Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  WHY THE KIDS ARE LATE

  After the flight from M.I. Airport, after luggage roulette—try packing a seventy-piece bow plus quiver—Tom Sternberg edged furtively into an O’Hare men’s room and stayed in there for a really long time. Mark Nechtr got distracted watching a guy with long soft hair and beard, and a clipboard, who was giving away money in the commuter terminal. The man was well-dressed, respectable. The treasury notes were crisp. Mark couldn’t determine what the scam was. He ruled out Cult because the guy had an utterly ordinary expression: no Krishna glaze or Bagwanite’s pirate squint; no Moonie’s mannequin cheer. Yet people kept avoiding him. He kept asking them what they were afraid of. Beefy types with holsters and field radios eventually led him off. What was the scam? The guy was maybe thirty, tops. Mark, a born watcher, watched, from a distance.

  MORE QUICKLY WHY THEY’RE LATE

  The LordAloft pilot, a Polynesian in a just bitching three-piece and mirrored glasses, wouldn’t allow Mark’s disassembled bow or quiver on the helicopter. The twelve shuttle passengers all sit together in a big plastic bubble: all luggage on LordAloft is accessible in-flight. Target arrows are deadly weapons, after all. There are FAA regulations that even the deregulated might not make, but must obey, koniki? A serious archer doesn’t just leave his equipment, so what’s to do. The helicopter ascends without them, sprays them with dark tarmac crud. Cases and carry-ons and almost-full quiver are spread out on the landing pad. Drew-Lynn is half-asleep, tranquilized, treating Mark’s arm like a banister. Sternberg has his thumb tentatively against his forehead, where there’s a bit of a poison-sumac cyst that’s developed. Their reserved seats ascend; they recede. Sternberg’s a bit honked off at Mark for being the sort you don’t leave without. It’s clear what’s to do. They go back inside O’Hare’s commuter terminal and transfer to the LordAloft 7:10. They kill time. D.L. sleeps in a weird chair whose attached TV wants quarters. Sternberg rehaunts the men’s room after loud requests for a comb. Mark stows his bow’s case and strings, quiver and wooden arrows, fingerless archer’s gloves, tincture of benzoin (for calluses) and fletcher in a tall rental locker. The key he keeps for his four quarters is unloseably huge. He was supposed to try to maybe write a bit, but mostly shoot, at whatever YWCA’s to be found downstate, while D.L. and her pen pal Sternberg, who’s pegged as a furtive but so far generally OK sort, are reuniting, reveling, and appearing in a panoramic commercial, and awaiting Jack Lord.

  HOW THE COMPLIMENTARY FLIGHT TO CHICAGO WAS

  Not complimentary for Mark, who’s just along.

  And in general not great at all. Drew-Lynn is neurosis in motion, and simply cannot abide take-off if certain cards show up on the pre-flight Tarot she spreads on the fold-down tray. Death is actually OK: that card just means change. But the Tower, the Nine of Swords, any really charismatic non-Death arcana—these do not reassure, from the tray. D.L. claims that every possible option this throw betrays is cataclysmic, even with the crystal to focus negative ions and positive karma, and so things get off to a shaky start, as they leave M.I.A. behind.

  AURAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE FLIGHT’S SHAKINESS FROM THE CONTEMPORARY ACTOR AND CLAUSTROPHOBE POINT OF VIEW OF TOM STERNBERG, TRAGIC

  “I suppose I should apologize, Mark.”

  “It’s OK, Sweets.”

  “I’m bad at will, I’ve decided. Postmodernism doesn’t stress the efficacy of will, as you know. Although you can’t deny I tried.”

  “D.L., screaming ‘This thing’s going down! We’re all toast!’ before we’ve even started moving doesn’t seem like trying all that hard, Sweets.…”

  “See, you’re mad.”

  “But it’s OK. How you doing over there, Tom?”

  “He’s trying to sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep, I hate these fucking things,” Tom says. The inside of his head has been a disappointing view. “They’re too big outside, too small inside. Hard to even breathe.” He lights a 100 and holds the long thing way away from D.L., for whom smoke is antimatter.

  “Like to take something?” Mark asks him.

  “Something?”

