Infinite jest - David Wallace

Her husband looked down at her, paling: ‘What is it?’

‘It’s pain.’

It was pain. Broken water had made several steps below them gleam. She seemed to James Incandenza to sort of turn in toward herself, hold herself low, curl and sink to a stairstep she barely made the edge of, hunched, her forehead against her shapely knees. Incandenza saw the whole slow thing in a light like he was Vermeer: she sank steadily from his side and he bent to hers and she then tried to rise.

‘Wait wait wait wait. Wait.’

‘It’s pain.’

A bit ragged from an afternoon of Wild Turkey and low-temperature holography, James had thought Avril was dying right before his eyes. His own father had dropped dead on a set of stairs. Luckily Avril’s half-brother Charles Tavis was upstairs, using the portable StairMaster he’d brought with him for an extended and emotional-battery-recharging visit the preceding spring, after the horrible snafu with the video-scoreboard at Toronto’s Skydome; and he heard the commotion and scuttled out and down and promptly took charge.

He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he’d been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the same material.[113] He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb. Mario had been given the name of Dr. James Incandenza’s father’s father, a dour and golf-addicted Green Valley AZ oculist who made a small fortune, just after Jim grew up and fled east, by inventing those quote X-Ray Specs! that don’t work but whose allure for mid-’6os pubescent comic-book readers almost compelled mail-order, then selling the copyrights to New England novelty-industry titan AcméCo, then promptly in mid-putt died, Mario Sr. did, allowing James Incandenza Sr. to retire from a sad third career as the Man From Glad[114] in sandwich-bag commercials during the B.S. 1960s and move back to the saguaro-studded desert he loathed and efficiently drink himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway.

Anyway, Mario II’s incomplete gestation and arachnoidal birth left the kid with some lifelong character-building physical challenges. Size was one, he being in sixth grade about the size of a toddler and at 18+ in a range somewhere between elf and jockey. There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volk-mann’s contracture[115] curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S’s and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and forming a pretend lens-frame to scout scenes through, plus maybe tossing tennis balls very short distances to players who wanted them, but not for much else, though the arms were impressively — almost familial-dysautonomically — pain-resistant, and could be pinched, punctured, singed, and even compressed in a basement optical-device-securing viselike thing by Mario’s older brother Orin without effect or complaint.

Bradypedestríanism-wise, Mario had not so much club feet as more like block feet: not only flat but perfectly square, good for kicking knob-fumbled doors open with but too short to be conventionally employed as feet: together with the lordosis in his lower spine, they force Mario to move in the sort of lurchy half-stumble of a vaudeville inebriate, body tilted way forward as if into a wind, right on the edge of pitching face-first onto the ground, which as a child he did fairly often, whether given a bit of a shove from behind by his older brother Orin or no. The frequent forward falls help explain why Mario’s nose was squished severely in and so flared out to either side of his face but did not rise from it, with the consequence that his nostrils tended to flap just a bit, particularly during sleep. One eyelid hung lower than the other over his open eyes — good and gently brown eyes, if a bit large and protrusive to qualify as conventionally human eyes — the one lid hung like an ill-tempered windowshade, and his older brother Orin had sometimes tried to give the recalcitrant lid that smart type of downward snap that can unstick a dicky shade, but had succeeded only in gradually loosening the lid from its sutures, so that it eventually had to be refashioned and reattached in yet another blepharoplasty-procedure, because it was in fact not Mario’s real eyelid — that had been sacrificed when the fist stuck to his face like a tongue to cold metal had been peeled away, at nativity — but an extremely advanced blepharoprosthesis of dermal fibropolymer studded with horsehair lashes that curved out into space well beyond the reach of his other lid’s lashes and together with the lazy lid-action itself gave even Mario’s most neutral expression the character of an oddly friendly pirate’s squint. Together with the involuntarily constant smile.

This is probably also the place to mention Hal’s older brother Mario’s khaki-colored skin, an odd dead gray-green that in its corticate texture and together with his atrophic in-curled arms and arachnodactylism gave him, particularly from a middle-distance, an almost uncannily reptilian/ dinosaurian look. The fingers being not only mucronate and talonesque but nonprehensile, which is what made Mario’s knifework untenable at table. Plus the thin lank slack hair, at once tattered and somehow too smooth, that looked at 18+ like the hair of a short plump 48-year-old stress engineer and athletic director and Academy Headmaster who grows one side to girlish length and carefully combs it so it rides thinly up and over the gleaming yarmulke of bare gray-green-complected scalp on top and down over the other side where it hangs lank and fools no one and tends to flap back up over in any wind Charles Tavis forgets to carefully keep his left side to. Or that he’s slow, Hal’s brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found — but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epis-temically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.

Or that his status at the Enfield Tennis Academy — erected, along with Dr. and Mrs. Fs marriage’s third and final home at the northern rear of the grounds, when Mario was nine and Hallie eight and Orin seventeen and in his one E.T.A. year B-4 Singles and in the U.S.T.A.’s top 75 — that Mario’s life there is by all appearances kind of a sad and left-out-type existence, the only physically challenged minor in residence, unable even to grip a regulation stick or stand unaided behind a boundaried space. That he and his late father had been, no pun intended, inseparable. That Mario’d been like an honorary assistant production-assistant and carried the late Incan-denza’s film and lenses and filters in a complex backpack the size of a joint of beef for most of the last three years of the late-blooming filmmaker’s life, attending him on shoots and sleeping with multiple pillows in small soft available spaces in the same motel room as Himself and occasionally tottering out for a bright-red plastic bottle of something called Big Red Soda Water and taking it to the apparently mute veiled graduate-intern down the motel’s hall, fetching coffee and joe and various pancreatitis-remedies and odds and ends for props and helping D. Leith out with Continuity when Incandenza wanted to preserve Continuity, basically being the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart’s final and best-loved love, lurching gamely but not pathetically to keep up with the tall stooped increasingly bats man’s slow patient two-meter stride through airports, train stations, carrying the lenses, inclined ever forward but in no way resembling any kind of leashed pet.

When required to stand upright and still, like when videotaping an E.T.A.’s service motion or manning the light meters on the set of a high-contrast chiaroscuro art film, Mario in his forward list is supported by a NNYC-apartrnent-door-style police lock, a.7-meter steel pole that extends from a special Velcroed vest and angles about 40° down and out to a slotted piece of lead blocking (a bitch to carry, in that complicated pack) placed by someone understanding and prehensile on the ground before him. He stood thus buttressed on sets Himself had him help erect and furnish and light, the lighting usually unbelievably complex and for some parts of the crew sometimes almost blinding, sunbursts of angled mirrors and Marino lamps and key-light kliegs, Mario getting a thorough technical grounding in a cinematic craft he never even imagined being able to pursue on his own until Xmas of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, when a gaily wrapped package forwarded from the offices of Incandenza’s attorney revealed that Himself had designed and built and legally willed (in a codicil) to be gaily wrapped and forwarded for Mario’s thirteenth Xmas a trusty old Bolex H64 Rex 5[116] tri-lensed camera bolted to an oversized old leather aviator’s helmet and supported by struts whose ends were the inverted tops of training-room crutches and curved nicely over Mario’s shoulders, so the Bolex H64 required no digital prehensility because it fit over Mario’s oversized face[117] like a tri-plated scuba mask and was controlled by a sewing-machine-adapted foot treadle, and but even then it took some serious getting used to, and Mario’s earliest pieces of digital juvenilia are marred/enhanced by this palsied, pointing-every-which-way quality of like home movies shot at a dead run.

Five years hence, Mario’s facility with the head-mount Bolex attenuates the sadness of his status here, allowing him to contribute via making the annual E.T.A. fundraising documentary cartridge, videotaping students’ strokes and occasionally from over the railing of Schtitt’s supervisory transom the occasional challenge-match — the taping’s become part of the pro-instruction package detailed in the E.T.A. catalogue — plus producing more ambitious, arty-type things that occasionally find a bit of an à-clef-type following in the E.T.A. community.

