Infinite Jest (100 page)

‘You think I fucking
like
to go around hug on folks? You think
any
of us
like
this
shit?
We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking
surrendered
our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand
between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground
with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had
to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking
puked.
Puked,
’ he said. ‘Not
com
fortable? Who the
fuck
are you? Don’t
even
try and tell me I’m coming over feeling
com
fortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass
motherfucking ass.’

Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands and
shout ‘
Talk
about it!’

‘And now you go and disre
spect
me in front of my whole clean and sober
set
just when I gone risk sharing my vulnera
bil
ity and dis
com
fort with you?’

Johnette Foltz was sort of pawing at the back of Roy Tony’s fatigue jacket, shuddering
mentally at how the report of an Ennet House resident assaulted at an NA meeting she’d
personally brought him to would look written up in the Staff Log.

‘
Now,
’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing
gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass
or do I gone fucking rip your head off and
shit
down your neck?’

Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow’s coat now with both hands and was trying
to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying
‘Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother,
he’s just new is all’; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy’s neck
and was hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked
like Erdedy was trying to climb him.

‘We’ve lost a couple already,’ Steeply admitted. ‘During the testing. Not just volunteers.
Some idiot intern in Data Analysis yielded to temptation and wanted to see what all
the fuss was for and got hold of Flatto’s I/O lab’s clearance card and went in and
viewed.’

‘From among the many Read-Only copies of your stock of the Entertainment.’

‘No great tragic loss in itself—lose some idiot-child intern.
C’est la guerre.
The real loss was that his supervisor tried to go in after him and pull him out.
Our head of Data Analysis himself.’

‘Hoyne, Henri or pronounce “Henry,” middle initial of F., with the wife, with his
adult diabetes he controls.’

‘
Did
control. Twenty-year man, Hank. Damn good man. He was a friend. He’s in four-point
restraints now. Nourishment through a tube. No desire or even basic survival-type
will for anything other than more viewing.’

‘Of it.’

‘I tried to visit.’

‘With your sleeveless skirt and different breasts.’

‘I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room, see him like that. Begging for just
even a few seconds—a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything. His eyes wobbling
around like some drug-addicted newborn. Break your fucking heart. In the next bed,
restrained, the idiot intern:
this
was the sort of undisciplined selfish child you like to talk about, Rémy. But Hank
Hoyne was no child. I watched this man put down all sugar and treats when he first
got diagnosed. Just put them down and walked away. Not even a whimper or backward
glance.’

‘A will of steel.’

‘An American adult of exemplary self-control and discretion.’

‘The
samizdat
is not to be played crazily about with, so. We too have lost persons. It is serious.’

The legs of the constellation of Perseus were amputated by the earth’s horizon. Perseus,
he wore the hat of a jongleur or pantalone. Hercules’ head, this head was square.
It was not long to dawn also because at 32° N Pollux and Castor became visible. They
were over Marathe’s left shoulder, as if giants were looking over his shoulder, one
of Castor’s legs inbent in a feminine manner.

‘But do you ever consider?’ Steeply lit another cigarette.

‘Fantasize, you are meaning.’

‘If it’s that consuming. If it somehow addresses desires that total,’ Steeply said.
‘Not even sure I can imagine what desires that total and utter even are.’ Up and down
upon the toes. Turning above the waist only to look back at Marathe. ‘You ever think
of what it’d be like, speculate?’

‘Us, we think of what ends the Entertainment may serve. We find its efficacy tempting.
You and we are tempted in different ways.’ Marathe could identify no other Southwest
U.S.A. constellations except the Big Dipper, which at this latitude appeared attached
to the Great Bear to form something resembling the ‘Big Bucket’ or the ‘Great Cradle.’
The chair gave small squeaks when he shifted his weight upon it.

Steeply said ‘Well I can’t say I’ve been tempted in the strictest sense of
tempted
.’

‘Perhaps we are meaning different things by this.’

‘Frankly, when I think of it I’m as much terrified as I am intrigued. Hank Hoyne is
an empty shell. The iron will, the analytic savvy. His love of a fine cigar. All gone.
His world’s as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost
to us. You look in his eyes and there’s nothing you can recognize in them. Poor Miriam.’
Steeply kneaded a bare shoulder. ‘Willis, on the I/O night-shift, came up with a phrase
for their eyes. “Empty of intent.” This appeared in a memo.’

Marathe pretended to sniff. ‘The temptation of the passive Reward of terminal
p,
this all seems complex to me. Terror seems part of the temptation for you. Us of
Québec’s cause, we have never felt this temptation for the Entertainment, or knowing.
But we respect its power. Thus, we do not fool crazily about.’

It was not that the sky was lightening so much as that the stars’ light had paled.
There became a sullenness about their light. Now, also, strange-looking U.S.A. insects
whirred actively past from time to time, moving jaggedly and making Marathe think
of many windblown sparks.

The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black-checked
shag carpet. Two of the room’s six institutional-plush chairs, whose legs were steel
tubes bent into big ellipses, which wobbled, so that while the chairs couldn’t really
be rocked in they could be sort of bobbed in, which Michael Pemulis was doing absently
as he waited and scanned a printout of Eschaton’s highly technical core ESCHAX directory,
i.e. bobbing in his chair, which produced a kind of rapid rodential squeaking that
gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods as he sat there kitty-corner from Pemulis,
also waiting. The printout kept rotating in Pemulis’s hands. Each chair had a 105-watt
reading lamp attached to the back on a flexible metal stalk that let the reading lamp
curve out from behind and shine right down on whatever magazine the waiting person
was looking at, but since the curved lamps induced this unbearable sensation of somebody
feverish right there reading over your shoulder, the magazines (some of whose covers
involved the color blue) tended to stay unread, and were fanned neatly out on a low
ceramic coffeetable. The carpet was a product of something called Antron. Hal could
see streaks of lividity where somebody’d vacuumed against the grain.

