Infinite jest - David Wallace

I’d heard nothing about Troeltsch apparently switching room-assignments with Trevor Axford. A gigantic wedge of snow slid down a steep part of the roof over our window and fell past the window and hit the ground below with a huge whump. For some reason the fact that something as major as a midterm room-switch could have taken place without my knowing anything about it filled me with dread. There were a few glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack again.

Mario’s bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis’s burn, unevenly squeezed. Mario was looking at my face. ‘Is it you’re sad about not getting to play if the Quebec players are canceled?’

‘And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,’ Coyle said disgustedly.

‘Frozen,’ I corrected him.

‘Except but now listen to Stice’s explanation.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said.

‘For the bed hovering.’

Mario looked at Coyle. ‘You said bolted.’

‘I said presumably bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that’s possible is bolts.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said.

‘Let him guess,’ Mario told Coyle.

‘The Darkness thinks ghosts.’ Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not set quite level in his face. ‘Slice’s explanation that he swore me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he’s been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game.’ One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at a different angle.

‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’ I said.

‘Stice is mentally buckling,’ Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just out of morning-breath range. ‘He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn’t let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.’

I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. ‘Did you guys hear sausage-analog and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?’

Mario asked again if I were sad.

Coyle said ‘I was down there. Stice’s map was taking the edge off appetites all over the room. Then deLint started in yelling at him.’ He was looking at me oddly. ‘I don’t see what’s so funny about it, man.’

Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack’s straps with practiced ease.

Coyle said ‘I don’t know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. What if they haul him off somewhere, and it’s my fault?’

‘There’s no denying The Dark’s raised his game this fall though.’

‘There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,’ Mario said as I held his hands carefully and pulled him upright.

‘What if it’s the mental buckling that’s raised his game?’ Coyle said. ‘Does it still count as buckling?’

Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used. Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines with an amateur’s wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up until the last phase of his career, Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofes-sionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired, Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the fact that it required nonactors to achieve this stilted artificial I’m-only-acting-here quality was one of very few things about Himself’s early projects that truly interested academic critics. But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn’t wanted skilled or believable acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and technical ingenuity didn’t much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and one way of looking at Himself’s abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several projects he’d been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting[378] that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place. Getting emotion out of either actors or audiences had never struck me as one of Himself’s strengths, though I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn’t see a lot of what was right there.

Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but he wasn’t very good, and before Himself discovered him, Watt’s career consisted mostly of regional-market commercials on broadcast television. His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of spots for a chain of East Coast endocrinology clinics. He’d worn a bulbous white costume, white toupee, and either a ball-and-chain or white tap-shoes, depending on whether he was portraying the Before-Gland or the After-Gland. Himself during one of these commercials had shouted Eureka at our HD Sony and travelled personally all the way to Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, where Watt lived with his mother and her cats, to recruit him. He used Cosgrove Watt in almost every project for eighteen months. Watt for a time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen. And up until Watt’s temporal-lobe problem made his social presence unbearable, Himself had actually put Watt, mother, and cats up in a contiguous suite of what later became prorectors’ rooms off the main E.T.A. tunnel, the Moms acquiescing in this but instructing Orin, Mario, and me never ever to remain in a room alone with Watt.

Accomplice! was one of Watt’s later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short that the TP retracked to the film’s beginning in almost no time. Himself’s film opens as a beautifully sad young bus-station male prostitute, fragile and epicene and so blond even his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop by a flabby, dissipated-looking old specimen with gray teeth and circumflex eyebrows and obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved older man, who takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the place Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects.

The sad and beautiful Aryan-looking boy agrees to seduction by the dissipated old specimen, but only on the condition that the man wear protection. The boy, who is inarticulate, nevertheless makes this stipulation extremely clear. Safe Sex or No Sex, he stipulates, holding up a familiar foil packet. The hideous old specimen — now in a smoking jacket and ascot of apricot-colored silk, and smoking through a long white FDR-style filter — is offended, thinks the young male prostitute has sized him up as such a depraved and dissipated old specimen that he might well have It, the Human Immuno Virus, he thinks. His thoughts are rendered via animated thought-bubbles, which Himself at that late-middle stage hoped the audience would find at once self-consciously nonillusory and wildly entertaining. Watt’s old specimen is grinning grayly in what he thinks is a pleasant way as he obligingly takes the foil packet and removes his ascot with what he believes to be a sensual flourish … but inside his thought-bubble he’s having temporal-lobe spasms of sadistic rage at the sad blond boy for appearing to size him up as a health risk. The obvious health risk here is referred to, both orally and in the thought-bubble, merely as It. For example: ‘Little bastard thinks I’m so dissipated-looking that I’ve been at this sort of thing so long that I’m likely to have It, does he,’ the old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble going all jagged with rage.

So the flabby old specimen’s now, at only six minutes into the cartridge, Track 510, he’s now taking the sad beautiful boy, in the standard (extravagantly hunched) homosexual way, on the canopied bed of his tacky boudoir: the young male prostitute’s dutifully assumed the hunched, homo-submissive position because the old ponce has showed him he’s wearing the condom. The young prostitute, who’s shown (hunched) only from the left side during the act itself, seems beautiful in a fragile, skinny-flanked, visible-ribs way, while the old specimen has the slack ass and pointy little breasts of a man made grotesque by years of dissipation. The intercourse scene is done under bright lamps, without any sort of soft focus or light-jazz background score to lighten the atmosphere of clinical detachment.

What the sad blond submissive boy doesn’t know is that the dissipated old specimen had secretly palmed an old-fashioned one-sharp-sided razor blade when he’d gone into his burgundy-tiled bathroom to gargle with cinnamon mouthwash and dab Calvin Klein-brand Pheromonic Musk on his flabby pulse-points, and as he hunches animalistically over the boy, he’s holding the business end of the blade right up next to the sad boy’s anus as he takes his pleasure, so that the blade’s sharp side slices into both condom and erect phallus on each outthrust, the hideous old specimen unmindful of the blood and whatever pain’s involved in the phallic slicing as, still hunched and thrusting, he peels the slit condom off like the skin of a sausage. The young male prostitute, hunched submissively, feels the condom-peel and then the blood and starts struggling like a condemned man, trying to get the condomless bleeding flabby old specimen out and off of him. But the boy’s thin and delicate, and the old man has no trouble holding him down with his soft slack flabby weight until he’s grimaced and grunted and taken his pleasure to its end. It’s apparently an explicit-homosexual-sex-scene convention that whoever takes the submissive hunched position keeps his face turned away from the camera while the dominant partner’s phallus is inside him, and Himself honors this convention, though a self-conscious footnote subtitled along the bottom of the screen rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a convention. The prostitute turns his agonized face around to the camera only after the depraved older homosexual has removed his bloody and deflating post-pleasure phallus, brings his blond-browed face around to his left to face the audience in a mute howl as he collapses onto his delicate chest with his arms out on the satin sheets and his violated bum hiked high in the air, revealing now at the crease of his bum and upper hamstring a vivid purple splotch, more vivid than any bruise and with eight spidery tentacles radiating from it that are, the older man’s horrified thought-bubble reveals, the unmistakable eight-legged-vivid-contusion-blotch sign of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, that most universal symptom of It, and the boy is sobbing that the depraved old homosexual has made him — the prostitute — a murderer, the boy’s racking sobs making the hiked bum waggle in front of the old specimen’s horrified face as the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ over and over, so that almost a third oí Accomplice!’s total length is devoted to the racked repetition of this word — way, way longer than is needed for the audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings. This was just the sort of issue Mario and I argued about. As I see it, even though the cartridge’s end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice!’$ essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final repetitive image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man’s face stops spasming in horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge’s real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry ‘Murderer!’

for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film’s audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?

It was only after Himself’s death that critics and theorists started to treat this question as potentially important. A woman at U. Cal-Irvine had earned tenure with an essay arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in Himself’s work illuminated the central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun. The essay was turgid to the point of being unreadable, besides using reference as a verb and pluralizing conundrum as conundra.379[379]

From my horizontal position on the bedroom floor I could use the TP’s remote to do everything but actually remove and insert cartridges into the drive’s dock. The room’s window was now a translucent clot of snow and steam. InterLace’s Spontaneous Disseminations for New New England were all about weather. With our subscription system, E.T.A. got numerous large-market Spontaneous tracks. Each track took a slightly different angle on the weather. Each track had a slightly different focus. Remote reports from Boston’s North and South shores, Providence, New Haven, and Hartford-Springfield served to establish a consensus that a terrific amount of snow had fallen and was continuing to fall and blow around and pile up. Cars were shown abandoned at hasty angles, and we got to see the universal white VW-Bug-shape of snow-buried cars. Black-helmeted gangs of adolescents on snowmobiles were shown prowling New Haven’s streets, clearly up to no good. Pedestrians were shown bent over and floundering; remote-report journalists were shown trying to flounder over to them to get their thoughts and reflections. One floundering reporter in Quincy on the South Shore abruptly disappeared from view except for a hand with a microphone protruding bravely from some sort of sinkhole of snow; the bent backs of technicians were then shown floundering away from the remote camera to his aid. People with snow blowers stood in their own little blizzards. A pedestrian was filmed doing a spectacular pratfall. Cars at all angles in streets were shown with their tires spinning, shuddering in stasis. One track kept cutting back to a man endlessly trying to brush off a windshield that immediately whitened again behind each brushstroke. A bus sat with its snout in a monster-sized drift. ATHSCME fans atop the wall north of Ti-conderoga NNY were shown making horizontal cyclones of snow in the air. Rouged somber women in InterLace studios concurred that this was the worst blizzard to hit the region since B.S. 1998 and the second-worst since B.S. 1993. A man in a wheelchair was shown staring stonily at a two-meter drift across the ramp outside the State House. Satellite maps of east-central O.N.A.N. showed a white formation that was spiralled and shaggy and seemed to have what looked like claws. It was not a Nor’easter. A hot moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an Arctic cold front had collided over the Concavity. The storm’s satellite photo was superimposed on schemata of the ‘98 ass-kicker and shown to be just about identical. An unwelcome old acquaintance was back, a striking woman with black bangs and vivid lipstick said, smiling somberly. Another track iterated: this was not a Nor’easter. It might have been better to say ‘smiling mirthlessly.’ The flat glazed eyes of the man brushing impotently at his windshield seemed to represent an important visual image; different tracks kept returning to his face. He refused to acknowledge journalists or requests for thoughts. His was the creepy businesslike face of someone carefully picking up glass in the road after an accident in which his decapitated wife’s been impaled on the steering wheel. Another track’s anchor was a beautiful black woman with purple lipstick and what looked like a very tall crew cut. Reports of snow came in from all directions. After a while I stopped keeping track of the number of times the word snow was repeated. All synonyms for snowstorm were rapidly exhausted. Helmetless thrill-seekers on snowmobiles were doing doughnuts in Copley Square downtown. Homeless men hunched nearly drift-covered in doorways, readying snorkels of rolled-up newspaper. Jim Troeltsch, now apparently a resident of B-204, had liked to do a pretty funny impression of an InterLace anchorwoman having an orgasm. One of the thrill-seekers’ snowmobiles spun out of control and plunged into a drift, and the remote camera stayed on the drift for several moments, but nothing emerged. Connecticut’s National Guard Reserve had been ordered to assemble but had not assembled because travel in Connecticut was impossible. Three men in uniforms and gray helmets chased two men in white helmets, all on snowmobiles, for reasons an on-site journalist described as not yet emergent. Remote-site journalists used such words as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and developing. But all this impersonal diction was preceded by the anchorperson’s first name, as if the report were part of an intimate conversation. An InterLace delivery-boy was shown delivering recorded cartridges on a snowmobile and was described as plucky. Otis P. Lord had undergone a procedure for the removal of the Hitachi monitor on Thursday, LaMont Chu had said. I had never once ridden a snowmobile, skied, or skated: E.T.A. discouraged them. DeLint described winter sports as practically getting down on one knee and begging for an injury. The snowmobiles on the viewer all made sounds like little chain-saws that were extra pugnacious to compensate for being so little. There was a poignant shot of a stuck plow in Northampton. ‘Individuals who are not with emergency reasons to travel’ (sic) were being officially discouraged from travelling by a state trooper in a hat with a chinstrap. A Brockton man in a Lands’ End parka took a fall too burlesque to have been unstaged.