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Fiction

MARCH 7, 2011 ISSUE

Backbone
BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE POWERS

very whole person has ambitions, objectives,

initiatives, goals. This one particular boys
goal was to be able to press his lips to every square
inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs
beneath the knee were childs play. After these
areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased
with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy
came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

here is little to say about the original animus or motive cause of the boys desire
to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. He had been housebound
one day with asthma, on a rainy and distended morning, apparently looking through
some of his fathers promotional materials. Some of these survived the eventual fire.
The boys asthma was thought to be congenital.
The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to
require any real contortion. (The young boy thought, at that point, of the lateral
malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle.) The strategy, as he understood it, was
to arrange himself on his bedrooms carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the
floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect ninety-degree angle to his thigh as
he could manage. Then he had to lean as far to the side as he could, bending out over
the splayed ankle and the foots outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining
with his fully extended lips (the boys idea of fully extended lips consisted at this point
of the exaggerated pucker that signifies kissing in childrens cartoons) toward a section
of the foots outside that he had marked with a bulls-eye of soluble ink. He struggled
to breathe against the dextrorotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther
to the side, very early one morning, until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back
and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine. The
boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his
failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedrooms door. The
pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for more than a month. One
can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old
child.
The fathers chiropractor, Dr. Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate

The fathers chiropractor, Dr. Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate
symptoms. More important, it was Dr. Kathy who introduced the boy to the concepts
of spine as microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism in
flexion. Dr. Kathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and
kind. The child lay on a tall padded table and placed his chin in a little cup. She
manipulated his head, very gently but in a way that seemed to make things happen all
the way down his back. Her hands were strong and soft and when she touched the
boys back he felt as if she were asking it questions and answering them all at the same
time. She had charts on her wall with exploded views of the human spine and the
muscles and fasciae and nerve bundles that surrounded the spine and were connected
to it. No lollipops were anywhere in view. The specific stretching exercises that Dr.
Kathy gave the boy were for the splenius capitis and longissimus cervicis and the deep
sheaths of nerve and muscle surrounding the boys T2 and T3 vertebrae, which were
what he had just injured. Dr. Kathy had reading glasses on a cord around her neck and
a green button-up sweater that looked as if it were made entirely of pollen. You could
tell she talked to everybody the same way. She instructed the boy to perform the
stretching exercises every single day and not to let boredom or a reduction in
symptomology keep him from doing them in a disciplined way. She said that the
long-term goal was not relief of present discomfort but neurological hygiene and
health and a wholeness of body and mind that he would someday appreciate very, very
much. For the boys father, Dr. Kathy prescribed an herbal relaxant.

hus was Dr. Kathy the childs formal introduction both to incremental
stretching and to the adult idea of quiet daily discipline and progress toward a
long-term goal. This proved fortuitous. During the five weeks that he was disabled
with a subluxated T3 vertebraoften in such discomfort that not even his inhaler
could ease the asthma that struck whenever he experienced pain or distressthe
heady enthusiasm of childhood had given way in the boy to a realization that the
objective of pressing his lips to every square inch of himself was going to require
maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time that
he could not then (because of his age) imagine.
One thing Dr. Kathy had taken time out to show the boy was a freestanding 3-D
model of a human spine that had not been taken care of in any real or significant way.
It looked dark, stunted, necrotic, and sad. Its tubercles and soft tissues were inflamed,
and the annulus fibrosus of its disks was the color of bad teeth. Up against the wall
behind this model was a hand-lettered plaque or sign explaining what Dr. Kathy liked
to say were the two different payment options for the spine and associated nervosa,
which were NOW and LATER.

ost professional contortionists are, in fact, simply persons born with congenital
atrophic/dystrophic conditions of major recti, or with acute lordotic flexion of
the lumbar spine, or both. A majority display Chvosteks sign or other forms of
ipsilateral spasticity. Very little effort or application is involved in their art, therefore.
In 1932, a preadolescent Ceylonese female was documented by British scholars of
Tamil mysticism as being capable of inserting into her mouth and down her
esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin, and the other leg to just

