Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  Not if they’re guilty, Lord replies. Not if they’re one of the special few here who know just where they belong.

  Jack Lord always knows more than those he questions suspect that he knows. It is the nature of his character. It is law.

  Another law of character is that an escapee always blabs to his cellmate about where he’s going. And Mark, like all confined compromisers of the Mainland’s order, like all loathsome men whose every movement is not toward but away, is a chatterer. A born talker. And Dave here, Lord can tell just by looking, is a born listener. Jack Lord’s pointing finger is that of a potent and manicured God. His eyes burn dark. He may not smile. Dave knows, and he must tell. The truth.

  Dave stands there and lies and lies and lies.

  “And even if I did know,” he says finally, voice even as cheese, “I don’t rat. I will not rat. And you cannot make me. I’ve got Life, coming. The community heard my lover’s screams. Fluids from my body were on the shaft that killed her. I’m going to be sentenced to Life. I’m trying to accept it, and this Facility. I’m coming of age. It’s a hell beyond Bosch’s worst nightmares here, and I’m headed for tenure. What more can you brandish? There’s nothing you can do.”

  Mark Nechtr’s dialogue does tend to get a tad flowery, when he’s carried away. But what the fuck. You know?

  But Jack Lord is smiling his one permitted smile: the smile that finds no humor in what may not change. The ordered world he lives by steering is black-and-white. Dave’s face yellows as Lord breaks the basic news. It’s not a question of what the penal authorities can do. It’s what his cellmate, even though absent, can do. Dave is the one stray thread in the counterfeit escapee’s seamless weave. And this counterfeiter’s a hardened pro: he knows one sleepy mumble could unravel months of craft. Perhaps—no, undoubtedly—Mark threatened Dave about what happens to those who rat. Omitted from his presentation, though, Lord advises, was what happens even to those who do not rat. Dave represents an untidiness. A loose thread. An aesthetic problem. And counterfeiters are compulsive about the aesthetic integrity of what they’ve wrought. Lord makes a prediction. Mark is going to have Dave exterminated. Dinked. Zotzed. Jobbed. Mark has a circle, a ghastly following, here in the Facility. They will come, Lord predicts. Dave’s only option is to rat, to reveal, to Jack Lord, Mark’s means and route and velocity and end. Then and only then may Lord, who does not make the rules he only enforces them right up to the hilt, be allowed to shield and protect a helpful witness, Dave, an asset, with penal value. Only then will Jack Lord be empowered to preserve Dave’s life. Let the archer eat and bathe, exercise and evacuate alone, in private, under trusted guard, away from Them. Perhaps even be able to work toward having Dave transferred to a different Facility. Let him make a fresh start, inside. Elsewhere. Clean penal slate. But Lord promises that all that, nay just plain old bare hand-to-mouth survival, can come to pass only if the archer reveals what Lord knows he knows. If not… well, things don’t need spelling out in this sort of environment, do they. No one is Alone in a Facility.

  Jack Lord smiles that monochrome smile we know. The matter’s in the archer’s hands, not the Warden’s. Dave is invited to give the whole matter some unleisurely thought, back in the general population. In the prison community.

  Sure enough. In no time, things come to pass. They come for him in the exercise yard, the shower, the license-plate shop, the cell. Dave is assaulted, savaged, violated, punctured with homemade weapons the more fearsome for their being homemade. The Word is out. The grapevine sings. Vague drums beat low. Something has been offered. A bounty beyond measure. A hundred cigarettes.

  Jack Lord explains to his teutonic new Assistant Warden—in a narrative interruption Ambrose says he’ll let slide, just barely—that the price of life in the penal system is low, because the Facility is overstocked with lives, lives that wear only numbers, lives without honor or value or end. There is no demand for them. The market’s invisible hand hefts a finger, damning the guilty to an existence of utter freedom, freedom to choke and starve, alone in a riot.

  Didactic little fucker, too. Nechtr. But Ambrose was being indulgent that seminar day. We could tell he loved the kid, deep down.

  But so here’s the weak, sickly, and badly damaged archer, in the run-down Facility infirmary, looking like death incarnate, a black-eyed mummy of gauze, fed by tubes, relieved by tubes that often run red. Jack Lord appears bedside, dressed all in black. That his black pants are bellbottoms symbolizes what we already know: this is a man above ridicule.

  Lord asks Dave how’s life in general, down there, these days. It’s the cold sort of question that is its own answer. The logic of Lord’s prophecy has been immaculate. Mark, who’s still at large, outside, though probably just long enough for someone in the population to accommodate his tentacled demand, has put a hundred-cigarette price on the archer’s bandaged head. A hundred 100s. The good kind. The kind that burn forfuckingever. Word’s out, kid. Not even this infirmary is safe, what with Dave’s life as simultaneously worthless and valuable as it now is. Lord invites Dave to have a look at that Trusty of an orderly over there, grinning a Grinch-grin and filling a blunt syringe with something that just doesn’t look promising at all; while out the hospital window’s mesh a fag-hungry population waits, implacable, patient, pounding their own palms with socks filled with sand.

  It’s a matter of time, kid down there. Jack Lord won’t waste it repeating himself. He’s terse; it’s well known. Dave can get dinked, or he can rat on the counterfeiter who sees him as a flaw, a smudge, who has the capacity and capital, and his suppliers the opportunity, to do the archer grievous and final harm. The Warden’s helping hands remain penally bound. Dave must let him help. He must give, to receive. There can be lunch, but it is never free.

  Ambrose tells us that this conversation, this dialogue between Dave in white gauze and Lord in black fashion, is handled with a deftness that earns our approval, a lengthy economy born of a precision that promises Payoff. That it “rings true.” And that the story’s end, “like all true apokes’ tragicomic climae” (which I’m still damned if I can find in any dictionary or thesaurus anywhere), is not the less triumphant for its pathos.

  OK, Ambrose concedes—he’s no pedant—the story here bends over backwards a little too far—limbos, almost—to argue that Dave’s climactic refusal to rat has nothing to do with his guilty innocence in the impalement and death of his one true love. That there’s way less self-hatred than selflessness being performatively rendered here. Selflessness is, of course, horror embodied; but the argument here is that it keeps safe in its ghastly silent center the green kernel that is the true self.

  Ambrose concedes that there are some technical fuck-ups here, because the story cuts its own argument’s legs out from under, viz. when Dave admits that his refusal to rat to Jack Lord, still, is deeply selfish in a way. That it has to do with Desire. That he, Dave, covets something, some one thing, even in the depths of injury and cut-rate anesthesia above which Jack Lord’s famous and logical image swims.

  It has to do with honor, see, the prisoner says.

  Dave tells an icon of popular culture that he feels like his own experiences and fuck-ups and trial and tribulations and anguish, both on the Outside and in the Facility, have given him some insights—some sight-ins—that have helped him on his way, a way less toward “coming of age” than toward just plain old living in the adult world. The adult world, in Dave’s opinion, has turned out to be a basically shifty, shitty place. It’s risky and often sad and always wildly insecure. It beats him over the head, just how insecure and fragile is his place in his own lifetime. He knows, now, that nearly everything you call Yours in the world can be taken away from you by other people, assuming that they want it enough. They can take away your freedom of location and movement, if there’s judgment. Men you didn’t vote for can take your life with one red button, Jack. The world can take your loved ones, your love, your one beloved. Your dreams can be taken. Your manhood, inte
grity of cock and bum: vapor before a gale. What’s his, then, that he can hold tight, secure?

  This is the one thing, he says. He’s had time to think, and he’s no idiot, and he’s been able to come up with just one thing. They can’t take your honor. Only that can be only given. And it can be given—with good reason, without good reason. But only given, that. It belongs to him. His be-longing. The one arrow he just can’t lose, unless he lets it fly. His one thing.

  Dave’s thought it over, and he’s decided he just does not rat. He does not betray. Not even Mark. Dave is going to be greedy. He’s going to refuse to give away his last thing.

