The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  Gately’s eyes keep rolling up in his head, only partly from pain.

  Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It’s like a lit gasper was psychic ballast for him or something. Everything he said to Gately seemed like it was going to be the last thing he said right before he looked at his watch and slapped his forehead and left.

  Thrust said whatever that Nuck that the residents allege shot him shot him with was serious ordnance, because there’d been bits of Gately’s shoulder and bowling shirt all over the complex’s little street. Thrust pointed at the huge bandage and asked whether they’d talked to Gately yet about was he going to get to keep what was left of the mutilated shoulder and arm. Gately found that the only audible sound he could make sounded like a run-over kitten. Thrust mentioned that Danielle S.’d been over to Mass Rehab with Burt F.S. and had reported how they were doing miraculous things with prosfeces these days. Gately’s eyes were rolling around in his head and he was making pathetic little scared aspirated sounds as he pictured himself with a hook and parrot and patch making piratical ‘Arr Matey’ sounds from the AA podium. He felt a terrible certainty that the whole nerve-assembly network that connected the human voice-box to the human mind and let somebody ask for crucial legal and medical feedback must run through the right human shoulder. All kinds of fucking shunts and crazy interconnections with nerves, he knew. He imagined himself with one of those solar-cell electric shaver voice-box prosfeces he has to hold up to his throat (maybe with his hook), trying to Carry the Message with it from the podium, sounding like an automatic teller or ROM-audio interface. Gately wanted to know what day the next day was and whether any of Lenz’s Nucks had been demapped, and what the official capacity of the guy was in the hat who’d been sitting just outside the door to the room either last night or the night before, his hat’s shadow cast in a kind of parallelogram across the open doorway, and if the guy was still there, assuming the sight of the guy’s hatted shadow had been valid and not phantasmic, and he wondered how they went about cuffing you if one of your arms’ shoulders was mutilated and the size of your head. If Gately took anything deeper than a half-breath, a mind-bending sheet of pain goes down his right side. He even breathed like a sick kitten, more like throbbing than breathing. Thrust said Hester Thrale had apparently disappeared sometime during the freakas and never came back. Gately could remember her running screaming off into the urban night. Thrust said her Alfa Romeo got towed the next A.M. right along with Lenz’s bum Duster, and her stuff’s been duly bagged and is on the porch and everything familiar like that. Thrust said they found this mysteriously huge stash of high-quality Irish Luggage during the Staff’s search of Lenz’s room, and the House looks to be fixed for trash- and eviction-bags for the next fiscal year. Discharged residents’ bagged possessions stay on the porch for three days, and Gately’s trying to calculate the present date from this fact. Thrust says Emil Minty got a Full House Restriction for getting observed removing one of Hester Thrale’s undergarments from her bag on the porch, for reasons nobody much wants to speculate about. Kate Gompert and Ruth van Cleve supposedly went to hit an NA meeting in Inman Square and got supposedly mugged and separated, and then only Ruth van Cleve showed up back at the House, and Pat’s sworn out a P.C. warrant for Gompert because of the girl’s other psych and suicide issues. Gately discovers he doesn’t even all that much care whether anybody thought to call Stavros L. at the Shattuck about Gately’s day job. Thrust smoothed his hair back and said what else let’s see. Johnette Foltz is so far covering Gately’s shifts and said to say he’s in her prayers. Chandler Foss finished out his nine months and graduated but came back the next morning and hung around for Morning Meditation, which has to be a good sign sobriety-wise for the old Chandulator. Jennifer Belbin did get indicted on the bad-check issue up in Wellfleet Circuit Court, but they’re going to let her finish out her residency at the House before anything goes to trial, which her P.D. said graduating the House is guaranteed to