The David Foster Wallace Reader by David Foster Wallace
After the telephone conversation, seated there on the bed’s protective towel, one of the other things that kept popping unbidden into Atwater’s mind was the peculiar little unconscious signifier that Brint Moltke made when he sat, the strange abdominal circle or hole that he formed with his hands. He’d made the sign again today, in the home’s kitchen, and Atwater could tell it was something Mr. Brint Moltke did a lot—it was in the way he sat, the way all of us have certain little trademark styles of gesturing when we speak or arranging various parts of our bodies when seated. In what he felt was his current state, Atwater’s mind seemed able only to return to the image of the gesture again and again; he could get no further with it. In a similar vein, every time he had made a shorthand note to himself to inquire about the other side of the Moltkes’ duplex, he would then promptly forget it. His stenographer’s notebook later turned out to include a half dozen such notations. The clown’s teeth were multicolored kernels of what Atwater’s folks had called Indian corn, its hair a spherical nimbus of corn chaff, which happened to be the single most allergenic substance known to man. And yet at the same time the hands’ circle seemed also a kind of signal, something that the artist perhaps wished to communicate to Atwater but didn’t know how or was not even fully aware he wished to. The strange blank fixed smile was a different matter—it too was unsettling, but the journalist never felt that it might be trying to signify anything beyond itself.
Atwater had never before received any kind of sexual injury. The discoloration was chiefly along the leg’s outside, but the swelling involved the kneecap, and this was clearly what was causing the real pain. The area of bruising extended from just below the knee to the lower thigh; certain features of the car door’s armrest and window’s controls were directly imprinted in the bruise’s center and already yellowing. The knee had felt constricted in his slacks’ left leg all day. It gave off a radioactive ache and was sensitive to even the lightest contact. Atwater examined it, breathing through his teeth. He felt the distinctive blend of repulsion and fascination nearly all people feel when examining a diseased or injured part of themselves. He also had the feeling that the knee now somehow existed in a more solid and emphatic way than the rest of him around it. It was something like the way he used to feel at the mirror in the bathroom as a boy, examining his protuberant ears from all different angles. The room was on the Holiday Inn’s second level and opened onto an exterior balcony that overlooked the pool; the cement stairs up had also hurt the knee. He couldn’t straighten his leg out all the way. In the afternoon light, his calf and foot appeared pale and extremely hairy, perhaps abnormally hairy. There were also spatial issues. He had allowed it to occur to him that the bruising was actually trapped blood leaking from injured blood vessels under the skin, and that the changes in color were signs of the trapped blood decomposing under the skin and of the human body’s attempts to deal with the decaying blood, and as a natural result he felt lightheaded and insubstantial and ill.
He was not so much injured as sore and more or less pummeled feeling elsewhere, as well.
Another childhood legacy: When anything painful or unpleasant happened to his body, Skip Atwater often got the queer sense that he was in fact not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped area of space itself, impenetrable but empty, with a certain vacuous roaring sensation we tend to associate with empty space. The whole thing was very private and difficult to describe, although Atwater had had a long and interesting off the record conversation about it with the Oregon multiple amputee who’d organized a series of high profile anti HMO events in 1999. It also now occurred to him for the first time that ‘gone in the stomach,’ which was a regional term for nausea he’d grown up with and then jettisoned after college, turned out to be a much more acute, concise descriptor than all the polysyllables he and the one legged activist had hurled at one another over the whole interior spatial displacement epiphenomenon.
There was something essentially soul killing about the print of the vegetable head clown that had made Atwater want to turn it to the wall, but it was bolted or glued and could not be moved. It was really on there, and Atwater now was trying to consider whether hanging a bath towel or something over it would or would not perhaps serve to draw emotional attention to the print and make it an even more oppressive part of the room for anyone who already knew what was under the towel. Whether the painting was worse actually seen or merely, so to speak, alluded to. Standing angled at the bathroom’s exterior sink and mirror unit, it occurred to him that these were just the sorts of overabstract thoughts that occupied his mind in motels, instead of the arguably much more urgent and concrete problem of finding the television’s remote control. For some reason, the controls on the TV itself were inactive, meaning that the remote was the only way to change channels or mute the volume or even turn the machine off, since the relevant plug and outlet were too far behind the dresser to reach and the dresser unit, like the excruciating print, was bolted to the wall and could not be budged. There was a low knocking at the door, which Atwater did not hear over the repetitive tune and message because he was at the sink with the water running. Nor could he remember for certain whether it was heat or cold that was effective for swelling after almost 48 hours, though it was common knowledge that ice was what was indicated directly after. What he eventually decided was to prepare both a hot and a cold compress, and to alternate them, his left fist moving in self exhortation as he tried to recall his childhood scouting manual’s protocol for contusions.
