Infinite jest - David Wallace

Gately’s not too agonized and feverish not to recognize gross self-pity when he hears it, wraith or no. As in the slogan ‘Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink.’ With all due respect, pretty hard to believe this wraith could stay sober, if he needed to get sober, with the combination of abstraction and tragically-misunderstood-me attitude he’s betraying, in the dream.

He’d been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life, the wraith avers, now back up on the silent heart monitor, though Boston AA had a humorless evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty. And he never could stand the vapid cliches and disdain for abstraction. Not to mention the cigarette smoke. The atmosphere of the meeting rooms had been like a poker game in hell, had been his impression. The wraith stops and says he bets Gately’s struggling to hide his curiosity about whether the wraith succeeded in coming up with a figurant-less entertainment so thoroughly engaging it’d make even an in-bent figurant of a boy laugh and cry out for more.

Father-figure-wise, Gately’s tried his best these last few sober months to fend off uninvited memories of his own grim conversations and interchanges with the M.P.

The wraith on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his face is upside-down only cm. from Gately’s face — the wraith’s face is only about half the size of Gately’s face, and has no odor — and responds vehemently that No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hidden-ness on either side. The wraith apparently can’t tell the difference between Gately just thinking to himself and Gately using his brain-voice to sort of think at the wraith. His shoulder suddenly sends up a flare of pain so sickening Gately’s afraid he might shit the bed. The wraith gasps and almost falls off the monitor as if he can totally empathize with the dextral flare. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure the same pain as Gately in order to hear his brain-voice and have a conversation with him. Even in a dream, that’d be a higher price than anybody’s ever paid to interface with D. W. Gately. Maybe the pain’s supposed to lend credibility to some Diseased argument for Demerol the wraith’s going to make. Gately feels somehow too self-conscious or stupid to ask the wraith if it’s here on behalf of the Higher Power or maybe the Disease, so instead of thinking at the wraith he simply concentrates on pretending to wonder to himself why the wraith is spending probably months of aggregate wraith-time flitting around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with crooner-photos and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn’t know from a rock instead of just quantuming over to wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking son. Though maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would drive the youngest son bats, though, might be the thing. The son didn’t exactly sound like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith’s shared. Of course this was assuming the mute figurant son even existed, this was assuming this wasn’t all some roundabout way of the Disease starting to talk Gately into succumbing to a shot of Demerol. He tries to concentrate on all this instead of remembering what Demerol’s warm rush of utter well-being felt like, remembering the comfortable sound of the clunk of his chin against his chest. Or instead of remembering any of his own interchanges with his mother’s live-in retired M.P. One of the highest prices of sobriety was not being able to keep from remembering things you didn’t want to remember, see for instance Ewell and the fraudulent-grandiosity thing from his wie-nieish childhood. The ex-M.P. had referred to small children and toddlers as ‘rug-rats.’ It was not a term of gruff affection. The M.P. had made the toddler Don Gately return empty Heineken bottles to the neighborhood packy and then haul-ass on back with the bottle-deposits, timing him with a U.S.N.-issue chronometer. He never laid a hand on Gately personally, that Don could recall. But he’d still been afraid of the M.P. The M.P.’d beaten his mother up on an almost daily basis. The most hazardous time for Gately’s mother was between eight Heinekens and ten Heinekens. When the M.P. threw her on the floor and knelt down very intently over her, picking his spots and hitting her very intently, he’d looked like a lobsterman pulling at his outboard’s rope. The M.P. was slightly shorter than Mrs. Gately but was broad and very muscular, and proud of his muscles, going shirtless whenever possible. Or in like sleeveless khaki military T’s. He had bars and weights and benches, and had taught the child Don Gately the fundamentals of free-weight training, with special emphasis on control and form as opposed to just sloppily lifting as much weight as possible. The weights were old and greasy and their poundage pre-metric. The M.P. was very precise and controlled in his approach to things, in a way Gately has somehow come to associate with all blond-haired men. When Gately, at age ten, began to be able to bench-press more weight than the M.P., the M.P. had not taken it in a good spirit and began refusing to spot him on his sets. The M.P. entered his own weights and repetitions carefully in a little notebook, pausing to do this after each set. He always licked the point of the pencil before he wrote, a habit Gately still finds repellent. In a different little notebook, the M.P. noted the date and time of each Heineken he consumed. He was the sort of person who equated incredibly careful record-keeping with control. In other words he was by nature a turd-counter. Gately had realized this at a very young age, and that it was bullshit and maybe crazy. The M.P. was very possibly crazy. The circumstances of his leaving the Navy were like: shadowy. When Gately involuntarily remembers the M.P. now he also remembers — and wonders why, and feels bad — that he never once asked his mother about the M.P. and why the fuck was he even there and did she actually love him, and why did she love him when he flang her down and beat her up on a more or less daily basis for fucking years on end. The intensifying rose-colors behind Gately’s closed lids are from the hospital room lightening as the light outside the window gets licoricey and predawn. Gately lies below the unoccupied heart-monitor snoring so hard the railings on either side of his bed shiver and rattle. When the M.P. was sleeping or out of the house, Don Gately and Mrs. Gately never once talked about him. His memory is clear on this. It wasn’t just that they never discussed him, or the notebooks or weights or chronometer or his beating up Mrs. Gately. The M.P.’s name was never even mentioned. The M.P. worked nights a lot — driving a cheese-and-egg delivery truck for Cheese King Inc. until he was terminated for embezzling wheels of Stilton and fencing them, then for a time on a mostly automated canning line, pulling a lever that sent New England chowder out of hundreds of spigots into hundreds of lidless cans with an indescribable plopping sound — and the Gately home was like a different world when the M.P. was working or out: it was like the very idea of the M.P. walked out the door with him, leaving Don and his mother not just behind but alone, together, at night, she on the couch and he on the floor, both gradually losing consciousness in front of broadcast TV’s final seasons. Gately tries especially hard now not to explore why it never occurred to him to step in and pull the M.P. off his mother, even after he could bench-press more than the M.P. The precise daily beatings had always seemed in some strangely emphatic way not his business. He rarely even felt anything, he remembers, watching him hit her. The M.P. was totally unshy about hitting her in front of Gately. It was like everybody unspokenly agreed the whole thing was none of Bimmy’s beeswax. When he was a toddler he’d flee the room and cry about it, he seems to recall. By a certain age, though, all he’d do is raise the volume on the television, not even bothering to look over at the beating, watching ‘Cheers!’ Sometimes he’d leave the room and go into the garage and lift weights, but when he left the room it was never like he was fleeing the room. When he’d been small he’d sometimes hear the springs and sounds from their bedroom sometimes in the A.M. and worry that the M.P. was beating her up on their bed, but at a certain point without anybody taking him aside and explaining anything to him he realized that the sounds then didn’t mean she was getting hurt. The similarity of her hurt sounds in the kitchen and living room and her sex-sounds through the asbestos fiberboard bedroom wall troubles Gately, though, when he remembers now, and is one reason why he fends off remembering, when awake.

Shirtless in the summer — and pale, with a blond man’s dislike for the sun — the M.P. would sit in the little kitchen, at the kitchen table, feet flat on the wood-grain tiling, with a patriotic-themed bandanna wrapped around his head, recording Heinekens in his little notebook. A previous tenant had thrown something heavy through the kitchen window once, and the window’s screen was fucked up and not quite flush, and houseflies came and went more or less at will. Gately, when small, would be in there in the kitchen with the M.P. sometimes; the tile was better for his little cars’ suspensions than nubbly carpet. What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen. He used no swatter or rolled cone of Herald. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white and fast. He’d whack them as they lit on the kitchen table. The flies. But in a controlled way. Not hard enough to kill them. He was very controlled and intent about it. He’d whack them just hard enough to disable them. Then he’d pick them up real precisely and remove either a wing or like a leg, something important to the fly. He’d take the wing or leg over to the beige kitchen waste-basket and very deliberately hike the lid with the foot-pedal and deposit the tiny wing or leg in the wastebasket, bending at the waist. The memory is unbidden and very clear. The M.P.’d wash his hands at the kitchen sink, using green generic dishwashing liquid. The maimed fly itself he’d ignore and allow to scuttle in crazed circles on the table until it got stuck in a sticky spot or fell off the edge onto the kitchen floor. The conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences in minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens, explaining that maiming a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies. A fly was stuck in a sticky spot of dried Heineken and agitating its wing as the M.P. explained that a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear. Human beings couldn’t hear a maimed fly’s screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass other flies could, and the screams of their maimed colleagues helped keep them away. By the time the M.P. would put his head on his big pale arms and grab a little shut-eye among the Heineken bottles on the sun-heated table there’d often be several flies trapped in goo or scuttling in circles on the table, sometimes giving odd little hops, trying to fly with one wing or no wings. Possibly in Denial, these flies, as to their like condition. The ones that fell to the floor Gately would hunch directly over on hands and knees, getting one big red ear down just as close to the fly as possible, listening, his big pink forehead wrinkled. What makes Gately most uncomfortable now as he starts to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true hospital morning is that he can’t remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery, ever, after the M.P. passed out, can’t mentally see himself stepping on them or wrapping them in paper towels and flushing them down the toilet or something, but he feels like he must have; it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing something more than just hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer-cars and trying to see if he could hear tiny agonized screams, listening very intently. But he can’t for the life of him remember doing more than trying to hear, and the sheer cerebral stress of trying to force a more noble memory should have awakened him, on top of the dextral hurt; but he doesn’t come all the way awake in the big crib until the memory’s realistic dream bleeds into a nasty fictional dream where he’s wearing Lenz’s worsted topcoat and leaning very precisely and carefully over the prone figure of the Hawaiian-dressed Nuck whose head he’s whacked repeatedly against the hood’s windshield, he’s supporting his inclined weight on his good left hand against the warm throbbing hood, bent in real close to the maimed head, his ear to the bleeding face, listening very intently. The head opens its red mouth.

The wet start Gately finally wakes with jars his shoulder and side and sends a yellow sheet of pain over him that makes him almost scream into the window’s light. For about a year once at age twenty in Maiden he’d slept most nights in a home-built loft in the dorm of a certain graduate R.N.-nursing program in Maiden, with a ragingly addicted R.N.-nursing student, in the loft, which you needed a five-rung ladder to get up into this loft and the thing was only a couple of feet under the ceiling, and every A.M. Gately’d awake out of some bad dream and sit up with a jolt and thwack his head against the ceiling, until after some time there was a permanent concavity in the ceiling and a flattish spot in the curve of the top of his forehead he can still feel, lying here blinking and holding his head with his good left hand. For a second, blinking and red with A.M. fever, he thinks he sees Ferocious Francis G. in the bedside chair, chin freshly shaved and dotted with bits of Kleenex, posture stolid, his old man’s saggy little tits rising slowly under a clean white T-, smiling grimly around blue tubes and an unlit cigar between his teeth and saying ‘Well kid at least you’re still on this side of the fuckin’ sod, I guess there’s something to be said for that there. And are you as yet sober, then?’ the Crocodile says coolly, disappearing and then not reappearing after several blinks.

The forms and sound in the room is really only three White Flaggers Gately’s never known or connected with that well, but are apparently here stopping in on their way to work, to show empathy and support, Bud O. and Glenn K. and Jack J. Glenn K. in daytime wears the gray jumpsuit and complex utility-belt of a refrigeration technician.

‘And who’s the fellow in the hat outside?’ he’s asking.

Gately grunts in a frantic way that suggests the phoneme ü.

‘Tall, well-dressed, grumpy, cocky-looking, piggy-eyed, wearing a hat. Civil-Service-looking. Black socks and brown shoes,’ Glenn K. says, pointing out toward the door where there’s sometimes been the ominous shadow of a hat.

Gately’s teeth taste long-unbrushed.

‘Looking settled in for a stay, surrounded with sports pages and the takeout foods of many cultures, Laddie,’ says Bud O., who the story from before Gately’s time goes once hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In he broke her nose and bent it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired, as a daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek — Bud O.’d tagged her with a left cross — until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which eventually nurtured and supported Mrs. O. into eventually telling Bud O. to take a flying fuck to the moon and getting her nose realigned back out front and leaving him for a male Al-Anon in Birkenstock sandals. Gately’s bowels have gone watery with dread: he has all-too-clear memories of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A.’s brown shoes, piggy eyes, Stetson w/ feather, and penchant for Third World takeout. He keeps grunting pathetically.