7 (Now you can probably see why this occasional ‘author’ appositive thing is sometimes necessary; it turned out that there were two separate David Wallaces posted at the Midwest REC, of whom the one who ended up accused of impersonation was guess who.)
1 Remote Fact Acquisition
2 Spontaneous Data Intrusion
* Meredith Rand becomes no less comely or beautiful when she speaks to someone else about ritualistically cutting herself and being pink-paper’d into the Zeller Center. But she does look abruptly older or more drawn. You can see, not just imagine but see the way her face will look at forty—which after all, as is well known, will be only a different form of beauty, a less received and more severe or ‘earned’ beauty, in which the emergent flaws and lines do not mar her beautiful features but rather frame them, show seams in a face that is made and not just stamped out at random. Meredith Rand’s nose and chin’s slight cleft shine slightly in the red light of the walls’ fake flames.
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by David Foster Wallace Literary Trust
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: April 2011
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The following chapters have appeared previously, in slightly different form, in the following publications:
Chapter 6, published as “Good People” in The New Yorker.
Chapter 16, published as “A New Examiner” in The Lifted Brow and Harper’s.
Chapter 33, published as “Wiggle Room” in The New Yorker.
Chapter 35, published as “The Compliance Branch” in Harper’s.
ISBN: 978-0-316-17529-6
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel Page 62