The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  “Bastard, though.”

  “No lie. And meanwhile the man is driving like mad in the Jeep toward the tiny far-off hospital, with the boy, who’s no longer convulsing but now is sort of autistic and slack-jawed and still obviously in a very bad way indeed, and the man’s driving like mad, but it’s very slow going, in the dark and the gelatinous rain and the mud of the deep-woods roads, and the man is so incredibly angry at the universe for putting his family in this position he feels as if he’s about to explode, but through enormous strength of will he keeps the lid on, and keeps driving, and eventually gets off the muddy deep-woods roads and onto the highway, where the going is at least a little faster. And the woman is meanwhile back at the cabin, waiting for the psychologist to arrive with the anticrying medicine, and she’s so full and so upset and depressed at everything , that’s happened that she’s yawning all the time, she’s unbelievably sleepy, and it gets still worse as the hours go by and it gets late and the gelatinous rain drums rhythmically on the cabin roof, but the baby is meanwhile having small but severe convulsive attacks whenever it cries, and the only way the woman finds she can keep it from crying is to hold it against her enormous Frito-crumbed breast; whenever she puts the baby down, it cries and begins to have an epileptic fit. So she’s staggering back and forth with the baby. And this goes on, some switching from scene to scene, the psychologist finally makes his sale and gets going, and he has an .incredibly fast and expensive car, paid for out of cabin profits, and he gets to the tiny backwoods hospital in no time flat, and he talks to the kindly old country doctor, and after a brief wait while the kindly old country doctor practically kills himself making the anticrying medicine in almost no time, the psychologist gets the medicine, and says the man will pay for it, and starts jetting down the highway toward the deep woods and the far-off cabin, at incredible speed, and in an ironic and ominous twist he goes right by the Jeep, for obvious reasons headed in the other direction, while the Jeep is pulled over in the dark with a flat, which the man is in a rage in the storm fixing, while the child slumps in the front seat in a bad way, and the psychologist’s incredibly fast car splashes a huge wave of rainwater on the man from clear across the highway and knocks the jack handle out, of the man’s hand, and the jack handle hits something small but vital on the axle of the Jeep, and partially breaks it, which the man doesn’t notice, because he’s so pissed off at the psychologist’s car for splashing water on him that he’s jumping up and down and screaming and giving the receding car the finger, and just temporarily out of control.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And meanwhile back at the cabin the woman is almost passing out, she’s so melancholy and worried and sleepy, but she can’t let go of the baby or it will begin to cry and flop epileptically. And the woman heroically and movingly holds out against sleepiness for just as long as she can, waiting for the psychologist, but finally she’s simply physically unable to stay awake any longer, being awake is just no longer an option, and so, as the only possible compromise with circumstance, she lies down on her bed, still holding the baby against her breast to keep it from crying and convulsing.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “And she falls asleep and rolls over on the baby and crushes it and kills it.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “And she wakes up and sees what’s happened and falls into an irreversible coma-like sleep from grief.”

  “OK, that’s enough.”

  “And the psychologist pulls up about ten minutes later and enters, in his poncho, and he sees what’s happened, and he calls the police to report it. And the only police in such a remote area is the state highway patrol, and the psychologist gives the patrol dispatcher a description of the man and the Jeep, which he is of course familiar with but just hadn’t seen when he splashed it, and he tells the dispatcher to have the patrol cars on the highway look for the Jeep and give the man and the boy a fast ride to the tiny far-off hospital if they’re found, and meanwhile also to get over to the cabin and have a look at the crushed baby and the comatose mother. And the dispatcher relays all the psychologist’s remarks to the troopers by radio, and a cruiser starts speeding down the highway on the way to the cabin, and on the highway it encounters the Jeep, and does a fast U and pulls it over, and the officer in the cruiser gets out and goes to the Jeep in the gelatinous rain and offers to give the man and the boy a fast ride to the tiny far-off hospital, and the man accepts, and as he’s getting the boy ready to be carried from the Jeep to the cruiser he asks the officer if it was his wife who had called the police, and the officer says no and then completely disastrously tells the man what he’s heard has happened back at the cabin, and to the accompaniment of a huge ripping clap of thunder the man flips out completely with uncontrollable anger at the news, and starts involuntarily flailing around with his arms, and one of his elbows, by accident, hits the boy, slumped in the seat beside him, in the nose, and the boy starts to scream and cry again and immediately flops onto the floor of the Jeep and begins to convulse, and his head first knocks the gearshift out of neutral, then his head gets wedged next to the accelerator, and the accelerator gets floored, and the Jeep takes off, with the officer caught and holding on and riding along the side because he’d been reaching in the window trying to calm the flailingly angry man, and the Jeep starts heading for the edge of the highway, beyond which lies a deep valley, a cliff, really, and the man is so angry he can’t see to steer, and the officer tries to grab the steering wheel from outside and steer away from the cliff, but the sudden tension on the wheel completely snaps the small but vital thing on the axle that had been broken by the jack handle’s flying out of the man’s hand earlier, and the steering fails completely, and the Jeep with the man, the boy, and the officer plunges over the cliff and falls several hundred feet onto the cabin where the old retired nun, you may remember, was nursing the prohibitively retarded people, and the Jeep falls onto the cabin and explodes in flames, and everyone involved is horribly killed.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Indeed.”

