The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘But my question was whether you talked to him about your possible suspicion, the possibility that he didn’t really understand you, and care, but was a creep?’

  Sometimes throughout the conversation Meredith Rand looks down critically at her fingernails, which are almond-shaped and neither too short nor too long, and painted a lustrous red. Shane Drinion looks at her hands only when Rand does, as a rule.

  ‘I didn’t have to,’ Rand says. ‘He brought it up. Edward did. He said given my problem it was only a matter of time before it occurred to me that maybe he didn’t understand and care but only understood me the way a mechanic understands a machine—this was a time in the second week in the nut ward that I was having all these dreams about different kinds of machinery, with gears and dials, which the doctors and so-called therapists wanted to talk about and get me to see the symbolism of, which he and I both laughed about because it was so obvious an idiot could have seen it, which he said wasn’t the doctors’ fault or that they were stupid, that was just the way the machine of the institution of in-patient therapy worked, and the doctors had no more choice about how much importance they put on the dreams than a little piece of machinery does about doing the little task or movement it’s been put there to do over and over again as part of the larger operation of the larger machine.’ Rand’s rep at the REC is that she’s sexy but crazy and a serious bore, just won’t shut up if you get her started; they argue about whether they ultimately envy her husband or pity him. ‘But he brought it up before I had a chance to even start thinking about it.’ She unsnaps her white vinyl case but does not extract a cigarette from it. ‘Which I have got to say was kind of surprising, because by this time I was eighteen, and I’d had such bad experiences with creeps and pervs and jocks and college boys’ “I love you” on the first date that I was very suspicious and cynical about guys’ double motives, and normally the minute this sickly little orderly started paying attention to me I’d have my defensive shields way up and be considering all kinds of creepy, depressing possibilities.’

  Drinion’s red forehead crinkles for just a moment. ‘Were you eighteen, or seventeen?’

  ‘Oh,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Right.’ As she acts younger, she begins to laugh sometimes in a fast and toneless way, like a reflex. ‘I was just eighteen. I had my eighteenth birthday on my third day in Zeller. My dad and mother even came out and brought a cake and noisemakers during visiting hours and tried to have this celebration, like whoopee, which was so embarrassing and depressing I didn’t know what to do, like, a week ago you’re hysterical about some cuts and put me in the bin and now you want to pretend it’s happy birthday, let’s ignore the girl screaming in the pink room while I blow out the candles and you fix the elastic of the hat under your chin, so I just played along because I didn’t know what to say about how totally weird it was for them to be acting like, happy birthday, Meredith, whoopee.’ She is kneading the flesh of one arm with the other arm’s hand as she recounts this. Sometimes, as Drinion sits with his hands laced on the tabletop before him, he changes having one thumb or the other be the thumb on top. His former glass of beer sits empty except for a semicircle of foamy material along the bottom’s edge. Meredith Rand now has three different narrow straws she can choose to chew on; one of them is already quite thoroughly chewed and flattened at one end. She says:

  ‘So he brought it up. He said it was probably going to occur to me on some level soon, so if I wanted it really intense we might as well talk about it. He’d always drop little bombs like this, and then while I sat there like’:—she forms an exaggerated taken-aback expression—‘he’d groan and swing his feet around off the table and go out with his clipboard to do checks—he had to officially check on everybody every quarter hour and note down where they were and make sure nobody was making themselves barf or looping pillowcases together to hang themselves with—and he’d go out and leave me there in the conference room with nothing to look at or do, waiting for him to come back, which tended to take him a long time because he never felt well, and if there was no nursing supervisor or anybody around to watch him he walked very slow and used to lean against the wall every so often to catch his breath. He was white as a ghost. Plus he took all these diuretics, which made him have to pee all the time. Except when I asked him about it all he’d say is that it was his own private business and we weren’t in here talking about him, it didn’t matter about him because all he really was was a kind of mirror for me.’

  ‘So you didn’t know that he had cardiomyopathy.’

  ‘All he’d say was that his health was a mess but that the advantage of being a physical mess was that he looked like exactly as much of a mess as he really was, there was no way to hide it or pretend he was less of a mess than he felt like. Which was very different than people like me; he said the only way for most people to show the mess was to fall apart and get put someplace like this, like Zeller, where it was undeniably obvious to you and your family and everybody else that you were a mess, so there was at least a certain relief to being put in the nut ward, but he said given the realities here, meaning insurance and money and the way institutions like Zeller worked, given the realities it was almost sure that I wouldn’t be in here that long, and what was I going to do when I got back out there in the real world where there were all these razor blades and X-Acto knives and long-slaved shirts. Long-sleeved shirts.’

  ‘Can I ask a question?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Did you react? When he brought up the idea that his helping you and intense conversations with you were connected to your attractiveness?’