After Orin Incandenza left the nest to first hit and then kick collegiate balls, there was almost nobody at E.T.A. or its Enfield-Brighton environs who did not treat Mario M. Incandenza with the casual gentility of somebody who doesn’t pity you or admire you so much as just vaguely prefer it when you’re around. And Mario — despite rectilinear feet and cumbersome police lock the most prodigious walker-and-recorder in three districts — hit the unsheltered area streets daily at a very slow pace, a halting constitutional, sometimes w/ head-mounted Bolex and sometimes not, and took citizens’ kindness and cruelty the same way, with a kind of extra-inclined half-bow that mocked his own canted posture without pity or cringe. Mario’s an especial favorite among the low-rent shopkeepers up and down E.T.A.’s stretch of Commonwealth Ave., and photographic stills from some of his better efforts adorn the walls behind certain Comm. Ave. deli counters and steam presses and Korean-keyed cash registers. The object of a strange and maybe kind of cliquey affection from Lyle the Spandexed sweat-guru, to whom he sometimes brings Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes to cut the diet’s salt, Mario sometimes finds younger E.T.A.s referred to him by Lyle on really ticklish matters of injury and incapacity and character and rallying-what-remains, and never much knows what to say. Trainer Barry Loach all but kisses the kid’s ring, since it’s Mario who through coincidence saved him from the rank panhandling underbelly of Boston Common’s netherworld and more or less got him his job.[118] Plus of course there’s the fact that Schtitt himself constitutionalizes with him, of certain warm evenings, and lets him ride in his surplus sidecar. An object of some weird attracto-repulsive gestalt for Charles Tavis, Mario treats C.T. with the quiet deference he can feel his possible half-uncle wanting, and stays out of his way as much as possible, for Tavis’s sake. Players at Denny’s, when they all get to go to Denny’s, almost vie to see who gets to cut up the cut-upable parts of Mario’s under-12-size Kilobreakfast.

And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes Mario, secretly. God-type issues aside, Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes. People who’re somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic[119] Mario floats, for Hal. He calls him Booboo but fears his opinion more than probably anybody except their Moms’s. Hal remembers the unending hours of blocks and balls on the hardwood floors of early childhood’s 36 Belle Ave., Weston MA, tangrams and See ‘N Spell, huge-headed Mario hanging in there for games he could not play, for make-believe in which he had no interest other than proximity to his brother. Avril remembers Mario still wanting Hal to help him with bathing and dressing at thirteen — an age when most unchallenged kids are ashamed of the very space their sound pink bodies take up — and wanting the help for Hal’s sake, not his own. Despite himself (and showing a striking lack of insight into his Moms’s psyche), Hal fears that Avril sees Mario as the family’s real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type, a very rare and shining thing, even if his intuition — slow and silent — scares her, his academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each A.M. without fail since the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry. This is why she tries so terribly hard to leave Mario alone, not to hover or wring, to treat him so less specially than she wants: it is for him. It is kind of noble, pitiable. Her love for the son who was born a surprise transcends all other experiences and informs her life. Hal suspects. It was Mario, not Avril, who obtained Hal his first copies of the unabridged O.E.D. at a time when Hal was still being shunted around for the assessment of possible damage, Booboo pulling them home in a wagon by his bicuspids over the fake-rural blacktop roads of upscale Weston, months before Hal tested out at Whatever’s Beyond Eidetic on the Mnemonic Verbal Inventory designed by a dear and trusted colleague of the Moms at Brandeis. It was Avril, not Hal, who insisted that Mario live not in HmH with her and Charles Tavis but with Hal in an E.T.A. subdorm. But in the Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland it was Hal, not she, who, when the veiled legate from the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed showed up at the E.T.A. driveway’s portcullis to discuss with Mario issues of blind inclusion v. visual estrangement, of the openness of concealment the veil might afford him, it was Hal, even as Mario laughed and half-bowed, it was Hal, brandishing his Dunlop stick, who told the guy to go peddle his linen someplace else.

30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT