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"Tell me the address and when to be there, alright?"

She cleared her throat and I could hear her run her hand over
her nose. "Don't you want to come with me and the kids?"

I don't even know how she got my number, or precisely where
she lived. I didn't want to have anything to do with her. Even now.
David started over with her.

"No offense, but I'd rather not."

"I understand, but;' and I could sense her digging deep to say,
"Would you at least say something? At the service, I mean? Itjust seems
right."

"Let me think about it."

§

When I first encountered David Foster Wallace, it was when people
were telling me how amazing he was - his brain, his words, his worlds.
In his stories, there was so much to feel, to see, to understand - so much
promise, even in the gloom. I felt like lowed it to other people to get to

know this person with such an effect on them.

At first, I thought it might have been a bit overblown. So I looked
deeper.

And when I finally thought I had a handle on him - I realized. He's
already dead. I'll never get to know him. To grow with his books, to see
where he was going - that would have been something great. But now,
I'll never know what could have been. I never really knew him. No one

did.

I don't know how much I cared to anyway.

David is the same way. I knew him from afar, from other people, from
my genetic markers. My mother, his mother, all of his brothers and
sisters-they thought we had to work at something.

To be together because of what we were to each other-they didn't real-
ize who we were to each other.

We were strangers. We always will be.

It was a shared pretense, the kind that can only be kept between fathers
and their bastard daughters.

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