The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel by David Foster Wallace

incandesced and opaque with water, which the wipers heaved mightily to displace. Britton’s gaze—seemed to Sylvanshine more like looking
at
his right eye than
into
it. (At this time it moved through Thomas Bondurant’s mind, which lended to be tornadic, as he looked out the window but more back and in at his own memory, that one could look out a window, look in a window as there was the gold ponytail and a flash of creamy shoulder
in
the window, through a window [close to ‘out’], or even
at
a window, as in examining the pane’s clarity and whether it was clean.) The gaze nevertheless seemed to be one of expectancy, and Sylvanshine felt again past the emptiness of his stomach and the pinched nerve in his clavicle how opaque the bus’s overall mood was and different from the horror-fraught tension of the Philadelphia 0104’s hundred and seventy agents or the manic torpor of tiny 408’s dozen in Rome. His own mood, the complex hybrid of destination-fatigue and anticipatory fear one feels at the end not of a journey but a move, did not in any way complement the mood of the former Squishee truck nor of the urbane wistful older agent to his left nor of the human blank-spot who’d asked an invasive question whose honest answer would entail acknowledging the invasion, putting Sylvanshine in a personnel-relations bind before he’d even arrived at the Post, which seemed for a moment terribly unfair and flushed Sylvanshine with self-pity, a feeling not as dark as the wing of despair but tinged carmine with a resentment that was both better and worsethan ordinary anger because it had no specific object. There seemed no one in particular to blame; something in Gary or Gerry Britton’s aspect made it obvious that his question was some inevitable extension of his character and that he was no more to be blamed for it than an ant was to be blamed for crawling on your potato salad at a picnic—creatures just did what they did.

§8
     
    Under the sign erected every May above the outer highway reading IT’S SPRING, THINK FARM SAFETY and through the north ingress with its own defaced name and signs addressed to soliciting and speed and universal glyph for children at play and down the blacktop’s gauntlet of double-wide showpieces past the rottweiler humping nothing in crazed spasms at chain’s end and the sound of frying through the kitchenette window of the trailer at the hairpin right and then hard left along the length of a speed bump into the dense copse as yet uncleared for new single-wides and the sound of dry things snapping and stridulation of bugs in the duff of the copse and the two bottles and bright plastic packet impaled on the mulberry twig, seeing through shifting parallax of saplings’ branches sections then of trailers along the north park’s anfractuous roads and lanes skirting the corrugate trailer where it was said the man left his family and returned sometime later with a gun and killed them all as they watched
Dragnet
and the torn abandoned sixteen-wide half overgrown by the edge of the copse where boys and their girls made strange agnate forms on pallets and left bright torn packs until a mishap with a stove blew the gas lead and ruptured the trailer’s south wall in a great labial tear that exposes the trailer’s guttedinsides to view from the edge of the copse and the plurality of eyes as the needles and stems of a long winter noisomely crunch beneath a plurality of shoes where the copse leaves off at a tangent past the end of the undeveloped cul-de-sac where they come now at dusk to watch the parked car heave on its springs. The windows steamed nearly opaque and so alive in the chassis that it seems to move without running, the boat-sized car, squeak of struts and absorbers and a jiggle just short of true rhythm. The birds at dusk and the smell of snapped pine and a younger one’s cinnamon gum. The shimmying motions resemble those of a car traveling at high speeds along a bad road, making the