Infinite jest - David Wallace

On Fortier’s return, Marathe delivered also the expected bad news of the finding of it: there was no need yet for high-rpm hardware of duplication: the found copy was Read-Only.[303]

Philosophical, Fortier reminded the A.F.R. that they did now encouragingly know the Entertainment of such power did truly exist, for themselves, and could thus gird their courage and fortitude for the more indirect task of forfeiting hopes of securing a Master copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the auteur’s own cartridge, from which all Read-Only copies had presumably been copied.

Thus, he said, now the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview known persons associated with the Entertainment and locating the original maker’s duplicable Master copy. None of this would have been worthy of the risk had they not now determined, through the heroic sacrifices of Joubet and Desjardins, that the device for extending O.N.A.N.’s self-destructing logic to its final conclusion lay within their arduous grasp.

Fortier gave numerous orders. The platoon of A.F.R. remained in the closed Anritoi Entertainent shop, behind their lingual window shade. Surveillance on the hated F.L.Q.’s bureau centrale, in the poorly disciplined house on Allston’s Rue de Brainerd — this was suspended, the A.F.R. personnel pulled in and relocated to this commandeered Inman Square shop, where Fortier and Marathe and M. Broullîme coordinated phases of activity in this next more arduous and indirect phase, and reviewed tactics also.

The deceased auteur’s colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. Their concentration of place worked in the favor of this. An employee at the Academy of Tennis of Enfield had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student already inside for closer work of surveillance. In the Desert, the redoubtable Mile. Luria P---was winning necessary confidences with her usual alacrity. An expensive source in the Subject’s former department of the M.I.T. University had reported the Entertainment’s probable performer’s last known employment — the small Cambridge radio station which Marathe and Beausoleil had pronounced Weee — where she had donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity.

Attentions were to be focused on the cartridge’s performer and on the Academy of Tennis of the auteur’s estate. The fact that the players of the Academy were to play a provincially-selected team from Quebec would have been easier to exploit had the A.F.R. possessed a tennis player of talent and lower extremities. Inquiries into the composition and travel of the Québecois team were under way from sources at home in Papineau.

On the day of Fortier’s return also, the performer’s radio program’s technical engineer of radio had been acquired in a public but low-risk operation whose success had raised hopeful spirits for the acquisitions of more directly related persons to the Entertainment in this next phase. This person of U.S.A. radio had divulged all he professed to know under the mere descriptive threat of technical-interview procedures. Marathe, the best lay judge of Americans’ veracity which the cell possessed, believed the veracity of the engineer; but nevertheless a formal technical interview had proceeded, justified in order to verify. The young and eruption-studded person’s report remained consistent two levels past average U.S.A. endurance, the only variance involving several curious claims that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was defensive in bed.

Today, Fortier himself, and Marathe, young Balbalis, R. Ossowiecke — all those with the better English — were thus now therefore making the rounds of all Substance-Difficulty-Rehabilitation facilities in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and demi-maisons within a 25-km. radius. Procedures for expanding the radius of inquiry by factors of two and three had been pre-formulated, teams assembled, lines rehearsed. Joubet and then Desjardins had succumbed and been transported north by van as well with the remains of the Antitois’ remains. The U.S.A. student radio engineering person, the veracity of whose limited statements of the Subject’s whereabouts Broullîme had verified to within +/— (.35) of assurance well before debriefing-levels incompatible with physical existence, had been allowed several hours to recover, then had become of service as the A.F.R.’s first Subject in field-tests of the samizdat cartridge’s motivational range. The room of storage again was utilized for this. His head immobilized with some straps, the test Subject had viewed the Entertainment twice at gratis, without the application of any motivational inquiry. For inquiry into the degree of motivation the cartridge will induce, M. Broullîme had rolled himself blindfolded into the room of storage holding an orthopedic saw and informed the Subject of the test that, as of beginning now, each subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from the Subject’s extremities. And handed the Subject the orthopedic saw in question, also. Broullîme’s explanation to Fortier was that thus a matrix could be created to compute the statistical relation between (n) the number of times the Subject replayed the Entertainment and (t) the amount of time he took to decide and remove a digit for each subsequent (n +1) viewing. The goal was to confirm with statistical assurance the Subject’s desire for viewing and reviewing as incapable of satiation. There could be no index of diminishing satisfaction as in the econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. For the samizdat Entertainment’s allure to be macro-politically lethal, the ninth digit of extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second. Broullîme, personally he had some skepticism about this. But this was Broullîme’s function in his role in the cell: expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur.

And then naturally also a wider range of field-test Subjects would then be required, to verify that this Subject’s responses were not merely subjective and typical only of a certain sensibility of entertainment-consumer. The bus window yielded a faint and ghostly reflection of Fortier, and, through that faint view, the lights of urban life outside the bus. Somerville Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Phoenix House administrative person had listened to Fortier’s delivery with shows of great compassion, then explained with patience that they were unable to admit addicted persons for whom English was the secondary language. D ‘accord, though he was pretending disappointment. Fortier had been able to see the admitted addicts of Phoenix House holding a gathering in the room of living outside the office door: no person among them wore a veil of facial concealment, and so c’est ça. Four small teams were at this moment rolling through the streets and small streets and alleys of the unpleasant district of the Antitoi establishment, for the purpose of acquiring additional Subjects for M. Broullîme for the time when the Subject’s digits were expended. The Subjects for suitability had to be passively undefended enough to be acquired publicly with quiet, yet not damaged in the brains or under the influence of the many of the district’s intoxicant compounds. The A.F.R. were highly trained in patience and to be disciplined.

The southbound bus, empty and (which he detested) fluorescently lit, climbs a thin hill off Winter Park, north Cambridge, heading for the Squares Inman and Central. Fortier looks out at the lights passing. He can smell snow coming; it soon will snow. He sees in his imagination two-thirds of NNE’s largest urban city inert, sybaritically entranced, staring, without bodily movement, home-bounded, fouling their divans and the chairs which may recline. He sees the district of business’s towers of buildings and luxury apartments striated as two of every three floors is darkened to lightless black. With here and there the vaguely blue flicker of expensive digital entertainment equipment flickering through darkened windows. He imagines M. Tine holding the hand holding the pen of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring War. He imagines teacups clinking thinly beneath trembling hands in the interior sanctums of Ottawa’s sanctum of power. He adjusts his sportcoat’s lapel over his sweater and smooths the wiry hair that tends to bulge unsmoothly around the bare spot. He watches the back of the bus driver’s neck as the driver stares straight ahead.

Sure enough the Chinkette women had been strengthless and lightweight, flew aside like dolls, and their bags were indeed treasure-heavy, hard to heft; but as Lenz cut left down the north-south alley he could hold the bags by their twine handles out slightly before him, so their weight’s momentum kind of pulled him along. The cruciform alleys through the blocks between Central and Inman in Little Lisbon were a kind of second city. Lenz ran. His breath came easy and he could feel himself from scalp to sole. Green and green-with-red dumpsters lined both walls and made the going narrow. He vaulted two sitting figures in khaki sharing a can of Sterno on the alley floor. He glided through the foul air above them, untouched by it. The sounds behind him were his footfalls’ echo off dumpsters and fire-escapes’ iron. His left hand ached nicely from holding both a bag’s handle and his large-print volume. A dumpster up ahead had been hitched to an E.W.D. truck and just left to sit: probably quitting time. The Empire guys had an incredible union. In the recess of the hitch’s bar a small blue light flickered and died. This was a dozen dumpsters up ahead. Lenz slowed to a brisk walk. His topcoat had slipped slightly off one of his shoulders but he had no free hand to fix it and wasn’t going to take time to put a bag down. His left hand felt cramped. It was somewhere vague between 2224 and 2226h. The alley was dark as a pocket. A tiny crash off somewhere south down the network of alleys was actually Poor Tony Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that tripped up Ruth van Cleve. The tiny blue flame came on, hung still, flickered, moved, hung there, went back out. Its glow was dark blue against the back of the huge E.W.D. truck. Empire trucks were unstoppable, hitches were valuable but locked down with a Kryptonite device thing you needed welding stuff to cut through. From the recess of the hitch there were small sounds. When the lighter lit again Lenz was almost on them, two boys on the hitch and two squatting down by the hitch facing them, four of them, a fire-escape’s pull-ladder distended like a tongue and hanging just above them. None of the boys was over like twelve. They used a M. Fizzy bottle instead of a pipe, and the smell of burnt plastic hung mixed with the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock. The boys were all small and slight and either black or spic, greedily hunching over the flame; they looked ratty. Lenz kept them in peripheral view as he strode briskly by, carrying his bags, spine straight and extruding dignified purpose. The lighter went out. The boys on the hitch eyed Lenz’s bags. The squatting boys turned their heads to look. Lenz kept them in peripheral view. None of them wore watches. One of them wore a knit cap and watched steadily. He locked eyes with Lenz’s left eye, made a gun of his thin hand, pretended to draw a slow bead. Like performing for the others. Lenz walked by with urban dignity, like he both saw them and didn’t. The smell was intense but real local, of the rock and bottle. He had to veer out to miss the Empire truck’s side mirror on its steel strut. He heard them say things as the truck’s grille fell behind, and unkind laughter, and then something called out in a minority agnate he didn’t know. He heard the lighter’s flint. He thought to himself Assholes. He was looking for someplace empty and a bit more lit, to go through the bags. And cleaner than this one north-south alley here, which smelled of ripe waste and rotting skin. He would separate the bags’ valuables from the nonvaluables and transfer the valuables to a single bag. He would fence the nonnegotiable valuables in Little Lisbon and refill the receptacle in his medical dictionary, and buy some attractiver shoes. The alley was devroid of cats and rodents both; he did not stop to reflect why. A rock or bit of brick courtesy of the junior crack-jockeys back there landed behind him and skittered past and rang out against something, and someone cried out aloud, a sexless figure lying back against a maybe duffel bag or pack against a dump-ster, its hand moving furiously in its groin and its feet pointed out into the alley and turned out like a dead body’s, its shoes two different shoes, its hair a clotted mass around its face, looking up over at Lenz going past in the faint start of light from a broader alley’s intersection ahead, chanting softly what Lenz could hear as he stepped gingerly over the rot-smelling legs as ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty.’ Lenz whispered to himself ‘Jesus what a lot of fucked-up ass-eating fucking losers.’

‘Our cult burned money for fuel.’

‘As in like currency.’

‘We used Ones. The Semi Divine One advocated thrift. We’d bring them to Him at the stove. There was one stove. We had to bring them to Him on our knees with no part of our feet could touch the floor. He sat by the stove in our blankets and fed it Ones. We got an extra slap if the currency was new.’

‘As in like crisp and new.’

‘It was a cleansing. Somebody always played a drum.’

‘Our cult’s Divinely Chosen Leader drove a Rolls. In neutral. We pushed him wherever he was Called to like be at. He never turned it on. The Rolls. I got all muscled up.’

‘In summer then they made us slither on our bellies. We had to embrace our snake-nature. It was a cleansing.’

‘As in like slithering.’

‘Serious slithering. They took wire and bound our arms and legs.’

‘At least your wire wasn’t barbed.’

‘I finally felt too cleansed to stay.’

‘Meaning over-pure, I can I.D. totally.’

‘It was too much love somehow to take.’

‘I’m like feeling the Identification all over, this is —’

‘Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end.’

‘And then our Divinely Chosen’s Love Squads made us chop wood with our teeth when it got cold. As in like subzero wintertime.’

‘Yours let you keep your teeth?’

‘Only the ones for gnawing. See?’

‘Sheesh.’

‘Just the ones for gnawing.’

Rémy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room evening of this Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, the last demi-maison on his portion of the list for this day. The hills of upper Enfield, they were de I’infere of difficulty, but the demi-maison itself had a ramp. A person with authority was conducting interviews to fill some vacancies of recent time in the place’s Office, of which its locked door was visible from this sitting. Marathe and others were invited to sit in the living room with a cup of unpleasant coffee. Urged to smoke if he liked. Everyone else was smoking. The living room smelled like an ashtray, and its ceiling was yellow like the fingers of long smokers. Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud. There were demi-maison patients viewing a cartridge of martial arts conflict, former patients and persons of the upper Enfield area cohabiting on the furniture, conversing. A damaged woman, also in a fauteuil de rollent like Marathe, slumped inutile next to the cartridge’s viewer, while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the kicks and thrusts of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the woman to twitch or cry out. Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway. Other persons, presumably addicted, waiting in the room to seek admittance to the Recovery House. The room was loud and hot. Marathe could hear a person who will seek admittance vomiting in the shrubberies just outside the window. Marathe’s chair was locked down next to a divan’s arm and directly before a window. The window, one could wish it was open more than a crack, he felt. Upon the dull-colored carpet a tormented-appearing man scuttling like the crab while two hooligans in leather played a cruel game of jumping over him. Persons reading cartoon books and painting the nails of their extremities. A tall-haired woman brought her foot to her mouth to blow upon her toes. Another young girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. No other in the room wore the veil of the Entertainment’s performer’s organization U.H.I.D. The smell of the U.S.A. cigarettes permeated his veil and made Marathe’s eyes water, and he thought of vomiting also. Two additional windows were open, but the room lacked all air.