Infinite jest - David Wallace

IngersolPs roommate J. J. Penn tries to claim that the vaporized Ann Kittenplan is wearing several articles of gear worth mucho INDDIR, and everyone tells him to shut up. The snow is now coming down hard enough to compose an environment, and everybody outside the sheltered pavilion looks gauzily shrouded, from Hal’s perspective.

Lord is crunching madly away at the TP under the just-opened protection of an old beach umbrella a previous game-master had welded to the top of the food cart. Lord wipes his nose against the same shoulder that’s clamping a phone to his ear, awkwardly, and reports he’s checked the D.E.C.’s Eschaton-Axiom directory via Pink2-capable modem and that unfortunately with all due respect to Ann and Mike it doesn’t seem to explicitly say players with strategic functions can’t become target-areas if they traipse around outside their defense-nets. LaMont Chu says how come point-values for actual players have never been assigned, then, for Pete’s sake, and Pemulis shouts across that that’s so totally beside the point it doesn’t matter, that the reason players aren’t explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what makes Eschaton and its axioms fucking possible in the first place. A kind of pale boat-wake of exhaust exits the idling Ford sedan off behind the pavilion and widens as it rises, dispersing. Pemulis says because otherwise use your heads otherwise nonstrategic emotions would get aroused and Combatants would be whacking balls at each other’s physical persons all the time and Eschaton wouldn’t even be possible in its icily elegant game-theoretical form. He’s stopped jumping up and down, at least, Troeltsch observes. Players’ exemption from strikes goes without saying, Pemulis says; it’s like preaxiomatic. Pemulis tells Lord to consider what he’s doing very carefully, because from where Pemulis is standing Lord looks to be willing to very possibly compromise Eschaton’s map for all time. Girls 16’s/18’s prorector Mary Esther Thode putts from left to right behind the pavilion on the long driveway from the circular drive to the portcullis and halts her scooter and lifts her helmet’s tinted visor and yells across for Kittenplan to put a hat on if she’s going to play in the snow in a crew-cut. This even though Kittenplan isn’t even strictly in Ms. Thode’s like umbrella of authority, Axford observes to Troeltsch, who relays this fact into his headset. Hal moves his mouth around to try to gather up spit in a mouth that’s gotten rather dry, which when you have a plug of Kodiak in is not very pleasant. Ann Kittenplan has been suffering from what look like almost Parkinsonian tremors for the last few minutes, her face writhing and her mustache almost standing right out straight. LaMont Chu repeats his claim that there’s no way players even with strategic functions can ever be legit target-areas if no INDDIR/SUFDDIR values have been entered for them in EndStat’s tally-function. Pemulis orders Chu not to distract Otis Lord from the incredibly potent and lethal ground Lord’s letting Ingersoll lead them onto. He says none of them have ever even seen the true meaning of the word crisis yet. Ingersoll calls over to Pemulis that his emeritus veto-power is only over Lord’s calculations, not over today’s game’s God’s decisions about what’s part of the game and what isn’t. Pemulis invites Ingersoll to do something anatomically impossible. Pemulis asks LaMont Chu and Ann Kittenplan if they’re just going to stand there with their thumbs in their bottoms and let Lord let Ingersoll eliminate Eschaton’s map for keeps for one slimy cheesy victory in just one day’s apocalypse. Kittenplan has been trembling and feeling at the back of her vein-laced head and looking across the Mediterranean at Ingersoll like somebody who knows they’ll go to prison for what they want to do. Axford posits certain very unlikely physical conditions under which what Pemulis told Ingersoll to do to himself wouldn’t be totally impossible. Hal spits thickly and gathers and tries to spit again, watching. Troeltsch broadcasts the fact that there’s always a queer vague vitaminish stink about Mary Esther Thode that he never can quite place. There’s the sudden tripartite whump of three Empire Waste Displacement vehicles being propelled above the cloud-cover to points far north. Hal identifies Thode’s ambient odor as the stink of thiamine, which for reasons best known to Thode she takes a lot of; and Troeltsch broadcasts the datum and refers to Hal as a ‘close source,’ which strikes Hal as odd and somehow off in a way he can’t quite name. Kittenplan shakes Chu’s arm loose and darts over and extracts a warhead from SOVWAR’s portable stockpile and shouts out that well OK then if players can be targets then in that case: and she fires a real screamer at IngersolPs head, which Ingersoll barely blocks with his Rossignol and shrieks that Kittenplan can’t launch anything at anything because she’s been vaporized by a 5-megaton contact-burst. Kittenplan tells Ingersoll to write his congressman about it and over LaMont Chu’s pleas for reasoned discussion takes several more theoretically valuable warheads out of the industrial-solvent bucket and gets truly serious about hitting Ingersoll, moving steadily east across Nigeria and Chad, causing Ingersoll to run due north across the courts’ map at impressive speed, abandoning IRLIBSYR’s ammo-bucket and tear-assing up through Siberia crying Foul. Lord’s mewing ineffectually for order, but some of the other Combatants’ staffs have begun to smell