The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  “Ummm ... ”

  “Rick just better be something entirely else, in his own right, is all I can say,” said Candy.

  Lenore looked at her. “Except I thought you said Mr. Allied was unattainable, hence part of the charm. I thought you said he was engaged to some Australian lady.”

  Candy laughed and drew on her cigarette, made an oval in the air and speared it. “I sense a sudden shift in the conversation. Well I just saw my big chance, is all. At a company party three days ago. Was it three? When you were in the Heights? I used Clint mercilessly to get to the executive side of the room. The violet dress came through. It got Nick, over hors d‘oeuvres. The dress did it. He was helpless. The dress was awesome.”

  “You’re awesome, is who’s awesome.”

  “Vidi, vici, veni, is all I can say,” said Candy. “Which is what you could say, too, with a really spectacular specimen, if you wanted. I’d think about it.”

  “Rick and I are supposed to be in love, you forget,” Lenore said quietly, back at her wrist.

  “What would Vlad the Impaler have to say to that, I wonder,” said Candy. She put out her cigarette in the middle of Yang.

  “What a bitch,” Peter Abbott said, emerging stiffly from beneath the console.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Candy.

  “I’m gonna have some words for those tunnel drips when they get back, is all I can say,” said Peter. He bent and with a grunt dragged an enormous box of exotic tools and cables and wires out from under the white counter. Began arranging items on the box’s shelves.

  “I hardly even dare to hope that you just fixed our lines,” said Lenore. The console began to beep the minute Peter plugged it back in; Candy took the call.

  Peter was hooking some things onto his belt. “What I’ve done here is to take the first step in Interactive Cable’s plan to restore service and get you some satisfaction.”

  “He didn’t fix anything,” Candy shot over. “He just attached something weird and deeply Freudian to the underside of the console, so they can do a tunnel-test or something. In case you’re in any doubt about the phones, I just talked to a Bambi’s Den of Discipline customer wanting to know about inflatable dolls.”

  “Inflatable dolls?”

  “The first step in a really expensive but ingenious plan Mr. Sludgeman came up with,” Peter Abbott was continuing, bent over his box on the counter. “We’re gonna do tunnel-tests. We’re gonna test your tunnel like nobody’s business.”

  “Big whiff,” said Candy Mandible.

  “Hey, lady, it is a big whiff,” Peter said. “A really big and nasty whiff, if you’re the one that’s gotta do it. Try to imagine having to test a whole nervous system by trying to stick all sorts of shit in the nerves.”

  “You are really the master of the yummy image,” said Lenore.

  “Just tell your supervisor, that hen lady, so I don’t have to tell her, ‘cause she scares the stuffing right out of this guy,” said Peter Abbott, jingling his belt nervously, “that what we’re doin’ is hooking all the consoles that utilize lines in your tunnel, the one under this building, hooking all the consoles into this network of testing cable, this cable that we’re gonna feed into the tunnel, to test it. If it’s one of the consoles that’s infecting all the others, we’re gonna know. If it’s something in the tunnel infecting all you guys, we’ll know. We’re gonna like feel the tunnel’s pulse.”

  “Feel the pulse of a nerve?”

  “Testing’s gonna hopefully start in a few days,” Peter said, picking up the last of his things and hooking them onto his belt. Lenore bent and saw a brightly colored spaghetti of new wires leading down from the base of the console to a plug in the cubicle’s floor. The wires pulsed with a strange sort of violet light.

  “That stuff looks really hard to put in,” she said to Peter.

  Peter turned and stared into her eyes. Lenore looked back innocently. Peter sighed. “Yeah, it’s a bitch. The tests can’t start till I get all you guys hooked into the test circuit. It’s a son of a bitch. I can only work so fast, and it’s just me, and I’m only gettin’ scale for it.”

  “Well, we certainly don’t want to keep you,” Candy said without looking up, handling a request for a wheel of Stilton.

  “I’ll see ya. I gotta go insert the exact same stuff over at Bambi’s Den of Discipline now,” Peter said, moving toward the door of the cubicle. “You take it easy.”

