The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  A small pause for this. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Do you think you’d know if you did?’

  ‘I think I would.’

  ‘Do you know what’s on the jukebox right now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you by any chance a homo?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’ Rand says.

  ‘I don’t think I’m really anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had what you mean by sexual attraction.’

  Rand is very good at reading affect on people’s faces, and as far as she can tell there’s nothing here on Drinion’s face to read. ‘Not even when you were a teenager?’

  That little pause for scanning again. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Did you worry you might be a homo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you worry that something was maybe wrong with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did other people worry that something was wrong?’

  Another pause, both blank and not. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You mean as an adolescent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think the truth is that no one paid enough attention to me to even wonder what was going on inside me, much less to worry about it.’ He hasn’t moved a bit.

  ‘Not even your family?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did that kind of bum you out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you lonely?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you ever get lonely?’

  Rand has come almost to be able to expect the pause after some questions, or to absorb it as a normal part of Drinion’s conversational rhythm. Drinion doesn’t acknowledge that she has already asked this before.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Drinion takes another sip from his glass of warm beer. There is something about the economy of his movements that Rand enjoys watching without even being quite aware that she enjoys it. ‘I don’t think I know how to answer that,’ the utility examiner says.

  ‘Well, like when you notice other people having romances or sex lives, and you don’t, or you can tell they feel lonely and you don’t, what do you think about the difference between you and them?’

  There is a pause. Drinion says: ‘I think there’s a doubleness about what it is you’re asking. It’s really about comparing. I think it’s more like if I’m watching someone and paying attention to them and thinking about what they’re like, I’m not paying so much attention to myself and what I’m like. So there’s no way to compare.’

  ‘You don’t ever compare anything to anything?’

  Drinion looks at his hand and the glass. ‘I have a hard time paying attention to more than one thing at a time. I think it’s one reason I don’t drive, for instance.’

  ‘But you know what’s playing on the jukebox.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But if you’re paying attention to our little conversation here, how do you know what’s on the jukebox?’

  There is now a longer pause. Drinion’s face looks slightly different when he comes to the end of his two-second-scan thing.

  Drinion says: ‘Well, it’s very loud, and also I’ve heard this song several times on the radio, either four or five times, and when it plays on the radio when it’s over they often give the song’s title and artist. I believe this is how radio stations are able to play copyrighted songs without being required to pay any sort of per-use fee. The radio play is part of the advertising of the record album that the song is part of. It’s a bit confusing, though. The idea that hearing the song several times for free on the radio makes the customer more likely to go to the store and buy the song seems somewhat confusing to me. Granted, often what is being sold is the entire record album that the song is only one part of, so it may be that the song on the radio functions a little bit like a preview of a movie that they show as an inducement to buy a ticket for that later movie, of which the preview is obviously only one small part. There’s also the matter of how the record companies’ accounting personnel treat the expenses involved in free radio play. It seems to be not a matter of corporate and ICE but rather inter-corporate, if you think about it. Surely there are significant shipping and distribution costs involved in placing the recording of the song in the hands of the radio stations that will play it. Can the record company or its parent write off these costs if the radio stations are not paying any fee for the rights to air the song and so there is no income against which to write off the expenses? Or can they be deducted as marketing and advertising expenses if in fact no moneys are being paid to the ostensible advertiser, here the radio stations or their parent companies, but rather only to the postal service or some private carrier? How would the Service examiner be able to distinguish such expenses from illicit or padded deductions if no larger compensation could be referenced against which to add or subtract these distribution costs?’

  Meredith Rand says: ‘Can I say that one of the reasons you come off as a little boring is that you don’t seem like you have any sense of what the real topic of a conversation is? This stuff doesn’t have anything to do with what we were just talking about, does it?’

  Drinion looks slightly puzzled for a moment, but not hurt or embarrassed. Rand says: ‘What makes you imagine anybody possibly even wants to hear some long job-related noodle you don’t even know about if the whole point of being here is that it’s Friday and we don’t have to think about shit like this for two days?’

  Drinion says: ‘You don’t normally choose to devote time to matters like this unless you’re clocked in, you’re saying.’

  ‘I’m talking about loneliness and people paying attention to you or not and you launch into this whole long like thing about radio expense protocols and it turns out the point of the whole thing is only that there’s procedural stuff you don’t know?’

  Drinion nods in a thoughtful way. ‘I understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘What do you imagine is going through the other person’s mind when you’re ranting like that? Do you just automatically assume they’re interested? Who cares about radio accounting if you’re not tasked to it?’

  Beth Rath is now seated between Keith Sabusawa and somebody else at the bar, all on stools in identical stool-postures that to Meredith Rand always look vulturelike. Howard Shearwater is playing pinball, at which he’s said to excel—his pinball machine is the more distant one from their table, and the angle of incidence doesn’t allow Rand to see the design or motif of the machine. The sun is not yet all the way down but the bar’s low lights in the artificial tiki torches on the wall have come up, and the air-conditioner vents’ rate seems at least to have been cranked back a bit. As baseball fans, real Peorians tend to be equally divided between the Cubs and the Cardinals, though in this era the Cubs fans tend to keep their partisanship more to themselves. Baseball on television is just about the most tedious type of sport there is, in Meredith Rand’s husband’s opinion. It may or may not rain, as usual. There are different-shaped puddles of condensation on all the places that do or did have a glass, and none of these ever evaporate. Drinion still hasn’t spoken or fidgeted or changed his facial expression much at all. This now right here is cigarette number three since 5:10. There are no attempted rings.

  Meredith Rand says: ‘What are you thinking now?’

  ‘I’m thinking that you raise a number of points that seem valid, and that I’m going to maybe have to give the whole matter of what someone is thinking when I’m speaking to them about something more thought.’

  Rand does the thing she can do where she smiles broadly with everything except the muscles around her eyes. ‘Are you patronizing me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  ‘No. I can tell you’ve become angry, though.’

  She exhales two brief tus
ks of smoke. Because of less backdraft from the air-conditioner vent, some of the smoke is going into Shane Drinion’s face. ‘Did you know that my husband is dying?’

  ‘No. I didn’t,’ Drinion says.

  They both sit for a moment, doing the respective sorts of facial things they are inclined to do.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say you’re sorry?’

  ‘What?’ Drinion says.

  ‘It’s what you say. It’s the standard etiquette thing to say.’

  ‘Well, I was considering this fact in the light of your asking me about sexual feelings and loneliness. Receipt of this fact changes the context for that conversation, it seems.’

  ‘Should I ask how so?’ Meredith Rand says.

  Drinion inclines his head. ‘I don’t know that.’

  ‘Did you think finding out he was dying might mean you’ve got some kind of sexual chance with me?’

  ‘I had not thought that, no.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  Beth Rath has started back over to the table with her mouth partly open to maybe say something or try to join the conversation, but Meredith Rand gives her a look that makes Rath turn around and return to her place on the red leather stool at the bar, where Ron is changing out the club soda cartridge. Meredith Rand puts her purse on the table and rises to recharge her glass.

  ‘Do you want another Heineken or whatever?’

  ‘I still haven’t finished this one.’

  ‘You don’t exactly party down, do you?’

  ‘I get full quickly. My stomach doesn’t seem to hold very much.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  Rand, Rath, and Sabusawa have some kind of quick conversation while Ron is making Meredith Rand’s gin and tonic, which Drinion doesn’t hear, though he can see slight reflections of the people at the bar in Meibeyer’s front window. Nobody knows what he looks like or what his face is doing as he sits at the table alone, or even what he’s looking at.

  ‘Do you know what cardiomyopathy is?’ Rand asks when she sits back down. She looks at her purse, which is almost more of a bag in terms of shape. Half the gin and tonic is already gone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘I think it’s a disease of the heart.’

