Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  This has, yes, been a digression. But if it’s irrelevant, then ours is that part of town you want to make sure you drive through quick, windows sealed and doors locked tight, oil thoroughly checked, and nothing fishy in the dash.

  Great lover, though, Mark. Healthy fucker. Energy right out the bazoo. Can fuck her into a sleep only the Dalmanated usually know. Tireless. Hard or flaccid at will. Comes only when he wants, like a cat. D.L. thinks she knows: it’s the fried roses the tactful old klepto gives the pupils he’s decided to gather to his arbitrary wing. The hors d’oeuvres her psychic pukes at the thought of. Healthily evil. Marries desire and fear into a kind of privately passionate virtuosity.

  Mark has kind of a problem with the roses now, she thinks. She sees him getting dependent. They don’t talk about it, Mark keeps his own counsel, but the problem with the flowers, she thinks, is what, ironically, keeps him from producing the way he wants.

  D.L. simply refuses to eat beauty. It’s defilement. A kind of blasphemy for atheists. Aesthetic Murder-One. D.L.’s got some desires, but says no thanks to eating what stands outside you, red and eternal, shouting that it’s not food. She won’t do it. Not even to be a better postmodernist. This makes her kind of heroic, in a tight-assed, grad-school way. Old fashioned, ironically. She does like the word virtue. Honor is even a noun to her, sometimes.

  “I thought you knew Jack Lord personally,” she says, seeing through DeHaven’s windshield what looks like imperfect tint. They are thunderheads. “Yet but now here you are, talking down his show. So why represent LordAloft?”

  “I never talk down, Missy. And I do know Jack.” J.D. flicks the dice with a finger while DeHaven keeps his arm on the gearshift, between J.D. and the stuttered red oil light, his face under the happy face grim. The oil light’s red stutters when the car jounces. The sound of the gravel is unendurable.

  “But Jack is a complex man,” says J.D. Steelritter. “I’ve known at least three different historical Jack Lords, since I’ve been in this business. That was the first Jack Lord, up over paradise in a helicopter, firing blanks at underpaid natives. Then there was a retired, artsy-fartsy, politically correct-type Jack Lord, back in the Seventies, who sculpted free-form and did gratis spots for Easter Seals. The new present Jack Lord doesn’t fuck around. He’s a businessman. A professional pilot and franchiser. A kind of ideal Yuppie with start-up capital and entrepreneurial drive and more balls than are presently in this whole entire rotten car, which by the way did or didn’t I say to step on it, shitspeck. And don’t think I don’t see that oil light. Quit with the elbow in my face. Screw the oil light. I don’t trust homemade instrumentation. Go. You’ve got till noon. Our shadows get short, I want these folks to be reveling.”

  “Varoom,” DeHaven says, but without conviction. The car leaps forward a bit, quieting. The golden arches are sort of toward the rear of Mark’s window now. The homemade car is definitely Northeast of Collision. Mark would like a rose, but his stash is low, and there’s nothing he especially wants, except arrival and several cups of coffee and a shower and sleep. And arrival is not a scenario anybody can influence, it’s starting to seem. It’s unbearably slow.

  “And shut up with that For Whom business,” J.D. growls at his son. “Gives me a pain.” He extracts and unwraps still another green Rothschild and crunches the tip and stows it in the wadded plastic wrapper, all with one hand. The other hand is inflicting absolute entomicide on the mass of dull, slow, stoic gnats that sit on the cracked red dash. Those gnats are creepy. Lemming-like. Nihilistic. Plus dull. An old hand, an actual chain-smoker of cigars, J.D. can also light a cigar with a match (lighter out of fluid) forefingered from its Ronald-emblazoned book and thumbed against the flint paper without being detached, all the while crushing tiny insects. This is not a safe procedure for ignition. Close cover before striking. Why not just use the dashboard lighter DeHaven fashioned out of a high-resistance iron mattress spring?

  Because the lighter flies out. It gets way too hot, and suddenly’ll just pop out, into J.D.’s fine lap. His son the atonal engineer. Defectively effective homemade dashboard lighter. Represents a product, won’t keep a nose on, lets the nose fall into the dash, then whines about red oil lights. J.D. sometimes looks at DeHaven with this sort of objective horrified amazement: I made that?

  “What do you mean, ‘For whom’?” DeHaven is saying to J.D.

