The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  She’s risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot. So her back is almost to him as she stands there at the little sideboard. An old folded pair of U.S.A. football pants and a helmet are on top of one of the file cabinets by the flag. Her one memento of Orin, who won’t talk to them or contact them in any way. She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high field of wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD. A blue blazer with an O.N.A.N.T.A. insignia is hung very neatly and straight on a wooden hanger from the metal tree of the coatrack in the corner. She’s always had her coffee out of the OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston. The Moms hangs up stuff like shirts and blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive. The mug has a hair-thin brown crack down one side, but it’s not dirty or stained, and she never gets lipstick on the rim the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups’ rims.

  Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens. His father and later Hal had changed him for years, never once judging or wrinkling their face or acting upset or sad.

  ‘But except hey Moms?’

  ‘I’m still right here.’

  Avril couldn’t change diapers. She’d come to him in tears, he’d been seven, and explained, and apologized. She just couldn’t handle diapers. She just couldn’t deal with them. She’d sobbed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood it didn’t mean she didn’t love him to death or find him repellent.

  ‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’

  She especially likes to hold the coffee’s mug in both hands. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’

  One thing that’s happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she doesn’t follow you. Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same little line, and she’s twenty-eight. ‘I don’t follow you. How can someone be too much himself?’

  ‘I think I wanted to ask you that.’

  ‘Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. ‘Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether I’ve been sensing that you yourself are sad?’

  Mario’s gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the Bolex’s foot-treadle with his hands, if necessary. The Center Courts’ towering lights cast an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin high clouds whose movement’s pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the faint reflections of the lit room, and up, the tennis lights’ odd small lumes like criss-crossing spots.

  ‘Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume you’d simply come and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.’

  And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’ headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.

  The dark had a distanceless shape. The room’s ceiling might as well have been clouds.

  ‘Skkkkk.’

  ‘Booboo?’

  ‘Skk-kkk.’

  ‘Mario.’

  ‘Hal!’

  ‘Were you asleep there, Boo?’

  ‘I don’t think I was.’

  ‘Cause I don’t want to wake you up if you were.’

  ‘Is it dark or is it me?’

  ‘The sun won’t be up for a while, I don’t think.’

  ‘So it’s dark then.’

  ‘Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’

  ‘You were saying “Thank you Sir may I have another” several times.’

  ‘Sorry Boo.’

  ‘Numerous times.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I think I slept right through it.’

  ‘Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores’ vibrations in your midsection.’

  ‘I slept right through it. I didn’t hear you even come in.’

  ‘Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in his rack again.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I hope you didn’t move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’

  ‘I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don’t know to borrow tapes, if we’re both devoted.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’

  ‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine. Moms asked me where’s Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up.’

  ‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’

  ‘She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you’re too trustworthy to worry about or check up on.’

  ‘Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are for somebody else’s teeth, not my teeth, and I can’t seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they’re not for my teeth.’

  ‘I promised LaMont Chu I’d tell him whatever information you told me, he was so concerned.’

  ‘The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’

  ‘LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.’

  ‘Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?’

  ‘S. Johnson used to be the Moms’s dog. That passed away.’

  ‘And you remember how he died, then.’

  ‘Hey Hal, you remember a period in time back in Weston when we were little that the Moms wouldn’t go anywhere without S. Johnson? She took him with her to work, and had that unique car seat for him when she had the Volvo, before Himself had the accident in the Volvo. The seat was from the Fisher-Price Company. We went to Himself’s opening of Kinds of Light at the Hayden320 that wouldn’t let in cigarettes or dogs and the Moms brought S. Johnson in a blind dog’s harness-collar that went all the way around his chest with the square bar on the leash thing and the Moms wore those sunglasses and looked up and to the right the whole time so it looked like she was legally blind so they’d let S.J. into the Hayden with us, because he had to be there. And how Himself just thought it was a good one on the Hayden, he said.’

  ‘I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about S. Johnson’s map getting eliminated.’

  ‘She was sad.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking compulsively about Orin ever since C.T. called us all in.
When you think about Orin what do you think, Boo?’

  ‘The best was remember when she had to fly and wouldn’t put him in a cagey box and they wouldn’t even let a blind dog on the plane, so she’d leave S. Johnson and leave him out tied to the Volvo and she’d make Orin put a phone out there with its antenna up during the day out by where S. Johnson was tied to the Volvo and she’d call on the phone and let it ring next to S. Johnson because she said how S. Johnson knew her unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he was thought about and cared about from afar, she said?’

  ‘She was unbent where that dog was concerned, I remember. She bought some kind of esoteric food for it. Remember how often she bathed it?

  ‘…’

  ‘What was it with her and that dog, Boo?’

  ‘And the day we were out rolling balls in the driveway and Orin and Marlon were there and S. Johnson was there lying there on the driveway tied to the bumper with the phone right there and it rang and rang and Orin picked it up and barked into it like a dog and hung it up and turned it off?’

  ‘…’

  ‘So she’d think it was S. Johnson? The joke that Orin thought was such a good one?’

  ‘Jesus, Boo, I don’t remember any of that.’

  ‘And he said we’d get Indian Rub-Burns down both arms if we didn’t pretend how we didn’t know what she was talking about if and when she asked us about the bark on the phone when she got home?’

  ‘The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well.’

  ‘We were supposed to shrug and look at her like she was minus cards from her deck, or else?’

  ‘Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I’ve been remembering.’

  ‘He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I miss him or not.’

  ‘I miss Family Trivia. Do you remember four times he let us sit in on when they played Family Trivia?’

  ‘You’ve got a phenomenal memory for this stuff, Boo.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You probably think I’m wondering why you don’t ask me about the thing with C.T. and Pemulis and the impromptu urine, after the Eschaton debacle, where the urologist took us right down to the administrative loo and was going to watch personally while we filled his cups, like watch it go in, the urine, to make sure it came from us personally.’

  ‘I think I especially have a phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked.’

  ‘You can ask, if you like.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn’t actually extract urine samples from us. We got to hold on to our urine, as the Moms no doubt knows quite well, don’t kid yourself, from C.T.’

  ‘I have a phenomenal memory for things that make me laugh is what I think it is.’

  ‘That Pemulis, without self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got the guy to give us thirty days—the Fundraiser, the WhataBurger, Thanksgiving Break, then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized receptacles he wants, is the arrangement we made.’

  ‘I can hear Schacht, you’re right. Also the fans.’

  ‘Boo?’

  ‘I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.’

  ‘Pemulis—the alleged weak-stomached clutch-artist—Pemulis showed some serious brass under pressure, standing there over that urinal. He played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument. I found myself feeling almost proud for him.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You might think I’m wondering why you aren’t asking me why thirty days, why it was so important to extract thirty days from the blue-blazered guy before a G.C./M.S. scan. As in what is there to be afraid of, you might ask.’

  ‘Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal.’

  ‘Jesus, it’s just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘Except with you I can feel you mean it.’

  ‘You’re up on your elbow. You’re on your side, facing my way. I can see your shadow.’

  ‘How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you’re ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?’

  ‘You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.’

  ‘Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You know, for me, Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they’re lying. Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a windowscreen.’

  ‘Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn’t think he was.’

  ‘Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.’

  ‘Maybe if we call him he’ll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him if you want to if you ask, maybe.’

  ‘Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.’

  ‘The merciful type of lie.’

  ‘Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that’s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal.’

  ‘Rococo’s a pretty word.’

  ‘So now I’ve established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I’ve established that as a sort of subtype.’

  ‘You sound like you can always tell.’

  ‘Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed he had that kind of performance in him.’

  ‘Psychosis live on the radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: “The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation,” quote.’

  ‘The truth is nobody can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.’

  ‘I ca
n’t ever tell. You wanted to know. You’re right. It never crosses my mind.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I’m the type that’d buy land, I think.’

  ‘You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?’

  ‘Boy do I ever.’

  ‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’

  ‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’

  ‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’

  ‘Golly Ned.’

  ‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’

  —pages 755–774

  Afterword

  Here is Mario, severely deformed, burdened by backpack of lead and steel, Bolex camera mounted to his oversized head and co-axialed operating treadle to his square feet, walking-and-recording through the cold night. He’s making a documentary for the Academy, searching for the real. He’s good at his job—people forget he’s there, drop their guard; when they talk they find that he listens, intently, nonjudgmentally. It’s hard not to see Mario as a tragic incarnation of Wallace’s ars poetica, hard not to despair at the corollary that the world, people, the real, may avail itself only to an artist who is apart, somehow stunted, somehow removed from feeling. The artist, given to recognizing life as material for art, becomes pinned beneath his own lens, becomes himself twisted by the process of twisting real into simulacrum.

  (Mario interviewing LaMont Chu: “I should tell you I feel like we’re getting the totally real LaMont Chu here.”)

  But Mario—epistemically bent, familial-dysautonomic—nevertheless feels. He may be insensate in the way of those invulnerable to others’ opinions of them, but he loves. He loves Hal “so much it makes his heart beat hard.” And he can’t tell if Hal is sad. Is it in spite of or because of his specific love that he can’t tell? “Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other,” Hal says. (See too: “Jim’s internal life was to Orin a black hole”; “Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being… when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.”) It’s hard not to see Mario as a tragic totem of Wallace’s metaphysics of love, hard not to despair at the implication that even a love as true and pure as Mario’s for Hal can never apprehend, let alone dissolve, the gap between them.