David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘I don’t know.’

‘It kind of did to me,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘I told him that was incredibly helpful and now I knew just what to do when I got discharged from Zeller, which was click my heels together and transform diagnosis into cure, and how could I ever repay him.’

Drinion says, ‘You were being deeply sarcastic.’

‘I was pissed!’ Meredith Rand says, a bit loudly. ‘I told him lo and behold it looked like it turned out he was just like the diagnosis-is-cure doctors in their nice suits, except of course his diagnosis was also insulting, which he could call honesty and get extra jollies hurting people’s feelings. I was just so pissed! And he laughed and said he wished I could see myself right now — he could see me because he was lying down and I was standing right over him, because every like fifteen minutes or so I had to help him up so he could sneak back in out of the hallway and go around with his clipboard and do checks. He said I looked like a little child that just had its toy taken away.’

‘Which probably made you even angrier,’ Drinion says.

‘He said something like all right then, OK, he’d explain it like he was talking to a child, to somebody so locked into the problem that she can’t even see that it’s her problem and not just the way the world is. I wanted to be liked and known for more than just the prettiness. That I wanted people to look past the prettiness thing and the sexual thing and see who I was, like as a person, and I felt really mad and sorry for myself that people didn’t.’

Meredith Rand, in the tavern, looks briefly up at Drinion. ‘Didn’t look past the surface,’ he says, to signify that he understands what she’s saying.

She cocks her head. ‘But in reality everything was the surface.’

‘Your surface?’

‘Yes, because under the surface were just all these feelings and conflicts about the surface, and anger, about how I looked and the effect on people I had, and really all there was inside was this constant tantrum about how I wasn’t getting saved and it was because of my prettiness, which he said if you think about it is really unattractive — nobody wants to get close to somebody who’s in the middle of this constant tantrum. Who’d want that?’ Rand makes a sort of ironic ta-da gesture in the air. ‘So, he said, I’d actually set it up so that the only reason anybody would be attracted to me as a person was that I was pretty, which was exactly the thing that made me so angry and lonely and sad.’

‘That sounds like a psychological trap.’

‘His comparison was he compared it to making a kind of machine that gave you an electric shock every time you said “Ow!” Of course, he knew I’d been having the machine dreams. I know I kept just looking at him, giving him this death-ray look that all the foxes in school get good at giving people, like they’re just supposed to melt away and die if you look at them like that. He was lying down with his feet up on the stairs as he’s saying all this. His lips were a little bit blue, the cardiomyopathy was getting worse all the time, and the Zeller stairways had those horrid fluorescent tube light things in the stairwell that made him look worse; he wasn’t even pale as much as gray, with this kind of frothy paste on his lips, because he couldn’t sip his little can of water when he was lying down on his back.’ Her eyes look like she’s really seeing him again in situ in the stairwell at Zeller. To tell the truth, he looked gross to me, scary, repulsive, like a corpse, or somebody in one of those pictures of people in stripes in concentration camps. The weird thing is that I cared about him at the same time I found him gross. He grossed me out,’ she says. ‘And that I was so deep in my problem that I couldn’t accept real, genuine, nonsexual or nonromantic or non-prettiness-type interest in me even if it was offered to me — he was talking about himself, which I knew, even though he didn’t spell it out; we’d gone over that ground for days and days before, and time was running out, we both knew. I’d be getting discharged and I’d never see him again. But I said some pretty horrible things.’

‘You’re referring to the stairwell,’ Shane Drinion says.

‘Because deep down inside, he said, I only saw myself in terms of the prettiness. I saw myself as so mediocre and banal inside that I couldn’t imagine anybody except my parents being interested in me for anything except what I looked like, as a fox. I was so angry, he said, that all anybody cared about or paid any attention to was the prettiness, but he said that was a smoke screen, theater of the human mind, that what really bothered me so much was I felt the same way, boys and men were treating me the same sort of way I really treated myself, and in reality it was really myself I was angry at except I couldn’t see it — I projected it onto the pervs whistling on the street or the sweaty boys trying to boff me or the other girls deciding I’m a bitch because I’m stuck up about the prettiness.’

There is a brief moment of silence, meaning nothing but the noise of pinball and the baseball game and the sounds of people unwinding.

‘Is this boring?’ she asks Drinion abruptly. She’s unaware of how she’s looking at Drinion as she asks this. For just a moment she appears to be almost a different person. It has suddenly occurred to Meredith Rand that Shane Drinion might be one of those ingratiating but ultimately shallow people who could seem to be paying attention while in fact allowing their attention to wander hill and dale all over the place, including possibly to considering how he wouldn’t be sitting here nodding politely and listening to this incredibly boring dribble, narcissistic dribble, if it didn’t afford him a chance to look directly at Meredith’s bottomless green eyes and exquisite bone structure, plus a bit of visible cleavage, since she’d taken off her flounce and unbuttoned her top button the minute the 5:00 buzzer had sounded.

‘Is it? Is this boring?’

Drinion responds: ‘The major part of it isn’t, no.’

‘What part of it is boring?’

‘Boring isn’t a very good term. Certain parts you tend to repeat, or say over again only in a slightly different way. These parts add no new information, so these parts require more work to pay attention to, alth—’

‘Like what parts? What is it that you think I keep telling over and over?’

‘I wouldn’t call it boring, though. It’s more that attending to these parts requires work, although it wouldn’t be fair to call that effort unpleasant. It’s that listening to the parts that do add new information or insights, these parts compel attention in a way that doesn’t require effort.’

‘What, is it that I keep going on and on about how supposedly beautiful I am?’

‘No,’ Drinion says. He cocks his head slightly. ‘In fact, to be honest, in those parts where you do repeat the same essential point or information in a slightly different way, the underlying motive, which I get the feeling is a concern that what you’re imparting might be unclear or uninteresting and must get recast and resaid in many different ways to assure yourself that the listener really understands you — this is interesting, and somewhat emotional, and it coheres in an interesting way with the surface subject of what Ed, in the story you’re telling, is teaching you, and so in that respect even the repetitive or redundant elements compel interest and require little conscious effort to pay attention to, at least so far as I’m concerned.’

Meredith Rand extracts another cigarette. ‘You sound like you’re reading off a card or something.’

‘I’m sorry it seems that way. I was trying to explain my answer to your question, because I got the sense you were hurt by my answer, and I felt that a fuller explanation would prevent the hurt. Or obviate it if you were angry. In my view, there was just a misunderstanding based on a miscommunication around the word boring. ’