Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  “Yes but remember we decided to construct an instance in which for once your interests are to be subordinated to those of another.”

  ‘So she’s to be reader, as well as object?’

  “See above for evidence that here she is so constructed as to be for once subject as well.”

  ‘A relief of contrivance, then? The therapeutic lie is to pretend the truth is a lie?’

  “Affording you a specular latitude perspective disinterest the opportunity to be emotionally generous.”

  ‘I think he should get to do whatever makes him feel better. I still care about him a lot. Just not in that way anymore.’

  ‘By late May 1983 her emotional bus has pulled out. I find in myself a need to get very away. To do a geographic. I am driving my mother’s enclosed car on hot Interstate 95 in southern Maine, moving north toward Prosopopeia, the home of my mother’s brother and his wife, almost at the Canadian border. Taking I-95 all the way from Worcester, Mass., lets me curve comfortably around the west of Boston, far from Cambridge, which I don’t wish ever to see again. I am Bruce, a hulking, pigeon-toed, blond, pale, red-lipped Midwestern boy, twenty-two, freshly graduated in electrical engineering from MIT, freshly patted on the head by assorted honors committees, freshly returned in putative triumph with my family to Bloomington, Indiana, there to be kicked roundly in the psychic groin by a certain cool, tight, waistless, etcetera, Indiana University graduate student, the object of my theoretical passion, distant affection and near-total loyalty for three years, my prospective fiancée as of Thanksgiving last.’

  ‘All I said to him then was do you think we could do it. He had asked me if he could ask me someday.’

  ‘I was home again for Christmas: as of the evening of 27/12 we were drinking champagne, lying on her leopard-skin rug.’

  ‘I told him a hundred times it wasn’t a leopard-skin rug: the last tenant just had a dog.’

  ‘We were discussing potential names for potential children. She said for a girl she might like “Kate.” ’

  ‘And then all of a sudden it’s like he suddenly wasn’t there.’

  ‘At this point she’d bring up how I seemed suddenly distant. I would explain in response that I had gotten, suddenly, over champagne, an idea for a truly central piece on the application of state variable techniques to the analysis of small-signal linear control systems. A piece that could have formed the crux of my whole senior year’s thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months.’

  ‘He went to his Dad’s office at the University and I didn’t see him for two days.’

  ‘She claims that’s when she began to feel differently about things. No doubt this new Statistics person comforted her while I spent two sleepless, Coke-and-pizza-fueled days on a piece that ended up empty and unfeasible. I went to her for comfort and found her almost hostile. Her eyes were dark and she was silent and trying with every fiber to look Unhappy. She practically had her forearm to her forehead. It was distressed-maiden/wronged-woman scenario.’

  ‘He only came to my apartment to sleep. He spent almost all Christmas break either working or sleeping, and he went back to Cambridge a week before he had to, to work on his thesis. His honors thesis is an epic poem about variable systems of information- and energy-transfer.’

  ‘She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the “me” she seemed so jealously to covet.’

  ‘He wants to be the first really great poet of technology.’

  ‘I see it like I see weather coming.’

  ‘He thinks art as literature will get progressively more mathematical and technical as time goes by. He says words as “correlative signifiers” are withering up.’

  ‘Words as fulfillers of the function of signification in artistic communication will wither like the rules of form before them. Meaning will be clean. No, she says? Assuming she cares enough even to try to understand? Then say that art necessarily exists in a state of tension with its own standards. That the clumsy and superfluous logos of all yesterdays gives way to the crisp and proper and satisfactory of any age. That poetry, like everything organized and understood under the rubric of Life, is dynamic. The superfluous always exists simply to have its ass kicked. The Norbert Wiener of today will be triumphant in the Darwinian arena of tomorrow.’

  ‘He said it was the most important thing in his life. What does that make me feel like?’

  ‘It’s Here. It’s Now. The next beauties will and must be new. I invited her to see a crystalline renaissance; cool and chip-flat; fibers of shine winking in aesthetic matrices under a spreading sodium dawn. What touches and so directs us is what applies. I sense the impending upheaval of a great cleaning, a coming tidiness foaming at every corner of meaning. I smell change, and relief at cost, like the musty promise of a summer rain. A new age and a new understanding of beauty as range, not locus. No more uni-object concepts, contemplations, warm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol, colossi; no more man, fist to brow or palm to décolletage, understood in terms of a thumping, thudding, heated Nature, itself conceived as colored, shaped, invested with odor, lending meaning in virtue of qualities. No more qualities. No more metaphors. Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata, correlation functions and spectra. Not sensuously here, but causally, efficaciously here. Here in the most intimate way. Plasma electronics, large-scale systems, operational amplification. I admit to seeing myself as an aesthetician of the cold, the new, the right, the truly and spotlessly here. Various as Poisson, morphically dense: pieces whose form, dimension, character, and implication can spread like sargasso from a single structured relation and a criterion of function. Odes to and of Green, Bessel, Legendre, Eigen. Yes there were moments this past year when I almost had to shield my eyes before the processor’s reflection: I became in myself axiom, language, and formation rule, and seemed to glow filament-white with a righteous fire.’

