The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Some professional type shots, you mean.’

  ‘The magazine has both staff photographers and freelancers the photo people like to use for various situations. The politics of influencing them as to which particular photographer they might send all gets pretty involved, I’m afraid.’ Atwater could taste his own carbon dioxide in the car’s air. ‘The key will be producing some images that are carefully lit and indirect and tasteful and yet at the same time emphatic in being able to show what he’s able to… just what he’s achieved.’

  ‘Already. You mean the doodads he’s come out with already.’

  ‘There will be no way to even pitch it at the executive level without real photos, I don’t think,’ Atwater said.

  For a moment there was only the wind and rain and a whisking sound of microfiber, due to Atwater’s fist.

  ‘You know what’s peculiar? Is sometimes I can hear it and then other times not,’ Amber said quietly. ‘That you said up to home you were from back here, and sometimes I can hear it and then other times you sound more… all business, and I can’t hear it in you at all.’

  ‘I’m originally from Anderson.’

  ‘Up by Muncie you mean. Where all the big mounds are.’

  ‘Anderson’s got the mounds, technically. Though I went to school in Muncie, at Ball State.’

  ‘There’s some more right here, up to Mixerville off the lake. They still say they don’t know who all made those mounds. They just know they’re old.’

  ‘The sense I get is there are still competing theories.’

  ‘Dave Letterman on the TV talks about Ball State all the time, that he was at. He’s from here someplace.’

  ‘He graduated long before I got there, though.’

  She did touch his ear now, though her finger was too large to fit inside or trace the auricle’s whorls and succeeded only in occluding Atwater’s hearing on that side, so that he could hear his own heartbeat and his voice seemed newly loud to him over the rain:

  ‘But with the operative question being whether he’ll do it.’

  ‘Brint,’ she said.

  ‘Respecting the subject of the piece.’

  ‘If he’ll sit still for it you mean.’

  The finger kept Atwater from turning his head, so that he could not see whether Mrs. Moltke was smiling or had made a deliberate sally or just what. ‘Since he’s so agonizingly shy, as you’ve explained. You must—he’s got to be able to see already that it will be, to some extent, a bit invasive.’ Atwater was in no way acknowledging the finger in his ear, which did not move or turn but simply stayed there. The feeling of queer levitation persisted, however. ‘Invasive of his privacy, of your privacy. And I don’t exactly get the sense, which I respect, that Mr. Moltke burns to share his art with the world, or necessarily to get a lot of personal exposure.’

  ‘He’ll do it,’ Amber said. The finger withdrew slightly but was still in contact with his ear. The very oldest she could possibly be was 28.

  The journalist said: ‘Because I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s an extraordinary thing and an extraordinary story, but Laurel and I are going to have to go right to the mat with the Executive Editor to secure a commitment to this piece, and it would make things really awkward if Mr. Moltke suddenly demurred or deferred or got cold feet or decided it was all just too private and invasive a process.’

  She did not ask who Laurel was. She was wholly on her left flank now, her luminous knee up next to her hand on the Daewoo unit, and only the bunched hem of his raincoat separating her knee and his, her great bosom crushed and jutting and its heartbeat’s quiver bringing one breast within inches of the Talbott’s shawl collar. He kept envisioning her having to strike or swat the artist before he’d respond to the simplest query. And the strange fixed grin, which probably would not photograph well at all.

  Again the artist’s wife said: ‘He’ll do it.’

  Unbeknownst to Atwater, the Cavalier’s right hand tires were now sunk in mud almost to the valves. What he felt as an occult force rotating him up and over toward Mrs. Moltke in clear contravention of the most basic journalistic ethics was in fact simple gravity: the compartment was now at a 20 degree angle. Wind gusts shook the car like a maraca, and the journalist could hear the sounds of thrashing foliage and windblown debris doing God knew what to the rental’s paint.

  ‘I have no doubt,’ the journalist said. ‘I think I’m just trying to determine for myself why you’re so sure, although obviously I’m going to defer to your judgment because he is your husband and if anyone knows another’s heart it’s obviously—’

  What he felt in the first instant to be Mrs. Moltke’s hand over his mouth turned out to be her forefinger held to his lips, chin, and lower jaw in an intimate shush. Atwater could not help wondering whether it was the same finger that had just been in his ear. Its tip was almost the width of both of his nostrils together.

  ‘He will because he’ll do it for me, Skip. Because I say.’

  ‘Mn srtny gld t—’

  ‘But go on and ask it.’ Mrs. Moltke backed the finger off a bit. ‘We should get it out here up front between us. Why I’d want my husband known for his shit.’

  ‘Though of course the pieces are so much more than that,’ Atwater said, his eyes appearing to cross slightly as he gazed at the finger. Another compact shiver, a whisking sound of fabric and his forehead running with sweat. The cinnamon heat and force of her exhalations like one of the heating grates along Columbus Circle where coteries of homeless sat in the winter in fingerless gloves and balaklava hoods, their eyes flat and pitiless as Atwater hurried past. He had to engage the car’s battery in order to crack his window, and a burst of noise from the radio made him jump.

  Amber Moltke appeared very still and intent. ‘Still and all, though,’ she said. ‘To have your TV reporters or Dave Letterman or that skinny one real late at night making their jokes about it, and folks reading in Style and thinking about Brint’s bowel, about him sitting there in the privy moving his bowel in some kind of special way to make something like that come out. Because that’s his whole hook, Skip, isn’t it. Why you’re here in the first place. That it’s his shit.’

  It turned out that a certain Richmond IN firm did a type of specialty shipping where they poured liquid styrene around fragile items, producing a very light form fitting insulation. The Federal Express outlet named on the box’s receipt, however, was in Scipio IN, which was also featured in the address on the Kinko’s cover sheet that had accompanied Sunday’s faxed photos, which faxes the next morning’s Fed Ex rendered more or less moot or superfluous, so that Laurel Manderley couldn’t quite see why Atwater’d gone to the trouble.

  At Monday’s working lunch, Laurel Manderley’s deceptively simple idea with respect to the package’s contents had been to hurry back and place them out on Ellen Bactrian’s desk before she returned from her dance class, so that they would be sitting there waiting for her, and not to say a word or try to prevail on Ellen in any way, but simply to let the pieces speak for themselves. This was, after all, what her own salaryman appeared to have done, giving Laurel no warning whatsoever that art was on the way.

  The following was actually part of a lengthy telephone conversation on the afternoon of 3 July between Laurel Manderley and Skip Atwater, the latter having literally limped back to the Mount Carmel Holiday Inn after negotiating an exhaustive and nerve wracking series of in situ authenticity tests at the artist’s home.

  ‘And what’s with that address, by the way?’

  ‘Willkie’s an Indiana politician. The name is ubiquitous here. I think he may have run against Truman. Remember the photo of Truman holding up the headline?’

  ‘No, I mean the half. What, fourteen and a half Willkie?’

  ‘It’s a duplex,’ Atwater said.

  ‘Oh.’

  There had been a brief silence, one whose strangeness might have been only in retrospect.

  ‘Who lives on the other side?’

  There had
been another pause. It was true that both salaryman and intern were extremely tired and discombobulated by this point.

  The journalist said: ‘I don’t know yet. Why?’

  To which Laurel Manderley had no good answer.

  In the listing Cavalier, at or about the height of the thunderstorm, Atwater shook his head. ‘It’s more than that,’ he said. He was, to all appearances, sincere. He appeared genuinely concerned that the artist’s wife not think his motives exploitative or sleazy. Amber’s finger was still right near his mouth. He told her it was not yet entirely clear to him how she viewed her husband’s pieces or understood the extraordinary power they exerted. Rain and debris notwithstanding, the windshield was too steamed over for Atwater to see that the view of SR 252 and the fixative works was now tilted 30 or more degrees, like a faulty altimeter. Still facing forward with his eyes rotated way over to the right, Atwater told the artist’s wife that his journalistic motives had been mixed at first, maybe, but that verily he did now believe. When they’d taken him through Mrs. Moltke’s sewing room and out back and pulled open the angled green door and led him down the raw pine steps into the storm cellar and he’d seen the pieces all lined up in graduated tiers that way, something had happened. The truth was he’d been moved, and he said he’d understood then for the first time, despite some prior exposure to the world of art through a course or two in college, how people of discernment could say they felt moved and redeemed by serious art. And he believed this was serious, real, bona fide art, he told her. At the same time, it was also true that Skip Atwater had not been in a sexually charged situation since the previous New Year’s annual YMSP2 party’s bout of drunken fanny photocopying, when he’d gotten a glimpse of one of the circulation interns’ pudenda as she settled on the Canon’s plexiglass sheet, which afterward was unnaturally warm.

  Registered motto of Chicago IL’s O Verily Productions, which for complicated business reasons appeared on its colophon in Portuguese:

  CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE’S NIGHTMARE

  Amber Moltke, however, pointed out that if conventionally produced, the pieces would really be just small reproductions that showed a great deal of expression and technical detail, that what made them special in the first place was what they were and how they came out fully formed from her husband’s behind, and she again asked rhetorically why on earth she would want these essential facts highlighted and talked about, that they were his shit—pronouncing the word shit in a very flat and matter of fact way—and Atwater admitted that he did wonder about this, and that the whole question of the pieces’ production and how this rendered them somehow simultaneously both more and less natural than conventional artworks seemed dizzyingly abstract and complex, and that but in any event there would almost inevitably be some elements that some Style readers would find distasteful or invasive in an ad hominem way, and confessed that he did wonder, both personally and professionally, whether it wasn’t possible that Mr. or at least Mrs. Moltke wasn’t perhaps more ambivalent about the terms of public exposure than she was allowing herself to realize.

  And Amber inclined even closer to Skip Atwater and said to him that she was not. That she’d thought on the whole business long and hard at the first soybean festival, long before Style even knew that Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Moltke of Mount Carmel even existed. She turned slightly to push at her mass of occipital curls, which had tightened shinily in the storm’s moist air. Her voice was a dulcet alto with something almost hypnotic in the timbre. There were tiny random fragments of spindrift rain through the window’s opened crack, and a planar flow of air that felt blessed, and the front seat’s starboard list became more severe, which as he rose so very slowly gave Atwater the sensation that either he was physically enlarging or Mrs. Moltke was diminishing somewhat in relative size, or at any rate that the physical disparity between them was becoming less marked. It occurred to Atwater that he could not recall when he had eaten last. He could not feel his right leg anymore, and his ear’s outer flange felt nearly aflame.

  Mrs. Moltke said how she’d thought about it and realized that most people didn’t even get such a chance, and that this here was hers, and Brint’s. To somehow stand out. To distinguish themselves from the great huge faceless mass of folks that watched the folks that did stand out. On the TV and in venues like Style. In retrospect, none of this turned out to be true. To be known, to matter, she said. To have church or Ye Olde Buffet or the new Bennigan’s at the Whitcomb Outlet Mall get quiet when her and Brint came in, and to feel people’s eyes, the weight of their gaze. That it made a difference someplace when they came in. To pick up a copy of People or Style at the beautician’s and see herself and Brint looking back out at her. To be on TV. That this was it. That surely Skip could understand. That yes, despite the overall dimness of Brint Moltke’s bulb and a lack of personal verve that almost approached death in life, when she’d met the drain technician at a church dance in 1997 she’d somehow known that he was her chance. His hair had been slicked down with aftershave and he’d worn white socks with his good suit, and had missed a belt loop, and yet she’d known. Call it a gift, this power—she was different and marked to someday stand out and she’d known it. Atwater himself had worn white socks with dress slacks until college, when his fraternity brothers had finally addressed the issue in Mock Court. His right hand still gripping the steering wheel, Atwater’s head was now rotated just as far as it would go in order to look more or less directly into Amber’s great right eye, whose lashes ruffled his hair when she fluttered them. No more than a quarter moon of tire now showed above the mud on each of the right side’s wheels.

  What Amber appeared now to be confiding to him in the rented Cavalier struck Atwater as extremely open and ingenuous and naked. The sheer preterite ugliness of it made its admission almost beautiful, Atwater felt. Bizarrely, it did not occur to him that Amber might be speaking to him as a reporter instead of a fellow person. He knew that there was an artlessness about him that helped people open up, and that he possessed a measure of true empathy. It’s why he considered himself fortunate to be tasked to WHAT IN THE WORLD rather than entertainment or beauty/fashion, budgets and prestige notwithstanding. The truth is that what Amber Moltke was confiding seemed to Atwater very close to the core of the American experience he wanted to capture in his journalism. It was also the tragic conflict at the heart of Style and all soft organs like it. The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn’t quite it. An odd thing was that his fist often stopped altogether when he thought abstractly. It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew—as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud—that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root of everything—of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that untold millions of people felt the same way—and that the celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at a BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves.

  There had been eye contact between the journalist and Amber Moltke this whole time, and by now Atwater could also look down, as it were, to see the complex whorls and parts in the young wife’s hair and the numerous clips and plastic clamps that
were buried in its lustrous mass. There was still the occasional ping of hail. And it was also the world altering pain of accepting one’s individual flaws and limitations and the tautological unattainability of our dreams and the dim indifference in the eyes of the circulation intern one tries, at the stroke of the true millennium, to share one’s ambivalence and pain with. Most of these latter considerations occurred during a brief diversion from the exchange’s main thread into something having to do with professional sewing and tatting and customized alterations, which evidently was what Amber did out of her home to help supplement her husband’s income from TriCounty Roto Rooter: ‘There’s not a fiber swatch or pattern in this world I cannot work with, that’s another gift it pleased God to bestow and I’m thankful, it’s restful and creative and keeps me out of trouble, these hands are not ever idle’—she holding up for one moment an actual hand, which could likely have gone all the way around Atwater’s head and still been able to touch finger to thumb.

  Skip Atwater’s one and only serious involvement ever had been with a medical illustrator for the Anatomical Monograph Company, which was located off the Pendleton Pike just outside Indianapolis proper, specializing in intricate exploded views of the human brain and upper spine, as well as in lower order ganglia for neurological comparison. She had been only 5′0", and toward the relationship’s end Atwater hadn’t cared one bit for the way she had looked at him when he undressed or got out of the shower. One evening he’d taken her to a Ruth’s Chris and had almost a hallucination or out of body experience in which he’d viewed himself écorché style from her imagined perspective as he ate, his jaw muscles working redly and esophagus contracting to move bits of bolus down. Only days later had come the shattering performance review from the Star’s assistant city editor, and Skip’s life had changed forever.