The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Well, but anyway,’ Meredith Rand says. She has had her chin in the same hand that holds the unlit Benson & Hedges, which looks like the opposite of comfortable. ‘So I do know that that last night, in the elevator, I wasn’t fully listening to him and, like, engaging with him on what he was telling me, because I was wrestling with all these inner feelings and conflicts about attraction to him and also totally freaking out about hearing that I’d never see him again, because the deal was that I was set up for outpatient counseling but that was on the second floor where all the doctors had their real offices, and he was only on on nights on the third floor, which was a locked ward. Just the idea that I didn’t know where he lived freaked me out. Plus I knew he might get fired soon, because he could barely even do checks anymore, and there’d been trouble with one of the vomiters that had been vomiting and he hadn’t checked her, plus I knew he hadn’t told the Zeller people about his health thing, the cardiomyopathy, which had been more or less under control when they first hired him, it sounded like, but had gotten worse and worse—’

  ‘He still hadn’t told you about the cardiomyopathy, though.’

  ‘Right, but whatever it was, the Zeller people didn’t know about it, and they just thought that he didn’t take care of himself very well, or he was hungover or lazy, something terrible. So I kept spacing out and thinking about what if I took my shirt off and, like, made out with him right here, would he let me or would he be grossed out or laugh at me, and how could I get him to see me again and still have intense conversations after I got out and had to go back to Mom and Central Catholic, and what if I told him I loved him, and what if he died after I got out and I didn’t even know he died because I didn’t know who he was or where he lived. It occurred to me I didn’t even know how he really felt about me as me and not some girl he was helping, like did he think I was interesting, or smart, or pretty. It was so hard to think that somebody that seemed to understand me so well and tell me the truth didn’t care for me in that special way.’

  ‘You mean having romantic feelings.’

  Rand shrugs a little with her eyebrows. ‘He was a guy, after all. So… and then it occurred to me that I was sort of doing just what he said my core problem was—thinking about him and not losing him and that he could save me and that the way to keep him was through sexual feelings because that’s all I had.

  ‘So then I know at some point he gave me a quiz about the overall topics we’d covered. It was both a joke and not.’ She lights the cigarette, finally. ‘Later on, he confessed it was because he thought he was really dying from this spell of cardiomyopathy—it turned out there were whole days at a time that he couldn’t catch his breath, like he was running even when he was just lying there; his lips were blue for a reason—and he said he’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t ever see me again and be able to tell if he’d been any help, he wanted to reassure himself that he’d helped somebody a little before he died. And of course on my end I was freaking out, I couldn’t figure out whether it would be better to ace the quiz or flunk it, in terms of getting to see him again. Even though he pretended the whole quiz was a joke, like I was a kindergartner getting quizzed by a kindergarten teacher. He was really good at being serious and making fun of himself at the same time—it’s one reason I loved him.’

  Drinion: ‘Loved?’

  ‘Like, question one: What have we learned about cutting ourself? And I said, like, we learned that it doesn’t matter why I cut or what the psychological machinery is behind the cutting, like if it’s projecting self-hatred or whatever. Exteriorizing the interior. We’ve learned all that matters is to not do it. To cut it out. Nobody else can make me cut it out; only I can decide to stop it. Because whatever the institutional reason, it’s hurting myself, it’s me being mean to myself, which was childish. It was not treating yourself with any respect. The only way you can be mean to yourself is if you deep down expect somebody else is going to gallop up and save you, which is a child’s fantasy. Reality meant nobody else was for sure going to be nice to me or treat me with any respect—that was the point of his thing about growing up, realizing that—and nobody else was for sure going to see me or treat me the way I wanted to be seen, so it was my job to make sure to see myself and treat myself like I was really worthwhile. It’s called being responsible instead of childish. The real responsibilities are to myself. And if liking my looks was part of that and part of what I thought was deep-down worthwhile, that was OK. I could like being pretty without making prettiness the only thing I had going for me, or feeling sorry for myself if people spazzed out about the prettiness. That was my answer to the quiz.’

