Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘So the suffering gets less lonely,’ Blott prompts him.

Two curves down the hall in V.R.5, where the viewer’s on the south wall and doesn’t get turned on, the Canadian John Wayne’s got LaMont Chu and ‘Sleepy T.P.’ Peterson and Kieran McKenna and Brian van Vleck.

‘He’s talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,’ Chu tells the other three. They’re on the floor Indian-style, Wayne standing with his back against the door, rotating his head to stretch the neck. ‘His point is that progress towards genuine Show-caliber mastery is slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than temperament.’

‘Is this right Mr. Wayne?’

Chu says ‘… that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’

‘Plateaux,’ Wayne says, looking at the ceiling and pushing the back of his head isometrically against the door. ‘With an X. Plateaux.’

The inactive viewer’s screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day. Chu’s cross-legged posture is textbook. ‘What John’s saying is the types who don’t hang in there and slog on the patient road toward mastery are basically three. Types. You’ve got what he calls your Despairing type, who’s fine as long as he’s in the quick-improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn’t got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog, and he can’t stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?’

‘Geronímo!’ the other kids yell, not quite in sync.

‘He bails, right,’ Chu says. He refers to index cards. Wayne’s head makes the door rattle slightly. Chu says, ‘Then you’ve got your Obsessive type, J.W. says, so eager to plateau-hop he doesn’t even know the word patient, much less bumble or slog, when he gets stalled at a plateau he tries to like will and force himself off it, by sheer force of work and drill and will and practice, drilling and obsessively honing and working more and more, as in frantically, and he overdoes it and gets hurt, and pretty soon he’s all chronically messed up with injuries, and he hobbles around on the court still obsessively overworking, until finally he’s hardly even able to walk or swing, and his ranking plummets, until finally one P.M. there’s a little knock on his door and it’s deLint, here for a little chat about your progress here at E.T.A.’

‘Banzai! El Bailo! See ya!’

‘Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You’ve got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he’s made to get to the plateau, and doesn’t mind staying at the plateau because it’s comfortable and familiar, and he doesn’t worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he’s designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still — his whole game is based on this plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he’ll say he doesn’t care, he says he’s in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he’s content. Until one day there’s a quiet knock at the door.’

‘It’s DeLint!’

‘A quiet chat!’

‘Geronzai!’

Van Vleck looks up at Wayne, who’s now turned away with his hands against the door frame, shoving, one leg back, stretching the right calf. ‘This is your advice, Mr. Wayne sir? This isn’t Chu palming himself off as you again?’

They all want to know how Wayne does it, #2 continentally in 18’s at just seventeen, and very likely #1 after the WhataBurger and already getting calls from ProServ agents Tavis has Lateral Alice Moore screen. Wayne’s the most sought-after Big Buddy at E.T.A. You have to apply for Wayne as Buddy by random drawing.

LaMont Chu and T. P. Peterson are sending van Vleck optical daggers as Wayne turns around to stretch a hip-flexor and says he’s said pretty much all he has to say.

‘Todder, I admire your savvy, I admire a kid’s certain worldly skepticism, no matter how misplaced it is here. So even though it fucks me on the odds, so there’s now like practically no way I can come out square,’ M. Pemulis says in V.R.2, subdorm C, sitting on the very edge of the divan with a few feet of beige shag between him and his four kids, all cross-legged on cushions; he says, Til reward your worldly skepticism this once by letting you try it with only two, so like I’ve got just two cards here, and I hold them up, one in each hand…’ He stops abruptly, knocks his temple with the heel of a hand that holds a Jack. ‘Whoa, what am I thinking. We all gotta put in our fiveski here first.’

Otis P. Lord clears his throat: ‘The ante.’

‘Or it’s called the pot,’ says Todd Possalthwaite, laying a five on the little pile.

‘Jaysus I’m thinking, sweet Jaysus what am I getting into with these kids that speak the lingo like veteran Jersey-shore croupiers. I got to be missing a widget or something, ‘t the fuck, though, you know what I’m saying? So Todd man you choose just one of the cards, we got the clubby Jack and the spade Queen here, and you choose … and so down they go both of them face-down, and I like swirl them around on the floor a little, not shuffle but swirl so they’re in plain view the whole time, and you follllllowwwwwwww the card you chose, around and around, which like with three cards maybe I’ve got some chance you lose track but with two? With just two?’

Ted Schacht in V.R.3 at his giant plasticene oral demonstrator, the huge dental mock-up, white planks of teeth and obscene pink gums, twine-size floss anchored around both wrists:

‘The vital thing here gentlemen being not the force or how often you rotate to particulate-free floss but the motion, see, a soft sawing motion, gently up and down both ancipitals of the enamel’ — demonstrating down the side of a bicuspid big as the kids’ heads, the plasticene gum-stuff yielding with sick sucking sounds, Schacht’s five kids all either glazed-looking or glued to their watch’s second-hand — ‘and then here’s the key, here’s the thing so few people understand: down below the ostensible gumline into the basal recessions at either side of the gingival mound that obtrudes between the teeth, down below, where your most pernicious particulates hide and breed.’

Troeltsch holds court in his, Pemulis and Schacht’s room in Subdorm C, supinely upright against both of his and one of Schacht’s pillows, the vaporizer chugging, one of his kids holding Kleenex at the ready.

‘Boys, what it is is I’ll tell you it’s repetition. First last always. It’s hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut. It’s making the same pivots and lunges and strokes over and over and over again, at you boys’s age it’s reps for their own sake, putting results on the back burner, why they never give anybody the boot for insufficient progress under fourteen, it’s repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe and sweat. It’s no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. At like fourteen, give and take, they figure here. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don’t need for the mechanics anymore, after they’ve sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball. The ball starts being something that you just know ought to be in the air, spinning. This is when they start getting on you about concentration. Right now of course you have to concentrate, there’s no choice, it’s not wired down into the language yet, you have to think about it every time you do it. But wait till fourteen or fifteen. Then they see you as being at one of the like crucial plateaus. Fifteen, tops. Then the concentration and character shit starts. Then they really come after you. This is the crucial plateau where character starts to matter. Focus, self-consciousness, the chattering head, the cackling voices, the choking-issue, fear versus whatever isn’t fear, self-image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped cold-footed men inside your mind, cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor. Now these start to matter. Thirteen at the earliest. Staff looks at a range of thirteen to fifteen. Also the age of manhood-rituals in various cultures. Think about it. Until then, repetition. Until then you might as well be machines, here, is their view. You’re just going through the motions. Think about the phrase: Going Through The Motions. Wiring them into the motherboard. You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it right now.’

James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. of Orinda CA prefers one long Q&A-type interface, with V.R.8’s viewer playing ambient stuff against relaxation-vistas of surf, shimmering ponds, fields of nodding wheat.

‘Time for about maybe two more, me droogies.’

‘Say it’s close and the guy starts kertwanging you. Balls are way in and he’s calling them out. You can’t believe the flagrancy of it.’

‘Implicit this is a no-linesman situation, Traub, you’re saying.’

Creepily-blue-eyed Audern Tallat-Kelpsa chimes in: ‘This is early rounds. The kind they give you only two balls. Honor systems. All of a sudden there he is kertwanging on you. It happens.’

‘I know it happens.’

Traub says, ‘Whether he’s outright kertwanging or just head-fucking you. Do you start kertwanging back? Tit for tat? What do you do?’

‘Do we assume there’s a crowd.’

‘Early round. Remote court. No witnesses. You’re on your own out there. Do you kertwang back.’

‘You do not kertwang back. You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling. If you still win, you’ll have grown inside as a person.’

‘If you lose?’

‘If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his next round.’

A couple of the kids have notebooks and studious nods. Struck is a prized tactician, very formal in B.B. group-sessions, something scholarly and detached about him his charges often revere.

‘We can discuss private water-jug unpleasantness on Friday,’ Struck says, looking at his watch.

A hand raised by the violently cross-eyed Carl Whale, age thirteen. Acknowledgment from Struck.

‘Say you have to fart.’

‘You’re serious, Mobes, aren’t you.’

‘Jim sir, say you’re playing out there, and suddenly you have to fart. It feels like one of those real hot nasty pressurized ones.’

‘I get the picture.’

Now some empathic murmurs, exchanged looks. Josh Gopnik is nodding very intensely. Struck stands very straight to the right of the viewer, hands behind his back like an Oxford don.

‘I mean the kind that’s real urgent.’ Whale looks briefly around him. ‘But that it’s not impossible it’s actually a need to go to the bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart.’

Now five heads are nodding, pained, urgent: clearly a vexing sub-14 issue. Struck examines a cuticle.

‘Meaning defecate is what you mean, then, Mobes. Go to the bathroom.’

Gopnik looks up. ‘Carl’s saying the kind where you don’t know what to do. What if you think you have to fart but it’s really that you have to shit?’

‘As in it’s a competitive situation, it’s not a situation where you can go bearing down and forcing and see what happens.’

‘So out of caution you don’t,’ Gopnik says.

‘—fart,’ Philip Traub says.

‘But then you’ve denied yourself an urgent fart, and you’re running around trying to compete with a terrible hot nasty uncomfortable fart riding around the court inside you.’

Two levels down, Ortho Stice and his brood: the little libraryish circle of soft chairs and lamps in the warm foyer off the front door to subdorm C:

‘And what he says he says it’s about more than tennis, mein kinder. Mein kinder, well it sort of means my family. He eyeballs me right square in the eye and says it’s about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn’t know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give. You’ll hear him ask it if you’re privileged to ever get an interface. The call could come at anytime: the man wants a mano-to-mano interface. You’ll hear him say it over and over. What have you got to give. What are you willing to part with. I see you’re looking a little pale there, Wagen-knecht. Is this scary you bet your little pink personal asses it’s scary. It’s the big time. He’ll tell you straight the fuck out. It’s about discipline and sacrifice and honor to something way bigger than your personal ass. He’ll mention America. He’ll talk patriotism and don’t think he won’t. He’ll talk about it’s patriotic play that’s the high road to the thing. He’s not American but I tell you straight out right here he makes me proud to be American. Mein kinder. He’ll say it’s how to learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn’t good its own self.’

There’s a long pause. The front door is newer than the wood around it.

‘I’d chew fiberglass for that old man.’

The only reason the Buddies in V.R.8 can hear the little burst of applause from the foyer is because Struck won’t hesitate to pause and consider silently as long as he has to. To the kids the pauses spell dignity and integrity and the still-water depth of a guy with nine years in at three different academies, and who has to shave daily. He exhales a slow breath through rounded lips, looking off up at the ceiling’s guilloche border.