The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  “Which thing, by the way, really begins to bother the man, and makes him intensely curious, especially as he begins to feel more and more connected to the woman, though not exactly in a passionate-love way, and thinks he feels her yearning to connect, too. And so he gradually wins her trust and affection, and she responds by starting to wash her hair, and dieting, and buying an extra thick shoe for her obscenely short leg, and things progress, although the Thermos woman is still clearly pathologically hung up about something. And then one night in very early April, after a walk all around the quainter parts of Brooklyn, the man takes the Thermos woman back to her apartment and has sex with her, seduces her, gets her all undressed—except, compassionately, for her scarf—and he makes love to her, and it’s at first surprisingly, but then when we think about it not all that surprisingly, revealed that this is the first time this incredibly passionate, love-oriented man, who’s about thirty, has ever had sex with anybody, at all.”

  “....”

  “Um, first time for the Thermos woman, too.”

  “....”

  “....”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “My ear! Shit! God!”

  “Try to swallow.”

  “....”

  “Try to yawn.”

  “....”

  “....”

  “Good God. I so hate airplanes, Lenore. I can think of no more convincing demonstration of my devotion to you than my coming on this trip. I am flying for you.”

  “You’re going to get to see Amherst in the very early fall. You said early fall in Amherst used to make you weep with joy.”

  “....”

  “You’re less pale. Can we assume the ear is better?”

  “Jesus.”

  “....”

  “So they have sex, and the man is able to be gentle and caring, which we can safely intuit he couldn’t have been, passion-wise, if he’d really been hopelessly in love in his old way with the Thermos woman, and the Thermos woman weeps tears of joy, at all the gentleness and caring, and we can practically hear the thud as she falls in love with the man, and she really begins to think it’s possible to connect with someone in the world outside her. And they’re lying in bed, and their limbs are unevenly intertwined, and the man is resting his head on the little shelf of the Thermos woman’s weak chin, and he’s playing idly with the scarf around her neck, which playing pathologically bothers the woman, which the man notices, and curiosity and concern wash over him, and he tries tentatively and experimentally slowly to undo the scarf and take it off, and the Thermos woman tenses all her muscles but through what is obviously great strength of will doesn’t stop him, although she’s weeping for real, now, and the man gently, and with kisses and reassurances, removes the scarf, throws it aside, and in the dimness of the bedroom sees something more than a little weird on the woman’s neck, and he goes and turns on the light, and in the light of the bedroom it’s revealed that the woman has a pale-green tree toad living in a pit at the base of her neck, on the left side.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “In a perfectly formed and non-woundish pit on the left side of the Thermos woman’s neck is a tiny tree toad, pale green, with a white throat that puffs rhythmically out and in. The toad stares up at the man from the woman’s neck with sad wise clear reptilian eyes, the clear and delicate lower lids of which blink upward, in reverse. And the woman is weeping, her secret is out, she has a tree toad living in her neck.”

  “Is it my imagination, or did this story just get really weird all of a sudden?”

  “Well, the context is supposed to explain and so minimize the weirdness. The tree toad in the pit in her neck is the thing that has kept the Thermos woman from connecting emotionally with the world outside her: it has been what has kept her in sadness and confusion, see also darkness and shadow, what has bound and constrained her, see also being wrapped in a scarf, what has kept her from facing the external world, see also staying in profile all the time. The tree toad is the mechanism of nonconnection and alienation, the symbol and cause of the Thermos woman’s isolation; yet it also becomes clear after a while that she is emotionally attached to the tree toad in a very big way, and cares more for it and gives it more attention than she gives herself, there in the privacy of her apartment. And the man also discovers that all the scarves the woman wears to cover up and hide the tree toad are full of tiny holes, air holes for the toad, holes that are practically invisible and that the woman herself makes via millions of tiny punctures of the cloth with a pin, late at night.”

  “My ear even hurts a little. We must be really high.”

  “So that the very thing that has made the woman unconnected when she wants to be connected and so has made her extremely unhappy is also the center of her life, a thing she cares a lot about, and is even, in certain ways the man can’t quite comprehend, proud of, and proud of the fact that she can feed the pale-green tree toad bits of food off her finger, and that it will let her scratch its white throat with a letter opener. So now things are understandably ambiguous, and it’s not clear whether deep down at the core of her being the Thermos woman really wants to connect, after all, at all. Except as time goes by and the man continues to hang around, exercising his non-love love-mechanism, being gentle and caring, the woman falls more and more for him, and clearly wants to connect, and her relation with the tree toad in the pit in her neck gets ambiguous, and at times she’s hostile toward it and flicks at it cruelly with her fingernail, except at other times she falls back into not wanting to connect, and so dotes on the tree toad, and scratches it with the letter opener, and is aloof toward the man. And this goes on and on, and she falls for the man on the whole more and more. And the man begins to be unsure about his formerly definitely non-love feelings for this strange and not too pretty but still quite complex and in many ways brave and in all ways certainly very interesting Thermos woman, and so his whole love-situation gets vastly more complicated than it’s ever been before.”

