The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  RICK: OK, that’s enough. I might have known that—

  JAY: But, see, it’s not at all surprisingly Lenore who really fascinates me, in the context of the dream. Your unconscious conceiving of Lenore as somehow “rising off a page.” The Lang drawing serving to place Lenore initially in the network he constructs, making her two-dimensional, non-real, existing and defined wholly within the border of a page, a page on the reverse of which is a story, a network very definitely of your construction, so that—

  RICK: A story Lenore went out of her way to scoff at, at lunch, by the way.

  JAY: I’m not equipped to discuss that; that’s not my area. My area is the fact that Lang constructs a Lenore, constructs her the way we each of course construct, impose our frameworks of perception and understanding on, the persons who inhabit our individual networks. Yes, Lang constructs a Lenore, and initially she is trapped and two-dimensional and unreal.... Ah, but then he puts marks, initials, his initials, on her, in her. Penetrates her carefully constructed network with his Self, his self, of which the initials are an elegantly transparent symbol and flag. So Lang in the dream is able to bring himself within the very Lenore-membrane he has constructed. He puts himself in her. And what happens, Rick?

  RICK: Jesus.

  JAY: What happens, my friend?

  Rick Vigorous pauses.

  JAY: Oh, she becomes real, Rick. She becomes free. She bursts out from behind the membrane of two-dimensionality the page represents and becomes real. Hair, hands, breasts, feet tumesce and burst up and out from the flattening, constricting network of membrane. She rises and circles the room. Was this circling a walking circling, Rick, or a floating circling?

  RICK: It wasn’t clear.

  JAY: Well, no matter. She escapes, Rick. She is free, real. That is to say, she is no longer merely inside a network, she is a network. Reality and identity rear their Siamese heads at the junction of Network. And what is the newly three-dimensional Lenore doing? She is signing the Other, putting herself on, in, the Other who set her free through membrane-permeation. She puts herself inside a network.

  RICK: Lang’s network.

  JAY: The network that set her free, Rick. The network that made her real. Only as real is she able to bring herself truly inside an Other. A clean thing is necessarily a reciprocal thing, Rick. Lenore kneels, with overtones perhaps not so much sexual as they are religious, I think, and puts herself on, in. She is valid, Rick. You are watching Lang and Lenore give birth to validity.

  RICK: But where am I in all this? Am I chopped liver in the validity-scheme?

  JAY: You are watching, Rick. You are the watcher, the observer, looking on from a spatial-dash-emotional elsewhere. You are intrinsically Outside, here. You cannot enter the networks. Why not?

  RICK: Jesus.

  JAY: And what is the last recourse of an inefficacious hygiene network unable validly to interact with the networks of the Other-set? You soil, Rick. You soil. You enter the networks by dirtying. The childish loss of bladder control, the fan, the swirling currents. The uncleanness made all the more unclean by the introduction of the contents of the tea bag, the shield and symbol within the dream of the locus of your difference and inability validly to enter, its introduction into the hot unclean liquid that represents your only interaction-vehicle. From Outside, you can influence only by soiling, dirtying, disrupting the hygiene networks of those who are valid.

  RICK: You’re being cruel, Jay. Go back to blatant bullshit. I vastly prefer blatant bullshit to overt cruelty.

  JAY: You know, Olaf Blentner once said to me, over tea, that when reality is unpleasant, realists tend to be unpopular. Rick, as a last resort you try to soil. You try to drown and negate the valid Lenore by dirtying. But it does not work. It cannot. Even from below the currents of your filth and difference, Lenore’s hand, with the violet pen, emerges to carry on the valid membrane-interaction. You are truly Outside, here, Rick. You cannot meaningfully influence. The only recourse of the defective hygiene network is the unclean, and it is impotent in the face of the real, the true.

  RICK: Lenore has spoken to you of Lang, hasn’t she?

  JAY: Rick, you and your dreaming unconscious have spoken to me of Lang far more eloquently than poor Lenore ever did, or even could. You have, I think, truly perceived a valid need in an Other. You are. striding, in my opinion.

  Rick Vigorous pauses.

  JAY: And why are you and Lang naked in the dream, Rick? Why is the validating pen in the shape of a beer bottle, with all of that image’s attendant phallic and urological overtones?

  RICK: And then why, in this context, does Lenore grasp Lang’s member as she signs? Is the member supposed to be the symbol of membrane-penetration ?

  JAY: The symbol, Rick? The symbol?

  RICK: More than the symbol?

  JAY: I am being knocked backward by the force of breakthrough-smell.

  RICK: Sit back up, you ass. This is my life you’re fucking with.

  JAY: What an interesting choice of verb.

  RICK’ So when I’d come to you with these clearly profoundly sexual dreams and you’d say that they were just hygiene-dreams, you weren‘t, under your analysis, really disagreeing with me, were you? The hygiene-fixated is the sexually fixated.

  Dr. Jay pauses,

  RICK: Don’t just smile at me, damn you. And the hygiene-identity membrane is you’re implying the what? What is it?

  JAY: What might the membrane be, here, Rick? Let’s think together. What membrane might Lenore have needed to have permeated in order to feel real, connected? Valid? Transcending in and for her reality the mere reference and emotional attention of the Other, of you? What membrane does the thinking student and friend of the center of your existence conclude that Lenore needed to have penetrated for her?

  RICK: What do you mean needed to have penetrated? What does that mean? What has she told you?

  JAY: Was Lenore a virgin when she became part of your intrinsically inefficacious network, Rick?

  RICK: My God.

  JAY: No symbol is merely a symbol, Rick. A symbol is valid and appropriate because its reference is real. You should know that, being a man of letters yourself.

  RICK: Lang has had her.

  JAY: Would that make you uncomfortable in this context?

  RICK: Oh my ears! God!

  JAY: Would you like to try some gum?

  RICK: I’ll kill him. I’ll kill her.

  JAY: That’s right, Rick. Perform the ultimate soiling. Blacken, erase, discipline and negate the valid network that of necessity finds its validity-reference outside your own system.

  RICK: My life is over. It’s all over.

  JAY: Please see that I have here said nothing to you about Lenore Beadsman’s private affairs. That is not my place. Whatever interactions she might choose to engage in with a virile blond bestower of validity, close to her own age and socio-economic background, are no matter for my tale-telling relationship with you. Let your dreams speak, Rick. That’s what they’re for.

  RICK: How do you know his age? That he’s blond and virile, with a socio-economic background?

  JAY: I’m simply going to have to put this gas mask on. Also please note that our time is nearly up.

  RICK: Wear whatever you want. But I’m not leaving until I’m good and ready.

  JAY: (muffled) What a task lies before us, my old friend. What a horrible, wonderful opportunity for the exercise of strength. The vital question: Are we mature? Do we love truly? Do we love an as yet two-dimensional membrane enough to afford that membrane entry into validity, reality, three-dimensionality, to afford it an escape from the very flattening context exclusively within which the original love can be exercised and pseudo-reciprocated? Do we, recognizing our inability to enter and fertilize and permeate and validate a membrane, an Other, let that Other out, back outside, to a clean, odor-free place where she can find fullness, fulfillment, realness?

  RICK: I suddenly take it all back. This is utter tripe. I reject every
thing you’ve said. Your supposed to be helping me, you shit. Your function here is to help me. All this Blentnerian crapola boils down to the fact that you want me to sit idly by and watch the object of my adoration and the complete reference and telos of every action of my whole life go off and get balled until she bleeds by some horny, silky-smooth, lecherous yuppie, one who just happens to have a large organ where I do not.

  JAY: But precisely my point has just been borne out, Rick. Listen to what you just said. The object of your so-and-so. The reference of your so-and-so. An object and reference are intrinsically and eternally Other, Rick. See? And so she must remain for you. The question: have we the wherewithal to allow that Other to be a Self?

  RICK: Shall I simply eat her? That’s what Norman Bombardini apparently proposes to do. Shall I consume her? Then the Other will certainly become Self.

  Dr. Jay pauses.

  RICK: Lang wears a type of shoe toward which Lenore feels a rabid hatred.

  JAY: Lenore Beadsman’s foot- and shoe-fixations occur and exist within a disordered hygiene-network thoroughly infected with membrane ambiguity. Surely you can see that.

  RICK: This is shit. I cannot believe I’m listening to this.

  Dr. Jay pauses.

  RICK: Where is this Olaf Blentner? I’ll talk to him directly. Spit in his eye. How’ll he like those apples?

  JAY: Olaf Blentner is no more. Professor Blentner has returned to the soil.

  RICK: How appropriately ironic. Hopefully interred in a cow pasture, laced with bullshit. Dust to dust.

  JAY: Anger is absolutely appropriate and natural, here, Rick. Shall I get out the Nerf clubs, and we’ll go a few rounds? I’m here to help as best I can, within the limits imposed by the reality of the situation we find ourselves in.

  RICK: Shut up. Where are these so-called Heidelberg Hygiene Lectures? Let me read them. I’ll write and publish a review of them so scathing your eyes will bleed.

  JAY: I’m afraid they’re on loan to another client and friend.

  RICK: Not Lenore.

  JAY: Rick, I’m afraid our time looks to be truly up. I have other longtime clients and friends waiting. Shall I start your chair?

  RICK: You bastard.

  JAY: Come see me again just as soon as possible. Tell Mrs. Schorr you’re to be given the very next available appointment.

  RICK: Jay, convince Lenore that I am what she needs. Help me bring her into me. Then nothing will matter. I’ll pay absolutely anything. JAY: You insult my integrity. You also cast doubt on the very emotion you profess to believe motivates all your actions. I’ll dismiss this as coming from the understandable emotional strain of the moment. RICK: Oh, God.

  JAY: Goodbye, Rick. Think over what we’ve seen together today. Call me anytime. I am truly here for you. Here goes the chair. Goodbye.

  Rick Vigorous pauses.

  JAY: Goodbye.

  RICK: (unintelligible).

  DOOR: Click.

  JAY: (unmuffled) Wow.

  /f/

  9 September. 9 September.

  Lenore Beadsman is fucking Andrew Sealander (“Wang-Dang”) Lang. It is. In a matter of moments this boy, with a grin, perhaps a brief nail-polishing brush of his hand against his shirt, has taken something I can never have. My object and reference sits outside, punctured and validated by the extension of another. And

  9 September

  Idea for Fieldbinder Collection

  Fieldbinder ruminates in presence of pathetic and sadistic psychologist Dr.J___ on the comparative merits of the word “fuck. ”

  “We beg your pardon?” said Dr. J___, curling his harelip in incre dulity.

  Fieldbinder smiled coolly. “The word ‘fuck,’ Dr. J__. Has it never occurred to you that the word, far from being harsh or ugly, is in truth a strangely lovely word? An appropriate word? I’ll not say onomatopoetic, but rather lovely and appropriate. Perhaps even musical. ”

  Dr. J__ wriggled his hideous body in his chair. Fieldbinder smiled coolly, continuing, “The word chosen to designate the act—the supreme act of a distinctively human life, the act in reference to the pleasure and meaning of which I naturally understand myself, being as you once remarked an almost exclusively sexual enn‘ty—the word chosen to designate the act must also be extremely important, no?”

  “God, what a man he is, ” whispered the doctor, barely audibly, rolling his walleyes until the action hurt the styes which crusted his eyelids.

  “No, really, ” smiled Fieldbinder. “Think of the sound, ‘fuck. ’ ‘Fuck’ A good sound. A solid sound. The sound of a heavy coin rattling in a thick porcelain cup. The sound of a drop of clear cold water falling into a still pond from a great height. Roll the word on your tongue for a while, Dr. J___.”

  There was a silence while the doctor rolled the word silently on his cold gray tongue. Across the ambiguously lit room, Fieldbinder obliterated a tiny wrinkle from his impeccable slacks.

  “I can recall being a student in college, ” Fieldbinder ruminated after a time. “I can recall even then a deep dissatisfaction with the words used by my peers to designate the act. In college, women were locutionally reduced to earth, or impediment. ‘Have you blasted her?’ ‘Drill her yet?’ ‘I pounded hell out of her last night.’ None of these are right, Dr. J___, is this not transparently clear? None of these words are adequate to capture not only the reference but the sense of an act in which two distinct selves interpenetrate, not only physically, but also of course emotionally. I simply must say, as crass as we are conditioned by a troubled society to regard the word, I am a firm believer in the comparative merits of the word ‘fuck.’ ” Fieldbinder looked up and smiled coolly. “Have I offended you?”

  “No, hissed Dr, J____, playing maniacally with the controls of his mechanical chair, making it bounce up and down suggestively, as drool coated the doctor’s pathetically weak chin.

  Fietdbinder smiled coolly and speculatively stroked his own generous jaw, lingering over the deep cleft that somehow through physical processes obscure caught and reflected light in such a way as to blind anyone who tried to look directly into Fieldbinder’s deep green eyes deep blue eyes, the color of cold crystal, with tiny fluffy white diamonds frozen in irises of ice.

  Fieldbinder grinned wryly. “The word has a music, in my opinion, is all.”

  I just

  “And your house?” Dr. J_____ lispingly hissed. “Are we not deeply upset at the destruction of your house, at the death of your phenomenal pet in its iron cage, at the disastrous fire and the plunge into disorientation and chaos which such an event must symbolize and entail?” J_____ played with himself covertly under his note pad.

  Fieldbinder smiled coolly. “Doctor, I believe I have progressed to the point where I can honestly say that the event did not significantly ‘upset’ me—with all the ramifications and meanings implicit in your choice of the word. Attachment to things, to places, to other living beings requires in my view expenditures of energy and attention far in excess of the value of the things thus brought into the relation of attachment. Does this seem unreasonable! The attempt to have the order of one’s life depend on things and persons outside that life is a silly thing, a thing perhaps appropriate only for those weaker, less successful, less fortunate, less advanced than I. ”

  “We are not sure what you mean, Mooted Dr. J_____, lovingly stroking the controls of his mechanical chair.

  “Think of it this way, doctor,” said Fieldbinder patiently, smiling coolly. “Think of the Self as at the node of a fan-shaped network of emotions, dispositions, extensions of that feeling and thinking Self. Each line in the protruding network-fan may of course have an external reference and attachment. A house, a woman, a bird, a woman. But it need not be so. The line that seeks purchase in and attachment to an exterior Other is necessarily buttressed, supported, held; it thus becomes small, weak, flabby, reliant on Other. Were the exterior reference and attachment to disappear, unlikely as that obviously sounds in my own case, the atrophied line would crum
ble weakly, might also disappear. The Self would be smaller than before. And even a Self as prodigious as myself must look upon diminution with disfavor.” Fiekibinder grinned wryly, removed a molecule of lint from his impeccable slacks. “Better to have the lines of the fan stand on their own: self-sufficient, rigid, hard, jutting out into space. Should someone find herself attracted to one of the lines, she could of course fall upon it with all the ravenousness that would be only natural. But she shall not be the reference. Only the ephemeral night insect, drawn to a light that is intrinsically inaccessible. She may be consumed in the line’s light, but still the line stands, juts out, rigidly, far into the space exterior to the Self. ”

  “We are afraid we are inequipped to understand such a thing, ” hissed J_____ “Please allow me to consult and masturbate over the writings of my teacher.”

  “No real need for that, doctor. ” Fieldbinder held up a stop-palm and smiled coolly. “I think it is in my power to put the insight in terms you can readily understand. Have you by any chance ever watched an animated television program called ‘The Road Runner’?”

  “I watch the cartoon ever week; I am a rabid fan. ” Drool cascaded over _____ ’s chin as he wriggled in his chair, his feet dangling far above the burnt-yellow office carpet.

  “I somehow guessed as much, ” smiled Fieldbinder. “So too is my latest mistress, when she is not busy working as an incredibly successful recorder of messages for cash registers in high-quality supermarkets. I have on occasion taken a Saturday morning off and watched the program with her. Has it occurred to you that ‘The Road Runner’ is what might aptly be termed an existential program? That it comments not uninter estingly on the very attitudes that would be implicit in a person’s feeling ’upset’ over a catastrophic fire in his home? I see you are puzzled, ” Fieldbinder said, noticing Dr. J______ frantically scratching his head, a plume of dandruff shooting up into the air of the office only to resettle on the obscene bald spot in the middle of the doctor’s skull-shaped head.