Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  “J.D.?” the mild-eyed man asks.

  “J.D.,” D.L. says, not turning around, too pissed even to recognize recognition. “And we’re not even sure where Collision is, from this airport. How far West of here is it? Is it walking distance? Is there a road? All we’ve seen is corn. It’s been disorienting, wind-blown, verdant, tall, total, menacingly fertile. This entire area is creepy. We have transportation needs. I’ll bet the insects here are fierce. Is your state bird the mosquito? Is this snake country?”

  “Fears?” the man with the money to offer is saying, idly working those near the line’s front. “Fears here?”

  By the way, for whom would perpetual union with this person yammering bad-news-customer-like at Nola be fun, I’ll bet you’re asking. Perhaps the most direct and efficient and diplomatic answer is that a rented Datsun is not in the offing.

  Mark looks up at what’s raised to public view. Jack Lord’s helicopter slowly ascends, wheeling gracefully into Hawaii’s electric blue, Lord at the helm, in a fine and no-bullshit-whatsoever business suit, Danno riding shotgun with his marksman’s rifle, in a slightly less fine but still all-business suit. Where is Tom Sternberg? He’ll give Sternberg till the next commemorative commercial, Mark thinks, trying to swallow a second gulp of soda against the rising gas of the first. Something almost imperceptibly furtive about Sternberg discourages the idea of contact in bathrooms. Mark is enormously sensitive to these sorts of things, in general. There’s still the tiniest bit of cooked flower between his teeth, which he works slowly with his healthy but sort of narrow tongue, in which irritated taste buds are visible as individual buds.

  Well and then he sees the probable Mormon, the money-giver, with D.L. and the hairy-armed Avis girl, at the counter, across the terminal, past the totally superfluous lounge window, which is itself past the next table, now occupied by a blonde, orange-faced flight attendant and an effete narrow-faced man in an age-glazed corduroy suit. Mark rises in alarm. They don’t need Latter-Day charity, Reunion or no. There’s always a Mormon around when you don’t want one, trying your patience with unsolicited kindness.

  “Stop me if I’m wrong, but what I sense here is conflict,” says the bearded man, who it turns out isn’t a practicing LDS, but rather works for J.D. Steelritter Advertising in some research capacity unrelated to the McDonald’s campaign or revel. “Stymied desire,” he muses. “It’s clear that there’s something you want, and an obstacle, a what’s the word a cheval-de-frise, to your actually having it.” He’s writing this stuff down on a clipboard whose poor clip is holding far too much print-out paper. “Doubtless in the confrontation and potential resolution of this conflict you’ll undergo changes in experience, outlook, personality, possibly even in the makeup of the desires…”

  “Needs. We have transportation needs.”

  “… themselves. Maybe changes that’ll be of interest not only to you, but to others. You’ll have something to interest the Reunion, when you arrive.”

  “If.”

  “When,” he emphasizes, his face like an ad for blind faith, happy karma.

  “Maybe then you could get your own credit card,” the Avis woman says helpfully, genuinely sorry that she does not fashion, but only communicates, company policy. The complimentary box of DoughNuggets is empty, its wax paper greebly and smeared. Honestly, though. Even bartering farmers are better than kids without real credit. And there is simply no way this person is only twenty-five, or pregnant, she thinks, as everyone else in the line all seems to lose his patience at once and she turns back to begin handling something that looks even worse than the commodities-trading center she’d left to get a job closer to her own family’s roots. If ever a person has looked infertile, she thinks, why then—

  J.D. Steelritter and DeHaven Steelritter are still out in the airport lot, if you will—their initial argument about ignition having metastasized into a really killer row about DeHaven’s less than fastidious records of just which alumni have arrived when. Turns out they’re missing three, not two, alumni. And is J.D. pissed.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “That’s just it!” J.D. shouts over DeHaven’s loud idle. “You say things. But you never show. Show me some pride, just once. Some desire. You have a job, shitspeck. Define for your old man what ‘job’ means. What does it mean to you: ‘job’?”

