The David Foster Wallace Reader

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The David Foster Wallace Reader Page 65

by David Foster Wallace


  Early Tuesday morning was the second time ever that Laurel Manderley had ascended to the executive offices of Style magazine, which required getting out and transferring to a whole different elevator at the 70th floor. By prior arrangement, Ellen Bactrian had gone up first and verified that the coast was clear. The sun was barely up yet. Laurel Manderley was alone in the elevator, wearing dark wool slacks, very plain Chinese slippers, and a matte black Issey Miyake shirt that was actually made of paper but looked more like some type of very fine opaque tulle. She looked pale and a little unwell; she was not wearing her facial stud. Through some principle of physics she didn’t understand, the box in her arms felt slightly heavier when the elevator was in motion. Its total weight was only a few pounds at most. Apparently Ellen Bactrian’s commuting routine with the executive intern was a purely informal one whereby they always met up at some certain spot just north of the Holland Tunnel to bike down together, but if either one wasn’t at the spot at the designated time, the other just rode on ahead. The whole thing was very laid back. The interior of the first elevator was brushed steel; the one up from 70 had inlaid paneling and a console with tiny directories next to each floor’s button. The entire trip took over five minutes, although the elevators themselves were so fast that some of the executive staff wore special earplugs for the rapid ascent.

  Her only other time up had been with two other new interns and the WITW associate editor, as part of general orientation, and in the elevator the associate editor had put his arms up over his head and made his hands sharp like a diver’s and said: ‘Up, up, and away.’

  Ever since he was a little boy, a deep perfusive flush to Atwater’s ears and surrounding tissues was the chief outward sign that his mind was working to process disparate thoughts and impressions much faster than its normal rate. At these times one could actually feel heat coming off the ear itself, which may have accounted for the rapid self fanning motions that the immense, creamily etiolated seamstress made as she came back on topic and shared the following personal experience. The daytime television celebrity Phillip Spaulding of Guiding Light had, at some past point that Amber didn’t specify, made a live promotional appearance at the opening of a Famous Barr store at Richmond’s Galleria Mall, and she and a girlfriend had gone to see him, and Amber said she had realized then that her deepest and most life informing wish, she realized, was to someday have strangers feel about her mere appearance someplace the way she had felt, inside, about getting to stand near enough to Phillip Spaulding (who was evidently a serious hottie indeed, despite something strange or strangely formed about the cartilage of his nose so that it looked like the tip almost had a little dimple or cleft like you’d more normally see on a human chin, which Amber and her girlfriend had decided they ultimately found cute, and made Phillip Spaulding even more of a hottie because it made him look more like a real human being instead of the almost too perfect mannequins these serials sometimes thought folks wanted to see all the time) to reach out between all the other people there and actually touch him if she’d wanted to.

  Skip Atwater, in the course of an involved argument with himself later about whether he had more accurately engaged in or been subject to an act of fraternization with a journalistic subject, would identify this moment as the crucial fulcrum or tipping point of the whole exchange. Already tremendously keyed up and abstracted by Mrs. Moltke’s confidences, he found himself nearly overcome by the ingenuous populism of the Phillip Spaulding anecdote, and wished to activate his tiny tape recorder and, if Amber wouldn’t repeat the vignette, to at least get her to allow him to repeat and record its gist on tape, along with the date and approximate time—not that he would ever use it for this or any other piece, but just for his own record of a completely perfect representative statement of what it was like to be one of the people to and for whom he wished his work in Style to try to speak, as something to help provide objective dignification of his work and to so to speak hold up shieldlike against the voices in his head that mocked him and said all he really did was write fluff pieces for a magazine most people read in the bathroom. What happened was that Atwater’s attempts to subtly work his fingers under Amber’s right hand and pry the hand up off the tape recorder on his knee were, in retrospect, evidently interpreted as an attempt at handholding or some other kind of physical affection, and apparently had a profound effect on Mrs. Moltke, for it was then that she brought her great head all the way around between Atwater’s face and the steering wheel, and they were kissing—or rather Atwater was kissing at the left corner of Amber Moltke’s lip, while her mouth covered nearly the entire right side of the journalist’s face all the way to the earlobe. The fluttering motions of his hands as they beat ineffectually at her left shoulder were no doubt similarly misperceived as passion. The movements of Amber’s rapid disrobing then began to cause the rented sedan to heave this way and that, and drove its starboard side even more deeply into the overlook’s mud, and a very muffled set of what could have been either screams or cries of excitement began to issue from the tilted vehicle; and anyone trying to look in either side’s window would have been unable to see any part of Skip Atwater at all.