Enter

esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin, and the other leg to just
above the patella, and as thereupon able to spin unaided on the orally protrusive knee
at rates in excess of 300 r.p.m. The phenomenon of suiphagia (i.e., self-swallowing)
has subsequently been identified as a rare form of inanitive pica, in most cases caused
by deficiencies in cadmium and/or zinc. The insides of the small boys thighs up to the
medial fork of his groin took months even to prepare for, daily hours spent crosslegged and bowed, slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fasciae of his
back and neck, the spinalis thoracis and levator scapulae, the iliocostalis lumborum all
the way to the sacrum, and the interior thighs dense and intransigent gracilis,
pectineus, and adductor longus, which fuse below Scarpas triangle and transmit
sickening pain through the pubis whenever their range of flexibility is exceeded. Had
anyone seen the child during these two- and three-hour sessions, bringing his soles
together and in to train the pectineus, bobbing slightly and then holding a deep crosslegged lean to work the great tight sheet of thoracolumbar fascia that connected his
pelvis to his dorsal costae, he would have appeared to that person either prayerful or
catatonic, or both.
Once the thighs anterior targets were achieved and touched with one or both lips, the
upper portions of his genitals were simple, and were protrusively kissed and passed
over even as plans for the ilium and outer buttocks were in conception. After these
achievements would come the more difficult and neck-intensive contortions required
to access the inner buttocks, perineum, and extreme upper groin.
The boy had turned seven.
The special place where he pursued his strange but newly mature objective was his
room, which had wallpaper with a jungle motif. The second-floor window yielded a
view of the back yards tree. Light from the sun came through the tree at different
angles and intensities at different times of day and illuminated different parts of the
boy as he stood, sat, inclined, or lay on the rooms carpet, stretching and holding
positions. His bedrooms carpet was white shag with a furry, polar aspect that the boys
father did not think went well with the walls repeating scheme of tiger, zebra, lion,
and palm, but the father kept his feelings to himself.
Radical increase of the lips protrusive range requires systematic exercise of the
maxillary fasciae, such as the depressor septi, orbicularis oris, depressor anguli oris,
depressor labii inferioris, and the buccinator, circumoral, and risorius groups. The
zygomatic muscles are superficially involved. Praxis: Affix string to Wetherly button of
at least 1.5-inch diameter borrowed from fathers second-best raincoat; place button
over upper and lower front teeth and enclose with lips; hold string fully extended at
ninety degrees to faces plane and pull on end with gradually increasing tension, using
lips to resist pull; hold for twenty seconds; repeat; repeat.
What did you think was going to happen when you filled the feeder with lasagna?

Sometimes the boys father sat on the floor outside

Sometimes the boys father sat on the floor outside

his bedroom with his back to the door, listening for
movement in the room. Its not clear whether the
boy ever heard him, although the wood of the door
sometimes made a creaky sound when the father
sat down against it or stood back up in the hallway
or shifted his position against the door. The boy
was in there stretching and holding contorted
positions for extraordinary periods of time. The
father was a somewhat nervous man, with a rushed,
fidgety manner that always lent him an air of
imminent departure. He had extensive
entrepreneurial activities and was in motion much
of the time. His place in most peoples mental albums was provisional, with something
like a dotted line around itthe image of someone saying something friendly over his
shoulder as he heads for an exit. Often, clients found that the father made them
uneasy. He was at his most effective on the phone.
By the time the child was eight, his long-term goal was beginning to affect his
physical development. His teachers remarked on changes in his posture and gait. The
boys smile, which appeared by now constant because of the effect of circumlabial
hypertrophy on the circumoral musculature, looked unusual alsorigid and overbroad
and seeming, in one custodians evaluative phrase, like nothing in this round world.

acts: the Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried wounds that penetrated both hands
and feet medially throughout his lifetime. The Umbrian St. Veronica Giuliani
presented with wounds in both hands and feet, as well as in her side, which wounds
were observed to open and close on command. The eighteenth-century holy woman
Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys in her hands wounds and
to turn them, reportedly facilitating the pilgrims own recovery from rationalist
despair.
According to both St. Bonaventura and Toms de Celano, St. Francis of Assisis
manual stigmata included baculiform masses of what presented as hardened black
flesh extrudent from both volar planes. If and when pressure was applied to a palms
so-called nail, a rod of flesh would immediately protrude from the back of the hand,
exactly as if a real so-called nail were passing through the hand.
And yet (fact): Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an
adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first-century
skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the
subjects wrists, not his hands. Hence the, quote, necessarily simultaneous truth and
falsity of the stigmata that the existential theologist E. M. Cioran explicates in his
1937 Lacrimi si Sfinti, the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart
as Gods open wound.
reas of the boys midsection from navel to xiphoid process, at the cleft of his

reas of the boys midsection from navel to xiphoid process, at the cleft of his
ribs, alone required nineteen months of stretching and postural exercises, the
more extreme of which must have been very painful indeed. At this stage, further
advances in flexibility were now subtle to the point of being undetectable without
extremely precise daily record-keeping.
Certain tensile limits in the flava, capsule, and process ligaments of the neck and
upper back were gently but persistently stretched, the boys chin placed to his (solubly
arrowed and dotted) chest at mid-sternum and then slid incrementally downone,
sometimes 1.5 millimetres a dayand this catatonic and/or meditative posture held
for an hour or more.
In the summer, during his early-morning routines, the tree outside the boys window
became busy with grackles coming and going, and then, as the sun rose, filled with the
birds harsh sounds, tearing sounds, which, as the boy sat cross-legged with his chin to
his chest, sounded through the pane like rusty screws turning, some complexly stuck
thing coming loose with a shriek. Past the southern exposures tree were the
foreshortened roofs of neighborhood homes and the fire hydrant and street sign of the
cross street and the forty-eight identical roofs of a low-income housing development
beyond the cross street, and, past the development, just at the horizon, the edges of the
verdant cornfields that began at the city limits. In late summer the fields green
became more sallow, and then in the fall there was merely sad stubble, and in the
winter the fields bare earth looked like nothing so much as just what it was.
At his elementary school, where his behavior was exemplary and his assignments
completed and his progress charted at the medial apex of all relevant curves, the boy
was, among his classmates, the sort of marginal social figure who was so marginal he
was not even teased. As early as Grade 3, the boy had begun to develop along unusual
physical lines as a result of his commitment to the objective; even so, something in his
aspect or bearing served to place him outside the bounds of schoolyard cruelty. The
boy followed classroom regulations and performed satisfactorily in group work. The
written evaluations of his socialization described the boy not as withdrawn or aloof
but as calm, unusually poised, and self-containing [sic]. The boy gave neither
trouble nor delight and was not much noticed. It is not known whether this bothered
him.

or was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal
of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not
clear even that he conceived of the goal as an achievement in any conventional sense.
Unlike his father, he did not read Ripley and had never heard of the McWhirters
certainly it was no kind of stunt. Nor any sort of self-evection; this is verifiedthe
boy had no conscious wish to transcend anything. If someone had asked him, the
boy would have said only that hed decided he wanted to press his lips to every last
micrometre of his own individual body. He would not have been able to say more than
this. Insights into or conceptions of his own physical inaccessibility to himself (as we
are all of us self-inaccessible and can, for example, touch parts of one another in ways
that we could not even dream of touching our own bodies) or of his complete

that we could not even dream of touching our own bodies) or of his complete
determination, apparently, to pierce that veil of inaccessibilityto be, in some childish
way, self-contained and -sufficientthese were beyond his conscious awareness. He
was, after all, just a little boy. His lips touched the upper areolae of his left and right
nipples in the autumn of his ninth year. The lips by this time were markedly large and
protrusive; part of his daily discipline was tedious button-and-string exercises
designed to promote hypertrophy of the orbicularis muscles. The ability to extend his
pursed lips as much as 10.4 centimetres had often meant the difference between
achieving part of his thorax and not. It had also been the orbicularis muscles, more
than any outstanding advance in vertebral flexion, that had permitted him to access
the rear areas of his scrotum and substantial portions of the papery skin around his
anus before he turned nine. These areas had been touched, tagged on the four-sided
chart inside his personal ledger, then washed clean of ink and forgotten. The boys
tendency was to forget each site once he had pressed his lips to it, as if the
establishment of its accessibility made the site henceforth unreal for him and the site
now in some sense existed only on the four-faced chart.
Fully and exquisitely real for the boy in his eleventh year, however, remained those
portions of his trunk that he had not yet attempted: areas of his chest above the
pectoralis minor and of his lower throat between clavicle and upper platysma, as well
as the smooth and endless planes and tracts of his back (excluding lateral portions of
the trapezius and rear deltoid, which he had achieved at eight and a half ) extending
upward from the buttocks.

our separate licensed, bonded physicians apparently testified that the Bavarian
mystic Therese Neumanns stigmata comprised corticate dermal structures that
passed medially through both her hands. Therese Neumanns capacity for inedia was
attested to by four Franciscan nuns, who attended her in rotating shifts in 1927. She
lived for almost thirty-five years without food or liquid; her one recorded bowel
movement (March 12, 1928) was determined by laboratory analysis to comprise only
mucus and empyreumatic bile.
A Bengali holy man known to his followers as Prahansatha the Second underwent
periods of meditative chanting during which his eyes exited their sockets and
ascended to float above his head, connected only by their dura-mater cords, and
thereupon performed (i.e., the floating eyes did) rhythmically stylized rotary
movements described by Western witnesses as evocative of dancing four-faced Shivas,
of charmed snakes, of interwoven genetic helices, of the counterpointed figure-eight
orbits of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies around each other at the perimeter
of the Local Group, or of all four (supposedly) at once.