  “These things happen, Pop,” DeHaven says, smoothing his yarn wig with a cotton-gloved hand as his malevolent car growls. The car can’t ever be turned off, if it’s to run right, was what started the row. “I’m sorry, and I’ll try not to ever fuck up anything ever again” (pissed himself, DeHaven). “But I can’t promise you I’ll never fuck up, because these things happen, Pop. Maybe to everybody except a genius like you.”

  J.D. looks for sarcasm, but it’s tough, what with sleep-dep and all; he can’t read much in the ingenuous bloodshot flutter of the big clown’s mascara.

  Though, not to take sides, but sometimes things do happen. Even in reality. In real realism. It’s a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they’re about equally strange. The strangest stories tend, in a way, to happen. Take for example the single solitary piece Mark Nechtr has thus far been able to produce for discussion in Dr. Ambrose’s graduate workshop at East Chesapeake Trade. Its conceit is lifted and carried off right out of a banner headline in the Baltimore Sun. Nothing as richly ambiguous as FIRM DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES, but a simple MURDER-SUICIDE IN DOWNTOWN ELEVATOR BAFFLES AUTHORITIES. And details of the story are traceable directly to the voluminous correspondence between D.L. and Tom Sternberg, who’s maybe about the most claustrophobic individual in the history of his generation.

  The elevator at issue is in a mental-health professionals’ building in downtown Baltimore. The setup is that a mental-health professional, the kind that can’t write ’scrips, a Ph.D., is treating two different guys for debilitating claustrophobia. And the treatment of both patients starts at the same time and proceeds more or less in sync, though neither patient ever meets the other. Until, that is, it becomes that time in treatment for each of the guys to confront the true beak and claws of his phobia head-on. Yes it’s elevator-time. They’re to be put in the building’s elevator and made to ride up and down repeatedly. But see now together, for support (the psychologist being a follower of the head-on-confrontation-but-with-support school of phobic treatment).

  So in they both go, and they’re riding up and down repeatedly.…

  Except the elevator eventually stalls, possibly from all the phobic energy swirling around in there, and it gets stuck between floors, and the buttons don’t work, the thing’s just broken down. The two claustrophobes are trapped, together, in a tiny elevator in a thin shaft in an enclosed building in the center of a crowded metropolis. For a while, true, they support each other. But, in the fullness of time enjoyed by all stalled things, of course, they eventually totally lose it.

  “YAAGH!” one screams at the other. “You’re closing in!”

  “No! No! You’re closing in!”

  “YAAGH!”

  “GAAH!”

  “Get very far away!”

  “You’re swelling! You’re taking up the whole elevator!”

  “Stop closing in!”

  “GAAH!”

  “YAAGH!”

  “You’re breathing both our air! You’re consuming my air! Stop that breathing!”

  “Leave me alone! Get away! Oh my God!”

  “Nothing left! No more breathing!”

  “YAAAAAAGHURGHLURGHLURGHLURGHL.”

  And so on. Their worst fears, which they’d slowly, supportively come to see were fiction, came true. The whole piece was kind of a go-figure story. Mark never showed it to D.L. D.L. had bagged the Program by then, and nuptials were closing in.

  I think what it was was Mark felt guilty, the story being basically just a pastiche of truths and everything. Plus ghastly and loathsome. Dr. Ambrose was surprisingly receptive, though, considering it turned out he’d written a very simila
r story, way back when, one about a fire in the bungalow of an elderly couple who are both wildly pyrophobic and cripplingly agoraphobic. Mark claimed he’d never read that story of Ambrose’s. The whole stuck-in-elevator thing had been his idea. With some help from the truth, admittedly. Ambrose had fingered the port-wine stain on his temple absently and told Mark that of course he believed him. He trusted Mark.

