Authors: David Foster Wallace
But he never did the whole time we were there. Wash. When she said we had to leave or she was taking off and taking Harriet was when she said when I was at work he started telling her how to have sex with a chicken. He said he had sex with the chickens. It was a trailer out past the dumpster-dock in the Spur, and he kept a couple chickens under it. No wonder they ran like hell when anybody came. He'd been like sexually abusing fowls. He kept talking to her about it, with all t-h's, like You hath to like thcrew them on, but when you come they jutht thort of fly off of you. She said she drew the line. We left and went to Pine Street shelter and she stayed for a while till this guy with a hat said he had a ranch in New Jersey and off she goes, and with Harriet. Harriet's our daughter. She's going to be three. She says it free, though. I doubt now the kid'll ever say a single t-h her whole life. And I don't even know where in New Jersey. Does New Jersey even have ranches? I'd been in school with her since grade school. Mildred. We were like childhood sweethearts. And then this guy who got her old cot at the shelter I got lice from. He moves into her cot and then I start to get lice. I was still trying to deliver ice to machines at gas stations. Who wouldn't have to get high just to stand it?’
'So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So what is this? You're ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don't know about? What exactly is the story here?’
'Fine, fine. Fine. Just completely fine. No problem at all. Happy to be here. Feeling better. Sleeping better. Love the chow. In a word, couldn't be finer. The grinding? The tooth-grinding? A tic. A jaw-strengthener. Expression of all-around fineness. Likewise the thing with the eyelid.’
'But I did too try. I been trying all month. I been on four interviews. They didn't none of them start till 11, and I'm like what's the point get up early sit around here I don't have to be down there till 11 ? I filled out applications everday. Where'm I suppose to go? You can't kick me out just for the moth— they don't call me back if I'm trying. Snot my fault. Go on and ask Clenette. Ask that Thrale girl and them if I ain't been trying. You can't. This is just so fucked up.
'I said where'm I suppose to go to?’
'I'm on a month's Full-House Restriction for using freaking mouth wash? Newsflash: news bulletin: mouthwash is for spitting out! It's like 2% proof!’
'It's about somebody else's farting, why I'm here.’
Til gladly identify myself if you'll first simply explain what it is I'm identifying myself as. This is my position. You're requiring me to attest to facts I do not possess. The term for this is "duress."
'So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?' Til come back when you're free.’
'It's back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.’
'First just let me say one thing.’
LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
'Open me anothowone of those boy and I'll tell you the highlight of that season of my season tickets was I got to see that incwedible son of a bitch set his fiwst wecord in the flesh. It was y'bwother's Cub Scout twoop outing you wouldn't join because I wemember this you w'afwaid you'd lose the online time in fwont of the TP. Wemember? Well I'll always wemember this one day, boy. It was against Sywacuse, what, eight seasons back. The little son of a bitch had a long of seventy-thwee that day and a avewage of sixty-fwigging-nine. Seventy-thwee for Chwist's sake. Open me anothowone, boy, use the exowcise. I wecall the sky was cloudy. When he punted you spent a weal long time studying the sky. They weally hung. He had a long hang-time of eight-point-thwee seconds that day. That's sewious hanging, boy. Me I nevewit five in my day. Chwist. The whole twoop said they never heawd anything like the sound of the son of a bitch's seventy-thwee. Won Wichardson, you wemember Wonnie, the twoop-leadawhateva, petwoleum jelly salesman outta Bwookline, Wonnie's a wetired pilot from the Sewvice, from a bomma-squadwon, Wonnie we's down at t'pub that night Wonnie says he says that seventy-thwee sounded just like fucking bombs sounded, that kind of cwacking WHUMP, when they hit, to the boys in the squadwon in the planes when they let them go.’
The radio show right before Madame Psychosis's midnight show on M.I.T.'s semi-underground WYYY is 'Those Were the Legends That Formerly Were,' one of those cruel tech-collegiate formats where any U.S. student who wants to can dart over from the super-collider lab or the Fourier Transforms study group for fifteen minutes and read on-air some parodic thing where he'd pretend to be his own dad apotheosizing some sort of thick-necked historic athletic figure the dad'd admired and had by implication compared with woeful distaste to the pencil-necked big-headed asthmatic little kid staring up through Coke-bottle lenses from his digital keyboard. The show's only rule is that you have to read your thing in the voice of some really silly cartoon character. There are other, rather more exotic patricidal formats for Asian, Latin, Arab, and European students on select weekend evenings. The consensus is Asian cartoon characters have the silliest voices.
Albeit literally sophomoric, 'Those Were the Legends . . .' is a useful drama-therapy-type catharsis-op — M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, pencil-neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist's kill-jar broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground — and the show pulls down solid FM ratings, though a lot of that's due to reverse-inertia, a Newton'sTI-like backward shove from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M-F 0000h.-0100h., which it precedes.
Y.D.A.U.'s WYYY late-shift student engineer, unfond of any elevator that follows a serpentine or vascular path, eschews the M.I.T. Student Union's elevator. He has an arrival routine where he skips the front entrances and comes in through the south side's acoustic meatus and gets a Millennial Fizzy® out of the vending machine in the sephenoid sinus, then descends creaky back wooden stairs from the Massa Intermedia's Reading Room down to about the Infundibular Recess, past the Tech Talk Daily CD-ROM student paper's production floor and the sick chemical smell of the Read-Only cartridge-press's developer, down past the epiglottal Hillel Club's dark and star-doored HQ, past the heavier door to the tiled lattice of hallways to the squash and racquetball courts and one volleyball court and the airy corpus callosum of 24 high-ceiling tennis courts endowed by an M.I.T. alum and now so little used they don't even know now where the nets are, down three more levels to the ghostly-clean and lithium-lit studios of FM 109-WYYY FM, broadcasting for the M.I.T. community and selected points beyond. The studio's walls are pink and laryngeally fissured. His asthma's better down here, the air thin and keen, the tracheal air-filters just below the flooring and the ventilators' air the freshest in the Union.
The engineer, a work-study graduate student with bad lungs and occluded pores, settles alone at his panel in the engineer's booth, adjusts a couple needles' bob, and sound-checks the only paid personality on the nightly docket, the darkly revered Madame Psychosis, whose cameo shadow is just visible outside the booth's thick glass, her screen half-obscuring the on-air studio's bank of phones, checking cueing and transition for the Thursday edition. She is hidden from all view by a jointed triptych screen of cream chiffon that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing panel's dials and frames her silhouette. Her silhouette is cleanly limned against the screen, sitting cross-legged in its in-sectile microphonic headset, smoking. The engineer always has to tighten his own headset's cranial band down from the 'Those Were' engineer's mammoth parietal breadth. He activates the intercom and offers to check Madame Psychosis's levels. He requests sound. Anything at all. He hasn't opened his can of pop. There is a long silence during which Madame Psychosis's silhouette doesn't look up from something she looks like she's collating at her little desk.
After a while she makes some little sounds, little plosives to check for roaring sounds in exhalations, a perennial problem in low-budget FM.
She makes a long s-sound.
The student engineer takes a hit from his portable inhaler.
She says 'He liked that sort of dreamy, dreaming music that had the rhythm of long things swinging.’
The engineer's movements at the panel's dials resemble someone adjusting the heater and sound system while driving.
'The Dow that can be told is not the eternal Dow,' she says.
The engineer, age twenty-three, has extremely bad skin.
'Attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object:’
The windowless laryngeal studio is terribly bright. Nothing casts a shadow. Recessed-lit fluorescence with a dual-spectrum lithiumized corona, developed two buildings over and awaiting O.N.A.N. patent. The chilly shadowless light of surgical theaters, convenience stores at 0400. The pink wrinkled walls sometimes look more gynecological than anything else.
