The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  Laurel Manderley made a little ta da gesture: ‘It’s the miraculous poo.’

  One of her bicycle’s wheels still idly turned, but the executive intern’s eyes had not once moved. She said: ‘Something isn’t even the word.’

  Established fact: Almost no adult remembers the details or psychic fallout of her own toilet training. By the time one might have cause to want to know, it has been so long that you have to try asking your parents—which rarely works, because most parents will deny not only recollection but even original involvement in anything having to do with your toilet training. Such denials are basic psychological protection, since parenting can sometimes be a nasty business. All these phenomena have been exhaustively researched and documented.

  R. Vaughn Corliss’s most tightly held secret vision or dream, dating from when he was just beginning to detach from Leach and TPE and to conceive of reinventing himself as a force in high concept cable: a channel devoted wholly to images of celebrities shitting. Reese Witherspoon shitting. Juliette Lewis shitting. Michael Jordan shitting. Longtime House Minority Whip Dick Gephardt shitting. Pamela Anderson shitting. George F. Will, with his bow tie and pruny mouth, shitting. Former PGA legend Hale Irwin shitting. Stones bassist Ron Wood shitting. Pope John Paul shitting as special attendants hold his robes’ hems up off the floor. Leonard Maltin, Annette Bening, Michael Flatley, either or both of the Olsen twins, shitting. And so on. Helen Hunt. The Price Is Right’s Bob Barker. Tom Cruise. Jane Pauley. Talia Shire. Yasser Arafat, Timothy McVeigh, Michael J. Fox. Former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros. The idea of real time footage of Martha Stewart perched shitting amid the soaps and sachets and color coordinated linens of her Connecticut estate’s master bathroom was so powerful that Corliss rarely allowed himself to imagine it. It was not a soporific conceit. It was also, obviously, private. Tom Clancy, Margaret Atwood, bell hooks. Dr. James Dobson. Beleaguered IL Governor George Ryan. Peter Jennings. Oprah. He told no one of this dream. Nor of his corollary vision of the images beamed into space, digitally sequenced for maximum range and coherence, and of advanced alien species studying this footage in order to learn almost everything necessary about planet earth circa 2001.

  He wasn’t a madman; it could never fly. Still, though. There was Reality TV, which Corliss himself had helped lay the ground floor of, and the nascent trend toward absorbing celebrities into the matrix of violation and exposure that was Reality: celebrity bloopers, celebrities showing you around their homes, celebrity boxing, celebrity political colloquy, celebrity blind dating, celebrity couples counseling. Even serving time at Leach’s TPE, Corliss could see that the logic of such programming was airtight and led inexorably to the ultimate exposures: celebrity major surgical procedures, celebrity death, celebrity autopsy. It only seemed absurd from outside the logic. How far along the final arc would Slo Mo High Def Full Sound Celebrity Defecation be? How soon before the idea ceased being too loony to mention aloud, to float as a balloon before the laughing heads of Development and Legal? Not yet, but not never. They’d laughed at Murdoch in Perth, once, Corliss knew.

  Laurel Manderley was the youngest of four children, and her toilet training, which commenced around 30 months, had been casual and ad hoc and basically no big deal. The Atwater brothers’ own had been early, brutal, and immensely effective—it was actually during toilet training that the elder twin had first learned to pump his left fist in self exhortation.

  Little Roland Corliss, whose nanny was an exponent of a small and unapologetically radical splinter of the Waldorf educational movement, had experienced no formal toilet training at all, but rather just the abrupt unexplained withdrawal of all diapers at age four. This was the same age at which he had entered Holy Calvary Lutheran Preschool, where unambiguous social consequences motivated him to learn almost immediately what toilets were for and how to use them, rather like the child who is rowed way out and then taught to swim the old fashioned way.

  BSG is magazine industry shorthand for the niche comprising People, Us, In Style, In Touch, Style, and Entertainment Weekly. (For demographic reasons, Teen People is not usually included among the BSGs.) The abbreviation stands for big soft glossy, with soft in turn meaning the very most demotic kind of human interest.

