Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it’s like you don’t want me to follow.’

‘Well I’ve got a brand-new life, just out of the wrapper, which you all say’ll take some time to fit.’

‘So they teach you how to accept your nonacceptance, the Union, you’re saying.’

‘You followed very well. You didn’t need fewer words at all. If you don’t mind my saying so, my sense is that you think you’re not bright but you’re not.’

‘Not bright?’

‘I put that poorly. You’re not not bright. As in you’re incorrect in thinking you have nothing upstairs.’

‘It’s a self-esteem issue, then, you’re seeing in me after like three days here, then. I feel low esteem about how I think I’m not bright enough for some people.’

‘Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently more AA take. U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.’

‘This makes the front of my head hurt, trying to follow this.’

‘Well you’ve been up all night.’

‘Then now I have to go to my other fucking job.’

‘You’re way brighter than you think, Don G., although I doubt anything anyone else says can get in there into the gnawed ragged place where you’re afraid you’re slow and dull.’

‘And what makes you think I think I’m not bright, unless it’s you’re saying it’s obvious to anybody I’m not bright?’

‘I didn’t mean to pry. Just tell me if you don’t want to speak to someone you barely know about it.’

‘Now you’re being sarcastic on what I said before.’

‘…’

‘I got kicked off of football my tenth-grade year for flunking English.’ ‘You played American football?’

‘I was good til I got kicked off. They gave me a tutor and I still flunked.’ ‘I used to twirl a baton at halftimes. I went to a special camp six summers running.’

‘…’

‘But a lot of the forms of self-hatred there is no veil for. U.H.I.D.’s taught a lot of us to be grateful that there’s at least a veil for our form.’ ‘So the veil’s a way to not hide it.’ ‘To hide openly, is more like it.’

‘I’m already seeing it’s very different from the drug-recovery agenda, the AA and NA program.’

‘Can I ask how you’re deformed?’

‘The best is when the sun’s coming up right through the snow and everything looks so white.’

‘…’

‘I almost forgot why I came on in, that that Kate girl said Ken E. like to get killed by some son of a bitch last night at that Waltham NA thing and they want somebody to tell Johnette not to make them go back again if they don’t want.’

‘One is Kate and Ken can talk for themselves with Johnette and I don’t need to pry in and you sure don’t need to pry in and rescue nobody else. Two is you’re all of a sudden talking different again, and when you were talking about the veil you didn’t sound like you to me. And three is don’t think I can’t see you’re coming out sideways all over the place about when I asked can I ask what deformity you’re not hiding the fact that you’re hiding under that thing. The Staff part of me wants to say if you don’t want to answer it just say so, but don’t try and go around the side and think you can distract me into forgetting I asked it.’

‘The U.H.I.D. in me would say you’re trapped in shame about the shame, in response, and that the shame-circle keeps you from really being present for your Staff job, Don. You’re more bugged by the possibility that I’m treating you as unbright and distractable than you are about a resident’s inability to come right out and openly exercise her right to refuse to answer an incredibly private and drug-unrelated question.’

‘And now she’s back to talking like a fucking English teacher again. But ignore that. That’s not the point. Look at how you’re trying to get our dialogue all distracted up in shame and me again instead of saying Yes or No to me asking Will you tell me what you’re missing behind that veil.’

‘Oh you’re good at hiding Mr. G. you’re good. The minute we start to poke at any inadequacies you’re ashamed of, see, you drop behind your own protective mask of House Staff and start probing areas that you now know I can’t bring myself to be open about — since you got me to tell you all about U.H.I.D.’s philosophy of hiding — so that your own sense of inadequacy gets either buried or used as a backlight to illuminate my own inability to be open and straightforward. The best defense is a good offense isn’t it Mr. Football Player.’

‘Aspirin-time, now, with all the words. You win. Go watch the snow come down someplace else.’

‘The thing is, Mr. Staff, I’ve already just completely opened up about my shame and my inability to be open and straightforward about this. You’re exposing something I’ve already held up to view. It’s your shame about being ashamed of what you’re afraid might be seen as a lack of brightness that’s getting to stay buried under this dead horse of my deformity that you’re trying to whip.’

‘And then meantime you still didn’t say a straight-on Yes or No to Can I ask what’s up behind there, are you cross-eyed or have a like beard, or do you have like really bad skin under there even though your skin everyplace that isn’t hidden looks —’

‘Looks what? My unhidden skin is what?’

‘See, this is you keep trying to sidetrack instead of just saying No to Can I ask. Just say No. Try it. It’s OK. Nothing bad’ll happen. Just try it straight out.’

‘Perfect. You were going to say every visible expanse of my skin is just drop-dead creamy perfect.’

‘Jesus, why am I even here? Why don’t you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and everything I’m going to say? Why not take the suggestion to say No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was I just sitting in here trying to keep awake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe-freak and did or didn’t you waltz on in and sit down and come to me?’

‘Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.’

‘Now with the sarcasm.’

‘I am so beautiful I am deformed.’

‘Now with the nonrespectful acting-out of treating me like I’m stupid for trying to get her to walk through her fear to give a straight-out No, which she isn’t willing.’

‘I am deformed with beauty.’

‘You want to see my professional Staff face here’s my Staff face. I nod and smile, I treat you like somebody I have to humor by nodding and smiling, and behind the face I’m going with my finger around and around my temple like What a fucking yutz, like Where’s the net.’

‘Believe what you want. I’m powerless over what you believe, I know.’

‘See the professional Staffer writing in the Meds Log: “Six extra-strong-kind aspirin for Staff after sarcasm and sideways refusal to walk through fears and sarcastic acting out by newcomer who thinks she knows everybody else’s issues.’

‘What position did you play?’

‘… that the Staffer wonders how come she’s even here in treatment then, if she knows so much.’

It is starting to get quietly around Ennet House that Randy Lenz has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerless-ness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence.

The nightly AA or NA meetings get out at 2l3Oh. or 22OOh., and curfew isn’t until 2330, and every Ennet resident mostly carpools back to the House with whatever residents have cars, or some of them go out in cars for massive doses of ice cream and coffee.

Lenz is one of the ones with a car, a heavily modified old Duster, white with what look like 12-gauge blasts of rust over the wheelwells, with oversized rear tires and an engine so bored-out for heavy-breathing speed it’s a small miracle he still has a license.

Lenz sets loafer one outside Ennet House only after sunset, and then only in his white toupee and mustache and billowing tall-collared topcoat, and goes only to the required nightly meetings; and the thing is that he’ll never drive his own car to the meetings. He always thumbs along with somebody else and adds to the crowd in their car. And then he always has to sit in the northernmost seat in the car, for some reason, using a compass and napkin to plot out what the night’s major direction of travel’ll be and then figuring out what seat he’ll have to be in to stay maximally north. Both Gately and Johnette Foltz have had to make a nightly routine of telling the other residents that Lenz is teaching them valuable patience and tolerance.

But then after the meeting lets out, Lenz never thumbs back with anybody. He always walks back to the House after meetings. He says it’s that he needs the air, what with being shut up in the crowded House all day and avoiding doors and windows, hiding from both sides of the Justice System.

And then one Wednesday after the Brookline Young People’s AA up Beacon by Chestnut Hill it takes him right up to 2329 to get home, almost two hours, even though it’s like a half-hour walk and even Burt Smith did it in September in under an hour; and Lenz gets back just at curfew and without saying a word to anybody books right up to his and Glynn’s and Day’s room, Polo topcoat flapping and powdered wig shedding powder, and sweating, and making an unacceptable classy-shoed racket running up the men’s side’s carpetless stairs, which Gately didn’t have time to go up and address because of having to deal with Bruce Green and Amy J. separately both missing curfew.

Lenz abroad in the urban night, solo, on almost a nightly basis, sometimes carrying a book.

Residents who seem to make it a point to go off alone a lot are red-flagged at Thursday’s All-Staff Meeting in Pat’s office as clear relapse-risks. But they’ve pulled spot-urines on Lenz five times, and the three times the lab didn’t fuck up the E.M.I.T. test Lenz’s urine’s come back clean. Gately’s basically decided to just let Lenz be. Some newcomers’ Higher Power is like Nature, the sky, the stars, the cold-penny tang of the autumn air, who knows.

So Lenz abroad in the night, unaccompanied and disguised, apparently strolling. He’s mastered the streets’ cockeyed grid around Enfield-Brighton-Allston. South Cambridge and East Newton and North Brookline and the hideous Spur. He takes side-streets home from meetings, mostly. Low-rent dumpster-strewn residential streets and Projects’ driveways that become alleys, gritty passages behind stores and dumpsters and warehouses and loading docks and Empire Waste Displacement’s mongo hangars, etc. His loafers have a wicked shine and make an elegant dancerly click as he walks along with his hands in his pockets and open coat flared wide, scanning. He scans for several nights before he even becomes aware of why or what he might be scanning for.[224] He moves nightly through urban-animal territory. Liberated housecats and hard-core strays ooze in and out of shadows, rustle in dumpsters, fuck and fight with hellish noises all around him as he walks, senses very sharp in the downscale night. You got your rats, your mice, your stray dogs with tongues hanging and countable ribs. Maybe the odd feral hamster and/or raccoon. Everything slinky and furtive after sunset. Also non-stray dogs that clank their chains or bay or lunge, when he goes by yards with dogs. He prefers to move north but will move east or west on the streets’ good sides. His shoes’ fine click precedes him by several hundred meters on cement of varying texture.

Sometimes near drainage pipes he sees serious rats, or sometimes near cat-free dumpsters. The first conscious thing he did was a rat that this one time he came on some rats in a wide W-E alley by the loading dock out behind the Svelte Nail Co. just east of Watertown on N. Harvard St. What night was that. It’d been coming back from East Watertown, which meant More Will Be Revealed NA with Glynn and Diehl instead of St. E.’s Better Late Than Never AA with the rest of the House’s herd, so a Monday. So on a Monday he’d been strolling through this one alley, his steps echoing trebled back off the cement sides of the docks and the north left wall he hugged, scanning without knowing what he was scanning for. Up ahead there was the Stegosaurus-shape of a Svelte Co. dumpster as versus your lower slimmer E.W.D.-type dumpster. There were dry skulky sounds issuing from the dumpster’s shadow. He hadn’t consciously picked anything up. The alley’s surface was coming apart and Lenz barely broke his dancerly stride picking a kilo-sized chunk of tar-shot concrete. It was rats. Two big rats were going at a half-eaten wiener in a mustardy paper tray from a Lunchwagon in a recess between the north wall and the dumpster’s barge-hitch. Their hideous pink tails were poking out into the alley’s dim light. They didn’t move as Randy Lenz came up behind them on the toes of his loafers. Their tails were meaty and bald and like twitched back and forth, twitching in and out of the dim yellow light. The big flat-top chunk came down on most of one rat and a bit of the other rat. There’d been godawful twittering squeaks, but the major hit on the one rat also made a very solid and significant noise, some aural combination of a tomato thrown at a wall and a pocketwatch getting clocked with a hammer. Material came out of the rat’s anus. The rat lay on its side in a very bad medical way, its tail twitching and anus material and there were little beads of blood on its whiskers that looked black, the beads, in the sodium security-lights along the Svelte Nail Co. roof. Its side heaved; its back legs were moving like it was running, but this rat wasn’t going anywhere. The other rat had vanished under the dumpster, dragging its rear region. There were more chunks of dismantled street lying all over. When Lenz brought another down on the head of the rat he consciously discovered what he liked to say at the moment of issue-resolution was: ‘There.’

Demapping rats became Lenz’s way of resolving internal-type issues for the first couple weeks of it, walking home in the verminal dark.

Don Gately, House chef and shopper, buys these huge econo-size boxes of Hefty[225] bags that get stored under the kitchen sink for whoever’s got Trash for their weekly chore. Ennet House generates serious waste.