  “You’ve been saying it. Repeating it. Two solid days. Back and forth. For Whom. Gets in my head. Gives me a pain. Quit with it.”

  “Varoom, I’ve been saying, Pop. Varoom. It’s something atonal I’m composing. It’s gonna involve engines, speed, lightning-war. It’s a title. My title.”

  “ ‘For whom’ are the first couple words of Dr. Ambrose’s best story,” Mark Nechtr says. D.L. snorts. J.D. draws at his cigar. The car is Cubanly redolent and greenly fogged. Mark is subjected, via crosscurrent from J.D.’s cracked window, to the main exhaust path of the stogie, but does not object. “It’s the first bit of his Funhouse story. ‘For whom.’ ”

  J.D. grunts the noncommittal grunt of a father who’s been mistaken about a son in front of that son. Even a violently rouged son.

  “I compose my own stuff, man. I don’t go around using other people’s stuff. That’s for bullshit artists. I’m no bullshit artist.”

  D.L. nods over her notebook in support.

  “Half right, anyway,” J.D. chuckles. His chuckle is like neither Ambrose’s maniacal cackle nor D.L.’s mucoidal laugh. Has Sternberg laughed yet, ever?

  Mark has been more comfortable with the general drift of a conversation before, lots of times. What if the stories that really stab him are really other people’s stories? What if they’re bullshit? What if he alone isn’t clued into this, and there’s no way to know? He’s afraid he does want a flower.

  Plus he has other obvious troubles coming. Magda is asking to have a look at his Ziploc. Her hands are hairy-knuckled, but not orange.

  “Varoom, I was saying.” DeHaven shakes his head, lighting an unfiltered with the same nonchalant ease as his father. He holds the cigarette between thumb and forefinger as he drags, which looks pretty suspicious. Sternberg, too, lights a 100, which because of the eye trouble appears to the side of where it is. And Magda is holding Mark’s smeared Baggie up to the way-back window’s southern light. The light through the NASSIN and !EM HSRAW is clean and penetrating. The arches, too, are now completely behind them.

  There’s the sort of silence in the loud car that precedes a small-talk question. Conversations between adults and kids tend to be punctuated with these silences a great deal. Then adults ask about present or future plans.

  DeHaven, hurrying gingerly in the face of unreliable lubrication data, is no longer even bothering to slow at the dangerous corn-obscured intersections. (There’s still lots of corn, by the way.) He fishtails suddenly West onto a 2500W. Again the golden M lies left, now fully revealed above a fallow stretch of soil.

  “So then what are you kids doing now?” Steelritter asks, smelling the proximity of the last shuttle’s end, doing something oral to the great cigar in his mouth so that it recedes, protrudes. He flares the slim nostrils of his hooked nose. A splatter of distant thunder sounds. The air through the cracks cools noticeably. Magda is looking at the side of Mark’s face. J.D. manipulates his burning protrusion:

  “Any actors left among us?” he asks.

  “Me,” Sternberg says, swimming briefly into J.D.’s rearviewed ken. DeHaven snorts something about horror movies, and D.L. gives the padded shoulder of his costume a rather over-familiar hush-pinch.

  “I’m still in the business, Mr. Steelritter,” Sternberg says, voice up an octave as he tries to be casual but courteous. Sometimes J.D. Steelritter actually uses Clout as his middle name, when he signs contracts.

  “Well good for you, kid.”

  “I’m based in the Boston area.”

  “Damn nice area.”

  “You bet. I like the area a lot.”

  “W
orking steady? Who’ve you got representing you? Do I know any of the people you’re under?”

  “I’m kind of still in the exciting breaking-in stage,” Sternberg says casually. “I’m waiting for a callback on a Bank of Boston gig. I’m up for the part of a really helpful teller.”

  J.D. exhales at his own tip, holding the thing up, inspecting it coolly for an even burn.

  “I have call-forwarding, for callbacks.”

  J.D. smiles to himself. “Maybe I can introduce you around to some of the more important folks, while you’re all reveling.”

  “Gee.”

  “The way I see this business going, after this McDonald’s thing, you could have a real future.”

  “Hey, that’s really encouraging to hear, sir.”

  “Bet your life it is, kid. That’s what I do.”

  “What do you mean that’s what you do?” Sternberg asks, confused.

  Magda clears her throat demurely against the oxides of three different brands and asks about Mark Nechtr’s plans.

