Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘Even historically — the 60s bomb-tossers, the Spic Separatists, the Ragheads —’

‘Very charming. These are attractive terms.’

‘Ragheads, Colombians, Brazilians — they had positive objectives.’

‘Desires for self which you could understand.’

‘Even if the objectives were nothing more than things we could file, pin to the board under “STATED OBJECTIVES” — the pathetic Spies. They wanted certain things. There was a context. A compass for maneuvers against them.’

‘Your guardians of National Security could understand these positive desires of self-interest. Look at them and “relate” as one says, at least. Knowing where you stand on the field of play.’

Steeply slowly nodded, as if to only himself. ‘There wasn’t just pure malice. There was never the sense that here were some people who had just all of a sudden let the air out of your tires for no reason.’

‘You allege we disperse our resources deflating automobile tires?’

‘A figure of speech. Or for example a serial killer. A sadist. Somebody who wants you down just for the deviant sake of wanting you down. A deviant.’

Far south, a blinking system of tri-colored lights described a spiral over the airport’s tower’s pulsing tip — this was a landing aircraft.

Steeply lit another cigarette off the butt of his previous and then tossed the butt, peering over the shelf’s edge to watch its spiralled fall. Marathe was looking up and right. Steeply said:

‘Because politics are one thing. Even way-out-far-in-the-distance fringe politics are one thing. Your Fortier doesn’t seem to care much about Reconfiguration, territory, redemisement, cartography, tariffs, Finlandization, O.N.A.N.ite Anschluss or toxic-waste displacement.’

‘Experialism.’

Steeply said ‘Or so-called Experialism. Even Separatism. None of the other cells’ agendas seem to drive you people. Most of the Office sees it as just sheer malice with you. No agenda or story.’

‘And for you there is something appalling.’

Steeply pursed his lips, as if trying to blow something off them. ‘But when there are delineatable strategic political goals and objectives. When there’s some set of ends we can make sense of the malice with. Then it’s just business.’

‘Nothing of persons.’ Marathe was looking up. Some of the stars seemed to flutter, others to burn with more steadiness.

‘We know which end is up when it’s business. We’ve got a field and a compass.’ He regarded Marathe directly in a way that was not accusing. ‘This seems personal,’ he said.

Marathe could not think of descriptions for the way Steeply regarded him. Neither was it sad nor inquisitive nor quite ruminative. There were small flickers and shadows of movements around the flickers of the celebratory fire down far away on the floor of the desert. Marathe could not determine whether Steeply was truly revealing emotions about himself. The flickers continually went out. Small shreds of young laughter drifted up to them in the vacuous silence. There were also sometimes rustles in the hillside’s scrub, of gravel or small living nightly things. Or whether perhaps Steeply was trying to give him something, let him know something and determine whether it went back to M. Fortier. Marathe’s arrangement with the Office of Unspecified Services seemed most often to consist in submitting himself to numerous tests and games of truth and betrayal. He felt often with U.S.O.U.S. like a caged rodent being regarded blandly by bland men in white coats.

Marathe shrugged. ‘U.S.A. has previously been hated. Richly so. Shining Path and your Maxwell House company. The trans-Latin cocaine cartels and the poor late M. Kemp with his exploding home. Did not both Iraq and Iran call U.S.A. the Very Large Satan? As you hatefully say they have Heads of Rags?’

Steeply exhumed smoke quickly to reply. ‘Yes but there were still contexts and ends. Revenue, religion, spheres of influence, Israel, petroleum, neo-Marxism, post-Cold-War power-jockeying. There was always a third thing.’

‘Some desire.’

‘Some piece of business. Some third thing between them and us — it wasn’t just us — it was something they wanted from us, or wanted us out of.’ Steeply seemed earnestly to say it. The third thing, the goal or desire — it mediated the ill will, abstracted it somehow.’

‘For this is how one who is sane proceeds,’ Marathe said, paying great concentration to aligning the blanket’s hems against his chest and wheels; ‘some desire of self, and efforts expending to meet that desire.’

‘Not just wanting negatives,’ Steeply said, shaking the lurid head. ‘Not just wanting some other’s harm for no purpose.’

Marathe again found himself pretending to sniff with the congestion. ‘And a U.S.A. purpose, desires?’ This he asked quietly; its sound was strange against stone.

