The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  The internist appeared to stand frozen in the gesture of a man looking at his watch. The photographer, for whom Atwater had had to wait over three hours in the Delaware County Airport, sat Indian style in a litter of equipment, picking at the carpet’s nap like a doleful child. A large and very precise French curl of hair was plastered to the man’s forehead with Brylcreem, whose scent was another of Skip Atwater’s childhood associations, and he knew it was the heat of the arc lights that made the hair cream smell so strong. The journalist’s left knee now ached no matter which way he distributed his weight. Every so often he pumped his fist at his side, but it was in a tentative and uninspired way.

  In the wake of a slow moving front, the area’s air was clear and dry and the sky a great cobalt expanse and Tuesday’s overall weather both hot and almost autumnally crisp.

  The Moltkes’ home’s bathroom door, a fiberboard model with interior hinges, was shut and locked. From its other side issued the sound of the sink and tub’s faucets intermixed with snatches of conservative talk radio. Her husband was an intensely private and skittish bathroom individual, Mrs. Moltke had explained to the MD and photographer, due without doubt to certain abuses he’d suffered as a tiny child. Negotiations over the terms of authentication had taken place in the home’s kitchen, and she had laid all this out with Mr. Moltke sitting right there beside her—Atwater had watched the man’s hands instead of his face while Amber declaimed about her husband’s bathroom habits and childhood trauma. Today she wore a great faded denim smock thing and seemed to loom in the periphery of Atwater’s sight no matter where he looked, rather like the sky when one’s outside.

  At one point in the negotiations, Atwater had needed to use the bathroom and had gone in there and seen it. He really had had to go; it had not been a pretense. The Moltkes’ toilet was in a small de facto alcove formed by the sink’s counter and the wall that comprised the door jamb. The room smelled exquisitely of mildew. He could see that the wall behind the sink and toilet was part of the same east load bearer that ran along the hallway and sitting room and conjoined the duplex’s other side. Atwater preferred a bathroom whose facilities were a bit farther from the door, for privacy’s sake, but he could see that the only way to accomplish this here would have been to place the shower unit where the toilet now was, which given this shower’s unusual size would be impossible. It was difficult to imagine Amber Moltke backing herself into this slender recess and settling carefully on the white oval seat to eliminate. Since the east wall also held the interior plumbing for all three of the room’s fixtures, it stood to reason that the bathroom on the other side of the duplex abutted this one, and that its own plumbing also lay within the wall. For a moment, nothing but an ingrained sense of propriety kept Atwater from trying to press his ear to the wall next to the medicine cabinet to see whether he could hear anything. Nor would he ever have allowed himself to open the Moltkes’ medicine cabinet, or to root in any serious way through the woodgrain shelves above the towel rack.

  The toilet itself was a generic American Standard, its white slightly brighter than the room’s walls and tile. The only noteworthy details were a large crack of some sort on the unpadded seat’s left side and a rather sluggish flushing action. The toilet and area of floor around it appeared very clean. Atwater was also the sort of person who always made sure to put the seat back down when he was finished.

  Evidently, Ellen Bactrian’s brain trust had decided against presenting a short list of specific works or types of pieces they wanted the artist to choose from. The initial pitch that Laurel Manderley had been directed to instruct Atwater to make was that both the MD and photographer would be set up in there with Brint Moltke while he produced whatever piece he felt moved on this day to create. As predicted, Amber declared this totally unacceptable. The proffered compromise, then, was the presence of just the MD (which in fact was all they’d wanted in the first place, Style having no possible use for in medias photos). Mrs. Moltke, however, had nixed this as well—Brint had never produced an artwork with anyone else in the room. He was, she iterated once more, an incorrigibly private bathroom person.

  During the parts of her presentation he’d already heard, the journalist noted in Gregg shorthand that the home’s kitchen was carpeted and deployed a green and burgundy color scheme in its walls, counters, and cabinets, that Mrs. Amber Moltke must almost certainly have had some type of school or community theater experience, and that the broad plastic cup from which the artist had occasionally sipped coffee was from the top of a Thermos unit that was not itself in evidence. Of these observations, only the second had any bearing on the piece that would eventually run in Style magazine’s final issue.

  What had especially impressed Ellen Bactrian was Laurel Manderley’s original suggestion that Skip pick up a portable fax machine at some Circuit City or Wal Mart on the way down from Muncie with the photographer—whose equipment had required the subcompact’s seats to be moved forward as far as they would go, and who not only smoked in the nonsmoking rental but had this thing where he then fieldstripped each cigarette butt and put the remains carefully in the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt—and that the unit be hooked up to the Moltkes’ kitchen phone, which had a clip outlet and could be switched back and forth from phone to fax with no problem. This allowed the MD, whose negotiated station was finally fixed at just outside the bathroom door, to receive the piece fresh (‘hot off the griddle’ had been the photographer’s phrase, which had caused the circle of Moltke’s digital mudra to quiver and distend for just a moment), to perform his immediate field tests, and to fax the findings directly to Laurel Manderley, signed and affixed with the same medical authorization number required by certain prescriptions.

  ‘You understand that Style is going to have to have some corroboration,’ Atwater had said. This was at the height of the ersatz negotiations in the Moltkes’ kitchen. He chose not to remind Amber that this entire issue had already been hashed out in the enmired Cavalier two days prior. ‘It’s not a matter of whether the magazine trusts you or not. It’s that some readers are obviously going to be skeptical. Style cannot afford to look overcredulous or like a dupe to even a fraction of its readers.’ He did not, in the kitchen, refer to the BSGs’ concern with distinguishing themselves from tabloids, though he did say: ‘They can’t afford to let this look like a tabloid story.’

  Both Amber Moltke and the photographer had been eating pieces of a national brand coffee cake that could evidently be heated in the microwave without becoming runny or damp. Her forkwork was deft and delicate and her face as broad across as two of Skip’s own placed somehow side by side.

  ‘Maybe we should just go on and let some tabloid do it, then,’ she had replied coolly.

  Atwater said: ‘Well, should you decide to do that, then yes, credibility ceases to be an issue. The story gets inserted between Delta Burke’s all fruit diet and reports of Elvis’s profile in a photo of Neptune. But no other outlet picks up the story or follows it up. Tabloid pieces don’t enter the mainstream.’ He said: ‘It’s a delicate balance of privacy and exposure for you and Brint, I’m aware. You’ll obviously have to make your own decision.’

  Later, waiting in the narrow and redolent hallway, Atwater noted in Gregg that at some point he and Amber had ceased even pretending to include the artist in the kitchen’s whole back and forth charade. And that the way his damaged knee really felt was this: ignominious.

  ‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. She was standing next to the trayless fax machine, and the editorial intern who had regaled the previous day’s working lunch with the intracunnilingual flatus vignette was seated at the other WITW salaryman’s console a few feet away. Today the editorial intern—whose first name also happened to be Laurel, and who was a particularly close friend and protégé of Ellen Bactrian—wore a Gaultier skirt and a sleeveless turtleneck of very soft looking ash gray cashmere.

  ‘Your own saliva,’ said Laurel Manderley. ‘You’re swallowing it all the time. Is it di
sgusting to you? No. But now imagine gradually filling up a juice glass or something with your own saliva, and then drinking it all down.’

  ‘That really is disgusting,’ the editorial intern admitted.

  ‘But why? When it’s in your mouth it’s not gross, but the minute it’s outside of your mouth and you consider putting it back in, it becomes gross.’

  ‘Are you suggesting it’s somehow the same thing with poo?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think with poo, it’s more like as long as it’s inside us we don’t think about it. In a way, poo only becomes poo when it’s excreted. Until then, it’s more like a part of you, like your inner organs.’

  ‘It’s maybe the same way we don’t think about our organs, our livers and intestines. They’re inside all of us—’

  ‘They are us. Who can live without intestines?’

  ‘But we still don’t want to see them. If we see them, they’re automatically disgusting.’

  Laurel Manderley kept touching at the side of her nose, which felt naked and somewhat creepily smooth. She also had the kind of sick headache where it hurt to move her eyes, and whenever she moved her eyes she could not help but seem to feel all the complex musculature connecting her eyeballs to her brain, which made her feel even woozier. She said: ‘But partly we don’t like seeing them because if they’re visible, that means there’s something wrong, there’s a hole or some kind of damage.’

  ‘But we also don’t even want to think about them,’ the other Laurel said. ‘Who sits there and goes, Now the salad I ate an hour ago is entering my intestines, now my intestines are pulsing and squeezing and moving the material along?’

  ‘Our hearts pulse and squeeze, and we don’t mind thinking about our heart.’

  ‘But we don’t want to see it. We don’t even want to see our blood. We faint dead away.’

  ‘Not menstrual blood, though.’

  ‘True. I was thinking more of like a blood test, seeing the blood in the tube. Or getting a cut and seeing the blood come out.’

  ‘Menstrual blood is disgusting, but it doesn’t make you lightheaded,’ Laurel Manderley said almost to herself, her large forehead crinkled with thought. Her hands felt as though they were shaking even though she knew no one else could see it.

  ‘Maybe menstrual blood is ultimately more like poo. It’s a waste thing, and disgusting, but it’s not wrong that it’s all of a sudden outside of you and visible, because the whole point is that it’s supposed to get out, it’s something you want to get rid of.’

  ‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. ‘Your skin isn’t disgusting to you, right?’

  ‘Sometimes my skin’s pretty disgusting.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  The other editorial intern laughed. ‘I know. I was just kidding.’

  ‘Skin’s outside of us,’ Laurel Manderley continued. ‘We see it all the time and there’s no problem. It’s even aesthetic sometimes, as in so and so’s got beautiful skin. But now imagine, say, a foot square section of human skin, just sitting there on a table.’

  ‘Eww.’

  ‘Suddenly it becomes disgusting. What’s that about?’

  The editorial intern recrossed her legs. The ankles above her slingback Jimmy Choos were maybe ever so slightly on the thick side, but she had on the sort of incredibly fine and lovely silk hose that you’re lucky to be able to wear even once without totally ruining them. She said: ‘Maybe again because it implies some kind of injury or violence.’

  The fax’s incoming light still had not lit. ‘It seems more like the skin is decontextualized.’ Laurel Manderley felt along the side of her nostril again. ‘You decontextualize it and take it off the human body and suddenly it’s disgusting.’

  ‘I don’t even like thinking about it, to be honest.’

  ‘I’m just telling you I don’t like it.’

  ‘Between you and I, I’d say I’m starting to agree. But it’s out of our hands now, as they say.’

  ‘You’re saying you’d maybe prefer it if I hadn’t gone to Miss Flick with them,’ Laurel Manderley said on the telephone. It was late Tuesday afternoon. At certain times, she and Atwater used the name Miss Flick as a private code term for Ellen Bactrian.

  ‘There was no other way to pitch it, I know. I know that,’ Skip Atwater responded. ‘Whatever’s to blame is not that. You did what I think I would have asked you to do myself if I’d had my wits about me.’ Laurel Manderley could hear the whispery whisk of his waist level fist. He said: ‘Whatever culpability is mine,’ which did not make that much sense to her. ‘Somewhere some core part of it got past me on this one, I think.’

  The Style journalist had been seated on the bed’s edge on a spread out towel, checking the status of his injured knee. In the privacy of his motel room, Atwater was sans blazer and the knot of his necktie was loosened. The room’s television was on, but it was tuned to the Spectravision base channel where the same fragment of song played over and over and the recorded voice of someone who was not Mrs. Gladys Hine welcomed you to the Mount Carmel Holiday Inn and invited you to press Menu in order to see options for movies, games, and a wide variety of in room entertainment, over and over; and Atwater had evidently misplaced the remote control (which in Holiday Inns tends to be very small) required for changing the channel or at the very least muting it. The left leg of his slacks was rolled neatly up to a point above the knee, every second fold reversed to prevent creasing. The television was a nineteen inch Symphonic on a swiveling base that was attached to the blondwood dresser unit facing the bed. It was the same second floor room he had checked into on Sunday—Laurel Manderley had somehow gotten Accounting to book the room straight through even though Atwater had spent the previous night in a Courtyard by Marriott on Chicago’s near north side, for which motel the freelance photographer was even now bound, at double his normal daily rate, in preparation for tomorrow’s combined coverage spectacle.

  On the wall above the room’s television was a large framed print of someone’s idea of a circus clown’s face and head constructed wholly out of vegetables. The eyes were olives and the lips peppers and the cheeks’ spots of color small tomatoes, for example. Repeatedly, on both Sunday and today, Atwater had imagined some occupant of the room suffering a stroke or incapacitating fall and having to lie on the floor looking up at the painting and listening to the base channel’s nine second message over and over, unable to move or cry out or look away. In some respects, Atwater’s various tics and habitual gestures were designed to physicalize his consciousness and to keep him from morbid abstractions like this—he wasn’t going to have a stroke, he wouldn’t have to look at the painting or listen to the idiot tune over and over until a maid came in the next morning and found him.

  ‘Because that’s the only reason. I thought you knew she’d sent them.’

  ‘And if I’d called in on time as I should have, we’d both have known and there would have been no chance of misunderstanding.’

  ‘That’s nice, but it’s not really my point,’ Laurel Manderley said. She was seated at Atwater’s console, absently snapping and unsnapping a calfskin barrette. As was SOP with Skip and his interns, this telephone conversation was neither rapid nor clipped. It was shortly before 3:30 and 4:30 respectively, since Indiana does not adhere to the DST convention. Laurel Manderley would later tell Skip that she had been so tired and unwell on Tuesday that she’d felt almost translucent, and plus was upset that she would have to come in on the Fourth, tomorrow, in order to mediate between Atwater and Ellen Bactrian re the so called artist’s appearance on The Suffering Channel’s inaugural tableau vivant thing, all of which had been literally thrown together in hours. It was not the way either of them normally worked.

  Nor had Style ever before sought to conjoin two different pieces in process. It was this that signified to Skip Atwater that either Mrs. Anger or one of her apparatchiks had taken a direct hand. That he felt no discernible trace of either vindication or resentment
about this was perhaps to his credit. What he did feel, suddenly and emphatically in the midst of the call, was that he might well be working for Laurel Manderley someday, that it would be she to whom he pitched pieces and pleaded for additional column inches.

  For Laurel Manderley’s own part, what she later realized she had been trying to do in the Tuesday afternoon telephone confab was to communicate her unease about the miraculous poo story without referring to her dream of spatial distortion and creeping evil in the Moltke couple’s home. In the professional world, one does not invoke dreams in order to express reservations about an ongoing project. It just doesn’t happen.

  Skip Atwater said: ‘Well, she did have my card. I gave her my card, of course. But not our Fed Ex number. You know I’d never do that.’

  ‘But think—they got here Monday morning. Yesterday was Monday.’

  ‘She spared no expense.’

  ‘Skip,’ Laurel Manderley said. ‘Fed Ex isn’t open on Sunday.’

  The whisking sound stopped. ‘Shit,’ Atwater said.

  ‘And I didn’t even call them for the initial interview until almost Saturday night.’

  ‘And Fed Ex isn’t apt to be open Saturday night, either.’

  ‘So the whole thing is just very creepy. So maybe you need to ask Mrs. Moltke what’s going on.’

  ‘You’re saying she must have sent the pieces before you’d even called.’ Atwater was not processing verbal information at his usual rate. One thing he was sure of was that he now had absolutely zero intention of telling Laurel Manderley about the potentially unethical fraternization in the Cavalier, which was also why he could say nothing to her of the whole knee issue.

  A person who tended to have very little conscious recall of his own dreams, Atwater today could remember only the previous two nights’ sensation of being somehow immersed in another human being, of having that person surround him like water or air. It did not exactly take an advanced clinical degree to interpret this dream. At most, Skip Atwater’s mother had been only three fifths to two thirds the size of Amber Moltke, although if you considered Mrs. Atwater’s size as it would appear to a small child, much of the disparity then vanished.