Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘I’m pretty much straight already, C-man, after that nut-shot,’ Gately said, ‘if you don’t want to waste the Narcan.’

‘Oh this isn’t no Narcan,’ C said softly, holding Gately’s arm.

‘Hadly,’ said the assistant, uncapping the syringe.

C said ‘Hold on to your hat.’ He poked the assistant’s shoulder. ‘Tell him.’

‘It’s pharm-grade Sunshine,’[387] the assistant said, tapping for a good vein.

‘Hold on to your heart,’ C said, watching the needle go in. The pharmacist slid it in expertly, horizontal and flush to the skin. Gately had never done Sunshine. Next to ungettable outside a Canadian hospital. He watched his own blood ruddle the serum as the pharmacist extended his thumb to ease the plunger back. The pharmacist’s assistant could really boot. C’s tongue was in the corner of his mouth as he watched. The corporate guy had Fackelmann’s arms held tight and a transvestal who’d gotten in behind the chair held his head by the chin and hair as the gray lady knelt before him with her threaded needle. Gately couldn’t keep himself from watching the stuff go in him. There was no pain. He wondered for a second if it was a hot shot: it seemed like a whole lot of trouble to go to just to get him off. The pharmacist’s thumbnail was ingrown. There were a couple eczema-flakes on Gately’s arm where the guy was inclined over it. You get to like the sight of your own blood after a while. The pharmacist had him half booted when Fackelmann started screaming. The scream’s pitch got higher as it drew out. When Gately could look away from the stuff going in, he saw the librarian-type lady was sewing Fackelmann’s eyelids open to the skin above his eyebrows. As in they were sewing poor old Count Faxula’s eyes open. A kid on the playground had used to turn his lids inside out at girls like they were doing now to the poor old Faxter. Gately gave a reflexive jerk toward him, and C hugged him tight with one arm.

‘Easy,’ C said very softly.

The taste of the hydrochloride in the Sunshine was the same, delicious, the taste of the smell of every Dr.’s office everywhere. He’d never done Talwin-PX. Impossible to get scrips for, the PX, a Canadian blend; U.S. Talwin’s[388] got.5 mg. of naloxone mixed in, to cut the buzz, is why Gately only did NX on top of Barn-Bams. He understood they’d given Fackelmann the anti-narc so he’d feel the needle as they sewed his eyes open. Cruel is spelled with a u, he remembered. The two Orientals left the room at C’s direction. Linda McC. sounded borderline-psychotic. The little gray lady worked fast. The eye that was already sewed open bulged obscenely. Everybody in the room except C and the corporate guy and grim lady started shooting dope. Two of the fags had their eyes shut and their faces at the ceiling as if they couldn’t take watching what they were doing to their arm. The pharmacist was tying off the passed-out Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, which seemed like insult + injury. There was every different kind of style and skill-level of injection and boot going on. Fackelmann’s face was still a scream-face. The corporate-tool type was dropping fluid from a pipette into Fackelmann’s sewed-open eye while the lady rethreaded the needle. It was just seeming to Gately he’d seen the fluid-in-eye thing in a cartridge or movie the M.P.’d liked when he was a Bim playing ball on the chintz in the sea when the Sunshine crossed the barrier and came on.

You could see why the U.S. made them cut the buzz. The air in the room got overclear, a glycerine shine, colors brightening terribly. If colors themselves could catch fire. The word on the C–II Talwin-PX was it was intense but short-acting, and pricey. No word on its interaction with massive residual amounts of I.V.-Dilaudid. Gately tried to figure while he still could. If they were going to eliminate his map with an O.D. they’d have used something cheap. And if the librarian was going to sew his eyes open. Gately was trying to think. Too they wouldn’t have got him. Him. Got him off.

The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned. Fackelmann’s screams about lies rose and fell, hard to hear against the arterial roar of the Sun. McC. was trying to muffle a cough. Gately couldn’t feel his legs. He could feel C’s arm around him taking more and more of his weight. C’s arms’s muscles rising and hardening: he could feel this. His legs were, like: opting out. Attack of floors and sidewalks. Kite used to sing a ditty called ‘32 Uses For Sterno Me Lad.’ C was starting to let him down easy. Strong squat hard kid. Most heroin-men you can knock down with a Boo. C: there was a gentleness about C, for a kid with the eyes of a lizard. He was letting him down real easy. C was going to protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor’s assault. The supported swoon spun Gately around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary view of the whole room in almost untakable focus. Pointgravè was vomiting chunkily. Two of the fags were sliding down the wall they had their backs to. Their red coats were aflame. The passing window exploded with light. Or else it was DesMontes that was vomiting and Pointgravè was taking the TP’s viewer off the wall and stretching its fibroid wire over toward Fackelmann against the wall. One of Fax’s eyes was as open as his mouth, disclosing way more eye than you ever want to see on somebody. He was no longer struggling. He stared piratically straight ahead. The librarian was starting on his other eye. The bland man had a rose in his Japel and he’d put on glasses with metaJ lenses and was blind-high and missing Fax’s eye with the dropper half the time, saying something to Pointgravè. A transvestal had P.H.-J.’s torn hem hiked up and a spiderish hand on her flesh-colored thigh. P.H.-J.’s face was gray and blue. The floor came up slowly. Bobby C’s squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half lit by the window, tucked up under Gately’s spinning shoulder. Gately felt less high than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant. His head left his shoulders. Gene and Linda were both screaming. The cartridge with the held-open eyes and dropper had been the one about ultra-violence and sadism. A favorite of Kite. Gately thinks sadism is pronounced ‘saddism.’ The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through the door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C’s grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Footnotes

[1] 1. Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth.

[2] Orin’s never once darkened the door of any sort of therapy-professional, by the way, so his takes on his dreams are always generally pretty surface-level.

[3] E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid’s curve, with the tennis courts and pavilions at the center and the staff and students’ parking lots in back of Comm.-Ad. forming the little bashed-in dent that from the air gives the whole facility the Valentine-heart aspect that still wouldn’t have been truly cardioid if the buildings themselves didn’t have their convex bulges all derived from arcs of the same r, a staggering feat given the uneven ground and wildly different electrical-and-plumbing-conduit wallspace required by dormitories, administrative offices, and polyresinous Lung, pull-offable probably by on the whole East Coast one guy, E.T.A.’s original architect, Avril’s old and very dear friend, the topology world’s closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch A.Y. (‘Vector-Field’) Rickey of Brandeis U., now deceased, who used to wow Hal and Mario in Weston by taking off his vest without removing his suit jacket, which M. Pemulis years later exposed as a cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continuous functions, which revelation Hal mourned in a Santa’s-not-real type of secret way, and which Mario simply ignored, preferring to see the vest thing as plain magic.

[4] Those younger staffers who double as academic and athletic instructors are, by convention at North American tennis academies, known as ‘prorectors.’

[5] Known usually as ‘drines — i.e. lightweight speed: Cylert, Tenuate,3 Fastin, Preludin, even sometimes Ritalin. It’s worth an N.B. that, unlike Jim Troeltsch or the Preludin-happy Bridget Boone, Michael Pemulis (out of maybe some queer sort of blue-collar street-type honor) rarely ingests any ‘drines before a match, reserving them for recreation — some people are wired to find heart-pounding eye-wobbling ‘drine-stimulation recreational.

a. Tenuate’s the trade name of diethylpropion hydrochloride, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, technically a prescription antiobesity agent, favored by some athletes for its mildly euphoric and resources-rallying properties w/o the tooth-grinding and hideous post-blood-spike crash that the hairier-chested ‘drines like Fastin and Cylert inflict, though with a discomfitting tendency to cause post-spike ocular nystagmus. Nystagmus or no nystagmus, Tenuate’s a particular favorite of Michael Pemulis, who hoards for personal ingestion every 75-mg. white Tenuate capsule he can lay hands on, and does not sell or trade them, except sometimes to roommate Jim Troeltsch, who nags Pemulis for them and also goes into Pemulis’s special entrepôt-yachting-cap and promotes still more of them on the sly, a couple at a time, feeling that they help his sports-color-commentary loquacity, which secret promotions Pemulis knows about all too well, and is biding his time to retaliate, never you fear.

[6] Lightweight tranqs: Valium-III and Valrelease, good old dependable Xanax, Dai-mane, Buspar, Serax, even Halcion (legally available in Canada, unbelievably, still); with those kids inclined toward a heavier slide — reds, Meprospan, ‘Happy Patch’ transder-mals, Miltown, Stelazine, the odd injury-’scrip Darvon) never lasting for more than a couple seasons for the obvious reason that serious tranqs can make even breathing seem like too much trouble to go to, the cause of a meaty percentage of tranq-related deaths being attributed off the record by Emergency Room personnel to ‘P.S.’ or ‘Pulmonary Sloth.’

[7] Top jr. players are for the most part pretty cautious with alcohol, mostly because the physical consequences of heavy intake — like nausea and dehydration and poor hand-eye interface — make high-level performance almost impossible. Very few other standard substances have prohibitive short-term hangovers, actually, though an evening of even synthetic cocaine will make the next day’s Dawn Drills very unpleasant indeed, which is why so few of E.T.A.’s hard core do cocaine, though there’s also the issue of expense: though many E.T.A.s are the children of upscale parents, the children themselves are rarely flush with $ from home, since the gratification of pretty much every physical need is either taken care of or prohibited by E.T.A. itself. It’s maybe worth noting that the same people hardwired to enjoy recreational ‘drines also tend to gravitate toward cocaine and methedrine and other engine-revvers, while another broad class of more naturally higher-strung types tend more toward the edge-bevelling substances: tranqs, cannabis, barbiturates, and — yes — alcohol.

[8] I.e.: psylocibin; Happy Patchesa; MDMA/Xstasy (bad news, though, X); various low-tech manipulations of the benzene-ring in methoxy-class psychedelics, usually home-makable; synthetic dickies like MMDA, DMA, DMMM, 2CB, para-DOT I–VI, etc. — though note this class doesn’t and shouldn’t include CNS-rattlers like STP, DOM, the long-infamous West-U.S.-Coast ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ (gamma hydroxybutyric acid), LSD-25 or -32, or DMZ/M.P. Enthusiasm for this stuff seems independent of neurologic type.

a. Homemade transdermals, usually MDMA or Muscimole, with DDMS or the over-counter-available DMSO as the transdermal carrier.

[9] A.k.a. LSD-25, often with a slight ‘drine kicker added, called ‘Black Star’ because in metro Boston the available acid usually comes on chip-sized squares of thin cardboard with a black stencilled star on them, all from a certain shadowy node of supply down in New Bedford. All acid and Grievous Bodily Harm, like cocaine and heroin, come into Boston mostly from New Bedford MA, which in turn gets most of its supply from Bridgeport CT, which is the true lower intestine of North America, Bridgeport, be advised, if you’ve never been through there.

[10] Like most sports academies, E.T.A. maintains the gentle fiction that 100 % of its students are enrolled at their own ambitious volition and not that of, say for instance, their parents, some of whom (tennis-parents, like the stage-mothers of Hollywood legend) are bad news indeed.

[11] An involved Arab women’s game involving little shells and a quilted gameboard — rather like mah jongg without rules, by the diplomatic and medical husbands’ estimate.

[12] Meperedine hydrochloride and pentazocine hydrochloride, Schedule C–II and C–IVa narcotic analgesics, respectively, both from the good folks over at Sanofi Winthrop Pharm-Labs, Inc.

a. Following the Continental Controlled Substance Act of Y.T.M.P., O.N.A.N.D.E.A.’s hierarchy of analgesics/antipyretics/anxiolytics establishes drug-classes of Category-II through Category-VI, with C–II’s (e.g. Dilaudid, Demerol) being judged the heaviest w/r/t dependence and possible abuse, down to C–VTs that are about as potent as a kiss on the forehead from Mom.

[13] Though masked in the evidentiary photo and never once given up or named by Gately to anyone, this can be presumed to have been one Trent (‘Quo Vadis’) Kite, Gately’s old and once-gifted friend from his Beverly MA childhood.

[14] This A.D.A.’s little personal trademark was that he always wore an anachronistic but quality Stetson-brand businessman’s hat with a decorative feather in the band, and frequently touched or played with the hat in tense situations.

[15] The Bureau of Alcohol/Tobacco/Firearms, at that time under the temporary aegis of the United States Office of Unspecified Services.

[16] Extremely unpleasant Québecois-insurgents-and-cartridge-related subsequent developments make it clear that this was (again) Trent (‘Quo Vadis’) Kite.

[17] The codeineless kind, though — almost the first physical datum Gately took in in the nasty flashbulb-flash shock of the occupied bedroom’s light coming on, to give you an idea of an oral-narcotics man’s depth of psychic investment.

[18] On top of the seascape safe’s more negotiable contents, themselves on top of an unplugged and head-parked and absolutely top-hole genuine InterLace state-of-the-art TP/viewer ensemble in a multishelved hardwood rollable like entertainment-system-console thing, with a cartridge-dock and double-head drive in a compartment underneath with doors with classy little brass maple-leaf knob things and several shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges, which latter Don Gately’s colleague just about drooled all over the parquet flooring at the potential discriminating-type-fence-value of, potentially, if they were rare or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid.