Infinite jest - David Wallace

White Flagger (‘Ferocious’) Francis Gehaney, one of the most ancient and gnarled of the Crocodiles, had a white crew cut and skallycap and suspenders over the flannel shirt that encased his gut, and an enormous cucumber-shaped red schnoz you could actually see whole arteries in the skin of, and brown stumpy teeth and emphysema and a portable little oxygen-tank thing whose blue tube was held under the schnoz with white tape, and the very clear bright eye-whites that went along with the extremely low resting pulse-rate of a guy with geologic amounts of sober AA time. Ferocious Francis G., whose mouth was never without a toothpick and who had on his right forearm a faded martini-glass-and-naked-lady tattoo of Korean-War-vintage, who’d gotten sober under the Nixon administration and who communicated in the obscene but antiquated epigrams the Crocs all used[196] — F.F. had taken Gately out for eye-rattling amounts of coffee, after the incident with the table and the head. He’d listened with the slight boredom of detached Identification to Gately’s complaint that there was no way something he didn’t understand enough to even start to believe in was seriously going to be interested in helping save his ass, even if He/She/It did in some sense exist. Gately still doesn’t quite know why it helped, but somehow it helped when Ferocious Francis suggested that maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn’t going to be major-league enough to save Gately’s addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it?

That was months ago. Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and tries to help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. And when Ferocious Francis G. and the White Flaggers presented him, on the September Sunday that marked his first year sober, with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake, Don Gately had cried in front of nonrelatives for the first time in his life. He now denies that he actually did cry, saying something about candle-fumes in his eye. But he did.

Gately is an unlikely choice for Ennet House chef, having fed for most of the last twelve years on sub-shop subs and corporate snack foods consumed amid some sort of motion. He is 188 cm. and 128 kg. and had never once eaten broccoli or a pear until last year. Chef-wise, he offers up an exceptionless routine of: boiled hot dogs; dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for texture; Cream of Chicken soup over spirochete-shaped noodles; ominously dark, leathery Shake ‘N Bake chicken legs; queasily underdone hamburgs; and hamburg-sauce spaghetti whose pasta he boils for almost an hour.[197] None but the most street-hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack about the food, which appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad steaming pans it was cooked in, with Gately’s big face hovering lun-arly above it, flushed and beaded under the floppy chef’s hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark joke he hadn’t got, his eyes full of anxiety and hopes for everyone’s full enjoyment, basically looking like a nervous bride serving her first conjugal dish, except this bride’s hands are the same size as the House’s dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts on them, and this bride seems to need no oven-mitts as he sets down massive pans on the towels that have to be laid down to keep the plastic tabletop from searing. Any sort of culinary comments are always extremely oblique. Randy Lenz up at the northeast corner likes to raise his can of tonic and say that Don’s food is the kind of food that helps you really appreciate whatever you’re drinking along with it. Geoffrey Day talks about what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner table not feeling bloated. Wade McDade, a young hard-core flask-alkie from Ashland KY, and Doony Glynn, who’s still woozy and infirm from some horrendous Workers Comp. scam gone awry last year, and is constantly sickly and who’s probably going to get Discharged soon for losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire and not even pretending to look for another one — the two have this bit they do on spaghetti night where McDade comes into the living room right before chow and goes ‘Some of that extra-fine spay-ghetti tonight, Doonster,’ and Doony Glynn goes ‘Ooo, will it be all lovely and soft?’ and McDade goes ‘Leave your teeth at home, boy’ in the voice of a Kentucky sheriff, leading Glynn to the table by the hand as if Glynn were a damaged child. They take care to do the bit while Gately’s still in the kitchen tossing salad and worrying about course-presentation. Though Tiny Ewell never fails to thank Gately for the meal, and April Cortelyu is lavish in her praises, and Burt F. Smith always rolls his eyes with pleasure and makes yummy-noises whenever he can get a fork to his mouth.

PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL

‘Do you remember hearing,’ U.S.O.U.S.’s Hugh Steeply said, ‘in your own country, in the late I think B.S. ‘70s, of an experimental program, a biomedical experiment, involving the idea of electro-implantations in the human brain?’ Steeply, at the shelf’s lip, turned to look. Marathe merely looked back at him. Steeply said: ‘No? Some sort of radical advance. Stereo-taxy. Epilepsy-treatment. They proposed to implant tiny little hair-thin electrodes in the brain. Some leading Canadian neurologist — Elder, Elders, something — at the time had hit on evidence that certain tiny little stimulations in certain brain-areas could prevent a seizure. As in an epileptic seizure. They implant electrodes — hair-thin, just a few millivolts or —’

‘Briggs electrodes.’

‘Beg pardon?’

Marathe coughed slightly. ‘Also the type used in pacemakers of the heart.’

Steeply felt his lip. ‘I’m thinking I’m recalling a tentative Bio-entry saying your father had had a pacemaker.’

Marathe touched his own face absently. The plutonium-239 pack of power. The Briggs electrode. The Kenbeck DC circuit. I am recalling terms and instructions. Avoid all microwaving ovens and many transmitters. Cremation for burial forbidden — this is because of plutonium-239.’

‘So but you know of this old program with epileptics? Experiments they thought could avoid ablative surgery for severe epilepsy?’

Marathe said nothing and made what might be seen as slightly shaking the head.

Steeply turned back to face the east with his hands clasped before his back, wishing to speak of it one way or another way, Marathe could tell.

‘I can’t remember if I read about it or heard a lecture or what. The implantation was a pretty inexact science. It was all experimental. A whole lot of electrodes had to be implanted in an incredibly small area in the temporal lobe to hope to find the nerve-terminals that involved epileptic seizures, and it was trial and error, stimulating each electrode and checking the reaction.’

‘Temporal lobes of the brain,’ Marathe said.

‘What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.’ Steeply looked back over his shoulder at Marathe. ‘I mean we’re talking about intense pleasure, Rémy. I’m remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable pleasure-tissue p-terminals.’

‘ “P” wishing to mean “the pleasure.”

‘And that their location seemed maddeningly inexact and unpredictable, even within brains of the same species — a p-terminal’d turn out to be right up next to some other neuron whose stimulation would cause pain, or hunger, or God knows what.’

‘The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.’

‘The whole point is they weren’t doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically experimental. They used animals and animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string neuro-team stuck with the epileptic animals. Older — or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name — headed the team to map these what he called quote “Rivers of Reward,” the p-terminals in the lobes.’

Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker’s cotton pockets, pleasantly nodding. ‘An experimental program of Canada, you stated.’

‘I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.’

Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. ‘This is a mental hospital. The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.’

‘Because they were theorizing that these quote “rivers” or terminals were also the brain’s receptors for things like beta-endorphins, L-dopa, Q-dopa, serotonin, all the various neurotransmitters of pleasure.’

‘The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.’

There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light.

‘But not humans yet,’ Steeply said. ‘Older’s earliest subject were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu— the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his />-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’

Marathe said ‘Not of the pleasure itself, however.’

‘I think dehydration. I’m fuzzy on just what the rat died of.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.’

‘Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates, even a dolphin.’

‘Up the evolving scale, p-terminals for each. Each died?’

‘Eventually,’ Steeply said, ‘or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember even if the pleasure-electrode was removed, the stimulation-lever removed, the subject’d run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get one more jolt.’

‘The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.’

‘You seem amused by this, Rémy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little neuroelectric adventure.’

‘I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.’

‘Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects, to see whether the human lobe had p-terminals and so on; and because of the sobering consequences for the subject-animals in the program they couldn’t legally use prisoners or patients, they had to try to secure volunteers.’

‘Because of a risk,’ Marathe said.

‘The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.’

Marathe pursed the lips: ‘I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked your then CIA for, what is the term, “Persons of Expendability” from Southeast Asia or Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring U.S.A.’s MK-Ultra.’[198]

Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. ‘But what apparently happened was that somehow word of the p-terminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up in Manitoba — some low-level worker at Brandon had broken security and leaked word.’

‘Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.’

‘… And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.’

‘In full knowledge of the rat’s and dolphin’s death, from pressing the lever.’

Marathe’s father had always assigned it to Rémy, his youngest, to go first inside some public restaurant or shop to check for the presence of a microwave or GC-type of transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a shoplifter, the shrieking instruments at doors.

Steeply said ‘And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing spin on the study of human pleasure and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation —’

‘To become some crazed rats.’

‘— All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon’s and Approception tests on all these hordes of prospective volunteers — the hordes were told it was part of the screening — the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal.’

‘In other words not any deviants.’

‘Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people — Canadian young people.’

‘Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.’

‘But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.’

Marathe gave him a bland look.

Steeply examined a cuticle. ‘By free choice, of course.’

Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard’s hard thought. ‘Thus, but how long before these leaks and rumors of p-terminals reach the Ottawa of government and public weal, for Canada’s government reacts with horror at the prospect of this.’

‘Oh, and not just Ottawa,’ Steeply said. ‘You can see the implications if a technology like Elder’s really became available. I know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey, whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley bit their knuckle in horror.’

‘The CIA chewed a hand?’

‘Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, high-discretionary-spending society.’

‘But it would be illegalized,’ Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines of movements Steeply made for keeping warm.

‘Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,’ Steeply said. ‘There was still the prospect of an underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes’d be no more exotic than syringes.’

‘But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.’

‘Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures. Abortions. Electric penile implants.’

‘The MK-Ultra surgeries.’

Steeply laughed without mirth. ‘Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?’