  “For tranquility, I mean. D.L.’s not taking anything, because of the baby, but she’s got everything from chloral hydrate to Dalmane fifteens,” Mark says.

  “We’ll see. I don’t think I want to be stumbling around O’Hare, when we land. It’s probably a fuck of a hike to the LordAloft gates. I hate airports maybe even worse than planes. They’re all the same.” He closes both eyes.

  D.L. to Mark: “I took something, darling. I’ll say I’m sorry. I promised, then I went and took something. That Nine of Swords…”

  “I know you took something.”

  “How do you know? You didn’t either know. I took them in the lavatory.”

  “You took thirty milligrams of chloral hydrate and a Dalmane fifteen. It’s in the way your head is wobbling.”

  What’s contemporarily tragic about Sternberg is that he has a fatal physical flaw. One of his eyes is turned completely around in his head. From the front it looks like a boiled egg. It won’t come back around straight. It’s like an injury. It’s incredibly bad for his ambitions as a commercial actor. He doesn’t talk about what the backward eye sees. He’s offended that D.L. in person asked him right off the bat.

  He has other flaws, too.

  “I’m bad at will, Mark, I’ve admitted.”

  “And then you drank a screwdriver. Right now the little miracle is probably rolling around in there totally stoned. It probably has no idea where it is or what’s going on.”

  “You are mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “But if you’re mad just say so. Just express it. Don’t be all anal all the time. Even Ambrose would express it.”

  “Why don’t you just get some sleep, since you and the baby took something.”

  “There’s a word for people like you, Mark. ‘Minimal.’ You never really react to things. Even art. You hardly ever give me feedback, even.”

  “I feed back, Drew. I gave you feedback just yesterday. I said I liked the ambiguousness of that ‘FIRM DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES’ title. Why you’re pissed is that I only said I thought a twenty-page poem that’s all punctuation wouldn’t be much fun for anybody to actually read. That’s feedback. It’s just not the reaction you want to hear.”

  “You persistently confuse reaction with this antiquated insistence that…”

  Sternberg whimpers, pulls from his back slacks pocket a seat-warm Reunion brochure and unfolds the square it’s in. The brochure is screamingly colored, high-tech, glossy except where it’s faded from being folded into a square. It details the attractions and itinerary of the Reunion of everybody who’s ever represented McDonald’s.

  HOW THEY ALL KNOW EACH OTHER

  Sternberg out of Boston and D.L. out of Hunt Valley were both in the same McDonald’s commercial on the McDonald’s-site-turned-set in Collision, Ill., in 1970. They were small children in 1970. They’ve corresponded since around puberty. So Mark and Sternberg are connected through D.L.

  WHERE THEY LIVE NOW

  Tom Sternberg lives with his parents in Boston’s Back Bay while he attends cattle calls and pesters agents and tries to break into the adult commercial industry. Mark and D.L. live in an airy and utterly Yupster Baltimore condo complex, in a spacious suite D.L. has fashioned into as close to a squalid garret as circumstances permit (given that their housekeeper’s a Philistine).

  WHY D.L. AND TOM HAVE NEVER ONCE GONE HUNGRY AT MEALTIME

  Not well known is the fact that anyone who has ever appeared in a McDonald’s commercial receives a never-expiring coupon entitling them to unlimited free hamburgers at any McDonald’s franchise, anywhere, anytime. It is a fringe benefit bestowed on commercial alumni by J.D. Steelritter Advertising in a stroke of sheer marketing genius. It allows McDonald’s to proclaim, beneath each set of golden arches, exactly how many billions and billions and billions of hamburgers have been “served” so far. Of course the franchise is under
no FCC or FTC obligation to mention that a decent percentage of these served burgers are in fact not paid for. The higher numbers breed higher numbers. Consumers are impressed, naturally, by the inflated number of items consumed, and consume even more. Actors are digestively secure, and so McDonald’s gigs are regarded in the industry as plums. And the enormous (partly free) volume of service actually conduces to what microeconomists call economies of scale: the flesh is shipped from Argentina by the megaton and cooked, turned, and served according to timers. The food is the same from Coast to Coast. Dependable. Soothing. It’s that rarest of transactions: everybody wins. We regard the How-Many-Served sign as just what our interpretation makes it: the sign of the world’s community restaurant. It was J.D. Steelritter’s second-greatest stroke of marketing genius. After the Reunion and Reunion commercial it will be his third-greatest.