  As of July 2001, three of the six major BSGs are owned by Eckleschafft-Böd Medien A.G., a German conglomerate that controls nearly 40 percent of all US trade publishing.

  Like the rest of the mainstream magazine industry, each of the BSG weeklies subscribes to an online service that compiles and organizes all contracted stringers’ submissions to both national wires and Gannett, of which submissions roughly 8 percent ever actually run in the major news dailies. A select company of editorial interns, known sometimes as shades because of the special anodized goggles required by OSHA for intensive screen time, is tasked to peruse this service.

  Skip Atwater, who was one of the rare and old school BSG journalists who actually pitched pieces as well as receiving assignments, was also one of the few paid staffers at Style who bothered to review the online service for himself. As a practical matter, he did so only when he was not in the field, and then usually at night, after his dogs had again gone to sleep, sitting up in his Ball State Cardinals cap with a glass of ale and operating his home desktop according to instructions which Laurel Manderley’s predecessor had configured as a special template that fit along the top of the unit’s keyboard. An AP stringer out of Indianapolis, filing from the Franklin County Fair on what was alleged to be the second largest Monte Cristo sandwich ever assembled, had included a curio about displays of extremely intricate and high class figurines made out of what the stringer had spelled fasces. The objets d’art themselves were not described—they had been arrayed in glass cases that were difficult to get near because of the crowds around them, and people’s hands and exhalations had apparently smeared the glass so badly that even when you did finally shoulder your way up close the interiors were half obscured. Later, Skip Atwater would learn that these slanted glass cabinets were acquired from the tax sale of a failed delicatessen in Greensburg IN, which for decades had had a small and anomalous Hasidic community.

  It was a word padding aside in a throwaway item unflagged by any of Style’s shades, and from his own native experience Atwater was disposed to assume that the things were probably crude little Elvises or Earnhardts made of livestock waste… except the display banner’s allegedly quoted Hands Free Art Crafts caught his eye. The phrase appeared to make no sense unless automation were involved, which, as applied to livestock waste, would be curious indeed. Curiosity, of course, being more or less Skip Atwater’s oeuvre with regard to WHAT IN THE WORLD. Not curiosity as in tabloid or freakshow, or rather all right sometimes borderline freakshow but with an upbeat thrust. The content and tone of all BSGs were dictated by market research and codified down to the smallest detail: celebrity profiles, entertainment news, hot trends, and human interest, with human interest representing a gamut in which the occasional freakshow item had a niche—but the rhetoric was tricky. BSGs were at pains to distinguish themselves from the tabloids, whose target market was wholly different. Style’s WITW items were people centered and always had to be both credible and uplifting, or latterly there at least had to be ancillary elements that were uplifting and got thumped hard.

  Atwater could thump with the best. And he was old school and energetic: he ran down two or three possible WITW stories for every one that got written, and pitched things, and could rewrite other men’s copy if asked to. The politics of rewrites could get sticky, and interns often had to mediate between the salarymen involved, but Atwater was known around Style’s editorial offices as someone who could both rewrite and get rewritten without being an asshole about it. At root, his reputation with staffers and interns alike was based in this: his consistent failure to be an asshole. Which could, of course, be a double edged sword. He was seen as having roughly the self esteem of a prawn. Some at Style found him fussy or pretentious. Others questioned his spontaneity
. Sometimes the phrase queer duck was used. There was the whole awkward issue of his monotone wardrobe. The fact that he actually carried pictures of his dogs in his wallet was either endearing or creepy, depending whom you asked. A few of the sharper interns intuited that he’d had to overcome a great deal in himself in order to get this far.