  Get ready, because Jack Lord is… nonplussed. This weak kid’s own life worth less to him than some idea? The Warden, were he younger, would be able to move his face’s image into a surprise Dr. Ambrose confesses he’d like to see shown. ’Cause there’s no logic here. No instinct. No sense. Some imaginary debt to a minimal human who’d job you over a matter of freaking aesthetics? Jack Lord’s white face does move, a bit. What manner of beasts, these kids today? Our future? Tomorrow’s Mainland? This boy would eat cock and die to honor some wacko abstract obligation to a person with no, and here Jack Lord means zero, value?

  The supine murderer would sincerely like to make the erect peace officer understand. It is no matter, this To Whom the debt is owed. Dave’s just too fucking selfish to do it. He feels like his bludgeon-blurred sense of obligation is all that’s him, now. As much what’s him as his past and present and future. His past is spent, cannot change; it’s not in his control. God knows the future sure isn’t. The present is, yes, probably just waiting to get zotzed by a market for endless flame. O Mr. Lord, but the fact that he does not rat: this is his self’s coin, value constant against every curve’s wave-like surge. Dave covets, values, hoards, and will not spend his honor. He’ll not trade, not for anything the cosmic Monty’s got stashed behind any silver curtain.

  (So OK, it goes on a little long. Nechtr’s lover-cold passion, unleashed, will admit no minimalist imperative, Magda knows.)

  But so no. He apologizes. He’d love to buy lunch. He’d love to see the counterfeiter who sat on his head hopping up and down on something pointy till the end of time. He’d love to help Jack Lord maintain order. The famous Warden may have anything but what is his. This is his.

  This last number is, believe it or not, a monologue, a ring-tailed kitty of a bitch to pull off, made somehow more powerful for us in class by the pathetically unself-conscious sentimentality with which a healthy but simple and kind of fucked-up boy reveals to us colleagues, and to his teacher, Magda’s old lover, J.D.’s crafty client, something as obviously hidden as a nose, today.

  Except but so does Dave rat? is the question Mark Nechtr’s unfinished and basically unfinishable piece leaves the E.C.T. workshop with. Does the archer maybe rat, finally, after all? Sure doesn’t look that way. But Ambrose invites us to listen closely to the kidnapped voice here. This Dave guy is characterized very carefully all the way through the thing as fundamentally weak. It’s the flaw that informs his character. Is this the real him, bandaged, prostrate before ideas so old they’re B.C.? That shit with Jack Lord: that was just words. Could a weak person act so? Debate, before the bell rings, is vigorous and hot. The ambiguity is the rich, accidental kind—admitting equally of concession and stand.

  Well and understandably Mark Nechtr wants to know, too. Does the archer who’s guilty of his lover rat? Doesn’t he, Mark Nechtr, have to know, if he’s going to make it up? And how can he in good conscience just rip off, swallow, digest and expel as his what an alumnus with a streaked orange face and removable hair has clearly seen first herself? Would that be honorable, or weak? Don’t make light of it. Don’t laugh. Look at him, beseeching, soaked, scalded. He looks like a supplicant, one of us, the unspecial who burn without ever getting to ignite, as he lies, stabbed for real, finally, by this one gift that always returns, in Pest-Aside-milky mud, among gorged little corpses, before a scarecrow stripped of fatigues to reveal what it’s been revealed as all along: two planks, opposed; a rotten orange head just stuck there, topped by a cap-usurping wig; and a power to strike contemporary fear into just those crows who’ve no stake or interest in a dead black lacuna between two fertile fields of greenly dripping feed.

  And, in a related relation, Mark Nechtr won’t rat. Will never tell of the realistic or sentimental compassion the poorly hidden and obvious Dr. Ambrose, warmed by fatigues whose sun-dried breast reveals only a suffix and number, arms strong as pine, fleshy of head, thin hair plastered across under the cap of some Chicago Cubs who this year just might do it—Nechtr never once will rat about the genuine feeling the cold genius used to cradle an infant’s thick healthy neck, to bear an exhausted but replenished but still deprived detergent heir from an unenclosed place, toward the possibility of transport. Night crawlers boil confused at their feet, pests marching back into the fray like men with a mission, bearing tiny straws into furrows lactic with runoff from Pest-Aside, the Brand that Lures to One Side, as the academic man straddles a double, trampled path marked by impractical pumps, fruit-stained skirt, corporate jacket, fried petals, prosthetically engorged blouse. He is just nice, to carry both arrow and archer, and not even to mention about ratting.

  Not that he’s not irritating, of course. A born talker, he reminds my classmate of various obvious facts. That they have left the East Coast, have left the world’s busiest airport, have left the world’s least busy C.I.A. and its inevitable pay lot; that they’ve driven here and there and but are now not lost but only stalled, idled too high by a fearsome plastic nose, on the last road, one whose in-sight curve Westward leads straight to Collision. That the storm’s worst has, once more, taken itself off East, where they’ve been. That they’ve left some awfully sore folks in a machine that’s now dead-level in mud, but are returning via the path they’ve taken from them who sit bunched tight in a clown’s car washed clean of plea or foreign brand, a homemade machine, attached even now by a length of chain to the chestnut mare of a big old farmer, harvester down, who’d wanted to hitch a lift only to the curve’s third shanty, since his eldest kid’s got the rented car; who has a surplus slicker, a flat-faced brood, a way with physics and chains, and the bare animal charity to pull a malevolent car from the earth and set it back on the road. That here’s the public representative of McDonald’s, pastel hips jutting and legs bowed atop the foaming mare, which heaves and steams and gallops, muscles in bunches moving like whole corn-fed waves under a tight hide. That it all looks at once mythic and familiar, set against the new same sun’s dripping green noon: J.D.’s perfect profile at the furry wheel, under hanging dice, cigar unlit, his window clean and down, while those of Sternberg and D.L. are up, since they like to feel what they look through, four hands on two panes; and the laboring horse game, galloping without purchase in the glassy mud, the enormous farmer pushing at the mare’s ass, except without any friction for his big boots, so he is, yes, OK, in a way, walking in place; the car, J.D. Steelritter’s accelerator pushed flat, the big car’s idle screaming, higher and higher, its big rear Goodyears’ hubs popped and spokes awhirl as the soaked earth, by not holding on, will not let them go.

  That, tired, but in time, they’ll arrive at what’s been built. That it’s way too late to go back on anything. So to the Reunion of All Who’ve Appeared, to the Egress, to the Funhouse, Ambrose’s erect Funhouse, designed to universal standards to be—past all the hype that will support it—just that. A house. That, though Dr. Ambrose would rather be among those for whom it’s designed, he’ll eat with sad cheer the fact that he, as builder, is not among: not a face in the crowd of those for whom it’s really there: the richly deprived, the phobically unenclosed, the in-need-of-shelter. Children.

  Just a tad too long? Lovesick! Mark’d! I have hidden exactly nothing. So trust me: we will arrive. Cross my heart. Stick a needle. To tell the truth, we might already be there. The gleaming tar reflects our state’s lidless noon. We can see ours
elves in what we walk on. Jack Lord’s promotional LordAloft chopper can even now be seen, reflected, aloft, in and out of the last of the clouds, probing with a white finger for all who are astray, stalled, behind schedules. The light of his image’s sun illuminates our homemade machine’s rear tire, spinning in place, as the mare gallops in place, as the big old man shoves in place, without purchase. But the wheel! Bound by nothing, the Goodyear spins and spins, has lost its ringing hub, has disclosed a radial’s spokes. Hold rapt for that impossible delay, that best interruption: that moment in all radial time when something unseen inside the blur of spokes seems to sputter, catch, and spin against the spin, inside.

  See this thing. See inside what spins without purchase. Close your eye. Absolutely no salesmen will call. Relax. Lie back. I want nothing from you. Lie back. Relax. Quality soil washes right out. Lie back. Open. Face directions. Look. Listen. Use ears I’d be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines’ noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It’s a love song.

  For whom?

  You are loved.

  About the Author

  David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College; his senior English thesis, the novel The Broom of the System, was published in 1987, and his senior philosophy thesis was published as Fate, Time, and Language in 2010. He earned a master of fine arts at the University of Arizona. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. He also published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion; the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster; a book about hip-hop, written with his friend Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers; and a book about infinity, Everything and More. Over the years Wallace taught at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award and served on the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.