Infinite jest - David Wallace

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

A disadvantage of your nasally ingested cocaine being that at a certain point somewhere past the euphoric crest — if you haven’t got the sense left to stop and just ride the crest, and instead keep going, nasally — it takes you into regions of almost interstellar cold and nasal numbness. Randy Lenz’s sinuses were frozen against his skull, numb and hung with crystal frost. His legs felt like they ended at the knees. He was trailing two very small-sized Chinese women as they lugged enormous paper shopping bags east on Bishop Allen Dr. under Central. His heart sounded like a shoe in the Ennet House basement’s dryer. His heart was beating that loud. The Chinese women scuttled at an amazing rate, given their size and the bags’ size. It was c. 2212:30-40h., smack in the middle of the former Interval of Issues-Resolution. The Chinese women didn’t walk so much as scuttle with a kind of insectile rapidity, and Lenz was heart-pressed to both keep up and seem to casually saunter, numb from the knee down and the nostril back. They made the turn onto Prospect St. two or a few blocks below Central Square, moving in the direction of Inman Square. Lenz followed ten or thirty paces behind, eyes on the twine handles of the shopping bags. The Chinese women were about the size of fire hydrants and moved like they had more than the normal amount of legs, conversing in their anxious and high-pitched monkey-language. Evolution proved your Orientoid tongues were closer to your primatal languages than not. At first, on the brick sidewalks of the stretch of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central, Lenz had thought they might be following him — he’d been followed a great deal in his time, and like the well-read Geoffrey D. he knew only too well thank you that the most fearsome surveillance got carried out by unlikely-looking people that followed you by walking in front of you with small mirrors in their glasses’

temples or elaborate systems of cellular communicators for reporting to the Command Center — or else also by helicopters, also, that flew too high to see, hovering, the tiny chop of their rotors disguised as your own drumming heart. But after he’d had success at successfully shaking the Chinese women twice — the second time so successfully he’d had to tear-ass around through alleys and vault wooden fences to pick them up again a couple blocks north on Bishop Allen Dr., scuttling along, jabbering — he’d settled down in his conviction about who was trailing who, here. As in just who had the controlling discretion over the general situation right here. The ejection from the House, which the ejection had at first seemed like the kiss of a death sentence, had turned out to maybe be just the thing. He’d tried the Straight On Narrow and for his pains had been threatened and dismissively sent off; he’d given it his best, and for the most part impressively; and he had been sent Away, Alone, and at least now could openly hide. R. Lenz lived by his wits out here, deeply disguised, on the amonymous streets of N. Cambridge and Somerville, never sleeping, ever moving, hiding in bright-lit and public plain sight, the last place They would think to find him.

Lenz wore fluorescent-yellow snowpants, the slightly shiny coat to a long-tailed tux, a sombrero with little wooden balls hanging off the brim, oversize tortoise-shell glasses that darkened automatically in response to bright light, and a glossy black mustache promoted from the upper lip of a mannequin at Lechmere’s in Cambridgeside — the ensemble the result of bold snatch-and-sprints all up and down the nighttime Charles, when he’d first gone Overground northeast from Enfield several-odd days back. The absolute blackness of the mannequin’s mustache — very securely attached with promoted Krazy Glue and made even glossier by the discharge from a nose Lenz can’t feel running — gives his pallor an almost ghostly aspect in the sombrero’s portable shade — another both advantage and disadvantage of nasal cocaine is that eating becomes otiose and optional, and one forgets to for extended periods of time, to eat — in his gaudy pastiche of disguise he passes easily for one of metro Boston’s homeless and wandering mad, the walking dead and dying, and is given a wide berth by all comers. The trick, he’s found, is to not sleep or eat, to stay up and moving at all times, alert in all six directions at all times, heading for under the cover of T-station or enclosed mall whenever the invisible rotors’ cardiac chop betrayed surveillance at altitude.

