The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  The Reverend shook Lang’s hand without looking at him. He stared into Lenore’s eyes. Lenore could smell his breath. “Miss Beadsman, you are in a position to aid us in delivering to the American people and to the world the Lord’s true contemporary message, through His chosen feathered vehicle.”

  “Look, I’m afraid I just don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Lenore. “There’s a pretty troubling explanation for Vlad’s talking, I’m afraid, that shouldn‘t—”

  “The only even remotely problematic problem is that the Lord is moving in such very mysterious ways through your pet that the miraculous little thing isn’t saying quite what requires to be said, quite as quickly as he might, given the extreme expense involved in delivering the message of the Lord these days,”said the Reverend. “The bird in its secular aspect seems to be so understandably caught up in the ecstasy of the Lord’s verbal presence within him that he goes far beyond what actually needs and is proper to be said, given the import of the mission.”

  “Little fucker sounds pretty healthy to me,” said Vlad the Impaler, crunching a sunflower seed.

  “A case in point,” the Reverend said solemnly to Lenore. “What you find yourself in a position to do is to help the bird deliver the message intended and required. His next line in the relevant initial message is, ‘All contributing subscriptions are tax-deductible.’ ” The Reverend’s smile reached almost to his ears. “If you could simply use your privileged position to reemphasize to the bird the vital importance of his mission, and prompt him to deliver the lines he’s directed by our Father through me to deliver, and also perhaps get him to stop biting the makeup-man ...” Sykes gestured toward a pale man with a bandaged hand.

  “I still don’t get it,” said Lenore.

  “May I, Reverend?” Candy said, trying to ignore something Lang was whispering into her ear.

  “By all means.” Sykes folded his arms and tapped a pointed boot on the floor. The director looked at his watch.

  “What apparently happened was that Mrs. Tissaw was in here dusting,” Candy said, “two days ago, the day you went right from the switchboard to Clarice’s and then I guess to Rick‘s, ’cause you sure weren’t around, and I was out too, because Nick Allied and I finally ...”

  “Ahem,” said the Reverend.

  “Anyway,” Candy said, “Mrs. Tissaw was in here, and she heard the little ... the bird, and he I guess was saying religious stuff ...”

  “Of the profoundest importance,” Sykes added.

  “... and she just had a complete spasm, from excitement, and she called ‘Real People,’ to try to get them to come have a look at him, because he’d supposedly been squawking something about ‘Real People’ ...”

  “Well Candy you know how come he was saying that,” Lenore said.

  “We all know tonight,” said Sykes, nodding solemnly. Affirmation-noise swelled from the cigarette smoke above the technicians’ heads.

  Candy rolled her eyes. “And I guess ‘Real People’ figured he wasn’t their cup of tea, weird-mixture-of-Biblical-and-obscene-stuff-wise, but the guy in charge told the guy on the phone to tell her to call CBN ...”

  “Which is of course me,” Sykes said.

  “And she did, and they flew somebody out here from the Reverend’s office,” Candy said. “And this was yesterday, when you were obviously totally out of town, and your Dad’s office said your brother didn’t have a phone, and that you were unreachable.”

  “LaVache and his stupid lymph node,” muttered Lenore.

  “But anyway the guy came and had a look, and I guess Vlad was just in incredible form, that day.”

  “As was of course meant from the beginning to be,” said the Reverend.

  “And but anyway the guy from ‘Partners With God Club’ saw him, and I guess just did a spiritual back-flip, and spasmed his way over to the phone, with Mrs. Tissaw like wringing her hands for joy beside him ...”

  “No need to embellish, Cindy,” said Sykes, looking with annoyance over at Wang-Dang Lang, who was at the cage, poking at Vlad the Impaler through the bars with a section of Styrofoam cup, while Vlad eyed him beadily.

  “And first the guy tried to call me, at work, to get me to try to call you, at Mrs. Tissaw’s surprisingly considerate suggestion, but I guess they never could get through, because the phone-situation at F and V is still really biting the big wazoo ...”

  “Ahem,” said Sykes.

  “But obviously if you were phoneless I wouldn’t have been able to reach you anyway, but anyway they tried, and then the guy of course called ‘Partners With God Club’ headquarters, and more or less told Father Sykes the story, and I guess they all decided old Vlad was much hotter stuff than just for ’Real Religious People’ or whatever, and the Reverend hightailed it up here from Atlanta ... ”

  “And the rest you can of course glean from what you see and feel here tonight,” said Sykes. “So then, if you’ll simply indicate to the bird its appointed lines, we can—”

  “So it looks like Mrs. Tissaw is who I ought to talk to,” Lenore said. “Because if she thinks she can just put a drugged bird on television, without even—”

  “Drugged with the intoxicating overdue message of the very Lord Himself!” Sykes cried. Lang suddenly yelled as Vlad latched onto his finger. The sound-man rushed over to get him loose.

  “So where is Mrs. Tissaw, is the big question,” said Lenore. “Maybe I could grab a quick shower, and then she and I could just sit down, and—”

  “Mrs. Tissaw is out shopping,” Sykes beamed.

  “Father Sykes’s agent gave her a really disturbing amount of money, as like an advance,” said Candy.

  “We sow to reap, here in America,” Sykes said, drawing the loudest affirmation yet from the technicians.

  “She’s out buying clothes, and girdles, and getting her hair tinted,” Candy said. “She’s getting ready to take Vlad the Impaler down to Atlanta with the Father.”

  “She’s going to what?”

  “The bird will be the first cohost in the history of the ‘Partners With God Club’!” Sykes cried, pointing a finger at the ceiling. Lang, who was back by Candy with a Kleenex around his finger, looked up to see what Sykes was pointing at.

  “Sow to reap!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler.

  “Mrs. Tissaw says she gets the bird temporarily in return for the chewed wall, and damage from Vlad pooping on the floor, which she says is more damage than you can pay for,” said Candy. “So she says she’ll temporarily just take Vlad instead. Her husband’s backing her up, just to get her out of town for a while, I think.”

  “The bird belongs to the ages, now,” the Reverend said quietly.

  “Not legally, though, if you guys want to have things get unpleasant,” Candy said, putting her arm around Lenore, who continued to edge toward the door.

  “Of course, Mrs. Simpson needn’t come at all, if you wish as would be only natural to accompany the chosen vehicle yourself into the new epoch it’s made possible,” Sykes said to Lenore.

  “Does this mean I don’t get the apartment?” said Lang.

  “Bathroom,” Lenore squeaked faintly in Candy’s ear.

  “All contributing subscriptions are deductible! Like this!” said Vlad the Impaler.

  “At last!” Sykes cried. He flew to the cage.

  “Action!” yelled the director.

  “Lay your sleeping head, my deductible love!”

  “Miss Beaksman, hear the mandate!” thundered Sykes. The camera zoomed in, filling everything.

  The hallway was cool and empty, after her room. Lenore wedged the bathroom door shut with the toe of a sneaker. She looked at the painted parrots on the shower curtain.

  “You say one word, and there’s going to be lunging like nobody’s ever seen.”

  13

  1990

  “So you’re upset, then.”

  “I think I’m too tired to be upset. I don’t know why I’m so tired.”

  “Like your brother.�
�

  “Which brother? The one who’s flapped all the time, or the anorexic one who we’ve had to watch go around the bend for years and now just disappears and is maybe dead for all I know? I just want to sleep. Just put your arm ... like that. Thank you.”

  “I thought you said the thing with John was that he was so reluctant to be in any way involved with anything’s death that he usually refused to eat, since every eating entails a death. That’s not anorexia.”

  “It is, sort of, if you think about it.”

  “And that he had a horizontal proof of the indisputability of the proposition that one should never kill, for whatever reason.”

  “A diagonal proof.”

  “Diagonal proof.”

  “I guess.”

  “He ... want it published, maybe?”

  “I doubt he ever wrote it down, since that would involve paper, and so trees, et cetera.”

  “Quite a fellow. A certain nobility.”

  “I don’t really even know him. He’s like this stranger who drops in from Auschwitz every Christmas. He’s also lately been very weirdly religious. He told me he wants to write this book arguing that Christianity is the universe’s way of punishing itself, that what Christianity is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an unperformable service.”

  “Obvious problems involved in actually writing the thing, of course.”

  “I think I’m even more worried about John than I am about Lenore.”

  “I certainly know one particular feathered animal I wouldn’t mind him eating.”

  “That’s not even a tiny bit funny, Rick.”

  “I’m sorry. To be honest, though, I think it will be good for you, to have the bird out of your hair, so to speak, until this nursing-home and thin-brother business gets cleared up.”

  “Poor Vlad the Impaler. All he ever wanted was a mirror and some food and a dish to go to the bathroom in.”

  “A dish he used with distressing infrequency, remember.”

  “I just can’t believe Mrs. Tissaw was saying he’d done thousands of dollars of damage to the room. That’s just a lie. She was standing there lying to me.”

  “She’s clearly in some sort of religious ecstasy. People in religious ecstasies put live snakes in their mouths. Mate with the eyesockets of rotting skulls. Smear themselves with dung. Bird-damage delusions are small potatoes.”

  “I’ve never had a shower feel any better than that shower did.”

  “You must have been in there quite a while, for them to have time to spirit the bird away before you returned.”

  “No one spirited anyone away. They just had him down in a van. And actually I guess that was sort of good, because it at least in a way took the decision out of my hands, right then. So I didn’t have to make any split-second decisions with those white-hot TV lights on me, which would have been spasm city.”

  “But you laid down the law that it’s just for a month.”

  “Candy and I squeaked faintly that it’s just for thirty shows as they all peeled away in their dumb vans, with the antennas. I told Mrs. Tissaw that if it’s more than a month without my permission I’ll take legal action. But I don’t think she was too impressed.”

  “We will take action, if necessary. We can use that man F and V has on retainer. God knows he owes us some sort of work for his fee. Or I’ll get us one on our own, and pay for it. The bird is after all legally mine, remember.”

  “What do you mean? You gave him to me for Christmas. I said that was the best Christmas present I’d ever gotten, remember?”

  “And plus you hate Vlad the Impaler. You make that clear all the time.”

  “I’ll admit I regret buying him for you. But, legally speaking, I have the receipt from Fuss ‘n’ Feathers pet shop. And, more to the point, as you may recall, on the relevant Christmas I did give you what you asked for, while you did not give me what I asked for. Had there been some sort of emotionally fulfilling Christmas exchange, that would have been one thing. As it was, it was one-sided. I never received my gift. Thus in some emotional dash legal deep sense the bird remains technically mine.”

  “You said you liked the beret I gave you.”

  “But it’s not what I asked for.”

  “Look, we’ve been through this. I told you I just won’t do that stuff. If you cared in any non-creepy way, you’d only want to do what I want to do. And I don’t want to be tied up, and I’m sure not going to hit your bottom with any paddles. It’s just sick.”

  “You don’t understand. Any possible sickness is obviated by the motivation behind it, as tried—”

  “Incredibly dangerous territory, Rick. Let’s abort.”

  “If you really loved me you’d let me.”

  “That’s not even going to get dignified.”

  “You do love me.”

  “Let’s not do this.”

  “ ....”

  “....”

  “Anyway, the point is that my emotional and economic and legal resources are behind you all the way. As it were. And don’t think this has anything to do with any royalties. You can keep all the royalties Swaggert promised you, though I must say I think the figure’s got to be a little inflated.”

  “Sykes.”

  “Sykes. He really wore white leather, with letters on the chest?”

  “It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so obscene. And I hated his cowboy boots.”

  “Footwear, again.”

  “And Lang was being incredibly obnoxious to Candy, I thought. His tongue was swinging down around his knees, practically. God knows what all happened after we dropped him back off.”

  “Nothing she won’t want to happen.”

  “You’re mean. Anyway she’s snagged the president of Allied Sausage Casings himself, now, she told me. Nick Allied. She finally bagged him, she said. She wore that violet dress about a week in a row. That dress is way too small for her.”

  “And of course when push comes to shove Lang is married, as well, to your—”

  “The worst thing about the Vlad thing is going to be the embarrassment. The money, well I don’t know what to think about any money-promises. But Sykes’s career is going to be shot for sure when Dad and Neil Obstat come out with the pineal food and the talking business becomes clear and people make the connection that he’s my bird, and I’m related to Dad. And eventually the police are just going to have to get called about Gramma, and the other residents and staff, and then there’ll be newspapers. It’s going to look like Sykes tried to put something over on all those poor people who like send his club their medicine money every week so they can be partners with God or whatever. It’s going to look like I maybe helped him perpetrate a fraud.”

  “You tried to tell him, Lenore.”

  “It was totally impossible. He was incapable of listening. I’d mention the word ‘father,’ and off he’d go, stomping his foot and pointing his finger at the ceiling. And he had horrible breath. I think maybe the worst breath I’ve ever smelled, on anybody. He absolutely dwarfed ludith, who was the previous champion.”

  “I loathe Prietht.”

  “....”

  “At least Lang got the room. He’ll be of help to me.”

  “And you know I’m going to miss him. I liked bitching about his mirror with Candy. I didn’t mind vacuuming his seeds and his gunk. And I really didn’t even mind hearing him say obscene stuff. His talking was almost sort of nice.”

  “What are your thoughts on Lang, overall?”

  “Although there was something cruel about it—it was almost like Gramma was being deliberately cruel. She got me all used to hearing her talk to me all the time ...”

  “He’s not what we’re used to, but I do feel affinities.”

  “... and then off she goes, and takes off, and won’t talk to me, but fixes it so that now Vlad talks to me, except all Vlad can really do is repeat what I say to him, and even that not too well ...”

  “Not precisely sure why I feel aff
inities, but I do. Two inside outsiders ...”

  “... so that it’s like I’m sort of talking to myself, alone, now, except even more so, because there’s now this little feathered pseudo-myself outside me that constantly reminds me it’s just myself I’m talking to, only.”

  “Except of course not anymore, now, right? Thanks to Mrs. Tissaw and the evangelist.”

  “I guess so.”

  “And what am I, Lenore, in terms of talking? Am I a mannequin? Am I a Bloemker-doll?”

  “You know what I mean, Rick. I’m grateful for you. You know I am.”

  “So you do love me, then. I do have you, after all.”

  “You know I hate this ‘having’ stuff.”

  “So I’ll settle for the fact that you love me.”

  “All right, you can settle for it.”

  “So you do love me.”

  “What did I just say?”

  “What did you just say, Lenore? As usual I’m really not sure. I certainly didn’t hear the word ‘love’ exit your mouth.”

  “Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really do what one says. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.”

  “You and Gramma Lenore should get together, is who should get together. I’m sure she’d hit you with all the paddles you want. Bats, mallets, boards with nails in them ...”

  “For Christ’s sake, Lenore.”

  “I do the best I can, Rick.”

  “So you do love me.”

  “I do the best I can.”

  “Meaning exactly what?”

  “....”

  “So then why do you love me?”

  “Oh, gee. I’d really rather not do this now.”

  “No, I’m serious, Lenore, why? On the basis of what? I need to know, so that I might try desperately to reinforce those features of me on the basis of which you love me. So that I can have you inside myself, for all time.”

  “You could just stop the having-talk, for one thing.”

  “Please, please. Oh, please.”