The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  Drinion says: ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘Exactly. That he knew me, understood me, was interested in understanding. People always say that, understand, I understand you, please help us understand you.’

  ‘I’ve said it several times, too, while we’ve been talking,’ Drinion says.

  ‘Do you know how many times?’

  ‘Nine, though I believe only four in quite the sense that you appear to be referring to, if I understand what you mean.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘My using the word understand again just now?’

  Rand makes an exasperated expression and directs it off to one side and then the other as if there were still more people at the table with them.

  Drinion says: ‘Not if I follow the sense of understand you mean, which doesn’t refer to understanding a statement or somebody’s implication but more a person, which seems to me less cognitive than a matter of empathy or I think even compassion would be the word you mean by this kind of understanding.’

  ‘The thing,’ she says, ‘is he really did. Use whatever word you want. Nobody knew these things he told me—one of them I don’t even think I knew, really, until he just put it out there in blunt words.’

  ‘This made an impression,’ Drinion says helpfully.

  Rand ignores him. ‘He was a natural therapist. He said it was his calling, his art. The way painting or being able to dance really well or to sit there reading the same thing for hours on end without moving or getting distracted is other people’s calling.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Would you say you have a calling?’ the POTEX asks Shane Drinion.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘He wasn’t a doctor, but when he saw somebody in there he thought he could maybe help, he’d try to help them. Otherwise he was more like a security guard, he said.’

  ‘…’

  ‘One time he said he was more just like a mirror. In the intense conversations. If he seemed mean or stupid, what it really meant was that you saw yourself as mean and stupid. If one time he struck you as smart and sensitive, it meant you were smart and sensitive that day—he just showed you what was there.

  ‘He looked terrible, but that was also part of the power of sitting in there with him and doing these intense bits of work. He looked so sick and washed out and delicate that you never got the idea that here was this smug, normal, healthy, rich doctor judging you and being glad he wasn’t you or just seeing you as a case to resolve. It was like really talking to somebody, with him.’

  ‘Anyone could tell that he made a great impression on you in this difficult time, your future husband,’ Shane Drinion says.

  ‘Are you being ironic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you thinking, like, here’s this messed-up seventeen-year-old falling in love with the therapist-type adult figure that she thinks is the only one that understands?’

  Shane Drinion shakes his head exactly twice. ‘That’s not what I’m thinking.’ It occurs to Rand that he could conceivably be bored out of his skull and she’d have no way of telling.

  ‘Because that’s pathetic,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘That’s like the oldest story in the book, and however messed up you might think this is, it sure wasn’t that.’ She’s sitting up very straight now for a moment. ‘Do you know what monopsony is?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  Shane Drinion clears his throat slightly. ‘It’s the reverse of monopoly. There’s a single buyer and multiple sellers.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I think bids for government contracts, such as when the Service upgraded its card readers at the La Junta center last year, are an example of a monopsonistic market.’

  ‘All right. Well, he taught me that one, too, although in a more of a personal context.’

  ‘As in a metaphor,’ Drinion says.

  ‘Do you see what it could have to do with loneliness?’

  Another very brief moment of inward scanning. ‘I can see how it might lead to distrust, since contract-bidding situations are susceptible to rigging, dishonest cost-projections, and things like that.’

  ‘You’re a very literal person, did you know that?’

  ‘…’

  ‘Here’s the literal thing, then,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Say you’re pretty, and there’s things about being pretty that you like—you get treated special, and people pay attention to you and talk about you, and if you walk in someplace you can almost feel the room change, and you like it.’

  ‘It’s a form of power,’ Drinion says.

  ‘But at the same time you also have less power,’ Meredith Rand says, ‘because the power you have is all totally connected to prettiness, and at some point you realize that the prettiness is like a kind of box you’re always in, or prison, that nobody’s ever going to see you or think about you apart from the prettiness.’

  ‘…’

  ‘It’s not like I even thought I was all that pretty,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Especially in high school.’ She’s rolling a cigarette back and forth between her fingers but not lighting it. ‘But I sure knew everybody else thought I was pretty. Ever since like twelve, people were saying how lovely and beautiful I was, and in high school I was one of the foxes, and everybody knew who they were, and it became sort of official, socially: I was pretty, I was desirable, I had the power. Do you get this?’

  ‘I think so,’ Shane Drinion says.

  ‘Because this is what intense meant—he and I really talked about it, the prettiness. It was the first time I ever really talked about it with anybody. Especially a guy. I mean except for “You’re so beautiful, I love you” and trying to put their tongue in your ear. Like that was all you needed to hear, that you were beautiful, and you were supposed to fall over and let them boff you.’

  ‘…’

  ‘If you’re pretty,’ Meredith Rand says, ‘it can be hard to respect guys.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Drinion says.

  ‘Because you never even get to see what they might really be like. Because the minute you’re around, they change; if they’ve decided you’re beautiful, they change. It’s like the thing in physics—if you’re there to look at the experiment, it supposedly messes up the results.’

  ‘There’s a paradox involved in it,’ Drinion says.

  ‘And except for a while you like it. You like the attention. Even if they change, you know it’s you making them change. You’re attractive, they’re attracted to you.’

  ‘Hence the tongues in the ear.’

  ‘Although with a lot of them it turns out it’s got the opposite effect. They almost avoid you. They get scared or nervous—it makes them want something, and they’re embarrassed or scared of wanting it—they can’t talk to you or even look at you, or else they start putting on a little show like Second-Knuckle Bob, this flirty sexist thing where they think they’re doing it to impress you but really it’s to impress other boys, to show they’re not afraid. And you haven’t even done or said anything to start it; all you have to do is just be there, and everybody changes. Presto change-o.’

  ‘It sounds taxing,’ Drinion says.

  Meredith Rand lights the cigarette she’s been holding. ‘Plus other girls hate you; they don’t even know you or talk to you and they decide they hate you, just because of how the boys all react—like you’re a threat to them, or they assume you’re a stuck-up bitch without even trying to get to know you.’ She has a definite style of averting her head to exhale and then bringing it back. Most people think she’s very direct.

  ‘I wasn’t a ditz,’ she says. ‘I was good with figures. I won the algebra prize in tenth-grade algebra. But of course nobody cared about me being smart or good at math. Even the men teachers got all googly and nervous or pervy and flirty when I came up after or something to ask about something. Like I was a fox and there was no way anybody could ever even think to see anything more than that.

  ‘Listen,’ Mer
edith Rand says. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not like I think I’m all that pretty. I’m not saying I’m beautiful. Actually I’ve never thought I was all that beautiful. My eyebrows are too heavy, for one thing. I’m not going to go around plucking them, but they’re too heavy. And my neck is, like, twice as long as a normal person’s, when I look in the mirror.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Not that it even matters.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No, I understand it doesn’t really matter,’ Drinion says.

  ‘Except it does. You don’t get it. The prettiness thing—at least when you’re that age, it’s like a kind of trap. There’s a greedy part of you that really likes the attention. You’re special, you’re desirable. It’s easy to start thinking of the prettiness as you, like it’s all you’ve got, it’s what makes you special. In your designer jeans and little sweaters you can put in the dryer so they’re even tighter. Walking around like that.’ Although it’s not as if what Meredith Rand wears at the Post is effacing or dowdy. They’re professional ensembles, well within code, but many of the Post’s examiners still bite their knuckles when she goes by, especially in cold months, when the extremely dry air produces static cling.

  She says: ‘The flip side being how you also start understanding that you’re really just a piece of meat. Is what you are. Really desirable meat, but also that you’ll never get taken seriously and never, like, be the president of a bank or something because no one will ever be able to see past the prettiness, the prettiness is what affects them and what makes them feel anything, and that’s all that matters to them, and it’s hard not to get sucked into that, to start, like, arranging yourself and seeing yourself the same way.’

  ‘You mean seeing and reacting to people through whether or not they’re attractive?’

  ‘No, no.’ You can see that Meredith Rand would have a hard time quitting cigarettes, since she uses the way she smokes and exhales and moves her head to convey a lot of affect. ‘I mean starting to see yourself as a piece of meat, that the only thing you’ve got is your looks and the way you affect boys, guys. You start doing it without even knowing you’re doing it. And it’s scary, because at the same time it also feels like a box; you know there’s more to you inside you because you can feel it, but nobody else will ever know—not even other girls, who either hate you or are scared of you, because you’re a monopsony, or else if they’re also the foxes or the cheerleaders they’re competing with you and feel like they have to do this whole competitive catty thing that guys don’t have any idea of, but trust me, it can be really cruel.’

  The fact that one of Drinion’s nostrils is slightly larger than the other sometimes makes it look as though he’s cocking his head a little bit, even when he is not. It’s somewhat parallel to the mouth-breathing thing. Meredith Rand usually interprets expressionlessness as inattention, the way someone’s face blanks out when you’re talking and they’re pretending to listen but not really listening, but this is not the way Drinion’s expressionlessness seems. Also, it’s either her imagination or Drinion is sitting up steadily straighter and taller, because he seems to be slightly taller than when the tête-à-tête started. A collection of different kinds of old-fashioned fedoras and homburgs and various business hats glued or pinned somehow to a varnished rosewood board that had been visible on the opposite wall of Meibeyer’s over Drinion’s head is now partly obscured by the crown of his head and the slight cowlick that sticks up at his round head’s apex. Drinion is actually levitating slightly, which is what happens when he is completely immersed; it’s very slight, and no one can see that his bottom is floating slightly above the seat of the chair. One night someone comes into the office and sees Drinion floating upside down over his desk with his eyes glued to a complex return, Drinion himself unaware of the levitating thing by definition, since it is only when his attention is completely on something else that the levitation happens.

  ‘Which is part of the feeling of the box,’ Meredith Rand is continuing. ‘There’s the feeling, which in teenagers is really bad anyway, of feeling like nobody can really ever know you or love you for who you are because they can’t really see you and for some reason you won’t let them even though you feel like you want them to. But it’s also at the same time a feeling that you know it’s boring and immature and like a bad type of movie problem, “Boo hoo, no one can love me for who I am,” so you’re also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you’re feeling it, the loneliness, so you don’t even have any sympathy for yourself. And this is what we talked about, this is what he told me about, that he knew without me telling him: how lonely I was, and how the cutting had something to do with the prettiness and feeling like I had no right to complain but still being really unhappy at the same time believing that not being pretty seemed like it would be the end of the world, I’d just be a piece of meat nobody wanted instead of a piece of meat they did happen to want. Like I was trapped inside it, and I still really had no right to complain about it because look at all the girls who were jealous and thought no one who’s pretty could be lonely or have any problems, and even if I did complain, then all the complaining was banal, he taught me banal, and tête-à-tête, and how this can become part of the whole loneliness—the truth of saying “I’m just meat, people only care about me as beautiful, no one cares what I really am inside, I’m lonely” is totally boring and banal, like something corny in Redbook, not beautiful or unique, or special. Which was the first time I thought of the scars and the cutting as letting the unbeautiful inside truth come out, be on the outside, even if I was also hiding it under long sleeves—although your blood is really actually quite pretty if you really look at it, I mean when it first comes out, although the cut has to be very careful and fine and not too deep so the blood just more appears as a line that kind of slowly wells up, so it’s thirty seconds or more before you have to wipe because it’s starting to run.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Shane Drinion asks.

  Meredith Rand exhales sharply and looks right at him. ‘What do you mean does it? I don’t do it anymore. I never have, since I met him. Because he more or less told me all this and told me the truth, that it doesn’t ultimately matter why I do it or what it, like, represents or what it’s about.’ Her gaze is very level and matter-of-fact. ‘All that matters is that I was doing it and to stop doing it. That was it. Unlike the doctors and small groups that were all about your feelings and why, as though if you knew why you did it you’d magically be able to stop. Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us—they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘You only stop if you stop. Not if you wait for somebody to explain it in some magic way that will presto change-o make you stop.’ She makes a sardonic flourish with her cigarette hand as she says presto change-o.

  Drinion: ‘It sounds as though he really helped you.’

  ‘He was very blunt,’ she says. ‘It turned out being blunt is something he’s proud of—it’s part of his act that there is no act. Only I only found that out later.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You can see, of course, how having somebody have this kind of compassion and understanding of what’s really going on inside you, how this would affect somebody that thought her big problem was the impossibility of anybody seeing past the prettiness to what was inside. Would you like to know his name?’

  Drinion blinks once. He doesn’t blink very often. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Edward. “Ed Rand, partial BS,” he’d say. So you can see why I was pretty much primed to fall in love with him.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘So I don’t need to spell it out,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘In a way, if he was a perv or a creep that played things that way, it would be a perfect setup for getting pretty young girls to fall for him. Work in a place that everybody comes in all mucked up
and lonely and in crisis, and find the young girls, whose basic problem is probably always going to be their looks. So all he had to do, if he was smart, and he’d seen hundreds of messed-up girls come through, who starved themselves, or stole clothes from shopping malls, or ate and couldn’t stop eating, or cut on themselves, or got into drugs, or kept running away with older black guys and getting dragged back over and over again by the parents, whatever, you get the idea, but that all had the same really essential problem, each time one of them came in, no matter what they were officially in for, which was not feeling like they were really known and understood and that was the cause of their loneliness, of the constant pain they were in that made them cut, or eat, or not eat, or give blowjobs to the whole basketball team in a row out back behind the cafeteria dumpster, which is what one cheerleader I know for a total fact did all the time junior year, although she was never really quite one of the foxes because she was known as such a total slut; a lot of the foxes just hated her.’ Rand looks briefly right at Drinion to see whether there is any visible reaction to the word blowjob, which he does not appear to provide. ‘And it’d be easy to get them in the conference room, and to tell them some stuff about themselves that totally shocked and amazed them because they hadn’t ever told anybody about it and yet it was totally easy to spot and know about because at the core it was all the same.’

  Drinion asks: ‘Did you tell him this, during the therapy sessions that were designated as intense?’

  Rand shakes her head as she extinguishes the Benson & Hedges cigarette. ‘They weren’t therapy sessions. He hated that term, all that terminology. They were just tête-à-têtes, talking.’ Again she uses the same number of stabs and partial rolls to extinguish it, although with less force than when she’s appeared impatient or angry with Shane Drinion. She says: ‘That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn’t realize, or like they couldn’t realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn’t a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution—he said just look at Christianity and the whole Christian Church.’