  ‘He said he’d be willing to take me with him. And when I asked him where, he got mad.’

  ‘I was convinced I could sing like a wire at Kelvin, high and pale, burn without ignition or friction, shine cool as a lemony moon, mated to a lattice of pure meaning. Interferenceless transfer. But a small, quiet, polite, scented, neatly ordered system of new signals has somehow shot me in the head. With words and tears she has amputated something from me. I gave her the intimate importance of me, and her bus pulled away, leaving something key of mine inside her like the weapon of a bee. All I want to do now is drive very away, to bleed.’

  “Which is neither here nor there.”

  ‘No, the thing to see is exactly that it’s there. That Maine is different from, fundamentally other than both Boston and Bloomington. Unfamiliar sights are a balm. From the hot enclosed car I see rocks veined with glassy color, immoderate blocks of granite whose cubed edges jut tangent to the scraggled surface of hills; slopes that lead away from the highway in gentle sine curves. The sky is a study in mint. Deer describe brown parabolae by the sides of the forested stretches.’

  “I sense feeling being avoided not confronted Bruce. Maybe here we might just admit together that if one uses a person as nothing more than a receptacle for one’s organs, fluids, and emotions, if one never regards her as more than and independent from the feelings and qualities one is disposed to invest her with from a distance, it is wrong then to turn around and depend on her feelings for any significant part of one’s own sense of wellbeing. Bruce why not just admit that what bothers you so much is that she has given irresistible notice that she has an emotional life with features that you knew nothing about, that she is just plain different from whatever you might have decided to make her into for yourself. In short a person Bruce.”

  ‘Look: a huge black bird has curved through the corner of my sight and let loose a strangely lovely berry rainbow of guano on the center of the windshield near Smyrna, Maine; and under the arc of this spectrum from a remote height a unit of memories is laid out and
systematized like colored print on the gray, chewed-looking two-lane road ahead of me. The trip I took with my family here to Prosopopeia, just two summers ago, and how she braved her own stone-faced parents’ disapproval to come along, how she and my sister discovered they could be friends, how she and I touched knees instead of holding hands on the airplane because my mother was seated next to her and she felt embarrassed. I remember with my gut the unbreachable promise of a whole new kind of distance implicit in the dizzying new height we all seemed to reach in the airplane on this long, storm-threatened flight, up to where the sky first turned cold and then darkened to cadet and we smelled space just above. How the shapes of a whole terrain of clouds, from inside the sky, took on the modal solidity of the real: shaggy buffalo heads; tattered bridges; the topology of states; political profiles; intricately etched turds. We flew away over the flat summer board games of Indiana and Ohio. Thunderstorms over Pennsylvania were great anvils that narrowed darkly to rain on counties. We had a steel belly. I remember a jutting, carbuncular ruby ring on the finger of an Indian woman in the seat across the aisle, a dot stained into her forehead, robes so full they seemed to foam. Her dark husband, in a business suit, with white eyes and white teeth and impossibly well-combed hair.’

  “And this place you would ‘take’ the girl to, someday? And why now that she is forever absent does she become that place, the loss of which summons images of decapitation and harm?”

  ‘Little I-95 proceeds north to Houlton, Maine, then curves east into New Brunswick. I exit the highway at Houlton, pay my toll, and, via a side street that leads between the Hagan Cabinet Company and the Atrium Supper Club, come out on County Route 1, again heading due north, through dense farmland, toward Mars Hill and then Prosopopeia. The sun sets gradually to my left over ranges of pale purple earth I learned two years ago are colored by the young potato plants they feed. An irrigation generator howls and clanks by the road a few miles out of Mars Hill, and in this purple now an intricate circuit of tiny rivers runs red in the late light. Just farther up 1 is a hand-lettered sign announcing hubcaps for sale, spoils of war with the rutted road, the improbable wares displayed in long rows on my right, glinting dull pink on a fence and the side of a barn-red barn, looking like the shields of an army of dwarfs. About everything there is an air of age, clocks running slow on sluggish current.’

  “The sun setting to the left means to the west, meaning even here you remember things west Bruce, meaning one becomes uncomfortable at this new silence from a subject in a west we have evidence you remember. One voice cannot just shut off another, even in a structure of lies, if light is to be shed the way we profess to—”

  ‘Perhaps I should mention that at the toll booth for the Houlton exit her photo’s receptacle came free when I pulled down the visor to get at the ticket, and curved airborne over to me in the backwash from the window I had to roll down, and ended half-wedged between the brake and the floor. In reaching for it I dropped my money and somehow touched the accelerator with my foot. The car moved forward and nudged the controlled gate that lowers to stop a vehicle until its debt to the state is discharged. The woman in the toll booth was out like a shot; a policeman in his cruiser by the road looked over and put down something he was eating. I had to scoop up my money and fork it over at the gate. The receptacle was bent and dusted with floor-dirt and cracker crumbs. The toll-taker was polite but firm. There was honking.’

  ‘The trip Bruce and his parents and his sister invited me for to Maine year before last was the last time I think everything was totally good between us. On the trip he pointed at things out of the airplane window and made his Mom and I laugh. We kept our legs touching and he’d touch my hand too, very gently, so his Mom wouldn’t see him. At his aunt and uncle’s house we went to a lake, and swam, and could of gone waterskiing if we wanted. Sometimes we took long walks all day down back roads and got dusty and sometimes lost, but we always got back because Bruce could tell times and directions by the sun. We drank water with our hands out of little streams that were really cold. Once Bruce was picking us blueberries for lunch and got stung by a bee on the hand and I pulled the stinger out, because I had nails, and put a berry on the sting and he laughed and said he didn’t care about anything, really. I had a wonderful time. It was really fun. It was when Bruce and I felt right. It felt right to be with him. It was maybe the last time it felt to me like there was both a real me and a real him when we were together. It was at his uncle’s house, on some sweatshirts and clothes on the ground in some woods at night by a potato field, that I gave Bruce something I can’t ever get back. I was glad I did it. But I think maybe that’s when Bruce’s feelings began to change. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it kind of drove him away a little that I did it finally. That I finally wanted to, and he could see that I did. It’s like he knew he really had me, and it made him go down inside himself, to have, instead of just want. I think he really likes to want. That’s OK. I think maybe we were just meant to be friends the whole time. We knew each other ever since high school. We swam in the quarry where they made that movie. We had driver’s education together, and took our tests for our driver’s licenses in the same car, is how we got to really know each other. Except we didn’t get really close until a long time after that, when we were both already in different colleges and only saw each other at vacations.’

  ‘I hit Prosopopeia just as the sun goes seriously down and all sorts of crepuscular Maine life begins rustling darkly in a spiny old section of forest I am happy to leave behind at the corporation limit. I detour briefly to stop at an IGA and buy some cold Michelob as a bit of a housewarming present, something my mother had suggested and financed. Michelob is a beer my uncle loves and does not really drink so much as inhale. It’s practically the only thing he can inhale. He has emphysema now, advanced, at fifty-five. Even the few steps from a chair to the kitchen door and a hearty handshake and the appropriation of one of my light bags is enough to make him have to begin his puffing exercise. He sits heavily back in his chair and begins to breathe, rhythmically, with concentration, between pursed lips, as my aunt hugs me and makes happy sounds punctuated by “Lord” and “Well” and then whisks all my luggage upstairs in one load. There’s not much luggage. I keep my bent receptacle with me. My uncle goes for a wheezer of adrenaline spray and resumes puffing as hard as he can, smiling tightly and waving away both my concern and his discomfort. He blows as though trying to extinguish a flame—which is perhaps close to what it felt like for him. He has dropped more weight, especially in his legs; his legs through his pants have a sticklike quality as he sits, breathing. Even thin and crinkled, though, he is still an eerie, breastless copy of my mother, with: gray-white hair, an oval high-cheekboned face, and blue pecans for eyes. Like my mother’s, these eyes can be sharply lit as a bird’s or sad and milky as a whale’s; while my uncle puffs they are blank, unfocused, away. My aunt is an unreasonably pretty sixty, genuinely but not cloyingly nice, a lady against whom the only indictment might be hair dyed to a sort of sweet amber found nowhere in nature. She has put my portable life in my bedroom and asks whether I’d eat some supper. I’d eat anything at all. A television is on, with no sound, by an ancient electric stove of chipped white enamel and a new brown dishwasher. My uncle says I look like I was the one carried the car out here rather than the other way around. I know I do not look good. I’ve driven straight for almost thirty hours, a trip punctuated only by the filling and emptying of various tanks. My shirt is crunchy with old sweat, I have a really persistent piece of darkened apple skin between my two front teeth, and something has happened to a blood vessel in one of my eyes from staring so long at distance and cement—there is a small nova of red at the corner and a sandy pain when I blink. My hair needs a shampoo so badly it’s almost yellow. I say I’m tired and sit down. My aunt gets bread from an actual bread box and takes a dish of tuna salad out of the refrigerator and begins stirring it up with a wooden spoon. My uncle eyes the beer on the kitchen counter, two tall silver
six-packs already spreading a bright puddle of condensation on the linoleum. He looks over at my aunt, who sighs to herself and gives a tiny nod. My uncle is instantly up, no invalid; he gets two beers loose and puts one in front of me and pops the other and drains probably half of it in one series of what I have to say are unattractively foamy swallows. My aunt asks whether I’d like one sandwich or two. My uncle says I’d better just eat up that tuna salad, that they’ve had it twice now and if it hangs around much longer they’re going to have to name it. His eyes are completely back, they are in him, and he uses them to laugh, to tease, to express. Just like his sister. He looks at the Sears receptacle by my place at the table and asks what I’ve got there. My aunt looks at him. I say memorabilia. He says it looks like it had a hard trip. The kitchen smells wonderful: of old wood and new bread and something sharply sweet, a faint tang of tuna. I can hear my mother’s car ticking and cooling out in the driveway. My aunt puts two fat sandwiches down in front of me, pops my tall beer, gives me another warm little hug with a joy she can’t contain and I can’t understand, given that I have more or less just appeared here, with no explicable reason and little warning other than a late-night phone call two days ago and some sort of follow-up conversation with my parents after I’d hit the road. She says it’s a wonderful surprise having me come visit them and she hopes I’ll stay just as long as I’d like and tell her what I like to eat so she can stock up and didn’t I feel so good and proud graduating out of such a good school in such a hard subject that she could never in a dog’s age understand. She sits down. We begin to talk about the family. The sandwiches are good, the beer slightly warm. My uncle eyes the six-packs again and goes into his shirt pocket for the disk of snuff he dips since he had to stop smoking. There is cool, sweet, grassy air through the kitchen screens. I am too tired not to feel good.’

  ‘I felt so sorry when he said he was going to have to go out of town, maybe for the whole summer. But I got mad when he said now we were even, summer for summer. Because him leaving this summer is his choice, just like last summer was all his choices, too. He stayed in Cambridge, in Boston, last summer, to work on starting his project, and he got a research job in his engineering lab, and he didn’t even ever really explain why he didn’t want to come be in Bloomington for the summer, even though I’d just got my B.A. here. But he sent me a big arrangement of roses and said for me to come live with him and be his love in Boston that summer, that he missed me so much he couldn’t endure it, and I went through a lot deciding, but I did, I used my graduation present money to fly to MIT and got a job as a hostess in Harvard Square at a German restaurant, the Wurst House, and we had an apartment in the Back Bay with a fireplace that was really expensive. But then after some time passed, Bruce acted like he really didn’t want me to be there. If he’d said something about it that would be one thing, but he just started being really cold. He’d be away at the lab all the time, and he never came in to see the Wurst House, and when we were alone at home he didn’t touch me for a week once, and he’d snap sometimes, or just be cold. It was like he was repulsed by me after a while. I’d started taking birth control pills by then. Then in July once he didn’t come home or call for a day and a night, and when he did he got mad that I was mad that he didn’t. He said why couldn’t he at least have some vestige of his own life every once in a while. I said he could, but I said it just didn’t feel to me like he felt the same anymore. He said how dare you tell me what I feel. I flew back home a few days later. We decided that’s what I better do, because if I stayed he’d feel like he had to be artificially nice all the time, and that wouldn’t be any fun for either of us. We both cried a little bit at Logan Airport when he took me on the bus. In Bloomington my family threw confetti on me when I got home, they were glad to have me back, and I felt good to be home, too. Then a day later Bruce sent arranged roses again and called and said he’d made a ghastly error, and he flew back home, too, and said he was very sorry that he had got obsessional about all sorts of exterior things, and he tried to make me understand that he felt like he was standing on the cusp between two eras, and that however he’d acted I should regard as evidence of his own personal shortcomings as a person, not as anything about his commitment to me as a lover. And I guess I had so much invested in the relationship by then that I said OK that’s OK, and he stayed in Bloomington over a week, and we did everything together, and at night he made me feel wonderful, it could really be wonderful being close with him, and he said he was making me feel wonderful because he wanted to, not because he thought he had to. Then he went back to Boston and said wait for me till Thanksgiving, don’t sit under apple trees, and I’ll come back to you, so I did, I even turned down friendly lunch invitations and football tickets from guys in my classes. And then Thanksgiving and Christmas felt to me like the exact same thing as that bad part of the summer in the Back Bay. My feelings just started to change. It wasn’t all him. It took time, but after time passed I felt something was missing, and I’m selfish, I can only feel like I’m giving more than I’m getting for so long, then things change.’