Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  Now “To life,” intoned the Ranger, nose full of dust and buzzard, eyes to quartz glitter by vegetable hooch, face shining with a odd and ignorant presence. Voice was still different, smoother. Young. Also familiar.

  T. Rex Minogue and his personal fowl looked at Simple Ranger. Asked him some soft and intimately acquainted questions about the variable various shapes of the dusted Big Dirt air patterns. Asserted he could hear the special whistle of the Ranger’s aloft land in certain storms of darkness, grey. Ranger done nodded. His face come and went.

  “But not a bad career, Ranger,” T. Rex continued, referring here to the governmental dust-watcher job Simple Ranger had had for a solid forty. But except T. Rex said wasn’t actually the Ranger who had got hisself the cushy WPA angle; fellow with the real cushiony arrangement was a certain old and hold-out government clerk in Washington, D.C., who’d got his antique job under the original F. Delano R. Clerk was the one had himself the cush: his entire and salaried career was just sending Simple Ranger, plus this certain blind octogenerial Japanese sub-sentry in Peuget, Wash., their checks ever month. Clerk lived in big-city Washington and owned TV, T. Rex revelated. Simple Ranger commenced to feeling along his own jaw, thrown by new fits down into a jelly jar of introversion and temporary funk. And just internal theorizing on how T. Rex Minogue possessed these far-off historical facts sent some civilians into a state of shivering that had T. Rex’s vulture agitated and hissing, plus opening and closing its clerical wings, thus hiding and revealing by turns the spectral and disquieting (calm, though) face of T. Rex Minogue, making his IMPENDING eye show red fire. The rows of audobonial Dirt-scavengers was still outside, now a tinch closer to the bar windows, watching, lined up.

  Things was threatening to get surreal until Glory Joy duBoise rose up, tall and shaky, looking the worse for a mixture of Rolling Rock and yam whiskey, which your thinking person don’t want to mix, and proclamated in a falsetto of disbelief and anger that: one) she disbelieved T. Rex’s sitting here, leguminous cool and unscathed, if her own Chuck Nunn was as desirous to scathe him right there in his parlor as T. Rex implied; and that: two) she was angry as a animal, plus forlorn and subject to devastation following the loss of Chuck Nunn Junior due to the hurtful precariousness of his post-accident temper, plus eyes, angry as a animal at the galaxy in general and T. Rex in especial for his causal part in the above precariousness, forlornness, and devastation; and that the malignant T. Rex Minogue just better come out clean about the whereabouts of Nunn if he didn’t want his wrinkled and senescent butt to make the acquaintance of Glory Joy’s high-heeled shoe, but good. And T. Rex, whose historical thirst for the self and corporeality of Glory Joy duBoise is the stuff of Minogue Oklahoma myth—a whole nother story, I informed the funked and othered Ranger

  —T. Rex, whose passion for our town’s lone arm-wave at beauty is legend, glanced, gazed, and stared at Glory Joy, til we all of us got skittery. T. Rex and G. Joy faced each other cross ten feet of plywood room like fields of energy, all energetic with lust mixed up with regret, on one hand, rage and repulsion mixed up with a dire need for knowledge of Nunn, on the other. Simple Ranger’s face had checked entirely out: the old and historical and adental man was dreaming out through the window into the geometry of bird and soil that stretched to the sky’s tight burlap seam.

  “I took the boy upstairs,” T. Rex croaked into his box. “Took him upstairs to my own boodwar and to the window and I showed the boy what was outside, is how I come out of the titantic plus miraculous struggle.” Addressed himself to Glory Joy, plus to Simple Ranger, who besides looking checked-out now was looking also strangely odd, bigger, eyes both here and not, his head’s outline too focused, some deep wrinkles in his face, stained by dust for all time, like slashes of No. 1 pencil. T. Rex touched his fowl’s claw with speculation, rue:

  “Took the boy to my own window and opened her up. It was mornin. Three months exact since we buried my brother, who got consumed by my liquor, by poetic burnings and yearnings, by grief and legalities on account of under-influence driving and the eyes and mind of Chuck and Mona May Nunn’s boy.”

  “What I see,” whispered the big sharp clear new Ranger in a smooth new clear young voice, his paperskinned hands steady around his jar of liquor. There was non-spectral colors in his eyes.

  “Ranger?”

  “What was outside?” said Glory Joy.

  “Was and is,” vibrated T. Rex Minogue. “Showed the boy where it all blew to. Showed him what his seatbelt done left him to look at and be.” Looked around. “Made the sucker sniff and see.” Drank up.

  “Made him smell death on your own wind? Death he’d missed by a impacted whisker, zif that was a prize? Made him read IMPENDING and DOOM, CANCER? Introduced him to buzzards and such fowl?”

  The birds was at the windows, now. All over them. Ranks broke. Bar all dark. Each window covered and pocked with a mabusity of cold red observational buzzard eyes. Dry rasp of orange claws going for purchase on the dusty frames and panes. We was on exhibit to animals.

  “Miss Glory Joy,” T. Rex said, “I knocked that boy upside the back. Out come the eyes, hangin. The eyes Drs. me and V.V. paid for put back together after they was busted.”

  “Made him think he owed you his eyes?” I incredulized.

  “Ranger, tell John Billy here he’s missin a point,” said T. Rex.

  “Don’t owe my eyes to nought but the clean high wind,” whispered Simple Ranger.

  Glory Joy stared. “Your eyes?”

  “Knocked that boy’s eyes loose, out they come, hangin,” recollected Minogue. “I lean his puppy ass out the window so he’s dangling his eyes out over the land. Wind blows them eyes around. Sucker can see straight down into everything there is.”

  We was all looking at the new Ranger, tall and straight and other. Each window a smeared tray of cold red watching marbles. Glory Joy took back her seat, dizzy with mix. T. Rex Minogue lifted his jar of deep orange up to the fly-speckled overhead light, swirled it round.

  “You brought Chuck Nunn Junior’s eyes out his head and made him look at dirt and brush and soil and fowls?” I said. I was pissed off. “You show him the waist-deep shit we all grew up in, like it’s a gift from you to him? Grey sights and greyer smells we can’t get out our own heads, and for that he declines to scathe you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Don’t believe it for nothing,” Glory Joy wailed. (Woman could wail.) “T. Rex done something sinister to Chuck Junior, is what happened.”

  I agreed loudly. Plus two civilians, as well, with the sinister part.

  The ceiling commenced to creak and precipitate dust, on account of the immense and shifting clerical weight on top. We was in the belly of something black and orange and numerous.

  Now: “Where it all blew to,” whispered the smooth steely Ranger. I remarked how his jelly jar’s colors was overhung with lush and various floras. Was me asked Simple Ranger how floras got in his liquor.

  “Gents, lady,” smiled T. Rex, “in regard for your community selves I’m here today public to say that me and Chuck and Mona May’s boy’s struggle ended where all things titantic end. In meadow-physics. We done some together, that day. Some macrocosmic speculation.”

  This one previous civilian, cleft palate, red iron hair, up and levitates. We look up at his Keds. He asks the air in front of him: “Where did Minogue Oklahoma blow to?”

  Commenced to just rain ceiling-dust.

  “Boys, wrap yourselves around something affirmative,” said T. Rex, his domestic bird now holding his box to his throat with one savvy claw. “Remember what’s the next world and what ain’t. Minogue blew to Minogue, neighbors. See you selves. You, me, the corporeally phenomenal Glory Joy, the Ranger especial, we been swirlin and blowin in and out Minogue land since twinkles commenced in our Daddies’ eyes.”

  “Minogue is you, Minogue?” slurred Glory Joy duBoise. I couldn’t say skank. We was all sleepy with vegetable fuss.

  “Minogue blew t
o Minogue,” Minogue said. “Under Dirt’s curve she’s whirled and fertilized her own self into a priceless poor. Lush, dead, elsewhere.”

  “So where is it at, Minogue,” asks the palatal man, aloft in a cumulus of webs and dust and creak. “Where’s the meat of the bones we crawl on, plus eke out of, plus die and sink back in without no sound.”

  “Ain’t no difference,” sighed the Ranger. He’d growed him half a beard in just time. He sniffed at his liquor.