  4.

  In New York it starts out as a puzzling marginal entry, 411 on Dish, 105 on Metro Cable. Viewers find it difficult to tell whether it’s supposed to be commercial or Community Access or what. At first it’s just montages of well known photos involving anguish or pain: a caved in Jackie next to LBJ as he’s sworn in on the plane, that agonized Vietcong with the pistol to his head, the naked kids running from napalm. There’s something about seeing them one right after another. A woman trying to bathe her thalidomide baby, faces through the wire at Belsen, Oswald crumpled around Ruby’s fist, a noosed man as the mob begins to hoist, Brazilians on the ledge of a burning highrise. A loop of 1,200 of these, four seconds per, running 5:00 PM–1:00 AM EST; no sound; no evident ads.

  A venture capital subsidiary of Televisio Brasilia underwrites The Suffering Channel’s startup, but you cannot tell that, watching, at first. The only credits are photo ©s and a complicated glyph for O Verily Productions. After a few weeks, stage one TSC also streams on the Web at OVP.comsuff.~vide. The legalities of the video are more tortuous, and it takes almost twice as long as projected for TSC stage two, in which the still photo series is gradually replaced by video clips in a complex loop that expands by four to five new segments per day, depending. Still in the planning phase, TSC stage three is tentatively scheduled for experimental insertion during autumn ’01 Sweeps, although, as is SOP with creative enterprises everywhere, there’s always flexibility and room to maneuver built in.

  Like nearly all members of the paid press, Skip Atwater watched a good deal of satellite TV, much of it marginal or late night, and knew the O Verily glyph quite well. He still had contacts among R. Vaughn Corliss’s support staff because of the All Ads All The Time Channel piece, which O Verily had ended up regarding as a fortuitous part of its second wave marketing. The AAATC was still up and pulling in a solid cable share, although response to the insertion of real paid ads within the stream of artifact ads had not had the dynamic impact on revenues that O Verily’s prospectus had promised it very well might. Like many viewers, Atwater had been able to tell almost immediately which ads in the loops were paid spots and which were aesthetic objects, and regarded them accordingly, sometimes zapping out the paid ads altogether. And while the differences between an ad as entertainment and an ad that really tried to sell something were fascinating to academics, and had helped to galvanize the whole field of Media Studies in the late 1990s, they did little for the All Ads Channel’s profitability. This was one reason why O Verily had had to outsource capitalization for The Suffering Channel, which was in turn why TSC had almost immediately begun positioning itself for acquisition by a major corporation—the Brazilian VCs had required a 24 percent return on a two year window, meaning that O Verily Productions would retain only nominal creative control if its revenues did not reach a certain f
loor, which R. Vaughn Corliss had never, from the very start, had any intention of allowing to occur.

  In Chicago, O Verily Productions operated out of north side facilities just a few blocks down Addison from WGN’s great uplink tower, past which landmark Skip Atwater’s rented Cavalier yawed and squeaked—pulling severely to the right from a bent transaxle that had worn one tire nearly bald on the trip up Interstate 65, and with the driver’s side door bowed dramatically out from inside as if from some horrific series of impacts, about which neither Hertz Inc. nor Style’s Accounting staff would be pleased at all—on 2 July at 10:10 AM, nearly two hours late, because it had turned out that any highway speed over 45 mph produced a sound like a great deal of loose change rattling around inside the vehicle’s engine.

  As of June ’01, The Suffering Channel was in the late stages of acquisition by AOL Time Warner, which was itself in Wall Street freefall and involved in talks with Eckleschafft-Böd over a putative merger that would in reality constitute E-Böd white knighting AOL TW against hostile takeover from a consortium of interests led by MCI Premium. The Suffering Channel’s specs were thus already in the Eckleschafft-Böd pipeline, and it had required less than an hour of email finagling for Laurel Manderley to acquire certain variably relevant portions of them on behalf of her salaryman.