  And there is something trustworthy about Mark Nechtr. Like, if he promises to do something, you know the only way it won’t get done is if he just can’t do it. Like, even if he’s hooked up with somebody he doesn’t really desire or want to be hooked up with, if he’s given his word, the only way he won’t stay hooked up with that person is if he just truly cannot do it. If he promises to get D.L. and Sternberg to this Reunion they’ve been looking forward to for so long, he’ll try. Though it doesn’t look like he’s trying too terribly hard right now—his big flaw is that he’s extremely easy to distract and fascinate, and now he’s fascinated with this beardedly distinguished non-Mormon Steelritter janissary (who puts in a call to Steelritter Advertising’s Collision office complex, where he says a Midwestern twang had promised they’d send an emergency van right over, J.D. and DeHaven Steelritter and Eberhardt ’70 and Sternberg ’70 and somebody down as Ambrose-Gatz ’67 all being late, now, and the alumni getting restless, somewhat sloshed, and of course hungry) and who, he tells Mark, passes out free money as part of an ingenious J.D. Steelritter marketing-diffraction-test scheme.

  As Hogan, the money-giver, tells the rapt Mark what the scam really is, Tom Sternberg is still in the men’s room, just destalling, to give you some tantalizing idea of the laxative might of a quick-fried flower. Sternberg’s now confronting the cracker-sized mirror stamped into the wall over an automatic airport sink. The sink spurts automatically at his approach. Step back and it stops. Saves water, but still. Disconcerting. Boy is he tired. Beyond tired—something behind that face in the mirror signals post-dire fatigue with the hissed whine of something inflatable in his head’s center, inflating. D.L. would point to the obverse eye and ask what it saw, if it saw anything of the baggy thing slowly taking shape in his head. Well screw you, D.L.

  Cause it’s only dark, generally, back there in his eye’s guts. Sometimes a spidery system of synaptic color, if he tries to move the bad eye too quickly. But usually nothing. But it’ll heal, anyway. It’ll come around. It’s all in his head, he knows. Youthful-rebellion injury. Mrs. Sternberg warned from day one that the boy that does a forbidden thing, such as like for example crosses his eyes just to hurt a mother: that boy finds they stay like that. Well-known fact. Look it up in whatever resources orthodox mothers with lapsed sons access. Like early to bed: it’s the sleep before dark that’s most important. Like don’t cry: you’re better than whoever laughs at you. Like try this lotion, for sumac.

  Here’s the fresh sumac cyst, though, here, boy, between his eyes. It’s darkened richly since the last cyst-check in O’Hare, matured from that tomato pink to the same plum shade as the airport lounge. The mirror does not lie.

  Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they’re progressing. Sternberg’s not at all sure he likes the idea of sharing a mirror with a whole lot of actors. He’s not sure he wants to rent a bureaucratic car and head West without sleep or soap for a Funhouse the brochure says is carefully designed utilizing mostly systems of mirrors. A crowded, mirrored place… Sternberg ponders the idea as the automatic sink fills gurgling to the slit of the emergency drain at its rim. This sumac cyst between his eyes feels fucking alive, man. Pulses painfully with the squeak of his head’s blood. The cyst is beginning to show a little bit of white at the acme. Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn’t take genius to figure out that you’ve got a body. A bit of white at an infected cyst’s cap is pretty much embodiedness embodied. No way he’s messing with the fucker, though. It would just love to be messed with. Would feed on it. And the stage after plum is eggplant, big and dusky and curved, like a new organ in itself, to be an ism of. And D.L. is here, after all. Who as a child he loved. Though what a personal letdown, in terms of D.L. Her being now married and knocked was OK—that was an attainability issue. The letdown is how fucking undesirable, how unlovable she’s turned out, in person, after time. Three years of letters since his dreams got wet and he’d written her care of Steelritter Advertising, drunk with bright hormone, to confess to this girl whose whereabouts he didn’t even know the effect she’d had on him as a child a whole decade back, during the filming of those spots at the very first McDonald’s, in Collision, Ill., preserved and converted to a commercial soundstage. The little men’s-room mirror’s image does that blurred, swimming, memory thing. He nine, she twelve. She’d seemed so… well, developed. Her bottom had made the slide’s iron sing. Her breastlets had been a maddening horizontal regularity in a jumper-top’s wrinkle. Sternberg in shorts and black socks, agog, glands kick-started, though he then still only halfway to puberty (low pituitary function). A winter afternoon in Illinois, the dead fields’ total snow like a well-ironed sheet, the sky blue as lit gas, shallow and broad as all outdoors, a saucer with ungentle black edges. The astringent classroom light of the elaborate McDonald’s set, D.L. sharing something deep-fried with Tom under the aluminum counter as stage mothers twittered and children and clown and -Burglar were choreographed just so, for an indoor shot. A kind of Beatrice in saddle shoes, she’d given birth to some of Sternberg’s first ideas. Her pubescent letters (she’d answered his letter, which was just plain nice) had started out so lilting, warm, putting-the-reader-at-ease. The poems and stories she later sent were less so; they seemed cold, coy for coyness’s sake, he never forgot he was sitting in a chair in his parents’ living room, reading print on paper; but they appeared deep and ambiguous and full of ideas in a way that, say, a Wisk spot’s cattle call sure didn’t. And but the photo she’d sent him: was that supposed to be of her? If so, something damned unsavory’s happened in the time between the taking and the looking. Now she seems so… well, underdeveloped. Like a total reversal. It’s frightening. And has she really smiled once, yet, the whole time, since they met at M.I. Airport? Has she even once really looked at him when he says something? Nechtr looks at him, but that’s almost even creepier: this Mark guy looks at you with the kind of distanced concentration you use to look at something you’re eating.

  Sternberg washes his hot face without soap. Way too much time has gone by in here, without question. Maybe everybody’s out there waiting, deducing the activity and so presence of bowels.

  He’s got Nechtr pegged. Nechtr’s that radiant distant type that it’s just impossible to tell if he’s putting you on, usually. So what the hell is he doing with this unsavory girl who looks way worse than her photo and says she’s currently working on a poem consisting entirely of punctuation? Who has a face like a… a long face? Who wears synthetic green? Was it a planned pregnancy? Shotgun wedding? The shotgun has yet to be invented that could get Sternberg to marry the D.L. this D.L. has turned out to be, somebody one eerily fuck of a lot like Mrs. Sternberg, the sort of person who, if you visited her house, she’d smile the whole time you were there, then clean vigorously after you left. A cosmic nyet to that. Plus her tits it turns out can’t be any bigger than they were that one childish day, that one single commercial either of them have ever been alumni of. Why didn’t Nechtr just offer to pay for the abortion? Are Trinitarians pro-Life? Plus she smells weird—orangy on top and then a whiff of something dead and preserved underneath. Let’s face it. She looks like her vagina would smell bad. He’d be long gone, personally, dude. Abortion or no. He’d be a red sail in the sunset by now if she tried—

  The sink, with a gurgled sigh like almost mercy, overflows, emergency drain-slit and all, Sternberg’s spent so unmercifully so much time in here. The water gurgles over the rim and onto the crotch of his ga
bardines. Great. That’s just great. Now it looks like he’s maybe wet himself. And what’s he supposed to say. Or even if he doesn’t say anything. Either way, explanation or interpretation, he comes out embodied. He demands compassion from a mirror he’s backed away from, hoping to make the water stop. But it doesn’t. Maybe it’s been on too long. It’s spilling onto the floor. Great. He demands compassion. Except of whom, though?

  “J.D. bases the principle on the same principle animal researchers use to tag and track animals. Each bill is tagged with this teeny little silicon transmitter, see?” Hogan points out to Mark and D.L. what looks vaguely like a monocle over the eye that separates Annuit from Coeptis on The Great Seal. “Simultaneously,” Hogan explains, “I ask the person who’s taking the money to name, right off the top of their head, what they fear most in the whole world. Their one great informing fear.”

  Hogan, into it, extends the heavy clipboard, flapping it open to a plain print-out sheet headed simply FEAR. Mark goes down the page:

  “Bomb.”

  “Meltdown or Bomb.”

  “Cancer—slow kind.”

  “Hyperinflation.”

  “The Greenhouse Effect.”

  “That my wife will scald me in my sleep.”

  “Hyperinflation and Attendant Fiscal Collapse.”

  “If the whole population in China all jumps up and down at once.”

  “Russian Bomb.”

  “Confusion.”

  “My father’s voice.”

  “Ozone depletion.”

  “Apocalypse.”

  “That phone call in the middle of the night.”

  “Slow kind of cancer from Meltdown or Bomb.”