Forever Overhead

The premise of the story is thin.  On the day of his thirteenth birthday in late summer, a boy dares himself to jump from a high-dive tower, at a public pool in Tucson, Arizona.  David Foster Wallace brilliantly turns that lean scenario into something of a meditation, in "Forever Overhead".  A meditation on, well, let's have a look at the story.

II.

The public pool has a "strong clear blue smell...a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals", Wallace tells us, that "connects with a chemical haze inside you, an interior dimness that bends light to its own ends, softens the difference between what leaves off and what begins." <1>  We are being directed to measure connection and disconnection, passing and becoming: leaving off and beginning. 

Indeed, to the near distance are mountains, "darkening into definition against a deep red tired light...their sharp connected tops form a spiked line", a line strikingly evoked by Wallace as an "EKG of the dying day."  The boy makes his way over to the diving tower.  "Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears."  

At the top of the tower, the boy is now second in line to dive.  He observes the progress of the woman in front of him.  "In no time she's at the end of the board, up, down on it, it bends low like it doesn't want her."  But gravity does, as earlier with the boy, climbing the tower.  "You have real weight on the ladder. The ground wants you back."

III.

Up above, over the pool, will the boy jump into the water below?  Wallace remarks in the story that the "lie is that it's one or the other."  Both, and neither.
__________
<1>Wallace, David Foster. "Forever Overhead". Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Back Bay Books, 2000.