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Fiction

JUNE 27, 1994 ISSUE

Several Birds
BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

oor Tony Krause had a seizure in the fall. It happened on a Gray

Line train from Watertown to Inman Square, Cambridge. Hed
been drinking codeine cough syrup in the mens room of the
Armenian Foundation Library in ghastly central Watertown, MA, for
over a week, darting out from cover only to beg a scrip from the
hideous Equus Reese and then dash in at Brooks Pharmacy, wearing a
simply vile ensemble of synthetic-fibre slacks and suspenders and
tweed Donegal cap hed had to cadge from a longshoremens union
hall. Poor Tony couldnt dare wear anything comely, not even his boa
or the Antitois red leather coat, not since that poor womans bag had
turned out to have a heart inside.* (#wallace_footnote1) He had
simply never felt so beset and overcome on all sides as on the black
July day when it fell to his lot to boost a beating heart. Who wouldnt
wonder Why me? And his Chinatown connection Mr. Wo still had
him marked for ghastly harm as a consequence of that horrid delivery
mixup with Susan T. Cheese last winter, since which Poor Tony hadnt
dared show one boa feather east of Tremont St. all spring; and now
since 29 July he was non grata at Harvard Square and environs, and
even just the mere sight of an Aigner accessory gave him palpitations.

Thus Poor Tony had no way to cop for himself. He could trust no
dealer enough to inject his wares. His former friend and associate
Susan T. Cheese was now no more trustworthy than the hateful Wo
himself; he didnt even want Susan T. Cheese to know where he was.
He began drinking cough syrup. He managed to get Bridget
Tenderhole and the strictly rough-trade Stokely Dark Star to cop for
him on the wink for a few weeks, until Stokely D.S. died in a Fenway
hospice, and then Bridget Tenderhole was shipped by his pimp to
Brockton under maddeningly vague circumstances.
Then Poor Tony had read the dark portents and swallowed the first of
his pride and hidden himself even more deeply in a Dumpster
complex behind the I.B.P.W.D.W.** (#wallace_footnote2) Local #4
Hall down in Fort Point and resolved to stay hidden there for as long
as he could send his last true friend and associate Lolasister out to
acquire enough heroin to chip, accepting w/o complaint the shameless
rip-offs he perpetrated upon him, until October, when the supply of
retail heroin dried horribly up and the only people even copping
enough to chip were people in a position to dash personally here and
there under an open public-access sky and no friend, no matter how
dear or indebted, could afford to cop for another.
Then, wholly friend- and connection-less, plus extremely low on
funds, Poor Tony, in hiding, began to Withdraw from Heroin. Not
just get strung out or sick. Withdraw. The various terms echoed in his
head with the simply most awful sinister-footsteps-echoing-indeserted-corridor quality. Withdrawal. The Wingless Fowl. Kicking.
The Old Cold Bird. Poor Tony had never once had to Withdraw, not
all the way down the sinister deserted corridor of Withdrawal, not
since he first got strung at 17. At the very worst someone kind had
always found him charming, if things got dire enough to have to rent
out his charms. Alas about the fact that his charms were now at low
ebb. He weighed 120 lbs. and his skin was the color of summer
squash. He had terrible shivering attacks and also perspired. He had a

sty that had scraped one eyeball as pink as a bunnys. His nose ran like
twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he didnt think
looked promising at all. There was an uncomely dry-rot smell about
him that even he could smell. In Watertown he tried to pawn his fine
auburn wig w/ removable chignon and was cursed at in Armenian
because the wig had infestations from his own hair below. Lets not
even mention the pawnbrokers critique of his red leather coat.
Poor Tony got more and more ill as he further Withdrew. His
symptoms themselves developed symptoms, troughs and nodes he
charted with morbid attention, in the Dumpster, in his suspenders
and tweed cap, clutching his wig and coat and other comely
habiliments he could neither wear nor pawn. The empty municipal
Dumpster he was hiding in was new and painted apple-green and the
inside was dimpled iron, and the Dumpster remained empty and
unutilized because persons declined to come near enough to utilize it.
It took some time for Poor Tony to realize why; for an interval it had
seemed like a break, fortunes one wan smile. A city sanitation crew
finally set him straight in language that left quite a bit of tact to be
wished for, he felt. The Dumpsters green iron cover also leaked when
it rained, and it contained already a colony of ants along one wall,
which Poor Tony had ever since a neurasthenic childhood feared and
detested in particular, ants; and in direct sunlight the quarters became
a hellish living environment from which even the ants seemed to
vanish.
With each step further into the black corridor of actual Withdrawal,
Poor Tony stamped his foot and simply refused to believe things
could get or feel any worse. Then he stopped being able to anticipate
when he needed to as it were visit the powder room. A fastidious
gender-dysphorics horror of incontinence cannot be described. Fluids
of varying consistency began to pour w/o advance notice from several
openings. Then they stayed there, on the Dumpsters hot dimpled
floor. There they were, not going anywhere. He had no way to cop.

His entire set of interpersonal associations now consisted of persons

who did not care about him plus persons who wished him harm. His
late obstetrician father had rended his own clothing in symbolic shiva
nine years ago in the kitchen of the Krause home, 412 Mount Auburn
Street, Watertown. It was the incontinence that drove Poor Tony out
of the Dumpster for a mad scampering relocation to an obscure
Armenian Foundation Library mens room in his old home district,
wherein he hung his coat and wig carefully from the hook and tried
to arrange a stall as comfortingly as he could with magazine photos
and cherished knickknacks, and flushed repeatedly, and sought to
keep true Withdrawal at some sort of bay with bottles of Codinex
Plus. A tiny percentage of codeine gets metabolized into good old
C17 morphine, affording an agonizing hint of what real relief from
The Bird might feel like. I.e., the cough syrup did little more than
draw the process out, extend the corridorslow up time.
Poor Tony Krause sat on the toilet in the domesticated stall all day
and night, alternately drinking and gushing. He held his high heels
up at night when the staff checked the stalls and turned off all the
lights and left Poor Tony in a darkness within darkness so utter he
had no idea where his own limbs were or went. He left that stall
maybe once every two days, scampering madly from Equus to Brooks
in cast-off shades and a kind of hood or shawl made pathetically of
mens-room brown-paper towels.
Time began to take on new aspects for him now as Withdrawal
progressed. Time began to pass with jagged edges. Its passage in the
dark or dim-lit stall was as if time were being carried by a procession
of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red
Southern ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile
gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tonys flesh in
compensation as it helped bear time forward down the corridor of
true Withdrawal. By the second week in the stall, time itself seemed
the corridor, lightless at either end. After more time time then ceased

to move or be moved or be move-throughable and assumed a shape

above and apart, a huge and orange-eyed wingless fowl hunched
incontinent atop the stall, with a kind of watchful but deeply uncaring
personality that didnt seem keen on Poor Tony Krause as a person at
all, or to wish him well. Not one little bit. It spoke to him from atop
the stall, the same things, over and over. They were unrepeatable.
Nothing in even Poor Tonys grim life experience prepared him for
the experience of time with a shape and an odor, squatting; and the
worsening physical symptoms were a spree at Saks compared to times
black assurances that the symptoms were merely hints, signposts
pointing up at a larger, far more dire set of Withdrawal phenomena
that hung just overhead by a string that unravelled steadily with the
passage of time. It would not keep still and would not end; it changed
shape and smell. It moved in and out of him like the very most feared
prison-shower assailant. Poor Tony had once had the hubris to fancy
hed had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly
really shivered until times cadencesjagged and cold and smelling
oddly of deodorantentered his body via several openings, cold the
way only damp cold is cold (the phrase hed once had the gall to
imagine he understood was the phrase chilled to the bone), shardstudded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass,
and he could hear his joints glassy crunch with every slightest shift of
his hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and
exiting at will, very cold and slow; and the pain of his breath against
his teeth. Time came to him in the falcon-black of the library night in
an orange Mohawk and merry widow w/ tacky Amalfi pumps and
nothing else, spread him and entered him roughly and had its way
and left him again in the form of endless gushing liquid shit that he
could not flush enough to keep up with. He spent the longest morbid
time trying to fathom whence all the shit came from when he was
ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus. Then at some point he
realized: time had entered the shit itself, had become the shit: Poor
Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him, now; he

ceased to exist apart from its flow. He now weighed more like 110 lbs.
His legs were the size his comely arms had been, before Withdrawal.
He was haunted by the word Zuckunga foreign and possibly
Yiddish word he did not recall having heard in civilian life. The word
kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head without
meaning anything. Hed once navely assumed that going mad meant
you were not aware of going mad; hed navely pictured madmen as
laughing. He kept seeing his sonless father again, stiffening in a
bronze casket. Chilled to the Zuckung.
When, then, finally, even funds for the codeine syrup were exhausted,
he still sat on the toilet in the rear stall of the A.F.L. loo, surrounded
by previously comforting hung habiliments, the fashion-magazine
photographs hed fastened to the wall with tape cadged on the way in
from the Reference Desk, sat for almost the whole next night and day,
because he had no faith that he could stem the flow of diarrhea long
enough to make it anywhereif anywhere to go presented itselfin
his only pair of pants.
During hours of lit operation, the mens room was full of old men
who wore identical brown loafers and spoke Slavic and whose
flatulence smelled of cabbage.
Toward the end of the second medicationless afternoon, the day of
the seizure, Poor Tony Krause began to Withdraw from the cough
syrups alcohol and codeine and demethylated morphine, as well as
the original heroin, a set of sensations for which not even his recent
experience had prepared himthe alcohol Withdrawal, especially
and when the true D.T.-type big-budget visuals commenced, when
the first glossy and minutely hirsute army ant crawled up his arm and
refused ghostlike to be brushed away or hammered dead, Poor Tony
threw his last bit of pride into times porcelain maw and pulled up his
slacksmortifyingly wrinkled from twelve days puddled around his
anklesmade what slight cosmetic repairs he could, and donned his

tacky cap with its Scotch-Taped scarf of paper towels and lit out in
last-ditch desperation for Cambridges Inman Square, for the sinister
and duplicitous Antitoi brothers, their Entertainment-N-Notionsfronted operations center hed long ago vowed never again to darken
the door of and now figured to be his one place of very last possible
resortthe Antitois, Canadians of the Quebec subgenus, sinister and
duplicitous but when it came down to it rather hapless political
insurgents hed once availed of services through the offices of
Lolasister, the only persons anywhere he could claim somehow owed
him a kindness, since the affair of the heart.*** (#wallace_footnote3)
On Watertown Centers underground Gray Line platform, when the
first hot loose load fell out of him like something off a shelf into the
baggy slacks and down his leg and out around his high heelhe still
had only his red high heels with the crossing straps to wear, which the
slacks were long enough to mostly hidePoor Tony closed his eyes
against the ants formicating up and down his arms skinny length and
screamed a soundless interior scream of incontinent soul-scalded woe.
The beloved feather boa fit almost entirely in one breast pocket,
where it stayed in the name of discretion.
On the crowded train itself, then, he discovered that hed gone in
three weeks from being a colorful and comelyalbeit freakishly
comelyperson to being one of those loathsome urban specimens
that respectable persons on T trains slide and drift quietly away from
without even seeming to notice them. His shawl of paper towels had
come partly untaped. He smelled of bilirubin and yellow sweat and
wore eyeliner that simply did not fly if one needed a shave. There had
been some negative urine incidents, as well, in the slacks. He had
never in his life felt so unattractive or sick. He wept silently in shame
and pain at the passage of each brightly lit public seconds pincers,
and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed little
insectile mouths to catch the tears. He could feel his erratic pulse in

his sty. The Gray Lines trains were of the trundlingbehemoth type,
and he sat all alone at one end of the long car and felt each slow
second take its cut.
When it descended, the seizure felt less like a separate and distinct
crisis than simply the next exhibit in the corridor of horrors that was
the Old Cold Bird.**** (#wallace_footnote4) The first thing that
didnt augur very well for the lobes was a shower of spark-sized
phosphenes from the ceiling of the swaying train, plus a fiery violet
aura around the heads of the respectables whod quietly retreated as
far as possible from the various puddles in which he sat. Their clean
pink faces looked somehow stricken, each inside a hood of violent
flame. Poor Tony didnt know that his silent whimpers had ceased to
be silent, was why everyone in the car had gotten so terribly interested
in the floor between their feet. He knew only that the sudden and
incongruous smell of Old Spice Stick Deodorant, Classic Original
Scentunbidden and unexplainable, his late obstetrician fathers
brand, not smelled for yearsand the tiny panicked twitters with
which the unbrushable red ants skittered glossily up into his mouth
and nose and disappeared, each of course taking its tiny pincered
farewell bite as it went, heralded some new and vivider exhibit on the
corridors horizon. Hed become, at puberty, violently allergic to the
smell of Old Spice. As he soiled himself and the plastic seat and floor
once again, the Classic Scent of times past intensified. Then Poor
Tonys body began to swell. He watched his limbs become airy white
dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him and
float sluggishly up, snout-first, into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling
rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic
stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
Then he had a seizure. The floor of the subway car became the ceiling
of the subway car, and he was on his arched back in a waterfall of
light, gagging on Old Spice and watching his tumid limbs tear-ass
around the cars interior like undone balloons. The booming Zuckung

Zuckung Zuckung was his high heels heels drumming on the soiled
floors tile. He heard a rushing train-roar that was no train on earth
and felt a vascular roaring rushing that until the pain hit seemed like
the gathering of a kind of orgasm of the head. His head inflated and
creaked as it stretched. Then the pain (seizures hurt, is what few
civilians have occasion to know) was the sharp end of a hammer.
There was a squeak and rush of release inside his skull and something
shot from him into the air and hung there and sparkled. His father
knelt beside him on the ceiling in a well-rended T-shirt, extolling the
Red Sox of Rice and Lynn. Tony wore summer taffeta. His poor body
flopped around without authorization from headquarters. He didnt
feel one bit like a puppet. He thought of gaffed fish. The gown had a
thousand flounces and a saucy bodice of crocheted lace. Then he saw
his father, still green-gowned and rubber-gloved, leaning to read the
headlines off the skin of a fish a newspaper had wrapped. That had
never happened. The largest-print headline said PUSH. Poor Tony
flopped and gasped and pushed down inside and the utter red of the
blood that feeds sight bloomed red behind his lids. Time wasnt
passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn T-shirt disclosing
the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once
comely bod. Poor Tony convulsed and drummed and gasped and
fluttered, a fountain of light all around him. He felt a piece of
nourishing and possibly even intoxicating meat in the back of his
throat but elected not to swallow it but swallowed it anyway, and was
immediately sorry hed done so; and when his fathers bloodyrubbered fingers folded his teeth back to retrieve the tongue hed
swallowed he refused absolutely to bite down ungratefully on the
hand that was taking his food, then without authorization he pushed
and bit down and took the gloved fingers clean off, so there was
rubber-wrapped meat in his chattering teeth, and his fathers own
head exploded like an exploding star into light between his gowns
raised arms and a call for Zuckung while Tonys heels drummed and
struggled against the widening stirrups of light they were hoisted into

while a curtain of red was drawn wetly up over the floor he stared
down at, Tony, and he heard someone yelling for someone to give him
air with one fingerless hand on his belly as he spread and bore down
to push, and he saw the legs they held would spread until they
cracked him open and all the way inside out on the ceiling, and his
last worry was that red-handed Poppa could see up his dress, what
was really there.

