For Wallace to orchestrate his material was enormously complex, and as he rewrote scenes he must have had to work hard to keep straight the various voices he was using. He had always been good at mimicry, but the voices in the recovery house chapters are subtler and truer than in the other sections. They seem to descend from a caring narrator rather than be roused up as proof of his talent. Wallace created dozens of characters, many capturing aspects of how he saw himself. There is Kate Gompert (her name borrowed from a woman who had played on the junior tennis circuit with Wallace and would subsequently sue him unsuccessfully for libel). Addicted to pot and brutally depressed, Gompert casts a practiced eye on the psych ward where she finds herself:
Kate Gompert was on Specials, which meant Suicide-Watch, which meant that the girl had at some point betrayed both Ideation and Intent, which meant she had to be watched right up close by a staffer twenty-four hours a day until the supervising M.D. called off the Specials.20
Another pot addict, Ken Erdedy, embodies a different side of Wallace. We first meet him barricaded in his apartment as he waits for an obliging young female acquaintance to bring dope—“a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana, 200 grams of unusually good marijuana.” The woman — the friend of a dealer — has promised it to him so he can go on one last binge before quitting for good, spurring an obsessively branching set of contingencies in Erdedy’s mind:
Where was the woman who said she’d come. She said she would come. Erdedy thought she’d have come by now…. He did not use the phone to call the woman who’d promised to come because if he tied up the line and if it happened to be the time when maybe she was trying to call him he was afraid she would hear the busy signal and think him disinterested and get angry and maybe take what she’d promised him somewhere else.21
Once Wallace had his setup, he seems to have worked with remarkable speed because by April 1992 he had 250 finished pages for Nadell. He was not just in the grip of inspiration. The point was to get a contract for the book. It was “the bravest thing” he had done since getting sober, he would later tell an interviewer, but he believed the work was going so well that he could deal with the pressure. “Life is good. I’m trying to get together enough of this Long Thing to plead for an advance,” he wrote Brad Morrow with uncharacteristic confidence that March.
As promised, on April 15, 1992, he was ready with his proposal and partial manuscript of Infinite Jest, “a novel,” he noted in his cover letter, “although structurally it’s not much like any other novels I’ve seen.” “Plot-wise,” he added, “this thing proceeds according to something more like a broad arc than a Freytagian triangle. The low gear in which plot stuff proceeds in sections 1 and 2 is intentional.” He warned of footnotes that were “just brutal.” He addressed his note to “Bonnie and Gerry and Whatever Other Trusted and Hopefully Trustworthy Persons End up Reading this,” and urged everyone to mail the manuscript back or destroy it when they were done. He sent the package off to Nadell.
Wallace’s literary rebirth did not coincide with any calming of his conviction that he had to be with Karr. Indeed, the opposite. In fact, one day in February, he thought briefly of committing murder for her. He called an ex-con he knew through his recovery program and tried to buy a gun. He had decided he would wait no longer for Karr to leave her husband; he planned to shoot him instead when he came into Cambridge to pick up the family dog. The ex-con called Larson, the head of Granada House, who told Karr. Wallace himself never showed up for the handover and thus ended what he would later call in a letter of apology “one of the scariest days of my life.” He wrote Larson in explanation, “I now know what obsession can make people capable of”—then added in longhand after—“at least of wanting to do.” To Karr at the time he insisted that the whole episode was an invention of the ex-con and she believed him.22
By the spring of 1992, Karr’s marriage was finally at an end and Wallace had new hope he could be at her side. He was ecstatic. He was ready to leave Boston. He had come to hate “this soot-fest city,” as he called it to Morrow. And he was sick of teaching. If he could get an advance, he could have the life and the woman he wanted. He had suffered beyond what he knew possible for her, and the suffering felt like an act of absolution.
In April, just before sending in the manuscript pages for Nadell and Howard, Wallace took the train down to Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia. Franzen was teaching a class there and had invited him to judge a fiction competition. Wallace also read from Infinite Jest. Playing to his young audience, he chose a section about Don Gately that predates his admission to Ennet House. In the segment, the young addict and a partner break into a local assistant district attorney’s house, take pictures of themselves with toothbrushes up their anuses, and send the pictures to him. Beforehand, Wallace asked for a chalkboard and wrote down words and abbreviations that might not be familiar to the students. Infinite Jest was filled with the languages Wallace had learned in Boston — from drug addict lingo to Alcoholics Anonymous slogans. One word that Wallace had recently learned was “shunt”—to disarm an alarm system by creating a new circuit for the electricity. Wallace had gotten the word in an interview with a retired burglary detective whom Mark Costello had met working as an assistant district attorney. Wallace had listened for an hour, overwhelmed by the fact-heavy conversation. When Costello looked, “shunt” was the only word he had written in his notebook.23
At Swarthmore, Wallace stayed with Franzen, who remembers “an endearingly eccentric figure,” a tobacco chewer with a love of showering, Diet Dr Pepper, and blondies. They hardly knew each other, despite having become, as Wallace would later put it in a letter to his friend, the “best of pals and lit combatants.” Wallace was urging Franzen and his then wife to join him and Karr in Syracuse, and after the reading the two young men headed north in Franzen’s old Saab to check out the city, Wallace upset he had left his favorite scarf, in the colors of the family tartan, behind.24 They took turns driving, the weather was bad, and Franzen was amazed at how much wiper fluid his friend used.
When they got to Syracuse, Wallace was surprised to find himself relegated to Karr’s floor for the night alongside Franzen. She appeared not to have the same expectations for his visit that he had. And when Wallace, Franzen, and Karr drove through the town, she asked him to crouch down out of view — apparently she was worried that news of his arrival would reach her husband, who was still nearby. Wallace and Franzen drove back down to Swarthmore the next day, discussing the purpose of literature nearly the whole way. Wallace argued that it was to alleviate loneliness and give comfort, to break through what he characterized in Infinite Jest as each person’s “excluded encagement in the self.” He wanted Franzen to know that he had become a different person and a different writer in the four years they’d known each other. After he got home, he wrote Franzen that their chat had been “among the most nourishing for me in recent memory” and suggested that his friend read Brian Moore’s Catholics, a story of a man who pledges everything for his faith. Franzen read the book and was unimpressed — his disciple had surpassed him in his quest for sincerity — but then Wallace rarely did things by halves.