The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  Meredith Rand pauses here and looks at Shane Drinion in anticipation of his asking what that diagnosis was supposed to mean, exactly; but he does not ask. He appears to have become reconciled to something, or to have decided to accept the way Meredith Rand remembers the story on her own terms, or to have concluded that trying to impose a certain kind of order on her side of the tête-à-tête was going to have the opposite effect.

  She is saying, ‘And naturally the “grow up” thing ticked me off, and I told him to go sit on something sharp, but I didn’t really mean it, because by around this time he’d said also that the word was starting to come down that I was going to get discharged soon, the treatment team was starting to talk about it, even though of course nobody ever thought to tell me anything about what was going on, and that my mother had been trying to set up outpatient counseling and trying to get one of the doctors to keep seeing me in his private practice, which was very full and also not totally covered by my dad’s insurance, so the whole thing was a bureaucratic nightmare, and it would take some time, but it was starting to sink into me that this wasn’t forever, that by as early as maybe next week or the week after I wouldn’t be seeing him or having intense conversations with him anymore, or even maybe ever see him again—I realized I didn’t know where he lived or even his last name, for Christ’s sake. This all sort of hit me, and I start freaking out when I think about it, because I’d already got a taste of what a couple days of suddenly not getting to talk to him or know where he was was like, and I’m freaking out, and in my mind I’m toying with the idea of sharpening something and doing some cutting that I didn’t even really feel like doing, just so I’d get kept in the nut ward a little longer, which I knew was completely nuts.’ She looks up very quickly at Drinion to see whether he’s reacting to this information. ‘Which was crazy, and actually I think he knew this was going on, he knew how important he’d gotten to be to me by then, I think, so he had extra leverage or ammo to use to tell me to just cut the shit—I’d be sitting on the stairway up to Four and he’d be lying on his back at the bottom of the stairway with his feet up right below me, so I spent all this time looking at his shoe soles, which were like Kmart shoes and the soles were plastic—and that “grow up” meant now, right this second, and quit being childish, because it would kill me. He said the girls that came through Zeller were all the same, and none of us had any idea of what being a grown-up was. Which was totally condescending, and normally the totally wrong thing to say to an eighteen-year-old. So there was this little argument about that. His point was that being childish wasn’t the same thing as being like a child, he said, because watch a real child play or stroke a cat or listen to a story and you’ll see it’s like the opposite of what we were all doing there in Zeller.’ Shane Drinion is leaning slightly forward. His bottom is now almost 1.75 inches off the chair seat; his work shoes’ gumlike soles, darkened at the perimeter by the same process that darkens pencils’ erasers, swing slightly just above the tile floor. Were it not for the sport coat hanging off the back of his chair, Beth Rath and others would be able to see light through the substantial gap between the seat of his chair and his slacks. ‘It’s more like he was explaining than arguing,’ Rand says. ‘He said there is a particular kind of stage of life where you get cut off from the, like, unself-conscious happiness and magic of childhood—he said only seriously disturbed or autistic children are without this childhood joy—but later in life and puberty it’s possible to leave that childhood freedom and completeness behind but still remain totally immature. Immature in the sense of waiting or wanting some magical daddy or rescuer to see you and really know and understand you and care as much about you as a child’s parents do, and save you. Save you from yourself. He also kept yawning a lot and hitting his shoes together, and I’d watch the soles go back and forth. He said this is how immaturity shows up in young women and girls; in men it’s somewhat different in how it looks but really it’s all the same, which is wanting to be distracted from what you’ve lost and fixed and saved by somebody. Which is pretty banal, it’s like something out of a doctor’s textbook, and I go so this is my core problem? This is what I’ve been stringing along waiting for? And he goes no, that’s everybody’s core problem, and it’s why girls are so obsessed with prettiness and whether they can attract somebody and arouse enough love in that person to save them. My core problem, he said, and this connects to the core problem I told you about just now, was the neat little trap I’d made for myself to ensure that I never really had to grow up and so I could stay immature and waiting forever for somebody to save me because I’d never be able to find out that nobody else can save me because I’d made it impossible for me to get what I was so convinced I needed and deserved, so I could always be angry and I could always get to go around thinking that my real problem was that no one could see or love the real me the way I needed so I’d always have my problem to sit and hold and stroke on and make believe was the real problem.’ Rand looks up sharply at Shane Drinion. ‘Does that seem banal?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It kind of did to me,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘I told him that was incredibly helpful and now I knew just what to do when I got discharged from Zeller, which was click my heels together and transform diagnosis into cure, and how could I ever repay him.’

  Drinion says, ‘You were being deeply sarcastic.’

  ‘I was pissed!’ Meredith Rand says, a bit loudly. ‘I told him lo and behold it looked like it turned out he was just like the diagnosis-is-cure doctors in their nice suits, except of course his diagnosis was also insulting, which he could call honesty and get extra jollies hurting people’s feelings. I was just so pissed! And he laughed and said he wished I could see myself right now—he could see me because he was lying down and I was standing right over him, because every like fifteen minutes or so I had to help him up so he could sneak back in out of the hallway and go around with his clipboard and do checks. He said I looked like a little child that just had its toy taken away.’

