The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  “Her items can be moved with minimal trouble.”

  “That’s not exactly what I mean, Rick.”

  “Perhaps if you were a bit more explicit, then.”

  “Let’s just say it has to do with my husband and your fiancée.”

  “Lenore is not quite exactly my fiancée.”

  “And Andy might not be my husband much longer.”

  “What?”

  “Did you know he was taking Lenore to see gymnastics tonight? The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”

  “Here the answer is that I told Lenore to ask Lang to go to this function with her, I’m afraid. We had a tiff this morning and I told her to. I was being juvenile.”

  “But Andy told me last night he was taking her. He told me he didn’t want any ... any flak from me about it. That was last night, not this morning.”

  “More wine?”

  “Rick, can I ask do you really own that fabulous bird who’s lighting up religious television?”

  “If you’re referring to Vlad the Impaler, he is Lenore’s cockatiel.”

  “That’s not what I heard, emotionally speaking.”

  “What did Lenore say to you?”

  “Rick, should I be straight with you?”

  “You can certainly be straight about anything Lenore told you.”

  “I find you very attractive. I’m sorry if that offends you, but I always have, really, in a way, ever since I was little, and you and Daddy would walk around the lawn in tennis clothes, looking for weeds and drinking things that I’d get to drink the last bits of out in the kitchen.”

  “....”

  “I remember how wet the glasses got in the summer, the water ran down the sides. I remember that. And you were out there in tennis clothes. It was like a childhood crush.”

  “... restroom, very briefly, if you’ll perhaps excuse me for just a second, I’ll be ...”

  “And all it would take is one word from Lenore, or you, to CBN, to get me in the door as a voice on ‘The Partners With God Club.’ Rick, you could be an absolutely tremendous help to me.”

  “What about Andy? What would he think?”

  “What about Andy? What about Lenore?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “Look. I’m a professional voice. I’m the best young corporate voice on the market today. Listen to this. This is CBN. This is ‘The Partners With God Club,’ with your host, Father Hart Lee Sykes, and his bird Vlad. Stay tuned, please.”

  “That really is awfully good.”

  “Damn right it’s awfully good. I’m a professional.”

  “But the bird’s stage name is Ugolino, not Vlad.”

  “Ugolino?”

  “Yes. Sykes claims Vlad the Impaler revealed his own stage name on the plane to Atlanta, amid a divinely induced aura of glazed blue light. Sykes claims Ugolino is some Biblical character or other. He’s still trying to pin down the reference.”

  “And his bird, Ugolino. Please stay tuned.”

  “No argument about quality from this end, Mindy.”

  “You could call the Christian people tomorrow.”

  “Lenore and I have an uncancellable appointment during the day tomorrow.”

  “An appointment?”

  “You might say we are going to the dentist.”

  “You’re going to the Ohio Desert, mister. I know all about it. Andy told me all about it. He’s going, too.”

  “No he isn’t. That is not possible. Just Lenore and I are going. That’s a fact.”

  “Relax. So maybe he’s going on his own. Maybe he’s going with that creepy guy from the baby food company who helped him with the Desert a long time ago. All I know is he said he was going to wander and commune.”

  “Just Lenore and I are going with each other, though.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “....”

  “So OK. I’ll fill in for a while.”

  “Good. Good. Fine.”

  “It’ll be fun, and like you said I’ll be able to be around whoever I want to be near.”

  “Yes.”

  “Except there’s still the matter of training.”

  “Not a problem at all.”

  “I’ll need to be trained. Although I think you’ll find I can remember whatever you want me to remember. I have a great memory.”

  “Well certainly. Ms. Peahen ... gave me some introductory material for you, which I as a matter of fact have right here ... somewhere. Walinda is willing to install you temporarily at my say-so.”

  “Train me.”

  “Just listen to this: ‘A Phase III Centrex 28 console with a number 5 Crossbar has features which greatly aid the console operator in the efficient performance of his or her duties.’ ”

  “That isn’t what I meant, Rick.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I have an idea. Let’s go discuss training. I’m staying right over at the Marriott.”

