The night before my latest weekend walk, we watched The End of the Tour. This influenced the choice of listening material for the hour or so I calculated it would take me to cover a hilly 5-km circuit I had been envisioning for a while. So, I decided, I would be listening to David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, read partly by the author and partly by an all-star cast of actors. It held a lot of promise, especially because I wanted to compare the real David Foster Wallace’s cadence against Jason Segel’s portrayal.
One funny thing about audiobooks is that memories of the content become inextricably linked to snapshots of places, like a geographically inclined pagination system. The story I was listening to started alongside the border of a park where a child’s birthday party was taking place. It was the main character’s birthday too. A description of his pleasant teenage demeanor was given as I admired a row of houses with the second floor built underneath and not on top of the first. I crossed a narrow street, leaving behind a vintage-looking corner store that I recognized from an old news segment that aired years ago—it had fallen victim to burglars, its windows smashed. This was the first time I saw it in real life.
On the other side of the street, as I passed a stately school entrance, I realized that what I was hearing had somehow stopped making sense. A vantage point had abruptly changed. There was a swimming pool, and a myriad of minute descriptions of things and people inside and outside of said pool. There was a diving board, and a particular discovery the main character made about it. I liked the subtle way the narrator—the author himself, no doubt—underscored this shocking realization with his gentle voice. But then came a comment on the spatial positioning of the main character that threw me off. I brushed it aside, though—I probably wasn’t paying enough attention, and might have to come back to it later.
On an upward slope I turned right—the road suddenly flattened. Beige nondescript buildings slowly gave way to a bustling commercial street. Someone got off a vehicle (was it a pickup truck?) next to a cherry tree in full bloom. Women wore felt hats to brunch. Blue tents from a farmer’s market covered a small park. The sidewalk was strewn with strollers, save for one block where a man lay motionless on a wheelchair, collapsed to his side. I found my way around him, eyes callously averted, but a couple of steps later the stench hit me like a brick on the back of my head.
I reached a corner where the storefronts and I parted ways. I turned right again, an abrupt slope shooting upward ahead of me. The sky was as blue as the sky in the story. The main character mustered his courage and climbed up the rungs of the ladder leading to the diving board. Meanwhile, to my left, on the other side of the street, a garage door was open; inside it, a group of men were playing a song that I identified but promptly forgot. So garage bands do exist. It’s sad how the names of real things keep getting co-opted by brands.
The endless ramp eventually let up, and a row of trees full of cherry blossoms welcomed me to the top of the hill. I stopped to take photos. When I resumed walking, my body felt a little betrayed: I had taken a rest where I could have just powered through. But the cherry blossoms were just too pretty and loud and ephemeral to pass up. I did my best to pay attention to the narration meanwhile, but once again, I thought I may have to revisit it later.
I was tackling the now downward slope carefully when I was hit by a perplexing phenomenon: I could remember what I was hearing. The pool. The people. The diving board. None of it was new. What a clever plot device, I thought. We’re going full circle. But then, the same shocking realization I’d heard two neighborhoods ago. The subdued alarm in the narrator’s voice was there again; I had loved that subtly pressed inflection enough to recognize it elsewhere. This was exactly the same passage.
Here I wanted to write the obvious joke that everything went downhill after this revelation, but in reality only I did—physically, for a few blocks before picking up altitude slightly for a few more and then definitely sliding down my way back home, listening to the next story with suspicion. I couldn’t go on like this, as if nothing had happened. What had happened, how did the story really go? I would not rest until I caught hold of the printed version of the book, all-star voice cast be damned. When I did, to my further dismay, I discovered that not only the short story I had listened to was horribly mangled, with the one repeated passage copied from the end and pasted over a part that never played at the beginning (hence the spatial confusion!), but also this audiobook was severely abridged and I was on my way to finding out—the hard way, surely—that many of its most popular stories were simply missing.
Part of me feels this whole botched audiobook adventure was a colossal waste of time, like it somehow tainted an otherwise perfectly fine outing (as if I needed walking to be more productive), but the surrealness of it against the electric blue sky and the garage band and the cherry blossoms was not so bad, come to think of it. I’d even dare say it was inspiring. Sometimes the mind just needs a good jolt to wake up.