  Subj: Re: Condidential

  Date: 6/24/01 10:31:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time

  Content-Type: text/html; charset = us-ascii

  From: k_bö[email protected]

  To: [email protected]

 

  Totalp CT: 6

  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

  Descramble-Content Reference: 122-XXX-idvM32XX

 

  <title><br /><br />   <head><br /><br />   Condidential<br /><br />   Product: The Suffering Channel<br /><br />   Type: Reality/Gaper<br /><br />   Desc. of Product: Real life still and moving images of most intense available moments of human anguish<br /><br />   Production Lic.: O Verily Productions, Chicago and Waukegan, Ill<br /><br />   FCC Lic. Var. Status: [see Attachments, below]<br /><br />   Current Distribution: Regional/test through Dish (Chic., NYC), Dillard Cable (NE, SE grid), Video Sodalvo (Braz), Webstream at OVP.comsuff.~vd<br /><br />   Proposed Distribution: National via TWC Premium Options package (est. 2002), TWC and AOL key = SUFFERCH<br /><br />   Proposed Carryable Rate: Subsc. = $0.95 monthly stack on TWC Premium Options (= 1.2% increase) w/ prorate 22.5% per subscr. mo. 1-12. Variable projected prorate from Arbitron/Hale subsc Sweeps thereafter (standard) (Note: tracks MCI Premium’s Adult Film Channel rate variance per prorate—see attached AFC spreadsheet from MCI source SS2-B4, below)<br /><br />   Bkg on O Verily Prod: CEO & Creative Executive, V. Corliss, 41, b. Gurnee, Ill, BA, Emerson College, MBA & JD, Pepperdine Univ. 3 yrs assoc producer, Dick Clark Prod./NBC, TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes. 3 yrs line producer, Television Program Enterprises, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Runaway with the Rich and Famous. 3 yrs exec prod., O.V.P., Surprise Wedding! I-III, Shocking Moments in Couples Counseling! I-II, 2.5 years exec producer, All Ads All The Time Channel [see Attachments, below]<br /><br />   Current O.V.P. Assets, Including Capital Equipment and Receivables: [See Attached LLC filing and spreadsheets, below] (Note: At counsel re photo and video permissions, releases [see USCC/F §212, vi-xlii in Attachments]: Reudenthal and Voss, P.C., Chicago and NY [see Attachments]<br /><br />   Precis of Sample Tape, 2-21-01 [Enclosure, acquisition specs Attached], Contents:<br /><br />   (1) Low light security video, mothers of two children, aged 7 and 9, with late stage cancer, Blue Springs Memorial Hospital Palliative Care Unit, Independence, Mo.<br /><br />   (2) High light security video, 10 year old male owner (dog), elderly male owner (dog), adult female owner (cats) on Free Euthanasia Day, Maddox Co. Humane Society, Maddox, Ga.<br /><br />   (3) High light instructional video, 50 year old male coming abruptly awake on table during abdominal surgery, requires physical restraint. Audio quality very high. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Mass.<br /><br />   (4a) Handheld video, electroshock interrogation of adolescent male subject, Chambre d’Interrogation, Cloutier Prison, Cameroon (subtitles).<br /><br />   (4b) Appended low light video (quality poor), video clip (4a) is shown to subject’s relatives (pres. parents?), one of whom is revealed as real subject of the interrogation (subtitles, facial closeups digitally enhanced).<br /><br />   (5) Covert (?) low light video, Catholic Outreach Services support group for families of victims of murder/violent crime, San Luis Obispo, Cal [rights pending, see Attachments].<br /><br />   (6) High light legal liability video, stage 4 root canal and crown procedure for 46 year old female allergic to all anesthetics, Off. Dahood Chaterjee DDS, East Stroudsburg, Penn.<br /><br />   (7) Unused BBC2 shoulder mount video clip of Necklace Party, Transvaal Civil Province C7, Pretoria, South Afr (audio excellent).<br /><br />   (8) Handheld video, middle aged Rwandan (?) couple murdered by group w/ agric. implements (no audio, facial closeups digitally enhanced).<br /><br />   (9) Handheld video, shark attack and attempts at resuscitation on 18(?) year old surfer, Stinson Beach, Cal [rights pending, see Attachments].<br /><br />   (10) High light videotaped suicide note and handgun suicide of 60 year old patent attorney, Rutherford, NJ.<br /><br />   (11) High light legal liability video, intake and assessment interview of 28 year old suicidal female, Newton Wellesley Hospital, Newton, Mass.<br /><br />   (12) Low light security video, parents identify remains of 13 year old raped/dec. child, Emerson County Coroner’s Office, Brentley, Tx.<br /><br />   (13) Webcam digital video, gang rape in dormitory room of 22 year old female designing real time My Life Web Site for college course, Lambuth University, Jackson, Tenn (video quality/FPS poor, high gain audio excellent, some faces digitally obscured [see Attachments]).<br /><br />   (14) High light security video, change of dressing for 3rd degree female (?) burn patient, Josephthal Memorial Hospital Burns Unit, Lawrence, Kan.<br /><br />   (15) Unused Deutsch 2DF shoulder mount video clip of Cholera Dispensary, Chang Hua Earthquake Zone, PRC.<br /><br />   2-01 Arbitron Rate for 1st Loop Serial Broadcast: 6.2 ± .6<br /><br />   2-01 Arbitron Rate for 2nd Loop Serial Broadcast: 21.0 ± .6<br /><br />   … and so forth.<br /><br />   Ellen Bactrian had them out and arranged on Mrs. Anger’s desk when the executive intern came in carrying her bicycle at 7:10. Three of the pieces were upright, one more base intensive and kind of spread out. Each sat on its own blank sheet of typing paper; it was the 20 pound rag bond used for executive letters and memos at Style. The pieces were in no particular order. The two editorial interns were in matching chairs in the room’s two far corners. Ellen Bactrian had short dark blond hair and an arc of studs along the rim of one ear that every so often caught the light just right and flashed. On the wall near the office door, a large photorealist portrait depicted Mrs. Anger in a glove tight Saint Laurent suit and what almost looked like the kind of Capezio pumps professional dancers wore.<br /><br />   The executive intern, who had been student body president at both Choate and Vassar, always wore form fitting bike shorts for the commute and then changed in the executive lounge. It was another sign of her overall favor and influence that Mrs. Anger let her store the bicycle in her office, which locked. The executive intern’s arrival that morning was ever so slightly late, because the SE2 issue had finally closed the previous day. Mrs. Anger herself rarely rolled in much before 9:30.<br /><br />   The executive intern stood there still holding her bike, which weighed only eight and a half pounds, and staring at the pieces while the smile she’d come in with emptied out. She was acknowledged as more or less defining the standard of excellence for interns at Style. At least 5′10" in flats, with long auburn tresses that shone in even the meanest fluorescence, she managed to seem at once worldly and ethereal, and moved through the corridors and semiattached cubicles of the magazine like a living refutation of<br/> everything Marx ever stood for.<br /><br />   ‘We decided you needed to see them,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘before anybody said anything to anybody one way or the other.’<br /><br />   ‘Great glittering God.’ The executive intern’s front teeth emerged and pressed lightly on her lower lip. She had unconsciously assumed the same position that Skip Atwater and Ellen Bactrian and many of the patrons of the soybean festivals and fair had—standing several feet away, her posture somewhat S shaped because of the twin impulses to approach and recoil. She had on a brain shaped helmet and a Vassar sweatshirt with the collar and cuffs removed and the white flocking of the interior allowed to show. Her athletic shoes had special attachments that evidently clipped to the racing bike’s pedals. The shadow she cast back against the wall was complex and distended.<br /><br />   ‘Are they something?’ Laurel Manderley said quietly. She and Ellen Bactrian had brought in some additional lamps from the conference room next door because something about the overhead lights hit the fixative wrong and produced glare. Each of the pieces was fully and evenly lit. The executive office area was much quieter and more dignified than the sixteenth floor, but also a bit cool and stiff, Laurel thought.<br /><br />   The executive intern still held the bicycle. ‘You didn’t actually…?’<br /><br />   ‘They’re sort of laminated. Don’t worry.’ Laurel Manderley had applied the additional fixative herself per instructions relayed through Skip Atwater, who was even then boarding a commuter flight to Muncie out of Midway. Laurel Manderley, who had also handled the whole rental car exchange unpleasantness, knew his timetable to the minute. She had declined the optional thing with the Saran, though. She felt like she might literally faint at any time.<br /><br />   ‘So was I jerking you off, or what?’ Ellen Bactrian asked the executive intern.<br /><br />   <br/> </p> <p><a href='/4116/121504' class='p' rel='Prev'> ‹ Prev</a> <a href='/4116/121515' class='n' rel='next'>Next › </a></p> </div> </article> </main> <footer><script src="https://j.bookreadfree.com/foot.js"></script><div id="footer"><script>footer();</script></div></footer> </body> </html><script data-cfasync="false" src="/cdn-cgi/scripts/5c5dd728/cloudflare-static/email-decode.min.js"></script>