Infinite jest - David Wallace

Lyle waves bygones away like a gnat you barely look at. He is completely engaged. The lightning now far off out over the Atlantic treats him like a weak strobe. Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects. Lyle leans in, waves Stice up even closer, and consents to tell Stice the story of this one man he once knew of. This man earned his living by going to various public sites where people congregated and were bored and impatient and cynical, he’d go in and bet people that he could stand on any chair in the place and then lift that chair up off the ground while standing on it. A bootstrap-type scenario. His M.O. is he climbs up on a chair and stands there and says publicly Hey, I can lift this chair I stand on. A bystander holds the bets. The idle bus-depot or DMV-waiting-area or hospital-lobby crowd is dumbstruck. They gaze up at a man who is standing 100 % on top of a chair he has grabbed the back of and raised several m. off the ground. There is vigorous speculation about how the trick’s done, which gives rise to side-bet action. A devoutly religious experimental oncologist dying of his own inoperable colorectal neoplastis moans Why oh why Lord do You give this man this idiotic picayune power and I no power over my own ravening colorectal cells. There are numerous silent variations on this sort of meditation in the crowd. The bet won, the $ finally forked over and handed up to him, the man Lyle says he once knew of now jumps back down to the floor, incidental change spraying from his pockets on impact, straightens his tie, and walks off, leaving behind a dumbfounded crowd still staring up at an object he had not underestimated.

Like most young people genetically hard-wired for a secret drug problem, Hal Incandenza also has severe compulsion-issues around nicotine and sugar. Because smoking will simply kill you during drills, only Bridget Boone, a steroidic Girls’ 16 named Carol Spodek, and one or the other of the Vaught twins are masochistic enough to do it, though Teddy Schacht has been known to enjoy the occasional panatela. The nicotine craving Hal tries to mollify as best he can by dipping Kodiak Wintergreen Smokeless Tobacco several times daily, spitting into either a cherished old childhood NASA glass or the empty can of Spiru-Tein High Protein Breakfast Beverage that even now sits — given a wide berth by all others — next to a small pile of the tennis balls the table’s kids don’t have to squeeze as long as they’re eating. Hal’s more serious problem is with sucrose — the Hope-smoker’s ever-beckoning siren — because he craves it always and awfully, Hal does — sugar — but finds now lately that any sugar-infusion above the level of a 56-gram AminoPal High Energy Bar now induces odd and unpleasant emotional states that don’t do him one bit of good on court.

Sitting here preacher-hatted, with a mouth full of multilayered baklava, Hal knows perfectly well that Mario gets his fetish for cartridges about puppets and entr’actes and audiences from their late father. Himself, during his anticonfluential middle period, went through this subphase of being obsessed with the idea of audiences’ relationships with various sorts of shows. Hal doesn’t even want to think about the grim one about the carnival of eyeballs.[154] But this one other short high-tech one was called ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ and was a film of a fake stage-production at Ford’s Theater in the nation’s capital of Wash. DC that, like all his audience-obsessed pieces, had cost Incandenza a real bundle in terms of human extras. The extras in this one are a well-dressed audience of guys in muttonchops and ladies with paper fans who fill the place from first row to the rear of the balcony’s boxes, and they’re watching an incredibly violent little involuted playlet called ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque,’ the relatively plotless plot of which is just that the mythic Medusa, snake-haired and armed with a sword and well-polished shield, is fighting to the death or petrification against L’Odalisque de Ste. Thérèse, a character out of old Québecois mythology who was supposedly so inhumanly gorgeous that anyone who looked at her turned instantly into a human-sized precious gem, from admiration. A pretty natural foil for the Medusa, obviously, the Odalisque has only a nail-file instead of a sword, but also has a well-wielded hand-held makeup mirror, and she and the Medusa are basically rumbling for like twenty minutes, leaping around the ornate stage trying to de-map each other with blades and/or de-animate each other with their respective reflectors, which each leaps around trying to position just right so that the other gets a glimpse of its own full-frontal reflection and gets instantly petrified or gemified or whatever. In the cartridge it’s pretty clear from their milky-pixeled translu-cence and insubstantiality that they’re holograms, but it’s not clear what they’re supposed to be on the level of the playlet, whether the audience is supposed to see/(not)see them as ghosts or wraiths or ‘real’ mythic entities or what. But it’s a ballsy fight-scene up there on the stage — having been intricately choreographed by an Oriental guy Himself rented from some commercial studio and put up in the HmH, who ate like a bird and smiled very politely all the time and didn’t have even a word to say to anybody, it seemed, except Avril, to whom the Oriental choreographer had cottoned right off — balletic and full of compelling little cornerings and near-misses and reversals, and the theater’s audience is rapt and clearly entertained to the gills, because they keep spontaneously applauding, as much maybe for the film’s play’s choreography as anything else — which would make it more like spontaneously meta-applauding, Hal supposes — because the whole fight-scene has to be ingeniously choreographed so that both combatants have their respectively scaly and cream-complected backs[155] to the audience, for obvious reasons … except as the shield and little mirror get whipped martially around and brandished at various strategic angles, certain members of the playlet’s well-dressed audience eventually start catching disastrous glimpses of the combatants’ fatal full-frontal reflections, and instantly get transformed into like ruby statues in their front-row seats, or get petrified and fall like embolized bats from the balcony’s boxes, etc. The cartridge goes on like this until there’s nobody left in the Ford’s Theater seats animate enough to applaud the nested narrative of the fight-scene play, and it ends with the two aesthetic foils still rumbling like mad before an audience of varicolored stone. ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ ‘s own audiences didn’t think too much of the thing, because the film audience never does get much of a decent full-frontal look at what it is about the combatants that supposedly has such a melodramatic effect on the rumble’s live audience, and so the film’s audience ends up feeling teased and vaguely cheated, and the thing had only a regional release, and the cartridge rented like yesterday’s newspapers, and it’s now next to impossible to find. But that wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination the James O. Incandenza film that audiences hated the most. The most hated Incandenza film, a variable-length one called The Joke, had only a very brief theatrical release, and then only at the widely scattered last remains of the pre-InterLace public art-film theaters in arty places like Cambridge MA and Berkeley CA. And InterLace never considered it for Pulse-Order rerelease, for obvious reasons. The art-film theaters’ marquees and posters and ads for the thing were all required to say something like ‘THE JOKE’: You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out Money to See This Film, which art-film habitues of course thought was a cleverly ironic anti-ad joke, and so they’d shell out for little paper theater tickets and file in in their sweater vests and tweeds and dirndls and tank up on espresso at the concession stand and find seats and sit down and make those little pre-movie leg and posture adjustments, and look around with that sort of vacant intensity, and they’d figure the tri-lensed Bolex H32 cameras — one held by a tall stooped old guy and one complexly mounted on the huge head of the oddly forward-listing boy with what looked like a steel spike coming out of his thorax — the big cameras down by the red-lit EXITS on either side of the screen, the patrons figured, were there for like an ad or an anti-ad or a behind-the-scenes metafilmic documentary or something. That is, until the lights went down and the film started up and what was on the wide public screen was just a wide-angled binoculated shot of this very art-film theater’s audience filing in with espressos and finding seats and sitting down and looking around and getting adjusted and saying knowledgeable little pre-movie things to their thick-lensed dates about what the Don’t-Pay-To-See-This ad and Bolex cameras probably signified, artistically, and settling in as the lights dimmed and facing the screen (i.e. now themselves, it turns out) with the coolly excited smiles of highbrow-entertainment expectation, smiles which the cameras and screen’s projection now revealed as just starting to drop from the faces of the audience as the audience saw row after row of itself staring back at it with less and less expectant and more and more blank and then puzzled and then eventually pissed-off facial expressions. The Joke’s total running time was just exactly as long as there was even one cross-legged patron left in the theater to watch his own huge projected image gazing back down at him with the special distaste of a disgusted and ripped-off-feeling art-film patron, which ended up being more than maybe twenty minutes only when there were critics or film-academics in the seats, who studied themselves studying themselves taking notes with endless fascination and finally left only when the espresso finally impelled them to the loo, at which point Himself and Mario would have to frantically pack up cameras and lens-cases and coaxials and run and totter like hell to catch the next cross-country flight from Cambridge to Berkeley or Berkeley to Cambridge, since they obviously had to be there all set up and Bolex’d for each showing at each venue. Mario said Lyle had said Incandenza had confessed that he’d loved the fact that The Joke was so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb, and that those rare critics who defended the film by arguing at convolved length that the simple-minded stasis was precisely the film’s aesthetic thesis were dead wrong, as usual. It’s still unclear whether it was the Eyeball-and-Sideshow thing or ‘The Medusa v…’ or The Joke that had metamorphosized into their late father’s later involvement with the hostilely anti-Real genre of ‘Found Drama,’ which was probably the historical zenith of self-consciously dumb stasis, but which audiences never actually even got to hate, for a-priori reasons.

FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER — Header; BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER— 12-point Subheader;

GENTLE PROMISES SKEPTICAL CUB SCOUT CONVENTION ‘YOU’LL BE ABLE TO EAT RIGHT OFF’ TERRITORIAL U.S. BY END OF TERM’S FIRST YEAR — Header;

ANOTHER LOVE CANAL? — 24-point Superheader; TOXIC HORROR ACCIDENTALLY UNCOVERED IN UPSTATE NEW HAMPSHIRE— 16-point Header-sized Subheader;

‘New Hampshire environmental officials yesterday flatly denied that vast collections of drums leaking industrial solvents, chlorides, benzenes and oxins had been quote “stumbled on” by 18 federal EPA staffers playing a casual game of softball east of Berlin, NH, claiming instead that the corroded receptacles had been placed there against statute by large men with white body suits and short haircuts in long shiny trailer trucks with O.N.A.N.’s official crest, a sombreroed eagle with a maple leaf in its mouth, stencilled on the sides. In the nation’s capital, a quote “full and energetic investigation” has been promised by the Gentle administration into claims by residents of Berlin, NH and Rumford, ME that the incidence of soft-skulled and extra-eyed newborns in the toxicly affected area far exceeds the national average.’ — $3.75 U.S. Nightly-Rental News Cartridge Anchor Lead;

SUB ROSA FUSION-IN-POISONOUS-ENVIRONMENT TEST SITE ALLEGED AT MONTPELIER, VT — Scientific North American Header;

MY BABY HAS SIX EYES AND BASICALLY NO SKULL–Lurid Color 32-point Tabloid Header, Dateline Lancaster NH;

FED EPA SOFTBALLERS ALLEGE TWO MORE ‘POISONOUS WASTE HORRORFEST’ ILLEGAL DUMP SITES ‘STUMBLED OVER’ NEAR NORTH SYRACUSE, HISTORIC TICONDEROGA — NYC Daily Header;

THE FINE ART OF FEDERAL STUMBLING: A WHOLE LOT OF SOFTBALL GOING ON — Editorial Header in Syracuse NY’s Post-Standard;

CANADIAN P.M. DENIES SECRET MINIATURE GOLF OUTING WITH OUTRAGED NEW ENGLAND GOVS — Surprisingly Small 3rd-Page 10-poínt Header;

GENTLE SHOCKER — Pearl-Harbor-Sized 32-point Super-superheader Almost Too Big to Read Clearly; MAYFLOWER, RED BALL, ALLIED, U-HAUL STOCKS SOAR— 16-point Financial Daily Subheader; TWO NORTHEAST GOVS HOSPITALIZED FOR INFARCTION, ANEURISM— 10-point Subheader;

GENTLE DECLARES ALL U.S. TERRITORY NORTH OF LINE FROM SYRACUSE TO TICONDEROGA, NY, TICONDEROGA, NY TO SALEM, MA FEDERAL DISASTERS, OFFERS FEDERAL AID FOR

UPSTATE AND NEW ENGLAND RESIDENTS WISHING TO RELOCATE, CLAIMS FUNDS FOR EPA CLEAN-UP ‘ARE NOT WITHIN THE MAP OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE’ [SIC]— Header from Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner Eventually Fired Even from Subheader Dept. for Exceeding Verbal Parameters and Now Starting to Get in the Same Hot Water All Over Again at a Much Less Prestigious Daily Paper;

and so on and so forth. Himself’s old optical editing lab has imposing Com-pugraphic typesetting and matteing facilities: it’s hard to tell which of the headlines and other stuff are for real and which have been dickied with, usually, if you’re too young to recall the actual chronology. At least some of the headlines are phony, the kids know; miniature golf indeed. But the accuracy of Mario’s puppeteered account of the seminal meeting of what’s come to be known as ‘The Concavity Cabinet’ gets to stand uncontested by fact. Nobody who wasn’t actually there at the 16 January meeting knows just what was said when or by whom, the Gentle administration being of the position that extant Oval Office recording equipment was a veritable petri dish of organisms. Gentle’s claque of doo-wopping Motown cabinet-puppets have purple dresses and matching lipstick and nail polish, and bouffants so blindingly Afrosheened that there had been special lighting and film-speed problems in the custodial closet:

SEC. TREAS.: You’re looking vigorous and hale today, sir.

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V–C O.N.A.N.: May I ask, Señor, why my distinguished co-Vice Chair of O.N.A.N. is not with us in attendance today.

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

MR. RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: The president’s taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has authorized me as his oral proxy on this may I say historically opportune day. The Canadian P.M.’s in a bit of a snit. He prefers to whinge in the media surrounded by Mounted Reserves and is off somewhere far from Quebec in a Kevlar vest doing whatever the Canadian word is for pouting, doubtless poring over opinion polls prepared by chinless guys in Canadian hornrims.