“Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognise that important things are happening to you.”
Written in the second person, David Foster Wallace’s breathtaking story ‘Forever Overhead’ puts us in the body of a young boy at a swimming pool. “Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right.”
The boy is at the pool with his family for his thirteenth birthday, his sister playing with her friends, his parents sunbathing in deckchairs. As the boy strays from his family, walking towards the diving board, we go deeper into his skin, feeling his heartbeat rise, seeing his footprints disappear on the hot concrete.
Queuing to climb the ladder, he pretends to look bored while looking at the older girls’ bodies. “The bottoms are in soft thin cloth, tight nylon stretch … The girls’ legs make you think of deer. Look bored.”
Capturing the acute self-awareness of puberty, ‘Forever Overhead’ is an incredibly visceral story. As the boy slowly climbs the ladder up to the diving board, his feet hurt on the thin metal rungs. Foster Wallace gives us such fine detail, from “the wind that makes a thin whistle in your ears” to the “constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads” on the boy’s skin. The use of the second person perspective brings us so close, adding a sense of intimacy, an aching tenderness. Each time I read this story I experience it anew.
First published in Fiction International, 1991, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999
A Personal Anthology 