Infinite jest - David Wallace

Discarded fridgelettes, empty boxes, immovable and complexly-address-labelled trunks, used athletic tape and Ace bandages, the occasional empty Visine bottle (which Blott stashes in his sweatshirt-pouch, for Mike Pemulis’s next contest), Optics I & II lab reports, broken ball machines and stray tennis balls too dead even for the repressurization machine, broken or discarded TP cartridges of stroke-analysis filmings or worn-out entertainments, an anomalous set of parfait glasses, fruit peels and AminoPal energy-bar-wrappers that the Club itself had left down here after meetings, discarded curls of grip and tensile string, several incongruous barrettes, several old broadcast televisions some older kids used to like to keep around to watch the static, and, along the seam of wall and floor, brittle limb-shaped husks of exfoliated Pledge, expanses of arm and leg already half-decayed into fragrant dust — this comprising the bulk of the crud down here, and the kids don’t much mind scanning and inventorying and bagging it, because their minds are diverted by something else very exciting, a kind of possible raison d’etre for the Club itself, unless Blott had been tweaking their Units, in which case look out Blott, is the consensus.

Gopnik to a sniffling Traub, while Peterson shines his flashlight on the clipboard for Chu: ‘Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere that Mary went, the lights became erratic.’

Carl Whale pretends to be immensely fat and moves along the wall with a blimpish splay-legged waddle.

Peterson to Traub, while Gopnik holds the light: ‘Eighteen-year-old top-ranked John Wayne / Had sex with Herr Schtitt on a train / They had sex again/And again and again/And again and again and again,’ which the slightly older kids find more entertaining than Traub does.

Kent Blott asks why a wispy-dicked blubberer like Phil gets to be in the Tunnel Club while his own applications get turned down, and Tallat-Kelpsa cuts him short by doing something to him in the dark that makes Blott shriek.

It’s utterly dark except for the dime-sized discs of their low-diffusion B.P.s, because they’ve left the tunnels’ strings of bare overhead bulbs off, because Gopnik, who’s originally from Brooklyn and knows from rodents, says only a complete booger-eating moron would do rat-reconnaissance in the light, and it seems reasonable to assume that feral hamsters, also, have a basically ratty attitude toward light.

Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that’s lying on its side up next to one wall, and Blott tries and barely lifts it, and pules, and Chu marks the oven down for the adults to lift and tells Blott to drop it, which invitation Blott takes literally, and the crash and tinkle infuriate Gopnik and McKenna, who say that scanning for rodents with Blott is like fly-fishing with an epileptic, which cheers Traub up quite a bit.

Feral hamsters — bogey-wise right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths, carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas that melts your face off and leaves you with exposed gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life, in terms of late-night hair-raising Concavity narratives — are rarely sighted south of the Lucíte walls and ATH-SCME’d checkpoints that delimit the Great Concavity, and only once in a blue moon anywhere south of like the new-border burg of Methuen MA, whose Chamber of Commerce calls it ‘The City That Interdependence Rebuilt,’ and anyway pace Blott are hardly ever seen solo, being the sort of rapacious locust-like mass-movement creature that Canadian agronomists call ‘Piranha of the Plains.’ An infestation of feral hamsters in the waste-rich terrain of metro Boston, to say nothing of the clutter-tunnelled E.T.A. grounds, would be an almost grand-scale public-health disaster, would cause simply no end of adult running-in-circles and knuckle-biting, and would consume megacalories of displaced pre-adolescent stress for the E.T.A. players. Every ear-cocked eye-peeled bag-toting kid in the off-tunnel this afternoon is hoping hamster in a big way, except for Kent Blott, who’s hoping simply and fervently for some sort of rodential sighting or scat-sample that’ll keep him from being disciplinarily hung upside-down in a lavatory stall to shriek until a staff-member finds him. He reminds the Tunnel Clubbers that it’s not like he’d claimed he espied the thing actually heading in this direction, he’d only seen the thing scuttling in a way that seemed to suggest a tendency or like probability of heading in this direction.

One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases’ sharp edges put holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges and fruit rinds, each only about half full, back to the lit vestibule outside the Comm.-Ad. tunnel’s start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly up.

Plus a confirmed feral-hamster sighting, Chu and Gopnik and ‘S.T.P.’

Peterson have agreed, could well distract the Headmaster’s office from post-Eschaton reprisals against Big Buddies Pemulis, Incandenza and Axford, whom the Club’s Eschatonite faction doesn’t want to see reprised against, particularly, though the consensus is nobody would much mind seeing the malefic Ann Kittenplan hung out to dry in a serious way. Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit — feral hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can’t eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow — and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike. Which would make the Tunnel Club guys something like heroes, fore-seeably.

They move along the tunnel, their mercuric lights Xing and separating and forming jagged angles, colored faintly pink.

But even a confirmed rat would be a coup. Dean of Academic Affairs Mrs. Inc has a violent phobic thing about vermin and waste and insects and overall facility hygiene, and Orkin men with beer-bellies and playing cards with naked girls in high-heeled shoes on the backs (McKenna’s claim) spray the bejeesus out of the E.T.A. grounds twice a semester. None of the younger E.T.A. boys — who have the same post-latency fetish for vermin they have about subterranean access and exclusive Clubs — none of them has ever once gotten to see or trap a rat or roach or even so much as a lousy silverfish anyplace around here. So the unspoken consensus is that a ham-ster’d be optimal but they’d settle for a rat. Just one lousy rat could give the whole Club a legit raison, an explicable reason for congregating underground — all of them are a bit uneasy about liking to congregate underground for no good or clear reason.

‘Sleeps, you think you could lift that and carry it?’

‘Chu man I wouldn’t even get up next to whatever that is much less touch it.’

Blott’s footfalls and tuneless whistling can be heard from far away, returning, and the distant squeak of overhead sneakers.

Gopnik stops and his light pans, playing on faces. ‘OK. Somebody farted.’

‘What’s this up next to it, Sleeps?’ Chu backing up to widen his light’s beam on something broad and squat and dark.

‘Could I get some lights over here on this you guys?’

‘Because did somebody go ahead and cut one in this little unventilated space?’

‘Chu, it’s a room fridge, that’s all.’

‘But it’s bigger than the room fridges.’

‘But it’s not as big as a real fridge.’

‘It’s in-between.’

‘I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.’

‘There is a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.’

‘Otherwise it’s a smell.’

‘Don’t try to describe it.’

‘Sleeps, that’s no human fart I’ve ever smelled.’

‘It’s too powerful for a fart.’

‘Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attack and staggered down here just to cut one.’

Peterson trains his light on the midsized brown fridge. ‘You don’t possibly think Chu says ‘No way. No way.’

‘What?’Blott says.

‘Don’t even think it,’ Chu says.

‘I don’t even think any kind of mammal could fart that bad, Chu.’

Peterson’s looking at Chu, both of their faces pale in the mercuric light. ‘No way somebody’d graduate and leave and put their fridge down here without taking the food out.’

Blott goes ‘Is that the smell?’

‘Was this Pearson’s fridge last year?’

Sleepy T.P. turns around. ‘Who smells a, like, a like decay-element?’

Lights on the tunnel ceiling from upraised hands.

‘Quorum on decay-type odor.’

‘Should we check?’ Chu says. ‘Blott’s hamster might be in there.’

‘Gnawing on something unspeakable, maybe.’

‘You mean open it?’

‘Pearson had a bigger than usual fridge.’

“Open it?’

Chu scratches behind his ear. ‘Me and Gop’11 light it up, Peterson opens it.’

‘Why me?’

‘You’re closest, Sleeps. Hold your breath.’

‘Jesus. Well back off up here so I can jump way back if anything like flies out.’

‘Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’

‘Happy to back way, way off,’ says Carl Whale, his light receding.

‘Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’

‘This could explain rodent-attraction and then some.’

‘Now look out … ready? … hummph.’

‘Ow! Get off!’

‘Put the light ov— oh my God.’ ‘Eeeeeeeyu.’ ‘Hhhhwwwww.’ ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Bllaaaaarrr.’

‘Such a smell I’m smelling!’

‘There’s mayonnaise! He left mayonnaise in there.’ ‘Why the bulge in the top of the lid?’ ‘The ballooning carton of orange juice!’ ‘Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.’ ‘So why’s that sandwich-meat moving?’ ‘Maggots?’ ‘Maggots!’

‘Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!’

‘This right here is exactly as close as I’m ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’

‘The smell’s expanding!’

‘I can smell it from here!’: Whale’s tiny distant voice.

‘I’m not enjoying this at all.’

‘This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’

‘What’re maggots?’

‘Should we just run really fast the other way?’

‘Second that.’

‘This is probably what the rat or hamster smelled,’ Blott ventures.

‘Run!’

High receding voices, bobbing lights, Whale’s light way out front.

After Stice and Incandenza split the first two sets and Hal dashed into the locker room at the break to put Collyrium-brand eyewash in eyes that were bothering him and deLint made warped crashing sounds on the tiers as he walked down the bleachers and over to have a word with Stice, who was squatting against the net-post holding his left arm up like a scrubbed surgeon and applying a towel to the arm, deLint’s place up next to Helen Steeply was taken by female prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, freshly showered, long-faced, a non-U.S. citizen, a tall Québecer former Satellite pro in rimless specs and a violetish ski cap just enough of a shade away from the journalist’s hat to make the people behind them pretend to shield their eyes from the clash. The putative newshound introduced herself and asked Poutrincourt who the heavy-browed kid was at the end of the top bleacher behind them, hunched over and gesturing and speaking into his empty fist.

‘James Troeltsch of Philadelphia is better to leave alone to play the broadcaster to himself. He is a strange and unhappy,’ Poutrincourt said, her face long and cavern-cheeked and not terribly happy-looking itself. Her slight shrugs and way of looking elsewhere while speaking were not unlike Rémy Marathe’s. ‘When we hear you are the journalist for shiny perfumed magazines of fad and trend we are told be unfriendly, but me, I think I am friendly.’ Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth. ‘My family’s loved ones also are large of size. It is difficult to be large.’

Steeply’s pre-assignment decision was to let all size-references pass as if there was some ability to screen out any reference to size or girth, originating possibly in adolescence. ‘Your Mr. deLint certainly held himself aloof.’

‘DeLint, when we prorectors are suggested to do a thing, he asks to himself only: how can I perfectly do this thing so the superiors will smile with pleasure at deLint.’ Poutrincourt’s right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white sneakers and a Donnay warmup of a deep glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously with both their caps. The circles beneath her eyes were also blue.

‘Why the instructions to be unfriendly?’

Poutrincourt always nodded for a while before she replied to anything, as if things had to go through various translation-circuits. She nodded and scratched at her long jaw, thinking. ‘You are here to make publicity a child player, one of our étoiles,[273] and Dr. Tavis, he is how you say quantified — ‘

‘Quarantined. Suspicious. Guarded.’

‘No…’

‘Confused. Torn. In a quandary.’

‘Quandary is how. Because this is a good place, and Hal is good, better since before the present, perhaps now he is étoile.’ A shrug, long arms akimbo. Hal reemerged from Comm.-Ad. and, ankle-brace or no, displayed a slow loose thoroughbred trot past the pavilion and bleachers and to the gate in #i2.’s southern fence, acting as if unwatched by people in bleachers, and tapped two of his big-headed tennis racquets together to listen for the strings’ pitch, exchanging some neutral words with deLint, who was standing with Stice at the edge of the transom’s shadow, Stice breaking into a half-laugh at something, twirling his racquet and walking back to serve as Hal retrieved a ball along the north fence. Both players’ racquets had large heads and thick frames. Thierry Poutrincourt said ‘And by nature who does not wish the shiny attention, that the magazines with cologne on their pages say this is étoile, Enfield Tennis Academy it is good?’

‘I’m here to do a soft inoffensive profile on his brother, with Hal mentioned only as part of an American family exceptional in several respects. I don’t see what’s quandariacal for Dr. Tavis about this.’ The tiny plump officious man who seemed to have a phone tucked under his chin at all times, the kind of frenzied over-cooperation that’s a technical interviewer’s worst nightmare for an interrogation; the little man’s monologue had done to Steeply’s brain kind of what a flashbulb does to your eyes, and if he’d explicitly denied him access to the brother then the denial had been slipped in after he’d worn Steeply down.