Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

The story that isn’t Mark Nechtr’s by Mark Nechtr concerns a young competitive archer, named Dave, and his live-in lover, named L____. Dave, who is not nearly so healthy as Mark, believes that the only things that give his life meaning and direction are his competitive archery and his lover, L____, who is a great deal more attractive and sympathetic than D.L., with cheekbones out to here and a zest for life Dave cannot but share, through her. L____ is pretty much an emblem of Dave’s generation, is deprived and aimless and mildly wacko, with moods that change like the shapes of the moon that obsess her. Dave stands witness to all of her faults, though only some of his own, and but anyway loves L____ anyway. It’s implied that he’s dependent on her, for support; she stands in the hushed tournament galleries when he stands perpendicular to targets and shoots competitively with his complex fiberglass bow and Dexter Aluminum arrows. Dave is a solid young competitive archer, but by no means the best, even in his age division, and at the piece’s outset he feels like a true, born-to-be archer only when L____ is standing there, in the gallery, watching him stand and deliver.

  But they fight, as lovers. L____ is self-conscious, neurasthenic, insecure, moody, diffracted. Dave is introverted, self-counseled, and tends to be about as expressive as processed cheese. When the hottest darkest mood in L____’s weather collides with his cold white quiet, they have violent arguments that seem utterly to transform them. Dave had never even raised his voice to a girl before he fell for L____, and hates confrontation’s habit of making his hands (which he values) unsteady. But when she slips into the worst of herself, they scream and fight and carry on like things possessed. Pointy personal shrapnel flies. The air gets coppery with violence. In truth, Dave is often afraid to turn his back on L____, especially in their kitchen, when sharp things are handy; and he’s ashamed of this, and of the fact that after a fight he’s often afraid to go to sleep when she is awake and malevolent and boiling water is only a stove and kettle away. Nevertheless he loves his lover, and cannot understand the dark heat that fills him when they fight, or his need to lick his lips while she lists real and imagined grievances—or that his only really true deep concern during the screaming matches is that the neighbors in their community might hear her screams, or his screams, or her different screams as they reconcile, always via violent union. Though callow and beardless and not experienced, Dave loves L____ enough to maintain the form of excitement throughout broad stretches of heated lovemaking; and L____ believes, wrongly, that he is a born lover. She loves him physically with an intensity that is informed by her zest for a life she consumes. But the intensity of her loyalty to Dave is shot through with streaks of what can only be called a kind of greed. When she loves him, and cries out through the thin ceiling to maybe the whole neighborhood oh just how much she loves him, he fears that she means only that she loves what she feels. And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer’s heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

  The workshop and Ambrose approve this overture, this setting-up, though they do point out that it goes on a bit longer than absolutely necessary, limitations of space and patience being a constant and defining limitation, these quick and distracting days.

  And but yes there is something self-obsessed about L____’s love, we can feel. For example, she wishes Dave to tell her, instead of that he loves her, that she is loved. Her father used to say it as he tucked her gently into his USMC-surplus poncho-liner at bed-time, she explains; and it made her happy. That she was loved. That she is loved. Dave feels like not he, but rather her desire to be loved, to be beloved, is what gives L____’s life its direction and meaning; and some tiny targeteer’s voice cries out inside him against telling her that she is loved just because the fact that he loves her isn’t enough to stave off insecurity and self-consciousness and dissension and row.

  Etc. etc. Dave, pretty darn stubborn when it comes to his tiny archer’s cry, refuses, inside, to use the passive voice to articulate his love. And one fine day he actually articulates this refusal, and the reasonable arguments that lie behind it. He does this at significant personal risk.

  For, articulated-to, enraged, L____ blows off her appearance at the most important junior archery tournament of the Tidewater shooting season. Dave shoots alone, unwatched, afraid—and but he overcomes, shoots so surprisingly well that he places an overall third in his age-division. His best finish yet. When L____ bursts into their loft at nighttime, darkly transformed by both his articulated refusal to use the passive voice and his subsequent failure to fail without her, Dave wills himself to appear cool and distant and emotionally mute, but is actually licking his lips furtively as a dusky heat inside him dawns and breaks into tributaries and attendant falls, spreading. Maybe the loudest fight in the history of this generation’s verbal love ensues, with broken valuables and threats of a very great stabbing.

