The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel by David Foster Wallace
Authors: David Foster Wallace
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a hand studied through the seats’ gap by the doll’s head held just so and its detachment and airborne flight seen in the same dream the lurch and sounds first seemed part of. The daughter thirteen now and starting to look it. Her mother’s eyes were distant and low-lidded in the company of men; now in Kansas she made faces at the rearview and chewed gum. ‘Ride up front up out of there up here why don’t you.’ The gum smelt cinnamon and its folded foil could make a glovebox pick by wrapping round to smooth a file’s emery at the point.
Outside a Portales rest stop, under a sun of beaten gold, the girl supine and half asleep in a porous nap on the little back shelf had suffered the man to hoist himself about behind the truck’s wheel and form his hand into an unsensual claw and send it out over the seatback to squeeze her personal titty, to throttle the titty, eyes pale and unprurient, she playing dead and staring unblinking past him, the man’s breathing audible and khaki cap pungent, manhandling the titty with what seemed an absent dispassion, leaving off only at the high heels’ sound in the lot outside. Still a stark advance over the previous year’s Cesar, who worked at painting highway signs and had green grains forever in the pores of his face and hands and required both mother and girl to keep the washroom door open no matter what their business inside, himself then in turn improved over Houston’s district of warehouses and gutted lofts whereat had fallen in with them for two months ‘Murray Blade,’ the semiprofessional welder whose knife in its forearm’s spring clip covered a tattoo of just that knife between two ownerless blue breasts the squeeze of a fist made swell at the sides which amused him. Men with leather vests and tempers who were tender when drunk in ways that made your back’s skin pebble up.
The 54 highway east was not federal and the winds of oncoming rigs struck the truck and its shell and caused yaw the mother steered against. All windows down against the man’s stored smell. An unmentionable thing in the glovebox the mother said to shut she couldn’tlook. The card with its entendre made French curls in their backwash and disappeared against the past road’s shimmer.
West of Pratt KS they purchased and ate Convenient Mart burritos heated in the device provided for that purpose. A great huge unfinishable Slushee.
Behind her carapace of disks and foil the mother’s mother held when madman Jack Benny or his spiral-eyed slaves came for them the best defense at hand was to play dead, to lie with blank eyes open and not blink or breathe while the men holstered their ray guns and walked about the house and looked at them, shrugging and telling one another they were too late because look here the woman and her nubile daughter were already deceased and best left be. Forced to practice together in the twin beds with open bottles of pills on the table betwixt and hands composed on their chests and eyes wide and breathing in such a slight way that the chest never rose. The older woman could hold her open eyes unblinking a very long time; the mother as child could not and they soon enough closed of their own, for a living child is no doll and does need to blink and breathe. The older woman said one could self-lubricate at will with the proper application of discipline and time. She said her decade on a carnival necklace and had a small nickel lock on the mailbox. Windows covered with foil in the crescents between the caps’ black circles. The mother carried drops and always claimed her eyes were dry.
Riding up front was good. She did not ask about the truck’s man. It was his truck they were in but he was not in the truck; it was hard to locate something to complain about in this. The mother’s relatings were least indifferent when the two faced the same; she made small jokes and sang and sent small looks the daughter’s way. All the world beyond the reach of the headlamps’
Outside a Portales rest stop, under a sun of beaten gold, the girl supine and half asleep in a porous nap on the little back shelf had suffered the man to hoist himself about behind the truck’s wheel and form his hand into an unsensual claw and send it out over the seatback to squeeze her personal titty, to throttle the titty, eyes pale and unprurient, she playing dead and staring unblinking past him, the man’s breathing audible and khaki cap pungent, manhandling the titty with what seemed an absent dispassion, leaving off only at the high heels’ sound in the lot outside. Still a stark advance over the previous year’s Cesar, who worked at painting highway signs and had green grains forever in the pores of his face and hands and required both mother and girl to keep the washroom door open no matter what their business inside, himself then in turn improved over Houston’s district of warehouses and gutted lofts whereat had fallen in with them for two months ‘Murray Blade,’ the semiprofessional welder whose knife in its forearm’s spring clip covered a tattoo of just that knife between two ownerless blue breasts the squeeze of a fist made swell at the sides which amused him. Men with leather vests and tempers who were tender when drunk in ways that made your back’s skin pebble up.
The 54 highway east was not federal and the winds of oncoming rigs struck the truck and its shell and caused yaw the mother steered against. All windows down against the man’s stored smell. An unmentionable thing in the glovebox the mother said to shut she couldn’tlook. The card with its entendre made French curls in their backwash and disappeared against the past road’s shimmer.
West of Pratt KS they purchased and ate Convenient Mart burritos heated in the device provided for that purpose. A great huge unfinishable Slushee.
Behind her carapace of disks and foil the mother’s mother held when madman Jack Benny or his spiral-eyed slaves came for them the best defense at hand was to play dead, to lie with blank eyes open and not blink or breathe while the men holstered their ray guns and walked about the house and looked at them, shrugging and telling one another they were too late because look here the woman and her nubile daughter were already deceased and best left be. Forced to practice together in the twin beds with open bottles of pills on the table betwixt and hands composed on their chests and eyes wide and breathing in such a slight way that the chest never rose. The older woman could hold her open eyes unblinking a very long time; the mother as child could not and they soon enough closed of their own, for a living child is no doll and does need to blink and breathe. The older woman said one could self-lubricate at will with the proper application of discipline and time. She said her decade on a carnival necklace and had a small nickel lock on the mailbox. Windows covered with foil in the crescents between the caps’ black circles. The mother carried drops and always claimed her eyes were dry.
Riding up front was good. She did not ask about the truck’s man. It was his truck they were in but he was not in the truck; it was hard to locate something to complain about in this. The mother’s relatings were least indifferent when the two faced the same; she made small jokes and sang and sent small looks the daughter’s way. All the world beyond the reach of the headlamps’
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