that Evan Ingersoll’s become fair game for cruelty — the way kids can seem to smell this sort of thing out with such uncanny acuity — and REDCHPs General Secretary and an AM-NAT vector-planning specialist and Josh Gopnik all start moving northeast over the map firing balls as hard as they can at Ingersoll, who’s dropped his launcher and is shaking frantically at the chained gate on the fence’s north side, where Mrs. Incandenza has decided she doesn’t want kids exiting the East Courts and trampling her calliopsis; and these little kids can hit balls exceptionally hard. Hal is now unable to gather enough spit to spit. One warhead hits Ingersoll in the neck and another solidly in the meat of the thigh. Ingersoll begins to limp around in small circles holding his neck, crying in that slow-motion shuddery way little kids have when they’re crying more at the fact of being hurt than at the hurt itself. Pemulis is walking backwards away from the south fence back toward the pavilion and has both arms up in either appeal or fury or something else. Axford tells Hal and Troeltsch he wishes he didn’t feel the dark thrill he felt watching Ingersoll get pummeled. Some filmy red peanut-skin has gotten into Jim Struck’s hair as he lies there motionless. O. P. Lord attempts to rule that Ingersoll is no longer on the four courts of Eschaton’s earth-map and so isn’t even theoretically a valid target-area. It doesn’t matter. Several kids close in on Ingersoll, triangulating their bombardment, T. Peterson on point. Ingersoll is hit several times, once right near the eye. Jim Troeltsch is up and running to the fence wanting to stop the thing, but Pemulis catches him by his headset’s cord and tells him to let them all lie in their own bed. Hal, now leaning forward, steeple-fingered, finds himself just about paralyzed with absorption. Trevor Axford, fist to his chin, asks Hal if he’s ever just simply fucking hated somebody without having any idea why. Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress. Now INDPAK’s Penn and AMNAT’s McKenna, who have long-standing personal bones to pick with Ann Kittenplan, peel off and gather ordnance and execute a pincer movement on Ann Kittenplan. She is hit twice from behind at close range. Ingersoll has long since gone down and is still getting hit. Lord is ruling at the top of his lungs that there’s no way AMNAT can launch against itself when he gets tagged right on the breastbone by an errant warhead. Clutching his chest with one hand, with the other he flicks the red beanie’s propeller, never before flicked, whose flicked spin heralds a worst-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type situation. Timmy Peterson takes a ball in the groin and goes down like a sack of refined flour. Everybody’s scooping up spent warheads and totally unrealistically refiring them. The fences shudder and sing as balls rain against them. Ingersoll now resembles some sort of animal that’s been run over in the road. Troeltsch, who’s looking for the first time at the idling sedan by West House’s dump-sters and asking if anybody knew anybody who drove a Nunhagen-Aspirin-adverting Ford, is the only upperclass spectator who doesn’t seem utterly silently engrossed. Ann Kittenplan has dropped her racquet and is charging McKenna. She takes two contact-bursts in the breast-area before she gets to him and lays McKenna out with an impressive left cross. LaMont Chu tackles Todd Possalthwaite from behind. Struck looks to have wet his pants in his sleep. J. J. Penn slips on a grounded warhead near Fiji and goes spectacularly down. The snowfall makes everything gauzy and terribly clear at the same time, eliminating all visual background so that the map’s action seems stark and surreal. Nobody’s using tennis balls now anymore. Josh Gopnik punches LaMont Chu in the stomach, and LaMont Chu yells that he’s been punched in the stomach. Ann Kittenplan has Kieran McKenna in a headlock and is punching him repeatedly on the top of the skull. Otis P. Lord lets down the beach umbrella and starts pushing his crazy-wheeled food cart at a diskette-rattling clip toward 12’s open south gate, still flicking furiously at the red beanie’s propeller. Struck’s hair is steadily accreting nut-skins. Pemulís is under cover but still standing, his legs well apart and his arms folded. The figure in the green Ford still hasn’t moved once. Troeltsch says he for his own part wouldn’t be just sitting and lying there if any of the Little Buddies under his personal charge were out there getting potentially injured, and Hal reflects that he does feel a certain sort of intense anxiety, but can’t sort through the almost infinite-seeming implications of what Troeltsch is saying fast enough to determine whether the anxiety is over something about what he’s seeing or something in the connection between what Troeltsch is saying and the degree to which he’s absorbed in what’s going on out inside the fence, which is a degenerative chaos so complex in its disorder that it’s hard to tell whether it seems choreographed or simply chaotically disordered. LaMont Chu is throwing up into the Indian Ocean. Todd Possalthwaite has his hands to his face and is shrieking something about his ‘doze.’ It is now, beyond any argument or equivocation, snowing. The sky is off-white. Lord and his cart are now literally making tracks for the edge of the map. Evan Ingersoll hasn’t moved in several minutes. Penn lies in a whitening service box with one leg bent beneath him at an impossible angle. Someone way off behind them has been blowing an athletic whistle. Ann Kittenplan begins to chase REDCHI’s General Secretary south across the Asian subcontinent at top speed. Pemulis is telling Hal he hates to say he told them so. Hal can see Axford leaning way forward sheltering something tiny from the wind as he flicks at it with a spent lighter. It occurs to him this is the third anniversary of Axhandle losing a right finger and half his right thumb. Fierce little J. Gopnik is flailing at the air and telling whoever wants it to come on, come on. Otis P. Lord and his cart sail clattering across Indochina toward the southern gate. Hal is suddenly aware that Troeltsch and Pemulis are wincing but is not himself wincing and isn’t sure why they are wincing and is looking out into the fray trying to determine whether he should be wincing when REDCHI’s General Secretary, calling loudly for his mother and in full flight as he looks over his shoulder at Ann Kittenplan’s contorted face, barrels directly into Lord’s speeding food cart. There’s a noise like the historical sum of all cafeteria accidents everywhere. 3.6-MB diskettes take flight like mad bats across what uncovered would be the baseline of Court 12. Different-colored beanies spill from the rolling solander box, whose lock’s hasp is broken and protrudes like a tongue as it rolls. The TP’s monitor and modem and Yushityu chassis, with most of Eschaton’s nervous system on its hard drive, assume a parabolic southwest vector. The heavy equipment’s altitude is impressive. An odd silent still moment hangs, the TP aloft. Pemulis bellows, his hands to his cheeks. Otis P. Lord hurdles the bent forms of food cart and General Secretary and sprints low over the court’s map’s snow, trying to save hardware that’s now at the top of its rainbow’s arc. It’s clear Lord won’t make it. It’s a slow-motion moment. The snowfall’s more than heavy enough now, Hal thinks, to excuse Lord’s not seeing LaMont Chu directly before him, on his hands and knees, throwing up. Lord impacts Chu’s arched form at about knee-level and is spectacularly airborne. The idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver’s-side window. Axford is holding the lighter’s chassis up to his ear and shaking it. Ann Kittenplan is ramming REDCHI’s leader’s face repeatedly into the mesh of the south fence. Lord’s flight’s parabola is less spectacular on the y-axis than the TP’s has been. The Yushityu’s hard-drive chassis makes an indescribable sound as it hits the earth and its brightly circuited guts come out. The color monitor lands on its back with its screen blinking ERROR at the white sky. Hal and everyone else can project Lord’s flight’s own terminus an instant before impact. For a brief moment that Hal will later regard as completely and uncomfortably bizarre, Hal feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing. The distant whistle patweets. Lord does indeed go headfirst down through the monitor’s screen, and stays there, his sneakers in the air and his warm-up pants sagging upward to reveal black socks. There’d been a bad sound of glass. Penn flails on his back. Possalthwaite, Ingersoll, and McKenna bleed. The second shift’s 1600h. siren down at Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of falling snow.

8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

Boston AA is Jike AA nowhere else on this planet. Just like AA everyplace else, Boston AA is divided into numerous individual AA Groups, and each Group has its particular Group name like the Reality Group or the Allston Group or the Clean and Sober Group, and each Group holds its regular meeting once a week. But almost all Boston Groups’ meetings are speaker meetings. That means that at the meetings there are recovering alcoholic speakers who stand up in front of everybody at an amplified podium and ‘share their experience, strength, and hope.’[131] And the singular thing is that these speakers are not ever members of the Group that’s holding the meeting, in Boston. The speakers at one certain Group’s weekly speaker meeting are always from some other certain Boston AA Group. The people from the other Group who are here at like your Group speaking are here on something called a Commitment. Commitments are where some members of one Group commit to hit the road and travel to another Group’s meeting to speak publicly from the podium. Then a bunch of people from the host Group hit the opposite lane of the same road on some other night and go to the visiting Group’s meeting, to speak. Groups always trade Commitments: you come speak to us and we’ll come speak to you. It can seem bizarre. You always go elsewhere to speak. At your own Group’s meeting you’re a host; you just sit there and listen as hard as you can, and you make coffee in 60-cup urns and stack polystyrene cups in big ziggurats and sell raffle tickets and make sandwiches, and you empty ashtrays and scrub out urns and sweep floors when the other Group’s speakers are through. You never share your experience, strength, and hope on-stage behind a fiberboard podium with its cheap nondigital PA system’s mike except in front of some other metro Boston Group.[132] Every night in Boston, bumper-stickered cars full of totally sober people, wall-eyed from caffeine and trying to read illegibly scrawled directions by the dashboard lights, crisscross the city, heading for the church basements or bingo halls or nursing-home cafeterias of other AA Groups, to put on Commitments. Being an active member of a Boston AA Group is probably a little bit like being a serious musician or like athlete, in terms of constant travel.