The David Foster Wallace Reader Read online

  So just more or less by accident May and I became friends, and we talked some. She wanted to write made-up stories for a living. I said I didn’t know that could be done. She was killed by her boyfriend in his drunken car only ten days ago. I tried to call May’s parents just to say that I was incredibly sorry yesterday, but their answering service informed me that Mr. and Mrs. Aculpa had gone out of town for an indefinite period. I can sympathize, because I am “out of town,” too.

  Dr. Kablumbus knew a lot about psychopharmaceuticals. He told my parents and me that there were two general kinds of antidepressants: tricyclics and M.A.O. inhibitors (I can’t remember what “M.A.O.” stands for exactly, but I have my own thoughts with respect to the matter). Apparently both kinds worked well, but Mr. Kablumbus said that there were certain things you couldn’t eat and drink with M.A.O. inhibitors, like beer, and certain kinds of sausage. My Mom was afraid I would forget and maybe eat and drink some of these things, so we all conferred and decided to go with a tricyclic. Dr. Kablumbus thought this was a very good choice.

  Just as with a long trip you don’t reach your destination right away, so with antidepressants you have to “go up” on them; i.e., you start with a very tiny little dose and work your way up to a full-size dose in order to get your blood level accustomed and all that. So in one way my trip to the planet Trillaphon took over a week. But in another way, it was like being off Earth and on the planet Trillaphon right from the very first morning after I started. The big difference between the Earth and the planet Trillaphon, of course, is distance: the planet Trillaphon is very very far away. But there are other differences that are sort of more immediate and intrinsic. I think the air on the planet Trillaphon must not be as rich in oxygen or nutrition or something, because you get a lot tireder a lot faster there. Just shoveling snow off a sidewalk or running to catch a bus or shooting a couple baskets or walking up a hill to sled down gets you very, very tired. Another annoying thing is that the planet Trillaphon is tilted ever so slightly on its axis or something, so that the ground when you look at it isn’t quite level; it lists a little to starboard. You get used to this fairly quickly, though, like getting your “sea legs” when you’re on a ship.

  Another thing is that the planet Trillaphon is a very sleepy planet. You have to take your antidepressants at night, and you better make sure there is a bed nearby, because it will be bedtime incredibly soon after you take them. Even during the day, the resident of the planet Trillaphon is a sleepy little soldier. Sleepy and tired, but too far away to be super-troubled.

  This has nothing to do with the very ridiculous incident in the bathtub on Christmas Eve, but there is something electrical about the planet Trillaphon. On Trillaphon for me there isn’t the old problem of my head making silence into a spangly glitter, because my tricyclic antidepressant—“Tofranil”—makes a sort of electrical noise of its own that drowns the spangle out completely. The new noise isn’t incredibly pleasant, but it’s better than the old noises, which I really couldn’t stand at all. The new noise on my planet is kind of a high-tension electric trill. That’s why for almost a year now I’ve somehow always gotten the name of my antidepressant wrong when I’m not looking right at the bottle: I’ve called it “Trillaphon” instead of “Tofranil,” because “Trillaphon” is more trilly and electrical, and it just sounds more like what it’s like to be there. But the electricalness of the planet Trillaphon is not just a noise. I guess if I were all glib like May is I’d say that “the planet Trillaphon is simply characterized by a more electrical way of life.” It is, sort of. Sometimes on the planet Trillaphon the hairs on your arms will stand up and a chill will go through the big muscles in your legs and your teeth will vibrate when you close your mouth, as if you’re under a high-tension line, or by a transformer. Sometimes you’ll crackle for no reason and see blue things. And even the sound of your brain-voice when you think thoughts to yourself on the planet Trillaphon is different than it was on Earth; now it sounds like it’s coming from a sort of speaker connected to you only by miles and miles and miles of wire, like you’re back listening to the “Golden Days of Radio.”

  It is very hard to read on the planet Trillaphon, but that is not too inconvenient, because I hardly ever read anymore, except for “Newsweek” magazine, a subscription which I got for my birthday. I am twenty-one years old.

  May was seventeen years old. Now sometimes I’ll sort of joke with myself and say that I need to switch to an M.A.O. inhibitor. May’s initials are M.A., and when I think about her now I get so sad I go “O!” In a way, I would understandably like to inhibit the “M.A.:O.” I’m sure Dr. Kablumbus would agree that it is in my own best interests to do so. If the bus driver I more or less killed had the initials M.A., that would be incredibly ironic.

  Communications between Earth and the planet Trillaphon are hard, but they are very inexpensive, so I am definitely probably going to call the Aculpas to say just how sorry I am about their daughter, and maybe even that I more or less loved her.

  The big question is whether the Bad Thing is on the planet Trillaphon. I don’t know if it is or not. Maybe it has a harder time in a thinner and less nutritious atmosphere. I certainly do, in some respects. Sometimes, when I don’t think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that I am going to be able to lead a Normal and Productive Life as a lawyer or something here on the planet Trillaphon, once I get so I can read again.

  Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing.

  Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really

  Afterword

  For me—knowing who David Foster Wallace would become, even having known him, albeit slightly, and sitting as I write this across the hall from the office that was his—rereading “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” today is an absolutely brutal experience. Apart from some “lite” pieces published in the Amherst humor magazine he coedited, this is his first published piece of fiction. And it’s a body blow.

  “The Planet Trillaphon” is neither a memoir nor a technical piece about clinical depression and suicide. It’s a short story, by one of the late twentieth century’s most distinctive voices. And I love the voice here. Take that opening sentence, which our narrator manages to qualify in six different ways: “I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like.” Listen to the faux-yokel Midwestern interjections that pepper the characters’ speech: “Boy oh boy,” “holy cow,” “well, hey,” “how the heck.” Midwestern, too, the narrator’s reticence: “I really don’t wish to go into a gigantic amount of detail” (following which, he goes into a gigantic amount of detail). The tone, while not perfectly managed, is wonderfully varied: long, urgent paragraphs swelling under the pressure of speech alternate with comic under- and overstatement. (Billions of dollars of clothes and electrical appliances? Really?)

  While some near and dear to me have suffered with clinical depression, I’ve known only transient, situational depression, what the narrator describes as “just sort of really intense sadness.” Reading “The Planet Trillaphon” I felt, for the first time, like I understood the vicious logic of real depression: how it feeds on and amplifies itself, establishes a closed loop between what D. T. Max terms “anxiety” and “the fear of anxiety.” There’s a bruised, frightened human heart at the center of “Trillaphon.” A troubled little soldier. It creates a powerful irony—that this story, given over to a narrator who laments his inability to make others understand what he’s going through, so effectively communicates his pain to us.

  And there are two beating hearts here: our narrator’s and that of the woman he “more or less loved,” May. More precisely, May Aculpa—a cringe-inducing pun on mea culpa, “through my fault,” from the Confiteor. In the course of The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon’s protagonist Oedipa Maas comes to realize that there
is a “high magic to low puns”; so, too, here. May “wanted to write made-up stories for a living,” a thing the narrator had thought impossible. Haunted by “Trillaphon” ’s porous boundary between fact and fiction, I wonder whether it isn’t the notion of “making up” stories, imaginatively inventing new stories, rather than rehashing and rehearsing his own, that strikes the narrator as fantastic.

  —Kevin J. H. Dettmar

  THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM

  1

  1981

  MOST REALLY PRETTY girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They’re long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes and a thick stair-step of it on the back of the heel, and a few long black hairs are curling out of the skin at the tops of the feet, and the red nail polish is cracking and peeling in curls and candy-striped with decay. Lenore only notices because Mindy’s bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; her bathrobe’s opening a little, so there’s some cleavage visible and everything, a lot more than Lenore’s got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindy’s wet washed shampooed head is coming undone and a wisp of dark shiny hair has slithered out of a crack in the folds and curled down all demurely past the side of Mindy’s face and under her chin. It smells like Flex shampoo in the room, and also pot, since Clarice and Sue Shaw are smoking a big thick j-bird Lenore got from Ed Creamer back at Shaker School and brought up with some other stuff for Clarice, here at school.

  What’s going on is that Lenore Beadsman, who’s fifteen, has just come all the way from home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, right near Cleveland, to visit her big sister, Clarice Beadsman, who’s a freshman at this women’s college, called Mount Holyoke; and Lenore’s staying with her sleeping bag in this room on the second floor of Rumpus Hall that Clarice shares with her roommates, Mindy Metalman and Sue Shaw. Lenore’s also come to sort of check out this college, a little bit. This is because even though she’s just fifteen she’s supposedly quite intelligent and thus accelerated and already a junior at Shaker School and thus thinking about college, application-wise, for next year. So she’s visiting. Right now it’s a Friday night in March.

  Sue Shaw, who’s not nearly as pretty as Mindy or Clarice, is bringing the joint over here to Mindy and Lenore, and Mindy takes it and lets her toe alone for a second and sucks the bird really hard, so it glows bright and a seed snaps loudly and bits of paper ash go flying and floating, which Clarice and Sue find super funny and start laughing at really hard, whooping and clutching at each other, and Mindy breathes it in really deep and holds it in and passes the bird to Lenore, but Lenore says no thank you.

  “No thank you,” says Lenore.

  “Go ahead, you brought it, why not…,” croaks Mindy Metalman, talking the way people talk without breathing, holding on to the smoke.

  “I know, but it’s track season at school and I’m on the team and I don’t smoke during the season, I can’t, it kills me,” Lenore says.

  So Mindy shrugs and finally lets out a big breath of pale used-up smoke and coughs a deep little cough and gets up with the bird and takes it over across the room to Clarice and Sue Shaw, who are by a big wooden stereo speaker listening to this song, again, by Cat Stevens, for like the tenth time tonight. Mindy’s robe’s more or less open, now, and Lenore can see some pretty amazing stuff, but Mindy just walks across the room. Lenore can at this point divide all the girls she’s known neatly into girls who think deep down they’re pretty and girls who deep down think they’re really not. Girls who think they’re pretty don’t care much about their bathrobes being undone and are good at makeup and like to walk when people are watching, and they act different when there are boys around; and girls like Lenore, who don’t think they’re too pretty, tend not to wear makeup, and run track, and wear black Converse sneakers, and keep their bathrobes pretty well fastened at all times. Mindy sure is pretty, though, except for her feet.

  The Cat Stevens song is over again, and the needle goes up by itself, and obviously none of these three feel like moving all the way to start it again, so they’re just sitting back in their hard wood desk chairs, Mindy in her faded pink terry robe with one shiny smooth leg all bare and sticking out; Clarice in her Desert boots and her dark blue jeans that Lenore calls her shoe-horn jeans, and that white western shirt she’d worn at the state fair the time she’d had her purse stolen, and her blond hair flooding all over the shirt, and her eyes very blue right now; Sue Shaw with her red hair and a green sweater and green tartan skirt and fat white legs with a bright red pimple just over one knee, legs crossed with one foot jiggling one of those boat shoes, with the sick white soles—Lenore dislikes that kind of shoe a lot.

  Clarice after a quiet bit lets out a long sigh and says, in whispers, “Cat… is… God,” giggling a little at the end. The other two giggle too.

  “God? How can Cat be God? Cat exists.” Mindy’s eyes are all red.

  “That’s offensive and completely blaphemous,” says Sue Shaw, eyes wide and puffed and indignant.

  “Blaphemous?” Clarice dies, looks at Lenore. “Blasphemous,” she says. Her eyes aren’t all that bad, really, just unusually cheerful, as if she’s got a joke she’s not telling.

  “Blissphemous,” says Mindy.

  “Blossphemous.”

  “Blousephemous.”

  “Bluesphemous.”

  “Boisterous.”

  “Boisteronahalfshell.”

  “Bucephalus.”

  “Barney Rubble.”

  “Baba Yaga.”

  “Bolshevik.”

  “Blaphemous!”

  They’re dying, doubled over, and Lenore’s laughing that weird sympathetic laugh you laugh when everybody else is laughing so hard they make you laugh too. The noise of the big party downstairs is coming through the floor and vibrating in Lenore’s black sneakers and the arms of the chair. Now Mindy slides out of her desk chair all limp and shlomps down on Lenore’s sleeping bag on the floor next to Clarice’s pretend-Persian ruglet from Mooradian’s in Cleveland, and Mindy modestly covers her crotch with a corner of her robe, but Lenore still can’t help but see the way her breasts swell up into the worn pink towel cloth of the robe, all full and stuff, even lying down on her back, there, on the floor. Lenore unconsciously looks down a little at her own chest, under her flannel shirt.

  “Hunger,” Sue Shaw says after a minute. “Massive, immense, uncontrollable, consuming, uncontrollable, hunger.”

  “This is so,” says Mindy.

  “We will wait”—Clarice looks at her watch on the underside of her wrist—“one, that is one hour, before eating anything what-soentirelyever.”

  “No we can’t possibly possibly do that.”

  “But do it we shall. As per room discussions of not one week ago, when we explicitly agreed that we shall not gorge when utterly flapped, lest we get fat and repulsive, like Mindy, over there, you poor midge.”

  “Fart-blossom,” Mindy says absently, she’s not fat and she knows it, Lenore knows it, they all know it.

  “A lady at all times, that Metalman,” Clarice says. Then, after a minute, “Speaking of which, you might just maybe either fix your robe or get dressed or get up off your back in Lenore’s stuff, I’m not really all up for giving you a gynecological exam, which is sort of what you’re making us do, here, O Lesbia of Thebes.”

  “Stuff and bother,” says Mindy, or rather, “Stuth and bozzer”; and she gets up swaying and reaching for solid things, goes over to the door that goes into her little single bedroom off the bathroom. She got there first in September and took it, Clarice had said in a letter, this Playboy-Playmatish JAP from Scarsdale, and she’s shedding what’s left of her bathrobe, battered into submission, leaving it all wet in Lenore’s lap in the chair by the door, and going through the door with her long legs, deliberate steps. Shuts the door.

  Clarice looks after her when she’s gone and shakes her head a tiny bit and looks over at Lenore and smile
s. There are sounds of laughter downstairs, and cattle-herd sounds of lots of people dancing. Lenore just loves to dance.

  Sue Shaw takes a big noisy drink of water out of a big plastic Jetsons glass on her desk up by the front door. “Speaking of which, you didn’t by any chance happen to see Splittstoesser this morning?” she says.

  “Nuh-uh,” says Clarice.

  “She was with Proctor.”

  “So?”

  “At seven o’clock? Both in nighties, all sleepy and googly, coming out of her room, together? Holding hands?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Now if anybody ever told me that Splittstoesser…”

  “I thought she was engaged to some guy.”

  “She is.”

  They both laugh like hell.

  “Awww.”

  “Who’s Splittstoesser?” Lenore asks.

  “Nancy Splittstoesser, at dinner? The girl in the red V-neck, with the earrings that were really little fists?”

  “Oh. But what about her?”

  Clarice and Sue look at each other and start to laugh again. Mindy Metalman comes back in, in gym shorts and an inside-out sweatshirt with the arms cut off. Lenore looks at her and smiles at the floor.