  ‘Which probably made you even angrier,’ Drinion says.

  ‘He said something like all right then, OK, he’d explain it like he was talking to a child, to somebody so locked into the problem that she can’t even see that it’s her problem and not just the way the world is. I wanted to be liked and known for more than just the prettiness. That I wanted people to look past the prettiness thing and the sexual thing and see who I was, like as a person, and I felt really mad and sorry for myself that people didn’t.’

  Meredith Rand, in the tavern, looks briefly up at Drinion. ‘Didn’t look past the surface,’ he says, to signify that he understands what she’s saying.

  She cocks her head. ‘But in reality everything was the surface.’

  ‘Your surface?’

  ‘Yes, because under the surface were just all these feelings and conflicts about the surface, and anger, about how I looked and the effect on people I had, and really all there was inside was this constant tantrum about how I wasn’t getting saved and it was because of my prettiness, which he said if you think about it is really unattractive—nobody wants to get close to somebody who’s in the middle of this constant tantrum. Who’d want that?’ Rand makes a sort of ironic ta-da gesture in the air. ‘So, he said, I’d actually set it up so that the only reason anybody would be attracted to me as a person was that I was pretty, which was exactly the thing that made me so angry and lonely and sad.’

  ‘That sounds like a psychological trap.’

  ‘His comparison was he compared it to making a kind of machine that gave you an electric shock every time you said “Ow!” Of course, he knew I’d been having the machine dreams. I know I kept just looking at him, giving him this death-ray look that all the foxes in school get good at giving people, like they’re just supposed to melt away and die if you look at them like that. He was lying down with his feet up on the stairs as he’s saying all this. His lips were a little bit blue, the cardiomyopathy was getting worse all the time, a
nd the Zeller stairways had those horrid fluorescent tube light things in the stairwell that made him look worse; he wasn’t even pale as much as gray, with this kind of frothy paste on his lips, because he couldn’t sip his little can of water when he was lying down on his back.’ Her eyes look like she’s really seeing him again in situ in the stairwell at Zeller. To tell the truth, he looked gross to me, scary, repulsive, like a corpse, or somebody in one of those pictures of people in stripes in concentration camps. The weird thing is that I cared about him at the same time I found him gross. He grossed me out,’ she says. ‘And that I was so deep in my problem that I couldn’t accept real, genuine, nonsexual or nonromantic or non-prettiness-type interest in me even if it was offered to me—he was talking about himself, which I knew, even though he didn’t spell it out; we’d gone over that ground for days and days before, and time was running out, we both knew. I’d be getting discharged and I’d never see him again. But I said some pretty horrible things.’

  ‘You’re referring to the stairwell,’ Shane Drinion says.

  ‘Because deep down inside, he said, I only saw myself in terms of the prettiness. I saw myself as so mediocre and banal inside that I couldn’t imagine anybody except my parents being interested in me for anything except what I looked like, as a fox. I was so angry, he said, that all anybody cared about or paid any attention to was the prettiness, but he said that was a smoke screen, theater of the human mind, that what really bothered me so much was I felt the same way, boys and men were treating me the same sort of way I really treated myself, and in reality it was really myself I was angry at except I couldn’t see it—I projected it onto the pervs whistling on the street or the sweaty boys trying to boff me or the other girls deciding I’m a bitch because I’m stuck up about the prettiness.’

  There is a brief moment of silence, meaning nothing but the noise of pinball and the baseball game and the sounds of people unwinding.

  ‘Is this boring?’ she asks Drinion abruptly. She’s unaware of how she’s looking at Drinion as she asks this. For just a moment she appears to be almost a different person. It has suddenly occurred to Meredith Rand that Shane Drinion might be one of those ingratiating but ultimately shallow people who could seem to be paying attention while in fact allowing their attention to wander hill and dale all over the place, including possibly to considering how he wouldn’t be sitting here nodding politely and listening to this incredibly boring dribble, narcissistic dribble, if it didn’t afford him a chance to look directly at Meredith’s bottomless green eyes and exquisite bone structure, plus a bit of visible cleavage, since she’d taken off her flounce and unbuttoned her top button the minute the 5:00 buzzer had sounded.

  ‘Is it? Is this boring?’

  Drinion responds: ‘The major part of it isn’t, no.’

  ‘What part of it is boring?’

  ‘Boring isn’t a very good term. Certain parts you tend to repeat, or say over again only in a slightly different way. These parts add no new information, so these parts require more work to pay attention to, alth—’

  ‘Like what parts? What is it that you think I keep telling over and over?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it boring, though. It’s more that attending to these parts requires work, although it wouldn’t be fair to call that effort unpleasant. It’s that listening to the parts that do add new information or insights, these parts compel attention in a way that doesn’t require effort.’

  ‘What, is it that I keep going on and on about how supposedly beautiful I am?’

  ‘No,’ Drinion says. He cocks his head slightly. ‘In fact, to be honest, in those parts where you do repeat the same essential point or information in a slightly different way, the underlying motive, which I get the feeling is a concern that what you’re imparting might be unclear or uninteresting and must get recast and resaid in many different ways to assure yourself that the listener really understands you—this is interesting, and somewhat emotional, and it coheres in an interesting way with the surface subject of what Ed, in the story you’re telling, is teaching you, and so in that respect even the repetitive or redundant elements compel interest and require little conscious effort to pay attention to, at least so far as I’m concerned.’

  Meredith Rand extracts another cigarette. ‘You sound like you’re reading off a card or something.’

  ‘I’m sorry it seems that way. I was trying to explain my answer to your question, because I got the sense you were hurt by my answer, and I felt that a fuller explanation would prevent the hurt. Or obviate it if you were angry. In my view, there was just a misunderstanding based on a miscommunication around the word boring.’

  Her smile is both mocking and not. ‘So I’m not the only one who’s worried about misunderstanding and keeps trying to head off misunderstanding for emotional reasons.’ But she can tell he is sincere; he is neither yanking her around nor kissing butt. Meredith can feel it. There is a feeling that comes with sitting across from Shane Drinion and having his eyes and attention on you. It isn’t excitement, but it is intense, a little bit like standing near the high-voltage transformer park south of Joliet Street.

  ‘Can I ask,’ Drinion says, ‘is it projection when you project emotions about yourself onto other people? Or is that displacement?’

  She makes another face. ‘He hated those kinds of words, actually. He said they were part of the self-nourishing institution of the mental-health system. He said even the word was contradictory—mental-health system. This was the next night, in the service elevator now, because somebody on the stairs on some other floor heard our voices the night before because the stairwell was all cement and metal and echoey, and Ed got ragged on somehow by the nursing supervisor for encouraging my unhealthy attachment to him that they’d gotten the idea of from how upset I was the time when he was out for two days—it turned out he was right on the edge of getting fired, mainly because he’d started missing the fifteen-minute checks sometimes and one girl was putting her finger down her throat and throwing up dinner and somebody found some of the throw-up and Ed had missed it because he’d been lying in the stairwell and it was harder to get up from lying all the way down with his feet on the stairs, even if I helped him up, and he’d blown off getting up to do checks. Some of the girls had also gotten all bitchy about us having conversations, like I was the favorite or something, and started a whole rumor with the treatment teams that I was always pretending I had to talk secretly to him and dragging him off and trying to make out with him or whatever. A couple of those girls were just beyond horrible, they were such bitches I’d never seen anything like it.’

  ‘…’

  ‘And it was also the day I got discharged, or got told that I was getting discharged the next day; my parents had worked it out and there were about seven million papers to sign the next day and then I was going home. There’d been this whole thing with my mom getting some doctor to sign off on outpatient counseling, blah blah. Nobody used the service elevator at night after the supper trays, so he opened it up and we went in there and he sat on the floor, the floor had a metal pattern thing and you couldn’t lie down. It stunk, it was worse than the stairwell.

  ‘He said it was the last night, the last conversation, and when I said I wanted intense he said it was showtime, we probably wouldn’t ever meet or see each other after this. I said what did he mean. I was totally freaking out, though. I was the one with double motives. It was showtime. I knew I couldn’t pull some kind of scam so I could stay, I knew he’d see through that, he’d just laugh at me. But I was ready to say I had romantic feelings—that I was attracted to him, even though I felt like I really wasn’t, sexually, even though later on it turned out I was. I just couldn’t admit it to myself, how I felt about him, because of my problem. Although I have to say now I’m not so sure,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Being married is totally different than being seventeen and in total identity crisis and idealizing somebody that seems to really see you and care.’ She looks far more like herself now. ‘But
he was the first guy that it felt like told me the truth, that didn’t just start having double motives and start performing or being all sweaty and intimidated and was willing to really see me and know me and just tell the truth about what he saw. And he really did know me—remember, he told me all those things about my mom and the neighbor that nobody knew.’ Her face hardens again, somewhat, or tightens, as she looks directly at Drinion, holding the cigarette but not lighting it. ‘Is this one of the parts that you said I repeat over and over?’

  Drinion shakes his head a little bit and then waits for Meredith Rand to continue. The hyperattractive POTEX continues looking at him.

  Drinion says: ‘No. I think the original subject of the story was you getting married. Getting married obviously assumes a mutual attraction and romantic emotions, so your first mention of a willingness to acknowledge romantic attraction is new information, and very relevant.’ His expression hasn’t changed at all.

  ‘So it’s not boring.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’ve never had romantic attraction feelings yourself.’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of, no.’

  ‘And if you ever had them, wouldn’t you be aware of them?’

  Drinion: ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘So your answer was a little bit slippery, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it was,’ Drinion says. Later she’d consider that he didn’t seem taken aback at all. It seemed like he was merely absorbing information and adding it to himself. And that (Rand wouldn’t consider this so much as just remember it as part of the sensuous memory of her making a bit of fun of Drinion and the odd way he responded whenever she did this, which she could more or less at will, make fun of him, because in certain ways he was a total nerd and dweeb) the display of different kinds of hats on the rear wall was now completely obscured except for the very tip of the bill of a fisherman’s cap in the upper row.