The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

calligraphy he’s spent three weekends on, and each invitation details in Roman-numeraled outline form the itinerary’s half-day at Six Flags, private PhD-guided tour of the Blanford Nature Center, and Reserved Banquet Area w/Free Play at Shakee’s Pizza and Indoor Arcade on Remembrance Drive (the whole day gratis and paid for out of the Paper and Aluminum Drives the boy got up at 4:00 A.M. all summer to organize and spearhead, the balance of the Drives’ receipts going to the Red Cross and the parents of a Kentwood third-grader with terminal spina bifida who dreams above all else of seeing the Lions’ Night Train Lane play live from his motorized wheelchair), and the invitations explicitly call the party this—a
BLOWOUT BASH—
in balloon-shaped font as the caption to an illustrated explosion of good cheer and -will and no-holds-barred-let-out-all-the-stops
FUN,
with the bold-faced proviso PLEASE—NO PRESENTS REQUIRED in each of each card’s four corners; and the 316 invitations, sent via First-Class Mail to every student, instructor, substitute instructor, aide, administrator, and custodian at C. P. Robinson Elementary, yield a total attendance of nine celebrants (not counting parents or LPNs of the incapacitated), and yet an undauntedly fine time is had by all, and such is the consensus on the Honest Appraisal and Suggestion Cards (also vellum) circulated at party’s end, the massive remainders of chocolate cake, Neapolitan ice cream, pizza, chips, caramel corn, Hershey’s Kisses, Red Cross and Officer Chuck pamphlets on organ/tissue donation and the correct procedures to follow if approached by a stranger respectively, kosher pizza for the Orthodox, designer napkins, and dietetic soda in souvenir
I Survived Leonard Stecyk’s 11th Birthday Blowout Bash 1964
plastic glasses w/built-in lemniscate Krazy Straws the guests were to keep as mementos all donated to the Kent County Children’s Home via procedures and transport that the birthday boy has initiated even while the big Twister free-for-all is under way, out of concerns about melted ice cream and staleness and flatness and the waste of a chance to help the less fortunate; and his father, driving the wood-panel station wagon and steadying his cheekwith one hand, avows again that the boy beside him has a large, good heart, and that he is proud, and that if the boy’s mother ever regains consciousness as they so very much hope, he knows she’ll be just awful proud as well.
    The boy makes As and enough occasional Bs to keep himself from getting a swelled head about marks, and his teachers shudder at the sound of even just his name. In the fifth grade he undertakes a district collection to provide a Special Fund of nickels for anyone at lunch who’s already spent their milk money but still might for whatever reason want or feel they need more milk. The Jolly Holly Milk Company gets wind of it and puts a squib about the Fund and an automated line drawing of the boy on the side of some of their half-pint cartons. Two-thirds of the school ceases to drink milk, while the Special Fund itself grows so large that the principal has to requisition a small safe for his office. The principal is now taking Seconal to sleep and experiencing fine tremors, and on two separate occasions is cited for Failure to Yield at marked crosswalks.
    A teacher in whose homeroom the boy suggests a charted reorganization of the coat hooks and boot boxes lining one wall so that the coat and galoshes of the student whose desk is nearest the door would themselves be nearest the door, and the second-nearest’s second-nearest, and so on, speeding the pupils’ egress to recess and reducing delays and possible quarrels and clots of half-bundled kids at the classroom door (which delays and clots the boy had taken the trouble this quarter to chart by statistical incidence, with relevant graphics and arrows but all names withheld), this tenured and highly respected veteran teacher ends up