'Like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.’
The engineer shivers in the bright chill and lights a gasper of his own and tells Madame Psychosis through the intercom that the whole range of levels is fine. Madame Psychosis is the only WYYY personality who brings in her own headset and jacks, plus a triptych screen. Over the screen's left section are four clocks set for different Zones, plus a numberless disk someone hung for a joke, to designate the annularized Great Concavity's No-Time. The E.S.T. clock's trackable hand carves off the last few seconds from the five minutes of dead air Madame Psychosis's contract stipulates gets to precede her show. You can see her silhouette putting out the cigarette very methodically. She cues tonight's synthesized bumper and theme music; the engineer flicks a lever and pumps the music up the coaxial medulla and through the amps and boosters packed into the crawlspaces above the high false ceiling of the corpus callosum's idle tennis courts and up and out the aerial that protrudes from the gray and bulbous surface of the Union's roof. Institutional design has come a ways from I. M. Pei. M.I.T.'s near-new Student Union, off the corner of Ames and Memorial Dr.,
60
60
East Cambridge, is one enormous cerebral cortex of reinforced concrete and polymer compounds. Madame Psychosis is smoking again, listening, head cocked. Her tall screen will leak smoke for her show's whole hour. The student engineer is counting down from five on an outstretched hand he can't see how she sees. And as pinkie meets palm, she says what she's said for three years of midnights, an opening bit that Mario Incandenza, the least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA, across the river, listening faithfully, finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling:
Her silhouette leans and says 'And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.
'And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.
'And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.’
A toneless male voice is then cued in to say It's Sixty Minutes More Or Less With Madame Psychosis On YYY-109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band. The different sounds are encoded and pumped by the student engineer up through the building's corpus and out the roof's aerial. This aerial, low-watt, has been rigged by the station's EM-wienies to tilt and spin, not unlike a centrifugal theme-park-type ride, spraying the signal in all directions. Since the B.S. 1966 Hundt Act, the low-watt fringes of the FM band are the only part of the Wireless Spectrum still licensed for public broadcast. The deep-water green of FM tuners all over the campus's labs and dorms and barnacled clots of grad apartments align themselves slowly toward the spatter's center, moving toward the dial's right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can't even see. Ratings are minor-league by the pre-InterLace broadcast standards of yore, but they are rock-solid consistent. Audience demand for Madame Psychosis has been, from the very start, inelastic. The aerial, inclined at about the angle of a 3-km. cannon, spins in a blurred ellipse — its rotary base is elliptical because that's the only shape the EM-wienies could rig a mold for. Obstructed on all sides by the tall buildings of East Cambridge and Commercial Drive and serious Downtown, though, only a couple thin pie-slices of signal escape M.I.T. proper, e.g. through the P.E.-Dept. gap of barely used lacrosse and soccer fields between the Philology and Low-Temp Physics complexes on Mem. Dr. and then across the florid-purple nighttime breadth of the historic Charles River, then through the heavy flow of traffic on Storrow Dr. on the Chuck's other side, so that by the time the signal laps at upper Brighton and Enfield you need almost surveillance-grade antennation to filter it in out of the EM-miasma of cellular and interconsole phone transmissions and TPs' EM-auras that crowd the FM fringes from every side. Unless, that is, your tuner is lucky enough to be located at the apex of a tall and more or less denuded hill, in Enfield, in which case you find yourself right in YYY's centrifugal line of fire.
Madame Psychosis eschews chatty openings and contextual filler. Her hour is compact and no-nonsense.
After the music fades, her shadow holds collated sheets up and riffles them slightly so the sound of paper is broadcast. 'Obesity,' she says. 'Obesity with hypogonadism. Also morbid obesity. Nodular leprosy with leonine fades.' The engineer can see her silhouette lift a cup as she pauses, which reminds him of the Millennial Fizzy in his bookbag.
She says 'The acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. The enuretic, this year of all years. The spasmodically torticollic.’