  Shane Drinion: ‘As I understand it, though, your actual experience is that someone else was being nice to you and treating you as worthwhile.’

  Rand smiles in a way that makes it seem as though she’s smiling in spite of herself. She’s also smoking her cigarette in a more thorough, sensuous way. ‘Well, yes, that’s what I was actually thinking about, standing there in the elevator and looking down at him and answering his quiz, which I did sincerely, but secretly I was totally freaking out. The truth is I felt like in reality he was just what he was saying was impossible and childish, he was exactly the other person he was saying I’d never really find. I felt like he loved me.’

  ‘So there is a very intense emotional conflict going on,’ Shane Drinion says.

  Rand holds her hands to the sides of her head and makes a quick face that mimics someone having some kind of nervous breakdown. ‘I was telling him about forgetting about other people and why they were or weren’t attracted and if they really cared and just being decent to myself, treating myself like I was worthwhile, loving myself in a grown-up way—and it was all true, I really had learned it, but I was also saying it all for him, because it’s what he wanted me to say, so he could feel like he’d really helped me. But if I said what he wanted me to say, would it mean he could leave and I’d never see him again, and he’d never miss me, because he’d think I was OK and going to be OK? But I still said it. I knew if I said I loved him or stripped down and kissed him right there, he’d think I was still in the childish problem, he’d think I still mixed up being treated like a valuable worthwhile person with sex and romantic feelings, and he’d think he wasted his time and it was hopeless, he’d think it was hopeless and he hadn’t reached me, and I couldn’t do that to him—if he was going to die or get fired then at least I could let him have this, the knowledge that he’d helped me, even though I really did feel like I was maybe in love with him, or needed him.’ She puts out her cigarette without any of the previous stabbing aspect, almost sort of tenderly, as if thinking tenderly of something else. ‘I all of a sudden felt like: Oh my God, this is what people mean when they go “I’ll die without you, you’re my whole life,” you know, “Can’t live, if living is without you,”’ Meredith Rand accompanying this last bit to the tune of Harry Nilsson’s ‘Can’t Live (If Living Is Without You).’ ‘All the terrible country songs my dad used to listen to in his shop in the garage, it seemed like every one of them was about somebody talking to some lover they’d lost and why and how they couldn’t live without them, how terrible their life was now, and drinking all the time because it hurt so terribly to be without them, that I could never stand because I thought they were so banal and I never said anything but I couldn’t believe he could listen to it all without almost barfing…. Actually he said if you listen to these songs and change the you to me, like, you understand that what they’re really singing about is losing some part of themself or betraying themself over and over for what they think other people want until they’re just dead inside and don’t even know what me means, which is why the only way they can think of it and why they’re feeling so dead and sad is to think of it as needing somebody else and not being able to live without them, this other person—which by some coincidence is the exact situation of a teeny baby, that without somebody to hold it and feed it and take care of it, it’ll die, literally, which he said is
not such a coincidence at all, really.’

  Drinion’s forehead is ever so slightly wrinkled with thought. ‘I’m confused. Ed explained the true meaning of country-and-western songs in the elevator? So you told him about the lyrics and now understanding the lyrics’ sentiments?’

  Rand is looking around, possibly for Beth Rath. ‘What? No, that was later on.’

  ‘So you did see each other again, after the elevator.’

  Rand raises the back of her hand to display the wedding ring. ‘Oh, yes.’

  Drinion says, ‘Is there some extra information I need to understand this?’

  Rand looks both distracted and annoyed. ‘Well, he didn’t die, obviously, Mr. Einstein.’

  Drinion rotates his empty glass. His forehead has a definite wrinkle. ‘But you’ve spent time describing the conflict between confessing love and your real motives, and how upset and uncomfortable you were at the prospect of not seeing him again.’

