The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Is this you passing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am I a subject, tonight?’

  ‘You can be a subject, Moms.’ He moves the big head around in a weary circle. ‘I get tired from wearing this.’

  ‘It gets heavy. I’ve held it.’

  ‘It’s good.’

  ‘I remember his making that. He took such care making that. It’s the last time I believe he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly.’

  ‘It’s terrific!’

  ‘He took weeks putting everything together.’

  He likes to look at her, too, leaning in and letting her know he likes looking. They are the two least embarrassable people either of them knows. She’s rarely here this late; she has a big study at the HmH. The only thing that ever shows she’s tired is that her hair gets a sort of huge white cowlick, like a rolling ocean comber of hair, and just on one side, the side with the phone, sticking up and touching the antenna. Her hair has been pure white since Mario can first remember seeing her looking down at him through the incubator’s glass. Pictures of her own father’s hair were like that. It goes down the middle of her back against the chair and down both arms, hanging off the arms near the elbow. Its part shows her pink scalp. She keeps the hair very clean and well-combed. She has one of Mr. deLint’s big whistles around her neck. The big cowlick casts a bent shadow on the sill of the window. There’s a maple-leaf flag and a 50-star U.S.A. flag hanging limp off brass poles on either side of the window; in an extreme corner are fleur-de-lis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks. C.T.’s office has an O.N.A.N. flag and a 49-star U.S.A. flag.318

  ‘I had quality interface dialogue with LaMont Chu upstairs. But I made the girl Felicity, the really thin one—she got upset. She said only a towel.’

  ‘Felicity will be just fine. So you’re just strolling. Peripatetic footage.’ She refuses to adjust syntax, to speak in any way down to him, it’d be beneath him, though he seems not to mind when most people do it, speak down.

  Nor will she ask about the burn on his pelvis unless he brings it up. She’s careful to keep her oar out of Mario’s health stuff unless he brings things up, out of concern that it might be taken as intrusive or smothering.

  ‘I saw your lights. Why is the Moms here, still, I thought to myself.’

  She made as if to clutch her head. ‘Don’t ask. I’ll starting whingeing. Tomorrow’s going to be hellishly busy.’ Mario didn’t hear her say goodbye to the man as she put down the phone so the antenna now points at Mario’s chest. She’s putting out the nub of the Benson & Hedge against the rooster-comb holder he’d squeezed and karate-chopped and put down the bowl’s center, when he made it, after she’d said she wanted it to be an ashtray. ‘You give me such pleasure standing there, all outfitted for work,’ she said. ‘Aprowl.’ She ground individual sparks out in the bowl. She had the idea that her smoking around Mario made him worry, though he’d never said anything about it one way or the other. ‘I have a breakfast engagement at 07, which means I have to do final swotting and whacking for morning classes now, so I just lurched back over here to do it instead of carrying everything back and forth.’

  ‘Are you tired?’

  She just smiled at him.

  ‘This is off.’ Pointing at his head. ‘I turned it off.’

  To look at them, you’d never guess these two persons were related, one sitting and one standing canted forward.

  ‘Will you eat with us? I hadn’t even thought of dinner until I saw you. I don’t even know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders.319 Turkey cartilage. Your bag is by the radio. Will you stay again? Charles is still in conference, I believe, he said.’

  ‘About the debracle with the Eschaton and the Postman’s nose?’

  ‘A person from a magazine has come to do a piece of reportage on your brother. Charles is speaking to her in lieu of any of the students. You may speak to her about Orin if you like.’

  ‘She’s been aprowl for Hal, Ortho said.’

  Avril has a certain way of cocking her fine head at him.

  ‘Your poor Uncle Charles has been with Thierry and this magazine person since this afternoon.’

  ‘Have you talked to him?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to buttonhole your brother. He’s not in your room. The Pemulis person was seen by Mary Esther taking their truck before Study Period. Is Hal with him, Mario?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Hal since lunchtime. He said he’d had a tooth thing.’

  ‘I didn’t even find out he’d been to see Zeggarelli until today.’

  ‘He asked about how the burn on my pelvis is.’

  ‘Which I won’t ask about unless you’d care to discuss how it’s coming along.’

  ‘It’s fine. Plus Hal said he wishes I’d come back and sleep there.’

  ‘I left two messages asking him to let me know how the tooth was. Love-o, I feel bad I wasn’t there for him. Hal and his teeth.’

  ‘Did C.T. tell what happened? Was he upset? Was that C.T. on the phone you were with?’ Mario can’t see why the Moms would call C.T. on the phone when he was in there right across the hall behind his doors. When she didn’t smoke a lot of the time she held a pen in her mouth; Mario didn’t know why. Her college mug has about a hundred blue pens in it, on the desk. She likes to square herself in her chair, sitting up extra straight and grasping the chair’s arms in a commanding posture. She looks like something Mario can’t place when she does this. He keeps thinking the word typhoon. He knows she’s not trying to consciously be commanding with him.

  ‘How was your own day, I want to hear.’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘I determined years ago that my position needs to be that I trust my children, and I’d never traffic in third-party hearsay when the lines of communication with my children are as open and judgment-free as I’m fortunate they are.’

  ‘That seems like a really good position. Hey Moms?’

  ‘So I have no problem waiting to hear about Eschaton, teeth, and urine from your brother, who’ll come to me the moment it’s appropriate for him to come to me.’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘I’m right here, Love-o.’

  Tycoon is the term her commanding way of sitting suggests, grasping her chair, a pen clamped in her teeth like a businessman’s cigar. There were other carpet-prints in the heavy shag.

  ‘Moms?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I ask you a thing?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘This is off,’ again indicating the silent apparatus on his head.

  ‘Is this a confidential thing, then?’

  ‘There isn’t any secret. My day was I was wondering about something. In my mind.’

  ‘I’m right here for you anytime day or night, Mario, as you are for me, as I am for Hal and we all are for each other.’ She gestures in a hard-to-describe way. ‘Right here.’

  ‘Moms?’

  ‘I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.’

  ‘How can you tell if somebody’s sad?’

  A quick smile. ‘You mean whether someone’s sad.’

  A smile back, but still earnest: ‘That improves it a lot. Whether someone’s sad, how can you tell so you’re sure?’

  Her teeth are not discolored; she gets them cleaned at the dentist all the time for the smoking, a habit she despises. Hal inherited the dental problems from Himself; Himself had horrible dental problems; half his teeth were bridges.

  ‘You’re not exactly insensitive when it comes to people, Love-o,’ she says.

  ‘What if you, like, only suspect somebody’s sad. How do you reinforce the suspicion?’

  ‘Confirm the suspicion?’

  ‘In your mind.’ Some of the prints in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are different, almost like knuckles. His lordotic posture makes him acute and observant about things like carpet-prints.

  ‘How would I, for my part, confirm a suspicion of sadness in someone, you mean?’


  ‘Yes. Good. All right.’

  ‘Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or rend his or her garments.’

  Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. ‘But say in a case where they don’t weep or rend. But you still have a suspicion which they’re sad.’

  She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine cigar. ‘He or she might alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile halfheartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at the floor more than is appropriate.’

  ‘But what if they don’t?’

  ‘Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous interests. The person may present with what appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to engage you. Torpor.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally “low.” ’

  Mario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression the sort of mangled one that expresses puzzlement, an attempt to reason out something hard. Pemulis called it Mario’s Data-Search Face, which Mario liked.

  ‘What if sometime they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions are in your mind.’

  She’s about the same height sitting as Mario upright and leaning forward. Now neither of them is quite looking at the other, both just a couple degrees off. Avril taps the pen against her front teeth. Her phone light is blinking, but there’s no ringing. The thing’s handset’s antenna still points at Mario. Her hands are not her age. She hoists the executive chair back slightly to cross her legs.

  ‘Would you feel comfortable telling me whether we’re discussing a particular person?’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘Is there someone specific in whom you’re intuiting sadness?’

  ‘Moms?’

  ‘Is this about Hal? Is Hal sad and for some reason not yet able to speak about it?’

  ‘I’m just saying how to be generally sure.’

  ‘And you have no idea where he is or whether he left the grounds this evening sad?’

  Lunch today was the exact same as lunch yesterday: pasta with tuna and garlic, and thick wheaty bread, and required salad, and milk or juice, and pears in juice in a dish. Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off because when she came in this morning Pemulis at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there’d been brooms on the wall in an X of brooms, out of nowhere, on the wall, when she’d come in very early to fire up the Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowing how the brooms were there or why or who glued them on had upset Mrs. Clarke’s nerves, who’d been with the Incandenzas since long before E.T.A., and had nerves.

  ‘I didn’t see Hal since lunchtime. He had an apple he cut into chunks and put peanut butter on, instead of pears in juice.’

  Avril nods with vigor.

  ‘LaMont didn’t know either. Mr. Schtitt is asleep in his chair in his room. Hey Moms?’

  Avril Incandenza can switch a Bic from one side of her mouth to the other without using her hand; she never knows she’s doing it when she’s doing it. ‘Whether or not we’re discussing anyone in particular, then.’

  Mario smiles at her.

  ‘Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’

  ‘I don’t know disassociation.’

  ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself”—“He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’

  ‘Engulf means obliterate.’

  ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices—Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’

  She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her.

  She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’

  She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk. A couple odd long crinkly paper strips of bright red hung over the side of the wastebasket, which was normally totally empty and clean.

  Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn’t ever quite world-class, shiny-magazine-class beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other beautiful women age too and get less beautiful. She’s 56 years old, and Mario gets pleasure out of just getting to look at her face, still. She doesn’t think she’s pretty, he knows. Orin and Hal both have parts of her prettiness in different ways. Mario likes to look at Hal and at their mother and try to see just what slendering and spacing of different features makes a woman’s face different from a man’s, in attractive people. A male face versus a face you can just tell is female. Avril thinks she’s much too tall to be pretty. She’d seemed much less tall when compared to Himself, who was seriously tall. Mario wears small special shoes, almost perfectly square, with weights at the heel and Velcro straps instead of laces, and a pair of the corduroys Orin Incandenza had worn in elementary school, which Mario still favors and wears instead of brand-new pants he’s given, and a warm crewneck sweater that’s striped like a flea.

  ‘My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o. It’s sometimes called “suppression,” ’ with the fingers out to the sides again. ‘Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness�
��s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful. For the hypothetical person in question. There may be sad people right here at the Academy who are like this, Mario, and perhaps you’re sensitive to it. You are not exactly insensitive when it comes to people.’

  Mario scratches his lip again.

  She says ‘What I’ll do’—leaning forward to write something on a Post-It note with a different pen than the one she has in her mouth—‘is to write down for you the terms disassociation, engulfment, and suppression, which I’ll put next to another word, repression, with an underlined unequal sign between them, because they denote entirely different things and should not be regarded as synonyms.’

  Mario shifts slightly forward. ‘Sometimes I get afraid when you forget you have to talk more simply to me.’

  ‘Well then I’m both sorry for that and grateful that you can tell me about it. I do forget things. Particularly when I’m tired. I forget and just get going.’ Lining the edges up and folding the little sticky note in half and then half again and dropping it into the wastebasket without having to look for where the wastebasket is. Her chair is a fine executive leather swivelling chair but it shrieks a little when she leans back or forward. Mario can tell she’s making herself not look at her watch, which is all right.

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’

  ‘Moms, I think I get it.’

  ‘Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?’