  But L____ hates herself more than she loves or hates Dave, it turns out, is the thing. Which makes her climactic lover’s thrust at him sort of perfect in both directions. Having de-quivered and brandished Dave’s best and unlosable Dexter Aluminum target arrow, as if to stab her lover, L____ turns it shaft-backwards and, with a look on her Valentine face past all belief—a look that communicates perfectly her three true selves: the blindly loyal, the greedily past-impassioned, and the self-imprisoned hating—with this look, reflected bulgingly in Dave’s TV’s dead green eye, she unfortunately puts the Dexter arrow through her own creamy oft-kissed throat, right up to the nock. She falls and lies there, victorious and pierced, her pelvis moving and life a bright fountain around the boy’s unlosable shaft.

  So far it’s a good graduate-workshop story, the rare kind that imposes the very logic it obeys; and plus it has the unnameable but stomach-punching quality of something real, a welcome relief from those dread watch-me-be-clever pieces—or, even more dread, a fashionably modern minimal exercise, going through its weary motions as it slouches toward epiphany. What “works least well” for Dr. Ambrose and Mark’s colleagues at the E.C.T. seminar is the part that deals with why this guy Dave is subsequently arrested and incarcerated and tried and imprisoned for L____’s murder. The section’s chattery, and about as subtle as a brick, but the gist is that picture this: L____ lies twisted and punctured and spent and moving and red before the mute Sony in Dave’s shared room, losing blood with every pulse, self-stabbed with the high-tech arrow that had placed Dave third alone. She’s clearly near death, and looks with supplication and a trust born of true love’s blind loyalty at Dave, waiting for him to obey basic human instincts and leap to remove the wickedly intrusive shaft. But Dave, come suddenly of age, hears no ching of instinct’s bell; he feels only the kind of numb visual objectivity that makes a born archer mature. He takes precious time out to look at the big picture, here. He takes the long view. He: sees that L____ has pulled crunchingly into death’s gravel driveway, that no way can she be saved in time (tourniquet pretty obviously impractical); fears that their community’s collective ear has heard the violent row he didn’t start; concludes that if he takes hold of the aluminum shaft to remove the weapon, the whorled oil his fingers exude will establish itself as his forensic mark on the Dexter arrow; and then his lover will die anyway, and the whole thing will maybe be interpreted by others as exactly what it will look like. Crime of passion. Murder-1. Dave licks his lips absently as he tries to anticipate interpretation. This goes on forever, narratively speaking. L____, her eyes never leaving her lover’s, finally, to pretty much everyone’s relief, expires.

  The workshop objects especially to two things, here. The first is the story’s claim that all Dave’s self-conscious caution about fingerprints is for naught, because the whorls of his oil are already on the arrow anyway—he had fletched, held, fitted, nocked, and shot the special arrow three times in that day’s competition. Since explicit and verisimilitudinous mention is made on Mark’s mss. p. 8 of the skin-thin leather gloves all serious competitive archers wear, though, the beli
evability of Dave’s fingerprints being on the shaft depends on an awareness that an archer’s glove covers only the wrist and palm (protecting them from the shaft’s explosive reaction to the bow’s leftward pressure): the nakedness of an archer’s fingers, Dr. Ambrose argues reasonably, is not a piece of information Mark can expect the average reader to have in the arsenal average readers bring to bear on average stories. Basically what you’re doing when you’re writing fiction is telling a lie, he tells those of us in the seminar; and the psychology of reading dictates that we’re willing to buy only what coheres, on some gut level, with what we already believe.

  Weaker still, Ambrose claims (though with tact and cheer), is the story’s claim that the Tidewater coroner’s inquest reveals that the cause of L____’s death, as she lay horizontal with the wicked shaft protruding, was neither trauma to aspirate organ nor loss of bodily fluid, but rather… old age. A collective “?!?” greets this move of Mark’s. Though it’s done lovingly.

  Do some very simple cost-benefit analyses, Ambrose advises Nechtr, rubbing the red commas his glasses have imposed on his orange nose’s bridge: Why compromise the tale’s carefully crafted heart-felt feel and charming emotional realism with a sudden, gratuitous, and worst of all symbolic bit of surrealism like this?

  Especially since the real meat of the story lies ahead, in the Maryland Facility for Correction, where a numbly shattered and even less healthy Dave awaits trial and a judicial retribution he cannot deny he deserves. The epistatic twist of the knife here is that Dave is Not Guilty, yet is at the same time guilty of being Not Guilty: his adult fear of the community’s interpretation of his prints and shaft has caused him to abandon his arrow, to betray a lover, to violate his own human primal instinct toward honor. How ethically, craftedly clever is this double-bladed twist, Ambrose tells us as we take notes; and how charmingly unfashionable to hear honor actually used as a noun, today.

  Meanwhile, inside the story we have all, as part of the class requirement, read and put copious comments in the margins of, we’re told that exactly nothing in Dave’s sheltered experience prepares him for the hellishness of the Facility where he awaits trial. He lives in a tight gray ghastly cell. And he is not Alone in there. He has a cellmate. His cellmate is horror embodied. A hardened career criminal awaiting sentencing on a counterfeiting conviction, the cellmate who licks his wet lips at Dave’s arrival is a “Three-Time Loser,” and under Maryland law can expect to receive the same Life Dave expects. The cellmate’s body is loathsome, flabby, puke-white, fat-spider-like, flatulent, pocked, cystic, and carbolic. Dave finds him disgusting, and the evident fact that the counterfeiter, whose name is Mark, loathes his own body, resents the cell’s two-thirds its confined storage requires, and is revolted by the sounds and odors that issue whenever he moves, breathes, or makes his unceasing use of the cell’s elimination bucket—this Mark’s self-loathing only increases the young archer’s disgust. Plus horror. The cellmate is so cruel, bestial, hard, terrible, sadistic and depraved and repugnant (he actually sits on Dave’s head, requiring that Dave play the part of bidet or else face the consequence) that Dave calmly considers suicide as maybe preferable to the possibility of Life in this cramped fetid cell with this hellish counterfeiter; but not for a moment, the story claims, does Dave feel ill-used by the universe in general, or doubt that he is not somehow precisely where he belongs: he cannot close his eyes without being subjected to the diplopic double image of his lover’s steady, supplicating and aging (!?) eyes, and then his own eyes vertical above her, darting from side to side, more concerned with how he is seen than with what he sees. Yes, when he’s not being savaged, violated, sat and shat upon, Dave has time to think; and he grows up all over again, in the Facility. He is, the story takes a risk by saying, “repentant”—which in its Franco-Latinate etymology, Ambrose reminds us from his station at the green blackboard, denotes a process, not a state. Dave accepts, numbly but not passively, his unacceptable confinement.

  Yes but the counterfeiter, Mark, hates the tiny cell even more than Dave, though suicide never enters spider-minds unviolated by naïve romantic thoughts about things like honor or betrayal. But Mark does (does) have Ideas. He believes—and whispers, over and over, as Dave falls asleep brown-nosed and bloody in the violated bunk below—that if he, Mark, can just work out the kinks in his counterfeit key, can just escape, leave the tiny gray cell and the barbed, guarded Facility complex behind, return to the mythic and fertile Tidewater marshland he’d roamed as a ghastly child, he can be happy, whole, human. An idea man, he posits that the whole purpose of confinement in barred cells with tiny barred windows—the latter all the worse for the prisoner’s ability to see a striped Outside which the bars render both visible and impossible to reach—the whole point is to “dehumanize,” and that he, Mark, as minimally human (Dave, no idiot, holds his peace on this point), has a right to escape analogous to any attacked man’s right to defend, to kill for what he must have or retain.

  Data: Mark has spent most of the latter portion of his life behind bars, in the Facility, and presides over a whole predatory school of demoralized Lifers who are the whole Facility’s basic mandate for erection. Mark has underground tentacles that extend into even the blackest markets. He and his school of followers do unspeakable things to Dave, force themselves on the weak sickly repentant archer in complexly depraved ways that Nechtr, quite frankly, hasn’t the nerve or dark imagination yet really even to describe. This lack of facility, though, is interpreted by a sensitive instructor and loving workshop as disciplined restraint, and is duly applauded.

  Etc. etc. but so eventually, one night, after Lockdown and the muffled screams of pre-sleep rape, Mark makes good his prophecy of flight. Dave wakes from his one familiar diplopic nightmare to see, against the striped light of the cellblock’s hallway, his bulbous cellmate manipulating a counterfeit key, one Mark has spent two months tempering in the Facility’s license-plate metal shop, into their cell door’s Lockdown mechanism. The key, which is surprisingly simple in shape and serration, nevertheless gives the hardened counterfeiter total control over the movements of all the Facility’s state-of-the-art automated doors. The key, as key, doesn’t look like much of anything: Mark’s had the thing in plain sight by the elimination bucket for weeks—only Dave, he said, had been told what it really was, or what, if willingly used, it could do.

  The barred door slides silently open on its reliably-oiled track. Dave hears Mark cock his floppy puke-white ear for sounds: there is only the distant whimpered symphony of unfree dreamers.

  And in that familiar moment of hesitation, the one before all leapers leap, Dave’s tormenting mate turns to survey the space he has filled and now would empty. The keen archerlight of Dave’s open eye is reflected in the counterfeit absence of the bar-shadow that usually shades him. He, supine, and Mark, erect, stare at each other across that silent moment. Dave does not know, right then, whether what is spoken is aloud.

  “You’ve known what I’ve made. You’ve heard me whisper. You see what I’m doing.”

  Dave nods.

  “And you know where I’m headed.”

  Dave does.

  “Don’t rat. Do not rat.”

  Dave nods.

  “Rat and I’ll kill you.”

  Dave hears.

  “Rat and I’ll have the whole place up your ass. They’ll fuck you bloody and feed you your cock. They’ll dink you. Your weak little body’ll be found in locations. Note the plural. Shitspeck.”

  “I hear you,” Dave says, so flatly there’s no hint of echo.

  But Mark’s voice always echoes. “Rat and you’re a late boy. As in zotzed. Klapped. This is a promise. I have tentacles, and rights. I’ll defend myself against you.”

  “I don’t rat,” Dave says.

  “Poppa!” cries a compulsive exhibitionist down the cellblock.

  “Don’t rat.”

  “Go, man.” Dave’s glad Mark’s going, who’re they kidding. “Bon voyage. Godspeed. Wear a hat. Do
n’t try to hitchhike.”

  Further echoed connections between ratting and violent death recede with the counterfeiter, who holds his key before him like a candle in the bright cellblock hall.

  Understandably, though, the M.F.C.’s professional penal authorities are not at all glad that the three-time counterfeiter has gone. Is at large. Penal helicopters chop and chuff all night, aloft. Dave turns his back to the still-unlocked door, holds his window’s bars in his fists, and watches searchlights shine from clouds to play the land outside; hears the whiny petition of eager leashed hounds, the sinal rhythm of the Facility’s escape siren; stands there, watching, till the gradual Maryland dawn, when he’s led by uniformed hands to the spare, spartan, no-nonsense office of the Facility’s Warden.

  Here a narrative risk is gauged and taken. The Warden is Jack Lord, of fame. With the sort of apparent inconsistency that makes creative writing professors such delightfully puzzling pixies, Ambrose approves this particular unrealistic/symbolic touch. Some of the rich ambiguity of realism is, he concedes, sacrificed. But since Nechtr’s whole story is interpreted by the workshop as about a whole new generation’s feelings of amorphous but deserved guilt, confinement, fear, confusion, and, yes, the place of honor in the general postmodern American scheme of things, his fictional use of a popular icon, forged in the medium that is (sadly? sadly?) this generation’s unbreakable window on itself, this rings somehow true, Ambrose tells us. It also ties in with the vivid post-escape helicopter imagery, which creates a sense of unity, craft, care. Which is good.

  Also good is the fact that Lord needs little description, since he is an image of fame. His hard square face—white as the face of a man keeping an iron grip on ever-recalcitrant reins—his improbable overt jaw, barely-there lips, black eyes and high dark hair, one lank askew, are stamped on the consciousness of a whole post-bellbottom generation. Dave needn’t even raise his eyes to know his gaoler’s mettle as he listens to Jack Lord, listens, and then lies, denies that he knew of Mark’s plans to escape, or that he witnessed the escape, or that he knows anything at all about the counterfeiter’s means of exit, or destination, or route, or rate of travel. Mark, Dave says, did not confide in him. Mark repelled, terrorized and violated him. He is, to be honest, glad the Three-Time Loser has gone, yes, but knows not where to; cares less. If he’d been privy to the whole thing, wouldn’t he be gone, too? Don’t all, facing Life, given the chance, flee?