Infinite jest - David Wallace

— That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis’s mother’s fork and then whole plate had clattered to the floor, and that amid the sounds of the pointers under the table fighting over that plate the mother’s own denial-system’s pressure blew, and she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that she’d known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated her suspicions and placed them under great pressure in the bell-jar of her own denial, because, she admits — admits is probably less accurate than something like keens or shrieks or jabbers — that her own father — an itinerant camp-meeting preacher — had molested her and her sister all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she’d married at just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she’d married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his daughter.

— That she’d said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before God and man.

— That whereupon she’d reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down to the Daddy’s acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid.

— That the Daddy’d kept a world-class collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks on wooden shelves down in the cellar.

— That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid.

— That Madame Psychosis’s name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy’s name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.

— That, despite the little rotter’s professions of self-recrimination for allowing the deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis increasingly untenable, it didn’t take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to figure out why the fellow’d given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the traumatic deformity, now did it.

— That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone’s failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home’s kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal — first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.[332]

The most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting listed in the little white Metro-Boston Recovery Options[333] booklet the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as ‘Q.R.S.-32A.’ Hal, who had no last class period, rushed through P.M.’S, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.’s were even warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight’s lemon chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn’t sure why, since it didn’t seem to be any kind of slobbering inability to abstain that was the problem — he hadn’t had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The issue’s the horrific way his head’s felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope.[334] It wasn’t just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal’s eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You’re UP I’ve Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn’t let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7’s of feeling wretched and bereft.

Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill and took the tow truck up Comm. Ave. to the C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond, the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit Boylston St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St. became shunpike Rte. 9, the major west-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal 1-90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27.

Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the sky’s combustionish orange had deepened to the hellish crimson of a fire’s last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after, and Hal’s spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics Anonymous Meeting thing out.

Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps were set so senselessly high on the truck’s grille.

The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and not returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then cancelled a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown. NPR had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects — George Will’s laryngectomy-prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He ate two of three $4.00 bran muffins he’d whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet bakery, grimacing as he swallowed because he’d forgotten a tonic to wash them down, then put in a mammoth plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA glass, which fit neatly in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and passed the last fifteen minutes of the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word Anonymous, all the way he supposed from the Æolic övuya through Thynne’s B.S. 1580s reference to ‘anonymall Chronicals’; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English on-áne, which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf’s eventual standard inversion to the classic anon, maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. ‘35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there’d been such a lengthy entry in the Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn’t had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over. Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he’d ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn’t (so far) compromised, the withdrawal’s effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.

The rock faces on either side of the truck when 27 goes through blasted hills of rock, the very fringes of the Berkshires’ penumbra, are either granite or gneiss.

Hal for a while also practices saying ‘My name’s Mike.’ ‘Mike. Hi.’ ‘Hey there, name’s Mike,’ etc., into the truck’s rearview.

By 15 minutes east of Natick it becomes obvious that the little booklet’s terse Q.R.S. designates a facility called Quabbin Recovery Systems, which is easy to find, roadside ad-signs starting to announce the place several clicks away, each sign a little different and designed to form a little like narrative of which actual arrival at Q.R.S. would be the climax. Even Hal’s late father was too young really to remember Burma-Shave signs.

Quabbin Recovery Systems is set far back from Rte. 27 on a winding groomed-gravel road flanked all the way up by classy old-time standing lanterns whose glass shades are pebbled and faceted like candy dishes and seem more for mood than illumination. Then the actual building’s driveway’s an even more winding little road that’s barely more than a tunnel through meditative pines and poor-postured Lombardy poplars. Once off the highway the whole nighttime scene out here in exurbia — Boston’s true boonies — seems ghostly and circumspect. Hal’s tires crunch cones in the road. Some sort of bird shits on his windshield. The driveway broadens gradually into a like delta and then a parking lot of mint-white gravel, and the physical Q.R.S. is right there, cubular and brooding. The building’s one of these late-model undeformed cubes of rough panel-brick and granite quoins. Illuminated moodily from below by more classy lanterns, it looks like a building-block from some child-titan’s toy-chest. Its windows are the smoky brown kind that in daylight become dark mirrors. Hal’s late father had publicly repudiated this kind of window-glass in an interview in Lens & Pane when the stuff first came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort of bloody, polluted aspect.

A good two-thirds of the lot’s parking places say RESERVED FOR STAFF, which strikes Hal as odd. The tow truck tends to diesel and chuff after deignition, finally subsiding with a shuddering fart. It’s dead quiet except for the hiss of light traffic down on 27 past all the trees. Only TP-link workers and marathon-type commuters live in exurban Natick. It’s either way colder out here or else a front’s been coming in while Hal drove. The lot’s piney air has the ethyl sting of winter.

Q.R.S.’s big doors and lintel are more of that reflector-shade glass. There’s no obvious bell, but the doors are unlocked. They open in that sort of pressurized way of institutional doors. The savanna-colored lobby is broad and still and has a vague medical/dental smell. Its carpet’s a dense low tan Dacronyl weave that evacuates sound. There’s a circular high-countered nurse’s station or reception desk, but nobody’s there.

The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak of blood in his head.

The 32A that follows Q.R.S. in the girl’s little white booklet is presumably a room number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A. jacket and carries the NASA glass he spits in. He’d have to spit even if he didn’t have chew in; the Ko-diak’s almost like a cover or excuse.

There is no map or You-Are-Here-type directory on view in the lobby. The lobby’s heat is intense and close but kind of porous; it’s in a sort of uneasy struggle with the radiant chill of all the smoked glass of the entrance. The lamps out in the lot and off along the driveway are blobs of sepia light through the glass. Inside, cove-lighting at the seams of walls and ceiling produce an indirect light that’s shadowless and seems to rise from the room’s objects themselves. It’s the same lighting and lion-colored carpeting in the first long hall Hal tries. The room numbers go up to 17 and then after Hal turns a sharp corner start at 34A. The room doors are false blond wood but look thick and private, flush in their frames. There’s also the smell of stale coffee. The walls’ color scheme is somewhere between puce and mature eggplant-skin, kind of nauseous against the sandy tan of the carpet. All buildings with any kind of health-theme to them have this thin sick sweet dental sub-odor to them. Q.R.S. also seems to have some sort of balsamy air-freshener going in the ventilation system, too, but it doesn’t quite cover the sweet medical stink or the bland sour smell of institutional food.

Hal hasn’t heard one human sound since he came in. The place’s silence has that glittery sound of total silence. His footfalls make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels furtive and burglarish and holds the NASA glass down at his side and the NA booklet higher up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced landscapes on the walls, little low tables with glossy pamphlets, a framed print of Picasso’s ‘Seated Harlequin,’ and nothing else that wasn’t just institutional bullshit, visual Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it’s like the gauntlets of doors just glide by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that’s chosen to hold itself still. If you asked Hal to describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would be to say he wished he were somewhere else and feeling some way besides how he felt. His mouth pours spit. The glass’s one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much fun to look at. He’s missed the glass a couple of times and marred the tan carpet with dark spit. After two 90° turns it’s clear the hallway’s run is a perfect square around the cube’s ground level. He’s seen no stairs or entrances to stairways. He empties the NASA glass rather gooily into a potted rubber tree’s dirt. Q.R.S.’s building may be one of those infamous Rubikular cubes that looks topologically undeformed but is actually impossible to negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third corner start at 18, and now Hal can hear either very distant or very muffled voices. He carries the NA booklet in front of him like a crucifix. He has about $50 U.S. and another $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom-emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no idea what sort of introductory costs might be involved. Q.R.S. didn’t purchase prime Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a São-Paulo-School Geometric-Minimalist architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was for sure.

Room 32A’s wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the muffled voices were behind this one. The Meeting was listed in the book as starting at 1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some sort of pre-Meeting orientation for people who’ve come for the first time, sort of tentatively, just to scout the whole enterprise out, so he doesn’t knock.

He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he’s straightening a bow tie before he enters a strange room.

And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doorknobs on the Quabbin Recovery Systems doors are the same as at E.T.A. — flat bars of brass toggle-bolted to the latch mechanism, so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the door.

But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn’t near big enough to create a mood of anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or ten adult middle-class males are in the warm room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of the men has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same way, that Indian cross-legged style with their hands on their knees and their feet under their knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere in sight. Hal eases the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair, all the time conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet. The chairs are placed in no discernible order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room’s own colors, walls and ceiling the color of Thousand Island dressing — a color-scheme with unplaceable but uneasy associations for Hal — and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 32A is stuffy with CO2 and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta.