Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max Page B

accident shortly after. “I tried to call May’s parents,” the narrator tells us at story’s end, “just to say that I was incredibly sorry,” but he gets the parents’ answering service. 7
    “Planet Trillaphon,” which Wallace would publish in the
Amherst Review
when he got back to college, is more original in subject than in style. 8 Its structure and pacing are those of well-made student fiction; Wallace was still deconstructing existing stories trying to find what held them together. He boasted to the interviewer David Lipsky years later that his gift in college was to be “a weird kind of forger. I can sound kind of like anybody.” Here he was rifling Pynchon for names and J. D. Salinger for tone, but the Salingerian faux naïveté becomes magnified with a lens worthy of Gogol as Wallace reimagines his nightly battles with acne as something surreal:
    I began to suffer from what I guess now was a hallucination. I thought that a huge wound, a really huge and deep wound, had opened on my face, on my cheek near my nose…. Right before graduation—or maybe a month before, maybe—it got really bad,such that when I’d pull my hand away from my face I’d see blood on my fingers, and bits of tissue and stuff, and I’d be able to smell the blood, too…. So one night when my parents were out somewhere I took a needle and some thread and tried to sew up the wound myself.
     
    A literary sensibility is emerging too. The prose feels fraught and necessary. The writing conveys a sense that consciousness tricks and torments us, helps us build a wall to hide from who we are, yet at the same time the pleasure-giving power of words eases the despair of the story, along with a hope that love can rescue, a wispy hint that is quickly obliterated and will not appear in Wallace’s work again for many years. 8
    What is most original and distinctive in “Trillaphon,” though, is the precision with which the narrator captures what it is like to be deeply depressed, his skillful evocation of a state of mind he wants us urgently to understand. One would hardly mistake this for ordinary student fiction about depression, the kind the narrator dismisses as “just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies…and in a couple days it’s gone altogether.” Real depression, the narrator insists, is different:
    To me it’s like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach….[Now] imagine your whole body being sick like that…. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in our body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e. coli and lactobacilli too, the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere, in everything. All just
sick
as hell. Now imagine that every single
atom
in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom…swollen and throbbing, off-color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases, everything off balance and woozy.
     
    But even this doesn’t capture the overwhelming experience of depression for the narrator. “The Bad Thing is you,” he concludes, echoing the caption under the Kafka picture he had on his bulletin board at home (the disease was life itself),
    nothing else…you are the sickness yourself…. You realize all this, here. And that, I guess, is…when you look at the black hole and it’s wearing your face. That’s when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they’re “severely