  “Where you at, there, Ranger?” smiled a uncertain and far-off T. Rex.

  “At the window,” whispered the Ranger, at the window. He stared into a wormy and boiling black peppered with eyes, red. “Me and Mr. Minogue is at the window looking down at what the life and death of every soul from Comanche to Nunn done gone to fertilize and plenish.”

  “Showed him what we own,” said T. Rex. He smelled at his old hands. “Showed what we all done gave via the planetarial actions of movement, wind, top-soil artistics, to the landed spread my own personal Daddy first plowed. That I first fertilized to humud black with the juices of his arrow-punctured self and my grief-withered Momma.”

  “Ain’t no Chuck Nunn from Minogue Oklahoma that ain’t eternal and aloft,” sighed the Ranger at the window. The cleft rigger got levitationally joined by some more civilians.

  Things was dark and singular.

  “Aloft,” intoned the damaged man. “My eyes are free of my head and flat grey temper and I am able to see directly below my dangling self the plumed and billowing clusters of the tops of trees of meat, dressed and heavy with the sweet white tissued blossoms indigenous to Minogue, fertilized by the wind-blown fruit of the toneless Curve on which me, my woman, my people move.”

  “Indigenous?” I slurred.

  “That voice there, John Billy, that voice there is Chuck Junior’s voice,” said Glory Joy, flat, toneless, curved, Klan-white.

  “When the high winds blew off Country,” the Ranger said, “I was able to hear the infinitely many soft sounds of the millions of delicate petals striking and rubbing together. They joined and clove together in wind. My eyes was blowing everywhere. And the rush of perfume sent up to me by the agitation of the clouds of petals nearly blew me out that window. Delighted. Aloft. Semi-moral. New.”

  Glory Joy duBoise up and levitated. Also myself. Soon we was all uncommitted except to air and vision. T. Rex stayed where he was at, under us, by our pyramid of bottles studded with jars.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Buzzards was gone. Flown home with a violence that set the edge-of-Minogue soil to lifting and tearing, twisted and grey, only to get beat down by a sudden plus unheard-of rush of clean rain from a innocent and milk-white sky. It fell like linen-wear, strings of technical light. Other such things. Windows ran smeared, then clear, then the rain shut down as abruptly as it had etc. etc.

  The land commenced to look wounded. Dimpled puddles stretched off into nothing, outside—coins of water bright and clean and looking like open cancres in the red light of the low hurt red sun.

  “Fore I die,” whispered the malignified T. Rex, “I need to know where y’all think you live.” He looked up. Around. “It’s why I’m public today. Think what this is costing me. I need to know where y’all think you live at,” he wailed. (Sucker could wail, too, gravelly vibrator or no.) His fowl got ornery.

  “Maybe we’ll just have us some fine new liquor first,” whispers a aloft Ranger beside me, old, unbearded, sky-eyed. I saw for the first time how cataracted he was.

  T. Rex commenced to hand up jars. “Tell me, Ranger,” he said.

  “Lord but don’t it look clean,” I was saying over and over.

  “Show me the Chuck Nunn Junior I love, plus need,” Glory Joy petitioned to a T. Rex maneuvering into a position for looking up her dress.

  I grappled with some unsayably fearsome temptations to tell Chuck Nunn Junior’s loyal and near-lovely woman who in all this landed world I loved.

  “What’s all that again?” said the Ranger in a flat grey gurgle.

  “Have some liquor.”

  “Tell me where y’all think you live at.”

  Should of seen me grapple.

  9. MY NAME IS JOHN BILLY.

  Was me supposed to tell you how, on that one fine dark day a pentecost’s throw from Ascension, we all of us got levitationally aloft, moving around the seated form of Minogue Oklahoma’s expired T. Rex Minogue. How we passed, hand over hand, jar after jar of his unstable sweet-potato medicine, each jar deeper in color, duskier, til it got like the washed and bleeding land in the colored outside. How we all, even and especially Glory Joy, got glazed and apolitical, also torpid, docile, our minds in a deep loose neutral gear; how I started the story how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him all over again; and how at a point in time,

  which is where we lived at, if the sucker’d asked me,

  we all, me and civilians and Woman and old lone listening sky-eyed Ranger, we all crossed the thin line and slept. Aloft. How we dreamed a community dream of Chuck and Mona May Nunn’s good luck boy Chuck Junior, riding his own mixer and might and absent purpose high, chasing a temper, a Daddy, Simple Ranger’s DeSoto and farm, an everything of flora, sheep, soil, light, elements, through the windy fire of Oklahoma’s roaring, watching stars. Now go on and ask me if we wasn’t sorry we ever woke up. Go on.