  “Yeah, Nechtr,” J.D. says. “You look like the acting type. Photogenic. Natural. At ease in designer jeans and that doctors’ wear. Any acting in your future? Your father’s in laundry, Nola said back there?”

  Needing very much to exhale anyway, Mark explains that he’s really just a graduate student. When DeHaven laughs and asks what in, Mark gets really interested in the floor. Sort of English, he says.

  “In creative writing,” D.L. amends, mostly to DeHaven, who still holds his cigarette like a joint, squinting against smoke between dashlight and road. D.L. turns slightly on the front hump. “He’s actually embarrassed to tell people what he really studies, when they ask. He actually lies. Why do you do that, darling?”

  J.D. chuckles that chuckle. “Hell, Nechtr, no need to be shy about it. A lot of writing teachers make good solid incomes from teaching creative writing. There’s a demand for it. Sometimes over at Steelritter Ads we get copywriters who’re just coming out of creative programs. Ambrose himself makes good solid steady money over at East Chesapeake Trades.”

  “That’s where Mark is. Mark’s under him.”

  J.D. ignores this girl. “Creative programs are one reason the whole Funhouse franchise thing’s finally gotten off the ground. Writing teachers don’t press. They know when to concede. They defer to people who know what’s what in an industry.”

  “Technically part of English Department… technically a degree in English,” Mark mutters indistinctly into the roar of the window he’s opened. Smoke is drawn out the big crack, sliding like the last bits of grainy stuff down a drain. The combined smokers’ smoke is the same general color as the clouds that have drawn past the Westward arches and are moving visibly this way. Threads of bright light appear and then instantly disappear in the clouds’ main body—filaments in bad bulbs. The air cools further, and there’s that rain’s-coming smell through the window’s crack. Magda leans a bit over Mark with the flowers and breathes deeply at the roar of the cross-current:

  “Rain,” with a sigh.

  And they pass a sudden and alone farmhouse, right up next to 2500W, with its trees and little skyline of silos, and tire swing, and rusted machinery at angles in the dense grass of its limitless yard. The fields around the house are full of odd grass-or-hay material. A big-armed woman in a lawn chair waves from the gray porch, a wet scythe and Styrofoam cooler at her feet. The house’s mailbox has a name on it and is yawning open, waiting for mail. The woman waves at the growling jacked-up Reunion car. Her wave is deliberate and even, like a windshield wiper. She’s a storm-watcher. A spectator sport in rural Illinois. Obscure elsewhere. But storms move like the very wind out here, no fucking around, building and delivering very quickly, often with violence, sometimes hail, damage, tornadoes. Then they move off with the calm even pace of something that knows it’s kicked your ass, they move away, still tall, bound for points East, behind you. It’s a spectacle. Mark would normally be more interested in the implications of the lawn chair and wave. He’d kind of like them to stop at the house and try to get some definite directions. Surely they can’t be lost. The Steelritters live around here. And if they’ve been shuttling for three solid days and nights, as J.D. says, the precise way to go should be a deep autonomic wrinkle in DeHaven’s brain by now. But they’re circling. They are not, by any means, creating for themselves the shortest distance between C.I. Airport and Collision, Ill. Mark does know about straight lines and shortest distances. Maybe J.D. and DeHaven are the kind of people who can’t navigate and talk at the same time. Mark feels in his designer hip pocket the giant key of the O’Hare rental locker.

  “Except he never writes anything,” D.L. says. “He doesn’t produce. He’s blocked. He’s thinking of leaving the Program. Aren’t you, Mark.”

  J.D. directs his scimitar and ember at Mark with real interest. “You’re paying to go to school to write and you don’t write anything?”

  “Varoom,” says DeHaven.

  “I’m not terribly prolific,” Mark says, wishing he could wish harm to the back of D.L.’s tightly knotted head.

  “He only produced one thing all year,” she tells the Steelritters. “And it was so bad he wouldn’t even show it to me. Now he’s blocked. These things happen in programs. That’s why I’ve decided I detest all—”

  “You’re blocked?” Sternberg asks Mark.

  Mark decides on maybe just one petal, to tide him over against arrival.

  “Probably a standards problem,” J.D. says, nodding as at the familiar. “I get a creative type under me who’s blocked, it always in the end turns out to be just a problem of unrealistic standards. Usually.”

  D.L. and DeHaven snort together at the use of the word realistic as yet another foil-bright fuel truck banshees past in the left lane, a spigot in back, next to its signs, dribbling amber fluid.

  “So what do I do I call them in on the carpet and bitch them out about how all they’ve got to do is adjust their standards,” J.D. says, his cigar now just protruding, staying there, saliva-dusky, balanced on his lower lip, so that it moves with the nonchalant grace of his speech, on that lip. “Adjust themselves downward and forward,” he growls. “Adjust their creative conceptualization of, what’s the word attainable felicity.”

  D.L.’s head snaps up at this.

  “That art-school crap’s bogus, man,” DeHaven muses. “Only bullshit artists move in packs.”

  “Silence and speed, shitspeck,” says J.D., hiking an elbow again to look back at Mark Nechtr, the unconnected kid, for whom J.D. shows a strange but genuine fondness. He gestures paralytically, if you will: “Adjust this paralyzing desire they have to create the perfect and totally new ad, is what I tell them,” he says. “I ask them—and remember this, kid, it’s free advice—I ask them, do they think it’s any accident that ‘perfectionism’ and ‘paralysis’ rhyme?”

  DeHaven rolls his mascara-circled eyes. Gravel clatters. A number of blank looks are exchanged. D.L. begins:

  “But—”

  “But they’re goddamn close enough, is what I tell them,” J.D. laughs, the laugh of a small enclosed person, his forehead again snapping clear. DeHaven lip-sync’d this whole thing. J.D.’s laughter sends his cigar pointing in directions. There’s a perilous tilted mountain of ash. His laughter becomes a meaty coughing fit.

  Mark, too, laughs, liking this man, in spite of his tough son.

  Sternberg deposits his smoked filter in a back-of-the-front-seat ashtray you do not want described and clears his own throat:

  “Nechtr, could we maybe discuss the possibility of some of those flowers, you think, for a sec?” gesturing with his forehead’s extra organ at the Ziploc Mark and Magda somehow both hold below J.D.’s headrest-limited view.

  Steelritter’s whole face lights up. The arches are now extremely near. He’s starved.

  “You a flower man, kid? What kind? Violets? Roses, maybe? I manage a little rose-bush farm of my own, back home. We get there—which we will—you alumni ar
e going to see a greenhouse to end all—”

  Magda quietly interrupts, trying to point out that they haven’t heard about Drew-Lynn’s present or future yet; but and then D.L. interrupts her, telling DeHaven and J.D. and Magda that she, D.L., is no longer a graduate student but now a real struggling artist. A postmodernist.

  “A postmodernist?” DeHaven grins.

  “Yeah, well, we handle Kellogg’s,” Steelritter says gruffly. “I say get out of here with your Post products.”

  “Specializing in language poetry and the apocalyptically cryptic Literature of Last Things, in exhaustion in general, and metafiction.”

  Puzzled, DeHaven scratches his scalp with the furiousness of the recently de-wigged. “Who’d you meet?”

  Mark is embarrassed for Drew-Lynn. Figure someone has to be.

  “In fact I rather wish Dr. Ambrose were coming for his discotheque’s opening today, too, although I must admit I no longer believe in him as a true artist. But I used to believe in him, and I’d like to see him cut his own ribbon,” D.L. says, yawning groggily.

  Magda coughs, feels at her pretty throat.

  “A genuine and pleasant guy,” J.D. nods in agreement. “Never any client-trouble over the whole long protracted Funhouse process. Doubts yes, but never an aggression, a press; never a real cross word. Seldom an ego. Also a flower fan, photogenic kid back there, by the way. You’re under him? And he’s got this wife who just can’t stop smiling,” he says. “Ever met that lady? So pleasant all the time it hurts. Dimples like bullet holes.”

  Behind a barbed-wire tangle can now be seen the Correctional Facility whose sign, way back at C.I.A., had said not to give rides. The Facility has slit windows, is low and squat except for guard towers on stilts, and anyway is just on the whole huge, taking several seconds to pass. Another sign, this one in red, says the area is Federal and Restricted. There’s no sign of movement Mark can see. The wall of towering storm clouds is now flush up against the (very) late-morning sun, giving the Southwest sky the appearance of a nighttime wall, but with a night-light. Sternberg is gesturing persistently for one of Mark’s fried roses; Mark ignores him, listening, rapt.