The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘…’

  ‘They couldn’t do horror-movie stuff, though, they couldn’t give you electroshock treatments like in that one movie, because everybody’s parents were right there practically every day and knew what was going on. If you were on that ward you weren’t committed to Zeller, you were admitted, and after seven days they actually had to let you go if your parents said so. Which some of them did, of the zombie girls. But they could legally sign forms that changed you to committed. The doctors in the suits could, so they were the scariest ones.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Plus the food was beyond gross.’

  ‘You had been giving yourself small, hidden cuts as some sort of psychological compensation,’ Shane Drinion says.

  Meredith Rand gives him a level look. She does notice that he seems to be sitting up slightly straighter or something, because the very lowest part of the display of different kinds of hats is obscured, and she knows she isn’t slumped down. ‘It felt good. It was creepy, and I knew it couldn’t be good if I was so secret and creepy about it, but it felt good. I don’t know that else to say.’ Every time she taps ash, it’s three taps of the same speed and angle with a red-nailed finger. ‘But I had fantasies about cutting on my neck, my face, which was creepy, and I’d been moving further up my arms all year without being able to help it, which scared me in hindsight. It was good I was in there; it was crazy—so maybe they were right after all.’

  Drinion simply watches her. There is no way to tell whether it is building up to really rain or if the mass will miss them. The light outside is the approximate color of a spent flashbulb. It’s too loud in here to know if there is thunder. Sometimes the air-conditioning seems to get colder or more insistent when it is about to storm, but that is not what it feels like is happening now.

  Meredith Rand says: ‘You have to say little things occasionally, like it’s a real conversation, to show you’re at least interested. Otherwise the person just feels like they’re yammering and the other person could be thinking about God only knows what.’

  ‘But putting cuts on your face would have externalized the situation too much,’ Drinion says.

  ‘There you go. Plus I didn’t want to cut my face. As he ended up showing me, my surface face was all I really thought I had. My face and my body, that I was supposedly a fox. I was one of the foxes at Central Catholic. That’s a high school here. They called us that—the foxes. Most of them were cheerleaders, too.’

  Drinion says: ‘So you were raised in the Catholic faith.’

  Rand shakes her head as she taps the cigarette. ‘That’s not relevant. That’s not the kind of little occasional response I meant.’

  ‘…’

  ‘The connection is the stuff about prettiness and loneliness you were talking about. Or we were, which is hard to understand, probably, given how supposedly being considered as good-looking in high school is the female ticket to popularity and being accepted and all the things that are supposed to be the opposite of loneliness.’ She sometimes uses direct questions as an excuse to meet his gaze directly: ‘Were you lonely in high school?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Right. Oh, right. Plus beauty is a form of power. People pay attention to you. It can be very seductive.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Only in close retrospect does Meredith Rand consider the strange intensity of talking to the utility examiner. Ordinarily very conscious of her surroundings and what other people around her were doing, Rand later realized that large blocks of the tête-à-tête at Meibeyer’s seemed removed from any kind of environment at all. That within these blocks of intense engagement she had been unconscious of the jukebox’s intrusive music or the thud of its excessive bass in her breastbone, the insistent burbles and dings of the pinball machines and video raceway game, the televised baseball above the bar, the normally distracting roar of surrounding conversations in which different audible snatches sometimes rose out and commanded attention and then receded into the ambient distracting noise of mixed-together voices all raised to overcome the room’s own noise. The only way she is able to explain it to Beth Rath is that it was as if a sort of insulated container had formed around their table and sometimes hardly anything else had penetrated through it. Even though it wasn’t like she just sat there looking right at the utility man all the time; it wasn’t like a hypnotic thing. She also hadn’t been aware of how much time had passed or was passing, which for Meredith Rand was a very unusual thing.* The best theory Meredith Rand could come up with was that it was that ‘Mr. X’ paid such close, intense attention to what she was saying—an intensity that had nothing to do with flirting or anything romantic; this was a whole different type of intensity—although it was also true to say that Meredith Rand had experienced absolutely zero romantic or sexual attraction to Shane Drinion at that table in Meibeyer’s. It was something else entirely.

  ‘It was him who told me this. Who laid it out that way. At night, after dinner, after all the groups and OT were over and the doctors in their nice suits went home and there was just one nurse on the meds desk and him. He had the white staff coat with a sweater and these plastic sneakers and a big ring of keys. You could hear him down the hall without looking, just from the ring of keys. We used to tell him it looked like the ring of keys weighed more than he did. Some of the girls gave him a lot of grief, because it wasn’t like he could really do anything to them.’

  ‘…’

  ‘There wasn’t anything to do after visits at night except watch TV in the community room, or play Ping-Pong on a table that had a really low net so even the girls on heavy meds could feel like they could play, too, and all he had to do was do med checks and give people passes for the phone, and at the end of his shift he had to fill out evals on everybody, which was totally routine unless there was some kind of psych crisis.’

  ‘So you observed him closely, it seems,’ Shane Drinion says.

  ‘It wasn’t like he was much to look at if you were going to call somebody good-looking or not. Some of the girls called him the corpse. They had to have their mean little names for everybody. Or they called him the grim reaper. It was all just physical. But it was like no part of him touched his clothes on the inside; they just hung on him. He moved like he was about sixty. But he was funny, and he really talked to you. If anybody wanted to talk about something, meaning really talk, he’d go in the conference room off the kitchen with them and talk.’ Meredith Rand has a set of routines for putting the cigarette out, all of which, whether fast and stabbing or slow and more grinding from the side, are quite thorough. ‘He didn’t make anybody do it. It wasn’t like he was tugging on your sleeve to go do tête-à-tête or let him practice on you. Most people just vegged out in front of the TV, or the ones in for drugs had to go to their drug meeting in the van. He had to put his feet up on the table, usually, when you had a one-on-one with him. The table in the conference room that the doctors spread out their files to talk to the parents at. He’d lean way back and put his sneakers up on the table, which he said it was because he had a bad back, but really it was because of the cardiomyopathy, which he’d gotten mysteriously in college and was why he didn’t finish college, which was why he was working this shitty nut ward attendant job, even though he was about seven thousand times smarter and more perceptive about what was really going on with people than the doctors and so-called counselors were. They saw everybody through this professional lens that was about half an inch across—whatever didn’t fit in the lens they either didn’t see or twisted it or squished it in so it fit. And having his feet in those chintzy Kmart shoes up on the table like that made him seem more like at least a person, like somebody you were really talking to instead of somebody trying to just diagnose you or trace your etiology so they’d have something to say that fit their little lens. They were a total joke, those shoes.’

  ‘May I ask a question?’

  ‘Why not just ask the question instead of taking the time to make me say yes you can ask a quest
ion?’

  ‘I see what you’re saying.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Elevating his feet was to help him circulate blood more efficiently?’

  ‘That’s what you wanted to ask?’

  ‘Is that not the sort of small, reinforcing question you were talking about?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Rand says. ‘Yes, it’s for circulation. Although at the time who knew why it was. It was believable he had a bad back. He sure didn’t look comfortable. All you could really tell was that this was somebody who was not in great shape.’

  ‘He appeared frail, especially for his age.’

  Sometimes now Rand will every so often toss her head back and to the side a tiny bit, very rapidly, as if rearranging her hair’s feathering without touching it, which certain types of adolescent girls do a great deal without necessarily being aware of it. ‘By the way, he taught me the word etiology. And he explained why the doctors had to be so distant and stiff; it was just part of their job. He didn’t force anybody, but at times it seemed like he picked certain people to talk to, and he made it hard to resist. The nights could be hard, and it wasn’t like watching Maude with suicidal people or people on heavy meds was going to help very much.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Do you remember Maude?’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘My mom loved that show. It was about the last thing in the world I wanted to see in there. If her husband got mad and told her “Maude, sit,” she’d sit, like a dog, and it got a big laugh on the canned laughter. Some feminism. Or Charlie’s Angels, which was just totally insulting, if you were a feminist.’

  ‘…’

  ‘The way he started talking to me was in the pink room, which was the isolation room, which is where they put you if you were on suicide watch and the law said you had to be legally observed twenty-four hours a day, or if you acted out in a disciplinary way where they said you presented a danger or disruptive influence—they could put you in there.’

  ‘Called the pink room because that was the room’s color?’ Drinion asks.

  Meredith Rand smiles coolly. ‘Baker-Miller pink, to be exact, because there had been experiments showing that seeing pink soothed mental agitation, and soon every nut ward everywhere started painting their isolation room pink. He told me that, too. He explained the color of the room they put me in; it had a sloped floor and a drain in the middle like something out of the Middle Ages. I was never on suicide watch, if you’re wondering. I have no idea how tripped out you are by any of this, like uh-oh here’s this crazy person, she was in Zeller when she was seventeen.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

  ‘What I did was tell a doctor who wasn’t even my doctor, I mean the one my dad’s insurance was paying for, but this was a different doctor who’d come in and cover for the doctor’s cases when he couldn’t come in, they all covered for each other all the time this way, so in like five days you’d talk to three different doctors, and they had to spread your file and case notes or whatever out on the table to even remember who you were—and this doctor, who never even blinked, kept trying to get me to talk about being abused and neglected as a child, which I never was, and I ended up telling him he was a freaking idiot and that he could either believe me when I told him the truth or just stick it up his stupid fat butt. And then that night I’m in the pink room, he’d ordered it, which was bullshit. Not like they dragged me in there and threw me in and slammed the door—everybody was pretty nice about it. But you know, one of the weird things about being in a psych hospital is you gradually start to feel like you have permission to say whatever you’re thinking. You feel like it’s OK or maybe even in some way expected to act crazy or uninhibited, which at first feels kind of liberating and good; there’s this feeling like no more smiley masks, no more pretending, which feels good, except it gets kind of seductive and dangerous, and actually it can make people worse in there—some inhibitions are good, they’re normal, he said, and part of the syndrome they call some people eventually getting institutionalized is that they get put in a nut ward at a young age or a fragile time when their sense of themselves is not really very fixed or resilient, and they start acting the way they think people in nut wards are expected to act, and after a while they really are that way, and they get caught in the system, the mental-health system, and they never really get out.’

  ‘And he told you that. He warned you about using uninhibited insults with the psychiatrist.’

  Her eyes have changed; she puts her chin in her hand, which makes her seem even younger. ‘He told me a lot of things. A lot. We talked for like two hours the night I was in the pink room. We both laugh about it now—he talked way more than I did, which is not how it’s supposed to be done. After a while every night we were in there like clockwork, ta—’

  ‘You went to the isolation room?’

  ‘No, I was just in there that one night, and the regular case doctor, I have to admit it, he got the substitute one in some kind of disciplinary trouble for signing me in there; he said it was reactive.’ Rand stops and taps her fingers against the side of her cheek. ‘Shit, I forget what I was saying.’

  Drinion looks slightly upward for an instant. ‘“Every night we were in there like clockwork.”’

  ‘In the conference room, after visits and whoever was freaking out because of something in visits got calmed down or medicated. We’d sit in there and talk, except he had to get up every so often to do checks on where everybody was and make sure nobody was in anybody else’s room, and make whoever was due for meds go to the meds desk. Every night on weekday nights we’d go in, and he’d do this thing he always did of filling up a Coke can with water at the fountain, he’d use a Coke can instead of a cup, and we’d sit down at the table and he’d go, “So shall we go intense tonight, Meredith, or just do some laid-back chitchat?” and I’d almost act like somebody looking at a menu and go, “Well, hmm, tonight I think I’d like to go intense, please.”’

  ‘Can I ask a question?’

  ‘Grr. Go ahead.’

  ‘Should I infer that intense refers to the cutting behavior and your reasons for doing it?’ Drinion asks. His hands are now on the table with the fingers laced together, which for most people causes the back to bow and slump, but with Drinion does not—his posture stays the same.

  ‘Negative. He was too smart for that. We didn’t talk about cutting often. That wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could come at directly that way. What he—it’s more like he mostly just told me all these things about myself.’

  One of Drinion’s interlaced fingers moves very slightly. ‘Not asked you things?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘And that didn’t make you angry? Presuming to tell you about yourself?’

  ‘The big difference is the way he was right. Just about everything he said was right.’

  ‘In what he told you about yourself.’

  ‘Look, and he did this mostly in the beginning, when he needed to establish credibility. That’s what he told me later—he knew I wouldn’t be there long, at Zeller, and he knew I needed to talk to somebody, and he needed to let me know very fast that he understood me, knew me, he wasn’t just dealing with me as a case or a problem to be figured out for his own career, which he knew was how the doctors and counselors seemed to me, which he said it didn’t matter if I was right about them or not, the point is that I believed it, it was part of my defenses. He said I was one of the most strongly defended people he’d ever seen come in there. In Zeller. Short of the outright psychotics, I mean, who were just about impregnable, but they got transferred out almost right away; he rarely had any one-on-ones with real psychotics. The psychotic thing is just defensive structures and beliefs so strong that the person can’t get out, they become the real world, and then it’s usually too late, because the structure of the brain gets changed. That person’s only hope is medication and a whole lot of pink around him at all times.’

  ‘He under
stood you as a person, you’re saying.’

  ‘What he did, right in the pink room, while I’m sitting there on the bunk and going oh my God there’s a drain in the floor, he right away told me two separate things about myself that I knew but nobody else knew. Nobody. I’m serious,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘It’s like, I couldn’t believe it. He was dead-on.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Now you’re wondering what the things are,’ she says.

  Drinion does that very small thing with the angle of his head. ‘Are you saying you’d like me to ask you what they are?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Almost by definition, I doubt that you’d tell them to someone.’

  ‘Bingo. Right. No way. Not that they’re all that interesting,’ she says. ‘But he did. He knew them, and you can bet that got my attention. That made me sit up and take notice. How could it not?’