Infinite jest - David Wallace

Lyle has a way of sucking on the insides of his cheeks as he listens. Plates of old ridged muscle emerge and subside as he shifts his weight slightly on the raised towel dispenser. The dispenser’s at about shoulder-height for someone like Chu. Like all good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment. It’s like he’s working as hard as you. You both of you, briefly, feel unalone. Lyle will suck in first one side’s cheek and then the other. ‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Why again exactly, now?’ ‘I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why? I guess to give my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.’ ‘And how would this do this again?’ ‘Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?’ ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they?’ Lyle sucks his cheeks. It’s not like he’s condescending or stringing you along. He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking. ‘LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’ ‘Maybe I ought to be getting back.’ ‘LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.’ ‘Animal?’ ‘You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.’ ‘This is good news?’ ‘It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.’ ‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.’ ‘Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?’ ‘La-Mont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.’ ‘So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.’ ‘You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right… there…’ Etc.

The thunder’s died down to a mutter, and the window’s spatter’s gone random and post-storm sad.

An E.T.A. female (female students wear two different towels, coming in), a breastless senior who can barely perspire at all, is troubled, whenever she has lunch with her fiance, by the persistent whine of a mosquito that she can’t see and no one else can hear. Summer and winter, indoors or alfresco. But only at lunch, and only with her fiance. Remarks or advice are not always the point. Sometimes suffering’s point is almost crying out in a high-pitched whine to be heard. As fitness gurus go, Lyle is results-oriented and can-do.[153] Ten-year-old Kent Blott, whose parents are Seventh-Day Adventists, isn’t yet old enough to masturbate, but he hears quite a lot about it, not surprisingly, from his adolescent peers, in rather lush detail, masturbation, and is worried about what sorts of homemade-type potentially wicked and soul-sapping pornographic cartridges will run through his psychic projector as he masturbates, when he eventually can masturbate, and worries about whether different sorts of fantasy scenes and combinations herald different sorts of psychic dysfunction or turpitude, and wants to get a good jump on worrying about it. The sounds of the dining hall’s gala are more frequent and convulsive without the sound of rain. Lyle tells Blott not to let the weight he would pull to himself exceed his own personal weight. Up to the left the storm’s clouds’ stragglers run like ink in water between the window and the risen moon. Mario Incandenza’s presidential puppet is just about to inaugurate Subsidized Time. 16-B’s Anton Doucette’s been driven to Lyle he says by an increasing self-consciousness about the big round dark raised mole on his upper-upper lip, just under his left nostril. It’s only a mole but looks pretty dire, nasally. People who first meet him are always pulling him off to the side and handing him a Kleenex. Doucette lately wishes either the mole were gone or he were gone. Even if people don’t stare at the mole it’s like they’re intentionally not staring at it. Doucette pounds himself in the chest and thigh, supposedly in frustration. He just cannot come to terms with how it must look. It’s getting worse as puberty intensifies, the anxiety. Then in a vicious cycle the anxiety prompts the nervous tic on his face’s right side. He’s starting to suspect that some upperclassmen are referring to him behind his back as Anton (‘Booger’) Doucette. It’s like he’s frozen on this anxiety, unable to move on to more advanced anxieties. He can’t see any way past this. The pounding is more a sign of intense unconscious self-hatred, though, Lyle knows. Doucette grimaces and says he’s starting to want to play tennis with his hand over his nose and upper lip. But he has a two-handed backhand and it’s too late to switch and there’s no way they’re going to let him switch to one hand just for aesthetic reasons. Lyle sends Anton Doucette packing off with directions to come on back with Mario Incandenza the minute the I.-Day gala lets out. Mario gets a fair number of aesthetic-self-consciousness referrals from Lyle. No type or rank of guru is above delegating. It’s like a law. Doucette says it’s like he’s stuck. It’s becoming all he thinks about. This is on his way out. His back’s additional moles form no outline or shape. Lyle pops the tab to a C.F.D.C. Mario tends to bring down most evenings around suppertime. In between door-dickyings and visits Lyle does little isometric neck-stretches, for the tension.

Between Gerhardt Schtitt’s pipe and Avril Incandenza’s Benson & Hedges and certain cheeks full of chewing tobacco — plus the maddening cooking-smells of honey and chocolate and real high-lipid walnuts from the kitchen vents, plus over 150 very fit bodies only some of which have been showered on this day off — the dining hall is warm and close and multi-odored. Mario as auteur opts for his late father’s parodic device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and historical headers from the last few great daily papers, all for a sort of time-lapse exposition of certain developments leading up to Interdependence and Subsidized Time and cartographic Reconfiguration and the renewal of a tight and considerably tidier Experialist U.S. of A., under Gentle:

UKRAINE, TWO MORE BALTIC STATES APPLY FOR NATO INCLUSION— 16-point bold Header;

SO THEN WHY A NATO? — Editorial Header;

E.E.C. SIDES WITH PACIFIC RIM, UPS TARIFFS IN RESPONSE TO U.S. QUOTAS — Header;

GENTLE ON WASTE STORAGE FROM DISMANTLED NATO THERMS: ‘NOT IN MY NATION, BABE’ — 12-point Subheader;

‘Amid smiles and two-handed handshakes that belied the high tensions here, the leaders of twelve out of fifteen NATO nations today signed an accord effectively dismantling the Western Bloc’s fifty-five-year-old defensive alliance.’ — News-Summary Cartridge Voiceover;

U.S., CANADIAN SUPPORT CUTS DOOMED NATO SUMMIT FROM START, ICELANDIC POL DECLARES — Header;

SO THEN WHY NOT A CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE, NOW, MAYBE? — Editorial Header;

MEXICO SIGNS ON FOR ‘ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE; BUT QUEBEC SEPARATISTS RALLY AGAINST ‘FINLANDIZATION’ OF ‘O.N.A.N.’ ALLIANCE; BUT GENTLE TO CANADA: UNLESS ‘O.N.A.N.’ TREATY SIGNED, NAFTA NULL, MANITOBAN THERMS STAY PUT, INTRACONTINENTAL POLLUTION AND WASTE DISPOSAL EACH NATION’S ‘INTERESTS TO PURSUE TO THE BEST THEY SEE FIT’ — Header from Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Head-liner Finally Demoted after Repeated Warnings about Taking up Too Much Space;

FED WORKERS PROTEST RANDOM FINGERNAIL-HYGIENE SCREENS — 12-point Header;

GENTLE PROPOSES NATIONALIZATION OF INTERLACE TELENT — Header; SAYS GOVT IN LINE FOR ‘PIECE OF THE ACTION’ ON VIDEO, CARTRIDGE, DISK RENTALS — 8-point subheader;

BURGER KING’S PILLSBURY AWARDED RIGHTS TO NEW YEAR — Header; PIZZA HUT’S PEPSICO FILES BID-RIGGING COMPLAINT WITH IRS — 12-point Subheader; CALENDAR AND PREPRINTED CHECK INDUSTRIES STOCKS SOAR — 8-point subheader;

Three blue-jawed convicts in antiquated stripes dicky their cell’s lock and run, backed by sirens and searchlights’ crisscrossed play, not for the wall but straight to the Warden’s empty nighttime office, where they sit rapt before his old dual-modem Macintosh, slapping their knees and pointing to the monitor and elbowing each other in the ribs, nibbling at inexplicably-appeared boxes of popcorn, with a Voiceover: ‘Cartridges by Modem! Just Insert a Blank Diskette! Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!’ — Some more of Ms. Heath’s classes’ puppets in a B-film parody of the InterLace TelEntertainment ads that the cable networks seemed so mysteriously suicidally to run all the time that last year of Unsubsidized Time;

O.N.A.N. PACT PENNED — 24-point Superheader;

CANADA ‘NUCK’LES UNDER — Tabloidish NY Daily’s 24-point Superheader;

ACID RAIN, LANDFILLS, BARGES, FUSION-TECH, MANITOBAN THERMS WERE ‘BIG STICKS,’ CHRETIEN ADMITS—16-point Header;

SHORT-HAIRED MEN IN SHINY TRUCKS ARE NOT DISMANTLING MANITOBAN THERMS BUT INSTEAD MOVING THEM JUST OVER BORDER INTO TURTLE MTN. INDIAN RESERVATION, HORRIFIED N.D. GOV CHARGES — 12-point Subheader from Demoted Headliner Already in Dutch Down in the Subheader Dept., Now, Too;

EXCLUSIVE COLOR PHOTOS SHOW BRAVE DOCS FUTILELY FIGHTING TIME TO REMOVE RAILROAD SPIKE FROM CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER’S RIGHT EYE — Tabloidish NY Daily’s 16-point Header;

PRESIDENT’S OFFICE IS ‘A ANALLY RETENTIVE HORROR SHOW SAYS THIS JUST RETIRED WHITE HOUSE CUSTODIAN — Tabloid Header with Photo of Old Guy with Basically One Eyebrow Running All

the Way across His Forehead Holding up a Mammoth Plastic Barrel He Claims Held Just One Day’s Haul of Dental Stimulators, Alcohol-Soaked Cotton Puffs, GI–X-Ray-Grade Colonic Purgative Bottles, Epidermal Ash, Surgical Masks and Gloves, Q-Tïps, Kleenex, and Homeopathic Pruritis-Cream Containers;

U.S.O.U.S. CHIEF TINE: CHARGES OF AN OVAL OFFICE LITTERED WITH KLEENEX AND FLOSS A ‘CLEAR CASE OF DIRTY TRICKS’ — Respectable Daily Header;

OVERLOADED WASTE BARGES COLLIDE, CAPSIZE OFF GLOUCESTER — Boston Daily Header;

HUGE PUTRID SLICK EMPTIES BEACHES OFF BOTH SHORES, CAPE — Equally Large Subheader;

GENTLE SPEAKS OUT ON A U.S. ‘CONSTIPATEDLY IMPACTED ON CONTINENTAL WASTE’ AT U.N.L.V. COMMENCEMENT-Header;

AD COUNCIL REPORT: BOSTON’S VINEY & VEALS AGENCY’S LI-POSUCTION AND TONGUE-STICK CAMPAIGNS NOT TO BLAME FOR ABC HQ BOMB THREATS — Advertising Age Header;

‘The Governors of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire today reacted strongly to President Gentle’s establishment of a blue-ribbon panel of waste experts to investigate the feasibility of mass landfill and conversion sites in northern New England’ — Respectable NY Daily’s Lead ‘Graph;

‘WE ARE NOT THIS CONTINENT’S SIGMOID COLON,’ GENTLE WARNS O.N.A.N. JOINT SESSION — Header;

BETHESDA MD’S: STRICKEN PRESIDENT CONFINED FOR ‘HYGIENIC STRESS’ FOLLOWING INCOHERENT O.N.A.N. ADDRESS — Header;

HOLOGRAPHY MAKES ULTRA-TOXIC FUSION GAMBIT SAFE FOR WORKERS, COMMUNITY, D.O.E. REP ASSURES METHUEN P.T.A. — Boston Daily Header;

GENTLE OUT OF BETHESDA NAVAL HOSP CONFINEMENT, TO ADDRESS U.S. CONGRESS ON ‘RECONFIGURATIVE OPTIONS’ FOR ‘TIGHT, TIDIER NATIONAL ERA’ — Header, all these twirling journalistically out from a black-acetate (one of O. Stice’s old Fila warm-up tops) background in vintagely allusive old-b&w-film style, with a sonic background of that sad sappy Italianate stuff Scorcese had loved for his own montages, with the headlines lap-dissolving into transverse-angled shots of a modest, green-masked Gentle accepting tight-lipped handshakes from Mexican and Canadian officials in an agreement to make the U.S. President the first Chair of the Organization of North American Nations, with Mexican Presidente and new heavily guarded Canadian P.M. to be co-Vice Chairs. Gentle’s first State of the O.N.A.N. Address, delivered before a triple-size Congress on the very last day of ‘B.S.’ solar time, holds out the promise of a whole bright spanking new millennium of sacrifices and rewards and Interdependence’s ‘not impossibly radically altered new look,’ continent-wide.

Do not underestimate objects! Lyle says he finds it impossible to over-stress this: do not underestimate objects. Partridge KS’s serve-and-volley prodigy Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, 16-A’s very top man, whose sauna-fresh torso gleams the same color as the moonlight off the idle weights’ metal, is being driven right to the edge by the fact that he goes to sleep with his bed against one wall and then but wakes up with his bed against a whole nother wall. Stice’d already had a whole series of beefs with roommate Kyle D. Coyle because he’d figured clearly Coyle was moving Stice’s bed around in Stice’s sleep. But then Coyle got put in the infirmary with a suspicious discharge, and he’s been out of the room for the last two nights, Coyle, and here Stice is still waking up with his bed against a different wall. So then he thought like Axford or Struck was dickying his door with a meal-card and sneaking in really late and messing with Stice’s bed out of obscure motives. So but last night Stice jammed a chair up against his door and piled empty tennis-ball cans on the chair to make a racket if there was any dickying, and lined up still more cans on the sills of all three windows, just to cover all bases; and but so the reason he’s here is this A.M. he wakes up with his bed moved over against the chair by the door at an angle he didn’t care for one bit and with all the ball-cans arranged in a neat pyramid in the dusty rectangle where his bed was supposed to normally be. Ortho Stice can think of only three possible explanations for what’s going on, and he presents them to an attentive cheek-sucking Lyle in ascending order of grimness. One is that Stice is telekinetic, but only in his sleep. Two is that somebody else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and has it in for Stice and wants to drive him batsoid for some reason. Three is that Stice is like getting up in his sleep and rearranging the room without knowing it or remembering it, which means he’s a severe fucking somnambulist, which means Lord only knows what all else he could get up and wander around and do in his sleep. He’s got promise, the Staff say; he’s got a quite legit shot at the Show when he graduates. Which he does not want to mess up with any sort of telekinetic or somnambulistical shenanigans. Stice offers up the planes of his torso and forehead. He wears one of his own personal towels, a black one. He is slim but wiry and beautifully muscled, and sweats freely and well. He says he knows too well he’d neglected Lyle’s advice about the pull-down station two years back, and regrets it. He wholeheartedly apologizes for the time last spring he got Struck and Axford to distract Lyle and then Krazy-Glued Lyle’s left buttock’s Span-dex to the wooden top of the towel dispenser. Stice says he realizes he’s the last guy with any right to come to Lyle cap in hand after all the cracks about the diet and hairstyle and all. But here he is, cap in hand, or rather calotte in hand, offering up his sauna’d planes, asking for Lyle’s input.