get her bit cut in at least half. The Asst. Director had gone up to court with Belbin on her own time. Doony Glynn’s still laid up with the diveritis thing, and can be neither coaxed nor threatened out of his fetal position in bed, and the House Manager’s trying to breastwork through the red tape at Health to get them to OK him admission to St. E.’s even though he’s got insurance fraud on his yellow sheet, part of his own past-wreckage. A guy that had gone through the House back when Thrust did and had stayed sober in AA for four solid years had suddenly out of nowhere slipped up and took The First Drink the same day as the Lenz freakas, and predictably ended getting totally shitfaced, and went and fell off the end of the Fort Point pier—like literally took a long walk on a short pier, apparently—and sank like a rock, and the memorial service is today, which is why Thrust is going to have to take off in a second here, he says. The new kid Tingley’s coming out of the linen closet for up to an hour at a time and is taking solid food and Johnette’s quit lobbying to have the kid sent over to Met State. The even newer new guy now that’s come in to take Chandler Foss’s spot’s name is Dave K. and is one grim story to behold, Thrust assures him, a junior executive guy at ATHSCME Air Displacement, an upscale guy with a picket house and kids and a worried wife with tall hair, who this Dave K.’s bottom was he drank half a liter of Cuerva at some ATHSCME Interdependence Day office party and everything like that and got in some insane drunken limbo-dance challenge with a rival executive and tried to like limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low, and got his spine all fucked up in a limbo-lock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy scuttles around the Ennet House living room like a crab, his scalp brushing the floor and his knees trembling with effort. Danielle S. thinks Burt F.S. might have batorial ammonia or some kind of chronic lung thing, and Geoff D.’s trying to get the other residents to sign a petition to get Burt barred from the kitchen and dining room because Burt can’t cover his mouth when he coughs, understandably. Thrust says Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are taking meals in their room and are under orders not to come down or go near any windows, because of what happened to the map of the Nuck they allegedly stomped and everything like that. Gately mews and blinks like mad. Thrust says everybody’s being real supportive of Jenny B. and encouraging her to turn the Wellfleet indictment over to her Higher Power. The Shed staff are still rolling the catatonic lady’s wheelchair over from the Shed to the House on scheduled A.M.’s, and Thrust says Johnette had to write up Minty and Diehl for putting one of those gag-arrows that are curved in the middle and look like there’s an arrow through your head over the catatonic lady’s paralyzed head yesterday and leaving her slumped by the TP like that all day. Plus Thrale’s panties; so suddenly in twelve hours Minty’s just one more offense away from getting the Shoe, which Thrust is already personally shining the tip of his very sharpest shoe, in hopes. The biggest issue at the House Bitch and Complaint meeting was that earlier this week it turns out Clenette H. had brung in this whole humongous shitload of cartridges she said they were getting ready to throw in the dumpster up at the swank tennis school up the hill she works at, and she promoted them and hauled them down to the House, and the residents all have a wild hair because Pat says Staff has to preview the cartridges for suitability and sex before they can be put out for the residents, and the residents are all bitching that this’ll take forever and it’s just the fucking Staff hoarding the new entertainment when the House’s TP’s just about on its hands and knees in the entertainment desert starving for new entertainment. McDade bitched at the meeting that if he had to watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence one more time he was going to take a brody off the House’s roof.

  Plus Thrust says Bruce Green hasn’t shared word one to Staff about his feelings about anything to do with Lenz or Gately’s embryoglio; that he just sits around waiting for somebody to read his mind; that his roommates hav
e complained that he thrashes and shouts about nuts and cigars in his sleep.

  Calvin Thrust, four years sober, straddling the backwards chair, keeps inclining himself ever more forward in the posture of a man who’s at any moment going to push up off out of the chair and leave. He reports how something deep in the previously hopelessly arrogant-seeming ‘Tiny’ Ewell seems like it’s broken and melted, spiritually speaking: the guy shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, was heard weeping in the 5-Man head, and was observed by Johnette taking out the kitchen trash in secret even though his Chore this week was Office Windows. Thrust had discovered fine dining in sobriety, and has the beginning of chins. His hair is slicked back with odorless stuff at all times, and he has a more or less permanent sore on his upper lip. Gately for some reason keeps imagining Joelle van Dyne dressed as Madame Psychosis sitting in a plain chair in the 3-Woman room eating a peach and looking out the open window at the crucifix atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s prolix roof. The crucifix isn’t big, but it’s up so high it’s visible from most anywhere in Enfield-Brighton. Sees Joelle delicately pulling the veil out to get the peach up under it. Thrust says Charlotte Treat’s T-cell count is down. She’s needlepointing Gately some kind of GET BETTER A DAY AT A TIME ASSUMING THAT’S GOD’S WILL doily, but it’s been slow going, because Treat’s developed some kind of goopy Virus-related eye infection that’s got her bumping into walls, and her counselor Maureen N. at the Staff Meeting wanted Pat to consider having her transferred to an HIV halfway house up in Everett that’s got some recovering addicts in there. Morris Hanley, speaking of T-cells, has baked some cream-cheese brownies for Gately as a nurturing gesture, but then the twats at the Trauma Wing’s nurses’ station, like, impounded them from Thrust when he came up, but he’d had a couple on the way over in the bloodstained ’Vette and he could assure Don that Hanley’s brownies were worth killing a loved one for and everything like that. Gately feels a sudden rush of anxiety over the issue of who’s cooking the House supper in his absence, like will they know to put corn flakes in the meat loaf, for texture. He finds Thrust insufferable and wishes he’d just fucking go already, but has to admit he’s less conscious of the horrific pain when somebody’s there, but that that’s mostly because the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody’s saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. Thrust puts his unlit gasper behind his ear where Gately predicts hair-tonic will render it unsmokable, looks conspiratorially around back over each shoulder, leans in so his face is visible between two bars of the bed’s side-railing, and bathes Gately’s face in old eggs and smoke as he leans in and quietly says that Gately’ll be psyched to hear that all the residents that were at the embryoglio—except Lenz and Thrale and the ones that aren’t in a legal position to step forward and like that, he says—he says they’ve most of them all come forward and filed depositions, that the BPD’s Finest, plus some rather weirder Federal guys with goofy-looking archaic crew cuts, probably involved because of the like inter-O.N.A.N. element of the Nucks—here Gately’s big heart skips and sinks—have come around and been voluntarily admitted inside, on Pat’s written OK, and they took depositions, which is like testifying on paper, and the depositions look to be basically 110% behind Don Gately and support a justifiable señorio of either self-defense or Lenz-defense. Several testimonies indicate the Nucks gave the impression of being under the influence of aggressive-type Substances. The single biggest problem right now, Thrust says Pat says, is the missing alleged Item. As in the .44 Item Gately was plugged with’s whereabouts are missing, Thrust says. The last resident to depose to seeing it was Green, who says he took it away from the Nuck the nigger girls stomped, whereupon he, Green, says he dropped it on the lawn. Whereupon it liked vanished from legal view. Thrust says that in his legal view the Item’s the thing that makes the difference between a señorio of ironshod self-defense and one of just maybe a huge fucking beef in which Gately got mysteriously plugged at some indefinite point while rearranging a couple Canadian maps with his huge bare hands. Gately’s heart is now somewhere around his bare hairy shins, at the mention of Federal crewcuts. His attempted plea for Thrust to come out and say did he actually kill anybody did he sounds like that crushed kitten again. The pain of the terror is past standing, and it helps him surrender and quit trying, and he relaxes his legs and decides Thrust gets to not say whatever he wants, that the reality right this second is that he’s mute and powerless over Thrust. Thrust leans in and hugs the back of the chair and says Clenette Henderson and Yolanda Willis are on Full House Restriction in their room to keep them from coming down and maybe fucking themselves over legally in a deposition. Because the Nuck with the plaid hat with the ear-flaps and the missing alleged Item had expired on the spot from a spike heel through the right eye, as he was getting the shit stomped out of him as only female niggers can stomp, and everything like that, and Yolanda Willis had very shrewdly left the shoe and spike heel right there protruding from the guy’s map with her toeprints all over its insides—meaning presumably the shoe’s—so producing the Item was going to be in her strong legal interests too, as well, as Thrust analyzes the legal landscape. Thrust says Pat’s limped around and appealed to every single resident personally, and everybody’s submitted more or less voluntarily to a room- and property-search and everything like that, and still no large-caliber Item has turned up, though Nell Gunther’s hidden Oriental-knife collection sure made an impression. Thrust predicts it’ll be strongly in Gately’s lego-judicial interest and everything like that to ransack his brain and mind for where and with who he last saw the alleged gun. The sun was starting to go down over the West Newton hills through the double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight against the far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater vents kept making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to get dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that.