  HERE AND THERE

  For K. Gödel

  ‘Her photograph tastes bitter to me. A show of hands on the part of those who are willing to believe that I kiss her photo? She’d not believe it, or it would make her sad, or rather it would make her angry and she would say you never kissed me the way you kiss my chemically bitter senior photo, the reasons you kiss my photo all have to do with you, not me.’

  ‘He didn’t really like to kiss me.’

  ‘On the back of the photo, beneath the remains of the reversible tape I had used to attach it carefully to the wall of my room at school, are written the words: “Received 3 February 1983; treasured as of that date.” ’

  ‘He didn’t like to kiss me. I could feel it.’

  ‘No contest to the charge that kissing an actual living girl is not my favorite boy-girl thing to do. It’s not a squeamishness issue, has nothing to do with the fact, noted somewhere, that kissing someone is actually sucking on a long tube the other end of which is full of excrement. For me it’s rather a sort of silliness issue. I feel silly. The girl and I are so close; the kiss contorts our mouths; noses get involved, bent; it’s as if we’re making faces at each other. At the time, with her, yes, I’d feel vaguely elsewhere, as a defense against myself. Admittedly this has to do with me, not her. But know that when I wasn’t with her I dreamed of the time I could kiss her again. I thought about her constantly. She filled my thoughts.’

  ‘What about my thoughts?’

  ‘And then let’s be equally candid about the utter lack of self-consciousness with which I’d kiss her elsewhere, slowly and in a way I’d found too soon she loved, and she’d admit she loved it, she does not lie, she’d admit to the pillow over her face to keep her quiet for the people in the other apartments. I knew her. I knew every curve, hollow, inlet and response of a body that was cool, hard, tight, waistless, vaguely masculine but still thoroughly exciting, quick to smile, quick to arch, quick to curl and cuddle and cling. I could unlock her like a differential, work her like an engine. Only when I was forced to be away at school did things mysteriously “change.” ’

  ‘I felt like there was something missing.’

  ‘I kiss her bitter photo. It’s cloudy from kisses. I know the outline of my mouth from her image. She continues to teach me without knowing.’

  ‘My feelings changed. It took time, but I felt like there was something missing. He just works all the time on well-formed formulas and poems and their rules. They’re the things that are important to him. He’d tell me he missed me and then stay away. I’m not angry but I’m selfish, I need a lot of attention. All the time apart gave me a chance to
do some thinking.’

  ‘All the time apart I thought of her constantly—but she says “My feelings have changed, what can I do, I can’t with Bruce anymore.” As if her feelings controlled her rather than vice versa. As if her feelings were something outside her, not in her control, like a bus she has to wait for.’

  ‘I met someone I like to spend time with. Someone here at home, at school. I met him in Stats. We got to be really good friends. It took time, but my feelings changed. Now I can’t with Bruce anymore. It doesn’t all have to do with him. It’s me, too. Things change.’

  ‘The photo is a Sears Mini-Portrait, too large for any wallet, so I’ve bought a special receptacle, a supporting framing folder of thick licorice cardboard. The receptacle is now wedged over the sun visor, along with a toll ticket, on the passenger side of my mother’s car. I keep the windows rolled up to negate any possibility of the photo’s blowing around, coming to harm. In June, in a car without air-conditioning, I keep the windows rolled up for the sake of her photo. What more should anyone be required to say?’

  “Bruce here I feel compelled to remind you that fiction therapy in order to be at all effective must locate itself and operate within a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space. It must be confronted as text which is to say fiction which is to say project. Sense one’s unease as you establish a line of distraction that now seems without either origin or end.”

  ‘This kind of fiction doesn’t interest me.’