Authors: David Foster Wallace
action photo of
ORIN INCANDENZA
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#71
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as
our way of saying Thank-You and how important you're letter has been to us. Cordjally, Jethro Bodine
Assistant Mailroom Technician
And c.
'Mmyellow.’
'Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’
'Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’
'A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’
'And not every Dickinson poem is singable to 'Yellow Rose,' O. Sorry to disappoint you. For instance like "Ample make this bed — Make this bed with awe" isn't even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’
'Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine's consideration.’
'A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory's unfortunately a dink. Plus I don't think you quite meant proviso.'‘
'Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.’
'You know I hate these Strategy calls.’
'Also of course works if you really do happen to be married. In which case you've got a ring already.’
Tm sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’
'The object being, to present yourself to the Subject as married, as in happily married, and you engage her in a conversation in which you make a big deal of how head-over-heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean the pilot-light of passion still burns in the central heating system of your love for her, your wife, even after all these several years you've been hitched.’
Tm sitting here looking through an old box of letters to kill just a very few minutes before a bunch of us climb in the tow truck for Pemulis's annual I.-Day-Eve town-painting.’
'But as you're saying all this to the Subject, your manner is nevertheless indicating that you're attracted to her.’
'It's poignant somehow that you always use the word Subject when you mean the exact obverse.’
'But it's not like flirtatious or salivious, your manner. More like just strongly involuntarily attracted. Almost as if hypnotized against your will. Your manner can indicate this just by following the Subject's conversational movements and changes of posture or facial expression in that sort of vacant intense way a hungry person watches somebody eating. Following the movements of the fork as if memerized. With, of course now, the occasional flicker of pain and conflict in your eyes, at the fact that here you are involuntarily memerized by somebody other than your serapic wife, which the point —’
'Time. Yo. I think you mean seraphic. I also think you meant lascivious and mesmerized.’
'You know what your problem is, Hallie?’
'I have just one problem?’
'But hang on until you see that 7's worth not making me digress away from, though. Because the point being to get across how it's an incredible tribute to the Subject's overwhelming female charms that you can even really even see her, the Subject, since you're so in love with your wife you barely even see most women as even female anymore, much less be involuntarily attracted to the Subject, much less have maybe the thought of infidelity skitter no matter how involuntarily across your devoted mind. And it's not like you'll have to volunteer any of this directly. The Subject'll draw the observations on her own. That's the point of the conflicted flickers in your memerized eyes, or at the most an involuntary tortured groan, a quick bite of the knuckle of the forefinger.’
'A heel of the hand to the forehead or something like that.’
'Get your manner down just conflicted-looking enough and the Subject herself'll actually start drawing you out on this fact, the involuntary attraction that's so painful to you and so flattering and tributary to her.’
'So wait. This is like a conversation where you're affecting all this flickering and groaning? Like you mean a cocktail-party-small-talk conversation? Or do you just brandish your fake ring at some girl at a bus stop and start a tortured tribute to your seraphic wife?’
'It takes place anywhere. Venue-adjustable. 7's portable and never-miss. The point is to maneuver the issue of your devoted attracted conflicted pain to the point where you can appear to almost sort of break down and can ask the Subject in all tortured sincerity if she thinks your involuntarily finding her so visibly female and attractive makes you a bad husband. Display vulnerability and ask her to evaluate the like integrity of your heart. Seem desperate. Your whole married self-concept shaken. Practically beg the Subject to reassure you you're not a bad-hearted man. Plead with the Subject to say what she thinks it might be about her charms that could drive your serapic wife even momentarily from your heart. You present the attraction you feel for the Subject as this involuntary identity-threatening soul-searing-type crisis you just desperately need her help with, the Subject's, person to person.’
'Sounds very moving.’
'And if it so happens you really are married, the additional advantage to 7's pitch is that you and the Subject both, however briefly, get to believe it. The pitch. The involuntary passionate doomed knight-errant-type pitch.’
'And of course, O., the Subject just happens to be married herself, often with small children, putting her directly in your crosshairs.’
'A matter of what's the word personal preference and taste that doesn't impact 7's surefire no-miss quality one way or the other. It's the doomed involuntary conflicted good-man's-downfall-type quality that no Subject can seemingly resist.’
'Ainsi, then.’
'Well O. the thing's sick. It's even sicker than 4. Was it 4? The one you said that Loach inspired, where you'd supposedly just that very day dropped out of Jesuit seminary after umpteen years of disciplined celibacy because of carno-spiritual yearnings you hadn't even been quite in touch with as carno-spiritual in nature until you just now this very moment laid eyes on the Subject? With the breviary and rented collar?’
'That was 4, yes. 4's pretty much of a gynecopia also, but within a kind of narrower demographic psychological range of potential Subjects. Notice I never said 4 was no-miss.’
'Well you must be a very proud young man. This is even sicker. The fake ring and fictional spouse. It's like you're inventing somebody you love just to seduce somebody else into helping you betray her. What's it like. It's like suborning somebody into helping you desecrate a tomb they don't know is empty.’
'This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody who still thinks it's exciting to shave.’
'I ought to go. I have a blackhead I have to see to.’
'You haven't asked why I called right back. Why I'm calling during high-toll hours.’
'Plus I feel some kind of toothache starting, and it's the weekend, and I want to see Schacht before Mrs. Clarke's confectionery day in the sun tomorrow. Plus I'm naked.’
'I'm surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice and asking you to call back ASAP on this. What is it out there, 1600? Why aren't you outside hard at play? Don't tell me Schtitt started cancelling p.m.'s for I.-Day Eve.’
'I tagged this kid Pemberton in the eye up at net. It was inadvertent. We were only four games in. He hit a big soft fluffy goose of an approach and I was trying to handcuff him. I hit it at him only to handcuff him. He never even got his stick up. Right in the left socket. It made a sound like a champagne cork. A prorector named Corbett Thorp said he thought Pemberton might have detached a retina. Something sure seemed detached. He was walking around in diminishing circles like he'd been hit with a mallet.’
'You sound really, like, remorse-riddled.’
'Kitchens arid heat, O. I've taken my share of balls in various spots. And whence bizarre metric theories about Emily Dickinson all of a sudden, by the way? And what's up with the lurking figures with wheelchairs?’
'You're a Top-Ten junior stickman suddenly now this year, Hallie, what's Schtitt doing giving you a cloth mouse like Hugh Pemberton to bat around anyway?’
'You remember him?’
'Who could forget a kid that looks like he's curtsying when he serves? With the white visor and the little amber glasses? That kid's been hanging from the bottom of the ladder by his nails since he was nine.’
'It's been carnage all week. Schtitt's playing the C teams against the A's. It's for the C's development, Donni said. Also because today word's down from the tower some of the staff thought some of the A's looked tentative against Port Wash.’
'They despise tentativity.’
'I think they want us just short of cocky for the Fundraiser and then the WhataBurger, where Wayne's got a chance to knock this Veach kid off the pole.’
'Let's not forget you though either, H. I can get down for at least the WhataBurger semis if you get there, if you want incentive.’
'As in in person, O.?’
'Word is you're worth watching now.’
'Word?’
'I keep my ear to the cement, Hallie.’
'At least for very short Subjects, I'd imagine.’
'We take off for the Patriots that Friday, what is that like the 27th or -8th, but it's a Saturday afternoon game. I can be down there by midday Sunday if you're still in the thick.’
'You'll probably need to wear some sort of sign around your neck so I know it's you.’
'So then you'll be up here just as we're down there, oddly, playing.’
'It goes without saying you'd give me the advance skinny if anybody I didn't want to see was by any chance flying down there with you guys.’
'The C versus A thing's been more like grotesque than confidence-building. Guys are taking out stress in kind of twisted ways. Struck beat Gloeckner in 40 minutes and then made a show of revealing he'd had 3-kilo ankle-weights on under his socks. Wayne made van Slack cry right there in front of everybody.’
'Word is Wayne has exactly one gear.’
'Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.’
'So but the reason I'm really calling, Hallie.’
'And you're being evasive about the dread about the disabled. The like rolling stalkers.’
'I haven't seen wheel one in days. I'm thinking possibly this was a kind of very shy sort of fan club of people without legs that look up to me —’
'Grotesque entendre, O.’
'— as, like, the ultimate leg. They use different ruses to follow me around and never come close or say anything because they're really shy because they don't have legs. So now my mind's resting easier.’
'Now if the roach- and spiders-at-heights fears'd subside you could really hold the head high.’
'So the reason I'm calling.’
'I already said I'd let you know when and if. No sightings of any journalists. Your Moment profiler.’
'I'm actually glad I got you in person. I was going to ask you to call me ASAP.’
Tm pleased to call you a sap whenever you like, O.’
'That's below you. And I can hear you still chewing that grisly shit. That shit's going to make your lower jaw fall right off. I've seen it happen down here, believe me. And you're wondering why the tooth problems all the time suddenly.’
'Snuff's saliva-stimulating. It's actually oral-hygiene-enhancing, when you factor in all the extra brushing. The caries are Himself's legacy. You know that. The Himself whose root canals put Dr. Zegarelli's kids through Andover.’
'This basically nonsocial call, H., is because I need your feedback on some issues from these half-dozen or so very complex and far-ranging and in-depth conversations I had with a certain Subject.’
'Not the mobile-home person, surely.’
'Whole different ballpark of Subject. The Dickinson theory I have to admit came from these conversations.’
'Sounds like one deep lady.’
'Whole levels and dimensions to this one. We've had a whole series of very intense verbal interchanges. Transcendentalist poetics was just one of the in-depth issues ranged over. This subject keeps me on the cerebral toes.’
'Dickinson's about as Transcendentalist as Poe. Your Subject's 0 for 2.’
'This is all off to the side of the call. I told this Subject I'd consider certain issues very carefully before I really responded.’
'Which meant you'd consider what she wanted to hear and how to ladle it on until she begs you to have intercourse with her.’
'I hence need considered-sounding responses to two basic questions.’
'Why this sick thing of making me complicit in these Strategic pursuits when you know I think they're troubled and sick? It's like asking somebody to help you culture anthrax or something.’
'Just two questions is all.’
'Now I'm beginning almost to be able to feel my pulse in the tooth, it feels like the infection's gathering force so fast.’
'Firstly, what does the following word I can't find in the dictionary mean: s-a-m-i-z-d-a-t.’
'Samizdat. Russian compound noun. Soviet twentieth-century idiom. Sam — stem: "self"; izdat — undeclined verb: "to publish." I think the literal denotation's technically archaic: the sub-rosa dissemination of politically charged materials that were banned when the Eschaton-era Kremlin was going around banning things. Connotatively, the generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby. There's no real samizdat in the U.S. per se, First Amendment-wise, I don't think. I suppose ultra-radical Québecois and Albertan stuff could be considered O.N.A.N.ite samizdat.’
Tow.’
'Not just Séparatisteur pamphlets, now. It'd have to be more incendiary. Materials advocating violence, destruction of property, disruption of Grids, anti-O.N.A.N. terrorism and so on. I don't think O.N.A.N.'s got technical bans per se, I don't think, but Poutrincourt said the R.C.M.P.s are empowered to impound literature and even desktop-publishing and InterLink hardware et cetera without any sort of warrant.’