Free A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Page A

the court’s
     corners or straight sprints back and forth along the perfect furrows of early beanfields each morning—once the first pain
     and fatigue of butterflies are got through, if both guys are good enough so that there are few unforced errors to break up
     the rally, a kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose
     awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide (you have to slide out of a run on Har-Tru) and whatever’s
     outside the lines of the court, and pretty much all you know then is the bright ball and the octangled butterfly outline of
     its trail across the billiard green of the court. We had one just endless rally and I’d left the planet in a silent swoop
     inside when the court and ball and butterfly trail all seemed to surge brightly and glow as the daylight just plain went out
     in the sky overhead. Neither of us had noticed that there’d been no wind blowing the familiar grit into our eyes for several
     minutes—a bad sign. There was no siren. Later they said the C.D. alert network had been out of order. This was June 6, 1978.
     The air temperature dropped so fast you could feel your hairs rise. There was no thunder and no air stirred. I could not tell
     you why we kept hitting. Neither of us said anything. There was no siren. It was high noon; there was nobody else on the courts.
     The riding mower out over east at the Softball field was still going back and forth. There were no depressions except a saprogenic
     ditch along the field of new corn just west. What could we have done? The air always smells of mowed grass before a bad storm.
     I think we thought it would rain at worst and that we’d play till it rained and then go sit in Antitoi’s parents’ station
     wagon. I do remember a mental obscenity—I had gut strings in my rackets, strings everybody with a high sectional ranking got
     free for letting the Wilson sales rep spray-paint a
W
across the racket face, so they were free, but I liked this particular string job on this racket, I liked them tight but
     not real tight, 62-63 p.s.i. on a Proflite stringer, and gut becomes pasta if it gets wet, but we were both in the fugue-state
     that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I’ve decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing,
     a fugue-state I associated too with plowing and seeding and detasseling and spreading herbicides back and forth in sentry
     duty along perfect lines, up and back, or military marching on flat blacktop, hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush,
     numbing and yet exquisitely felt. We were young, we didn’t know when to stop. Maybe I was mad at my body and wanted to hurt
     it, wear it down. Then the whole knee-high field to the west along Kirby Avenue all of a sudden flattened out in a wave coming
     toward us as if the field was getting steamrolled. Antitoi went wide west for a forehand cross and I saw the corn get laid
     down in waves and the sycamores in a copse lining the ditch point our way. There was no funnel. Either it had just materialized
     and come down or it wasn’t a real one. The big heavy swings on the industrial swingsets took off, wrapping themselves in their
     chains around and around the top crossbar; the park’s grass got laid down the same way the field had; the whole thing happened
     so fast I’d seen nothing like it; recall that Bi-mini H-Bomb film of the shock wave visible in the sea as it comes toward
     the ship’s film crew. This all happened very fast but in serial progression: field, trees, swings, grass, then the feel like
     the lift of the world’s biggest mitt, the nets suddenly and sexually up and out straight, and I seem to remember whacking
     a ball out of my hand at Antitoi to watch its radical west-east curve, and for some reason trying to run after this ball I’d
     just hit, but I couldn’t have tried to run after a ball I had hit, but I remember the