David Foster Wallace Dream

I am a reporter for a newspaper, and I am to interview the writer David Foster Wallace. The assignment is a bizarre one – he committed suicide in 2008. A photographer and I are sent to his house. We knock on the door; it opens. We enter.

In front of us is the late professor David Foster Wallace. I figure this must be a dream or the most important day for the world of transcendentalism. The introductions are short and we segue to interviewing right away. As we talk to him in the living room, next to us on the carpet is a girl child of seven playing with her stuffed Mammoth and Whale. That, of all things, confuses me. The girl, who I know to be his daughter, should be eighteen in 2013 not seven. The year must be 2002.

Still the depressed moody person he always has been, DFW is close to his daughter. Our conversations are interrupted by her demands to be hugged, to ride on his shoulders, or her snuggling into his lap. She asks us where we are from, why we are asking hard questions to him. She says she wants to write stories like daddy; she wants to write stories for little boys and girls. She shows us her picture book and she tells us what illustrations will go with her stories. She doesn't like how daddy's stories don't have pictures.

DFW is a rising start in 2002, not yet at the zenith of his career. We discuss his writings, the jobs he's had, the places he's lived at. I tread around the topic of his depression. Our encounter would have made into his stories if he had thought about it, he says offhandedly while explaining how dealing with thin blurry line between the real and the unreal was his forte. He talks about his love for mathematics. He considers himself a mathematician at heart who likes to write.

The elephant in the room, the reason I was sent to interview him, stays an undercurrent throughout the conversation until he decides to talk about it. He is aware that he's in a terribly bad place and in six years he will kill himself. He looks with great pain at his daughter, who is now building a block tower. He whispers she will will have grown up a bit by then, and he wouldn't feel as bad.

The absurdities of the encounter are not lost on us. I am talking to a dead writer 11 years in the past, who is omniscient – at least inhumanly knowledgeable – about his future. He is aware of the impossibility of his existence. That he is likely a figment of my imagination, an ironic contrast to one of his characters who'd rather be a fictional character than a real person, is absolutely fine, thank you, with him. He needs to talk to someone to explain his condition.

We stay over for dinner after the interview. DFW knows his way around the kitchen well, having lived alone a considerable time as a bachelor. I play with his daughter while he is chopping vegetables. She is trying to scare the fish from across the aquarium walls by making faces. The big fish, she explains, are so big because they are afraid daddy might forget to give them food them so they get fat from all the food now so they don't die when there is no food. She snatches her slipper away from the jaws of the tiny brown mastiff who was sleeping peacefully but had decided to go outside with the slippers. She reprimands him and makes him sit. He lays on the ground ready to go back to sleep. After DFW is done with chopping the vegetables, we go to the kitchen to help him, but he has had a head start on three dishes with surprising agility. As we leave after a sumptuous rather spicy meal, we agree on the strangeness of the situation. DFW mentions lightly that this must be one of our dreams because his aren't this happy.

Just as I leave the room, I know I have to go back. I go back into the apartment, and the scene has changed. The room is dusty. It looks as if it were a living museum under construction. Chairs, tables, piles of books, two old computers are all covered in sheets of plastic. DFW sits nervously on the couch, waiting for me. He looks paler, older. He smiles a weak but warm smile, hugging me as one hugs an old friend after a long interval.

The year is 2009, I find out from the wall-calendar. A year after his death. We make small talk. I ask him why, when he loved her [his daughter] so much, he had decided to not be there for her. A long pause; followed by long sigh. He asks me, irritated, if I'm blaming him for his death. I tell him I want to know why he killed himself when he had such a good reason to be alive.

More pregnant pause. His legendary mane covers his face as he speaks staring downwards perhaps at my knees. He says that times had been unusually hard on him then. He hadn't seen his family for a long time and he was dealing with issues that seemed to be more urgent than his family. He couldn't handle those issues, he says, they were too much for him. He always knew he would kill himself, in a spectacular fashion. It was only a matter of time and it felt right in late 2008, he says. This interview winds down into sad awkward silence.

Next scene. I am walking into a cafeteria of a private high school. I just figure out who the girl beaming at me is before she gives me a long, tight hug. The year is 2013. This is real life. More real than the other parts anyway. My assignment is about to complete, I am meeting the grown-up daughter. She talks to me as if I were an old friend. For me it was only hours ago that I last saw her. Eleven years have passed for her.