  ‘I was seventeen, for Christ’s sake. I was a drama queen. They take me home, I look in the phone book, and he’s right there in the phone book. His apartment building was like ten minutes from my house.’

  Drinion’s mouth is in the distended position of someone who wants to ask something but isn’t sure where to even start, and is signifying that facially instead of out loud.

  Rand’s arm is up in some kind of signal to Beth Rath.

  ‘Anyway, that’s how I met him.’

  §47

  Toni Ware stood at the pay phone on the lot’s fringes. Instead of a booth it was just on a post. She leaned slightly against the front bumper of her car, which shone. One of the dogs’ faces appeared over the backseat; when she looked hard at it a moment it dropped back out of sight. In the front passenger seat were a dozen standard six-pound bricks, each with a Return-Postage-Paid card from a different marketer. She was a standard-sized woman, just on the pale side of fair in slacks and a beige spring coat that flapped and popped in the wind. The man at the phone’s other end was repeating her order, which was complex and involved several feet of #6 copper tubing angle-cut into four-inch lengths; the angle on the cuts was to be 60 degrees. This woman had twenty different voices; all but two were warm and pleasant. She didn’t cup the phone’s speaker to cut the wind but let it roar in the phone. Everyone has unconscious mannerisms they fall into on a telephone; hers was to look at the cuticles of the hand that didn’t hold the phone and to use that hand’s thumb to feel at each cuticle in turn. There were four women in the convenience store’s lot, and a bust of the store’s cashier through a gap between signs on the window for bulk-purchase beer. Two women were at the pumps; another was in a tan Gremlin waiting for a pump to free. They wore plastic wraps over their hair against the wind. There was a period when Toni had to wait for the hardware wholesaler to verify her credit card, which meant that the place was on a tight margin and couldn’t afford even a four-hour float on the order, which meant they could be affected. Everyone conducts a rapid unconscious scan of each social sense object they encounter. Some scans’ big concern involved fear and the threat-potential of each new datum; others’ involved sexual potential, revenue potential, aesthetic grade, status indicators, power, and/or susceptibility to domination. Toni Ware’s scans, which were detailed and thorough, were concerned entirely with whether the object could be affected. Her hair appeared grayish-blond, or the sort of dry blond that in certain kinds of light appears almost gray. The wind hit the door hard as people came out; she watched its force affect their faces and the small unconscious ingathering gestures they made as they attempted to huddle and walk quickly at the same time. It wasn’t especially cold but the wind made it seem cold. The color of her eyes depended on what lenses she wore. The credit card number she gave the man was her own, but neither the name nor the federal ID# she gave belonged to her as such. Both dogs had the same name but knew without fail which one she was calling. Her love for the dogs transcended all other experience and informed her life. The voice she used with the Butts Hardware clerk was younger than she, conspicuously jejune, causing merchants whose emotional tastes were more refined than simple exploitation to feel paternal—superior and tender at the same time. What she said when he confirmed her order was: ‘Great. Very great. Yay,’ with ‘Yay’ stated instead of shouted. It was a voice that caused the listener to imagine someone with long blond hair and bell-bottoms who cocked her head and gave even statements an interrogative lilt. She played on this knife-edge most of the time—giving a false impression that was nevertheless concrete and tightly controlled. It felt like art. The issue was not destruction. Just as total order is dull, so is chaos dull: There’s nothing informing about a mess. The store’s cashier gave each customer a cool smile and engaged in a brief exchange. Toni Ware had twice in three years been part of an investigation of the store, whose name was QWIK ’N’ EZ—its sign’s icon was suspiciously like Bob’s Big Boy—and was one of the first of the off-interstate stations to eliminate the full-serve pumps and attach a tiny grocery with cigarettes and soda pop and junk for Qwik Stop shopping. They did a phenomenal cash business and had been tagged by the local DIF function every year; but they were whistle-clean, field-audit was judged a waste of salary, their receipts jibed perfectly and their books were just messy enough to be uncooked, the owner a Pentecostal Christian who’d already started construction on another of what Bondurant called Ramp Tumors on the second 74 exit and had bids in for lots on two more.

