The David Foster Wallace Reader by David Foster Wallace

  About a month later, an envelope arrived in the A.D.A.’s home’s exquisite wrought-iron mailbox. In the envelope were a standard American Dental Association glossy brochure on the importance of daily oral hygiene—available at like any dentist’s office anywhere—and two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots, one of big Don Gately and one of his associate, each in a Halloween mask denoting a clown’s great good professional cheer, each with his pants down and bent over and each with the enhanced-focus handle of one of the couple’s toothbrushes protruding from his bottom.

  Don Gately had sense enough never to work the North Shore again after that. But he ended up in hideous trouble anyway, A.D.A.-wise. It was either bad luck or kismet or so forth. It was because of a cold, a plain old human rhinovirus. And not even Don Gately’s cold, is what made him finally stop and question his kismet.

  The thing started out looking like tit on a tray, burglary-wise. A beautiful neo-Georgian home in a wildly upscale part of Brookline was set nicely back from an unlit pseudo-rural road, had a chintzy SentryCo alarm system that fed, idiotically enough, on a whole separate 330 v AC 90 Hz cable with its own meter, didn’t seem to be on anything like a regular P.M.-patrol route, and had, at its rear, flimsily tasteful French doors surrounded by dense and thorn-free deciduous shrubbery and blocked off from the garage’s halogen floods by a private E.W.D.-issue upscale dumpster. It was in short a real cock-tease of a home, burglary-wise, for a drug addict. And Don Gately straight-shunted the alarm’s meter and, with an associate,16 broke and entered and crept around on huge cat feet.

  Except unfortunately the owner of the house turned out to be still home, even though both of his cars and the rest of his family were gone. The little guy was asleep sick in bed upstairs in acetate pajamas with a hot water bottle on his chest and half a glass of OJ and a bottle of NyQuil17 and a foreign book and copies of International Affairs and Interdependent Affairs and a pair of thick specs and an industrial-size box of Kleenex on the bedside table and an empty vaporizer barely humming at the foot of the bed, and the guy was to say the least nonplussed to wake up and see high-filter flashlights crisscrossing over the unlit bedroom walls and bureau and teak chiffonnier as Gately and associate scanned for a wall-safe, which surprisingly like 90% of people with wall-safes conceal in their master bedroom behind some sort of land- or seascape painting. People turned out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel strange sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no man should be entitled. Gately had a way stickier conscience about the possession of some of these large particular facts than he did about making off with other people’s personal merchandise. But then all of a sudden in mid-silent-search for a safe here’s this upscale homeowner turning out to be home with a nasty head-cold while his family’s out on a two-car foliage-tour in what’s left of the Berkshires, writhing groggily and NyQuilized around on the bed and making honking adenoidal sounds and asking what in bloody hell is the meaning of this, except he’s saying it in Québecois French, which means to these thuggish U.S. drug addicts in Halloween-clowns’ masks exactly nothing, he’s sitting up in bed, a little and older-type homeowner with a football-shaped head and gray van Dyke and eyes you can tell are used to corrective lenses as he switches on the bright bedside lamp. Gately could easily have screwed out of there and never looked back; but here indeed, in the lamplight, is a seascape over next to the chiffonnier, and the associate has a quick peek and reports that the safe behind it is to laugh at, it can be opened with harsh language, almost; and oral narcotics addicts tend to operate on an extremely rigid physical schedule of need and satisfaction, and Gately is at this moment firmly in the need part of the schedule; and so D. W. Gately disastrously decides to go ahead and allow a nonviolent burglary to become in effect a robbery—which the operative legal difference involves either violence or the coercive threat of same—and Gately draws himself up to his full menacing height and shines his flashlight in the little homeowner’s rheumy eyes and addresses him the way menacing criminals speak in popular entertainment—d’s for th’s, various apocopes, and so on—and takes hold of the guy’s ear and conducts him down to a kitchen chair and binds his arms and legs to the chair with electrical cords neatly clipped from refrigerator and can-opener and M. Café-brand Automatic Café-au-Lait-Maker, binds him just short of gangrenously tight, because he’s hoping the Berkshire foliage is prime and the guy’s going to be soloing in this chair for a good stretch of time, and Gately starts looking through the kitchen’s drawers for the silverware—not the good-silver-for-company silverware; that was in a calfskin case underneath some neatly folded old spare Christmas wrapping in a stunning hardwood-with-ivory-inlay chest of drawers in the living room, where over 90% of upscale people’s good silver is always hidden, and has already been promoted and is piled18 just off the foyer—but just the regular old everyday flatware silverware, because the vast bulk of homeowners keep their dish towels two drawers below their everyday-silverware drawer, and God’s made no better call-for-help-stifling gag in the world than a good old oily-smelling fake-linen dish towel; and the bound guy in the cords on the chair suddenly snaps to the implications of what Gately’s looking for and is struggling and saying: Do not gag me, I have a terrible cold, my nose she is a brick of the snot, I have not the power to breathe through the nose, for the love of God please do not gag my mouth; and as a gesture of goodwill the homeowner tells Gately, who’s rummaging, the combination of the bedroom’s seascape safe, except in French numbers, which together with the honking adenoidal inflection the guy’s grippe gives his speech doesn’t even sound like human speech to Gately, and but also the guy tells Gately there are some antique pre-British-takeover Québecois gold coins in a calfskin purse taped to the back of an undistinguished Impressionist landscape in the living room. But everything the Canadian homeowner says means no more to poor old Don Gately, whistling a jolly tune and trying to look menacing in his clown’s mask, than the cries of, say, North Shore gulls or inland grackles; and sure enough the towels are two drawers under the spoons, and here comes Gately across the kitchen looking like a sort of Bozo from hell, and the Québecer guy’s mouth goes oval with horror, and into that mouth goes a balled-up, faintly greasy-smelling kitchen towel, and across the guy’s cheeks and over the dome of protruding linen goes some fine-quality fibrous strapping tape from the drawer under the decommissioned phone—why does everybody keep the serious mailing supplies in the drawer nearest the kitchen phone?—and Don Gately and associate finish their swift and with-the-best-of-intentions nonviolent business of stripping the Brookline home as bare as a post-feral-hamster meadow, and they relock the front door and hit the unlit road in Gately’s reliable and double-mufflered 4 x 4. And the bound, wheezing, acetate-clad Canadian—the right-hand man to probably the most infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer north of the Great Concavity, the lieutenant and trouble-shooting trusted adviser who selflessly volunteered to move with his family to the savagely American area of metro Boston to act as liaison between and general leash-holder for the half-dozen or so malevolent and mutually antagonistic groups of Québecer Separatists and Albertan ultra-rightists united only in their fanatical conviction that the U.S.A.’s Experialistic ‘gift’ or ‘return’ of the so-calledly ‘Reconfigured’ Great Convexity to its northern neighbor and O.N.A.N. ally constituted an intolerable blow to Canadian sovereignty, honor, and hygiene—this homeowner, unquestionably a V.I.P., although admittedly rather a covert V.I.P., or probably more accurately a ‘P.I.T.,’19 in French, this meek-looking Canadian-terrorism-coordinator—bound to his chair, thoroughly gagged, sitting there, alone, under cold fluorescent kitchen lights,20 the rhinovirally afflicted man, gagged with skill and quality materials—the guy, having worked so hard to partially clear one clotted nasal passage that he tore intercostal ligaments in his ribs, soon found even that pinprick of air blocked off by mucus’s implacable lava-like flow once again, and so has to tear more ligaments trying to breach the other nostri
l, and so on; and after an hour of struggle and flames in his chest and blood on his lips and the white kitchen towel from trying frantically to tongue the towel out past the tape, which is quality tape, and after hopes skyrocketing when the doorbell rings and then hopes blackly dashed when the person at the door, a young woman with a clipboard and chewing gum who’s offering promotional coupons good for Happy Holidays discounts on memberships of six months or more at a string of Boston non-UV tanning salons, shrugs in her parka and makes a mark on the clipboard and blithely retreats down the long driveway to the pseudo-rural road, an hour of this or more, finally the Québecois P.I.T., after unspeakable agony—slow suffocation, mucoidal or no, being no day at the Montreal Tulip-Fest—at the height of which agony, hearing his head’s pulse as receding thunder and watching his vision’s circle shrink as a red aperture around his sight rotates steadily in from the edges, at the height of which he could think only, despite the pain and panic, of what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all this time, to die, a thought which the towel and tape denied expression via the rueful grin with which the best men meet the dumbest ends—this Guillaume DuPlessis passed bluely from this life, and sat there, in the kitchen chair, 250 clicks due east of some really spectacular autumn foliage, for almost two nights and days, his posture getting more and more military as rigor mortis set in, with his bare feet looking like purple loaves of bread, from the lividity; and when Brookline’s Finest were finally summoned and got him unbound from the coldly lit chair, they had to carry him out as if he were still seated, so militarily comme-il-faut had his limbs and spine hardened. And poor old Don Gately, whose professional habit of killing power with straight shunts to a meter’s inflow was pretty much a signature M.O., and who had, of course, a special place in the heart of a remorseless Revere A.D.A. with judicial clout throughout Boston’s three counties and beyond, an of course particularly remorseless A.D.A., as of late, whose wife now needed Valium even just to floss, and was patiently awaiting his chance, the A.D.A. was, coldly biding his time, being a patient Get-Even and Cold-Dish man just like Don Gately, who was, through no will to energy-consuming violence on his part, in the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man’s life right around.

  Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace Telentertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free Internet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu nanoprocessors, laser chromotography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiberoptic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.

  —pages 55–60

  As of Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

  THE ENFIELD TENNIS Academy has been in accredited operation for three pre-Subsidized years and then eight Subsidized years, first under the direction of Dr. James Incandenza and then under the administration of his half-brother-in-law Charles Tavis, Ed.D. James Orin Incandenza—the only child of a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then promising young pre-Method actor who, during the interval of J. O. Incandenza’s early formative years, had become a disrespected and largely unemployable actor, driven back to his native Tucson AZ and dividing his remaining energies between stints as a tennis pro at ranch-type resorts and then short-run productions at something called the Desert Beat Theater Project, the father, a dipsomaniacal tragedian progressively crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright and with a bitterness of ambiguous origin but consuming intensity toward the Method school of professional acting and its more promising exponents, a father who somewhere around the nadir of his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed basement workshop and build a promising junior athlete the way other fathers might restore vintage autos or build ships inside bottles, or like refinish chairs, etc.—James Incandenza proved a withdrawn but compliant student of the game and soon a gifted jr. player—tall, bespectacled, domineering at net—who used tennis scholarships to finance, on his own, private secondary and then higher education at places just about as far away from the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning. The United States government’s prestigious O.N.R.23 financed his doctorate in optical physics, fulfilling something of a childhood dream. His strategic value, during the Federal interval G. Ford-early G. Bush, as more or less the top applied-geometrical-optics man in the O.N.R. and S.A.C., designing neutron-scattering reflectors for thermo-strategic weapons systems, then in the Atomic Energy Commission—where his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels is commonly regarded as one of the big half-dozen discoveries that made possible cold annular fusion and approximate energy-independence for the U.S. and its various allies and protectorates—his optical acumen translated, after an early retirement from the public sector, into a patented fortune in rearview mirrors, light-sensitive eyewear, holographic birthday and Xmas greeting cartridges, videophonic Tableaux, homolosine-cartography software, nonfluorescent public-lighting systems and film-equipment; then, in the optative retirement from hard science that building and opening a U.S.T.A.-accredited and pedagogically experimental tennis academy apparently represented for him, into ‘après-garde’ experimental- and conceptual-film work too far either ahead of or behind its time, possibly, to be much appreciated at the time of his death in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar—although a lot of it (the experimental- and conceptual-film work) was admittedly just plain pretentious and unengaging and bad, and probably not helped at all by the man’s very gradual spiral into the crippling dipsomania of his late father.24

  The tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking Dr. Incandenza’s May-December 25 marriage to one of the few bona fide bombshell-type females in North American academia, the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and gainly and teetotalling and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon, the only female academic ever to hold the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill University, whom Incandenza’d met at a U. Toronto conference on Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems, was rendered even more romantic by the bureaucratic tribulations involved in obtaining an Exit- and then an Entrance-Visa, to say nothing of a Green Card, for even a U.S.-spoused Professor Mondragon whose involvement, however demonstrably nonviolent, with certain members of the Québecois-Separatist Left while in graduate school had placed her name on the R.C.M.P.’s notorious ‘Personnes à Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement’ List. The birth of the Incandenzas’ first child, Orin, had been at least partly a legal maneuver.

  It is known that, during the last five years of his life, Dr. James O. Incandenza liquidated his assets and patent-licenses, ceded control over most of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s operations to his wife’s half-brother—a former engineer most recently employed in Amateur Sports Administration at Throppinghamshire Provincial College, New Brunswick, Canada—and devoted his unimpaired hours almost exclusively to the production of documentaries, technically recondite art films, and mordantly obscure and obsessive dramatic cartridges, leaving behind a substantial (given the late age at which he bloomed, creatively) number of completed films and cartridges, some of which have earned a small academic following for their technical feck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.

  Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great loss in at least three worlds. President J. Gentle (F.C.), acting on behalf of the U.S.D.D.’s O.N.R. and O.N.A.N.’s post-annular A.E.C., conferred a posthumous citation and conveyed his condolences by classified ARPA-NET Electronic Mail. Incandenza’s burial in Québec’s L’Islet County was twice delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles. Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift. Certain leading young quote ‘après-gard
e’ and ‘anticonfluential’ filmmakers employed, in their output for the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, certain oblique visual gestures—most involving the chiaroscuro lamping and custom-lens effects for which Incandenza’s distinctive deep focus was known—that paid the sort of deep-insider’s elegaic tribute no audience could be expected to notice. An interview with Incandenza was posthumously included in a book on the genesis of annulation. And those of E.T.A.’s junior players whose hypertrophied arms could fit inside them wore black bands on court for almost a year.