expected. The way the board protrudes from shadow into light and you can’t see past the end. When it all turns out to be different you should get to think. It should be required.

Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It’s because of them.

‘Bear with me a moment, now. Chicken-sexing. Since hens have a far greater commercial value than males, cocks, roosters, it is apparently vital to determine the sex of a newly hatched chick. In order to know whether to expend capital on raising it or not, you see. A cock is nearly worthless, apparently, on the open market. The sex characteristics of newly hatched chicks, however, are entirely internal, and it is impossible with the naked eye to tell whether a given chick is a hen or a cock. This is what I have been told, at any rate. A professional chicken-sexer, however, can nevertheless tell. The sex. He can go through a brood of freshly hatched chicks, examining each one entirely by eye, and tell the poultry farmer which chicks to keep and which are cocks. The cocks are to be allowed to perish. “Hen, hen, cock, cock, hen,” and so on and so forth. This is apparently in Australia. The profession. And they are nearly always right. Correct. The fowl determined to be hens do in fact grow up to be hens and return the poultry farmer’s investment. What the chicken-sexer cannot do, however, is explain how he knows. The sex. It’s apparently often a patrilineal profession, handed down from father to son. Australia, New Zealand. Have him hold up a new-hatched chick, a young cock shall we say, and ask him how he can tell that it is a cock, and the professional chicken-sexer will apparently shrug his shoulders and say “Looks like a cock to me.”

Not really psychotic, I came to see. Crazy like a fox. An agenda behind every outburst. ‘Too much excitement, overtired, cranky, feverish, needs a lie-down, just frustrated, just a long day’—the litany of her excuses for him. His endless emotional manipulation of her. The ceaselessness of it and her inhuman reaction: even when she recognized what he was up to she excused him, she was charmed by the nakedness of his insecurity, his what she called ‘need’ for her, what she called my son’s ‘need for reassurance.’ Need for reassurance? What reassurance? He never doubted. He knew it all belonged to him. He never doubted. As if it were due him. As if he deserved it. Insanity. Solipsism. He wanted it all. All I had, had had, never would. It never ended. Blind, reasonless appetite. I will say it: evil. There. I can imagine your face. But he was evil. And I alone seemed to know it. He afflicted me in a thousand ways and I could say nothing.

That I despised him. There is no other word. Often I was forced to avert my eyes from him, look away. Hide. I discovered why fathers hold the evening paper as they do.

‘That essential at-center-life-is-just-a-cute-pet-bunny fluffiness about them that makes it so exceedingly hard to take them seriously or not to end up feeling as if you’re exploiting them in some way.’

There is nothing particularly wrong with this, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.