He’d got quickly familiarized with Little Lisbon’s networks of alleys and transoms and back trash-lots, and its (dwindling) population of feral cats and dogs. The area was fertile in overhead clocks of banks and churches, dictating movements. He carried his Browning X444 Serrated in its shoulder-holster strapped inside his one sock just above the spats of the formal footwear he’d taken off the same A Formal Affair, Ltd. sidewalk display as the tux’s coat. His lighter was in a fluorescent zip-uppable slash pocket; quality trashbags were plentiful in dumpsters and Land Barges stopped at lights. The James Principles of the Gifford Lectures, its razored-out recep-tacled heart now quite a bit closer to empty than Lenz would be comfortable thinking about directly, he had in his hand tucked up under one formal arm. And the Chinese women scuttled centipedishly abreast, their mammoth shopping bags held in a right hand and left, respective, so the bags were side by side between them. Lenz was closing the gap behind them, but gradually and with no little nonchalant stealth, considering it was hard to walk stealthily when one couldn’t feel one’s feet, and when one’s eyeglasses darkened automatically whenever one went under a streetlight and then took their time lightening up again, after, so that no less than two of Lenz’s vital sensory street-senses were disorientated; but he still managed both stealth and nonchalance both. He had no clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant mad of metro Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility. The shopping bags looked heavy and impressive, their weight making the Chinese women lean in slightly toward each other. Call it 22l4:lOh. The Chinese women and then Lenz all passed a gray-faced woman squatting back between two dumpsters, her multiple skirts hiked up. Vehicles were packed bumper-flush all along the curb, with myriad double parking also. The Chinese women passed a man lined up at the curb with a toy bow and arrows, and when the glasses undarkened Lenz could see him as well as he passed also — the guy wore a rat-colored suit and was shooting a suction-cup arrow at the side of a For Lease building and then going up and drawing a miniature chalk circle on the brick around the arrow, and then another circle around that circle, and etc., as in a what’s the word. The women paid him no Orientoid mind. The suit’s string tie was also brown in tone, unlike a rat’s tail. His wall’s chalk was more pinkish. One of the women said something high-pitched, like an exclamation to the other. Your monkey-languages’ exclamatories have an explosive ricocheting sound to them. As in a component of boing to every word. A window up across the street was producing The Star-Spanned Banner all this time. The man had a string tie and fingerless little gloves, and he stepped back from the wall to examine his pink circles and almost collided with Lenz, and they both looked at each other and shook their heads like Look at this poor son of an urban bitch I’m on the same street with.

It was universally well known that your basic Orientoid types carried their earthly sum-total of personal wealth with them at all times. As in on their person while they scuttled around. The Orientoid religion prohibited banks, and Lenz had seen mammoth double-width twine-handled shopping bags in too many tiny Chinese women’s hands not to have deducted that the Chinese female species of Oriental used shopping bags to carry their personal wealth. He felt the energy required for the snatch-and-sprint increasing now with each stride, drawing nonchalantly closer, able now to distinguish different patterns in the clear like plastic flags they wrapped their little hair in. The Chinese women. His heartrate speedened to a steady warming gallop. He began to feel his feet. Adrenaline about what would shortly occur dried his nose and helped his mouth stop moving around on his face. The Frightful Hog was not and never numb, and now it stirred in the snowpants slightly with excitement of wits and the thrill of the hunt. Far from cutting-edge surveillance: the shoe was on the other foot: the unwitting Oriental women had no idea who they were dealing with, behind them, no idea he was back there surveilling them and closing the nonchalant gap, stumbling only slightly after each streetlight’s light. He was in total control of this situation. And they did not even know there was a situation. Bull’s-eye. Lenz straightened the mustache with one finger and gave a tiny little Yellow-Brick-Road stutter-skip of pure controlling glee, his adrenaline invisible for all to see.

There were two ways of going, and Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were prepared to pursue both these. Less better was the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment’s au-teur, its actress and rumored performer, relatives — if necessary, taking them and subjecting them to technical interview, leading with hope to the original auteur’s cartridge of the Entertainment. This had risks and exposures and was held abeyant until the directer route — to locate and secure a Master copy of the Entertainment on their own — had been exhausted. It was this way that thus they were now still here, in the Antitois’ shop of Cambridge, to — comme on dit — be turning all the stones.

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The secret to sprinting in high heels, Poor Tony Krause knew, was to run on one’s toes, inclined way forward, with so much forward momentum that one stayed well up on her toes and the heels never came into play. Evidently the wretched Creature behind him knew this trade-secret too. They careered up Prospect, the Creature’s clutching hand just mm. away from the trailing boa. Poor Tony held the two purses together tucked away against his side like a football in U.S. football. Pedestrians moved artfully aside, long-practiced. Poor Tony saw the pedestrians’ faces very clearly as his odor preceded him like a shock-wave. A man in a car coat made a smell-face and did a kind of artful veronica to let the two of them career past. Poor Tony’s breath came in great ragged stitchy gasps. He had not banked on victim-pursuit. He felt the Creature’s hand grope for purchase on the remains of his boa. The Donegal cap flew off and was not mourned. The Thing’s own breathing was also ragged, but the obscenities she hurled still came from the diaphragm, with conviction and vigor. The other Thing had impacted a pole with a meaty sound Tony had shuddered to hear. His own father had struck himself about the head and shoulders as he grieved for his symbolically dead son. The moment after the impact and the strap gave way, Tony was up on his toes and in full flight, not banking on pursuit from the other one, this black Creature screaming and just off his tail. For the first couple blocks the Creature had shouted for Help and to Stop The Bitch, and Poor Tony, then with a decent lead, had countered by also yelling Help! and For God’s Sake Stop Her, flummoxing any would-be citizens. An ancient trade-device among Harvard Square crews. But now the black Creature had closed to within mm., and now it had real hold of the boa as they careered breathing at full speed on their toes, and Krause unlooped the thing from his neck with a flourish and sacrificed the boa to the Thing, but the loathsome Creature’s hand came right back, clutching at the air just over his leather collar, its ragged breath in his ear, cursing him. Poor Tony grieved in mid-stride at the thought that the Thing had doubtless just tossed the boa carelessly aside into the street or gutter. Their shoes’ toes formed complex and variable rhythms on the pavement; sometimes their footfalls were in sync, then they were not. The Thing stayed agonizingly just behind. Bold-print signs for FRESH-KILLED CHICKEN and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION flashed past; Antitoi Entertainment was just over two long north-south blocks distant. Krause and pursuer both jay-ran through a gridlocked intersection. Poor Tony shouted Help! and Please! The hand and hissed breath just behind him was like one of those simply horrid dreams where something unimaginable is chasing you for km. after km. and just before its talons close on the back of your collar you wake up sitting bolt upright; except this horrid Creature’s-clutching-hand-just-behind-him scenario went on and on, storefront and curb and leaping pedestrians all melting together at the periphery due right. Antitoi Ent.’s discreet back door was accessible by a parking alley that cut west off Prospect just before Broadway and went west to intersect a smaller and dumpster-lined north-south alley, one of whose dumpsters (in which Poor Tony had occasionally slept, when out late and short of train-fare) was within underhand-toss distance of the Canadian brothers’ rear exit. Poor Tony, purses under arm and the other hand clamped tight to the wig, calculated that if he could get a reasonable lead on the Creature by the time they hit the smaller alley the dumpsters would keep It from seeing just which hopefully unlocked rear door P.T. sought basic human kindly refuge behind. He feinted around a bodega’s sidewalk fruit display and shot a quick look back, hoping the Creature would crash itself ass-over-teakettle into the stacked fruit. It did not. It was still right there, breathing. Its stutter-step around two cardboard tiers of Cape cranberries was discouragingly deft. This Thing had all too clearly chased persons before. Its breath had a ragged implacability about it. It was all too clearly in this for the long haul. It was no longer shouting Stop or gutterish obscenities. Poor Tony’s breaths felt flamish. It sounded as if he were weeping, almost. He tried to shout Help! and could not; he hadn’t the breath to spare; black specks floated upward through his vision; only certain of the streetlamps worked; his heartbeat was zuckungzuckungzuckung. Poor Tony hurdled a queerly placed cardboard display for something wheelchaired and heard the Creature vault it also and land lightly on its toes. Its uppers were not straps and could not dig like the fine Aigners; Tony felt blood on his feet. The entrance to the parking alley west was between a Tax Preparer’s and something else; it was right around here; Krause squinted; the black specks were tiny rings with opaque centers and floated upward through his sight like balloons, lazily; Poor Tony was post-seizure, infirm, not to mention Withdrawn; his breath came in stitches and half-sobs; he could barely stay on his toes; he had not consumed food since before the library’s men’s room stall, which was how many days; he scanned the blurred storefronts ripping past; an elderly person went down with a noise as the Creature stiff-armed him; somewhere a rape-whistle blew; the Tax Preparer’s had the odd storefront announcement ON PARLE LE POR-TUGAIS ICI. Its hand’s finger knocked the rim of Tony’s leather collar with each footfall until it moved up and Poor Tony could feel its fingers in the hair of the chignon he held clamped to his head with a hand. Poor Tony’s father used to come home to 412 Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans and sit in a chair in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask’s green strings had dug into the head. Its doubtlessly luridly long-nailed fingers were twining for purchase in his wig’s hair when they hit the Preparer’s and Tony cut a sharp right, breaking a heel on the pivot but gaining several steps toward a lead as the Creature’s momentum carried it past the alley’s recessed mouth. Krause whimpered raggedly and flew west, up on his bloody toes, hearing his breath off both alley walls, negotiating broken glass and the homeless supine, hearing it back behind him several steps crying a tight-echoed Stop Motherfucking Stop! with a supine person Krause vaulted lifting a decayed head from the alley floor to counter with: Go.