  She had two home lines and a bulky mobile phone and two office patch codes but used pay phones for personal business. She was neither attractive nor ugly. Except for a certain anemic intensity to her face there was nothing to attract or repel or cause any more notice than a thousand other Peoria women who’d been described as ‘cute’ in their bloom and were now invisible. She liked to come in under people’s radar. The only person who might have noticed her hanging up the phone was someone who’d wanted to use it himself. Two women and a reddish man in flannel were filling their tanks. A child in one of the cars was crying, its face a knot. The cars’ windows rendered its weeping a dumbshow. Its mother had a caved-in face and stared stolidly by the tank, smoothing her hair’s plastic as the hose dispensed gas on auto. The station’s flagpole’s flag’s rope’s pulleys and joists clinked dully in the wind. Her own car’s slight idled throb behind her, the two dogs hunkered down in identical postures. She slowed just enough to lock eyes with the child as she passed the rear right window, its face clenched and red, her own face empty of intent as for a moment the whole lot and street blazed with intensity, a nonconnotative tone in her head like a rung bell. Interesting the way some people will stand still by the tank and let it fill and others like the pudgy woman up ahead cannot, must busy themselves with small tasks like squeegeeing the windshield or using blue towels to wipe at the brake lights, unable to stand still and wait. The man dispensed by hand, rounding off to an even sum. Half the child’s face was cut off by the window’s reflection of the sky and flag that popped high above her. And she liked the sound of her own footfalls, the solid sound and feeling the impact in her teeth. #6 tube was hard enough to go in all the way and soft enough that driving it made little sound; three at the base would do for any tree.

  The Tumor’s inside had a grocery’s bleached light and was laid out with glass doors of pop at the back and two aisles of corporate gauge retail coffee and pet food and snacks E-W with your sundries and tobacco behind the orange counter where the young woman in denim workshirt and red bandanna done up slave-style with tiny rabbit ears at the back asked about fuel and totaled beer and snuff and sent change down an anodized chute into a steel cup. Behind the door at the rear of the second aisle was the stockroom and manager’s office. The larger chain models had introduced video cameras, but these Ramp Tumors were blind. There were five other US citizens in the store and then a sixth when the woman sans child came in to pay, and while Toni selected enough items to fill a bag she observed them interact or not and felt again the acquaintance she always ass
umed all strangers in rooms she entered enjoyed, the conviction that everyone in the room all knew each other well and felt the connection and sameness they shared by virtue of what they had in common, the quality of not being her. None of them was affected by her in any way. One can of Mighty Dog Gourmet Beef was 69¢, which given wholesale and overhead was still a 20 percent margin of pure cream. The counter woman, who was in her early thirties and had incorporated her weight into a country mother presentation that involved pink cheeks and a laugh like a roar and a worldly good-humored sexuality, asked if she had any fuel today.

  ‘Full up,’ Toni said. ‘Stopped to use the phone and come in to get out of the damn wind!’

  ‘Still tootin’ out there I see.’ The counter woman smiled, totaling pet food Toni would throw away on a cut-rate NCR 1280 that totaled receipts on a one-day roll they stored in canisters and had to be taken out and unfurled to run a Field, the office filled with eighty-foot strips like a liner’s bunting at sail.

  ‘Like to blow me right off the road comin’ in,’ Toni said. The counter woman seemed unaware that Toni Ware was affecting the exact accent and cadence of her own speech. The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

  ‘Got you some dogs that can do some eating.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Don’t I know.’

  ‘That was $11.80.’ The smile long-practiced to seem so sincere. As if Toni would be remembered one moment after she forced the door and staggered off under the flag like the rest of them. And why the conventional was? The stunted creature behind her smelled of hair oil and ambient breakfast; she imagined particles of meat and eggs in his facial hair and under his nails as she produced a Treasury note.