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In any event, he chose to go to a halfway house in Brighton run by a woman who had worked in a psychology lab funded by nasa before she herself went into rehab...Despite having written a book on rap, his knowledge of anything other than middle-class academic life was minimal. He wrote Nadell at the end of November, “I am getting booted out of here and transferred to a halfway house...It is a grim place, and I am grimly resolved to go there.”

The compound consisted of seven buildings—“seven moons orbiting a dead planet,” as it is described in “Infinite Jest”—all leased to various substance-abuse and mental-health assistance groups. Wallace met Deb Larson, the director, at his new temporary home. Tall and blonde, she walked with a limp: drunk, she had fallen down in her kitchen, hitting her head, causing a partial paralysis. Even then she hadn’t stopped drinking. Wallace respected her. She was pretty and smart and gave him a link to an old life that was still his present—you could almost see Harvard from the top floor of the building. Recovery facilities tried to control the stress levels of their participants, and one activity they generally prohibited was school. Wallace had no choice but to call the philosophy department at Harvard and ask for a leave of absence. He was too humiliated to go back to get the vegetable juicer, a gift from his mother, that he had left behind in the graduate office.

Wallace was expected to find low-level work...to get hired as a guard at Lotus Development, a large software company...The Lotus experience, he recalled in a later interview, reminded him of “every bad ’60s novel about meaningless authority,” but at the time he bore it well. “Give me a little time to get used to no recreational materials and wearing a polyester uniform and living with 4 tatooed ex-cons and I’ll be right as rain,” he wrote the editor and literary critic Steven Moore with ironic brio shortly after starting...He could see the strange side of his situation. When the galleys of his story “Order and Flux in Northampton” arrived from Conjunctions with a page missing, he told his editor Brad Morrow he could send it at his convenience. “I’m not going anywhere for Xmas,” he wrote.

But in his heart he was stunned with what had happened to him. “I am,” he wrote his former professor at Amherst Dale Peterson, “OK, though very humiliated and confused.”

 

         New Yorker