David Foster Wallace

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

Clarice distributed masks. There was a Clarice-mask for Clarice, an Alvin-mask for Alvin, a Stonecipher-mask for Stonecipher, a Spatula-mask for Spatula. The masks were very good and very lifelike. Clarice made them out of plaster molds and papier-mâché and Reynolds Wrap, in a workshop in the basement. Clarice was in many ways an artist, Lenore thought, CabanaTan notwithstanding. She was particularly good at making things with people’s faces on them. Every year she gave her father, Lenore’s father, cans of tennis balls in which every ball was an eerie likeness of the head of Bob Gerber or Erv Beechnut. Stonecipher Beadsman III loved to play tennis with these balls. Clarice also on the sly made some Stonecipher-Beadsman-III-head balls that she and Alvin batted around from time to time. During a dark period, about a year before, there had appeared a can of Alvin-head balls.

We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve, one or two of her friends standing with towering hairdos off to the side, wary lest they be caught in the ropes of sexual tension that snapped and crackled in the air between Janet and me, the friends watching us, me, for the tiniest error, the Beatles on the record player playing “Eight Days a Week,” and my hands prepared some sort of hors d’oeuvre, what do I mean some sort, a fastened cylinder of bologna on a Ritz cracker, and she declined it, and stared at me kindly, telling me with her eyes that she was willing to play the elaborate and exhausting game, that it was all right, and I put the hors d’oeuvre into my mouth, and the cracker seemed to explode into deserts of dust, and there was meat, and I recall she was talking about the upcoming election, and the unavoidable and untalkaboutably horrible invitation to dance began its salmon’s migration from my intestine up toward the brain, and my hand was in the pocket of my slacks, soaking through the wool, and in a disastrous flash I thought of something witty to say, to delay the invitation, and my heart leapt, and my throat constricted, and I turned convulsively from myself to say the thing to Janet Dibdin, as she stared with undeserved trust into my eyes, and I tried to say the thing, and as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d’oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva in it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin’s nose, and stayed there.