  For Tom Sternberg, airports are not fun. They blur and do not hold his eye. Central Illinois Airport is no exception. For the contemporarily tragic, all airports are the same: orange-faced blondes, slit-skirted stewardesses with luggage they can pull, college boys with Nazi cheekbones, the inevitable green vest of the airport-lounge bartender. Black-haired women in yellow. P.A. announcers just one mouth-marble short of incomprehensible. Blankly harried junior-executive types, the kind who are made by their employers to travel, hauling complicated cases and what look like over-the-shoulder body bags for their identical shiny-seated uniforms. College girls, with cheekbones, in gym shorts with Greek letters on the ass. Crowds, people hugging. Ashtrays beneath No Smoking signs. A rabbi runs for a missed connection. A pale woman totes a limp infant. A lone and disoriented Oriental’s black bangs ride his forehead, fencelike. Latino men in bell-bottoms walk in conspiratorial two’s, one holding a metal suitcase.

  “Can’t say as I like the look of that suitcase,” he tells Mark, who is pacing tiptoed in the C.I. Airport commuter terminal, waiting for D.L. to take aspirin and wash her post-tranquil face in the women’s room. She’s had sleep, though, at least. Said it just made her more tired.

  They’re late, and so no Ronald or coincident Personnel to meet them as foretold in brochure. Sternberg is now officially sleep-deprived. For him this is not fun, either. It affects his vision. The morning colors have the over-bright primacy of movies filmed pre-Panavision. Fluttery hallucinations dance in his outward eye’s periphery. An armless statue on a skateboard. A cypress swamp, milky water swirling in pockets, drooling over exposed roots. A rainbow snapping like a whip. Except it turns out they’re not even real hallucinations; they’re posters: “Visit This Art Gallery”; “Explore Louisiana”; “Buy a Lawnchair at This Store and Get Ready to Check Out a Genuine Midwestern Thunderstorm.” And so on. Not real. The closure of Sternberg’s reversed eye tickles—eye-lashes against raw nerves. A high pitch sounds in his skull—a sleep-dep test pattern, something persistent and shrill in a very small box.

  “Is that all corn?” Mark asks, pointing past the terminal window.

  “Sure as fuck green, isn’t it.”

  “It’s all there is. It’s all you can see. I’ve never seen so much of anything.”

  “This is farm country, man. Serious farmers. D.L. and I were here as kids, for the commercial. Then it was white. Mom brought me back for an audition the next summer, though. Still has nightmares about all the corn. She wakes up, sometimes.”

  Mark Nechtr stares, slackly intense, at whatever he looks at. He doesn’t even seem sleep-deprived to Sternberg. Radiantly perfect fucker. Creepy stare, though. Has the look of somebody in the front row of a really absorbing show all the time.

  Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He’s needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O’Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg’s shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

  Thomas Sternberg is thus, like the Historical Idealists of yore—to whom, if the locutionally muscular and forever terrible enfant Dr. C____ Ambrose were fabricating this, he could (and so would) make frequent and explicit and intellectually-fruitful-no-matter-how-irritating reference—Sternberg is thus preternaturally fascinated with the misdirecting pose of bloodless abstraction. Ideas. He’s an idea man. It has nothing to do with how intelligent he is, or isn’t. Ideas, good and bad, but always bloodless, just kind of inform his whole character and outlook.

  He and Mark are both looking around the commuter terminal. Things are clearing out. Emptying. It’s a bit creepy. The terminal has that too-suddenly-hushed feeling of the moment after loud music stops. Curt-looking men in custodial white are tearing down the WELCOME WELCOME bunting. Posters launch themselves at the tourist trade from every wall. One glassed-in print advertises a family bowling center, another a forty-eight-hour continuous showing of “Hawaii Five-O” episodes in the airport’s lounges, in honor of Jack Lord and J.D. Steelritter and the LordAloft shuttle service’s national kick-off.