  “Listen, would you like a Canadian Club? I can get Jennifer to bring you a Canadian Club.”

  “Not too tasty with gum, I’m afraid, of which I would however like another piece.”

  “Coming right up.”

  “And so things are complicated, and the man earns the Thermos woman’s trust more and more, and finally one night she brings him to her family’s home in Yonkers, for a family get-together and dinner, and the man meets her whole family, and he knows right away something’s up, because they all have scarves around their necks, and they’re clearly extremely on edge about there being an outsider in their midst, but anyway they all sit around the living room for a while, in uncomfortable silence, with cocktails, and Cokes for the little kids, and then they sit down to dinner, and right before they all sit down, the Thermos woman looks significantly at the man, and then at her father, and then in a gesture of letting the family know she’s clued the man into her secret condition and initiated some kind of nascent emotional connection, she undoes her scarf and throws it aside, and her tree toad gives a little chirrup, and there’s a moment of incredibly tense silence, and then the father slowly undoes and discards his scarf, too, and in the pit in the left side of his neck there’s a mottle-throated fan-wing moth, and then the whole rest of the family undo their scarves, too, and they all have little animals living in pits in their necks: the mother has a narrow-tailed salamander, one brother has a driver ant, one sister has a wolf spider, another brother has an axolotl, one of the little children has a sod webworm. Et cetera et cetera.”

  “I think I feel the need for context again.”

  “Well, the father explains to the man, as the family is sitting around the table, eating, and also feeding their respective neck-tenants little morsels off the tips of their fingers, that their family is from an ancient and narratively unspecified area in Eastern Europe, in which area the people have always stood in really ambiguous relations to the world outside them, and that the area’s families were internally fiercely l
oyal, and their members were intimately and thoroughly connected with one another, but that the family units themselves were fiercely independent, and tended to view just about all non-family-members as outsiders, and didn’t connect with them, and that the tiny animals in their necks, which specific animal-types used to be unique to each family and the same for each member of a particular family, in the old days, were symbols of this difference from and non-connection with the rest of the outside world. But then the father goes on to say that these days inbreeding and the passage of time were making the animal-types in the necks of the family-members different, and that also, regrettably, some younger members of the fiercely loyal families were now inclined to resent the secrecy and non-connection with the world that having animals in their necks required and entitled them to, and that some members of his own family had unfortunately given him to understand that they weren’t entirely happy about the situation. And here he and all the other members of the family stop eating and glare at the Thermos woman, there in her glasses, who is silently trying to feed her tree toad a bit of pot roast off the tip of her finger. And the man’s heart just about breaks with pity for the Thermos woman, who so clearly now stands in such an ambiguous relation to everything and everyone around her, and his heart almost breaks, and he also realizes in an epiphany-ish flash that he has sort of fallen in love with the Thermos woman, in a way, though not in the way he’d fallen for any of the uncountable number of women he’d fallen in love with before.”

  “Look down a second, if it doesn’t hurt your ear. I think we’re over Pennsylvania. I thought I saw a hex sign on a barn roof. We’re past Lake Erie, at least.”

  “Thank God. Drowning in sludge is one of my special horrors.”

  “....”

  “And so things are complicated, enormously complicated, and the man feels he’s now experiencing the kind of strong discriminating love the love therapist had been recommending, so he’s pleased, and also maybe I neglected to mention he’s long since toned down his head-over-heels-in-love-in-public inclinations, things are now much more under control, and with all his professional weight-measure experience, plus his new-found amorous restraint, he manages to land a fairly good job with a company that makes scales, and he’s doing pretty well, although he does miss that exciting head-busting rush of hot feeling he used to get from being madly, passionately, non-discriminatingly in love. But the Thermos woman is clearly undergoing even more complicated changes and feelings than the man; she’s obviously fallen in love with him, and her nascent connection with him is obviously arousing in her a desire to begin to connect emotionally with the entire outside world, and she gets more concerned with and attentive to her own appearance; she loses more weight, and buys contact lenses to replace the Coke-bottle glasses, and gets a perm, and there’s still of course the problem of chinlessness and leg-length, but still. But most of all she now noticeably begins to perceive the green tree toad in the pit in her neck as a definite problem, and ceases to identify herelf with it and non-connection, and begins instead to identify herself with herself and connection. But now her perception of the tiny toad as a definite problem, which is, remember, a function of her new world view and desire to connect, now paradoxically causes her enormous grief and distress, because, now that she feels a bit connected to the world, she no longer feels that she wants to stay in shadow and present only profiles—so far so good—but that now even though she doesn’t want to hide away she feels more than ever as though she ought to, because she’s got a reptile living in a pit in her neck, after all, and is to that extent alienated and different and comparatively disgusting, with respect to the world she now wants to connect with.”

  “Aren’t tree toads amphibians, really?”

  “Wise-ass. Amphibian in a pit in her neck. But she suddenly and ominously gets even more fanatical about being in shadow and wearing the scarves, even though these are obviously alienating things: the more she wants to be accepted by the world, the more she’s beaten back by her heightened perception of her own difference, amphibian-tenant-wise. She becomes absolutely obsessed with the green tree toad, and gives it a really hard time with her fingernail, and cries, and tells the man she hates the toad, and the man tries to cheer her up by taking her out dancing at a nightclub that has lots of shadows. Gum, please.”

  “...”

  “And things get worse, and the Thermos woman is now drinking a lot, sitting in her apartment, and as she’s drinking, the man will look at her sadly, as he sits nearby working on the design for a scale; and the tree toad, when it’s not busy getting flicked by a fingernail, will look at the man and blink sadly, from the lower lid up, there in the pit in the Thermos woman’s neck.”

  “....”

  “And now, disastrously, it’s late April. It’s the height of spring, almost. Have you ever been around someplace that has tree toads, in the spring, Lenore?”

  “Oh, no. ”

  “They sing. It’s involuntary. It’s instinctive. They sing and chirrup like mad. And this, I rather like to think, is why the tree toad looked sadly at the man as the man was looking sadly at the drinking Thermos woman: the tree toad has its own nature to be true to, too. The toad’s maybe aware that its singing will have a disastrous effect on the Thermos woman, right now, because whereas in the past she always just used to keep herself hidden away, in the spring, in the singing season, now she’s clearly torn by strong desires to connect, to be a part of the world. And so maybe the tree toad knows it’s hurting the Thermos woman, maybe irreparably, by chirruping like mad, but what can it do? And the singing clearly drives the Thermos woman absolutely insane with frustration and horror, and her urges both to connect and to hide away in shadow are tearing at her like hell, and it’s all pathetic, and also, as should by now be apparent, more than a little ominous.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “And one day, not long after the toad began singing in the apartment, as the air is described as getting soft and sweet and tinged with gentle promises of warmth, with a flowery smell all around, even in New York City, the man gets a call at work from the Thermos woman’s father, in Yonkers: it seems that the Thermos woman had thrown herself in front of the subway and killed herself that morning in a truly horrible way.”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “And the man is obviously incredibly upset, and doesn’t even thank the father for calling him, even though it was quite a thing for the Eastern European father to do, what with the man being an outsider, et cetera, and so but the man is incredibly upset, and doesn’t even go to the funeral, he’s so frantic, and he discovers now—the hard way—that he really was connected to the Thermos woman, really and truly, deeply and significantly, and that the severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection, and he wallows in grief, and also disastrously his old love problem immediately comes roaring back stronger than ever, and the man is falling passionately in love with anything with a pulse, practically, and now, disastrously, men as well as women, and he’s perceived as a homosexual, and starts getting regularly beaten up at work, and then he loses his job when he tells his supervisor he’s in love with him, and he’s back out wandering the streets, and now he starts falling in love with children, too, which is obviously frowned upon by society, and he commits some gross though of course involuntary indiscretions, and gets arrested, and thrown in jail overnight, and he’s in a truly horrible way, and he curses the love therapist for even suggesting that he try to love with his discriminating-love-faculty.”

  “May I please ask a question?”

  “Yes. ”

  “Why didn’t the Thermos woman just take the tree toad out of her neck and put it in a coffee can or something?”

  “A, the implication is that the only way the animal-in-neck people can rid themselves of the animals in their necks is to die, see for instance the subway, and b, you’re totally, completely missing what I at any rate perceive to be the point of the story.”
/>   “....”

  “And the man is in a horrible way, and his old love problem is raging, together with and compounded by his continued grief at the severed Thermos-woman-connection, and his desire never ever to connect again, which desire itself stands in a troublingly ambiguous and bad-way-producing relation to the original love problem. And so things are just horrible. And they go on this way for about a week, and then one night in May the man is lying totally overcome by grief and by his roughly twenty-five fallings in love and run-ins with the police that day, and he’s almost out of his mind, lying in a very bad way there on the rug of his apartment, and suddenly there’s an impossibly tiny knock at the apartment door.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh, no’?”

  “....”

  “Well he opens the door, and there on the floor of the hall outside his apartment is the Thermos woman’s tiny delicate pale-green tree toad, blinking up at him, from the lower eyelid up, with its left rear foot flattened and trailing way behind it and obviously hurt, no doubt we’re to assume from the subway episode, which episode however the toad at least seemed to have survived.”

  “Wow.”

  “And the story ends with the man, bleary-eyed and punchy from grief and love and connection-ambiguity, at the door, staring down at the tiny pale-green tree toad, which is still simply looking up at him, blinking sadly in reverse, and giving a few tentative little chirrups. And they’re just there in the hall looking at each other as the story ends.”