Infinite jest - David Wallace

Gene Fackelmann had, it turns out, for years been getting fraudulently over on Whitey Sorkin’s bookmaking operation in all sorts of little ways that Gately and Kite (according to Kite) hadn’t known about. Usually it was something like Fax taking long-shot action from marginal bettors not well known to Sorkin and not phoning the action in to Sorkin’s secretary, and then, when the long-shot lost, collecting the skeet plus vig[372] from the bettor and rat-holing it all for himself. It had seemed to Gately after he found out about it a suicidal-type risk, since if any of these long-shots ever actually won Fackelmann would be responsible for giving the bettor his winnings from ‘Whitey’ — meaning it would be Sorkin that would hear the complaint if Fackelmann didn’t come up with the $ on his own and get it to the bettor — and the whole crew’s pharmacological expenses meant they always existed on the absolutest margins of liquidity, at least that’s what Gately and Kite (according to Kite) had always thought. It wasn’t until Fackelmann’s map had been presumably eliminated for keeps and Kite had returned from his long highatus and Gately and Kite were getting the late Fackelmann’s stuff together to divvy up valuables and dump the rest and Gately found, taped to the underside of Fackelmann’s porn-cartridge storage case, over $22,000 in mint-crisp O.N.A.N. currency, not until then that Gately realized that Fack-elmann had through iron will kept unspent an emergency reserve skeet-payment stake for just such a worst-case possibility. Gately split this found Fackelmann-$ with Trent Kite, then but went and turned his half of it in to Sorkin, claiming it was all they’d found. It wasn’t that he forked his half over to Sorkin out of any kind of fear — Sorkin would have regretfully had the C kid and his Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too, along with Fack-elmann, if he’d thought Gately had been part of Fax’s scam — but out of guilt over having been clueless about his own fellow Twin Tower screwing Sorkin after Sorkin had been so neurasthenically over-generous to them both, and because Fackelmann’s betrayal had ended up so hurting Sorkin and causing him so much psychosomatic grief that he’d spent a whole week in bed in Saugus in the dark with Lone Ranger-type sleep shades on, drinking VO and Cafergot and clutching his traumatized cranium and face, feeling betrayed and abandoned, he’d said, his whole faith in the human creature shaken, he’d wept to Gately over the cellular phone, after it all came out. Ultimately, Gately gave Sorkin his half of Fackelmann’s secret $ mostly to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know somebody cared. He also did it for Fackelmann’s memory, which he was mourning Fax’s gruesome death even at the same time he cursed him for a liar and rat-punk. It was a time of moral confusion for Don G., and his half of the post-mortem $ seemed like the best he could do in terms of like a gesture. He didn’t rat out that Kite had a whole other half, which Kite spent his half of the $ on Grateful Dead bootlegs and a portable semiconductor-refrigeration unit for his D.E.C. 2100’s motherboard that upped his processing capacity to 32 mb2 of RAM, roughly the same as an InterLace Disseminator-substation or an NNE Bell cellular SWITCHnet; though it wasn’t two months before he’d pawned the D.E.C. and put it in his arm, and had become such a steeply-downhill-type Dilaudid-addict that when he signed on as Gately’s new trusted associate for B&Es after Gately got out of Billerica the once-mighty Kite wasn’t even able to dicky an alarm or shunt a meter, and Gately found himself the brains of the team, which it was a mark of his own high-angle decline that this fact didn’t make him more nervous.

The R.N. that’d flushed his colon while Gately wept with shame is now back in the room with an M.D. Gately hasn’t seen before. He lies there pinwheel-eyed from pain and efforts to Abide via memory. One eye has some sort of blurry sleep-goop film in it that won’t blink or rub away. The room is filled with mournful gunmetal winter-P.M. light. The M.D. and gorgeous R.N. are doing something to the room’s other bed, attaching something metally complex from out of a big case not unlike a good-table-silverware case, with molded purple velvet insides for metal rods and two half-circles of steel. The intercom dings. The M.D.’s got a beeper at his belt, an object with still more unhealthy associations. Gately hasn’t exactly been asleep. The heat of his post-op fever makes his face feel tight, like standing too close to a fire. His right side’s settled down to a sick ache like a kicked groin. Fackelmann’s favorite phrase had been ‘That’s a goddamned lie!’ He’d used it in response to just about everything. His mustache always looked like it was getting ready to crawl off his lip. Gately’s always despised facial hair. The former naval M.P. had had a great big yellow-gray mustache he waxed into two sharp protruding steer-horns. The M.P. was vain about his mustache and spent giant amounts of time clipping and grooming and waxing it. When the M.P. passed out, Gately used to come quietly up and gently push the stiff waxed sides of the mustache into crazy canted angles. Sorkin’s new third field-operative C’d claimed to collect ears and to have a collection of ears. Bobby C with his lightless eyes and flat lipless head, like a reptile. The M.D. was one of those apprentice Residential M.D.s that looked about twelve, scrubbed and groomed to a dull pink shine. He radiated the bustling cheer they teach M.D.s how to radiate at you. He had a child’s haircut, complete with spit-curl, and his thin neck swam in the collar of his white M.D.-coat, and his coat’s pens’ pocket-protector and the owlish glasses he kept pushing up, together with the little neck, gave Gately the sudden insight that most M.D.s and A.D.A.s and P.D./P.O.s and shrinks, the fearsomest authority figures in a drug addict’s life, that these guys came from the pencil-necked ranks of the same weak-chinned wienie kids that drug addicts used to despise and revile and bully, as kids. The R.N. was so attractive in the gray light and goop-blur it was almost grotesque. Her tits were such that she had a little cleft of cleavage showing even over her R.N.’s uniform, which was not like a low-neckline thing. The milky cleavage that suggests tits like two smooth scoops of vanilla ice cream that your healthy-type girls all have probably got. Gately’s forced to confront the fact that he’s never once been with a really healthy girl, and not with even so much as a girl of any kind in sobriety. And then when she reaches way up to unscrew a bolt in some kind of steelish plate on the wall over the empty bed the like hemline of her uniform retreats up north so that the white stockings’ rich violinish curves at the top of the insides of her legs in the white LISLE are visible in backlit silhouette, and an EMBRASURE of sad windowlight shines through her legs. The raw healthy sexuality of the whole thing just about makes Gately sick with longing and self-pity, and he wants to avert his head. The young M.D. is also staring at the lissome stretch and retreating hem, not even pretending to help with the bolt, missing as he goes to push up the glasses so that he stabs himself in the forehead. The M.D. and R.N. exchange several pieces of real technical medical language. The M.D. drops his clipboard twice. The R.N. either doesn’t notice any of the sexual tension in the room because she’s spent her whole life as the eye of a storm of sexual tension, or else she just pretends not to notice. Gately’s almost positive the M.D.’s jacked off before to the thought of this R.N., and he feels sick that he totally empathizes with the M.D. It’d be CIRCUMAMBIENT sexual tension, would be the ghostword. Gately’d never even let an unhealthy strung-out-type female go into the head for at least an hour after he’d taken a dump in there, out of embarrassment, and now this sickening circumambient creature had with her own Fleet syringe and soft hands summoned a loose pathetic dump from the anus of Bimmy Gately, which anus she had thus seen close up, producing a dump.

It doesn’t even register on Gately that it’s spitting a little goopy sleet outside until he’s made himself avert his head from the window and R.N. The ceiling’s throbbing a little, like a dog when it’s hot. The R.N. had told him, from behind, her name was Cathy or Kathy, but Gately wants to think of her as just the R.N. He can smell himself, a smell like sandwich-meat left in the sun, and feel greasy sweat purling all over his scalp, and his unshaved chin against his throat, and the tube taped into his mouth is tacky with the scum of sleep. The thin pillow is hot and he has no way to flip it over to the cool side of the pillow. It’s like his shoulder’s grown its own testicles and every time his heart beats some very small guy kicked him in them, the testicles. The M.D. sees Gately’s open eyes and tells the nurse the gunshot patient is semiconscious again and is he Q’d for any kind of P.M. med. The sleetfall is slight; it sounds like somebody’s throwing little fistfuls of sand at the window from real far away. The deadly R.N., helping the M.D. clamp some kind of weird steel back-braceish thing with what looks like a metal halo they’d put together from parts out of the big case, clamping the thing to the head of the bed and to little steel plates under the bed’s heart monitor — it looks sort of like the upper part of an electric chair, he thinks — the R.N. looks down in mid-stretch and says Hi Mr. Gately and says Mr. Gately is allergic and doesn’t get any meds except antipyretics and Toradol in a drip Dr. Pressburger do you Mr. Gately you poor brave allergic thing. Her voice is like you can just imagine what she’d sound like getting X’d and really liking it. Gately’s repelled at himself for having taken a dump in front of this kind of R.N. The M.D.’s name had sounded just like ‘Pressburger’ or ‘Priss-burger,’ and Gately’s now sure the poor yutz’d taken daily ass-kickings from sinister future drug addicts, as a kid. The M.D.’s perspiring in the ambient sexuality of the R.N. He says (the M.D. does) So what’s he intu-bated for if he’s conscious and self-ventilating and on a drip. This is while the M.D.’s trying to screw the metal halo itself to the top of the back-braceish thing with bolt-head screws, one knee up on the bed and stretching so part of the red soft upper part of his ass is showing over his belt, not being able to get the thing screwed on, shaking the metal halo like it’s its stubborn fault, and even lying there Gately can tell the guy’s turning the bolt-head screws the wrong way. The R.N. comes over and puts a cool soft hand on Gately’s forehead in a way that makes the forehead want to die with shame. What Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there’d been concern that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded with in, through, or near his lower-something Trachea, since there’d been trauma to his Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a 16 mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of 20 % Mucomyst[373] q. 2 h. on the off-chance of hemorrhage or mucoidal flux, like just in case. The parts of this Gately can follow he doesn’t care for one bit. He doesn’t want to know his body even fucking has something with six syllables in it. The horrifying R.N. wipes Gately’s face off as best she can with her hand and says she’ll try to fit him in for a sponge bath before she goes off-shift at 1600h., at which Gately goes rigid with dread. The R.N.’s hand smells of Kiss My Face-brand Organic Hand and Body Lotion, which Pat Montesian also uses. She tells the poor M.D. to let her have a try at the cranial brace, those things are always a bear to screw in. Her shoes are those subaudible nurses’ shoes that make no sound, so it seems like she glides away from Gately’s bed instead of walks away. Her legs aren’t visible until she gets a certain ways away. The M.D.’s own shoes have a wet squeak to the left one. The M.D. looks like he hasn’t slept well in about a year. There’s a faint vibe of prescription ‘drines about the guy, on Gately’s view. He paces squeakily at the foot of the bed watching the R.N. turn the screws the right way and pushes his owlish glasses up and says that Clifford Pendleton, scratch golfer or no, is a post-traumatic maroon, that nebulized Mucomyst is for (and here his voice makes it clear he’s reciting from memory, like to show off) abnormal, viscid, or inspissated post-traumatic mucus, not potential hemorrhaging or edema, and that 16 mm. siphuncular intubation itself had been specifically discreditated as an intratracheal-edema prophylaxis in the second-to-latest issue of Morbid Trauma Quarterly as so diametrically invasive that it was more apt to exacerbate than to alleviate hemoptysis, according to somebody he calls ‘Laird’ or ‘Layered.’ Gately’s listening in with the uncomprehending close attention of like a child whose parents are discussing something adultly complex about child-care in its presence. The condescension with which Prissburger inserts that hemoptysis means something called ‘pertussive hemorrhage,’ like Kathy the R.N. wasn’t enough of a pro not to have to insert little technical explanations for, makes Gately sad for the guy — it’s obvious the guy pathetically thinks this kind of limp condescending shit will impress her. Gately’s got to admit he would have tried to impress her, too, though, if she hadn’t met him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus. The R.N.’s finishing packing up the parts of the brace thing the M.D. couldn’t seem to attach, meanwhile. She was saying the M.D. seemed awful well-up on methodology for something called a 2R, as they left, and Gately could tell the M.D. couldn’t tell she was being a little sarcastic. The M.D. was struggling to try to carry the thing’s case, which Gately judges weighs at most 30 kg. It occurs to him head-on for the first time that the real reason Stavros L. hired shelter-cleaning guys out of halfway houses was that he could get away with paying them like bupkis, and that he (Don G.) must surely on some level have known this all along but been in some kind of Denial about confronting it head-on that he was getting fucked over by Stavros the shoe-freak, and that the word embrasure had been surely another invasive-wraith ghostword, and then now also that nobody seems to exactly be falling all over themself to bring the paper and pen it had sure seemed like Joelle van D. had understood Gately’s mimed request for, and that thus maybe Joelle’s visit and show-and-tell with the snapshots had been just as much a febrile hallucination as the figuranted wraith, and that it has stopped spitting sleet but the clouds out there still look like they mean serious business out there over Brighton-Allston, and that if Joelle v.D.’s intimate visit with the photo album was a hallucination that at least meant it was also a hallucination she was wearing fucking college-kid Ken Erdedy’s sweatpants, and that the low-angled sadness of the cloudy P.M. light meant it had to be pretty near 1600h. EST so that maybe There By The Grace he could avoid maybe getting an uncontrolled woodie getting sponged naked by the horrifyingly attractive K/Cathy and but still could get sponged by her linebacker of a replacement, because the sour meaty smell of himself was grim, only maybe miss the woodie-hazard and get sponged by the big hairy-moled 1600-2400h. nurse in support-hose to who Gately’s anus was a stranger. Plus that 1600h. EST was Spontaneous-Dissemination time for Mr. Bouncety-Bounce, the mentally ill kiddy-show host Gately’s always loved and used to try his best with Kite and poor old Fackelmann to be home and largely alert for, and that nobody’s once offered to click on the HD viewer that hangs next to a myopic fake-Turner fog-and-boat print on the wall opposite Gately’s and the former kid’s beds, and that he had no remote with which to either activate the TP at 1600 or ask somebody else to activate it. That without some kind of notebook and pencil he couldn’t communicate even the basícest question or like concept to anybody — it was like he was a vegetated hemorrhagic-stroke-victim. Without a pencil and notebook he couldn’t even seem to get across a request for a notebook and pencil; it was like he was trapped inside his huge chattering head. Unless, his head then points out, Joelle van Dyne’s visit had been real and her understanding of the pen-and-notebook gesture had been real, and but somebody out there in the hallway with a hat or at the Hospital President’s office or at the nurses’ station with his innerdicted M.-Hanley-brownies had also innerdicted the request for writing supplies, at the Finest’s request, so he couldn’t get his story straight with anybody before they came for him, that it was like a pre-interrogation softening-up thing, they were leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and unmoving and blank like the House’s catatonic lady slumped moist and pale in her chair or the Advanced Basics Group’s adopted girl’s vegetable-kingdom sister, or the whole catatonic gang over at E.M.P.H.H.’s #5 Shed, silent and dead-faced even when touching a tree or propped up amid exploding front-lawn firecrackers. Or the wraith’s nonexistent kid. It’s got to be past 1600h., light-wise, unless it’s the lowering clouds. There’s roughly 0 % or less visibility now outside the sleet-crusted window. The room’s windowlight is darkening to that Kaopec-tate shade that has always marked the just-pre-sunset time of day that Gately (like most drug addicts) has always most dreaded, and had always either lowered his helmet and charged extra-murderous at somebody to block it out (the late-day dread) or else dropped QuoVadis or oral narcotics or turned on Mr. Bouncety-Bounce extra loud or busied himself in his silly chef’s hat in the Ennet House kitchen or made sure he was at a Meeting sitting way up close in nose-pore range, to block it out (the late-day dread), the gray-light late-afternoon dread, always worse in winter, the dread, in winter’s watered-down light — just like the secret dread he’s always felt whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left him alone in a room, a terrible stomach-sinking dread that probably dates all the way back to being alone in his XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed.