Infinite jest - David Wallace

He’s got your autodidactic orator’s way with emotional dramatic pauses that don’t seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn’t affected, the story’s emotive drama. Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink. This always happens when you don’t expect it, when it’s a meeting you have to drag yourself to and are all but sure will suck. The speaker’s face has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive. Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good. It’s the first time she’s felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can’t show him the face. It’s the first time in a long time — tonight, 11/14—Joelle’s even considered possibly showing somebody the face.

After the pause the speaker says all the other sorry motherfuckers in the Shattuck Shelter in there started in to bitching about what was this shit, peanut butter sandwiches for fucking supper. The speaker says how whatever he silently thanked for just that particular sandwich he held and chewed, washing it down with gritty Sunny Square coffee, that thing became his Higher Power. He’s now seven-plus months clean. Universal Bleacher let him go, but he’s got steady work at Logan, pushing a third-shift mop, and a Holmes on his crew’s also in the Program — by coincidence. His pregnant wife, it turned out, had gone to a Unwed Mothers Shelter with Shantel, that night. She was still in there. D.S.S. still wouldn’t let him appeal his wife’s Restraining Order and see Shantel, but he got to talk to his little girl on the phone just last month. And he’s now straight, from Giving Up and joining the Freeway Access Group and getting Active and taking the voluntary suggestions of the Fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous. His wife was due to have her baby around Xmas. He said he didn’t know what was going to happen to him or his family. But he says he has received certain promises from his new family — the Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous — and so he had certain hope-type emotions about the future, inside. He didn’t so much conclude or make obligatory reference to Gratitude or any of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say he’d started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the right choice, personally speaking.

Entertainment-wise, things take a rapid turn for the splattery once the tough girl Blood Sister seemed to have saved is found bluely dead in her novitiate’s cot, her habit’s interior pockets stuffed with all kinds of substances and paraphernalia and her arm a veritable forest of syringes. Tight shot of B.S., face working purply, staring down at the ex-ex-punker. Suspecting foul play instead of spiritual recidivism, Blood Sister, disregarding first the Other-Cheek pieties and then the impassioned pleas and then the direct orders of the Vice-Mother Superior — who happens now to be the tough nun who’d saved Blood Sister, way back — begins reverting to her former Toronto-mean-street pre-salvation tough-biker-chick ways: de-mufflering her Harley Hawg, hauling an age-faded stud-covered leather bike-jacket out of storage and squeezing it over her pectoral-swollen habit, unbandaging her most lurid tattoos, shaking down former altar boys for information, flipping off motorists who get in her bike’s way, meeting old street-contacts in dim saloons and tossing back jiggers with even the most cirrhotic of them, beating, bludgeoning, akido-ing, disarming thugs of power tools, avenging the desalvation and demapping of her young charge, determined to prove that the girl’s death was no accident or backslide, that Blood Sister had not failed with the soul she’d chosen to save to discharge her own soul’s debt to the tough old Vice-Mother Superior who’d saved her, Blood Sister, so far back. Several thuggish stuntmen and countless liters of potassium thiocyanate[296] later, the truth does out: the novitiate girl had been murdered by the Mother Superior, the order’s top and toughest nun. This M.S. is the nun who’d saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the evidence Blood Sister needs to prove that her salvation-debt really was discharged is also evidence inimical to the legal interests of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister’s own saviour is obligated, so Blood Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as evidence of the Mother Superior’s guilt accretes. In one scene she says fuck. In another she swings a censer like a mace and brains an old verger who’s one of the Mother Superior’s stooges, knocking his toothless head clean off. Then, in Act III, a veritable orgy of retribution follows the full emergence of the sordid truth: it seems that the tough old Vice-Mother Superior, viz. the nun who’d saved Blood Sister, had in fact not been saved, truly, after all — had in fact, during 20+ years of exemplary novena-saying and wafer-baking, been suffering a kind of hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot, and had resumed, the Více-M.S., at about the time Blood Sister had donned the habit of full nunhood, had not only resumed Substance-dependence but had started actually dealing in serious weights of whatever at the time was most profitable (which after 20+ years had changed from Marseillese heroin to Colombian freebaseable-grade Bing Crosby) to support her own hidden habit, covertly operating a high-volume retail operation out of the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission’s little-used confessionals. This nun’s superior, the top tough Mother Superior nun, stumbling onto the drug-operation after the now-demapped verger informed her that a suspicious number of limousines were discharging gold-chained and not very penitent-looking persons into the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission, and disastrously unable to summon the pious humility to accept the fact that she’d failed, it seemed, at truly and forever saving the ex-dealer whose salvation the Mother Superior required to discharge the debt to the now-retired octogenarian nun who’d saved her — this Mother Superior herself is the one who murdered Blood Sister’s ex-punk novitiate, to silence the girl. What emerges is that Blood Sister’s addicted punk-girl’s Substance-copping venue, when she was Out There pre-salvation, had been nothing other than the Vice-Mother Superior’s infamous Community Outreach Rescue Mission. In other words, the nun who’d saved Blood Sister but had herself been secretly unsaved had been the tough girl’s Bing-dealer, is why the tough non-Catholic girl’d been so mysteriously adept at the Confiteor. The order’s Mother Superior had figured that it was only a matter of time before the girl’s conversion and salvation reached the sort of spiritual pitch where her guarded silence broke and she told Blood Sister the seamy truth about the nun she (Blood Sister) thought had saved her (Blood Sister). So she (the Mother Superior) had eliminated the girl’s map — ostensibly, she (the Mother Superior) told her lieutenant, the Vice-Mother Superior, to save her (the Vice-Mother Superior) from exposure and excommunication and maybe worse, if the girl weren’t silenced.[297]

This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near-Kabuki volume during an appalling free-for-all in the office of the Mother Superior who hadn’t saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns — who’d been tough and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted bike-chicks — teaming up and kicking Blood Sister’s ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling habite-ments and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of the wall’s huge decorative mahogany crucifix, with Blood Sister giving a good account of herself but still getting her wimple beat in and finally, after several whirling kicks to the forehead, starting to bid adieu to her corporeal map and commend herself to the arms of God; until the unsaved recidivist Vice-Mother Superior nun who’d saved Blood Sister, wiping blood from her eyes after a head-butt and seeing the Mother Superior about to decapitate Blood Sister with the souvenir Champlain-era tomahawk the Huron nun who’d been saved by the original founder of the Toronto tough-girl-saving order had used to decapitate Jesuit missionaries before she (the tough Huron nun) had been saved, seeing the tomahawk raised with both arms before the normally pious-eyed old Mother Superior’s face — a face now rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of humility and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil — seeing now the upraised hatchet and demonized face of the M.S., the unsaved Vice-nun has a moment of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister’s demapping by leaping across the office and cold-cocking the Mother Superior with a large decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn’t even be named, the object’s symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. Now Blood Sister has the Champlain-era hatchet, and the unsaved nun who’d saved her has an unnamed object whose mahogany’s no match for a hatchet, and they stand facing each other over the prone Mother Superior’s puddle of skirts, chests heaving, and the Vice-M.S. has a writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had saved you but ultimately couldn’t even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever. They stare at each other for countless frames, the office wall behind them cruciformly pale where the unnamed object’d hung. Then Blood Sister shrugs in resignation and drops the tomahawk, and turns and with an ironic little obeisance walks out the Mother Superior’s office door and through the little sacristy and over the altar and down the little convent nave (bike boots echoing on the tile, emphasizing the silence) and out the big doors whose tympanum overhead is carved with a sword and a ploughshare and a syringe and a soup-ladle and the motto CON-TRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA, the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it’s Boone who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for.[298] On-screen, we’re still following the tough nun (or ex-nun). The fact that the hatchet she resignedly dropped fetched the prone Mother Superior a pretty healthy knock is presented as clearly accidental… because she (Blood Sister) is still walking away from the convent, moving emphatically and in a gradually deepening focus. Limping toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn. The cartridge’s closing sequence shows her astride her Hawg on Toronto’s meanest street. About to lapse? Backslide back into her tough pre-saved ways? It’s unclear in a way that’s supposed to be rich: her expression is agnostic at best, but the huge sign of a discount Harley-muffler outlet juts just at the horizon she’s roaring toward. The closing credits are the odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield.

It’s hard to tell whether Boone and Bash’s applause is sarcastic. There’s that post-entertainment flurry of changed positions and stretched limbs and critical sallies. Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill. Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man brought Blott in to speak to Hal about something disturbing they encountered during their disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels that P.M. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, flipping through cartridge cases to see whether Low-Temperature Civics is up here. All the cases are clearly labelled.

The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging view of Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters and looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint than swallowed. Kate Gompert held her hurt head and heard it roar. Ruth van Cleve’s pursuit was slowed by her arms, which were waving around as she screamed; and the apparition was swinging their purses to clear a path on the sidewalk before it. Kate Gompert could see pedestrians leaping out into the street way up ahead to avoid getting clocked. The whole visual scene seemed tinged in violet.

A voice under a storefront awning right nearby somewhere said: ‘Seen it!’

Kate Gompert leaned over again and held the part of her head that surrounded her eye. The eye was palpably swelling shut, and her whole vision was queerly violet. A sound in her head like a drawbridge being drawn up, implacable trundle and squeaks. Hot watery spit was flooding her mouth, and she kept swallowing against nausea.

‘Seen it? Bet your ever-living goddamn life I seen it!’ A kind of gargoyle seemed to detach itself from a storefront hardware display and moved in, its motions oddly jerky, as in a film missing frames. ‘Seen the whole thing!’ it said, then repeated it. ‘I’m a witness!’ it said.

Kate Gompert put her other arm out against the lightpost and hauled herself mostly upright, looking at it.

‘Witnessed the whole godfdamn thing,’ it said. In the eye that wasn’t swelling shut the thing resolved violetly into a bearded man in an army coat and a sleeveless army coat over that coat, spittle in his beard. One eye had a system of exploded arteries in it. He shook like an old machine. There was a smell involved. The old man got right up close, looming in, so that pedestrians had to curve out around both of them together. Kate Gompert could feel her pulse in her eye.

‘Witness! Eyewitness! The whole thing!’ But he was looking someplace else, like more around at people passing. ‘Seen it? I’m him!’ Not clear who he was shouting at. It wasn’t her, and the passersby were paying that studious, urban kind of no-attention as they broke and melted around them at the lightpost and then reformed. Kate Gompert had the idea that supporting herself against the lightpost would keep her from throwing up. Concussion is really another word for a bruised brain. She tried not to think about it, that the impact had maybe sent one part of her brain slamming against her skull, and now that part was purply swelling, mashed up against the inside of her skull. The lightpost she held herself up with was what had hit her. ‘Fellow? I’m your fellow. Witness? Saw it all!’ And the old fellow was holding a trembling palm up just under Kate Gompert’s face, as if he wanted it thrown up into. The palm was violet, with splotches of some sort of possible fungal decay, and with dark branching lines where the pink palm-lines of people who don’t live in dumpsters usually are, and Kate Gompert studied the palm abstractly, and the weather-bleached GIGABUCKS[299] ticket on the pavement below it. The ticket seemed to recede into a violet mist and then move back up. Pedestrians barely glanced at them and then looked studiously elsewhere: a drunk-looking pale girl and a street bum showing her something in his hand. ‘Witnessed the whole thing being committed,’ the man remarked to a passerby with a cellular on his belt. Kate Gompert couldn’t summon the juice to tell him to go screw. That’s the way it was said down here in the real city, Go Screw, with a deft little thumb-gesture. She couldn’t even say Go Away, though the smell involved in the man made it worse, the nausea. It seemed terribly important not to vomit. She could feel her pulse in the eye the pole had hit. As if the strain of vomiting could aggravate the spongy purpling of the part of her brain the pole had bruised. The thought made her want to vomit in this horrid palm that wouldn’t stay still. She tried to reason. If the man had witnessed the whole thing then how could he think she’d have change to put in his hand. Ruth van Cleve had been listing some of her baby’s jailed father’s wittier aliases when Kate Gompert had felt a hand strike her back and close around the strap of her purse. Ruth van Cleve had cried out as the apparition of just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen crashed forward between them, knocking them apart. Ruth van Cleve’s vinyl purse’s strap gave right away, but Kate Gompert’s thin but densely macramé’d strap held around her shoulder and she was pulled wrenchingly forward by the womanly apparition’s momentum as it tried to sprint up Prospect St., and the red hag-like figure was yanked wrenchingly back as the quality Filene’s all-cotton French-braidedly macramé’d purse-strap held, and Kate Gompert had got a whiff of something danker than the dankest municipal sewage and a glimpse of what looked like a five-day facial growth on the hag’s face as street-tough Ruth van Cleve got a grip on her/his/its red leather coat, proclaiming the thief a son of a mafun ho. Kate Gompert was staggering forward, trying to get her arm out of the strap’s loop. They all three moved forward together this way. The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off Ruth van Cleve, and her/its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn’t weigh very much) out around in a wide circle (she’d had a flashback of reminiscence back to Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club’s rink’s ‘Wee Blades’ Toddler Skating Hour, as a child), gaining speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside lightpost rotated toward her, also gaining speed, and the sound was somewhere between a bonk and a clang, and the sky and the sidewalk switched places, and a violet sun exploded outward, and the whole street turned violet and swung like a clanging bell; and then she was alone and purseless and watching the two recede, both seeming to be shrieking for help.