Steeply was pinching yet a next particle of tobacco from his lipstick. He said This you can’t generalize on with most of us, since our whole system is founded on your individual’s freedom to pursue his own individual desires.’ His mascara had now cooled in the formations of its past running. Marathe kept silent and fussed with the blanket as Steeply sometimes regarded him. A whole minute passed this way. Finally Steeply said:

‘Me, for me personally, as an American, Rémy, if you’re really serious, I think it’s probably your standard old basic American dreams and ideals. Freedom from tyranny, from excessive want, fear, censorship of speech and thought.’ He was looking with seriousness, even in this wig. ‘The old ones, tested by time. Relative plenty, meaningful work, adequate leisure-time. The ones you might call corny.’ His smiling revealed to Marathe lipstick upon one incisor. ‘We want choice. A sense of efficaciousness and choice. To be loved by someone. To freely love who you happen to love. To be loved irregardless of whether you can tell them Classified stuff about your job. To have them just trust you and trust that you know what you’re doing. To feel valued. Not to be agendalessly despised. To have good neighborly relations. Cheap and abundant energy. Pride in your work and family, and home.’ The lipstick had been smeared onto the tooth when the finger had removed the grain of tobacco. He was ‘faisait monter la pression’:[170] ‘The little things. Access to transport. Good digestion. Work-saving appliances. A wife who doesn’t mistake your job’s requirements for your own fetishes. Reliable waste-removal and disposal. Sunsets over the Pacific. Shoes that don’t cut off circulation. Frozen yogurt. A tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing.’

Marathe’s face, it showed nothing. ‘The loyalty of a domestic pet.’

Steeply pointed the cigarette. ‘There you go, friend.’

‘High-quality entertainment. High value for the dollar of leisure and spectation.’

Steeply laughed agreeably, exhaling a shaped sausage of smoke. In response to this, Marathe smiled. There was some silence for thinking until Marathe finally said, looking up and off to think: ‘This U.S.A. type of person and desires appears to me like almost the classic, how do you say, uti-litaire.’

‘A French appliance?’

‘Comme on dit,’ Marathe said, ‘utilitarienne. Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: result: what is good. This is the U.S.A. of you.’

Steeply pronounced the U.S.A. English word for Marathe, then. Then a sustained pause. Steeply rose and fell upon his toes. A bonfire of young persons was burning some k. down away on the desert floor, the flames burning in a seeming ring instead of a sphere.

Marathe said ‘But yes, but precisely whose pleasure and whose pain, in this personality type’s equation of what is good?’

When Steeply removed a particle of the cigarette from the lip he would then roll it absently between his first finger and thumb; this did not appear womanly. ‘Come again?’

Mara the scratched inside the wind breaker. ‘I am wondering, me, in the equations of this U.S.A. type: the best good is each individual U.S.A. person’s maximum pleasure? or it is the maximum pleasure for all the people?’

Steeply nodded in a way that indicated willing patience with someone whose wits were not too speedy. ‘But there you go, but this question itself shows how our different types of national character part ways from each other, Rémy. The American genius, our good fortune is that someplace along the line back there in American history them realizing that each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results together in maximizing everyone’s good.’

‘Ah.’

‘We learn this as early as grade school, as kids.’

‘I am seeing.’

‘This is what lets us steer free of oppression and tyranny. Even your Greekly democratic howling-mob-type tyranny. The United States: a community of sacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice. The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. Defended with teeth and bared claws all through our history.’

‘Bien sûr.’

Steeply for the first time seemed to be feeling with his hand his wig’s disorder. He was attempting to straightly reposition it without removing the wig. Marathe tried not to envision what his B.S.S. had done to the natural brown male hair of Steeply, to accommodate the complex wig. Steeply said: ‘It might be hard for you to quite understand what’s so precious about this for us, from across this chasm of different values that separates our peoples.’

Marathe flexed his hand. ‘Perhaps because it is so general and abstracted. In practice, however, you may force me to understand.’

‘We don’t force. It’s exactly about not-forcing, our history’s genius. You are entitled to your values of maximum pleasure. So long as you don’t fuck with mine. Are you seeing?’

‘Perhaps help me see by practical evidence. An instance. Suppose you are able at one moment to increase your own pleasure, but the cost of this is the displeasuring pain of another? Another sacred individual’s displeasing pain.’

Steeply said: ‘Well now this is precisely what gives us the fantods about the A.F.R., why it’s so important I think to remember how we come from different cultures and value systems, Rémy. Because in our U.S. value system, anybody who derives an increase in pleasure from somebody else’s pain is a deviant, a sadistic sicko, and is thereby excluded from the community of everybody’s right to pursue their own best pleasure-to-pain ratio.

Sickos deserve compassion and the best treatment feasible. But they’re not part of the big picture.’

Marathe willed himself not to rise on his stumps again. ‘No, but not another’s pain as a pleasurable end in itself. I did not mean where my pleasure is in your pain. How to say better. Imagine there arises a situation in which your deprivation or pain is merely the consequence, the price, of my own pleasure.’

‘You mean you’re talking a tough-choices, limited-resources-type situation.’

‘But in the simplest of examples. The most child-like case.’ Marathe’s eyes momentarily gleamed with enthusiasm. ‘Suppose that you and I, we both wish to enjoy a hot bowl of the Habitant soupe aux pois.’

Steeply said ‘You mean…’

‘But yes. French-Canadian-type pea soup. Produit du Montreal. Saveur Maison. Prête a Servir.’171[171]

‘What is it with you people and this stuff?’

‘In this case imagining both you and I are in the worst way craving for Habitant Soup. But there is one can only, of the small and well-known Single-Serving Size.’

‘An American invention, by the way, the 3-S, let’s insert.’

The part of Marathe’s mind that hovered above and watched coldly, it could not know whether Steeply was being deliberately parodically dense and annoying, to arouse Marathe to some revealing passion. Marathe made his rotary gesture of impatience, slowly. ‘But OK,’ he said neutrally. ‘It is simple here. We both want the soup. So me, my pleasure from eating the Habitant soupe aux pois has the price of your pain at not eating soup when you badly crave it.’ Marathe was patting his pockets for something. ‘And the reverse, if you are who eats this serving. By the U.S.A. genius of for each “pursuivre le bonheur,”[172]then, who can decide who may receive this soup?’

Steeply stood with weight on one leg. ‘Example’s a bit oversimplified. We bid on the soup, maybe. We negotiate. Maybe we divide the soup.’

‘No, for the ingenious Single-Serving Size of serving is notoriously for only one, and we are both large and vigorous U.S.A. individuals who have spent the afternoon watching huge men in pads and helmets hurl themselves at one another in the High Definition of InterLace, and we are both ravenous for the satiation of a complete hot bowl’s serving. Half the bowl would only torment this craving I have.’

The fast shadow of pain across the face of Steeply showed Marathe’s choice of example was witty: the divorced U.S.A. man has much experience with the small size of Single-Serving products. Marathe said:

‘OK. OK, yes, why should I, as the sacred individual, give you half of my soup? My own pleasure over torment is what is good, for I am a loyal U.S.A., a genius of this individual desire.’

The bonfire slowly was filling out. Another cross of colored lights circled the airport area of Tucson. Steeply’s movements of smoothing the wig and twisting fingers through the snarls of hair became perhaps more abrupt and frustrated. Steeply said ‘Well whose soup is it legally? Who actually bought the soup?’

Marathe shrugged. ‘Not relevant for my question. Suppose a third party, now unfortunately deceased. He appears at our flat with a can oísoupe aux pots to eat while watching recorded U.S.A. sporting and suddenly is clutching his heart and falls to the carpeting deceased, holding the soup we are now both so wishing.’

‘Then we bid on the soup. Whoever’s got the most desire for the soup and is willing to fork over the higher price buys out the other’s half, then the other just jogs on down — jogs or rolls on down to Safeway and buys himself some more soup. Whoever’s willing to put his money where his hunger is gets the dead guy’s soup.’

Marathe shook his head without any heat. ‘The Safeway store and bidding, these are also not relevant to my question I hope the example of pea soup to raise. Which perhaps this is a dull-witted question.’

Steeply was at the wig with both hands, for repair. Former perspiration had mashed its form inward on one side, as well as small clots and small burrs from the falls of his descent to the outcropping. Presumably there was no comb or brushes in his small evening’s-wear purse. The rear of his dress was dirty. The straps of his prostheses’ brassiere dug cruelly into the meat of his back and shoulders. Again there was for Marathe the picture of something soft being slowly throttled.