“And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?”

David Foster Wallace wrote that line, and somewhere in the obscure plumbing of my consciousness, I recognize exactly what he meant.

Not entirely, of course. Let us maintain certain standards. But enough to feel that little shudder of recognition—the sense that Wallace has once again wandered into a psychological district I have visited, perhaps at night, perhaps under an assumed name.

There is something magnificent about leonine roar: the public toilet suddenly promoted from regrettable civic necessity to great beast of the municipal jungle. You press the handle and awaken a creature beneath the tiles. It bellows. The pipes tremble. Somewhere, a hand dryer answers its mating call.

I suspect I could investigate why this image feels so true. Wallace certainly would have. He possessed the unnerving courage to follow embarrassment, disgust, anxiety, and bodily absurdity deep into their tunnels, equipped with nothing but a lantern and several hundred footnotes.

I, however, decline the expedition.

Some territories of consciousness are best left untraversed. I can see the entrance; I acknowledge the subterranean roaring; I simply do not wish to descend. This is precisely why civilization invented artificial intelligence: so that another intelligence may venture into the psychic plumbing while I remain upstairs with a cup of tea.

And so I delegate the matter to AI—my impeccably mannered Virgil of the public lavatory. Let it contemplate the roar. Let it map the pipes. I shall wait here, grateful to Wallace for the image and even more grateful that understanding it need not become a personal journey.

David Foster Wallace has introduced me to the word fantod, and frankly, it is about time.

For years, my life has been overrun by strange visitations of the mind: reveries, phantasms, psychic weather, little interior disturbances wearing capes. I have searched for the proper name for them, but every candidate proved either too genteel or too grand. Reverie sounds as though one is gazing dreamily across a lake. Phantasm suggests a Gothic specter rattling the ancestral silverware.

But fantod—and especially the fantods—has the right nervous electricity. It sounds like a small, disreputable creature that lives behind the wallpaper and interferes with one’s plans.

I therefore feel considerable sympathy for David Foster Wallace. My own existence has been overwhelmed by fantods for years; I simply lacked the taxonomic equipment to identify them. Now, at last, I can point toward the psychic menagerie and say: “Ah. Fantods. I thought so.”

This discovery alone has made me very happy to be reading Infinite Jest. Any novel capable of giving a name to one’s previously unnamed inner fauna has already rendered a valuable public service.