Though the magazines’ coffeetable was nonblue—a wet-nail-polish red with
E.T.A.
in a kind of gray escutcheon—two of the unsettlingly attached lamps that kept its
magazines unread and neatly fanned were blue, although the two blue lamps were not
the lamps attached to the two blue chairs. Dr. Charles Tavis liked to say that you
could tell a lot about an administrator by the decor of his waiting room. The Headmaster’s
waiting room was part of a little hallway in the Comm.-Ad. lobby’s southwest corner.
The premie violets in an asymmetrical sprig in a tennis-ball-shaped vase on the coffeetable
were arguably in the blue family. And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper’s
sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an
overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper that was by an unpleasant
coincidence also the wallpaper in the Enfield offices of a Dr. Zegarelli, D.D.S.,
which Hal’s just come back from, after a removal: the left side of his face still
feels big and dead, with this persistent sensation that he’s drooling without being
able to feel it or stop it. No one’s sure what C.T.’s choice of this wallpaper is
supposed to communicate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow
to scout out E.T.A., but Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him
feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting.

The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room’s two windows have always been dark
blue. There was a nautical-blue border of braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis’s
jaunty yachting cap. Hal was confident Pemulis would remove the insouciant hat the
minute they were called in on what was presumably going to be the carpet.

Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos of E.T.A.
students that hung on the walls;
²⁰⁹
the chassis of Alice Moore’s Intel 972 word processor w/ modem but no cartridge-capability;
also Ms. Moore’s fingertips and lips. The E.T.A. Headmaster’s receptionist and administrative
assistant is known to the players as Lateral Alice Moore. In her youth Lateral Alice
Moore had been a helicopter pilot and airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston
radio station until a tragic collision with another station’s airborne traffic-report
helicopter—plus then the cataclysmic fall to the rush hour’s Jamaica Way six-laner
below—had left her with chronic oxygen debt and a neurological condition whereby she
was able to move only from side to side. So hence the sobriquet Lateral Alice Moore.
An effective time-killer while sitting there waiting for whatever administrator’s
summoned you is to have Lateral Alice Moore drum rapidly on her chest and give imitations
of her old Boston rush-hour traffic reports in a stuttered helicopterish reporter-voice.
Neither Hal, continually checking his chin for drool, nor Pemulis, scanning and bobbing,
nor Ann Kittenplan nor Trevor Axford—about whom there was today not even a hint of
the color blue—are in the mood for this right now, awaiting what they presume to be
some kind of administrative fallout from Sunday’s horrendous Eschaton fiasco. The
presumption is based on who’s been summoned here, to wait.

The two different-sized offices that open off the waiting room (through the open and
only other door of which the dusky blue Mannington shag of the Comm.-Ad. lobby is
visible) belong to Dr. Charles Tavis and to Mrs. Avril Incandenza. Tavis’s office’s
outer door is real oak and has his name and degree and title in (nonblue) letters
so big that the total I.D. crowds the door’s margins. There’s also an inner door.

Avril, whose feelings about enclosure are well known, has no door on her office. Her
office is bigger than C.T.’s, though, and has a seminar table it’s always been obvious
he covets. Avril’s office’s blue-and-black-checkered shag is deeper than the waiting
room’s shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn. Avril
serves (pro bono) as E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs and Dean of Females. She’s
in there unenclosed right now with pretty much every E.T.A. female under thirteen
except Ann Kittenplan, whose tattooed knuckles are bruised and who looks somehow cross-dressed
in a dress and (nonblue) barrette. Avril has vividly white hair—as of the last few
months before Himself’s felo de se—that looks like it never went through the gray
stage (it mostly didn’t) and legs whose taper you can see T. Axford is appraising
with the frankness of adolescence as she paces a bit in front of the crowded seminar
table, in full if kind of oblique-angled view of the people in the waiting room.
²¹⁰
Though it’s not technically in the waiting room with Hal, the plastic fine-tip felt
pen Avril taps professionally against her incisors as she paces and considers is:
blue.

Administrative diddle-checks have been required at all North American tennis academies
since the infamous case of coach R. Bill (‘Touchy’) Phiely at California’s Rolling
Hills Academy, whose hair-raising diary and collection of telephotos and tiny panties—discovered
only after his disappearance into the Humboldt County hill country with a thirteen-year-old
companion—created what might be conservatively termed a climate of concern among the
continent’s tennis parents. At the Enfield Tennis Academy, for the last four years,
Dr. Dolores Rusk is supposed to hold a kind of distaff community meeting with all
female players judged naïve and moppetish enough to be potential diddlees—the youngest
of these is Rhode Island’s pint-sized Tina Echt, just seven but a true cannibal off
the backhand side—to interface in a discreet but nurturingly empowering group setting,
etc., and nip any potential Phielyisms in the bud. Monthly diddle-checks are in Rusk’s
contract because they’re in E.T.A.’s O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation-charter.

Dean of Females Avril M. Incandenza presides over the diddle-check when Dr. Rusk is
otherwise engaged, and Rusk is so very rarely legitimately engaged that the fact that
it’s the Moms doing diddle-prevention duty today leads Hal to fear that Rusk is maybe
in there in the Headmaster’s office getting ready to be in on the upcoming disciplinary
scene: C.T. would have to be really upset to want to have Rusk included; Rusk might
be there more for C.T. than for any studential psyches.