The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘If he doesn’t, it’s some kind of, what, a miracle? Idiot savantry? Divine intervention?’

  ‘Or else some kind of extremely sick fraud.’

  Fraud was a frightening word to them both, for obvious reasons. One consequence of getting Mrs. Anger’s executive intern in on the miraculous poo story was that Eckleschafft-Böd US’s Legal people were now involved and devoting resources to the piece in a way that Laurel Manderley and Ellen Bactrian could never have caused, even given the WITW associate editor’s own background in Legal. BSG weeklies rarely broke stories or covered anything that other media hadn’t already premasticated. The prospect was both exciting and frightful.

  The executive intern said: ‘Or else maybe it’s subconscious. Maybe his colon somehow knows things his conscious mind doesn’t.’

  ‘Is it the colon that determines the whole shape and configuration and everything of the… you know?’

  The executive intern made a face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really want to think about it.’

  ‘What is the colon, anyhow? Is it part of the intestines or is it technically its own organ?’

  Ellen Bactrian’s and the executive intern’s fathers were both MDs in Westchester County NY, though the two men practiced different medical specialties and had never met. The executive intern periodically reversed the direction of her elliptical trainer’s pedals, working her quadriceps and calves instead of the hamstrings and lower gluteals. Her facial expression throughout these periods of reversal was both intent and abstracted.

  ‘Either way,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘it’s obviously human interest right out the wazoo.’ She then related the anecdote that Laurel Manderley had shared with her in the elevators on the way back down from the 82nd floor early that morning, about the DKNY clad circulation intern at lunch telling everybody that she sometimes pretended her waste was a baby and then expecting them to relate or to think her candor was somehow hip or brave.

  For a moment there was nothing but the sound of two syncopated elliptical trainers. Then the executive intern said: ‘There’s a way to do this.’ She blotted momentarily at her upper lip with the inside of her wristband. ‘Joan would say we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We’ve been thinking about the subject of the piece instead of the angle for the piece.’ Joan referred to Mrs. Anger, the Executive Editor of Style.

  ‘The UBA’s been a problem from the start,’ Ellen Bactrian said. ‘What I told—’

  The executive intern interrupted: ‘There doesn’t have to be a strict UBA, though, because we can take the piece out of WHAT IN THE WORLD and do it in SOCIETY PAGES. Is the miraculous poo phenomenon art, or miracle, or just disgusting.’ She seemed not to be aware that her limbs’ forward speed had increased; she was now forcing her workout’s program instead of following it. SOCIETY PAGES was the section of Style devoted to soft coverage of social issues such as postnatal depression and the rain forest. According to the magazine’s editorial template, SP items ran up to 600 words as opposed to WITW’s 400.

  Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning we include some bites from credible sources who think it is disgusting. We have Skip create controversy in the piece itself.’ It was true that her use of Atwater’s name in the remark was somewhat strategic—there were complex turf issues involved in altering a piece’s venue within the magazine, and Ellen Bactrian could well imagine the WITW associate editor’s facial expression and some of the cynical jokes he might make in order to mask his hurt at being shut out of the story altogether.

  ‘No,’ the executive intern responded. ‘Not quite. We don’t create the controversy, we cover it.’ She was checking her sports watch even though there were digital clocks right there on the machines’ consoles. Both women had met or exceeded their target heartrate for over half an hour.

  A short time later, they were in the little tiled area where people toweled off after a shower. At this time of day, the locker room was steamy and extremely crowded. The executive intern looked like something out of Norse mythology. The hundreds of tiny parallel scars on the insides of her upper arms were all but invisible. It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are. The executive intern was saying: ‘The real angle is about coverage. Style is not foisting a gross or potentially offensive story on its readers. Rather, Style is doing soft coverage on a controversial story that already exists.’

  Ellen Bactrian had two towels, one of which she had wrapped around her head in an immense lavender turban. ‘So Atwater will just rotate over and do it for SOCIETY PAGES, you’re saying? Or will Genevieve want to send in her own salaryman?’ Genevieve was the given name of the new associate editor in charge of SOCIETY PAGES, with whom Ellen Bactrian’s overman had already locked horns several times in editorial meetings.

  The executive intern had inclined her head over to the side and was combing out a shower related tangle with her fingers. As was something of an unconscious habit, she bit gently at her lower lip in concentration. ‘I’m like ninety percent sure this is the way to go,’ she said. ‘Style is covering the human element of a controversy that’s already raging.’ At this point, they were at their rented lockers, which, in contradistinction to those on the men’s side, were full length in order to facilitate hanging. Painstakingly modified with portable inset shelving and adhesive hooks, both the women’s locker units were small marvels of organization.

  Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning it will need to be done somewhere else first. SOCIETY PAGES covers the coverage and the controversy.’ She favored Gaultier pinstripe slacks and sleeveless cashmere tops that could be worn either solo or under a jacket. So long as the slacks and top were in the same color family, sleeveless could still be all business—Mrs. Anger had taught them all that.

  In what appeared to be another unconscious habit, the executive intern sometimes actually pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead when she was thinking especially hard. In a way, it was her version of Skip Atwater’s capital flush. The opinion of nearly all the magazine’s other interns was that the executive intern was operating on a level where she didn’t have to be concerned about things like color families or maintaining a cool professional demeanor.

  ‘But it can’t be too big,’ she said.

  ‘The piece, or the venue?’ Ellen Bactrian always had to pat the ear with all the studs in it dry with a disposable little antibiotic cloth.

  ‘We don’t want Style readers to already know the story. This is the tricky part. We want them to feel as if Style is their first exposure to a story whose existence still precedes their seeing it.’

  ‘In a media sense, you mean.’

  The executive intern’s skirt was made of several dozen men’s neckties all stitched together lengthwise in a complicated way. She and a Mauritanian exchange student in THE THUMB who wore hallucinatorily colored tribal garb were the only two interns at Style who could get away with this sort of thing. It was actually the executive intern, at a working lunch two summers past, who had originally compared Skip Atwater to a jockey who’d broken training, though she had said it in a light and almost affectionate way—coming from her, it had not sounded cruel. Over Memorial Day weekend, she had actually been a guest of Mrs. Anger at her summer home in Quogue, where she had reportedly played mahjongg with none other than Mrs. Hans G. Böd. Her future seemed literally without limit.

  ‘Yes, though again, it’s delicate,’ the executive intern said. ‘Think of it as not unlike the Bush daughters, or that thing last Christmas on Dodi’s driver.’ These were rough analogies, but they did convey to Ellen Bactrian the executive intern’s basic thrust. In a broad sense, the cover the extant story angle was one of the standard ways BSGs distinguished themselves from both hard news glossies and the tabloids. On another level, Ellen Bactrian was also being informed that the overall piece was still her and the WHAT IN THE WORLD associate editor’s baby; and the executive intern’s repeated use of terms like tricky and delicate was designe
d both to flatter Ellen Bactrian and to apprise her that her editorial skill set would be amply tested by the challenges ahead.

  Gaultier slacks held their crease a great deal better if your hanger had clips and they could hang from the cuffs. The voluptuous humidity of the locker room was actually good for the tiny wrinkles that always accumulated through the morning. Unbeknownst to Ellen Bactrian, lower level interns often referred to her and the executive intern in the same hushed and venerative tones. A constant sense that she was insufficient and ever at risk of exposing her incompetence was one of the ways Ellen Bactrian kept her edge. Were she to learn that she, too, was virtually assured of a salaried offer from Style at her internship’s end, she would literally be unable to process the information—it might well send her over the edge, the executive intern knew. The way the girl now pressed at her forehead in unconscious imitation of the executive intern was a sign of just the kind of core insecurity the executive intern was trying to mitigate by bringing her along slowly and structuring their conversations as brainstorming rather than, for instance, her simply outright telling Ellen Bactrian how the miraculous poo story should be structured so that everyone made out. The executive intern was one of the greatest, most intuitive nurturers of talent Mrs. Anger had ever seen—and she herself had interned under Katharine Graham, back in the day.

  ‘So it can’t be too big,’ Ellen Bactrian was saying, first one hand against the locker and then the other as she adjusted her Blahniks’ straps. She now spoke in the half dreamy way of classic brainstorming. ‘Meaning we don’t totally sacrifice the scoop element. We need just enough of a prior venue so the story already exists. We’re covering a controversy instead of profiling some freakoid whose b.m. comes out in the shape of Anubis’s head.’ Her hair had almost completely air dried already.

  The executive intern’s belt for the skirt was two feet of good double hemp nautical rope. Her sandals were Laurent, open toe heels that went with nearly anything. She tied the ankles’ straps with half hitches and began to apply just the tiniest bit of clear gloss. Ellen Bactrian had now turned and was looking at her:

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  Their eyes met in the compact’s little mirror, and the executive intern smiled coolly. ‘Your salaryman’s already out there. You said he’s shuttling between the two pieces already, no?’

  Ellen Bactrian said: ‘But is there actual suffering involved?’ She was already constructing a mental flow chart of calls to be made and arrangements undertaken and then dividing the overall list between herself and Laurel Manderley, whom she now considered a bit of a pistol.

  ‘Well, listen—can he take orders?’

  ‘Skip? Skip’s a consummate pro.’

  The executive intern was adjusting the balloon sleeves of her blouse. ‘And according to him, the miraculous poo man is skittish on the story?’

  ‘The word Laurel says Skip used was excruciated.’

  ‘Is that even a word?’

  ‘It’s apparently totally the wife’s show, in terms of publicity. The artist guy is scared of his own shadow—according to Laurel, he’s sitting there flashing Skip secret signs like No, please God, no.’

  ‘So how hard could it be to represent this to Atwater’s All Ads person as comprising bona fide suffering?’

  Ellen Bactrian’s mental flow charts often contained actual boxes, Roman numerals, and multiarrow graphics—that’s how gifted an administrator she was. ‘You’re talking about something live, then.’

  ‘With the proviso that of course it’s all academic until this afternoon’s tests check out.’

  ‘But do we know for sure he’ll even go for it?’

  The executive intern never brushed her hair after a shower. She just gave her head two or three shakes and let it fall gloriously where it might and turned, slightly, to give Ellen Bactrian the full effect:

  ‘Who?’ She had ten weeks to live.

  6.

  In what everyone at the next day’s working lunch would agree was a masterstroke, the special limousine that arrived at 5:00 AM Wednesday to convey the artist and his wife to Chicago was like something out of a Style reader’s dream. Half a city block long, white the way cruise ships and bridal gowns are white, it had a television and wet bar, opposing seats of cordovan leather, noiseless AC, and a thick glass shield between passenger compartment and driver that could be raised and lowered at the touch of a button on the woodgrain panel, for privacy. To Skip Atwater, it looked like the hearse of the kind of star for whom the whole world stops dead in its tracks to mourn. Inside, the Moltkes faced each other, their knees almost touching, the artist’s hands obscured from view by the panels of his new beige sportcoat.

  The salaryman’s Kia trailing at a respectful distance, the limousine proceeded at dawn through the stolid caucasian poverty of Mount Carmel. There were only faint suggestions of faces behind its windows’ darkened glass, but whoever was awake to see the limousine glide by could tell that whoever was in there looking out saw everything afresh, like coming out of a long coma.

  O Verily was, understandably, a madhouse. The time from initial pitch to live broadcast was 31 hours. The Suffering Channel would enter stage three at 8:00 PM CDT on 4 July, ten weeks ahead of schedule, with three tableaux vivant. There were five different line producers, and all of them were very busy indeed.

  It was not Sweeps Week; but as the saying goes in cable, every week is Sweeps Week.

  A 52 year old grandmother from Round Lake Beach IL had a growth in her pancreas. The needle biopsy w/ CAT assist at Rush Presbyterian would be captured live by a remote crew; so would the activities of the radiology MD and pathologist whose job was to stain the sample and determine whether the growth was malignant. The segment entailed two separate freelance crews, all of whom were IA union and on holiday double time. The second part of the feed would be split screen. In something of a permissions coup, they’d have the woman’s face for the whole ten minutes it took for the stain to set and the pathologist to scope it. She and her husband would be looking at a monitor on which the pathology crew’s real time feed would be displayed—viewers would get to see the verdict and her reaction to it at the same time.

  Finding just the right host for the segments’ intros and voiceovers was an immense headache, given that nearly every plausible candidate’s agent was off for the Fourth, and that whomever The Suffering Channel cast they were then all but bound to stick with for at least one stage three cycle. Finalists were still being auditioned as late as 3:00 PM—and Style magazine’s Skip Atwater, in a move whose judgment was later questioned all up and down the editorial line, ended up devoting a good part of his time, attention, and shorthand notes to these auditions, as well as to a lengthy and somewhat meandering Q&A with an assistant to the Reudenthal and Voss associate tasked to the day’s multiform permissions and releases.

  In 1996, an unemployed arc welder was convicted of abducting and torturing to death a Penn State coed named Carole Ann Deutsch. Over four hours of high quality audiotape had been recovered from the suspect’s apartment and entered into evidence at trial. Voiceprint analysis confirmed that the screams and pleadings on the tapes—which were played for the jury, though not in open court—belonged to the victim. This tableau’s venue was a hastily converted OVP conference room. For the first time, Carole Ann Deutsch’s widowed father, of Glassport PA, would listen to selections from those tapes. There with him for support are the associate pastor from Mr. Deutsch’s church and an APA certified trauma counselor whose sunburn, only hours old, presents some ticklish problems for the segment’s makeup coordinator.

  Longtime People’s Court moderator Doug Llewellyn hosts. After lengthy and sometimes heated negotiations—during which at one point Mrs. Anger herself had to be contacted at home and enjoined to speak directly by cell to R. Vaughn Corliss, which Ellen Bactrian later said made her just about want to curl up and die—representatives of both the ACLU and the League of Decency are on hand for brief interviews by Skip
Atwater of Style.

  It is a clear Lucite commode unit atop a ten foot platform of tempered glass beneath which a video crew will record the real time emergence of either an iconically billowing and ecstatic Monroe or a five to seven inch Winged Victory of Samothrace, depending on dramatic last minute instructions. Suspended from the studio’s lighting grid to a position directly before the commode unit, a special monitor taking feed from below will give the artist visual access to his own production for the first time ever in his career. He believes what he sees will be public.

  In point of fact, the piece’s physical emergence will not really be broadcast. The combined arguments of Style’s Ellen Bactrian and the Development heads of O Verily Productions finally persuaded Mr. Corliss it would be beyond the pale. Instead, the artist’s wife has been interviewed on tape respecting Brint Moltke’s abusive childhood and the terrific shame, ambivalence, and sheer human suffering involved in his unchosen art. Edited portions of this interview will compose the voiceover as TSC viewers watch the artist’s face in the act of creation, its every wince and grimace captured by the special camera hidden within the chassis of the commode’s monitor.

  A consciência é o pesadelo da natureza.

  It is, of course, malignant. Subsequently, though, Carole Ann Deutsch’s father discomfits everyone by seeming less interested in the tapes than in justifying his appearance on the broadcast itself. His purpose for being here is to inform the public of what victims’ loved ones go through, to humanize the process and raise awareness. He repeats this several times, but at no point does he share how he feels or what he feels he’s gone through just now, listening. In the context of what he and the viewers have just heard, Mr. Deutsch’s reaction comes off as almost obscenely abstract and disengaged. On the other hand, Doug Llewellyn’s own evident humanity and ad lib skill in getting everyone through the segment testify to the soundness of his casting.