* (#wallace_footnote_marker1) Excerpted from Moment Weekly, 10

August, 20:
. . . victim, a 46-year-old Boston, Massachusetts, accountant with
irreversible restenosis of the heart, responded so well to the
replacement of her defective heart with a Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial
Heart that within weeks she had resumed the active life style she had
so enjoyed before stricken, pursuing her active schedule with the
extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in an Etienne Aigner
purse, where the hearts ventricular tubes ran up to shunts in the
womans arms and ferried life giving blood between her living, active
body and the extraordinary heart in her purse.
. . . facts of her subsequent fate appear tragic, untimely, bizarrely [and]
cruelly ironic: the . . . [woman] was actively window shopping in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, fashionable Harvard Square, when a
transvestite purse snatcher, a known drug addict with a criminal
history well known to [police], bizarrely outfitted in a surplus cocktail
dress, spike heels, and tattered feather boa, brutally tore the life
sustaining purse from the womans unwitting grasp.
The [victim] gave chase to the purse snatching woman for as long as
she could, reportedly plaintively shouting to passers by the panicked
words Stop her! She stole my heart! on the fashionable sidewalk
crowded with shoppers. . . . [In] response to her plaintive cries,

tragically, misunderstanding shoppers and passers by merely shook

their heads [and] smiled knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed
to be yet another alternative life styles relationship gone sour. A duo
of Cambridge patrolmen were witnessed quipping, Happens all the
time, as the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake
of the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart.
The drug crazed purse snatcher may have found even his hardened
conscience moved by the life saving prosthesis the ill gotten womans
handbag revealed, which runs on the same rechargeable power cell as
an electric mans razor, and may well have continued to beat and bleed
for a period of time in the rudely disconnected purse.
That the prosthetic crime victim gave spirited chase for over four
blocks before collapsing onto her empty chest provides testimony to
the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX replacement procedure. . . .

** (#wallace_footnote_marker2) International Brotherhood of Pier,

Wharf, and Dock Workers.

*** (#wallace_footnote_marker3) The way Poor Tony Krause became

in any way associated with the Antitois was that, for a heavily cut
bundle to split six ways, Lolasister, Susan T. Cheese, P. T. Krause,
Bridget Tenderhole, Equus Reese, and the late Stokely (D.S.)
McNair had had to wear identical red leather coats and auburn wigs
and strapless heels and go and hang around the lobby of Harvard
Squares Sheraton Commander Hotel with six mannish-looking
women in the same wigs and coats while a strikingly androgynous
Quebecer insurgent who filled out her/his red leather coat in a way
that made Bridget Tenderhole dig his nails into his palms in sheer
green envy came through the Commanders revolving Lucite doors

and strode purposefully into the crowded Epaulet Ballroom and fired
two rounds of 9-mm wadcutter into the right eye of the Canadian
Minister of Trade, who was addressing the New England press from a
leaf-shaped rostrum. The decoys were then required to mill
hysterically in the lobby, all twelve of them, and then hit the revolving
doors and disperse in a dozen different vectors as the sharpshooting
Qubcois cross-dresser legged it out of the Epaulet Ballroom and
lobby pursued by burly federal men with earplugs and Cobray M-11
subs, so the federal mend see identical epicene figures high-heeling it
away in different directions and get fuddled about whom to chase.
Lolasister and Poor Tony had originally met the Antitoi Bros (only
one of whom could or would speak, and whod been in charge of the
diversionary aspects of the Sheraton Commander operation, and had
clearly been subordinate to still other Quebecers of way higher I.Q.)
had met them at Inman Squares Ryles tavern, which had GenderDysphoric Night every second Wednesday, and attracted comely and
unrough trade.

**** (#wallace_footnote_marker4) In actual fact the seizurea kind of

synaptic firefight in Poor Tonys desiccated temporal lobeswas
caused by Withdrawal not from heroin but from plain old grain
alcohol, which was Codinex Plus cough syrups primary ingredient
and balm. Hed consumed upwards of sixteen little eighty-proof
bottles of Codinex per day for an extended period, and so was
cruising for a real neurological bruising when he just up and stopped.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE