2022

An edited excerpt from “Broom of the System” by David Foster Wallace

This story concerns a man who suffers from second-order vanity. What is this, you ask?

A second-order vain person is first of all a vain person. He’s vain about his intelligence, and wants people to think he’s smart. Or about his appearance, and wants people to think he’s attractive. Or his sense of humor, or his talents, et cetera. The vain person is concerned that people not percieve him as dumb, or ugly, or stupid.

Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Enormously afraid that others will percieve him as a vain person. He will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or maybe he’ll even try to give the impression that he doesn’t consider himself funny at all. He’ll be washing his hands in a public restroom, and will be unable to resist the temptation to admire and scrutinize himself in the mirror, but he’ll pretend he’s fixing a contact lens or getting something out of his eye while he does so, so that people won’t percieve him as the sort of person who admires himself in mirrors.

Today we have a story about a man who was second-order vain about his appearance. Obsessed with his body, but also obsessed with the desire that no one know of his obsession. He goes to enormous lengths to hide his vanity from his girlfriend. Did I mention he lives with an apparantely ravingly beautiful and also very nice girl? Well he does, who loves him like mad and also he loves her. And they’re getting along fine, although the man is of course under quite a bit of strain, obsessed and also obsessed with hiding his obsession.

Until one day in the bathtub, the man notices something strange on his leg, a kind of raised gray spot, and he goes to a doctor and is diagnosed as being in the first stages of a certain nonfatal but quite disfiguring disease, that will eventually leave this apparantely handsome man not a little disfigured. Unless, that is, he consents to undeergo a tremendously complicated and expensive treatment procedure, for which he has to fly all the way to Switzerland, and spend just about his whole life savings, which savings are in a joint bank account and require his girlfriend’s co-signature to withdraw.

The thought of his girlfriend knowing that he is the sort of man who would spend his life savings and fly to Switzerland to avoid disfigurement so horrifies him that he delays and delays making the decision to fly away for the treatment, and in the meantime the spot is growing and the skin on his leg is getting grayer, and flaking off in sheets, and the bones are swelling and getting gnarled, which condition he tries to hide by buying a novelty cast and putting it on his leg and telling his girlfriend that his leg is mysteriously broken, but the condition is meanwhile spreading to his other leg, and up his stomach and back; and so he takes to his bed and keeps himself covered with blankets and tells his girlfriend he’s mysteriously sick, and he also by the way starts making an effort to be really cold and aloof to the girlfriend, to keep her at a distance, even though he really loves her to distraction. And he only gets out of bed when she’s off at work, she sells women’s clothes, and only when she’s gone will he get up and stand in front of the full-length mirror in their bathroom, for hours, gazing at himself in horror, and gently sponging gray flakes off of his increasingly twisted body.

As days go by, as the disease continues to progress, spreading to the man’s upper body and arms and hands which he tries to hide by claiming he’s mysteriously horribly cold, and wearing heavy sweaters and ski mittens, and he’s also being increasingly cruel and nasty toward his lovely roommate, and won’t let her come near him, and gives her to understand that she’s done something terrible, and made him angry, but won’t tell her what it is, and the girlfriend begins to sit up at night in the bathroom crying, and the man can hear her, and his heart is breaking because he loves her so, but he’s got this obsession about not being ugly, and of course now if he tells her the truth and shows her everything, not only will she see that he has suddenly become ugly, but it will also become clear to her that he has the original obsession about not being ugly, see for instance the cast, sweaters, and mittens, and of course he’s doubly obsessed about not revealing this original obsession. So he gets meaner and meaner to this sweet beautiful girl who loves him, and eventually, even though she’s a lovely girl and deeply in love with him, she’s also only human and eventually becomes pissed off, little by little, simply in self-defense, and starts being cold and distant in return, and relations between the two become strained, which is breaking the man’s heart, deep down. And meanwhile of course the disease is still spreading, it’s on his neck and almost to the height of his highest turtleneck sweater, and also one or two gray flakey gnarls are appearing on the man’s nose, previews of coming attractions, the man sees. And so one morning, on just about the last day the man figures he can keep it all hidden from the girlfriend, also the morning after a really major and disasterous fight that clearly almost broke the girl’s heart, the girl is sitting in the bathroom, crying, and the man quietly gets out of bed and bundles up and takes a cab to go and see his doctor.

The doctor is quite upset about the man’s not having called him in so long, and is more than a little concerned about the spread of the disease, and he looks the man over and clucks his tongue and says this is just about the latest the Switzerland treatment can start and still be effective, and if they delay any longer the disease will swallow the man completely, become irreversible, he’ll be alive but gnarled all over and flakey for all time. The doctor looks at the man and says he’s going to step out of the office and allow the man to think things over. The doctor clearly thinks the man is out of his mind for not being in Switzerland already. And so the man sits alone in the office, all bundled up, with his mittens on, and has a real crisis, and his heart is breaking, and he’s incredibly horrified, because of the obsesion-obsession, but finally he has a breakthrough, which is not so subtly symbolized by a ray of sunlight breaking through the heavy clouds that are in the sky that day and coming through the window of the doctor’s office and hitting the man, but and anyway he sees in this breakthrough that the most important thing is really his wonderful, lovely girlfriend and their love, and that that’s what really matters, so he decides to call her and tell her everything and ask her to come down and so-sign the withdrawal slip for his life savings so he can hop a flight to Switzerland that very day, and to hell with the horror of telling her, even though it will be unbelievably horrifying.

And so our story ends with the man sitting at the doctor’s desk, phone in his mitten, listening to the phone ring in the apartment, and it’s ringing quite a few times, though not yyet a ridiculous number of times, but enough so it’s just becoming by implication unclear whether the girlfriend is even still there or not, whether she’s taken off, maybe for good. And that’s how it ends, with the man there and the phone ringing in his mitten and a patch of sun coming through the doctor’s window.