The second level’s ice machine roared without cease in a large utility closet next to Atwater’s room. His tie reknotted but the left leg of his slacks still rolled way up, the journalist had the Holiday Inn’s distinctive lightweight ice bucket in his hand when he opened the door and stepped out into the ambient noise and chlorine smell of the balcony. His shoe nearly came down in the message before he saw it and stopped, one foot suspended in air, aware at the same time that chlorine was not the only scent in the balcony’s wind. The “HELP ME” was ornate and calligraphic, quotation marks sic. In overall design, it was not unlike the cursive HAPPY BIRTHDAY VIRGIL AND ROB, YMSP2 ’00, and other phrases of decorative icing on certain parties’ cakes of his experience. But it was not made of icing. That much was immediately, emphatically clear.
Holding the bucket, his ears crimson and partly denuded leg still raised, the journalist was paralyzed by the twin urges to examine the message’s workmanship more closely and to get far away as quickly as possible, perhaps even to check out altogether. He knew that great force of will would be required to try to imagine the various postures and contractions involved in producing the phrase, its detached and plumb straight underscoring, the tiny and perfectly formed quotation marks. Part of him was aware that it had not yet occurred to him to consider what the phrase might actually mean or imply in this context. In a sense, the content of the message was obliterated by the overwhelming fact of its medium and implied mode of production. The phrase terminated neatly at the second E’s serif; there was no tailing off or spotting.
A faint human sound made Atwater look hard right—an older couple in golfing visors stood some yards off outside their door, looking at him and the balcony’s brown cri de coeur. The wife’s expression pretty much said it all.
All salarymen, staff, and upper level interns at Style had free corporate memberships to the large fitness center located on the second underground level of the WTC’s South Tower. The only expense was a monthly locker fee, which was well worth it if you didn’t want to schlep a separate set of exercise clothing along with you to the offices every day. Two of the facility’s walls were lined with mirrored plate. There were no windows, but the center’s cardio fitness area was replete with raised banks of television monitors whose high gain audios could be accessed with ordinary Walkman headphones, and the channels could be changed via touchpad controls that were right there on the consoles of all the machines except the stationary bicycles, which themselves were som
At midday on Tuesday 3 July, Ellen Bactrian and Mrs. Anger’s executive intern were on two of the elliptical training machines along the fitness center’s north wall. Ellen Bactrian wore a dark gray Fila unitard with Reebok crosstrainers. There was a neoprene brace on her right knee, but it was mostly prophylactic, the legacy of a soccer injury at Wellesley three seasons past. Multicolored fairy lights on the machines’ sides spelled out the brand name of the elliptical trainers. The executive intern, in the same ensemble she’d worn for biking in to the Style offices that morning, had programmed her machine to the same medium level of difficulty as Ellen Bactrian’s, as a kind of courtesy.
It being the lunch hour, the center’s cardio fitness area was almost fully occupied. Every elliptical trainer was in use, though only a few of the interns were using headsets. The nearby StairMasters were used almost exclusively by midlevel financial analysts, all of whom had bristly cybernetic haircuts. Not for over 40 years had the crewcut and variations upon it been so popular; a SURFACES item on the phenom was not long in the offing.
Certain parts of a four way internal email exchange Tuesday morning had concerned what specified type(s) of piece the magazine should require the Indianan to produce under tightly controlled circumstances in order to verify that his abilities were not a hoax or some tasteless case of idiot savantism. The fourth member of this exchange had been the photo intern whose mammoth engagement ring at Tutti Mangia had occasioned so much cattiness during yesterday’s SE2 closing. Some of the specs proposed for the authenticity test were: A 0.5 reproduction of the Academy Awards’ well known Oscar statuette, G. W. F. Hegel’s image of Napoleon as the world spirit on horseback, a WWII Pershing tank with rotating turret, any coherently identifiable detail from Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, a buck with a twelve point rack, either the upper or lower portion of the ancient Etruscan Mars of Todi, and the well known tableau of several US Marines planting the flag on an Iwo Jiman atoll. The idea of any sort of Crucifixion or Pietà type piece was flamed the moment it was proposed. Although Skip Atwater had not yet been given his specific marching orders, Mrs. Anger’s executive intern and Ellen Bactrian were both currently leaning toward a representation of the famous photograph in which Marilyn Monroe’s skirts are blown upward by some type of vent in the sidewalk and the expression on her face is, to say the least, intimately familiar to readers of Style.
Some of the internal email exchange’s topics and arguments had carried over into various different lunchtime colloquies and brainstorming sessions, including the present one in the World Trade Center’s corporate fitness facility, which proceeded more or less naturally because an axiom of elliptical cardio conditioning is that your target heartrate and respiration are to stay just at the upper limit of what allows for normal conversation.
‘But is the physical, so to speak handmade character of a piece of art part of the artwork’s overall quality?’
That is, in elliptical training you want your breathing to be deep and rapid but not labored—Ellen Bactrian’s rhetorical question took only a tiny bit longer to get out than a normal, at rest rhetorical question.
The executive intern responded: ‘Do we all really value a painting more than a photograph anymore?’
‘Let’s say we do.’
The executive intern laughed. ‘That’s almost a textbook petitio principii.’ She actually pronounced principii correctly, which almost no one can do.
‘A great painting certainly sells for more than a great photograph, doesn’t it?’
The executive intern was silent for several broad quadular movements of the elliptical trainer. Then she said: ‘Why not just say rather that Style’s readership would not have a problem with the assumption that a good painting or sculpture is intrinsically better, more human and meaningful, than a good photo.’
Often, editorial brainstorming sounds like an argument, but it isn’t—it’s two or more people thinking aloud in a directed way. Mrs. Anger herself sometimes referred to the brainstorming process as dilation, but this was a vestige of her Fleet Street background, and no one on her staff aped the phrase.
A woman about their mothers’ age was exhibiting near perfect technique on a rowing machine in the mirror, mouthing the words to what Ellen Bactrian thought she recognized as a Venetian bacarole. The other rowing machine was vacant. Ellen Bactrian said: ‘But now, if we agree the human element’s key, then does the physical process or processes by which the painting is produced, or any artwork, have anything to do with the artwork’s quality?’
‘By quality you’re still referring to how good it is.’
It is difficult to shrug on an elliptical trainer. ‘Good quote unquote.’
‘Then the answer again is that what we’re interested in is human interest, not some abstract aesthetic value.’
‘And yet isn’t the point that they’re not mutually exclusive? How about all Picasso’s affairs, or the thing with van Gogh’s ear?’
‘Yes, but van Gogh didn’t paint with his ear.’
By habit, Ellen Bactrian avoided looking directly at their side by side reflections in the mirrored wall. The executive intern was at least three inches taller than she. The sounds of all the young men’s legs working the StairMasters were at certain points syncopated, then not, then gradually syncopated again. The two editorial interns’ movements on the elliptical trainers, on the other hand, appeared synchronized down to the smallest detail. Each of them had a bottle of water with a sports cap in her elliptical trainer’s special receptacle, although they were not the same brands of bottled water. The fitness center’s sonic environment was basically one large, complex, and rhythmic pneumatic clank.
Between breaths, an ever so slightly peevish or impatient tone entered Ellen Bactrian’s voice: ‘Then, say, the My Left Foot guy who painted with his left foot.’
‘Or the idiot savant who can reproduce Chopin after one hearing,’ the executive intern said. This was an indirect bit of massaging on her part, since there had been a WITW profile of just such an idiot savant in an issue the previous summer—the piece’s UBA was that the retarded man’s mother had battled heroically to keep him out of an institution.
Under the diffused high lumen lights of the cardio fitness area, the executive intern’s quads and delts seemed like something out of an advertisement. Ellen Bactrian was fit and attractive, with a perfectly respectable body fat percentage, but around the executive intern she often felt squat and dumpy. An unhealthy part of her sometimes suspected that the executive intern liked exercising with her because it made her, the executive intern, feel comparatively even more willowy and scintillant and buff. What neither Ellen Bactrian nor anyone else at Style knew was that the executive intern had had a dark period in preparatory school during which she’d made scores of tiny cuts in the tender skin of her upper arms’ insides and then squeezed reconstituted lemon juice into the cuts as penance for a long list of personal shortcomings, a list she had tracked daily in her journal in a special numerical key code that was totally unbreakable unless you knew exactly which page of The Bell Jar the code’s numbers were keyed to. Those days were now behind her, but they were still part of who the executive intern was.
‘Yes,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘although, although I’m no art critic, Skip’s guy’s pieces are also artworks of surpassing quality and value in their own right.’
‘Although of course all the readers will get to see is photos—’
‘Maybe.’ Both interns laughed briefly. The issue of publishable photos had been one they’d all agreed that morning to table—there were, as the WITW associate editor sometimes liked to quip, bigger fish on the front burner.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Although remember that even photos, if Amine’s to be believed, if absolutely properly lit and detailed so that—’
‘Except hold on, answer this—does this person have to actually be familiar with something to represent it the way he
Both women were at a node of their computerized workout and were breathing almost heavily now. Amine Tadić was Style magazine’s associate photo editor; her head intern had served as her proxy in the morning’s email confab.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘What do you mean?’
‘According to Laurel, this is a person with maybe like a year or two of community college. How on earth would he know Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, or what Anubis’s head looks like?’
‘Or for that matter which side the Liberty Bell’s crack’s on.’
‘I sure didn’t know it.’
Ellen Bactrian laughed. ‘Laurel did. Or she said she did—obviously she could have looked it up.’ Ellen Bactrian was also, on her own time, trying to learn how to type completely different things with each hand, à la the WHAT IN THE WORLD section’s associate editor, for whom she had certain feelings that she knew perfectly well were SOP transference for an intelligent, ambitious woman her age, since the associate editor was both seductive and a textbook authority figure. Ellen Bactrian liked the associate editor’s wife quite a lot, actually, and so took great pains to keep the whole bimanual thing in perspective.
The executive intern was able to reach down and hydrate without breaking rhythm, which on an elliptical trainer takes a great deal of practice. ‘I’m saying: Does the man have to see or know something in order to represent it? Produce it? Let’s say that if he does and it’s all totally conscious and intentional, then he’s a real artist.’
‘But if he doesn’t—’
‘Which is why the unlikeliness of a Roto Rooter guy from Nowhere Indiana knowing futurism or the Unique Forms is relevant,’ the executive intern said, wiping her forehead with a terry wristband.