  “.... ”

  “A thoroughly, thoroughly troubled story. The product of a nastily troubled little collegiate mind. And there were about twenty more pages in which the huge beautiful woman lay in a pathetic fetal position in an irreversible coma while the psychologist rationalized the whole thing as due to collective-societal pressures too deep and insidious even to be avoided by flight to the woods, and tried to milk the comatose woman’s dead family’s remaining assets through legal maneuvers.”

  “Mother of God.”

  “Quite.”

  “Are you going to use it?”

  “Are you joking? It’s staggeringly long, longer than the whole next issue will be. And ridiculously sad.”

  “....”

  “And atrociously typed. That bothers me too. An unbelievably involved story that some sad kid must have spent months dreaming up and working out, and then he types it with his elbows. I’m going to send a personal rejection slip in which I advise the kid first to learn to type and then to go writhe to some suggestive music.”

  “I liked it. I thought it was a killer story.”

  “Yours is not a literary sensibility, Lenore.”

  “Gee, thanks a lot. Spunkless and non-literary.”

  “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  “....”

  “Come here. Come on.”

  “Go peddle your papers.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Lenore.”

  “....”

  /d/

  “Frequent and Vigorous.”

  “Fnoof fnoof.”

  “Frequent and Vigorous.”

  “What?”

  “Operator. Frequent and Vigorous.”

  “Lenore.”

  “Gasp a similar ladder. Operator. Special-wecial food.”

  “Lenore! You’re talking in your sleep! You’re being incoherent!”

  “What?”

  “You’re being incoherent.”

&
nbsp; “Fnoof.”

  “That’s better.”

  /e/

  “Holy cow!”

  “Fnoof fnoof.”

  “What the hell!”

  “Fnoof. What?”

  “Rick, I don’t own a walker.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t own a walker. I especially don’t own Mrs. Yingst’s walker, with that Lawrence Welk guy’s picture on it. What was it doing in my room?”

  “What walker?”

  “And what did Vlad the Impaler mean special-wecial food, who’s got the book?”

  “What? That bird should be killed, Lenore. I’ll kill it for you.”

  “Nobody’s in Corfu, at all. I’m being messed with.”

  “Fnoof.”

  “Jesus.”

  8

  1990

  /a/

  PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION, THURSDAY, 26 AUGUST 1990, IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D. PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.

  DR. JAY: So it would be safe to characterize yesterday as just not a good day at all, then.

  MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: I think that would be a safe assessment, yes.

  JAY: And how does that make you feel?

  LENORE: Well, I think sort of by definition a day that isn’t good at all makes you feel pretty shitty, right?

  JAY: Do you feel pressured into feeling shitty?

  LENORE: What?

  JAY: If a bad day is by definition one that makes you feel shitty, do you feel pressured to feel shitty about a bad day, or do you feel natural about it?

  LENORE: What the hell does that have to do with anything?

  JAY: The question makes you uncomfortable.

  LENORE: No, it makes me feel like I just listened to a pretty meaningless and dumb question, which I’m afraid I think that was.

  JAY: I don’t think it’s dumb at all. Aren’t you the one who complains of feeling pressured and coerced into feeling and doing the things you feel and do? Or do I have you confused with some other long/time client and friend?

  LENORE: Look, maybe it’s just safe to say that I feel shitty because bad things are happening, OK? Lenore acts incredibly weird and melodramatic for about a month, then just decides to leave the place where she’s supposed to live as a cold-blooded semi-invalid, and to take people with her, even though she’s ninety-two, and she doesn’t bother to call to say what’s going on, even though they’re obviously still in Cleveland, see for instance Mrs. Yingst’s walker, which could only have gotten in my room at about six-thirty last night, and my father clearly knows what’s up, see for instance having Karl Rummage tell Mr. Bloemker all this stuff yesterday morning before anybody knew, and he doesn’t bother to let me know either, and takes off for Corfu, and I think someone may have given my bird Vlad the Impaler LSD because he’s now blabbering all the time, which he never did before, and it’s conveniently mostly obscene stuff that Mrs. Tissaw’s going to flip about and evict me for if she hears it, and my job really bites the big kielbasa right now because there are like massive mess-ups in the phone lines and we don’t have our number anymore and people keep calling for all sorts of bizarre other things, and of course no sign of anybody from Interactive Cable today, this morning, and then at the switchboard I get a lot of flowers and some supposedly humorously nearly empty boxes of candy, and it turns out they’re from Mr. Bombardini ...

  JAY: Norman Bombardini?

  LENORE: ... Yes, who’s our landlord, at Frequent and Vigorous, and who’s unbelievably fat and hostile, and as a fringe benefit also clearly insane, and thinks he’s doing me a huge favor, pardon the pun, by promising me a comer of a soon-to-be-full universe all for myself, and he claims he’s infatuated with me.

  JAY: And then there is of course Rick.

  LENORE: Rick is Rick. Rick is a constant in every equation. Let’s leave Rick out of this.

  JAY: You feel uncomfortable talking about Rick in this context.

  LENORE: What context? There’s no context. A context implies something that hangs together. All that’s happening now is that a thoroughly screwed-up life that’s barely hung together is now even less well hung together.

  JAY: So the woman is worried that her life is not “well hung.”

  LENORE: Go suck a rock.

  Dr. Jay pauses. Lenore Beadsman pauses.

  JAY: Interesting, though.

  LENORE: What?

  JAY: Don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s rather an interesting situation? Set of situations?

  LENORE: Meaning what?

  JAY: Meaning very little. Only that if one is going to feel shitty, to continue your use of the adjective, about not having enough “control” over things, and we of course admit freely that we still haven’t been able satisfactorily to articulate what we mean by that, yet, have we ... ?

  LENORE: God, the plural tense, now.

  JAY: ... that it’s at least comparatively desirable to be impotently involved in an interesting situation, rather than a dull one, is that not so?

  LENORE: Interesting to whom?

  JAY: Ah. That matters to you.

  LENORE: It matters to me a lot.

  JAY: I smell breakthrough, I don’t mind telling you. There’s a scent of breakthrough in the air.

  LENORE: I think it’s my armpit. I think I need a shower.

  JAY: Hiding behind symptomatic skirts is not fair. If I say I smell breakthrough, I smell breakthrough.

  LENORE: You always say you smell breakthrough. You say you smell breakthrough almost every time I’m here. I think you must coat your nostrils with breakthrough first thing every morning. What does that mean, anyway, “breakthrough”?

  JAY: You tell me.

  LENORE: These seat belts on the chair aren’t really for the patients’ safety on the track, are they? They’re to keep your jugular from being lunged for about thirty times a day, right?

  JAY: You feel anger.

  LENORE: I feel shitty. Pure, uncoerced shitty. Interesting for whom? JAY: Whom might there be to interest?

  LENORE: Now what the hell does that mean?

  JAY: The smell of breakthrough is getting weaker.

  LENORE: Well, look.

  JAY: Yes?

  LENORE: Suppose Gramma tells me really convincingly that all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it?

  JAY: What the hell does that mean?

  LENORE: You feel anger.

  JAY: I have an ejection button, you know. I can press a button on the underside of this drawer, here, and send you screaming out into the lake.

  LENORE: You must be about the worst psychologist of all time. Why won’t you ever let me go with my thoughts?

  JAY: I’m sorry.

  LENORE: That’s why I’m here, right? That’s why I pay you roughly two-thirds of everything I make, right?

  JAY: I’m honored and ashamed, all at once. Back to the Grandmother, and a life that’s told, not lived.

  LENORE: Right.

  JAY: Right.

  LENORE: So what would that mean?

  JAY: In all earnestness I say you tell me.

  LENORE: Well see, it seems like it’s not really like a life that’s told, not lived; it’s just that the living is the telling, that there’s nothing going on with me that isn’t either told or tellable, and if so, what’s the difference, why live at all?

  JAY: I really don’t understand.

  LENORE: Maybe it just makes no sense. Maybe it’s just completely irrational and dumb.

  JAY: But obviously it bothers you.

  LENORE: Pretty keen perception. If there’s nothing about me but what can be said about me, what separates me from this lady in this story Rick got who eats junk food and gains weight and squashes her child in her sleep? She’s exactly what’s said about her, right? Nothing more at all. And same with me, seems like. Gramma says she’s going to show me how a life is words and nothing else. Gramma says words can kill and create. Everything.

  JAY
: Sounds like Gramma is maybe half a bubble off plumb, to me. LENORE: Well, just no. She’s not crazy and she’s sure not stupid. You should know that. And see, the thing is, if she can do all this to me with words, if she can make me feel this way, and perceive my life as screwed way up and not hung together, and question whether I’m really even me, if there is a me, crazy as that sounds, if she can do all that just by talking to me, with just words, then what does that say about words?

  JAY: “... she said, using words.”

  LENORE: Well exactly. There it is. Lenore would totally agree. Which is why it sometimes just drives me nuts that Rick wants to talk all the time. Talk talk talk. Tell tell tell. At least when he tells me stories, it’s up-front and clear what’s story and what isn‘t, right?

  JAY: I’m getting a scent.

  LENORE: I don’t think the armpit theory should be rejected out of hand.