Infinite jest - David Wallace

Joelle runs just like a girl, Erdedy notes.[256] She gets out through the many-angled cars into the street just as Gately decides to lie down.

It’s not like passing out. It’s just a decision Gately makes to like lie back with his knees bent and pointing up into the sky’s depth, which seems to bulge and recede with the pulse in his right shoulder, which has now gone dead cold, which means there will very soon be pain, he predicts.

He waves off concern with the left hand and goes ‘Flesh-wound’ the second Joelle’s bare feet and robe’s hem are in view.

‘Son of a fucking bitch.’

‘Flesh-wound.’

‘Are you ever bleeding.’

‘Thanks for the feedback.’

You can hear Henderson and Willis off in the background still going ‘fu.’

‘I think you can tell them he’s probably subdued,’ Gately pointing off in what he thinks is #4’s lawn’s direction. His lying flat gives him a double-chin, he can feel, and pulls his big face into a smile. His big present fear is throwing up in front of and maybe partly on Joelle v.D., whose calves he’s noted.

Now Lenz’s lizard-skin loafers with grass stains at the toes. ‘Don what can I say.’

Gately struggles to sit back up. ‘You got fucking armed Nucks wanting your ass too?’

Revealing a kind of blackly kimonoish thing under, Joelle has taken off the terry robe and folds the robe into a kind of trapezoidal pad and is kneeling over Gately’s shoulder, straddling his arm, pressing down on the pad with the heels of her hands.

‘Owie.’

‘Lenz he’s really bleeding bad here.’

‘I’m groping to even know what to begin to say, Don.’

‘You owe me urine, Lenz.’

‘I think there’s two of them, like, desisted.’ Wade McD.’s unlaced high-tops, his voice breathy with awe.

‘He’s bleeding really bad I said.’

‘You mean deceased.’

‘There’s one of their shoes in one of them’s fucking eye.’

‘Tell Ken to put his hands down for Christ’s sake.’

‘Oh fucking God.’

Gately can feel his eyes crossing and uncrossing by themselves.

‘He soaking right through it man look at that shit.’

‘This man needs an ambulance.’

Somebody else female says God again and Gately’s hearing warbles a bit as Joelle snaps at her to shut up. She leans down and in, so Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil’s billowing hem. ‘Whom should we call?’ she asks him.

‘Call Pat’s machine and Calvin. You have to dial 9. Tell them to come down.’

‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Airdaddy!’ Minty is shouting at Ken E.

‘Tell her to call Annie and the E.M. office down there and do some like strategic thing.’

‘Where the fuck is Security when it isn’t just innocent recovering cars to get towed?’

‘And call Pat,’ Gately says.

A forest of footwear and bare feet and shins all around him, and heads too high to see. Lenz screaming back to somebody in the House: ‘Call a fucking ambulance already.’

‘Regulate the voice, man.’

‘Fucking call about five ambulances is more like it.’

‘Mothafucka.’

‘Ssshh.’

‘I just never saw anything like that.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ Gately gasps, trying to rise and deciding he just likes it better lying down. ‘Don’t call one for me.’

‘This is the straight and narrow?’

‘By doze is fide.’

‘He doesn’t want one he said.’

Green’s and Minty’s boots, Treat’s purple plastic shower-thongs. Somebody has on Clearasil, he can smell.

‘Seen some righteous ass-kickings in my past, brother, but —’

Somebody male screams back off to the right.

‘Just don’t try and walk me around,’ Gately grins up.

‘Dipshit.’

‘He can’t go in no E.R. with a gunshot,’ Minty says to Lenz, whose shoes keep moving to get himself north of everybody.

‘Somebody turn off the car will you?’

‘I wouldn’t touch nothing.’

Gately focuses at where the Joelle girl’s eyes would be. Her thighs are forked way wide to straddle his arm, which is numb and doesn’t feel like his. She’s bearing down on him. She smells strange but good. She’s got all her weight on her bathrobe’s pad. She weighs roughly nothing. The first threads of pain are starting to radiate out of the shoulder and down the side and into the neck. Gately hasn’t looked down at the shoulder, on purpose, and he tries to wedge his left hand’s finger under the shoulder to see if anything went through. The night’s so clear the stars shine right through people’s heads.

‘Green.’

Tb dot touchig dothig, dud worry.’

‘Look at his bead.’’

Her kimono’s shoulders are humped and glassy black in the Montego’s light. Gately’s brain keeps wanting to go away inside himself. When you start to feel deeply cold that’s shock and blood-loss. Gately sort of wills himself to stay right here, looks over past Joelle’s hand at Lenz’s fine shoes. ‘Lenz. You and Green. Get me inside.’

‘Green!’

The circle of stars’ heads’ faces above are all faceless from the headlights’ shadows. Some car engines have shut off and some haven’t. One of the cars has a twittering fan-belt. Somebody’s suggesting to call the genuine Finest — Erdedy — which everybody greets with scorn at his naïveté. Gately’s figuring Staff from the Shed or #4 has called them or at least dialed down to Security. By the time he was ten only his pinkie-finger would fit in the dialer’s holes of his mother’s old princess phone; he exerts will to uncross his eyes and stay right here; he in the worst way does not want to be lying here with a gunshot in shock trying to deal with the Finest.

‘I think one of these guys is, like, expired.’

‘No shit Shylock.’

‘Nobody call.’ Gately yells it up and out. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit when they stand him up. ‘Nobody call nobody til you get me in.’ He can smell Green’s leather jacket overhead. Bits of grass and whatnot drifting down onto him from where Lenz is still brushing off his clothes, and coins of blood on the street from Green’s nose. Joelle tells Lenz if he doesn’t cut something out she’s going to hand him his ass. Gately’s whole right side had gone deadly cold. To Joelle he says, ‘I’m Supervised. I’ll go to jail sure.’

‘You got fucking eyewitnesses out the ass behind you Don man,’ either McDade or Glynn says, but it can’t be Glynn, for some reason he tries to bring up inside him. And it seems like Charlotte T.’s voice saying Ewell’s trying to get in Pat’s office to call but Gately locked Pat’s door.

‘Nobody call anyone!’ Joelle shouts up and out. She smells good.

‘They’re calling!’

‘Get him off the phone! Say prank for Christ’s sake! You hear me?’ Her kimono smells good. Her voice has a Staff-like authority. The scene out here has changed: Gately’s down, Madame Psychosis is in charge.

‘We’re going to get him up and we’re going to get him inside,’ she says to the circle. ‘Lenz.’

There’s impending static-crackle and the sound of a serious set of keys.

Her voice is that one Madame lady’s voice on no-subscription radio, from out of nowhere he’s all of a sudden sure, is where he heard that odd empty half-accented voice before.

‘Secyotty! Hold it right thaah.’ It’s at least luckily one of the ex-football E.M. Security guys, that spends half his shift down at the Life and then goes up and down the streetlet all night playing with his service baton and singing sea chanties off-key, that’s just impressively qualified to Come In to AA with them.

Joelle: ‘Erdedy — deal with him.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s the drunk,’ Gately gets out.

Joelle’s looking up at presumably Ken E. ‘Go over and look high-income and respectable at him. Verbalize at him. Distract him while we get him inside before the real ones come.’

‘How am I supposed to explain all these prone figures draped over cars?’

‘For Christ’s sake Ken he’s not a mental titan — distract him with something shiny or something. Get your thumb out of your ass and move.’

Gately’s smile has reached his eyes. ‘You’re Madame on the FM, is how I knew you.’

Erdedy’s squeaky shoe and the obese guy’s radio and keys. ‘Who hold it? As in desist?’

‘Secyotty I said halt!’

Green and Lenz bending in, white breath all over and Green’s dripping nose the same copper smell as Lenz.

‘I knew I knew you,’ Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable.

‘If I could ask you to specify halt from what.’

‘Get his back up here first,’ Green tells Lenz.

‘Not crazy about all this blood,’ Lenz is saying.

Many hands slide under his back; the shoulder blooms with colorless fire. The sky looks so 3-D you could like dive in. The stars distend and sprout spikes. Joelle’s warm legs shift with her weight to keep pressure on the pad. The squishing sound Gately knows means the robe’s soaked through. He wants somebody to congratulate him for not having thrown up. You can tell some of the stars are nearer and some far, down there. What Gately’s always thought of as the Big Question Mark is really the Big Dipper.

‘I’m oddering desist until who’s in change that I can repot the sichation.’ The Security guy’s hammered, his name’s Sidney or Stanley and he wears his Security-hat and baton shopping in the Purity Supreme and always asks Gately how it’s hanging. His shoes’ uppers are blasted along the feet’s in-sides the way fat men that have to walk a lot’s are; his ex-ballplayer’s col-lops and big hanging gut are one of Gately’s great motivators for nightly situps. Gately turns his head to throw up a little on both Green and Joelle, who both ignore it.

‘Oh sorry. Oh shit I hate that.’

Joelle v.D. runs a hand down Gately’s wet arm that leaves a warm wake, the hand, and then gently squeezes as much of the wrist as she can get her hand around. ‘And Lo,’ she says softly.

‘Jesus his leg’s all bloody too.’

‘Boy do I know guys loved that show you did.’ A tiny bit more throwing up.

‘Now we’re going to lift him very gently and get the feet under.’

‘Here Green man get over here on the south why don’t you.’

‘I’m oddering the whole sitchation halt it right thaah wheyaah.’

Lenz and Green’s shoes coming together and moving apart at either side of Gately, faces coming down in a fish-eye lens, lifting:

‘Ready?’

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT:

InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so hígh-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50 % of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorb-able at home on couches. Ms. Tawni Kondo’s immensely popular exercise program spontaneously disseminated daily in all three O.N.A.N. time zones at 0700h., a combination of low-impact aerobics, Canadian Air Force calisthenics, and what might be termed ‘cosmetic psychology’ — upwards of 60 million North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a mass choreography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai chi slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China — except that the Chinese assemble publicly together. One-third of those 50 % of metro Bostonians who still leave home to work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94 % of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home: pulses, storage cartridges, digital displays, domestic decor — an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes.

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice.

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers’ Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splat-ting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see. Hence the apotheosis and intricate pecking-order of Boston street musicians, the best of whom now commute to work in foreign autos. The nightly chance to crank back the drapes and face out into the streets at 0000h., when all street-parked vehicles have to switch sides and everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching. Street fights, supermarket-checkout confrontations, tax-auctions, speeders stopped for ticketing, coprolaliac Touretters on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. The fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way. Q.v. the crowd-control headaches at crime-scenes, fires, demonstrations, rallies, marches, displays of Canadian insurgency; crowds brought together now so quickly, too quickly even to see them, a kind of visual inversion of watching something melt, the crowds collect and are held tight by an almost seemingly nucleic force, watching together. Almost anything can do it. Street vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted figures in wheelchairs with hand-lettered signs outlining entitlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, charismatic preachers with portable PAs. Hardcore panhandlers stem like they’re selling nostrums to small crowds; the best panhandling now verges on stand-up comedy, and is rewarded by watching crowds. Cultists in saffron with much percussion and laser-jet leaflets. Even some old-style Eurobeggars, black-browed persons in striped leggings, mute and aloof. Even local candidates, activists, advocates and grass-roots aides have returned full-circle to the public stump — the bunting-hung platform, the dumpster-lid, vehicles’ roofs, awnings, anything overhead, anything raised to a crowd-collecting public view: people climb and declaim, drawing crowds.