  He knew just what he was: a professional soft news journalist. We all make our adjustments, hence the term well adjusted. A babyfaced bantam with ears about which he’d been savagely teased as a boy—Jughead, Spock, Little Pitcher. A polished, shallow, earnest, productive, consummate corporate pro. Over the past three years, Skip Atwater had turned in some 70 separate pieces to Style, of which almost 50 saw print and a handful of others ran under rewriters’ names. A volunteer fire company in suburban Tulsa where you had to be a grandmother to join. When Baby Won’t Wait—Moms who never made it to the hospital tell their amazing stories. Drinking and boating: The other DUI. Just who really was Slim Whitman. This Grass Ain’t Blue—Kentucky’s other cash crop. He Delivers—81 year old obstetrician welcomes the grandchild of his own first patient. Former Condit intern speaks out. Today’s forest ranger: He doesn’t just sit in a tower. Holy Rollers—Inline skateathon saves church from default. Eczema: The silent epidemic. Rock ’n’ Roll High School—Which future pop stars made the grade? Nevada bikers rev up the fight against myasthenia gravis. Head of the Parade—From Macy’s to the Tournament of Roses, this float designer has done them all. The All Ads All The Time cable channel. Rock of Ages—These geologists celebrate the millennium in a whole new way. Sometimes he felt that if not for his schipperkes’ love he would simply blow away and dissipate like milkweed. The women who didn’t get picked for Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire: Where did they come from, to what do they return. Leapin’ Lizards—The Gulf Coast’s new alligator plague. One Lucky Bunch of Cats—A terminally ill Lotto winner’s astounding bequest. Those new home cottage cheese makers: Marvel or ripoff? Be(-Happy-)Atitudes—This Orange County pastor claims Christ was no sourpuss. Dramamine and NASA: The untold story. Secret documents reveal Wallis Simpson cheated on Edward VIII. A Whole Lotta Dough—Delaware teen sells $40,000 worth of Girl Scout cookies… and isn’t finished yet! For these former agoraphobics, home is not where the heart is. Contra: The thinking person’s square dance.

  At the same time, it was acknowledged that Atwater’s best had sometimes been those pieces he ran down himself and pitched, items that often pushed the BSG envelope. For 7 March ’99, Atwater had submitted the longest WITW piece ever done for Style, on the case of a U. Maryland professor murdered in his apartment where the only witness was the man’s African gray parrot, and all the parrot would repeat was ‘Oh God, no, please no’ and then gruesome noises, and on the veterinary hypnotist that the authorities had had working with the parrot to see what more they could get out of it. The UBA here had been the hypnotist and her bio and beliefs about animal consciousness, the central tensions being was she just a New Age loon along the lines of Beverly Hills pet therapists or was there really something to it, and if the parrot was hypnotizable as advertised and sang then what would be its evidentiary status in court.

  Very early every morning of childhood, Mrs. Atwater’s way of waking her two boys up was to stand between their beds and clap her hands loudly together, not stopping until their feet actually touched the bedroom floor, which now floated in the depths of Virgil Atwater’s memory as a kind of sardonic ovation. Hopping Mad—This triple amputee isn’t taking health care costs lying down. The meth lab next door! Mrs. Gladys Hine, the voice behind over 1,500 automated phone menus. The Dish—This Washington D.C. caterer has seen it all. Computer solitaire: The last addiction? No Sweet Talkin’—Blue M&Ms have these consumers up in arms. Dallas commuter’s airbag nightmare. Menopause and herbs: Exciting new findings. Fat Chance—Lottery cheaters and the heavyweight squad that busts them. Seance secrets of online medium Duwayne Evans. Ice sculpture: How do they do that?

  Atwater’s best regarded piece ever so far, 3 July ’00: A little girl in Upland CA had been born with an unpronounceable neurological condition whereby she could not form facial expressions, normal and healthy in every way with blond pigtails and a corgi named Skipper except her face was a flat staring granite mask, and the parents were starting a foundation for the incredibly over 5,000 other people worldwide who couldn’t form normal facial expressions, and Atwater had run down, pitched, and landed 2,500 words for a piece only half of which was back matter, plus another two columns’ worth of multiple photos of the girl reclined expressionless in her mother’s lap, stony and staring under raised arms on a roller coaster, and so forth. Atwater had finally gotten the go ahead from the bimanual associate editor on the Suffering Channel piece because he’d done the ’99 WITW fluffer on the All Ads All The Time Channel, which was also O Verily, and could truthfully posit a rapport with R. Vaughn Corliss, whose eccentric recluse persona formed a neat human hook—although the associate editor had said that where Atwater was ever going to find the UBA in the TSC story was anyone’s guess and would stretch Atwater’s skill set to the limit.

  5.

  The first of the dreams Laurel Manderley found so disturbing had occurred the same night that the digital photos of Brint Moltke’s work had appeared on the floor below the fax and she had felt the queer twin impulses both to bend and get them and to run as fast as she could from the cubicle complex. An ominous vatic feeling had persisted throughout the rest of the evening, which was doubly unsettling to Laurel Manderley, because she normally believed about as much in intuition and the uncanny as US Vice President Dick Cheney did.

  She lay late at night in the loft, her bunkmate encased in Kiehl’s cream beneath her. The dream involved a small house that she somehow knew was the one with the fractional address that belonged to the lady and her husband in Skip Atwater’s miraculous poo story. They were all in there, in the like living room or den, sitting there and either not doing anything or not doing anything Laurel Manderley could identify. The creepiness of the dream was akin to the fear she’d sometimes felt in her maternal grandparents’ summer home in Lyford Cay, which had certain closet doors that opened by themselves whenever Laurel was in the room. It wasn’t clear what Mr. and Mrs. Moltke looked like, or wore, or what they were saying, and at one point there was a dog standing in the middle of the room but its breed and even color were unclear. There was nothing overtly surreal or menacing in the scene. It seemed more like something generic or vague or tentative, like an abstract or outline. The only specifically strange thing was that the house had two front doors, even though one of them wasn’t in the front but it was still a front door. But this fact could not begin to account for the overwhelming sense of dread Laurel Manderley felt, sitting there. There was a premonition of not just danger but evil. There was a creeping, ambient evil present, except even though present it was not in the room. Like the second front door, it was somehow both there and not. She couldn’t wait to get out, she had to get out. But when she stood up with the excuse of asking to use the bathroom, even in the midst of asking she couldn’t stand the feeling of evil and began running for the door in stocking feet in order to get out, but it was not the front door she ran for, it was the other door, even though she didn’t know where it was, except she must know because there it was, with a decorative and terribly detailed metal scarab over the knob, and whatever the overwhelming evil was was right behind it, the door, but for some reason even as she’s overcome with fear she’s also reaching for the doorknob, she’s going to open it, she can see herself starting to open it—and that’s when she wakes. And then almost the totally exact same thing happens the next night, and she’s afraid now that if she has it again then the next time she’ll actually open the front door that isn’t in front… and her fear of this possibility is the only thing she can put her finger on in trying to describe the dream to Siobhan and Tara on the train ride home Tuesday night, but there’s no way to convey just why the two front door thing is so terrifying, since she
herself can’t even rationally explain it.

  The Moltkes were childless, but their home’s bathroom lay off a narrow hallway whose east wall was hung with framed photos of Brint and Amber’s friends’ and relatives’ children, as well as certain shots of the Moltkes themselves as youngsters. The presence in this hallway of Atwater, a freelance photographer who wore a Hawaiian shirt and smelled strongly of hair cream, and a Richmond IN internist whom Ellen Bactrian had personally found and engaged had already disarranged some of the photos, which now hung at haphazard angles and revealed partial cracks and an odd set of bulges in the wall’s surface. There was one quite extraordinary shot of Amber at what had to have been her wedding’s reception, radiant in white brocade and holding the cake’s tiered platform in one hand while with the other she brought the cutter to bear. And what at first glance had looked like someone else was a Little League photo of Moltke himself, in uniform and holding an aluminum bat, the artist perhaps nine or ten and his batting helmet far too large. And so on.

  Atwater’s new rental car, a pointedly budget Kia that even he felt cramped in, sat in the Moltke’s driveway with the MD’s Lincoln Brougham just behind it. Moltke’s company van was parked in the duplex’s other driveway, which bespoke some kind of possible arrangement with the other side’s occupant that Atwater, who felt more than a little battered and conflicted and ill at ease in Mrs. Moltke’s presence, had not yet thought to inquire about. The artist’s wife had objected strenuously to a procedure that she said both she and her husband found distasteful and degrading, and was now in her sewing room off the kitchen, whence the occasional impact of her foot on an old machine’s treadle shook the hallway and caused the freelance photographer to have to readjust his light stands several different times.