Free The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace Page A

that’s good.
    MR. LUNGBERG: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun’s pretty bright here.... What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand? Talk about sinister. And the black would soak up the heat a lot better, too. Be really hot, enhance the blastedness aspect.
    GOVERNOR: I like it. Ed Roy, what do you think? Can cacti and scorpions live in black sand?
    MR. YANCEY: No problem I can see.
    MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost of black sand?
    MR. YANCEY: A little more expensive, probably. I’d have to talk to the boys in Sand. But I feel I can commit now to saying it’d be manageable in the context of the whole project.
    GOVERNOR: Done.
    MR. LUNGBERG: When do we start?
    GOVERNOR: Immediately, Joe. Hewing is by nature a fast, violent thing. MR. OBSTAT: Chief, just let me say I’m excited. You have my congratulations, man to man and citizen to Governor.
    GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. You better go call your Mom, big fella. MR. OBSTAT: Right.
    MR. LUNGBERG: What about a name, Chief?
    GOVERNOR: A name? That’s a typically excellent point, Joe. I never thought of the name issue.
    MR. LUNGBERG: May I make a suggestion?
    GOVERNOR: Go.
    MR. LUNGBERG: The Great Ohio Desert.
    GOVERNOR: The Great Ohio Desert.
    MR. LUNGBERG: Yes.
    GOVERNOR: Joe, a super name. I take my hat off to you. You’ve done it again. Great. It spells size, desolation, grandeur, and it says it’s in Ohio.
    MR. LUNGBERG: Not too presumptuous?
    GOVERNOR: Not at all. Fits the concept to a T.
    MR. OBSTAT: I take my hat off to you too, Joe.
    MR. YANCEY: Damn fine name, Joe.
    GOVERNOR: So we’re all set. Concept. Desert. Color. Name. All that’s left is the hewing.
    MR. YANCEY: Well let’s get down to it, then.

5
    1990

/a/
    Suppose someone had said to me, ten years ago, in Scarsdale, or on the commuter train, suppose the person had been my next-door neighbor, Rex Metalman, the corporate accountant with the unbelievable undulating daughter, suppose this was back in the days before his lawn mania took truly serious hold and his nightly paramilitary sentry-duty with the illuminated riding mower and the weekly planeloads of DDT dropping from the sky in search of perhaps one sod webworm nest and his complete intransigence in the face of the reasonable and in the beginning polite requests of one or even all of the neighbors that hostilities against the range of potential lawn enemies that obsessed him be toned down, at least in scale, before all this drove a wedge the size of a bag of Scott’s into our tennis friendship, suppose Rex Metalman had speculated in my presence, then, that ten years later, which is to say now, I, Rick Vigorous, would be living in Cleveland, Ohio, between a biologically dead and completely offensive-smelling lake and a billion-dollar man-made desert, that I would be divorced from my wife and physically distanced from the growth of my son, that I would be operating a firm in partnership with an invisible person, little more, it seems clear now, than a corporate entity interested in failure for tax purposes, the firm publishing things perhaps even slightly more laughable than nothing at all, and that perched high atop this mountain of the unthinkable would be the fact that I was in love, grossly and pathetically and fiercely and completely in love with a person eighteen count them eighteen years younger than I, a woman from one of Cleveland’s first families, who lives in a city owned by her father but who works answering telephones for something like four dollars an hour, a woman whose uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers is an unanalyzable and troubling constant, who takes somewhere, I suspect, between five and eight showers a day, who works in neurosis like a whaler in scrim shaw, who lives with a schizophrenically narcissistic bird and an almost certainly nymphomaniacal bitch of a roommate, and who finds in me, somewhere, who knows where,