lenore is sleeping, unusually soundly tonight, under her scratchy howard johnson’s blanket. her breath as it comes up to me is soft and sweet; i feed on it. her lips are moist, with the tiniest bits of the white paste of sleep at the corners.
i do not know a horizontal lenore. lenore in her bed is an otherworldly, protean thing. lying on her side, defined by the swell of a breast and the curve of a hip, she is an s. a chance curl around the pillow she holds to her stomach, and she becomes variously a question mark, a comma, a parenthesis. and then spread out before me, open, wet, completely and rarely vulnerable, her eyes looking into mine, she is a v. i will confess that her shoe is in my lap as i write this. the soft light of the lamp bolted into the wall over my shoulder blends with the inconsistent grainy gray of the television’s cold flicker to cast for me a shadow of lenore’s chin, down her throat, to cover her tiny adam’s grape, just caressed by the razor point of a hair-mandible, in a soft black various as breath. who knows how long i watch. the whine of an indian-head test pattern brings me around.
the broom of the system, pg. 236
david foster wallace
