Brief Interviews With Hideous Men Read Free

seeing, which seems wrong to submit to without even thinking.
    Looked at another way, the same board is just a long thin flat thing covered with a rough white plastic stuff. The white surface is very rough and is freckled and lined with a pale watered red that is nevertheless still red and not yet pink—drops of old pool water that are catching the light of the late sun over sharp mountains. The rough white stuff of the board is wet. And cold. Your feet are hurt from the thin rungs and have a great ability to feel. They feel your weight. There are handrails running above the beginning of the board. They are not like the ladder’s handrails just were. They are thick and set very low, so you almost have to bend over to hold on to them. They are just for show, no one holds them. Holding on takes time and alters the rhythm of the machine.
    It is a long cold rough white plastic or fiberglass board, veined with the sad near-pink color of bad candy.
    But at the end of the white board, the edge, where you’ll come down with your weight to make it send you off, there are two areas of darkness. Two flat shadows in the broad light. Two vague black ovals. The end of the board has two dirty spots.
    They are from all the people who’ve gone before you. Your feet as you stand here are tender and dented, hurt by the rough wet surface, and you see that the two dark spots are from people’s skin. They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight. More people than you could count without losing track. The weight and abrasion of their disappearance leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind, bits and shards and curls of skin that dirty and darken and tan as they lie tiny and smeared in the sun at the end of the board. They pile up and get smeared and mixed together. They darken in two circles.
    No time is passing outside you at all. It is amazing. The late ballet below is slow motion, the overbroad movements of mimes in blue jelly. If you wanted you could really stay here forever, vibrating inside so fast you float motionless in time, like a bee over something sweet.
    But they should clean the board. Anybody who thought about it for even a second would see that they should clean the end of the board of people’s skin, of two black collections of what’s left of before, spots that from back here look like eyes, like blind and cross-eyed eyes.
    Where you are now is still and quiet. Wind radio shouting splashing not here. No time and no real sound but your blood squeaking in your head.
    Overhead here means sight and smell. The smells are intimate, newly clear. The smell of bleach’s special flower, but out of it other things rise to you like a weed’s seeded snow. You smell deep yellow popcorn. Sweet tan oil like hot coconut. Either hot dogs or corn dogs. A thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper cups. And the special smell of tons of water coming off tons of skin, rising like steam off a new bath. Animal heat. From overhead it is more real than anything.
    Look at it. You can see the whole complicated thing, blue and white and brown and white, soaked in a watery spangle of deepening red. Everybody. This is what people call a view. And you knew that from below you wouldn’t look nearly so high overhead. You see now how high overhead you are. You knew from down there no one could tell.
    He says it behind you, his eyes on your ankles, the solid bald man, Hey kid. They want to know. Do your plans up here involve the whole day or what exactly is the story. Hey kid are you okay.
    There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
    Hey kid he says Hey kid are you okay.
    Metal flowers bloom on your tongue. No more time for thinking. Now that there is time you don’t have time.
    Hey.
    Slowly now, out across everything, there’s a watching that spreads like hit water’s rings. Watch it spread out from the