Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  “The dark.”

  “That I’ll scald my husband while he’s asleep.”

  “Nuclear Winter.”

  “If we get leaders over there in the U.S.S. of R. that are too young to remember what World War II was like, over there.”

  “Overextension.”

  “Fear itself.”

  “Bombs of all kinds.”

  “The Contamination of the White Aryan Race from nigger fag subversion.”

  “Scalding.”

  “The light.”

  “Nuclear terrorism.”

  “Confusion.”

  “Myself.”

  “That there’s no God.”

  “Discomfort.”

  “My genitals.”

  “A sequel to Three’s Company.”

  “That I die and get to go to heaven and I get there and it stops being heaven because I’m there.”

  “Death by Water.”

  “Bombs that can fit in metal suitcases.”

  “That there’s a God.”

  “That the people who invented Max Headroom are busy now inventing something else.”

  “And so on,” Hogan says, flipping the clipboard closed, “with some similar distributions on the Desire end, when we did Desire. J.D. figures this—that anybody who’ll take money from a stranger, in an airport, for free, with no idea of who we are or what if any scam is at work, who’ll reveal his number-one fear and desire to a clipboard, for money, is a born consumer, a micromarket all to himself, full of desire and fear and vice versa, the perfect target for the next wave of targeting campaigns. And we want some kind of targeting of his spending patterns. And so the bills are tagged.”

  “Jesus,” says Mark, rapt.

  “Mark darling,” D.L. says through grit teeth.

  “Relax. I told you I called a van,” Hogan says, hiking over backwards to get at the paper cup’s good but cold last drop. He hands the frantic Avis lady the cup to throw out for him and looks the two kids over. “You two’ve worked with J.D. before, right? The Reunion and everything?”

  “Well,” Mark starts, “I—”

  “So you know this is a genius I get to work for. This man is a genius. It’s an honor to even do market research for J.D. Steelritter. Even in this God-forsaken place.” He looks around as if for eavesdroppers. “This is the man, this is the legendary man, I’m sure you two know, who eventually got Arm and Hammer baking soda customers to start pouring the stuff down the drain. As… get this… drain freshener!” He licks a bit of sweetener off the heel of his hand. “Is that genius? Is that textbook planned-obsolescence, or what? And all off fear. J.D. eventually figured out that anybody who’d buy a box of baking soda out of fear of refrigerator odor wouldn’t hesitate one second to shell out for another box to prevent drain odor.” He laughs a marvelous laugh. “Drain odor? What’s that, for Christ’s sake? It’s just fear. Very careful research, fear, and the vision of a genius. The man is a legend. I even had a poster of him on my wall, in ad school.”

  D.L. spots Sternberg creeping curiously and furtively from the men’s room with its broad-shouldered symbol back to the lounge, moving serpentine, shoulder-first, trying somehow to keep his back to everything at once, his hands cupped before him like those of the suddenly nude. She raises her arm to him, to fill him in on potential transportation developments, but he doesn’t even look their way. He eases gingerly back down at their round table and now low-level cola and still-going cigarette just in time to hear “Hawaii Five-O” ’s last Jack Lord give Danno his last instructions, ever, to book certain people, Murder-One. The nock of Mark’s Dexter Aluminum arrow overhangs the round table’s edge. The table’s wood-grained surface is pocked with holes, from Mark’s lounge trick.

  “These all seem like adult fears,” Mark is saying to Hogan. “Are any of those younger people’s fears? Is there a different list for kids?”

  Hogan’s eyes go cold. He mashes down the clipboard’s metal cover and latches it. “Not at liberty,” he says shortly.

  “Why isn’t fear just fear? What does it matter whose fear?”

  “And by the way,” Hogan indicates the crisp treasury note D.L. is snapping into her wallet. “Can I get your fears, please?”

  “You want our fears?”

  “No such thing as a free lunch, kid,” Hogan shrugs.

  “That’s just the kind of fear I’m talking about,” Mark says. “I don’t see why you—”

  At this point somebody like Dr. C____ Ambrose would probably interrupt to observe that it seems as though a pretty long time has passed since his last interruption on the general textuality of what’s going on. But it seems almost like too little of true import has been going on to irritatingly interrupt and reveal as conventional artifact. Except but now some things really do start to go on. Two figures, one a long-awaited clown, round the broad carpeted curve of the lower terminal, passing the crowds at luggage roulette, bearing down. J.D. has gotten off DeHaven’s slouchily apologetic good-for-nothing-shitspeck back, and has had a look at his watch, and they’ve rushed inside upstairs and had a look at the flight manifests for both the LordAloft 7:10 and the BrittAir 7:45. All three alumni and -ae are accounted for, in these manifest documents. J.D. and DeHaven have been scouring the whole of C.I. Airport. The last alumni are going to get a ride.

  WHY J.D. STEELRITTER GAVE HIS SON DeHAVEN THE RONALD McDONALD JOB IN THE FIRST PLACE, “STAGE FRIGHT” INCIDENT ASIDE

  Because DeHaven Steelritter, son, has unwittingly given J.D. some of J.D.’s most creative and inspired ideas. It was DeHaven who first poured Arm & Hammer baking soda down the drain of the Steelritter farmhouse kitchen, in Collision, to try to erase the indelible odor of two marijuana roaches mistakenly washed down there along with the remains of something sweet. What happened to the fridge’s baking soda? asks Mrs. Steelritter, who fears the noisomely oily smell of the fried roses that festoon the second-to-the-bottom refrigerator shelf. Where’s my Arm and Hammer? she asks, as they sit down to a giant Midwest supper. DeHaven—who, like anybody who smokes dope under his parents’ roof, is quick on his feet when it comes to explaining wild kitchen incongruities—delineates a deep concern for the impression the odor of the Steelritter drain could have made on the next houseguest who just might visit the kitchen and have occasion to get a whiff of a drain that, he declares, dry-mouthed, had smelled like death embodied.

  The rest is ad history.

  ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW SOME OF J.D. STEELRITTER’S MOST POWERFUL AND LEGENDARY PUBLIC-RELATIONS CREATIONS ARE REALLY NOTHING MORE THAN A SLIGHT TRANSFIGURATION OF WHAT REALLY JUST GOES ON AROUND HIS OWN ROSE FARM’S FARMHOUSE

  One fine winter morning, years back, J.D. Steelritter was getting ready to go off to work at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex, just across the snowy, greenhouse-dotted fields and intersection from home. But anyway he’s heading for the door, and little DeHaven, home from sixth grade (his second shot at it) with one of those mysterious feverless colds that just cry out to be nipped in the bud—he tells J.D., in complete innocence, the innocence of a child before a television, to have a nice day.

  The rest, as they say.

  HOW, EVEN THOUGH J.D. STEELRITTER AND RONALD McDONALD ARE BEARING DOWN, FULLY INTENDING SIMPLY TO MEET, GREET, FORGIVE ALL DISRUPTIONS OF SCHEDULE, AND SHUTTLE THE AWAITED ALUMNI WESTWARD, TOM STERNBERG THREATENS, TO THE IMMEASURABLE CHAGRIN OF EVERYONE INVOLVED, TO DELAY EVEN FURTHER AN AT-LAST DEPARTURE FROM THEIR AIRPORT ARRIVAL AND A HOPEFULLY QUICK TRIP TO COLLISION, ILLINOIS, AND THE STILL-ON-IMPATIENT-HOLD FULFILLMENT OF THE PROMISE OF REUNION AND PAYOFF

  Sternberg sees brown natives paddling against the final episode’s tide of closing credits, listing all who’ve ever appeared. He sees Mark in deep conversation with a guy who looks a hell of a lot like Sternberg’s personal idea of what Jesus Christ in real life probably looked like, while D.L. stands on one foot and then the other, green and diffident and unsmiling. Sternberg’s crotch is still very wet, and now warm, and just not comfortable at all. He see
s Mark’s bag of fried flowers on the tip-pocked table. Funny thing about those flowers. Who’d voluntarily cook and eat a rose? It’s like planting and watering a breadstick. It’s perverse, and even sort of obscene, eating what’s clearly put on earth to be extra-gastric. Didn’t taste all that hot, either. And there’s still a piece stuck with the intransigence of the flimsy between two molars.

  Except, after he’d washed the thing down with a Jolt and a grimace, he suddenly felt like he could go expel what he needed to expel. He was still afraid, but it was as if the level scale that had held his desire to evacuate and his fear of discovered embodiment in a mutual and paralytic suspension had been not so much tilted as just yanked out from under consideration. He was still very afraid; but, post-rose, the fear had seemed somehow very tangent to his desire to go. His need to have gone. He feels empty, better. And gets cocky, as the empty will sometimes get.

  Basically what happens now is that he tries but utterly fucks up Mark’s trick with the target arrow. He’d seen Mark do it a couple times, a nonchalant and perfect bar trick, the fucker. Sternberg, maybe barely even consciously, has always wanted to do a nonchalant bar trick, the kind involving spoons and eggs, glasses in pyramids, knives and spread hands, syringes and dip. And here’s his fag and his cola and ashtray and the flowers, fried, and the arrow, extended over the table’s edge. And before he even knows it the arrow’s aloft. By his hand.

  The thing is that the esoteric arrow-in-table trick requires that the overhung nock be knocked upward, from below, so that the arrow goes forward and up and down into the table before the nonchalant trickster. But however Sternberg, maybe out of ignorance, or pride, whacks the arrow’s overhang from above: hence its parabolic transmission backward, over his shoulder and ass-over-teakettle into the air behind him, only to hit the thickly anomalous window of the indoor lounge, rebound, and land javelinlike in the pear compote of the effete, narrow-faced, corduroyed pesticide salesman who’s wangled a tête-à-tête with the blonde orange-faced flight-attendant who served him on his commuter flight from Peoria and who’d let slip, en route, while making change from the coin-cartridge at her belt, that she had to stick around C.I. Airport after descent, waiting for a ride of some sort, and whom the pesticide salesman wants very much to ball, age- and face-color-considerations temporarily on hold, because things haven’t been going well for the pesticide salesman, lately, at all, given that this year’s generation of corn pests seems to have developed a genetic immunity to—worse, more like an epicurean taste for—his company’s particular line of pesticides, cornfields soaked in this pesticide now sought out by the most discriminating-palated pests, who have been observed under research-laboratory magnification using their little legs and mandibles actually to spread the stuff with the even care of marmalade on a leaf or kernel before digging in, a horror, the pesticide company’s best hope for salvaging the fiscal year now being to take a suggestion from their marketer at J.D. Steelritter Advertising and pitch the stuff as a pest-distractant, new brand name Pest-Aside, to be sprayed on untilled or infertile fields as a red pickled herring to divert and so prevent entomological inroads into the more verdant and condiment-free cornfields; but it’s a bit late in the game for this ploy to do more than cover some losses, and the pesticide salesman is angst-ridden and red-eyed and effetely low on self-esteem, and wants very much to ball this ageless but oddly sexy orange-faced stewardess, as further coverage against estimable losses. The stewardess is brittlely blond, her face orange, though stained port near the temple. She owns luggage that can be pulled instead of carried. Her name is Magda, with the g being silent and the a accordingly diphthongulated into something like the i in “child” or “lie.”

  And but so the narrow-faced pestidor, poised over his compote, reacts to the sudden and quivering and doubtless low-on-his-list-of-expected-appearances appearance of the big wicked Dexter target arrow with a shocked spasm that sends Magda the flight attendant’s morning brandy straight into her lap.

  “What the hell is that?” Sternberg hears the salesman cry behind him, and winces a why-him wince.

  “Oh, gee,” cries Magda, instantly up—trying, as the spilled-upon try, somehow to back away from her own clothes. Sternberg, who like most people of his generation tries to brush eye-averted and shoulder-first past whatever disorder he causes, and also not anxious to confront anybody right now, what with an ominously dark gabardine crotch—and seeing, right that very minute, a polka-dotted and loose-limbed Ronald McDonald come galumphing up to deposit a butt in the Avis ashtray and a golden-arched nametag to both D.L. and Mark Nechtr, the latter declining to be tagged and directing the attention of clown, Avis lady, guy who looks like Jesus, and holy shit J.D. Steelritter himself toward the lounge, toward him, Tom Sternberg—tries to brush shoulder-first past the little disorder Mark’s arrow has caused. However, the understandably pissed-off pesticide man, compote punctured and love-object brandy-stained, arrests Sternberg’s flight with a wedding-banded hand and aims an isosceles system of nose-pores at Tom’s good eye.

  Sternberg tries the brusque variety of a “Sorry about that,” moving shoulder-first, hands cupped before him.

  “I’m afraid sorry won’t quite do, here, young sir.”

  “Young sir?”

  “Look at my skirt.” Magda sighs.

  “You’ve… stabbed my breakfast.”

  Though brandy in the lap isn’t a completely downer-type sensation, really. Not on a par with cold water on the groin of the ambivalently embodied. Water from the automatic sink is still gushing defective, by the way, from a faucet below and just South of a woman whose white face, frozen in a photographically forevered climax, adorns the wall’s condom concession; and the overflow is just beginning to shine at the base of the men’s-room door, to spread a dark arc against the thin industrial carpet of the lower terminal.

  “It was an accident, dude,” Sternberg says, forehead aflame as Ronald’s giant floppy tread lounge-ward sounds. “I’m late for this real important ride that’s finally just here, so maybe we could just…”

  “I am not a dude, and you are not riding off anywhere without some kind of significant gesture of apology.”

  “What’s up, gang?” the clown asks from the nearby lounge door, a cool clown, making a fist to look at nails that are obscured by cotton gloves. Behind and beyond, J.D. is illustrating some wide remark to Nola (she of the translucent wart) at the mobbed Avis counter.

  “I said I was sorry, man,” Sternberg says, deciding equally-pissed-off is the way to play this one.

  “There a Sternberg and or an Ambrose-Gatz here?” DeHaven asks, nodding briefly over at the pouch-eyed overtime bartender, who’s punching out, shedding his inevitable green vest as the elevated screen goes peacefully static for the first time in days.

  “Yes that’s just it you have said you are sorry, and only then when I stopped you.” Red-eyed and somewhat blue-balled, the salesman, who manages to be effete in corduroy, no mean feat, hears his own night-flight sleep-dep signal, the sound of an infinity of mutated little jaws munching, little legs patting contented little thoraxes. “But you’ve made no gesture.”

  “I got a gesture for you, if you want a gesture.”

  “He’s said, but not demonstrated,” the pesticide man appeals to the stewardess.

  “I’m Magda Ambrose-Gatz,” says Magda, at herself with a moist napkin.

  “And I’m Thomas Sternberg.”

  DeHaven’s painted smile broadens over a smear of abortive beard, to which particles of pancake makeup cling, as he distributes the Reunion’s very last tags. He looks Sternberg over. “Mean zit on the old forehead, there, big guy.”

  “It’s poison sumac. It’s not a zit. And this on my pants is water.”

  DeHaven has turned to the salesman, looking intimidating as only a professional clown can. He sizes the effete man up. “Think you’re pretty hot shit, don’tcha.”

  “The temperature of shit doesn’t enter into it. This… apparition of a boy has
deliberately spilled Rèmy on my date.”

  “It’s not a zit.”

  “And I’m not a date,” comes Magda’s quiet-when-calm voice from Sternberg’s inverted side.

  Sternberg is struggling to restrain his rose-fed desire to jab the effete man’s still-arresting hand with the fruity tip of Mark’s arrow, which Magda, still on Sternberg’s blind side, has removed and is inspecting. But the restraining hand is removed by the fine plump hand of J.D. Steelritter, who at this moment intrudes on Tom’s sight as a cigar, a stomach, and a hand from above, freeing him. J.D. clears his throat.

  Some people can ask whether there’s any trouble here in a way that ensures a correct negative. Imagine the obverse of a greedy lover’s midnight query:

  “YOU AWAKE?”

  The writer and academic C____ Ambrose, with his birthmark and cheery smile and a maniacal laugh the whole workshop has decided we associate most closely with Gothic castles and portraits with eyes that move, exerts an enormous influence on Mark Nechtr’s outlook. Even when Mark doesn’t trust him, he listens to him. Even when he doesn’t listen to him, he’s consciously reacting against the option of listening, and listens for what not to listen to.

  Ambrose tells our graduate seminar that people read fiction the way relatives of the kidnapped listen to the captive’s voice on the captor-held phone: paying attention, natch, to what the victim says, but absolutely hanging on the pitch, quaver, and hue of what’s said, reading a code born of intimacy for interlinear clues about condition, location, outlook, the likelihood of safe return.… That little aside cost Mark two months.

  But Dr. Ambrose isn’t immune to this kind of stuff either. He’s clearly obsessed with criticism the way you get obsessed with something your fear of which informs you. He told us all right before Thanksgiving to imagine you’re walking by the Criticism Store, and you see a sign in the store window that says FIRE SALE! COMPLETE ILLUMINATION, PAYOFF, UNDERSTANDING AND FULFILLMENT SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! PRICES GUTTED! And in you scurry, with your Visa. And but it turns out it’s only the sign in the window itself that’s for sale, at the Criticism Store.