tudies of human algesia have established that the musculoskeletal structures

most sensitive to painful stimulation are the periosteum and joint capsules.
Tendons, ligaments, and subchondral bone are classified as significantly painsensitive, while muscle and cortical bones sensitivity has been established as
moderate, and articular cartilage and fibrocartilages as mild.
Pain is a wholly subjective experience and thus inaccessible as a diagnostic object.

Pain is a wholly subjective experience and thus inaccessible as a diagnostic object.

Considerations of personality type also complicate the evaluation. As a general rule,
however, the observed behavior of a patient in pain can provide a measure of (a) the
pains intensity and (b) the patients ability to cope with it.
Common fallacies about pain include:
People who are critically ill or gravely injured always experience intense pain.
The greater the pain, the greater the extent and severity of the damage.
Severe chronic pain is symptomatic of incurable illness.
In fact, patients who are critically ill or gravely injured do not necessarily experience
intense pain. Nor is the observed intensity of pain directly proportional to the extent
or severity of the damage; the correlation depends also on whether the pain pathways
of the anterolateral spinothalamic system are intact and functioning within established
norms. In addition, the personality of a neurotic patient may accentuate felt pain, and
a stoic or resilient personality may diminish its perceived intensity.
How come I always get the crying baby right behind
me?

o one ever did ask him. His father believed

only that he had an eccentric but very
limber and flexible child, a child whod taken Kathy
Kessingers homilies about spinal hygiene to heart,
the way some children will take things to heart,
and now spent a lot of time flexing and limbering
his body, which, as the queer heartcraft of children
went, was preferable to many other slack or
damaging fixations the father could think of. The
father, an entrepreneur who sold motivational tapes through the mail, worked out of a
home office but was frequently away for seminars and mysterious evening sales calls.
The familys home, which faced west, was tall and slender and contemporary; it
resembled one half of a duplex town house from which the other half had been
suddenly removed. It had olive-colored aluminum siding and was on a cul-de-sac, at
the northern end of which stood a side entrance to the countys third-largest cemetery,
whose name was woven in iron above the main gate but not above that side entrance.
The word that the father thought of when he thought of the boy was: dutiful, which
surprised the man, for it was a rather old-fashioned word and he had no idea where it
came from when he thought of the boy in his room, from outside the door.

Dr. Kathy, who sometimes saw the boy for continuing prophylactic adjustments to his

Dr. Kathy, who sometimes saw the boy for continuing prophylactic adjustments to his
thoracic vertebrae, facets, and anterior rami, and was not a loon or a huckster in a
shopping-center office but simply a D.C. who believed in the interpenetrating dance
of spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos as totalityin the universe as an infinite
system of neural connections that had evolved, at its highest point, an organism that
could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that
the human nervous system became the universes way of being aware of and thus
accessible [to] itselfDr. Kathy believed the patient to be a very quiet, innerdirected boy who had responded to a traumatic T3 subluxation with a commitment to
neurospiritual integrity that might well signal a calling to chiropractic as an eventual
career. It was she who had given the boy his first, comparatively simple stretching
manuals, as well as the copies of B. R. Faucets famous neuromuscular diagrams
(1961, Los Angeles College of Chiropractic), out of which the boy had fashioned
the freestanding four-sided cardboard chart that stood as if guarding his pillowless
bed while he slept.

he fathers belief in ATTITUDE as the overarching determinant of

ALTITUDE had been unwavering since his own adolescence, during which
awkward time he had discovered the works of Dale Carnegie and of the Beecher
Foundation, and had utilized these practical philosophies to bolster his own selfconfidence and to improve his social standingthis standing, as well as all
interpersonal exchanges and incidents that served as evidence thereof, was charted
weekly, and the charts and graphs displayed for ease of reference on the inside of his
bedrooms closet door. Even as a provisional adult, the father still worked tirelessly to
maintain and improve his attitude and so influence his own altitude in personal
achievement. To the medicine cabinets mirror in the homes bathroom, for instance,
where he could not help but reread and internalize them as he tended to his personal
grooming, were taped such inspirational maxims as:
NO BIRD SOARS TOO HIGH, IF HE SOARS WITH HIS OWN WINGS

BLAKE

IF WE ABDICATE OUR INITIATIVE, WE BECOME PASSIVE-RECEPTIVE

VICTIMS OF ONCOMING CIRCUMSTANCESBEECHER FOUNDATION

DARE TO ACHIEVE! NAPOLEON HILL

THE COWARD FLEES EVEN WHEN NO MAN PURSUETHTHE BIBLE

WHATEVER YOU CAN DO OR DREAM, YOU CAN BEGIN IT. / BOLDNESS

HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT. BEGIN IT NOW! GOETHE

and so forth, dozens or at times even scores of inspirational quotes and reminders,
carefully printed in block capitals on small, fortune-cookie-size slips of paper and
taped to the mirror as written reminders of the fathers personal responsibility for
whether he soared boldly, sometimes so many slips and pieces of tape that only a few
slots of actual mirror were left above the bathrooms sink, and the father had to almost
contort himself even to see to shave.
When the boys father thought of himself, on the other hand, the word that came

When the boys father thought of himself, on the other hand, the word that came
unbidden first to mind was always tortured. Much of this secret torturewhose
causes he perceived as impossibly complex and protean and involving both normal
male sexual drives and highly abnormal personal weakness and lack of backbonewas
actually quite simple to diagnose. Wedded at twenty to a woman about whom hed
known just one salient thing, this father-to-be had almost immediately found
marriages conjugal routines tedious and stifling; and that sense of monotony and
sexual obligation (as opposed to sexual achievement) had caused in him a feeling that
he thought was almost like death. Even as a newlywed, he had begun to suffer from
night terrors and to wake from nightmares about some terrible confinement feeling
unable to move or breathe. These dreams did not exactly require a psychiatric Einstein
to interpret, the father knew, and after almost a year of inner struggle and self-analysis
he had given in and begun seeing another woman, sexually. This woman, whom the
father had met at a motivational seminar, was also married, and had a small child of
her own, and they had agreed that this put some sensible limits and restrictions on the
affair.
Within a short time, however, the father had begun to find this other woman kind of
tedious and oppressive, as well. The fact that they lived separate lives and had little to
talk about made the sex start to seem obligatory. It put too much weight on the
physical sex, it seemed, and spoiled it. The father attempted to cool things off and to
see the woman less, whereupon she in return also began to seem less interested and
accessible than she had been. This was when the torture started. The father began to
fear that the woman would break off the affair with him, either to resume
monogamous sex with her husband or to take up with some other man. This fear,
which was a completely secret and interior torture, caused him to pursue the woman
all over again even as he came more and more to despise her. The father, in short,
longed to detach from the woman, but he didnt want the woman to be able to detach.
He began to feel numb and even nauseated when he was with the other woman, but
when he was away from her he felt tortured by thoughts of her with someone else. It
seemed like an impossible situation, and the dreams of contorted suffocation came
back more and more often. The only possible remedy that the father (whose son had
just turned four) could see was not to detach from the woman he was having an affair
with but to hang in there with the affair, but also to find and begin seeing a third
woman, in secret and as it were on the side, in order to feelif only for a short time
the relief and excitement of an attachment freely chosen.
Thus began the fathers true cycle of torture, in which the number of women with
whom he was secretly involved and to whom he had sexual obligations steadily
expanded, and in which not one of the women could be let go or given cause to detach
and break it off, even as each became less and less a source of anything more than a
sort of dutiful tedium of energy and time and the will to forge on in the face of
despair.

he boys mid- and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even

he boys mid- and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even
impossible unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and
discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner life in Grades 4 and 5. And
beyond, of course, like the falls at a long rivers end, lay the unimaginable prospects of
achieving the back of his neck, the eight centimetres just below the chins point, the
galeae of his scalps back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose,
eyesas well as the paradoxical Ding an sich of his lips themselves, accessing which
appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites occupied a near-mythic
place in the over-all project: the boy revered them in such a way as to place them
almost beyond the range of conscious intent. This boy was not by nature a worrier
(unlike himself, his father thought), but the inaccessibility of these last sites seemed so
immense that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward
his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his eleventh
year, darkening the whole endeavor, a tenebrous shadow that the boy chose to see as
lending the enterprise a sombre dignity, rather than futility or pathos.
He did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head
would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that
anyone could ever call doubt, inside.

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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE