Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  “Gotta tell you, in confidence, though,” J.D. says, craning to see the sun finally get taken. “Never could get all the way through a single one of those things the guy writes. Not one of them, and we’re friends. Sent me the whole load of his stuff. Couldn’t even lift the box. Figured that was a bad sign right there.”

  There’s thunder.

  “And sure enough,” J.D. says. “Un-get-throughable. Troubled marriages all over the place. Hard as hell to read.”

  “Marriages?”

  “Sometimes boring, too,” D.L. says, nodding as if in admission. “Indulgent. Cerebral but infantile. Masturbatory. A sort of look-Dad-no-hands quality.”

  “Hey, now, Sweets.”

  “Or, in the opposite concept, too,” J.D. Steelritter says, butting his cigar in another clottedly ghastly ashtray, hearing in the corn’s pre-kick-ass-storm hiss that idiot-high For Whom he’d thought was his son’s idiocy; “too smart. Too clever for its own good. Makes it too coy.”

  “Almost Talmudically self-conscious?” Mark says. “Obsessed with its own interpretation?”

  Magda has pressed against Mark in the asexual way of a stranger next to you at a really scary film, her left shoulder muscular and port-wine birthmark bright.

  “Personally I’m a hundred percent behind your basic phenomena of interpretation,” J.D. says. “Interpretation is meat on my table and burger coupons in you kids’ wallets. But for instance this story we had to use to blueprint the franchise campaign off of… that For Whom story, in ’Sixty-Seven. Liked the concept. Did not like the story. Do not like stories about stories.”

  D.L. snorts softly to herself.

  Steelritter looks down at her. “Because never did and never will do an ad for an ad. Would you? A salesman selling salesmen? Makes no sense. No heart. Bad marriage. No value.”

  Mark has leaned forward, smelling cannabis and talcum and carbolic and amber from DeHaven and D.L.

  “Stories are basically like ad campaigns, no?” J.D. says. DeHaven isn’t lip-syncing this one. “Which they both, in terms of objective, are like getting laid, as I’m sure you know from trade school, Nechtr”—looking briefly back. “ ‘Let me inside you,’ they say. You want to get laid by somebody that keeps saying ‘Here I am, laying you?’ Yes? No? No. Sure you don’t. I sure don’t. It’s a cold tease. No heart. Cruel. A story ought to lead you to bed with both hands. None of this coy-mistress shit.”

  By way of a weather report: the dark fingers of scout-clouds have reached past the sun and are groping at the malevolent car’s broadly shallow sky. Shadows fall in county-sized stripes, making gray bars in dull-green terrain, an oriental watercolor whispering muted color. And Tom Sternberg, whom Mark has been studiously ignoring, and whose debilitating claustrophobia you’ve probably forgotten because he’s been just strength embodied, so far, in the speeding crowded enclosed car, has that erection, still, sees no way politics can be brought into the above discussion, is now dreadfully afraid of himself, wants one of those scale-of-stasis-yanking fried blossoms, except now can’t get the distracted, rapt Mark’s attention. And is clubbed between the eyes with an idea. He asks J.D. Steelritter whether his own rose-bush farm grows the roses the Maryland academic Mark trusts cuts and fries and turned Mark on to. This is a cataclysmic development: Magda’s yellow silence is that horrified public kind of one whose seatmate has farted at the ballet.

  FINAL INTERRUPTION

  Mark Nechtr has taken a keen personal interest in J.D. Steelritter’s informal criticism of Dr. C____ Ambrose’s famous metafictional story, “Lost in the Funhouse.” He thinks J.D. is wrong, but that the adman’s lover/story analogy is apposite, and that it helps explain why Mark has always been so troubled by the story, and by Ambrose’s willingness now to franchise his art into a new third dimension—to build “real” Funhouses. He believes now that J.D. Steelritter and the absent Dr. Ambrose have not just “sold out” (way too easy an indictment for anybody to level at anybody else), but that they’ve actually done it backwards: they want to build a Funhouse for lovers out of a story that does not love. J.D. himself had said the story doesn’t love, no? Yes. However, Mark postulates that Steelritter is only half-right. The story does not love, but this is precisely because it is not cruel. A story, just maybe, should treat the reader like it wants to… well, fuck him. A story can, yes, Mark speculates, be made out of a Funhouse. But not by using the Funhouse as the kind of symbol you can take or leave standing there. Not by putting the poor characters in one, or by pretending the poor writer’s in one, wandering around. The way to make a story a Funhouse is to put the story itself in one. For a lover. Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him. Pretend the whole thing’s like love. Walk arm in arm with the mark through the grinning happy door. Shove. Get back out before the happy jaws meet tight. Reader’s inside the whole thing. Not at all as expected. Feels utterly alone. The thing’s wildly disordered, but creepily so, hard and cold as windshield glass; each possible sensory angle is used, every carefully-taught technique in your quiver expended, since each “technique” is, really, just a reflective surface that betrays what it pretends to reveal.

  Except the Exit would never be out of sight. It’d be brightly, lewdly lit. There’d be no labyrinths to thread through, no dark to negotiate, no barrels or disks to disorient, no wax minotaur-machina to pop out on springs and flutter the sphincters of the lost. The Egress would be clearly marked, and straight ahead, and not even all that far. It would be the stuff the place is made of that would make it Fun. The whole enterprise a frictionless plane. Cool, smooth, never grasping, well lubed, flatly without purchase, burnished to a mirrored gloss. The lover tries to traverse: there is the motion of travel, except no travel. More, the reflective surfaces in all directions would reflect each static forward step, interpret it as a backward step. There’d be the illusion (sic) of both the dreamer’s unmoving sprint and the disco-moonwalker’s backward glide. The Exit and Egress and End in full view the whole time.

  But boy it would take one cold son of a bitch to write such a place erect. A whole different breed from the basically benign and cheery metafictionist Mark trusts. It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict. The story would barely even be able to be voluntary, as fiction. The same mix of bottomless dread and phylogenic lust Mark feels when he bends to the pan’s sizzle to see what…

  Except Mark feels in his flat young gut, though, that such a story would NOT be metafiction. Because metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It’s the act of a lonely solipsist’s self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It’s lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well. Mark’s checked their whole orgy out. The poor lucky reader’s not that scene’s target, though he hears the keen whistle and feels the razored breeze and knows that there but for the grace of the Pater of us all lies someone, impaled red as the circle’s center, prone and arranged, each limb a direction, on land so borderless there’s nothing to hold your eye except food and sky and the shadow of one slow clock.…

  Please don’t tell anybody, but Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares. Maybe it’s not called anything. Maybe it’s just the involved revelation of betrayal. Of the fact that “selling out” is fundamentally redundant. The stuff would probably use metafiction as a bright smiling disguise, a harmless floppy-shoed costume, because metafiction is safe to read, familiar as syndication; and no victim is as delicious as the one who smiles in relief at your familiar approach. Who sees t
he sharp aluminum arrow aimed just enough to one side of him to bare himself, open.…

  But here’s a development. Recall that the regulation competitive arrow, at full draw, is aimed a bit left of center, because of the dimensions of the bow—the object that does the shooting, and which gets in the way—but which, in the way, resists, is touched, moved, irritated by, the shaft’s stubborn rightward push. Because, irritated, it resists, quite simple premodern laws come into play. The uncentered arrow, launched leftward by the resisting bow, resists that leftward resistance with an equal and opposite rightward shudder and spasm (aluminum’s especially good, for the spasm part). This resisting shudder again prompts a leftward reaction, then a rightward reaction; and in effect the whistling arrow zigzags, moving—almost wriggling, really—alternately left and right, though in ever diminishing amounts (physics, law, gravity, stress, fatigue, exhaustion), until at a certain point the arrow, aimed with all sincerity just West of the lover, is on line with his heart. Someday.

  Yes: it sounds less erotic than homicidal. Forget Renaissancemblances between fucking and death. In today’s diseased now, everything’s literal; and Mark admits this sounds deeply nuts. Like slam-dancing, serial killings, Faces of Death Parts I–III, civilian populations held hostage by their fear of foreign target areas. It is neither romantic nor clever, Mark knows. It is cold. Far colder than today. Colder than killing people because you need what they need. Colder than paying someone just what the market will bear. Than falling asleep while your bloody-armed lover weeps that you fall asleep instead of ever listening. Than splattering gravel on someone who’s too big to fit.

  And, worse, it sounds dishonorable. Like a betrayal. Like pulling out of what’s opened to let you inside and leaving it there, fucked and bloody, tossing it away like a stuffed animal to lie twisted in whatever position it lands in. Where’s honor, here, in what he sees? Where’s plain old integrity?

  I LIED: THREE REASONS WHY THE ABOVE WAS NOT REALLY AN INTERRUPTION, BECAUSE THIS ISN’T THE SORT OF FICTION THAT CAN BE INTERRUPTED, BECAUSE IT’S NOT FICTION, BUT REAL AND TRUE AND RIGHT NOW

  If this were fiction, the cataclysm that prevents the six people in DeHaven’s homemade car from ever actually getting to the promised Reunion in Collision would be a collision. DeHaven, out of a sullenly distracting attraction to the terse minimal girl beside him, or out of some timelessly Greek hostility toward his father riding shotgun with his big wet cigar, would close his eyes and put the accelerator to the floor at the very most verdant and obscure rural Illinois intersection—say, 2000N and 2000W—and collide three-way with the Oriental-crammed Chrysler and the foreign flashy car full of the big old farmer’s corn-fed children. The Orientals, being expendable through sheer numbers, would be toast. The two cars full of shaken but unharmed Occidentals would end up somehow on top of each other, facing opposed directions, windshields mated like two hypoteni come together to blossom a square of chassis and crazily spinning wheels. Our six and their six would sit there, upside-down, looking at one another through patented unbreakable glass, their faces illuminated against the darkness of approaching rain by the flaming toaster of a foreign Chrysler.

  If this were fiction, Magda would turn out in reality to be not Magda Ambrose-Gatz, but actually Dr. C____ Ambrose in disguise. It would turn out that Mark Nechtr had long ago been chosen by Dr. Ambrose as the boy who would inherit clever academic fiction’s orb and gown, and that Ambrose has historically tracked and kept tabs on and encountered Mark in any number of ingenious disguises, à la Henry Burlingame of the seminal Sot-Weed Factor. Magda/Ambrose would illustrate, via an illuminating and entertaining range of voices and dialects, the identities in which s/he has kept atavistic watch on Mark’s progress toward adulthood:

  ‘Faith everlastin’ me lad but you’re growin’ like the very hills’ heatherrrrr.’

  ‘Father Costello? Mom’s old priest, who heard her confessions, and came for dinner every month?’

  ‘Left at the next corner, please.’

  ‘Officer Al? The officer who gave me my first driving test, in my old Datsun?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not it. Not there. Let me… oh, there. Oh, yes. See? Oh, God.’

  ‘Charlene Hipple? From the YWCA? The archery coach who took my virginity?’

  And so on. Dr. Ambrose, who values the selflessness possible only in the disguise of a voyeur, would be on the way with the five, less to see the Funhouse open than to see the unfolding of the Reunion—which he, like J.D. Steelritter the adman, views as the American fulfillment of a long-promised apocalypse, one after which all desire is by nature gratified, people cease to need, and enjoy value just because they are. In the best kind of Continental-Marxist-capitalist-apocalyptic tradition, the distinction between essence and existence, management and labor, true and false, fiction and reality collapses under the unrelenting dazzle of Jack Lord’s aloft searchlight.

  If this were fiction, the fried roses that unite J.D. as cultivator, Ambrose as distributor, Mark as consumer and disciple, D.L. as Manichee, Magda as apostate, and Sternberg as supplicant would be rendered—by the magical process of quick-frying—all the more lovely, as roses: crimsonly brittle, fine-spun red-green glass, varnished in deep oil and preserved in mid-blush for unhurried inspection, as trapped in flight as a gorgeous pest in amber. But the roses J.D. Steelritter has demanded that Mark Nechtr fork over this fucking instant are sootily dark, bent, twisted, urban, dusty, ugly and oily in the kind of smeared big Baggie junior-high dope comes in.

  “What’s the deal with these,” the best in the business asks flatly.

  “What deal?”

  “You’re saying Ambrose gave you these, aren’t you.”

  Magda is giving Steelritter a look almost as steady as Mark’s.

  “I didn’t know I was saying anything at all, sir.”

  DeHaven glances over with a son’s special fear as J.D. gives suddenly in to an anger as total as the corn they drive through:

  “Listen you little speck of shit these are mine. I plant them and care for them and kill them and prepare them. These, for you, are for later. Part of the whole Reunion package. That professorial fart and I had a negotiated gentlemen’s agreement. These are for his fears. Not for him to pass out on streets. I’ll ask you again. He gave you these?”

  “Nechtr did say he got them from somebody he trusted a lot, Mr. Steelritter,” from Sternberg’s corner.

  “I’ll stamp him out. He’s through in the industry. In every industry. Ambrose is dinked. He’s zotzed.”

  “Of course he got them from him,” D.L. says, her tone weariness over glee. “Just tell him, love.”

  “I got them under the condition I don’t say where, if asked,” Mark says quietly.

  “That rat,” J.D. says, his voice high with disbelief. “That hairless arrogant puss, that I brought up from a franchised nothing.”

  “Pop, this oil light’s flashing kind of bright, right here.”

  J.D. is rapping his big forehead with the heel of his hand. “How fucking untidy.”

  “Nechtr said they give you an odd sort of self-control, sir,” Sternberg says. Which Mark did not. Mark doesn’t even look at him. He’s staring at J.D. Steelritter’s fine face.

  “These things are the violent end of American advertising, kid,” J.D. grimaces critically at the dusty, well-traveled crud in the blurred Baggie. “Advertising embodied.”

  Sternberg horrified for real: “What?”

  DeHaven’s own distracting confusion sends a plume of talcum from a well-scratched scalp. “But we eat those suckers all the time,” he says. “Fridge’s full of them. Mom has to buy extra baking soda. They don’t taste great, kind of corny. Mom says creative geniuses have perverse tastes, is all.” He looks down at D.L. “What’s the deal?”

  DeHaven’s oil light flashes OIL, illuminating redly each time the clown’s lit nose is jounced with the car on the shittily maintained country road.

  “They’re obscene,” D.L. says without expression. “Tha
t’s the only deal they’re part of.”

  “They make certain wishes come true, sir, don’t they,” Sternberg says.

  Magda looks at Sternberg as if he’s about five.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” J.D. shouts, as they nearly sideswipe that Chrysler, which has fishtailed out of a blind verdant intersection’s gravel and is now going East, the wrong way. The sunlight’s color through the clouds is that of quality licorice, and the air is chill. Lightning convulses in the sky’s western flank.

  “Make wishes come true,” J.D. snorts. There’s no cigar in his mouth. “They make wishes. There’s a difference, no?” Yes, he thinks. Until the Reunion.

  “They’re obsce-ene,” D.L. says in the singsong of the ignored.

  “Take what you fear most and turn it to wishes. Ambrose doesn’t know what he and you are into, kid back there.”

  Mark says he has no idea what Mr. Steelritter is talking about.

  What Mark Nechtr fears most: solipsistic solipsism: silence.

  What Tom Sternberg fears most: whatever he’s inside.

  What Drew-Lynn Eberhardt fears most: as yet unbetrayed, thus unknown.

  What Dr. C____ Ambrose fears most: the loss of his object and interpretive wedge: stained skirt, prostheses, pretend-history, blonde wig off its stem.

  What DeHaven Steelritter fears most: see below.

  “You think an ad’s just a piece of art?” J.D. is saying. “You think it’s not about what life’s really about? That your fears and desires grow on trees? Come out of nowhere? That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ’s sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO’s. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built—and your wishes, on that foundation.” He raises above his headrest Mark’s stash, and his own. “These were my own Pop’s. From a funeral, back East. They bring the two inside each other. Marriage of violence. Shotgun wedding.”