The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  The Antichrist laughed and hefted the leg. His hightop was with Lenore’s hightops, out in front of them in the grass. The little girl was peering around her mother’s leg at the Antichrist, who pretended to ignore her.

  “Where’s your friend Mr. Vigorous? What’s he supposed to be doing?”

  “I don’t really know. I think he’s wandering around. I think he sort of has some internal catching up to do. He hasn’t been back here, ever, since he graduated.”

  “I see.”

  The two older children had stopped rolling and now started to trudge heavily back up the steep hill. The father and mother hissed at each other over the camera’s light meter. Around the woman’s calf were green eyes and wisps of red hair. The Antichrist put part of the leg inside his shirt.

  “Are you pretty sleepy?” Lenore asked. “From the Quaaludes, I mean?”

  LaVache looked at the trees. “The Breather told you this was a Quaalude day? What a garrulous room-group, today. It was a very small Quaalude. And no, not really, Quaaludes don’t make me sleepy, anymore, really.”

  “How do they make you feel?”

  The Antichrist looked at his ankle. “Like I’m elsewhere.”

  Lenore looked at the little girl.

  “Elseone,” LaVache said to his ankle. “Besides,” he looked up, “the old cortex is a flurry of activity now, because I have to get all prepared to talk Hegelian sublation with Nervous Roy Keller, which will be a bitch, because Nervous Roy is far too nervous to assimilate any but the most clearly presented information. Clear presentation is not Hegel’s strength.”

  Lenore tugged at a blade of grass. It came out of the ground with a faint squeak. “How come you do everybody else’s work for them, Stoney?”

  “Where do you think Lenore is?” the Antichrist asked the leg.

  “Why do you do other people’s work and not your own?” said Lenore. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. John included.”

  “Speaking of which ...”

  “How come you’re doing this? You’re flapped here all the time, aren’t you?”

  The Antichrist brought a joint out of the drawer. “I have a leg to support.”

  “How come?”

  The Antichrist lit up with practiced ease in the wind and looked at his sister from behind his cloud. “It’s my thing,” he said. “Everybody here has a thing. You have to have a thing here. My thing is being the Antichrist, more or less being a waste-product and supporting my leg. A tragically wasted intellect. So to speak. You can’t be thingless, Lenore. Mr. Vigorous notwithstanding.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  LaVache looked over Lenore’s head, at the sun. “Let’s pause for just a moment to let me try to get all this straight.” He scratched at an eyebrow. “You came all the way out here, to the very most tangential of Beadsmans, to inform me that you don’t know where certain people are, and to ask me whether I know where certain people are. And you did so at Dad’s request.”

  “What Dad wants me to find out is whether you’ve heard or have any idea where exactly Lenore or John are. Is. Especially Gramma, for Dad.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you say you have no idea.”

  “Right.”

  “Did you know about the stuff Gramma was doing with Dad?” Lenore asked. “The nursing home stuff?”

  “More or less. More less than more.”

  The little green-eyed girl was cautiously approaching Lenore and LaVache, moving inside her mother’s long late shadow. The Antichrist, still pretending to ignore her, nevertheless enticed her with the leg.

  “How come?” Lenore said.

  “How come what?”

  “How come you knew?”

  “I believe Lenore told me, in her own unique epigrammatic way.”

  “Well, when?”

  “A while ago. Actually I did some math for her and Mrs. Kling.”

  “Yingst.”

  “Yingst. Some multiple regression. Last Christmas. Really more John’s area than mine, but since dear John is, or was, busy starving himself, and the leg quite obviously isn‘t, it cheerfully gobbled up the hundred clams with nary a qualm.”

  “Have any thoughts of how come Lenore told me exactly nothing about any of this, by any chance?”

  “Nothing even remotely resembling a thought,” LaVache said. When Lenore looked up from her blade of grass, she saw that the little girl was now sitting next to the Antichrist, her small soft legs with shiny black shoes out in front of her. The Antichrist was letting her touch the leg. To Lenore he said, “I really must confess to wondering, in the dark part of the night, what you and Lenore actually talk about all the time. You were over there constantly, this past summer.”

  “Well, I was reading to Concamadine, some of the time, too.”

  “I’m glad someone can stand to see her.”

  “Who says I can stand to see her?”

  “She still likes Old Mother West Wind? Ollie the otter and Sergio the snake and all that?”

  “I really haven’t seen her in a while. She liked it the last time I read it to her. At least she made what I interpreted as liking-sounds.”

  “How lovely,” LaVache said. “You better go see her. She must get really lonely. You think?”

  The little girl was looking at the side of the Antichrist’s dark shiny face, Lenore could see. The girl tugged on the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

  “Are you the devil?” she asked in a loud voice. Her parents didn’t seem to hear her.

  “Not right at the moment,” the Antichrist said to the little girl, turning the leg over to her completely, for a bit.

  “I don’t want to go there anymore, at least until Lenore gets back,” Lenore said softly, shaping a hooked curve of hair under her chin. “I’m afraid I really and truly hate Concamadine. I don’t know if your theory is right, but I’m afraid I do. And that Mr. Bloemker who’s constantly around gives me even more big-time creeps than he did before, for reasons I don’t feel like going into right at the moment. And plus of course now Lenore’s just gone, for over a week, and after working awfully hard to make really sure I’d care about her, she now doesn’t even bother to say where she is. She should know I’m not Dad. Just like you, of all people, should know I’m not Dad.”

  The Antichrist played with the floppy empty leg of his corduroy shorts.

  “I’m beginning to think Lenore’s dead,” said Lenore. “It’s horrible to think that and still not be able to really grieve. I think she maybe even died in the nursing home, and Mrs. Yingst did something to her, when she wasn’t busy giving innocent animals LSD or pineal-food.”

  “You know, in my opinion, if you want my off the-top-of-my-head opinion, I think Lenore’s maybe dead, too,” the Antichrist said, amusing the little girl by guiding her hands so as to make the leg dance on the ground, his joint held easily between two fingers. “She’s about a hundred, after all, isn’t she? I think she’s just gone off somewhere to die. Somewhere where no one could see her being for the briefest second defenseless. I think that would be her style. Either that or she’s down at Gerber’s right now, preparing to give Dad an incredible kick in the corporate groin. To which I say go for it.”

  The little red-haired girl laughed loudly as the leg performed a particularly tricky dance step. The man in white loafers and the woman with veins turned from the field.

  “Brenda!” the mother yelled. The little girl looked up from the leg at her mother. “Come away from there right this minute!” The mother bore down.

  “Just a quick anatomy lesson, here, ma‘am,” said the Antichrist.

  “Come away from there I said.” The little girl was lifted away by a wrist. The leg lay in the grass. The two older children were struggling on the curve again. A shadow in a sportcoat fell over Lenore and LaVache. Lenore made a visor out of her hand. The father stared down, his complicated camera obviously really heavy around his neck. Lenore looked at his shoes. They had networks of tiny
black cracks in the white leather.

  The father sniffed the air, his hands on his hips. “Is that one of those funny cigarettes?”

  LaVache held up the nubbin of joint and looked at it reflectively. “Sir,” he said, “this is a deadly serious cigarette.”

  “You ought to be ashamed, using drugs in a public place, around little children, who are impressionable,” the mother said. Lenore resisted the impulse to touch the mother’s stockingless calf. She considered the fact that the veins in some older women’s calves are a blue found nowhere else in nature. A nicotine blue, almost.

  “I think I’m so ashamed I suddenly don’t feel like being around people, right now,” the Antichrist said slowly, squinting up into the two shadows. There were “Hmmphs,” and the parents came away, calling to the struggling children to come this instant. Lenore heard Brenda’s tiny shoes on the cement of the War Memorial, above them, a moment later. They were alone on the curve of the hill. The Antichrist was scratching at his hip, Lenore saw. No he wasn’t: he was reaching into his pocket. He pulled something out. It was a Stonecipheco label. Veal purée. He finished unfolding it and turned it over and smoothed it against his hip, then gave it to Lenore. Lenore noticed that LaVache’s nails really needed cutting.

  On the white, slightly fuzzy back of the label was an ink drawing of a man walking up a hill, as seen from the side. The man’s profile was smiling. The hill looked sandy. It was the same sort of doodle Lenore had found in Lenore’s room at the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.

  “Hmmm,” she said. She looked at the Antichrist. She took out of the zippered compartment at the side of her vinyl purse the drawing of the barber with the exploded head. She gave it to LaVache. LaVache laughed.

  “Ah, the barber,” he said. “Boy, she may be a ring-tailed bitch, but I do get a kick out of Lenore. I really sort of hope she isn’t dead, after all, to tell the truth.”

  Lenore looked at the Antichrist. “How unbelievably decent of you, seeing she’s your relative.” She reached way out with her foot into the grass and gave the leg an angry little kick.

  “Ow,” said LaVache.

  Lenore wiped a couple of tiny sprinkler-droplets from the skin under her eyes. “When did you get this?” she asked. “I thought you said you had no ideas about Gramma. Or does ‘idea’ mean ’toenail,‘ for you, or something?”

  The Antichrist tore at some grass, looked at his sister. “No, ‘idea’ means ’idea,‘ but that, you may have noticed, is not an idea, but rather a sort of drawing. An infamous Lenore Beadsman drawing, right out of her infamous school of stick-figure symbolist art.” He smiled, did something to his hair. “You remember the drawing of John and Dad, that one Christmas? The time John had said something about Miss Malig, something pretty funny, and Dad had said that if you can’t say anything nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all, and John pointed out that that thing itself that Dad had just said to him really wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination ’nice,‘ and so shouldn’t itself have been said, and so was, interestingly, internally contradictory? And Lenore gave us that drawing of John and Dad, and Dad’s exploded head, and the corn-cob suppository? A really deadly drawing, I thought.”

  “But when did you get this one?” Lenore asked, looking at the veal label. She thought she could make out a cactus in the splatter of ink surrounding the incline of the hill in the drawing.

  “It was waiting in my p. o. box when I got here,” LaVache said. “Return-address-less, I might add, and interestingly not in Lenore’s distinctive indecipherable hand. That was ten ... eleven days ago. I got it eleven days ago, Lenore.” The Antichrist suddenly hawked and spat white.

  Lenore ignored the spitting, and the fact that the Antichrist’s head was lolling quite a bit now. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.

  “Oh, very much so, don’t we, precious,” the Antichrist hissed to his leg.

  “Then maybe you’ll be good enough to tell me, because I’m afraid I seem to be clueless on this one,” Lenore said, staring at the label.

  The Antichrist sucked at the red eye of the corpse of his joint. Lenore saw that he held the nubbin delicately in his very long fingernails, avoided getting burned. He grinned at Lenore. “What would you do if I demanded that you first feed the leg?” he asked.

  Lenore looked at her brother, then at the leg. She said, “I’d propose a deal. You tell me the thing you know, the thing that clearly bears on the well-being of a relative we’re both supposed to love, the thing that it looks like I came all the way out here to find out; you tell me, and in return I don’t throw the leg all the way down to the bottom of the hill, leaving you with a long and possibly dangerous and certainly very embarrassing retrieval-hop.”

  “Oh, now, don’t be that way,” smiled the Antichrist, casually reattaching and strapping the leg, which took a minute. When he was attached, he said, “The drawing is of a sort referred to in the Investigations, as I’m sure you, the hotshot major, would remember a lot better than I, if you thought about it for about three seconds. I seem to recollect the reference being page fifty-four, note b, of the Geach and Anscombe translation. We’re presented with a picture of a man climbing a slope, in profile, one leg in front of the other as he progresses, marking motion, walking up the incline, facing the top, eyes directed at the top, all the standard climbing-association stuff. Et cetera et cetera. So it’s a picture of a man walking up a hill. But then remember Gramma Lenore’s own Dr. Wittgenstein says hold on now, pardner, because the picture could just as clearly and exactly and easily represent the man sliding down the slope, with one leg higher than the other, backwards, et cetera. Just as exactly.”

  “Shit,” said Lenore.

  “And then we’re invited to draw all these totally fecal conclusions about why we just automatically assume from just looking at the picture that the guy’s climbing and not sliding. Going up instead of coming down. Complete and total dribble, and really actually heart-rending psychological innocence, as far as I’m concerned, which you should remember, given this certain conversation we all had in the Volvo when you were in school, when Gramma decided I was evil and said I needed to be ‘stamped out,’ declared her intention to stop giving me Christmas presents. Anyway ...”

  “Well and then here, on the other hand, we’ve got this antinomy,” Lenore said, looking at the barber drawing.

  “Right,” the Antichrist said, throwing away the tiny dot of black joint. He paused for a moment, looking out into nothing. Lenore looked at him. “Brenda,” she heard him say loudly, “you should go back to your parents immediately. Try not to be at all impressionable, at least while you’re around here.”

  Lenore twisted around and looked. The little girl with green eyes was standing behind them, above them, on the cement rim of the Memorial, looking down at their heads. The wind ruffled her silky socks. She stared at the Antichrist.

  “Shoo, love of mine,” LaVache said.

  The girl turned and fled. Her shoes clicked on the cement, fading.

  Lenore looked at her brother. More grass squeaked in his hands. The sprinklers suddenly all went off, stopped hissing, the water sucked back inside itself, in the pipes, down in the fields. The fields looked great. They shone fire in the red light, deepened to twinkle in the glossy black of the gym shadows. “So then here I guess I’m supposed to ask what you think the two together might be supposed to mean,” Lenore said.

  LaVache laughed like a seal. His head lolled. “Gramma would be disappointed in her minion,” he said. “They obviously ... mean whatever you want them to mean. Whatever you want to use them for. Ms. Beadsman ... ,” he pretended to hold a microphone under Lenore’s nose, “... how would you like the drawings to function? Audience, please just hold off on that input ...” The Antichrist made tick-tock noises with his tongue. “Function,” he said. “The extreme unction of function. Function. From the Latin ‘func,’ meaning foul-smelling due to persistent overuse. She has crawled off. She is either dead, or functioning furiously. Speaking of func
tioning furiously, you might help me up, here, for a moment, please.”

  Lenore helped her brother up. He limped behind a bush at the side of the hill. Lenore heard sounds of him going to the bathroom into the dry bush.

  “I have an idea,” the Antichrist’s voice came over the bush to Lenore. “Let’s do the natural Beadsman thing. Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend just for fun that Lenore hasn’t expired, that Mrs. Yingst hasn’t chopped her up and fed her to Vlad the Impaler, that Gramma actually does give a hoot about your being potentially worried, and might actually be trying to use that worry in some nefarious way.” He came back over, slowly, keeping his balance on the incline. “Now, under this game-scenario, how might we wish to see the drawings as functioning, here?” He settled back down with Lenore’s help, looked at her. “The sliding-man drawing, under this scenario, might say, hey, ho, watch how you go. Perceive how you—we—perceive Lenore’s being ... ‘missing.’ Don’t just look at it; think about how to look at it. Maybe it ... means the opposite of what you think it does, of the way it ... looks.” LaVache was having leg trouble, on the hump of the hill. Lenore helped him get more comfortable. She held the baby food labels in her hand.

  LaVache continued, “See, maybe Lenore isn’t gone at all. Maybe you’re who’s gone, when all is said and done. Maybe ... this one I particularly like ... maybe Dad’s gone, spiralled into the industrial void. Maybe he’s taken us with him. Maybe Lenore’s found. Maybe instead of her sliding away from you, you’ve slid away from her. Or climbed away from her. Maybe it’s all a sliding-and-climbing game! Chutes and Ladders, risen from the dead!” The Antichrist was having trouble talking, because his mouth was all dry from the joint. He got the last of Clint Wood’s fee from his drawer and lit it.

  “Hmmm,” Lenore was saying.

  “Except don’t think about yourself, in this game, at all,” said the Antichrist. “Because in this game, the way we’re playing, the barber drawing means don’t think about yourself, in the context of the game, or your head explodes into art deco. Just think about other people, if you want to play. Which means that family-members have to be treated as explicitly Other, which I must say I find attractively refreshing.”