  Rand snaps and unsnaps her white cigarette case. ‘I said something like, so you’re saying you’d be in here with me all concerned and interested if I was fat with zits and a, like, big old jaw? And he said he couldn’t say one way or the other, he’d worked with all kinds of people that came through, and some were plain girls and some were pretty, he said it had more to do with how defended people were. If they were too defended in terms of their real problems—or if they were just outright psycho, and when they looked at him they saw some shiny terrifying four-faced statue or something—then he couldn’t do anything. It was only if he felt a kind of vibe off the person where he felt like he could maybe understand them and maybe offer real interpersonal talking and help with them instead of just the inevitable doctor-and-institution thing.’

  ‘Did you accept that as an answer to your question?’ Drinion says, without any kind of incredulous or judging expression that Meredith Rand can see.

  ‘No, I said something sarcastic like blah blah blah whatever, but he said that wasn’t his real answer, he wanted to answer the question because he knew how important it was, he could totally understand the anxiety and suspicion of would he really even care and pay attention if I wasn’t pretty, because he said in actuality this was my whole core problem, the one that would follow me when I got out of Zeller, and that I had to find out how to deal with or I’d be back in here or worse. Then he said it was close to lights-out and we had to quit for today, and I was, like, you’re telling me there’s this major core problem I have to deal with or else and then that’s it, time for noddy blinkums? I was so ticked off. And then the next two or three nights he wasn’t even there, and I was totally spasming out, and there was only this other guy there from the weekends, and the day staff won’t ever tell you anything, all they see is that you’re agitated and they report that you’re agitated but nobody actually cares about what you’re agitated about, no one wants to even know what your question is, if you’re an in-patient you’re not a human being and they don’t have to tell you anything.’ Rand makes her face assume a look of frustrated distance. ‘It turned out he’d been in the hospital—the real hospital; when the inflammation gets bad then the heart doesn’t pump the blood out all the way, and it’s a little like what they call congestive heart failure; they have to put you on oxygen and heavy-duty anti-inflammatories.’

  ‘So you were concerned,’
Drinion says.

  ‘But at the time I didn’t even know that, all I knew was he wasn’t there, and then it was the weekend, so it was a long time before he got back, and at first when he did I was totally ticked and wouldn’t even talk to him in the hall.’

  ‘You’d been left hanging.’

  ‘Well,’ Rand says, ‘I took it personally that he’d gotten me all involved and said all these heavy therapeutic things and then disappeared, like it was all just a sadistic game, and when he got back the next week and asked me in the TV room, I just pretended I was into the TV show and pretended he wasn’t even there.’

  ‘You didn’t know that he’d been in the hospital,’ Drinion says.

  ‘After I found out how sick he was, I felt pretty bad about it; I felt like I acted like a spoiled child or some girl that was jilted for the prom. But I also realized I cared about him, I felt like I almost sort of needed him, and except for my dad and a couple friends when I was little I couldn’t even remember how long it had been since I felt like I really cared and needed somebody. Because of the prettiness thing.’

  Meredith Rand says: ‘Have you ever only found out you cared about somebody when they’re not around and you’re like Oh my God, they’re not around, now what am I going to do?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well anyway, but it made an impression. What came out when I finally said oh all right whatever and started talking to him in the conference room again is that maybe I’d felt like I’d ticked him off and sort of drove him away when I asked him if he’d be in here doing the intense tête-à-tête thing with me if I was fat and cross-eyed. Like that it ticked him off, or that he’d finally decided I was so cynical and suspicious of men only being interested in me because of the prettiness thing that he’d finally figured out that he wasn’t going to be able to con me into thinking he actually cared enough that he’d get to boff me or even just feed his ego that here was this so-called beautiful girl that got into him and cared and wrote his name over and over in big loopy cursive in her diary or whatever his trip was. I think all this ugly stuff came out because I was mad because he’d disappeared like that, I thought, and just ditched me and left me here. But he was pretty good about it; he said he could see how I’d feel that way, considering what my real problem was, which then for a while after that I think he let me think he hadn’t come in for work for those days just so I could start to see the problem for myself, to figure out what it was and start to see it for what it was.’

  ‘Did you demand any sort of explanation?’ Drinion asks.

  ‘A bunch of times. The weird thing is that now, so much later on, I can’t remember for sure if he eventually spat it out or if he got me to figure it out for myself,’ Meredith Rand says, now looking ever so slightly up in order to meet Drinion’s eyes, which if she’d think about it is rather strange, given their respective heights and places at the table, ‘the so-called core problem.’ Drinion’s forehead crinkles slightly as he looks at her. She rotates the fingers of one hand in a procedural or summarizing way: ‘Subject, who is seen as very pretty, wants to be liked for more than her prettiness, and is angry that she isn’t liked or cared about for reasons that don’t have anything to do with her prettiness. But in fact, everything about her is filtered through her prettiness for her— she is so angry and suspicious that she couldn’t even accept real, true, no-agenda caring even if it’s offered to her, because deep down inside she, the subject herself, can’t believe that anything except prettiness or sex appeal is the motive for anybody’s caring. Except her parents,’ she inserts, ‘who are nice but not too bright, and anyway they’re her parents—we’re talking about people out in the world.’ She makes a summing-up gesture that may or may not be ironic. ‘Subject is really her own core problem, and only she can solve it, and only if she quits wanting to be lonely and feeling sorry for myself and going “Poor me, I’m so lonely, nobody understands how bad I hurt, boo hoo.”’

  ‘To be honest, I was asking about a different explanation.’ By now, Drinion appears considerably taller than he had when the tête-à-tête started. The rows of hats on the wall behind him are almost completely obscured. It is also odd to have someone stare into your eyes this continuously without feeling challenged or nervous, or even excited. It will occur to Rand later, as she’s driven home, that during the tête-à-tête with Drinion she’d felt sensuously aroused in a way that had little to do with being excited or nervous, that she’d felt the surface of the chair against her bottom and back and the backs of her legs, and the material of her skirt, and the sides of her shoes against the sides of her feet in hose whose microtextured weave she could also feel, and the feel of her tongue against her teeth’s rear and palate, the vent’s air against her hairline and the room’s other air against her face and arms and the taste of cigarette smoke’s residue. At one or two points she’d even felt she could feel the exact shape of her eyeballs against her lids’ insides when she blinked—she was aware when she blinked. The only kind of experience she could associate with it involved their cat that she’d had when she was a girl before it got hit by a car and the way she could sit with the cat in her lap and stroke the cat and feel the rumble of the cat’s purring and feel every bit of the texture of the cat’s warm fur and the muscle and bone beneath that, and that she could sit for long periods of time stroking the cat and feeling it with her eyes half-shut as if she was spaced out or stuporous-looking but had felt, in fact, like she was the opposite of stuporous—she felt totally aware and alive, and at the same time when she sat slowly stroking the cat with the same motion over and over it was like she forgot her name and address and almost everything else about her life for ten or twenty minutes, even though it wasn’t like spacing out at all, and she loved that cat. She missed the feel of its weight, which was like nothing else, neither heavy nor light, and at times for almost the next two or three days she felt like she feels now, like the cat.

  ‘You mean of the wanting to boff me thing?’

  Drinion: ‘I think so.’

  Meredith Rand: ‘He said he was basically a dead man, he used the words dead man and walking dead, so the point is he couldn’t be into me in that way, he said. He wouldn’t have the physical energy to try to get in my pants even if he’d wanted to.’

  Shane Drinion: ‘He told you about his condition, then.’

  Meredith Rand: ‘Not in so many words; he said it was really none of my business except in how it bore down on my problem. And I said my suspicion was starting to be that he was dropping all these hints about “my problem, my problem” but not just spitting out what it was supposed to be, to sort of string me along for some reason, and that I wasn’t going to pretend I knew exactly what the reason was or what he wanted but it was hard not to think on some level it was creepy or pervy, which I simply flat-out told him. I’d quit being polite by then.’

  ‘I’m a little confused,’ Drinion says. ‘This was all before he’d simply stated what he believed your main problem was?’

  Meredith Rand shakes her head, though in response to what is now doubly unclear. One of the examiners’ complaints is that she goes off on these long stories but at some point loses the thread and it’s nearly impossible not to drift off or zone out when you can’t understand what the hell she’s getting at anymore. Several of the single posted examiners have decided she’s simply crazy, great to look at from a distance but definitely a wide-berth-type girl, especially on breaks, when every moment of diversion is precious, and she can be worse than the work itself. She is saying: ‘By this time I was either getting hit on or rapped to by every guy in Zeller, from the day attendant to the men on the second floor when we came down for OT, which was a major drag in all kinds of ways. Although he did point out that if it bummed me out so much, why did I put mascara on even if I was in a mental hospital. Which you have to admit was a valid thing to point out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She is grinding the heel of her hand into one eye, to signify either fatigue or an attemp
t to stay on track in the story, although Drinion gives no sign of being bored or impatient. ‘Plus also by around this time he said the Zeller doctors started saying that my so-called attachment to this one attendant—they also saw all the rapping and sniffing around everybody was doing—all the intense solo tête-à-têtes were starting to look dependent or unhealthy, and not saying anything to me about it but asking him all kinds of questions and basically starting to give him a really hard time, so we started having to wait for everybody to get all engrossed at TV time and then go talk in the stairwell just outside the ward, where it wasn’t so public, where he’d usually lie down on the cement of the landing with his feet up on the second or third stair up, which by this time he admitted wasn’t for his back but he needed the elevation to keep his circulation going. So we ended up spending a lot of the first couple days out in the stairwell talking about the whole business of my suspicions about what he wanted from me and why he was doing this, around and around, and he did tell me a little more about himself and getting cardiomyopathy in college, but he also kept saying OK, he’d talk about all this as long as I wanted to, but that it was kind of a vicious circle because anything he said I could be suspicious of and attribute some kind of secondary agenda to if I wanted to, and I might think it was all honest and open but it wasn’t really intense or efficacious, in his opinion, it was more like going around and around inside the problem instead of really looking at the problem, which he said because he was a walking dead man and not really part of the institution of the nut ward he felt like maybe he was the only person there who’d really tell me the truth about my problem, which he said was basically that I needed to grow up.’