  Meredith Rand taps her cigarette lighter experimentally against her front teeth. ‘You seem like a good listener. Are you? You want to hear a sad story?’

  After a moment, Drinion says: ‘I’m not certain how to answer that.’

  ‘I mean my sad story. Part of mine. Everybody’s got their sad story. You want to hear part of mine?’

  ‘…’

  ‘It’s actually a disease of the muscle of the heart. Cardiomyopathy.’

  ‘I thought that the heart was itself a muscle,’ Shane Drinion says.

  ‘It means as opposed to the vasculature of the heart. Trust me, I’m kind of an expert on this. What they call heart disease is the major vessels. As in a heart attack. Cardiomyopathy is the muscle of the heart, the stuff of it, the thing that squeezes and relaxes. Especially when it’s of unknown cause. Which it is. They aren’t sure what caused it. The theory was that he’d had a terrible flu or some virus when he was in college that seemed to get better but nobody knew it had settled in his myocardium somehow, the muscle tissue of his heart, and gradually infected it and compromised it.’

  ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘You’re thinking how sad, maybe, to fall in love and get married and then have your husband get a fatal disease—because it is, it’s fatal. Like the rich kid in that movie, what’s it called, except there it’s the wife, who’s kind of a lump if you want my opinion, but the rich kid gets disinherited and everything and marries her and then she gets fatally ill. It’s a tear-jerker.’ Rand’s eyes, too, change slightly when she’s scanning some kind of memory. ‘It’s a little like congestive heart failure. Actually, in many cases of cardiomyopathy the actual cause of death when the person finally dies is listed as congestive heart failure.’

  Shane Drinion has his hand around his glass with a little beer but does not raise the glass. ‘Is this because the muscle of the heart becomes compromised and can’t squeeze well enough to circulate the blood?’

  ‘Yes, and he had it before we got married, he had it even before I met him, and I met him when I was super young, I wasn’t even eighteen yet. And he was thirty-two, and a ward attendant in Zeller.’ She is extracting a cigarette. ‘Do you happen to know what Zeller is?’

  ‘I think you mean the mental health center building near the Exposition Gardens on Northmoor.’ Drinion’s bottom is hovering very slightly—perhaps one or two millimeters at most—above the seat of his wooden chair.

  ‘It’s actually on University, the main entrance is.’

  ‘…’

  ‘It’s a psych hospital. Do you know what a psych hospital is?’

  ‘In a general sense, yes.’

  ‘Are you just being polite?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The bin. The mental Marriott. A nut ward. Do you want to know why I was there?’

  ‘Were you visiting someone important to you?’

  ‘Negative. I was a patient there for three and a half weeks. Do you want to know how come?’

  ‘I can’t tell whether you’re really asking me, or whether this question is simply an overture to telling me.’

  Meredith Rand makes her mouth into a sardonic sideways shape and clicks her tongue a couple times. ‘All right. That’s kind of annoying, but I can’t say you don’t have a point. I was a cutter. Do you know what a cutter is?’

  There is no difference—Drinion’s face remains composed and neutral without seeming in any way to be trying to stay neutral. Meredith Rand has a very good subliminal antenna for this sort of thing—she’s allergic to performance. ‘My assumption is that it’s someone who cuts.’

  ‘Was that like a witticism?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t know why I did it. I’m still not sure, except he taught me that trying to analyze it or understand all the whys was bullshit—the only important thing was knocking it off, because if I didn’t it would land me right back in the psych ward, that the idea I could hide it with bandages or sleeves and keep it a totally private thing that didn’t affect anybody else was arrogant bullshit. And he’s right. No matter where you do it or how carefully you do it, there’s always a time when somebody sees something and says something, or when somebody is funking around in the hall and pretending to beg you to cut algebra and go to the park and get stoned and climb on the statue of Lincoln and grabs your arm too hard and some of the cuts open up and you bleed through your long sleeves, even if you’ve got two shirts on, and somebody sends for the nurse even if you tell them to fuck off and it was an accident and you’ll just go home and get it seen to at home. There always comes a day when somebody sees something in your face that tells them you’re lying and then the next thing you know there you are, in a lit room with your arms and legs uncovered, trying to explain yourself to somebody with zero sense of humor, actually a little bit like talking to you right now.’ With a quick tight smile.

  Drinion nods slowly.

  ‘That was kind of nasty. I need to apologize for that.’

  ‘I don’t have a very good sense of humor, it’s true.’

  ‘This is different. It’s like they do this initial intake interview, with a legal form on a white clipboard they ask you questions from as required by law, and if they ask you if you ever hear voices and you say sure, I hear yours right now asking me a question, they don’t think it’s funny or even acknowledge you’re even trying to be funny but just sit there looking at you. Like they’re a computer and you can’t proceed until you give the properly formatted answer.’

  ‘The question itself seems ambiguous. For instance, what voices are they referring to?’

  ‘So they have, like, three different kinds of wards at Zeller, and two of them are locked, and the one they put me on as a mental patient is th
e one that he also worked on, on the third floor, with mostly rich girls from the Heights who wouldn’t eat or took a bottle of Tylenol when their boyfriend dumped them, et cetera, or stuck their finger down their throat every time they ate something. There were a lot of barfers there.’

  Drinion keeps looking at her. Now no part of his bottom or back is touching the chair, although the separation is so slight that no one else could see this unless somehow a very bright light were shined from the side, illuminating the slight gap between Drinion and the chair.

  ‘You might be asking how I got in there, since we definitely were not rich or from the Heights.’

  ‘…’

  ‘The answer is good insurance through my dad’s union. He ran the baling wire line at American Twine and Wire from 1956 until it closed down. The only days of work he ever missed were some of the days I was in Zeller.’ Rand makes a very brief distended horror-face whose exact meaning is unclear and lights the cigarette she has been holding and looking at. ‘To give you an idea.’

  Drinion finishes the last bit of the Michelob and wipes his mouth a little on the napkin the glass has rested on. He then replaces the napkin and the glass. His beer’s been at room temperature for much too long to produce any new condensation.

  ‘And it’s true that he already looked sick when I met him. Not gross or anything, it’s not like he oozed or went around coughing or anything, but pale, even for winter. He looked delicate, like somebody old. He was totally skinny, too, although compared to the anorexic girls it was hard to see right off how skinny he was—it was more like he was so pale and got tired easily; he couldn’t move very fast. With the terrible dark circles under his eyes. Some of the time he looked tired or sleepy, although it was also late at night, because he was the second-shift ward attendant on the ward, from five to the middle of the night when the night guy came on, who we never even really saw except for breakfast or if somebody had a crisis in the middle of the night.’

  ‘He wasn’t a doctor, then,’ Drinion says.

  ‘The doctors were a joke. At Zeller. The psychiatrists. They came in in the afternoon for like an hour, in suits—they always wore nice suits; they were professionals—and talked more to the RNs and the parents when they came in, mostly. And then they’d finally come in and you’d have a weird, stiff conversation, like they were your dad or something. And they had zero sense of humor, and looked at their watch the whole time. Even the ones who you could halfway see might be human beings were more interested in your case, not in you. Like in what your case might mean, how it was like or different than other cases in the textbooks. Don’t get me started on the medical establishment at psych wards. They were bizarre to deal with; it could really mess with your head. If you said you hated it there and it wasn’t helping and you wanted to leave, they saw it as a symptom of your case, not as you wanting to leave. It was like you weren’t a human being, you were a piece of machinery they could take apart and figure out how it worked.’ She snaps and unsnaps her cigarette case. ‘It was really scary, actually, because they could sign papers to keep you in there or move you to a worse ward, the other locked ward was a lot worse and people talked about it, you don’t want to hear about it. Or they could decide to give you meds that turned some of the girls into zombies; it’s like one day they were there and the next there was nobody home. Like zomboids in really nice bathrobes from home. It was just very creepy.’