  One huge poster just dominates the wall opposite Sternberg: an enormous J.D. Steelritter is shown next to an enormous Ronald McDonald, one who resembles J.D., under the greasepaint, in the strange way that, say, rugby resembles football—the enormous Ronald’s holding an only slightly less enormous promo-poster of the prototype Funhouse discotheque, of which Sternberg’s eye can make out only what looks pretty much like an ordinary house, one you could expect to see lots of in any bedroom community anywhere, except for the enormous cadaverous grin that represents the Funhouse’s door. The expression on J.D.’s face is ingenious, already makes you feel deprived not being there with them.

  “We’re late,” D.L. says, returning and immediately clinging to Mark in a way you can’t tell if he minds. “They’ve left, I’m afraid. Those janitors just shrugged when I asked them where anybody is.”

  Sternberg touches his forehead lightly. “We were supposed to get greeted with nametags, with real gold arches, the brochure said.”

  “Look at the fields,” D.L. says, gesturing at outside, rotating her small head South to North.

  “We could rent a car, I guess,” Mark muses.

  “Ever rented a car?” Sternberg asks. “Unbelievable hassle. Like applying for citizenship to someplace. Forms to fill out. Identity to prove. You have to have a fucking credit card. Incredible lines. Picture Moscow on fresh-meat day.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “I almost thought I saw a kid with a nametag from a McMuffin spot going into the men’s room just now,” Sternberg says, wanting very much to smoke a 100, eyeing the filters and lone wet-tipped cigar butt in the window’s ashtray’s sand, but not lighting up, because smoking really makes him have to shit, if he has to shit.

  “You want to go in and have a look?”

  NO. “We could just cruise around and look for somebody,” Sternberg says nonchalantly. “There’s no way this place can be as empty as it looks.”

  It looks pretty empty, though. “Maybe I’ll look,” Mark ventures.

  D.L. loves to put her hands on windows. “Can you even remember which way Collision is, from here?” she yawns. She can’t see anything but land, the LordAloft’s return to Chicago a blurred and receding dot exiting the window’s left border. “If Collision was out there, close by, wouldn’t we see it? There’s certainly nothing in the way.”

  “Collision’s West of here. That’s East, out that window.”

  “So you don�
�t see anybody to ask,” Mark repeats quietly.

  “Why are there like no windows facing West in here?”

  Mark sighs, cracks pale knuckles, rubs his face. “I do not know. We could try Hertz or something. We’ve got a credit card. Or we could just walk around and find somebody. Or we could eat. You hungry at all, Tom?”

  No way Sternberg is going to eat anything right now. He rarely eats around people anyway. And obversely.

  Speaking of speaking about shit: Dr. Ambrose, whom we all admire with a fierceness reserved for the charismatic, could at this point profitably engage in some wordplay around and about the similarities, phonological and then etymological, between the words scatology and eschatology. Smooth allusions to Homeric horses pooping death-dealing Ithacans, Luther’s excremental vision, Swift’s incontinent Yahoos. Neither D.L. nor Sternberg, nor J.D. and DeHaven—who’re pulling up outside in the pay lot, arguing about something to do with DeHaven’s car’s ignition—have the equipment to react to opportunity in this particular manner. Mark now feels as though he distrusts wordplay.

  So basically they’re just standing around, as people will, their luggage a vivid jumble at their feet, kind of bogged down, tired, with that so-near-and-yet type of tension, a sense of somewhere definite they must be at by a definite time, but no clear consensus on how to get there. Since they’re late. As Dr. Ambrose might venture to observe, they’re figuratively unsure about where to go from here.

  HOW THE CENTRAL ILLINOIS TOWN OF COLLISION CAME TO BE INCORPORATED

  Fact: all Illinois communities, from well-built Chicago down to Little Egypt, have their origin and reason in the production of nourishment. The soil of Illinois is second only to the Nile Delta in terms of decayed-matter percentage, fertility. Illinois has also always been known for its uncountable number of tiny, shittily maintained, shoulderless rural highways, against and alongside which corn grows quickly and thickly and tall. Tall, dense, the gorged corn obscures drivers’ ability to see, at intersections of the little roads, whether anything’s coming. And the funding necessary for CAUTION signs just never has quite come through.