Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘Q.’

‘The Moms though now stops just inside the border of string and she squints, her glasses have dust, she starts to see and process just what it is the kid’s holding out to her. Her hand’s outstretched in the air over the garden’s string and she stops.

‘Hallie takes one step forward, arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes “I ate this.”

‘The Moms says she begs his pardon.

‘Helen, you decide. But consider the fragility of the obsesso-compulsive’s control. The terrible life-ruling phobias. Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision, and untidiness, which you can’t get much untidier than basement-mold.’

‘Q.’

‘The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time.

‘ “I ate this” Hal goes, he’s still holding the thing out, not crying, a kind of clinical grimness to him about it, like the mold’s some audit it’s his job to show her. And do you want to know if she touched it?’

‘Q.’

‘It suddenly occurs to me that if you want stuff on the Moms and The Mad Stork you could contact Bain. He practically lived with us in Weston. As like a secondary source. I’m sure he’d discuss the Moms’s foibles all you want. The man still practically holds up a crucifix at any mention. His little greeting-card company has just been bought up by a huge novelty concern, so I’m sure he’s in his big room lying there having palm-fronds waved and his forehead wiped, feeling flush and voluble. I guess I’d rather you didn’t ask him about my foibles, but he’s inexhaustible on the subject of the Moms and O.C.D. He never leaves home, which home is one room, the converted Children’s Reading Room of what used to be the Waltham Public Library, which is the whole third floor. He learned from the Moms how to minimize doorways to traverse. I’m afraid he’s not InterNetted and has an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail. His snail-mail address is Marlon K. Bain, Saprogenic Greetings Inc., BPL-Waltham Bldg., 1214 Totten Pond Road, Waltham MA 021549872/4. It’d also be good if you could avoid mentioning the number 2 to him. He has problems with the number 2. I don’t know if his not leaving home is similar to the Moms’s not leaving home. This is the most I’ve thought about the Moms in a dog’s age, to be honest with you. You have this way of getting stuff out of me. It’s like you do nothing but sit there with that cigarette and you’re all I can see and all I want is to please you. It’s like I can’t help it. Is this just good journalism, Helen?’

‘Or is there something more going on here, some kind of strange bond I feel between us that sort of like tears down all my normal personal-life boundaries and makes me open totally to you? I guess I have to hope you won’t take advantage. Does this all sound like some kind of line? Maybe if it was a line it’d sound less lame. I guess I do wish I could come off more suave. I don’t know what else to do except just tell what’s going on inside me, even if it sounds lame. I never have any clue what you’re thinking about it.’

‘ “Help! My son ate this!” She screamed the same thing over and over, holding the mold-rhombus up like a torch, running around just inside the string border while I and Hallie staggered back, literally like staggered back, gaping at our first taste of apocalypse, a corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order.

‘ “Help! My son ate this! My son has eaten this! Help!” she kept screaming, running in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string, and I’m seeing The Mad Stork’s face at the glass door over the deck, palms out and thumbs together to make a frame, and Mario my other brother next to him as usual down around his knee, with Mario’s face all squished against the glass from supporting his weight, their breath on the window spreading, Hal inside the string finally and trying to follow her, crying, and not impossibly I also crying a little, just from the infectious stress, and those two through the back door’s glass just watching, and fucking Booboo also trying to make that frame with his hands, so finally it was Mr. Reehagen next door, who was so-called “friends” with her, who had to come out and over and finally had to hook up the hose/

a. This may be a lie — no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having been any cameras in HmH’s kitchen, bathroom, etc.

b. sic.

[235] She’d arrayed the photos herself, from her purse, on the dresser; he hadn’t had to ask her to; it added to the sense of synchronous mercy, a cosmic kindness balancing out the Jacuzzi’s dead bird and the frigidly invasive reporter.

[236] E.T.A. shorthand: Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin.

[237] The NW-to-NE angle at the former Monteplier VT isn’t quite 90°, but it is very close. By the way, the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem triangle is one of those endless-based 25-130-25 triangles that looks so hideous when projected onto one of Corbett Thorp’s distorting globes in the Trivium’s Cubular Trigonometry.

[238] Quod vide here Ch. 7, ‘It All Started with a Colorectal Neoplastis, an Openness to Communicative Manifestations of Divine Grace, and a Seedy-Looking Fellow That Publicly Lifted a Chair He Was Standing On, That Was Clearly Just Such a Manifestation,’ in The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut fur Neutronenphysik und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY. (N.b. that while the annular meta-disease treatment is highly effective on metastatic cancers, it proved a disappointment on the HIV-spectrum viri, since AIDS is itself a meta-disease.)

[239] Because he’d been sworn to secrecy, Green doesn’t tell Lenz that Charlotte Treat had shared with Green that her adoptive father had been one-time Chair of the Northeast Regional Board of Dental Anesthesiologists, and had been pretty liberal with the use of the old N2O and thiopental sodium around the Treats’ Revere MA household, for personal and extremely unsavory reasons.

[240] ® The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hilo HI — ‘A LOW SODIUM FOOD.’

[241] Popular corporate-hard-rock bands, though it shows where Bruce Green’s psychic decline really started that, except for TBA5, these bands were all truly big two or three years past, and are now slightly passe, with Choosy Mothers having split up entirely by now to explore individual creative directions.

[242] This is one reason why he consents to be hung way out into space from Schtitt’s transom for filming all-court play, held only by some prorector with a firm grip on the back of his lock’s vest, which the players looking up at Mario’s forward ski-jump posture off the crow’s nest find incredibly terrifying and audacious and ballsy, and Avril won’t even leave HmH during all-court filmings.

[243] This though Avril’s never come right out and articulated her worry about his P.M. safety to Mario, not wanting to seem as though she’s making a special issue of his deficits and vulnerability or to seem inconsistent when she lets Hal go off nightly wherever he likes or just basically in any way to inhibit Mario’s sense of autonomy and freedom by causing him to worry about her worrying — which he does, rather a lot, worry about Avril’s worrying about him. If that makes sense.

[244] Mario, like his maternal uncle Charles Tavis, has a dislike of fluorescent lighting.

[245] ‘Is that supposed to mean something? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. Literally nothing.’

[246] A depressing new Sober Club in Somerville’s Davis Square where AAs and NAs — mostly new and young — get heartbreakingly dolled up and dance stiffly and tremble with sober sexual anxiety and they stand around with Cokes and M.F.s telling each other how great it is to be in an intensely social venue with all your self-conscious inhibitions unmedicated and screaming in your head. The smiles alone in these places are excruciating to see.

[247] A Restriction means just no Overnight that week and an extra Chore; a House Restriction means you have to be back an hour after work and nightly meetings; Full House is no leaving the House except for work and meetings, and 15 minutes to get back, and no even leaving to buy smokes or a paper, or even to go out in the lawn for oxygen, and one violation means a Discharge: F.H.R. is Ennet’s version of the Hole, and it’s dreaded.

[248] Ennet House takes its urines over to the methadone clinic, which has all manner of clients who have to submit weekly urines to courts and programs, and the clinic lets Ennet put its urines gratis in the weekly batch the clinic sends out to an E.M.I.T.-mill clinic all the way out in Natick, and in return every once in a while Pat gets a call from the trollish little social worker who runs #2 about some client down there who’s decided he wants off the methadone, as well, and Pat will shoot the client way up on the Interview list and give him an interview and usually let the client in — Calvin T. and Danielle S. had both originally gotten into Ennet House this way, i.e. via #2.

[249] It’s maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or incontinence his mother’d just drunkenly left there or passed out in, no matter how pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once.

[250] (who owns a Lincoln, Henderson does, origins unknown and suspicious)

[251] This is all for Insurance Reasons, the Staff sheet on which Gately doesn’t understand all the language of, and fears.

[252] It’s against House rules to smoke upstairs in the bedrooms — more Insurance Reasons — and a week’s Restriction is supposed to be mandatory, and Pat’s personally a fanatic about the rule, but Gately, much as he fears the grim boilerplate on the Insurance Sheet, always pretends he doesn’t see anything when he sees somebody smoking up here, since when he was a resident he actually used to sometimes smoke in his sleep he was so tense, and every once in a while will wake up and find that he has again, i.e. lit a gasper and apparently smoked it and put it out all in his sleep, down in bed in his Staff oubliette in the basement.

[253] (the items from the House’s donated-clothes baskets that fit Gately being few and far)

[254] Gately’s made it an iron point never again ever to run, once he got straight.

[255] NNE street argot for any kind of handgun.

[256] (Erdedy’s hands still up, w/ keys)

[257] (NNE Region, trying hard not to irritate Tine Sr. by fidgeting)

[258] (Desert-SW Region, understated in a massive peasant skirt and sensible flats)

[259] These, ® a number of fine companies, are like enormous versions of the little windshield-washer implements at service stations — an industrial mop-handle w/ a canted rubber blade at the end, used for spreading puddle-water out so it dries faster, at some academies replaced with the EZ-DRI hinged-roller-of-dense-sponge-at-the-end court-dryer, which E.T.A. eschews because of how fast the rolling sponge at the end mildews and smells bad.

[260] Mrs. Incandenza always grades everything in blue ink.

[261] A phenomenon not unknown, viz. menial employees and shift-workers mining E.T.A.’s collected waste for cast-off value, and permitted by the administration and Mr. Harde, or rather just not actively discouraged, since ‘One man’s trash …’ and so on, with the only requirement being a certain visual discretion when carrying off E.T.A.’s offal, simply because the whole thing’s kind of embarrassing for everybody.

[262] I.e. the Women’s Tennis Association, the distaff equivalent of the A.T.P.

[263] Sic, presumably for Betamax (®Sony).

[264] Sic, but it’s pretty obvious what Marathe means here.

[265] Reinforced Aluminum Spectation Unit.

[266] The occasional upscale parent could be seen exiting Comm.-Ad. and crossing behind the West Courts’ south fence to the asphalt lot and what were unmistakably parental autos, all remarkable for their textbook tire-pressure and bristles of cellular antennae and the absence of any little dust-smiles on their rear or side windows. Charles Tavis had spent the morning interfacing with parents of those E.T.A. kids injured in I.-Day’s Es-chaton free-for-all. Lateral Alice Moore, for a treat, had been listening to Tavis and parents on her headphones, while typing, instead of her collection of aerobic favorites. Struck and Pemulis had cruised by before lunch and blarneyed her into putting the exchanges on her intercom’s speaker for a couple minutes. You should hear C.T. enclosed with parents sometime. It was only some of the parents — Todd Possalthwaite’s dad was on honeymoon in the Azores, and Otis P. Lord’s mother had some inner-ear thing and the Lords couldn’t fly. But Pemulis and Struck concurred that everyone with any kind of administration in his blood should hear E.T.A.’s Headmaster with parents and a placative mission, a master charmer past all social gauge, a Houdini with the manacles of fact, the interfaces like fluidless seductions — Pemulis said the man’s missed a genuine calling in sales — everyone practically wanting to smoke a cigarette afterward, the parents leave weeping, pumping Tavis’s hands — one parent per hand — practically begging him to accept both their thanks and their apologies for daring to even possibly think, even for a moment. Then, supporting each other, making their way over Lateral Alice’s third rail and past the beaming extremely polite lads by her desk and out through the pressurized glass lobby doors and down off the white-pillared neo-Georgian porch and past courts and bleachers and into their well-maintained autos and out the portcullis and very slowly down the hill’s brick drive before they even recall they’d forgotten to pop in on their injured kid, sign his cast, feel his forehead, say Hey.

[267] I.e. ace/double fault, rather like the ratio of strikeouts to walks for a pitcher.

[268] It was like Steeply’d never seen so many left-handed people: both Hal Incandenza and the boy in black were left-handed, one of the two little girls four courts down was left-handed, deLint was marking the chart with his left hand. Both A.F.R. turncoat Rémy Marathe and Québecer triple-operative Luria P— — were southpaws, though Steeply realized that this could hardly be called significant.

[269]

Saprogenic Greetings*

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags ‘N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises

Ms. Helen Steepley And So On November Y.D.A.U.

… (1) Orin Incandenza and I played, practiced, and generally hung out through most of what seemed at the time to be our formative years. We met because I kept encountering him across the net in the local tennis tournaments we played around metro Boston, Boys’ 10’s. We were the two best 10-year-old males in Boston. We soon became practice partners, our mothers driving us every weekday afternoon to a junior development program at the Auburndale Tennis Club in West Newton. After my own parents were horribly killed on the Jamaica Way commuter road one morning in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter, I became a sort of hanger-on at the Incandenza house out in Weston. When J.O.I, founded the Academy, I was one of the first matriculants. Orin and I were inseparable until around age 15, when I reached my own zenith in terms of early puberty and athletic promise and began to be able to beat him. He took it hard. We were never inseparable again. We spent quantity time together again briefly for a few months the next year, during a period when we both experimented heavily with recreational substances. We both ended up losing enthusiasm for substances after only a couple years, Orin because he had finally entered puberty and had discovered the weaker sex and found he needed all his faculties and guile, myself because a couple of really negative methoxy-psychedelic experiences left me with certain Disabilities that to this day make normal life an exceptional challenge, and which I tend to blame on having done deadly-serious hallucinogens at a sort of larval psychological stage during which no N. American adolescent should be allowed to do hallucinogens. These Disabilities led to my departure from the Enfield Tennis Academy at 17, prior to graduation, and my withdrawal from competitive junior tennis and contemporary life as we know it. Orin was largely burned out on tennis too by 17, though no one in his right mind could have foreseen a defection to organized U.S. football in his future.