Infinite jest - David Wallace

He said to the man in the wheelchair, ‘Goody.’

‘Plus or minus three percent sample.’

‘Eager to cooperate in any way.’

The man cocked his head in that way people in wheelchairs do. ‘Scholarly academic study.’

‘Pisser.’ Leaning against the jamb with arms crossed, watching the man try to process the dissimilarity in the size of his limbs. No shins or extremities, however withery, extended below the wheelchair’s blanket’s hem. The guy was like totally legless. Orin’s rising heart went out.

‘Chamber of Commerce survey. Concerned veterans’ group systematic inquiry. Consumer advocacy polling operation. Three percentage points error on either of two sides of the issue.’

‘Bully.’

‘Consumer-advocacy group opinion sweep. Very little time involved. Government study. Ad council demographic assessment. Sweeps. Random anonymity. Minimum in terms of time or trouble.’

‘I’m clearing my mind to be of maximum help.’

When the man had taken out his pen with a flourish and looked down at his board Orin got a look at the yarmulke of skin in the center of the seated man’s hair. There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man.

‘What do you miss, please?’

Orin smiled coolly. ‘Very little, I like to think.’

‘Backtrack. U.S.A. citizen?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have how many years?’

‘Age?’

‘You have which age?’

‘Age is twenty-six.’

‘Over twenty-five?’

‘That’d follow.’ Orin was waiting for the ruse involving the pen that’d get him to sign something so the very shy fan club’d get their autograph. He tried to remember from Mario’s childhood how long under blankets before it got unbearably hot and you started to smother and thrash.

The man pretended to notate. ‘Employed, self-employed, unemployed?’

Orin smiled. ‘The first.’

‘Please list what you miss.’

The whisper of the vent, hush of the wine-colored hallway, vaguest whisper of rustling sheets behind, imagining the growing bubble of CO2 under the sheets.

‘Please list lifestyle elements of your U.S.A. lifetime you recall, and/or at present lack, and miss.’

Tm not sure I follow.’

The man flipped a page over to check. ‘Pine, yearn, winsome, nostalgia. Lump of throat.’ Flipping one more sheet. ‘Wistful, as well.’

‘You mean childhood memories. You mean like cocoa with half-melted marshmallows floating on top in a checker-tiled kitchen warmed by an enamel gas range, that sort of thing. Or omnissent doors at airports and Star Markets that somehow knew you were there and slid open. Before they disappeared. Where did those doors go?’

‘Enamel is with the e?’

‘And then some.’

Orin’s gaze now was up at the ceiling’s acoustic tile, the little blinking disk of the hall’s smoke detector, as if memories were always lighter than air. The seated man stared blandly up at the throb of Orin’s internal jugular vein. Orin’s face changed a little. Behind him, under the blankets, the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the portable Oz-mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol.

‘I miss TV,’ Orin said, looking back down. He no longer smiled coolly.

‘The former television of commercial broadcast.’

‘I do.’

‘Reason in several words or less, please, for the box after REASON,’ displaying the board.

‘Oh, man.’ Orin looked back up and away at what seemed to be nothing, feeling at his jaw around the retromandibular’s much tinier and more vulnerable throb. ‘Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases “Order before midnight tonight” and “Save up to fifty percent and more.” I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss “Sermonette” and “Evensong” and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’

‘Vapid ditty,’ pretending to notate.

‘I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’

‘Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure.’

‘You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’

There were two muffled sneezes from the bed behind him that the handicapped man didn’t even acknowledge, pretending to write, brushing his string tie’s dangle away again and again as he wrote. Orin tried not to imagine the topography of the sheets the Subject’d sneezed into. He no longer cared about the ruse. He did feel tender, somehow, toward him.

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.’

‘Inflicted.’

‘I don’t think I exactly know,’ Orin said, suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside. The terrible sense as in dreams of something vital you’ve forgotten to do. The inclined head’s bald spot was freckled and tan. ‘Is there a next item?’

‘Things to tell me you do not miss.’

‘For symmetry.’

‘Balance of opinion.’

Orin smiled. ‘Plus or minus.’

‘Just so,’ the man said.

Orin resisted an urge to lay his hand tenderly over the arc of the disabled man’s skull. ‘Well how much time do we have here?’

The skyscraper-gawking aspect was only when the man’s gaze went higher than Orin’s neck. They were not shy or indirect or even the eyes of someone in any way disabled, was what struck Orin later as odd — besides the Swiss accent, the absence of a signature-ruse, the Subject’s patience with the wait and the absence of gasping when O. pulled the covers abruptly back, later. The man had looked up at Orin and flicked his eyes slightly past him, at the room behind with pantyless floor and humped covers. Orin was meant to see the glance past him. ‘Can return at later time which we specify. You are, comme on dit, engaged?’

Orin’s smile wasn’t as cool as he thought as he told the seated figure that that was a matter of opinion.

As at all D.S.A.S.-certified halfway facilities, Ennet House’s resident curfew is 2330h. From 2300 to 2330, the Staffer on night-duty has to do head-counts and sit around like somebody’s mom waiting for different residents to come in. There’s always ones that always like to cut it close and play with the idea of getting Discharged for something picayune so it won’t be their fault. Tonight Clenette H. and the deeply whacked-out Yolanda W. come back in from Footprints[246] around 2315 in purple skirts and purple lipstick and ironed hair, tottering on heels and telling each other what a wicked time they just had. Hester Thrale undulates in in a false fox jacket at 2320 as usual even though she has to be up at like 0430 for the breakfast-shift at the Provident Nursing Home and sometimes eats breakfast with Gately, both of their faces nodding down perilously close to their Frosted Flakes. Chandler Foss and the spectrally thin April Cortelyu come in from someplace with postures and expressions that arouse comments and force Gately to Log a possible issue about an in-House relationship. Gately has to bid goodnight to two craggy-faced brunette ex-residents who’ve been planted on the couch all night talking cults. Emil Minty and Nell Gunther and sometimes Gavin Diehl (who Gately did three weeks of a municipal bit with, once, at Concord Farm) make a nightly point of going to smoke outside on the front porch and coming in only after Gately says twice he’s got to lock the door, just as some limp rebellious gesture. Tonight they’re closely followed by a mus-tacheless Lenz, who sort of oozes through the door just as Gately’s going through his keys to get the key to lock it, and kind of brushes by and goes up to the 3-Man without a word, which he’s been doing a lot lately, which Gately has to Log, plus the fact that it’s now after 2330 and he can’t account for either the semi-new girl Amy J. or — more upsetting — Bruce Green. Then Green knocks at the front door at 2336 — Gately has to Log the exact time and then it’s his call whether to unlock the door. After curfew Staff doesn’t have to unlock the door. Many a bad-news resident gets effectively bounced this way. Gately lets him in. Green’s never come close to missing curfew before and looks godawful, skin potato-white and eyes vacant. And a big quiet kid is one thing, but Green looks at the floor of Pat’s office like it’s a loved one while Gately gives him the required ass-chewing; and Green takes the standard dreaded week’s Full House Restriction[247] in such a vacantly hangdog way, and is so lamely vague when Gately asks does he want to tell him where he’s been at and why he couldn’t make 2330 and whether there’s anything that’s an issue that he might want to share with Staff, so unresponsive that Gately feels like he has no choice but to pull an immediate spot-urine on Green, which Gately hates doing not only because he plays cribbage with Green and feels like he’s taken Green under the old Gately wing and is probably the closest thing to a sponsor the kid’s got but also because urine samples taken after Unit #2’s clinic’s closed[248] have to be stored overnight in the little Staff miniature fridgelette in Don Gately’s basement room — the only fridge in the House that no resident could conceivably dicky into — and Gately hates to have a warm blue-lidded cup of somebody’s goddamn urine in his fridgelette with his pears and Polar seltzer, etc. Green submits to Gately’s cross-armed presence in the men’s head as Green produces a urine so efficiently and with so little bullshit that Gately is able to take the lidded cup between gloved thumb and finger and get it downstairs and tagged and Logged and down in the fridgelette in time to not be late for getting the residents’ cars moved, the night-shift’s biggest pain in the ass; but then his final head-count at 2345 reminds Gately that Amy J. isn’t back, and she hasn’t called, and Pat has told him the decision to Discharge after a missed curfew is his call, and at 2350 Gately makes the decision, and has to get Treat and Belbin to go up into the 5-Woman room and pack the girl’s stuff up in the same Irish Luggage she’d brought it in Monday, and Gately has to put the trashbags on the front porch with a quick note explaining the Discharge and wishing the girl good luck, and has to call Pat’s answering device down in Milton and leave word of a mandatory Curfew-Discharge at 2350h., so Pat can hear about it first thing in the A.M. and schedule interviews to fill the available bed ASAP, and then with a hissed curse Gately remembers the anti-big-hanging-gut situps he’s sworn to himself to do every night before 0000, and it’s 2356, and he has time to do only 20 with his huge discolored sneakers wedged under the frame of the office’s black vinyl couch before it’s unavoidably time to supervise moving the residents’ cars around.

Gately’s predecessor as male live-in Staff, a designer-narcotics man who’s now (via Mass Rehab) learning to repair jet engines at East Coast AeroTech, once described residents’ vehicles to Gately as a continuing boil on the ass of night Staff. Ennet House Jets any resident with a legally registered vehicle and insurance keep their car at the House, if they want, during residency, to use for work and nightly meetings, etc., and the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital goes along, except they put authorized parking for all the Units’ clients out in the little street right outside the House. And since metro Boston’s serious fiscal troubles in the third year of Subsidized Time there’s been this hellish municipal deal where only one side of any street is legal for parking, and the legal side switches abruptly at 0000h., and cruisers and municipal tow trucks prowl the streets from 0001h. on, writing $95.00 tickets and/or towing suddenly-illegally-parked vehicles to a region of the South End so blasted and dangerous no cabbie with anything to live for will even go there. So the interval 2355h.-OOO5h. in Boston is a time of total but not very spiritual community, with guys in skivvies and ladies in mud-masks staggering out yawning into the crowded midnight streets and disabling their alarms and revving and all trying to pull out and do a U and find a parallel-parking place facing the other way. There’s nothing very mysterious about the fact that metro Boston’s battery- and homicide-rates during this ten-minute interval are the highest per diem, so that ambulances and paddy wagons are especially aprowl at this hour, too, adding to the general clot and snarl.

Since the E.M.P.H.H. Units’ catatonics and enfeebled people rarely own registered vehicles, it’s generally pretty easy to find places along the little road to switch to, but it’s a constant sore point between Pat Montesian and the E.M.P.H.H. Board of Regents that Ennet House residents don’t get to park overnight in the big off-street lot by the condemned hospital building — the lot’s spaces are reserved for all the different Units’ professional staff starting at 0600h., and E.M. Security got sick of staffs’ complaints about drug addicts’ poorly maintained autos still sitting there taking up their spots in the A.M. — and that Security won’t consider changing the little E.M. streetlet’s nightly side-switch to 2300h., before Ennet Houses’s D.S.A.S.-required curfew; E.M.’s Board claims it’s a municipal ordinance that they can’t be expected to mess with just to accommodate one tenant, while Pat’s memos keep pointing out that the Enfield Marine Hospital complex is state- not city-owned, and that Ennet House residents are the only tenants who face the nightly car-moving problem, since just about everyone else is catatonic or enfeebled. And so on.

But so every P.M. at like 2359 Gately has to lock up the lockers and Pat’s cabinets and desk drawers and the door to the front office and put the phone console’s answering machine on and personally escort all residents who own cars out post-curfew outside into the little nameless streetlet, and for somebody with Gately’s real limited managerial skills the headaches involved are daunting: he has to herd the vehicular residents together just inside the locked front door; he has to threaten the residents he’s herded together into staying together by the door while he clomps upstairs to get the one or two drivers who always forget and fall asleep before 0000 — and this straggler-collecting is a particular pain in the ass if the straggler’s a female, because he has to unlock and press the Male Coming Up button by the kitchen, and the ‘buzzer’ sounds more like a klaxon, and wakes the edgiest female residents up with an ugly surge of adrenaline, and Gately as he clomps up the stairs gets roundly bitched out by all the mud-masked heads sticking out into the female hall, and he by regulation can’t go into the sleeper’s bedroom but has to pound on the door and keep shouting out his gender and get one of the straggler’s roommates to wake her up and get her dressed and to the bedroom door; so he has to retrieve the stragglers and chew them out and threaten them with both a Restriction and a possible tow while herding them quick-walking down the staircase to join the main car-owner herd as quickly as possible before the main herd can like disperse. They’ll always disperse if he takes too long getting stragglers; they’ll get distracted or hungry or need an ashtray or just get impatient and start looking at the whole car-moving-after-curfew thing as an imposition on their time. Their early-recovery Denial makes it impossible for them to imagine their own car getting towed instead of, say, somebody else’s car. It’s the same Denial Gately can see at work in the younger B.U. or — C. students when he’s driving Pat’s Aventura to the Food Bank or Purity Supreme when they’ll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the car, whose brakes are fortunately in top shape. Gately’s snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they’re immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they’re exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else. They’ll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don’t deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they’re constitutionally unable to learn from anybody else’s experience: if some jaywalking B.U. student does get splattered on Comm. or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005, your other student’s or addict’s response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable difference makes it possible for that other guy to get splattered or towed and not him, the ponderer. They never doubt the difference — they just ponder it. It’s like a kind of idolatry of uniqueness. It’s unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry. Eugenio M. and Annie Parrot always recommend letting everybody get towed at least once, early on in their residency, to help make believers out of them in terms of laws and rules; but Gately for some reason on his night-shifts can’t do it, cannot fucking stand to have one of his people get towed as long as there’s something he can do to prevent it, and then plus if they do get towed there’s the nail-chewing hassle of arranging their transport to the South End’s municipal lot the next day, fielding calls from bosses and supplying verification of residents’ carlessness in terms of getting to work without letting the boss know that the earless employee is a resident of a halfway house, which is totally sacred private residents’ private information to give out or not — Gately breaks a full-body sweat just thinking about the managerial headaches involved in a fucking tow, so he’ll spend time herding and regathering and chewing the absentminded asses of residents who Gene M. says have such calloused asses still it’s a waste of Gately’s time and spirit: you have to let them learn for themselves.[249] Gately alerts Thrale and Foss and Erdedy and Henderson,[250] and Morris Hanley, and drags the new kid Tingley out of the linen closet, and Nell Gunther — who’s fucking sacked out slack-mouthed on the couch, in violation — and lets them all get coats and herds them together by the locked front door. Yolanda W. says she left personal items in Clenette’s car and can she come. Lenz owns a car but doesn’t answer Gately’s yell up the stairs. Gately tells the herd to stay put and that if anybody leaves the herd he’s going to take a personal interest in their discomfort. Gately clomps up the stairs and into the 3-Man room, plotting different fun ways to wake Lenz up without bruises that’d show. Lenz is not asleep but is wearing personal-stereo headphones, plus a jock strap, doing handstand-pushups up against the wall by Geoffrey Day’s rack, his bottom only inches from Day’s pillow and farting in rhythm to the pushups’ downstrokes, as Day lies there in pajamas and Lone Ranger sleep mask, hands folded over his heaving chest, lips moving soundlessly. Gately’s maybe a little rough about grabbing Lenz’s calf and lifting him off his hands and using his other big hand on Lenz’s hip to twirl him around upright like a drill-team’s rifle, but Lenz’s cry is of over-ebullient greeting, not pain, but it sends both Day and Gavin Diehl bolt-upright in their racks, and then they curse as Lenz hits the floor. Lenz starts saying he’d let time completely get away from him and didn’t know what time it was. Gately can hear the herd down by the front door at the bottom of the stairs stamping and chuffing and getting ready to maybe disperse.