  “....”

  “It’ll be fun and instructive. Trust me. Check please!”

  “Not entirely sure I even ...”

  “And but what are those reflections in the street, Rick? Look there, by the comer. The street lights up, and then it doesn’t. What’s going on?”

  “Neon. Gymnastic neon, I think.”

  “Neon. Isn’t that pretty. Off, on. One, two.”

  “You don’t find it a bit troubling?”

  “Not one tiny bit.”

  /g/

  “I don’t know,” Lang said. “I just don’t know what’s with these freakin’ locks.”

  “You have to jiggle the key sometimes. Sometimes Candy and I have to jiggle it.”

  “You’re telling me,” Lang muttered. He got the door open.

  Misty Schwartz’s second-floor apartment looked a lot like Lenore’s room, except it was a bit smaller, and had only one west window, and was definitely much tidier. Lenore looked around, then up at the ceiling that was her floor upstairs.

  “You must be very neat,” she said.

  Lang was hanging up their coats. “I was a boy, and I’d make my bed, and here’d come my Daddy with a Kennedy half-dollar, and he’d flip it onto the bed, and if the thing didn’t just bounce right back up onto my Daddy’s thumb with the Kennedy head back on top I had to make the sucker up all over again.”

  “Geez.”

  “Look, you maybe want a can of wine?” Lang said, making motions toward the door of the apartment. “I got some wine downstairs, in the Fridgidaire. It’s next to your soda water, you might have seen.”

  “A can of wine?”

  “They were on sale.”

  “Think I’ll pass,” Lenore said. She smoothed out her dress from the hairy ride on the Inner Belt in Lang’s new Trans Am. A plane came in very low now, and for a moment everything seemed to slow way down, in the noise. Lang stood by the door, looking at her. Lenore could see the way the bright light from Misty’s overhead fixture hit off Lang’s eyes, hitting and breaking up like there were chips of mint in his eyes. Lenore felt the back of her neck with her hand.

  As Lang smiled and turned to go she said, “Look, why not. I’ll try a can, or some of your can, whatever. Why not try some wine,” she said.

  “Well that’s just fine,” said Lang. “You can warm up that old TV, if you want.” He went out and left the door open.

  That old TV was a huge white sail of a screen that curved predator-like over a squat mahogany box. Inside the box a projector pointed like a gun at the screen’s breadbasket. Lenore hit a red button on the box, and an enormous head filled the screen, and there was volume. She hastily turned the thing off, and the screen drizzled and was blank again. The head had been someone from “Dallas,” though, Lenore was pretty sure.

  When someone has the same general kind of room you do, it’s usually very interesting to see what they’ve done with it. In Misty Schwartz’s case it wasn’t quite as interesting as it might have been. Lenore didn’t know Misty very well;
there had been some unpleasantness over a phone bill, on the Tissaws’ central kitchen phone, a few months ago, and Lenore had since been down to Misty’s place only once or twice, when she had to borrow necessities. Candy Mandible, who had borne the brunt of the phone bill unpleasantness, had said that the only reason Misty Schwartz wasn’t a lesbian was that she had never seen her own face in the mirror. Lenore thought that made no sense at all.

  Which didn’t keep her from really not caring too much for Misty’s apartment, though: a room in which lines of steel and a certain kind of grainy white burlap fabric predominated. There was a chair made of white burlap cushions collected and given shape in a frame of polished metal bars. A clear glass table with the same kind of metal frame. At right angles a small couch of the same material as the chair. On the wall a painting of a plain pale orange square against a white background; also a picture of Misty Schwartz and some man on a black statue of a sperm whale, the kind of whale with those jaws. The man was down lying in the jaws, with his arm back over his forehead like Pauline in Peril, and Misty was riding on the thing’s back, pretending to give it the whip, her mouth and eyes open wide. The photo was right flush up next to the painting. That was it for the walls, except for the television screen, which was pretty clearly a Lang addition.

  Lenore looked for evidence of Lang. By the bed—a bed tightly made; Lenore thought about trying the thing with the half-dollar and decided against it—was a duffel bag, stuffed full and with some of its contents vomited out onto the floor around it, which fact was partially hidden by a carefully folded blanket Lang had placed over most of the scene, as if he had been in a hurry. On the bed were some new shirts and white socks, all still in their store plastic. But that was all. On the whole it just didn’t seem like a Lang sort of room, to Lenore, at all.

  “This just doesn’t seem like your kind of room,” Lenore said to Lang when he came back with his hands full of cans and glasses. She watched him put everything down carefully on the glass table.

  “Well it’s a inexpensive room, and no bugs, and the neighbors are tough to beat.” Lang grinned.

  “I just mean decor-wise. I just can’t picture you really living in a room with Swedish furniture and paintings of squares.”

  Lang hunkered down on the couch and looked for a second over at the blank white television screen. “And so what kind of decor do you picture me in the middle of?” He closed his eyes and popped the top off a can of wine.

  Lenore ran her hand along the mantle of Misty’s cold fireplace. “Oh, I don’t know.” She smiled to herself. “Smoky leather. Leather chairs. A leopardy rug, with maybe a snarling bear’s head on it. Lascivious calendars and posters ...” She turned. “Maybe some expensive stereo stuff with its control-knobs all gleamy in an overhead light whose brightness you can adjust by turning a dial ...”

  Lang laughed and hit his knee with his fist. “Undamncanny. You just largely described my old college room.”

  “Did I.”

  “Forgot the animal heads on the walls, though.” Lang manipulated his eyebrows at her.

  Lenore laughed. “The animal heads,” she said. “How could I.”

  “And the mirrors on the ceiling ...” Lang looked down and came back up holding a big glass. “A little vino?”

  Lenore came over to the couch.

  “Couldn’t find any damn wine glasses, so I used these. I hope it’s OK to just take glasses, if we wash them out after.” They were Road Runner glasses that Candy Mandible had gotten in some sort of fast-food restaurant promotion.

  Lenore took a glass of wine. “It’s OK. They’re Candy’s. She’s pretty generous with her stuff. As I’m sure you know.” She sat down in the white chair, carefully pulling the back of her dress down so the skin of her legs wasn’t touching the burlap cushion. She crossed her legs.

  “I figured they were either hers or yours, or poor old Misty Schwartz‘s,” said Lang. “And I didn’t think that poor girl needs any glasses about now.” He leaned back on the couch. “Sent her a card, by the way, in the hospital, saying who I was, about the room, saying I hoped she got better and all.”

  “That was pretty nice of you,” Lenore said, picking the glass up from the table. The wine was yellow and sweet and so cold it hurt Lenore’s teeth. She put her glass back on the table and got a bit of a tooth-shiver from the sound of glass on glass, on top of the cold of the wine.

  “Nah,” said Lang, crossing his leg over so his ankle was on his knee and holding onto the ankle with one big hand. Lenore looked at his shoe and his hairy ankle.

  “Nah,” said Lang. “Just polite, is all. Melinda Sue had a similar thing happen to her, except I guess not as bad. Woman was still slathered to hell in Noxzema for a week.”

  “Sounds horrible.”

  “Should tell your sister to watch out, not get burnt.”

  “Will do.”

  “You like the wine?” Lang held his glass up toward the light fixture and tried to look at the wine around a cartoon of the coyote, who was wincing and holding a tiny umbrella over his head, apparently about to get clobbered by a boulder.

  “It sure is cold,” Lenore said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Lang. He looked over at the white screen again. “Should I just assume you don’t want to watch ‘Dallas,’ then?”

  “I turned it on for a second,” Lenore said. “It’s really not my show, which doesn’t mean it’s a bad show or anything. If you want to watch it, go ahead; I’ll watch just about anything, at least for a while.”

  “Nah,” said Lang. He took off his sportcoat and got up and hung it up. Lenore touched the sides of her hair. She could feel lines of heat going into her arms and legs, from the wine. She held her glass up to the light. On her glass the Road Runner was running, his legs were just a blur, and the curving road behind him looked used and limp and rubbery against the brown hills of some desert. There were cacti.

  “Can I maybe ask where all those lottery tickets come from, that are in your purse?” Lang said, sitting down again, now on the edge of the couch closest to Lenore’s chair, so they could see each other in the glass of the table when they looked down. He looked down at her. “Who’s the lottery-playing demon around here?”

  Lenore laughed. “Candy and I play a lot. I mean a lot.” She smoothed hair out of her eyes, and Lang watched her do it. “We play a lot. We have all these systems, using our birthdays and the letters in our names and stuff. Ohio has a really good lottery.”

  Lang drank. “Ever win at all?”

  “We will,” Lenore said. She laughed. “We started playing in college, just for fun, and I was a philosophy major, and for a joke we hit on this sort of syllogism, ostensibly proving we’d win—”

  “Syllogism?”

  “Yeah,” Lenore said. “Like a tiny little argument.” She smiled over at Lang and held up fingers. “One. Obviously somebody has to win the lottery. Two. I am somebody. Three. Therefore obviously I have to win the lottery.”

  “Shit on fire.”

  Lenore laughed.

  “So why does that seem like it works, when it doesn‘t, since you haven’t won?”

  “It’s called an E-screech equivocation. My brother disproved it to me that same year when I made him mad about something. It’s sort of a math thing.” Lenore laughed again. “The whole thing’s probably silly, but Candy and I still get a kick out of it.”

  Lang played with the hairs on his ankle. “You were a phi-los-ophy major, then.” He drew out the word “philosophy.”

  “Philosophy and then Spanish, too,” said Lenore, nodding. “I was a double major in school.”

  “I personally majored in ec-o-nomics,” Lang said, doing it again.

  Lenore ignored him. “I took an economics class one time,” she said. “Dad wanted me to major in it, for a while.”

  “But you said no sir.”

  “I just didn’t do it, is all. I didn’t say anything.”

  “I admire that,” Lang said, pouring more wine for both of them and cr
ushing the empty can in his hand. He threw it in the wastebasket from clear across the room. “Yes I do,” he said.

  “Admire what?”

  “Except I have trouble picturing you as a phi-los-opher,” he said. “I remember seeing you in Melinda-Sue’s room that one time, so long ago, and thinking to myself: artist. I remember thinking artist to myself, that time.”

  The wine was warmer now. Lenore fought off a cough. “Well I’m sure not an artist, although Clarice has what you could call a sort of artsy talent. And I wasn’t ever a philosopher, I was just a student.” She looked into the table. “But how come you can’t picture it?”

  “I dunno,” Lang said, throwing an arm back along the top of the couch, holding its steel bar in his hand and stroking it with his fingers. Lenore’s neck felt even tighter at the back. She felt like she could see Lang from all different angles all of a sudden: his profile next to her, his reflection down in the glass table, his other side in the window out past the couch and the television screen. He was all over, it seemed.

  Lang was saying: “Just have this picture from school of all these phi-los-ophy guys in beards and glasses and sandals with socks in them, saying all this wise shit all the time.” He grinned.

  “That’s just so wrong, Lenore said, leaning forward in the chair. ”The ones I know are about the least wise-seeming people you could imagine. At least the really good ones don’t act like they think they’re wise or anything. They’re really just like physicists, or math—“

  “You care for a peanut?” Lang said suddenly.

  “No thank you,” said Lenore. “You go ahead, though.”

  “Nah. Little suckers get back in my teeth.”

  “Mine too. I hate it when peanuts do that.”

  “So go ahead with what you were saying, I’m sorry.”

  Lenore smiled and shook her head. “It wasn’t important. I was just going to say that they’re like mathematicians, really, except they play their games with words, instead of numbers, and so things are even harder. At least that’s the way it got to seem to me. By the end of school I didn’t like it much anymore.”