  “Happy inserting,” said Candy. The jingle of Peter’s belt receded.

  “Peter, goodbye!” called Judith Prietht, sitting up a bit to get her head over the top of the cubicle. Peter was gone. The shadow in the huge lobby had almost seemed to move toward him to take him, Lenore saw.

  “I’m going to talk to Rick about getting some smaller windows in this lobby,” she said to Candy. “This shadow stuff is starting to really give me the creeps. I don’t like the way the shadow is handling people’s exits.”

  “You know who you have to talk to about the Building.” Candy smiled, winked at Lenore, gestured at the flowered wreath on the wastebasket. “The big fromage. El Grandé Yango.”

  “Not even potentially funny. Humor not even possible in that.”

  Candy laughed and bent to the console.

  /b/

  “So is all clear, here?”

  “No problem I can see, R.V.”

  “Can’t possibly take more than two or three months.”

  “Less, if we haul ass.”

  “If this is ready for distribution by Thanksgiving we’re supposedly in line for a mammoth bonus.”

  “Kick-ass.”

  “So then, no questions?”

  “None I can see, except maybe who that skeleton guy is, out front.”

  “Who?”

  “That skeleton guy, out front, in the sidewalk, under that mesh?”

  “Oh. Well that’s Moses Cleaveland, Andrew.”

  “Who?”

  “General Moses Cleaveland, the founder of the city of Cleveland.”

  “The founder of the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a ‘Reserved Parking’ sign sticking out of his eye?”

  “What shall we say? Shall we say that reserved parking respects no man?”

  “Say whatever you want. Just seems a tinch disrespectful, is all.”

  “Fits with the whole concept, then.” “....”

  /c/

  8 September

  Vance.

  Is there any skin, any substance at all, softer than the cheek of a young child as it yields under a late-afternoon caress at the swimming pool? When the child is caped in a towel, thin calves emerging whitely and trailing away into feet with their temporary stains. The skin is so soft, all defenses, all color washed away, white as shell, loose, lips bright red tinged with blue, trembling; the child shivers, in the summer, at the pool, as the sun hints at becoming only implicit, and the hard-haired mothers stare without pity. And the trembling skin is almost translucent, new.

  The pool gives birth to clean new red-eyed children, trembling in cotton capes, and then the slightest wetting of any part of the renewed white skin sends up into space a rebirth of the fragrance of rebirth, a clean that survives until the next bath. The new children are to kiss. And the red sun lowers to melt into the blue bath of clean chlorine, and the red-eyed children are lifted out and leave themselves in prints on the paved deck, shrinking. And suntan oil yields to the sterile scent of a new start, at the end of the day, always a new start. And, as with every newness, ears that pain, and eyes that sting and water.

  “Lenore, where are you?” Fieldbinder wrote in his journal, a Batman notebook lifted from the toychest of his absent son. “Evelyn, where are you? Bring my Plain Dealer when you come. ”

  I’ve had a look at the little bastard who apparently has Lenore’s picture in his wallet. He is in the Stonecipheco staff directory sent me by the phenomenally thorough Mr. Rummage. This Obstat person, this person who went to high school with Lenore, and whose f
ather was a force behind our absurd Desert and is now in Washington aspiring to some greater sillinesses; this young Obstat who is himself an improbable force behind this whole increasingly troubling Corfu-food project. I’ve had a look at him, here in the directory, and I feel ever so much better. Looks to be almost as short as I, and thin, eminently breakable, with watery colorless hair retreating from a head positively dominated and defined by the shape of the skull underneath. The skin stretched tight over that skull. A skull that seems to me perhaps even to threaten to burst through and end the whole charade. Yecch.

  So a head the shape of a skull. And tiny little lifeless brown eyes, eyes like little anuses.

  I have nothing to fear from an anus-eyed skull-head.

  He and Lang are apparently lunching. He and Lang enjoy some sort of connection through Industrial Desert Design. Lang came close to insinuating that he had had congress with Mandible last night, this morning. I must approach him carefully on the subject of the reversal. My ears still hurt me, from the flight, and there are sounds when I swallow.

  For once Fieldbinder was actually looking forward to seeing his pathetic psychologist, Dr. J____, with his ridiculous moving chairs, the next day. Fieldbinder had been having a dream that was troubling him a lot. that was troubling him no end.

  My father was a large, soft estate attorney who dressed exclusively in flannel in his off-hours. Broad and pale. With boots. And a small boy’s persistent love for throwing stones into deep, empty places, and listening. He spanked. He was one of those parents who spanked. I never once laid an angry hand to Vance Vigorous’s bottom. Maybe that is part of the trouble.

  It is a windy day. Clouds scud. The wind whips at Lake Erie, the shaggy lake. My office window is sliced neatly in black. Half. In the lit half, the wind makes Lake Erie shaggy. In the shadow-half it all looks like rotten mayonnaise, there in the distance, squelching brown and white between the pudgy fingers of the wind. What a hideous view.

  And where on earth does Norman Bombardini get off putting a sign through the eye of the founder of Cleveland?

  Ten minutes, at the outside. I’ll simply keep time on the wall of my office. When the shadow reaches the diploma, she will be here.

  /d/

  “Is this place great or what?” Neil Obstat, Jr. was saying to Wang-Dang Lang. “Just wait. The bartender sticks his thumb in his eye once an hour. It’s in his contract.”

  “And look at the gazongas on that Ginger,” Lang said, tilting his beer bottle. “Never seen any shit like this.”

  “We can come back here tonight,” said Obstat. “They’ve got even wilder shit at night. Cleveland at night can get pretty wild.” He sucked at his Twizzler. “Cleveland gets underrated. You guys in the East forget that significant cultural stuff goes on in the Midwest.”

  “Nothing insignificant about those gazongas, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  Lang and Obstat were in Gilligan’s Isle. It was almost lunchtime. This was lunch. Lang had spent the morning with Rick Vigorous, determining that he would be able to do all his translation work in a week, if he worked at all hard. Lang was looking forward to the next three months. He’d been given the rest of the day off. He’d called Neil Obstat the minute he’d happened to see Rick Vigorous staring at Obstat’s picture in some of the material from Stonecipheco.

  “I can’t get over seeing you again, and here in Cleveland,” Obstat was saying. They were at the Professor’s thumb. “And you say you’re not in deserts anymore.”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Temporarily. You’ve been doing accounting? Just can’t see you as an accountant, big guy.”

  “The story behind that has to do with this girl who was just such hot shit that I let her run the show, for a bit of time,” Lang said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the plastic bench.

  “Not Lenore Beadsman.”

  “No, course not Lenore Beadsman.” Lang signalled for another beer, and the bartender over there in his white hat gave him a thumbs-up. “My wife,” Lang said to Obstat. “The girl who’s my wife.”

  “Really hot, huh?”

  “Don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Sure.” Obstat sipped his Twizzler. “But you mentioned something about Lenore Beadsman, when you called.”

  “Did I?”

  “Positive.”

  “Huh. Well she works at the place I’m workin’ at, translating your wild shit for you.”

  “Stuff is wild, isn’t it?” Obstat squirmed on his seat. “Boy I’m excited, is all I can say. This is the sort of thing a corporate chemist just dreams of. I thought I’d be spending all my time testing pH levels in creamed fruit.”

  “I just can’t believe the shit works. Does it really work at all like y‘all are havin’ us say in this ad?”

  “Really looks like it does, guy. The Chief has been ga-ga for months. Kids are talking months, maybe years before they would have, in limited tests. We’re talking not only eventual market domination, but a potentially really significant insight into the relation between nutrition and mental development, between what the body needs and the mind can do.”

  The bartender, coming over with Lang’s fourth beer, slipped on a strategically placed maraschino cherry and pitched headlong into Ginger’s chest. He missed his eye with his thumb, but did manage to crack his head nastily on the plastic table. Beer flew everywhere.

  Obstat laughed and clapped with everyone else, “Aww, Gilligan.” He bent and quickly tied the bartender’s shoelaces together.

  “What about my beer?” Lang was saying.

  “Coming right up,” the bartender murmured. He was on his feet and moving when the shoelaces got him. He somersaulted into and off of Mrs. Howell’s hair, ending up draped over her pince-nez.

  Obstat giggled.

  “Immature fucker,” Lang grinned.

  “Got to get into the spirit of the place.”

  Lang sucked off the last bit of beer in his bottle. “But you say you do know this Beadsman girl, then,” he said to Obstat.

  Obstat got serious. “Do I ever,” he said. “I went to high school with her, when we were kids. I’ve had a crush since I was this high. She’s maybe even a reason why I went to work for Stonecipheco. Unconscious or something. Except I had no idea she didn’t like her Dad and didn’t want to go into the Company. I’m pissed. I only got to see her in person again the other day, when we were all in the Chief’s office. The Chief is her Dad. And one of their relatives got us going on the whole pineal project, and now she’s trying to rip us off. But I can still pull it off. Except I think Lenore’s frigid. I made a bit of a dick of myself over her in school, and I was going for heavy eye contact, in the Chiefs office. But she always just looked right through me. I think she’s frigid.”

  Lang accepted another beer without looking up. “But hot, though, too.”

  Obstat fingered his tie. “Don’t know what it is about her, Wanger. The girl’s just always slayed me. The way she dresses, the not incidental gazonga factor. And her legs. The single most out-of-this. world pair of legs I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

  “I was noticin’ those legs,” Lang said, nodding.

  “I’ve had this wild fantasy, for who knows how long, about doing her out in the G.O.D.,” Obstat said, looking faraway. He looked back at Lang and blushed a bit. “You been back out there, lately, at all? I’ve been dying to go. I still remember when we planted cacti.”

  “We can go any time you want,” said Lang. “I’m gonna buy some sort of car for out here tomorrow, I decided. Lenore’s little boyfriend’s paying me like the money hurt his hand.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “This guy named Vigorous, owns the firm we’re at, or at least part of it.” Lang looked off over Obstat’s shoulder, at the Skipper.

  “I remember the Chief saying something to her about a Vigorous, in his office,” Obstat said, narrowing his little brown eyes. He dug at his Twizzler’s plastic pineapple jug with a straw.

  “He’s a interestin
g little dung beetle. Doublest chin I ever did see on a human being.” Lang drank deeply. “How’d he get hold of Lenore, I wonder, if she’s so all-fired hot as you say.”

  “There is no God in the universe, Wang-Dang,” Obstat said, shaking his big head.

  “So I keep getting told. Even though the girl herself owns this wild-ass bird that’s gonna be on religious TV, with padre Sykes, who’s my own personal Daddy’s favorite.” Lang held up a bandaged finger. “Little Fucker damn near took my digit off, yesterday.”

  “You were at Lenore’s house, with her bird?”

  Lang stared silently at Obstat.

  “Well, we know all about the bird thing,” Obstat said, looking away and shaking his head. “We’re shitting all kinds of different bricks over that one. We think what happened was this relative who got us going on the project slipped the thing a pineal mickey. Which means maybe they’re going around slipping it all over the place. Which means other companies could get hold of it. Which has the Chief shitting bricks, believe you me—that along with the fact that the retards in Jars have made something like three times as many jars as we need, or have lids for, even, so the Chief has to try to sell some jars to this chain of medical laboratories, and he‘s—”

  “This crap can make animals talk?” Lang interrupted.

  “Well, our understanding is the bird doesn’t talk, so much as just repeat.”

  “... remember Candy did say something about that.”

  “Who?”

  “They got peanuts in this bar, at all?”, Lang said. They both looked around. “What kind of self-respectin’ bar doesn’t have peanuts?”

  “Coconut I know they’ve got. It’s a mood place.”

  “Shit on fire.”

  “But anyway we don’t really know what it can do. You ought to hear some of these kids. They can sing like birds.”

  “Some joke.”