The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  “I used to live at 16 Vine,” I said quietly. Lang turned to me. The “Bob Newhart” crowd must have thought we were in love. Our eyes shone with the thrill of apparent connection. It was something of a thrill, given the context. I tingle a bit even now, in the motel. “My ex-wife still lives there, though I’ve been led to believe she’s preparing to sell,” I said.

  “Mrs. Peck?” Lang’s eyes opened wide. “Veronica?”

  “Ms. Peck,” I said, clutching for real now at Lang’s sportcoat sleeve. “Peck was her maiden name. And I used to play tennis with Rex Metalman, long ago. I used to watch Rex go at his lawn almost every day. It was a neighborhood event.”

  “I will be dipped and fried and completely goddamned,” said Lang. “I just had no idea Ronnie’d been married to an Amherst alum. Sheeit.” He thumped the bar with his hand again. I noticed his hand, suddenly. It was heavy, and brown, and strong. A hard hand.

  “Ronnie?” I said.

  “Well, I know her pretty good, her living next door and all.” Lang looked down to play with the ring of moisture his beer glass had made on the dark wood of the bar.

  “I see,” I said. “How is Ronnie?”

  We looked at each other in the mirror. “Last time I saw her, she was just fine,” Lang said. He poured more beer into the suds at the bottom of the glass. I saw salt, from the peanuts, on the rim. “What exactly do you do, Rick? In Cleveland.”

  “Publishing,” I said. “I manage a publishing firm in Cleveland. Frequent and Vigorous, Publishing, Inc.”

  “Hmmm,” Lang said.

  “What about Mindy?” I asked. “I knew her, slightly, as a girl. Is Mindy well? Does Mindy have a career of her own?”

  “Mindy does have a career,” Lang said after a moment. “Mindy is a voice.”

  “A voice?” I said. My head was filled with visions of Mindy Metalman. Her bedroom had been directly across the fence from my den.

  “A voice,” said Lang. He played with a cocktail napkin decorated with a huge lipstick-kiss design. “You ever been in a grocery? And when you pay for your items and all at the cash register, the girl pushes the items over the scanner thing, that beeps, and then this voice in the register says the price? Or do you have one of them late-model cars that says to please fasten seat belts when you didn’t fasten your seat belts? Melinda Sue is the voice in things.”

  “That’s Mindy Metalman?” I shopped. I drove a late-model car.

  “Mrs. A. S. Lang herself, now,” said Lang. “The big voice used to be this lady in Centerport, on Long Island? But she’s getting old, scratchy. Melinda Sue’s pretty much pushin’ her out of the business. ”

  “Heavens,” I said, “That certainly sounds like an enormously interesting career. Does Mindy enjoy it?”

  “Sure she enjoys it. It’s easy as shit. She just sits around like once a week, with a drink and a million-dollar tape recorder and a script with lines like ‘Change due, four dollars.’ It’s easy as hell. But she’s ambitious now, all of a sudden. Her and her manager.” Lang swallowed half his beer. “Alan Gluskoter, her manager. Ambitious Al. They’re ambitious, now.” More beer. “She wants television.”

  “Television?”

  Lang stared at himself. “You know the voice that says ‘This is CBS,’ or ‘This is ABC,’ or ‘Stay tuned to CBS, please’? She wants to be that voice. That’s her great aspiration.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Yeah.”

  I was about to wet my pants. The only pair of pants I’d brought on the trip.

  I slid off my stool, stretched, pretended to yawn. “Think I’ll just dash into the men’s room,” I said. “I want to see something. I think I may have left my initials in the wood of the stall here.”

  Lang smiled at both of us. “I know I did. I carved hell out of everything when I was a student here.” He stood. “Hell, I’ll go with you. Could use a squirt myself.”

  “Quite,” I said.

  In the men’s room Lang ranged expertly over the urinal, aiming for the deodorant disc. “Room for two, here, big guy,” he said.

  I muttered something and hurried into the stall, ostensibly to hunt for initials, really so that I could shut the door. I tried to last just as long as I could. Long after my last tinkle had ceased to sound, I could still hear the roar of Lang’s jet. This was an Amherst man.

  I looked for my initials. All I can say at this point is that I must have been confused. I was sure I’d left another R.V. in the Flange’s stall, up over the door latch, to the left, actually I even thought I could remember the occasion of the carving, but here in the spot I remembered was, instead of an R.V., a deep, wickedly sharp set of W.D.L., long since filled in with violet pen. I pored over the wooden surfaces of the stall until I saw Lang’s boat shoes under the door.

  “Not there,” I said, opening the door. “My initials don’t seem to be there.”

  “Maybe they went ahead and changed the door sometime since ‘69,” said Lang, coming into the stall with me and swinging the door shut, so that I had to sit on the toilet to give him room to look at the door.

  “Same door as ‘83, though, ’cause here are mine, still,” he said, pointing at the deep W.D.L. over the latch. He brushed at the letters with a big thumb, removing a smidgeon of God knows what.

  “W.D.L. for Andrew Sealander Lang?” I said.

  “I got called Wang-Dang Lang all through school,” said Lang, grinning. “Actually I still get called Wang-Dang Lang, by my real good friends. You can call me Wang-Dang, if you want.” He stared lovingly at his initials.

  “Thank you,” I said. I had to pee again, already, I felt.

  There were sounds of the restroom door opening. Snickering. I thought I recognized the Approacher’s voice. They must have been looking at our four shoes in the crowded stall. The group attended to business, noisily, and eventually left, after teasing us by flicking the lights off and on several times. I was lost in thought, for the most part, trying to account for my memory of my initials in the Flange’s door, which memory was clear and distinct, in the face of the evidence. It certainly looked like the same door. Lang studied the door with me, thinking.

  “Is your girlfriend Clarice’s younger sister?” he suddenly asked.

  I looked up at him from the toilet. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, Lenore is two years younger than Clarice.”

  “You know, I’m pretty sure I’ve met her, then,” said Lang, absently digging with his finger at some peanut in a molar, extracting some beige material. He looked at it. “ ‘Cause Clarice had a sister visiting her the night I met my wife. Or was it that other girl had a sister up?” He scratched. “No, I’m real sure it was Beadsman. I think I remember for sure she said her name was Lenore Beadsman.” He looked faraway.

  “So you probably met my fiancée before I did,” I said.

  Lang grinned down at me. “And you knew my wife before I even met her, when she was a little girl.”

  I grinned back. “Not all that little.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lang laughed. Spontaneously, out of the sheer odd warmth of the moment, we did the Psi Phi handshake again. “Quaaaango!” We laughed.

  I got off the toilet. We left the restroom and went back into the bar. There were stage titters from the Approacher’s little television coterie. Wang-Dang Lang ignored them and clapped his arm around my shoulders.

  “Ah, Rick, Rick,” he said. “I just don’t know what the hell to do.” He looked around. “I just feel like I need to ...”

  “Get outside,” I said. For us inside outsiders, the only real place to go was outside.

  “Well, yeah. Exactly.” He looked me in the eye. “I feel like I need to get out. Just ... out, for a while.” He ordered another beer as I chewed the whiskey out of my ice.

  “Are things not well with you and the wife?”

  In the mirror Lang said, “Things are the same as ever, fine and Daddy—excuse—fine and dandy as ever. I just feel ... constricted, like I can’t breathe. Like I’m breathin
’ used-up air. I’m living in the bitch’s town, in her house, working for her Daddy, hearing her voice when I get in my freaking car. I think we need a slight vacation from each other. Things are just less than wonderful right now. I think I just need to get out, for a period of time.”

  “Establish other connections,” I said. “Hence the utter appropriateness of your little trip up here. It’ll do you a world of good.” God, there was a time when I would have given limbs to be constricted by Mindy Metalman.

  “Eggzackly,” Lang said. He punched me affectionately in the arm. I struggled not to rub my shoulder.

  “And so just one hell of a buzz, meetin’ you,” Land said to me in the mirror. “A House brother, a neighbor, damn near a relative. Like an uncle or something. Shit on fire. Ti symptosis.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “What was what?”

  “ ‘Tea’ something,” I said.

  “Ti symptosis?” said Lang. “It’s just this expression. ‘Ti symptosis’ is idiomatic modern Greek for, like, ’What a hell of a coincidence.‘ Which this is, sure enough, let me tell you.”

  “Greek?” I said. “You speak modem Greek?”

  Lang laughed loudly. “Does a bear make skata in the woods?” I intuited that even such as he was beginning to feel the lake of beer inside him. “Yeah,” he said, “I picked up Greek real well after college. I told you I was overseas? I was working for my Daddy’s company? This really kick-ass company called Industrial Desert Design, Dallas?”

  I stared at Lang. “Your father owns Industrial Desert Design?”

  “You know Industrial Desert Design?” said Lang.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “I live in Ohio. Just north of your magnum opus.”

  “I will be slapped, pinched, and rolled,” Lang said, pounding the bar with his fist. “This is just too goddamned great. Is that thing great or what? I worked on the crew for that, in the summer, when I was just eleven, twelve years old. I planted cactuses. That was a fucking blast.”

  “So then you travelled for I.D.D. after college?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Lang. “Best couple years of this little life, so far. I more or less oversaw this one whole project, this real tasteful little desert—nothing fancy, mind you, but small, solid, tasteful, and sinister. This really kick-ass desert project on the west side of Kerkira, near Italy.”

  “Kerkira?” I said.

  “Yeah. Beautifulest goddamn place I ever seen. This island. I loved it there. I was all over it, did all kinds of wild shit. Why, one time, me and Ed Roy Yancey, Jr., who was more or less my right hand, we took this goat, and about ten pounds of butter, and we ...”

  “Kerkira?” I said.

  “Y‘all probably know it as Corfu,” said Lang. “Kerkira is the Greek name for Corfu. Corfusian, too, since Greek is their language, too, over there.”

  I stared at the mirror. The bartender was fingering his mohawk and looking at Lang. On the television some sort of obscene Fran kenstein figure was lumbering around to the accompaniment of canned laughter.

  “Let me review this for a moment,” I said, trying to collect my thoughts. “You, who were in my fraternity, at college, and are married to my former next-door neighbor, who was roommates in college with the sister of my fiancée, whom you have met, are intimately familiar with the culture and language of the inhabitants of the island of Corfu, and are furthermore as of now probably unemployed, and chafing for some sort of at least temporary change in your geographical, professional, and personal circumstances right now. Is all that correct?”

  Lang looked at me in the mirror. His eyes were sleepy again. But simple. He was knocking at the door. Our houses, our rhododendrons were fundamentally the same. “Not at all sure what it is you’re tryin’ to drive at, Dick,” he said. The jukebox broke suddenly into “Eight Days a Week”; I fancied I saw the Approacher grinning at me from the machine. I felt an overwhelming urge to wander, to take Lang with me back to the admission line for the forests, as the sun began to die.

  “Ti symptosis,” I said.

  Lenore is sleeping, unusually soundly tonight, under her scratchy Howard Johnson’s blanket. Her breath as it comes up to me is soft and sweet; I feed on it. Her lips are moist, with the tiniest bits of the white paste of sleep at the comers.

  I do not know a horizontal Lenore. Lenore in her bed is an otherworldly, protean thing. Lying on her side, defined by the swell of a breast and the curve of a hip, she is an S. A chance curl around the pillow she holds to her stomach, and she becomes variously a question mark, a comma, a parenthesis. And then spread out before me, open, wet, completely and rarely vulnerable, her eyes looking into mine, she is a V. I will confess that her shoe is in my lap as I write this. The soft light of the lamp bolted into the wall over my shoulder blends with the inconstant grainy gray of the television’s cold flicker to cast for me a shadow of Lenore’s chin, down her throat, to cover her tiny adam’s grape, just caressed by the razor point of a hair-mandible, in a soft black various as breath. Who knows how long I watch. The whine of an Indian-head test pattern brings me around. I find that sitting up in bed for any length of time makes my bottom terrifically numb.

  /i/

  Cat, Heat, and the Breather all lay around the room they shared with the Antichrist, in various states of distress, in the sun, which now came through the big windows in the west wall, because the Antichrist had opened the curtains at four, at Lenore’s suggestion, and the sun washed the room in late heat, and lit up the systems of dust moving in the air. The sun itself, in the sky, slowly lowered on its wire, swelling and getting inflamed, soon to drop behind the Art Building and leave the room in cool black again. Cat’s preemp tive head banging had unfortunately not been able to keep things from becoming very unpleasant indeed in his comer.

  While all this happened, Lenore and the Antichrist walked outside, and Lenore let the warmth of the big sun and the motion of the breeze dry her hair, and LaVache got some badly needed exercise. They talked while they walked, some. It took a long time for Lenore and LaVache, with Lenore helping LaVache, to get up to the Art Building, orbit the quad, amid tree roots and Frisbee players, and come out on Memorial Hill, to look south at the forests and the bird sanctuary behind the sprawling space of the athletic fields, the fields themselves covered with writhing wind-influenced jets of water from the industrial sprinklers, the mist from the sprinklers’ plumes hanging low over the wet fields and breaking into color as the sun lowered to touch it, some tiny fine wind-blown water bits migrating north and gently dotting Lenore’s eyelids and lips as she and the Antichrist settled on the hump of the hill, as she helped the Antichrist lower himself to the ground and stretch the leg out before him in the curve of the grass. They looked out at the fields, and the forests, and the mountains beyond that, purple and vaguely gauzy in the faraway heat.

  With Lenore and the Antichrist on the crest of the hill, nearby, was a family: a father in checked sportcoat and white leather loafers, a mother with a red cotton skirt and high hair and blue broken veins in her calves, a tiny red-haired girl, maybe five, with great green eyes and shiny black shoes and silky white socks, beneath a tiny white dress, and also two older children of indeterminate gender who were struggling and wrestling on the curve, trying to shove each other down the hill. While the father and mother worked with their camera to take a picture of the view off the hill, really stunning in the strange light of late afternoon, with the wash of watery red mixed with gymnasium shadows spilling in like ink from the right, the west, and while the two older children struggled, the little girl watched LaVache, who noticed her and detached the leg and played with it, a bit, to amuse the girl, who stared with huge eyes, and tugged at the hem of the mother’s red skirt, and was ignored.

  Lenore watched LaVache lean back and put the foot of the leg on his nose and balance the leg with no hands. The little girl, who had come closer, sat down heavily with her legs out in front of her, staring at Lenore and the Antichrist and the leg. The Antich
rist took the leg off his nose and manipulated his heavy eyebrows at the little girl, grinning. The little girl rolled up to her feet and ran to her mother’s hem, hiding behind a calf.

  Lenore laughed. “You’re horrible,” she said.

  LaVache removed some grass from between the toes of the leg. “Yes.” Lenore’s hair felt lovely and light and soft, clean, dried by the hot wind off the fields. The two older children suddenly shrieked in unison and rolled away down the hill, becoming small.

  “Did Candy really seduce you?” Lenore asked her brother.

  The Antichrist scratched at his hip. “No, Lenore, she didn’t. I lied to Heat and the Breather.” He looked at the leg. “A really important part of being here is learning how to lie. ‘Strategic misrepresentation,’ we call it. I’ve been wildly infatuated with Candy for a long time. To be honest with you, it was really her breasts that launched me into puberty, that time she came home with you for spring break, I think four years ago. Last summer was just particularly bad, in terms of the infatuation. I simply presented fantasy as fact to Heat and the Breather. Heat has a huge mouth. My latest theory is that Heat isn’t busy enough with homework, a situation you can be quite sure I’ll be remedying.”

  “Oh,” Lenore said. She felt the grass. “You know, to be honest, I don’t much like the Breather, either, I’m afraid. The Breather seems awfully touchy-feely to me.”

  The Antichrist didn’t say anything.

  “What’s his name, anyway?” said Lenore.

  “His name’s the Breather.”

  “I mean his real name.”

  “Who cares. Mike something.”

  “Hmmm.”

  The Antichrist was staring out into the thin twisting fountains in the fields, and the forests, all in the reddening shadowy light. “Do you still drink a lot of Tab?” he said, out of the blue.

  Lenore looked at him. She decided he was high. “I don’t drink Tab much anymore,” she said. “I mostly drink seltzer water now. Tab tastes to me like some little kid made it with his chemistry set.”