One of the lovely but also a little unnerving recurring moments in The Broom of the System, DFW’s first novel, is when Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman and Rick Vigorous will be in bed, and she’ll ask him, a literary editor and secret short story writer, who is insanely jealous, and also obsessed by “context,” for a story. A story, please, she’ll say. They’ll quip back and forth for a moment (you can imagine, if you haven’t read it, that in these moments DFW uses that format of clipped single lines of dialogue one after the other), and then Rick will give in. And will tell her a story which came to him in the mail that day, which starts off rather typically, but then goes on, and on, taking up a much bigger chunk of the book than you expected, and then suddenly but also slowly veering off often into a fairy tale of a sort whose world is almost cartoonishly hyper-painful — in a way that is, in the most fucked up of ways, a pleasure to be in. In my own memory, Lenore normally says something to Rick like “Tell me a story,” but it turns out that that was a line I got from after DFW died.
There’s a moment in §46 when it sort of clicks past its allotted time, goes one step too far: ‘Do you happen to know what Zeller is?’ (467) (This was it for me, at least, though I could also see the line up on the top of the page [‘I mean my sad story. Part of mine. Everybody’s got their sad story. You want to hear part of mine?’] being a candidate — a losing one.) We don’t really need to be told that she goes off on these long stories (495) to know that Meredith Rand habitually at any opportunity tells whoever’s present some story — we need to be told for other reasons — but we also don’t need to doubt too much that her tête-à-tête with Drinion is, somehow, different. But now, it wouldn’t seem right that the fact of her sharing some secret past with Drinion that she most likely hasn’t with any other of the examiners is what achieves this. (They likely know more than she thinks.) It’s not in other words so much what she tells him — when, on 504, she refers back to those things about my mom and the neighbor that nobody knew, she has, and kind of incredibly, forgotten that on 479 she had 30 or so minutes earlier made a thing about refusing to tell Drinion these things — but maybe, more, the way she does. All that gesturing and instantly erected temporary protocol. I imagine that when she goes off on breaks it’s different from when she goes on, here, one step further, in front of Drinion.
In Broom, the stories Rick recounts for Lenore, when they go one step further, turn in that slow but also sudden way fantastic. They’re sort of freed to be hyperbolical and symbolic and over the top about the more normal situations they’re referring back to in a way that ends up feeling far more keyed into and true to life than almost anything people call realistic. I’m thinking of one in particular that is awful even to half remember. But with Meredith, the story — i.e., the one embedded in the story of her tête-à-tête with Drinion — doesn’t get fantastic. It just goes on; “deeper,” we might say. It’s not clear what she’s making up. (Nor, actually, how she knows where to stop.) She doesn’t go to a dark awful forest filled with suffering types. She just goes on committed to remembering for Drinion — this, just, computer of an ideal man noone would ever want himself to be fully like — what happened, what it was like. In part, I think, the self-assigned imperative to get her story right for Drinion, for it to be realistically painful, hamstrings her. It would me, too. But this is also what locks her into him: the insular container thing she’ll describe.
It’s key, I think, that we get Meredith as an adult, grown up, looking back, rather than at 17/18 cutting herself or in the hallway at Central Catholic or holed up in Zeller. TPK’s given us childhoods in the present before, so it could have done so with her, too. But instead we get her past embedded, told, retold. A moment embodying this: when Drinion asks her if it hurts (486), Rand’s instant instinct is to correct him: I don’t do it anymore. Because while it’s true that she seemingly no longer does the one shitty thing that got her institutionalized, the question wasn’t, Do you still do it? but: Does it hurt? And so then, how could the answer be No?
It’s as if part of Rand needs to believe that she has this entire time in Meibeyer’s in front of Drinion been referring back to a time in her life that was, but purely isn’t any more. Her sad story (her love story, maybe — of how she and her husband met) being a sort of file that she can pull and present whenever she’s so moved. But §46 collapses past and present a little. Undermines the idea of a past ready to hand a bit. Rand’s telling of her story is studded, for one, with her checking in with Drinion (who’s there), the jukebox, the game, the pinball machines, people unwinding, her repertoire of cigarette-enabled tics. If she begins to get even knee deep into her story, Rand gets returned to her presence in the present. Or, no: when she gets knee deep into her story, she gets returned to her presence in the present. Realizes she’d been feeling her eyeballs. So it’s kind of odd, then, that later she’ll conjure up their tête-à-tête as removed from any kind of environment at all (472) — that later, for Beth Rath, she’ll call this sensation of temporary contextlessness, precisely a being unaware at the moment of the thud of the jukebox’s excessive bass in her breastbone (think about this), “intensity.” Could the achievement of being so intensely in your environment be signified by its opposite? If Rand were to say something like, “It was as if we were the only two people in the world”— that, for example, would seem almost like it were describing the opposite of what is going on between her and Drinion.
The two of them, but also everyone else in there they’re tuning out, cut off from the collecting storm clouds outside by their temporarily shared physical context (which trumps whatever container they’re experiencing). Why do we need to know about the clouds when the examiners can’t? Not seeing is part of paying attention, it might be redundant but worth pointing out. Are we ready to call “pay attention” (and its variations) a sort of placeholder of joke, signifying next to nothing, but no less serious for it?
Have you noticed the beautiful calm voice DFW busts out when he’s looking only at landscapes? What if he applied it to people?
Anyway, we don’t need Rand to half unconsciously refer to both her Ed and Drinion as mirrors of herself to get that she’s repeating herself. But the point is not, Oh, she’s really uncured, or, Oh, her habits are just so deeply ingrained, or even, Oh, she’s still a child, but rather something, I think, like: it’s still going on. Her sad story, the experience it’s referring to. Isn’t this why it sort of just abruptly just dies there, on 508, Rand suddenly signaling to Rath she’s ready to leave? What makes this the end? ‘Is[n’t] there some extra information I need to understand this?’ Hey, wait. What Rand has to tell us about back when she was a fox, and how she met her husband, it’s completely engrossing (particularly if it rings personal bells), and only made more engrossing against the emptied banal backdrop of Meibeyer’s. I’m in part I think trying to keep it for myself. But what I don’t want us to forget is this: that her story is for Shane Drinion, who in a sense asks for it no less than Lenore does. That it can only even be told vis-à-vis him, even; that, really, he co-tells the story. And that all that Meredith Rand’s recounting, he’s experiencing firsthand.
And yet that also, what gets conceived of as a sort of locked-in temporarily timeless hermetic tête-à-tête is actually, if it’s good, the least sealed off of situations.
So, everyone’s got their stories. One by one, we’ve gotten the examiners’. Toni Ware’s in §8, David Cusk’s in §13, and so on. At first, we got them without knowing we’d then meet them later on, in the present. Then we caught on. Now, as the present backdrop of the IRS inches to the fore (… will it make it?), we have the variously very damaged kids we’ve met collected in one place in the present, each walking around in their adult bodies with their private stories inside them, which stories remain for the most part known to us but totally hidden from the other examiners, who mainly aren’t even conscious of them as concealed. But I don’t know. We’ve talked, because we’ve been talking about DFW, about interiority, skull traps, what’s going on inside a given person and how it’s almost by definition inaccessible — but a story isn’t a beetle in a box. For Meredith Rand to walk around with some eyes on her, the PGOAT of the Peoria IRS, her pinkie finger puckered, her story, her past, bearing ever so intensely normally on her present from both sides — noone may have any clue what Ed’s name is, or what Zeller is, but this isn’t the same thing as Rand being unavoidably fundamentally cut off. There aren’t exactly unshared stories. We’ve got these tiny moments of physical self-betrayal, for one. (The suspicious unreadability of Drinions’s face tells you infinitely more about the reader than it does him.) ‘But in reality everything was the surface.’ (499) The most awesome thing about Drinion, then, for Rand, might be his inability to process the phrase “inward reaction.”
Now, what’s his secret?