Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘Where have I come, please. I became disoriented upon a set of stairs. I became panicked. I nearly removed my blindfold. Where are we? I detect many odors.’

‘You’re just off the weight room, in the little hall off the tunnel that isn’t the little hall that goes to the sauna. Why the blindfold, though?’

‘And the origin of this sound of hysterical weeping and moans, this is —?’

‘It’s Anton Doucette in there. He’s in there clinically depressed. Lyle’s trying to buck him up. Some of the crueler guys are in there watching like it’s entertainment. I got disgusted. Somebody in pain isn’t entertainment. I did my sets, now I’m a vapor-trail.’

‘You exude vapor?’

‘Always nice running into you, Id.’

‘Await. Please conduct me upstairs or into the locker for a lavatory visit. The blindfold I am wearing is experimental on the part of Thorp. You are told of the visually challenged player who will matriculate?’

The blind kid? From like Nowheresburg, Iowa? Dempster?’

‘Dymphna.’

‘He’s not coming in til next term. He delayed, Inc said they said. Dural edema or something.’

‘Though age only nine, he is in his Midwest region’s ranking of Twelve and Belows highly ranked. Coach Thorp tells this.’

‘Well, I’d say for a blind, soft-skulled kid he’s real high-ranked, Id, yeah.’

‘But Dymphna. I hear Thorp tell that the highness of the ranking may be due to the blindness itself. Thorp and Texas Watson were who scouted this player.’

‘I wouldn’t mention the name Watson near that weight room in there if I were you.’

‘Thorp tells that his excellence of play is scouted by them to be his anticipation. As in the player Dymphna arrives at the necessary location well before the opponent player’s ball, through anticipation.’

‘I know what anticipation is, Id.’

‘Thorp tells to me that this excellence in anticipation in the blind is because of hearing and sounds, because sounds are merely … here. Please read the comment I have carefully notated upon this folded piece of paper.’

‘ “Sound Merely ‘Variations In Intensity’ — Throp.” Throp?’

‘It was meaning Thorp, in excitement. He tells that one may, perforce, judge the opponent player’s VAPS[236] in more detail by the ear than the eye. This is experimental theory of Thorp. This is explaining why the highly ranked Dymphna appears to always have floated by magic to the necessary spot where a ball is soon to land. Thorp tells this in a convincing manner.’

‘Perforce?’

That this blind person is able to judge the necessary spot of landing by the intensity of the sound of the ball against the opponent player’s string.’

‘Instead of watching the contact and then imaginatively extending the beginning of its flight, like those of us hobbled by sight.’

T, Idris Arslanian, am compelled with Thorp’s telling.’

‘Which helps explain the blindfold.’

‘I therefore experiment with volunteer blindness. Training the ear in degrees of intensity in play. Today versus Whale I was wearing the blindfold to play.’

‘How’d it go?’

‘Not as well as hoped. I frequently faced the wrong direction for play. I frequently judged by the intensity of balls struck on adjacent courts and ran onto adjacent courts, intruding on play.’

‘We sort of wondered what all the ruckus was down there at the 14’s end.’

‘Thorp tells that training the ear is a process of time, in encouragement.’

‘Well, later, Id.’

‘Stop. Wait before leaving. Please conduct me to a lavatory. Ted Schacht? Are you as yet there?’

‘…’

‘Are you as yet there? I very —’

‘Whuffff watch where you’re going kid for Christ’s sake.’

‘Who is this please.’

‘Troeltsch, James L., slightly doubled over.’

‘It is I, Idris Arslanian, wearing a rayon handkerchief as a blindfold over my features. I am disoriented and wishing badly for a lavatory. Wondering also what is ensuing inside the weight room, where Schacht alleges you are all watching Doucette weep in clinical depression.’

‘Kertwannnggg! Just kidding, Ars. It’s really Mike Pemulis.’

Then you, Mike Pemulis, may even now be questioning why is this blindfold upon Idris Arslanian.’

‘What blindfold? Ars, no, you’re wearing a fucking blindfold too?’

‘You, Mike Pemulis, are also wearing a blindfold?’

‘Just kertwanging on you, brother.’

‘I became disoriented on a stairway, then conversed with Ted Schacht. I am suspecting I do not trust your sense of laughter enough to conduct me back upstairs.’

‘You should feel your way in and just for one second see the amount of high-stress sweat Lyle’s taking off Anton (“The Booger”) Doucette in there, Ars.’

‘Doucette is the two-hand player whose mole appears to be material from a nostril, clinically depressing Doucette at its appearance.’

‘Rog on the mole. Except that’s not what’s depressing the Booger this time. This one we decided we’d describe him as more like anxiously depressed than depressed.’

‘One can be depressed of different types?’

‘Boy are you young, Ars. The Booger’s got himself convinced he’s going to get the academic Boot. He’s been on proby this whole year, since apparently some trouble last year with Thorp’s cubular trig —’

‘I am sympathizing with this in toto.’

‘— and but except now he claims he’s close to flunking in Watson’s laughable Energy survey class, which would obviously mean the old Boot at term’s end, if he really does flunk. He’s thought himself into a brainlock of anxiety. He’s in there clutching his skull with Lyle and Mario, and some of the like less kind guys in there have a pool going on whether Lyle can pull him back from the brink.’

‘Texas Watson the prorector, teaching of energy in models of resource-scarcity and resource-plenty.’

‘Ars, I’m nodding in confirmation. Fossil fuels all the way up to annular fusion/fission cycles, DT-lithiumization, so on and so forth. All on a real superficial-type level, since Watson’s basically got like a little liquid-filled nubbin at the top of his spine where his brain ought to be.’

‘Texas Watson does not overwhelm with brightness, it is true.’

‘But Doucette’s got himself convinced he’s got this insurmagulate conceptual block that keeps him from grasping annulation, even superficially.’

‘After we converse you will conduct me to micturate, please.’

‘It’s the same sort of block some people get with the Mean-Value Theorem. Or in Optics when we get to color fields. At a certain level of abstraction it’s like the brain recoils.’

‘Causing pain of impact within the skull, resulting in clutching the head.’

‘Watson’s gone the extra click with him. Watson’s good-hearted if nothing else. He’s tried flash-cards, mnemonic rhymes, even claymation filmstrips from over at Rindge-Latin Remedial.’

‘You are saying without avail.’

‘I’m saying apparently the Boogster just sits there in class, eyes bugging out, stomach in fucking knots, dope-slapped by anxiety. I’m saying frozen.’

‘You are saying recoiling.’

‘The right side of his face frozen in this anxiety-tic. Envisioning any possible tennis career as with these little wings on it, flying off. Talking all kinds of crazy self-injuring anxious-depression talk. It all started with him and Mario and me in the sauna, him breaking down, me and Mario trying to talk him out of the crazy washed-up-at-fifteen-type depressed talk, Mario exploiting a previous like therapeutic bond with the kid from about the mole, then with me putting DT-annulation in broad-stroke terms a freaking invertebrate could have understood for Christ’s sake. Just about passing out from the sauna all through this. Finally taking him in to Lyle even with the 18 ‘s still doing circuits in there. Lyle’s working with the Booger now. Between the anxiety and the marathon sauna-time it’s a real feeding frenzy for old Lyle let me tell you.’

‘I too confess experiences of anxiety for annulation with Tex Watson, though I am Trivially thirteen and not yet required to grapple in hard science.’

‘Mario in the sauna kept telling Doucette to just imagine somebody doing somersaults with one hand nailed to the ground, which what the fuck is that, and lo and surprise didn’t help the Booger a whole lot.’

‘Did not part the veil of Maya.’

‘Didn’t do jack.’

‘Annular energy cycles are intensively abstract, my home nation believes.’

‘But my whole message to Boog was that DT-cycles aren’t all that fucking hard if you don’t paralyze your brain with career-with-wings brain-cartoons. The extra-hot breedering and lithiumization stuff gets hairy, but the whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing in toto you can imagine as nothing but a huge right triangle.’

‘You are presaging to give the thumbnail lecture.’

‘Commit this one simple model to your little Pakistani RAM-cells, and you’ll tapdance right through Watson’s kiddie-physics and up into Optics, which is where the abstracto-conceptual fur really flies, kid, let me tell you.’

‘I am one of the seldom of my home nation whose talents are weak in science, unhappily.’

‘This is why God also gave you quick hands and a wicked lob off the backhand, though. Just picture a kind of massive pseudocartographic right triangle.[237] You’ve got your central, impregnately-guarded O.N.A.N.- Sun-strand waste-intensive fusion facility up in what used to be Montpelier in what used to be Vermont, in the Concavity. From Montpelier the process’s waste’s piped to two sites, one of which is that blue glow at night up by the Methuen Fan-Complex, just south of the Concavity, right flush up against the Wall and Checkpoint Pongo —’

‘Which our tall and sleep-depriving fans in our area point at to blow away from the south.’

‘— Roger that, where the toxo-fusion’s waste’s plutonium fluoride’s refined into plutonium-239 and uranium-238 and fissioned in a standard if somewhat hot and risky breeder-system, much of the output of which is waste U-239, which gets piped or catapulted or long-shiny-trucked way up to what used to be Loring A.F.B. — Air Force Base near what used to be Presque Isle Maine — where it’s allowed to decay naturally into nep-tunium-239 and then plutonium-239 and then added to the UF4 fractional waste also piped up from Montpelier, then fissioned in a purposely ugly way in such a way as to create like hellacious amounts of highly poisonous radioactive wastes, which are mixed with heavy water and specially heated-zirconium-piped through special heavily guarded heated zirconium pipes back down to Montpelier as raw materiel for the massive poisons needed for toxic lithiumization and waste-intenseness and annular fusion.’

‘My head is spinning on its axis.’

‘Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and — utilization. See? And when are we going to get you out on the old Eschaton map for a little geopolitical sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob? Incidentally, the arrhythmic meaty whacking sound is Booger hitting himself in the thigh and chest in there, which self-abuse is a textbook symptom of an anxiously depressed episode.’

‘With this I can create sympathy. For, confusingly to me, fusion produces no waste. This we are taught in the science of my home nation. This is the very essence of the promise of the attraction of fusion for a densely populous and waste-impacted nation such as mine, we are taught fusion to be self-sufficient and wasteless perpetuation. Alas, my need to visit the lavatory is becoming distended.’

‘But except no, although this was the very roadblock that’d stymified annulation, and what had to be overcome, and was overcome, though in a way so unintuitive and abstracto-conceptual that this is where your Third World educational system’s real sadly in need of like a massive up-to-date-textbook airlift or something. It’s also at just this point in the fusion-wastelessness problem where our own glorious optical Founder, Inc’s ex-Da, Mrs. Inc’s poor cue —’

‘I know who you refer.’

‘The man himself, at just this point, makes his final lasting contribution to state science after he quit designing neutron-diffusion reflectors for Defense. You’ve seen the coprolite placque in Tavis’s office. This is from the A.E.C., for the Incster’s Da’s, like, lasting contribution to the energy of waste.’

‘The purpose for which I was upon the stairs and became disoriented was to visit a lavatory. This was long ago.’

‘Hold your water one second is all this’ll take. You wouldn’t even fucking be here without Inc’s Da, you know. What the guy did was he helped design these special holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the behavior of subatomics in highly poisonous environments. Without getting poisoned themselves.’

‘They thus are studying holographic conversions of the poisons instead of the poisons.’

‘Men’s Sanity in Corporate Sterno, Ars. Like an optical glove-box. The ultimate prophylactic.’

‘Please conduct me.’

‘Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?’

‘This means what? A bottle of medicine?’

‘The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted now, but the whole idea of treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer was anathematic just a couple decades back.’

‘Anathematic?’

‘As in like radical, fringe. Wacko. Laughed out of town on a rail by quote mainstream established science. Whose idea of treatment was to like poison the whole body and see what was left. Though annular chemotherapy did start out kind of wacko. You can see these early microphotos Schacht’s got that poster of that he won’t take down even after you’re sick of it, the early microphotos of cancer cells getting force-fed micromassive quantities of overdone beef and diet soda, forced to chain-smoke microsized Marlboros near tiny little cellular phones —’[238]

‘I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot.’

‘— except and corollarying out of the micromedical model was this equally radical idea that maybe you could achieve a high-waste annulating fusion by bombarding highly toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the radioactive particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and produces relatively stable plutonium fluoride and uranium tetra-fluoride. All you turn out to need is access to mind-staggering volumes of toxic material.’