Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online

with bonus reports of the crash in PA and Bush being moved into a SAC bunker and a car bomb that’s gone off in Chicago (the latter then retracted), pretty much everybody either cries or comes very close, according to his or her relative abilities. Mrs. Thompson says less than almost anyone. I don’t think she cries, but she doesn’t rock in her chair as usual, either. Her first husband’s death was apparently sudden and grisly, and I know at times during the war F—- would be out in the field and she wouldn’t hear from him for weeks at a time and didn’t know whether he was even alive. Duane Bracero’s main contribution is to keep iterating how much like a movie it all seems. Duane, who’s at least twenty-five but still lives at home while supposedly studying to be a welder, is one of these people who always wears camouflage T-shirts and paratrooper boots but would never dream of actually enlisting (as, to be fair, neither would I). He has also kept his hat, the front of which promotes something called SLIPKNOT, on his head indoors in Mrs. Thompson’s house. It always seems to be important to have at least one person in the vicinity to hate.
    It turns out the cause of poor tendony Mrs. R—-’s meltdown in the kitchen is that she has either a grandniece or removed cousin who’s doing some type of internship at Time, Inc., in the Time-Life Building or whatever it’s called, about which Mrs. R—- and whoever she’s managed to call know only that it’s a vertiginously tall skyscraper someplace in New York City, and she’s out of her mind with worry, and two other ladies have been out here the whole time holding both her hands and trying to decide whether they should call her doctor (Mrs. R—- has kind of a history), and I end up doing pretty much the only good I do all day by explaining to Mrs. R—- where midtown Manhattan is. It thereupon emerges that none of the people here I’m watching the Horror with—not even the couple ladies who’d gone to see Cats as part of some group tour thing through the church in 1991—have even the vaguest notion of New York’s layout and don’t know, for example, how radically far south the Financial District and Statue of Liberty are; they have to be shown this via pointing out the ocean in the foreground of the skyline they all know so well (from TV).
    The half-assed little geography lesson is the start of a feeling of alienation from these good people that builds in me all throughout the part of the Horror where people flee rubble and dust. These ladies are not stupid, or ignorant. Mrs. Thompson can read both Latin and Spanish, and Ms. Voigtlander is a certified speech therapist who once explained to me that the strange gulping sound that makes NBC’s Tom Brokaw so distracting to listen to is an actual speech impediment called a glottal L . It was one of the ladies out in the kitchen supporting Mrs. R—- who pointed out that 11 September is the anniversary of the Camp David Accords, which was certainly news to me.
    What these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room. It does not, for instance, occur to anyone here to remark on how it’s maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider the possibility that Dan Rather’s hair’s being mussed might not be wholly accidental, or that the constant rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn’t seen it yet. None of the ladies seem to notice the president’s odd little lightless eyes appear to get closer and closer together throughout his taped address, nor that some of his lines sound almost plagiaristically identical to those uttered by Bruce Willis (as a right-wing wacko, recall) in The Siege a couple years back. Nor that at least some of the sheer weirdness of watching the Horror unfold has been how closely