Infinite Jest (101 page)

Axhandle has his eyes closed and is repeating a mnemonic limerick about Brewster’s
Angle for the Leith-taught Quadrivial colloquium ‘Reflections on Refraction.’ Michael
Pemulis is still scanning a serrated scroll of EndStat-axiomatic Pink
₂
, which looks to be all math and spiky brackets, and bobbing, ignoring Ann Kittenplan’s
murderous looks and tubercular throat-clearings at the squeaking of his bobbing blue
chair. You can tell Pemulis really is studying because he keeps turning something
upside-down and then rightside-up. Hal declines to share his Rusk-being-in-there-with-Tavis
worries with Michael Pemulis, not just because Hal avoids ever mentioning Rusk’s name
but also because Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gem-like flame, and though he’d
never admit it is already clearly nauseated with worry that he’s going to get the
lion’s share of the blame for damage to Lord and Possalthwaite and not only receive
corrective on-court discipline but maybe get denied a spot on the trip to Tucson’s
WhataBurger, or worse.
²¹¹

Avril is indirect but syntactically crisp with the couple dozen little girls in there,
probing. The girls’ outfits involve blue at many levels of hue and intensity in varied
combination. Avril Incandenza’s voice is higher on the register than one would expect
from a woman so imposingly tall. It is high and sort of airy. Oddly insubstantial,
is the E.T.A. consensus. Orin says one reason Avril dislikes music is that whenever
she hums along she sounds insane.

The absence of a door to the Moms’s office means you might as well be in there, in
terms of being able to hear what’s going on. She has little sense of spatial privacy
or boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child. Lateral Alice Moore wears
a sort of surreal combination of black Lycra Spandex and filmy green tulle. The portable-stereo
headphones she wears—entering what appear to be Response-macros for 80+ received invitations
to next week’s WhataBurger Invitational—are powder-blue. Her typing is clearly in
synch with something’s backbeat. Her lips and cheek-points are the vague robin’s-egg
of cyanosis.

Just why Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk is unclear and seems free-floating; Hal gets
a different answer from Pemulis every time. Hal himself feels uncomfortable around
Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn’t aware of any particular reason for being uncomfortable
around her. But Pemulis positively detests Rusk. It was Pemulis who’d dickied in at
night and hooked a Delco battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked office
door, at age fifteen, Rusk’s office door, the first door over in the other little
hallway at the lobby’s NE corner, next to the shift-nurses’ office and infirmary,
then exiting Rusk’s office by a window and thorny hedge, which Pemulis was extremely
fortunate no one but Hal and Schacht and maybe Mario knew he authored the hot knob,
because the whole scheme turned quickly disastrous, because it was an elderly Brighton-Irish
cleaning lady who got to the hot knob first, at like 0500h., and it turned out Pemulis
had seriously under-calculated the brass-conducted Delco voltage involved, and if
the cleaning lady hadn’t been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she would
have ended up with way worse than the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes
she regained consciousness with, and the cleaning lady’s Ward Boss was upper Brighton’s
infamous F. X. (‘Follow That Ambulance’) Byrne, rapacious personal-injury J.D., and
the Academy’s Workman’s Comp. premiums had skyrocketed, and the whole thing was still
in litigation.

Avril had eschewed an office door even before the cleaning-lady kertwang, for simple
enclosure-reasons.

Recrossed legs and closer inspection reveal that Trevor Axford’s left sock, though
not his right sock, is blue.

Sinistral, his right hand missing digits from a fireworks accident three Interdependence
Days past, Axhandle is several cm. shorter than Hal Incandenza and is a true redheaded
person, with copper-colored hair and that moist white freckle-chocked skin that even
through two layers of summer Pledge only reddens and peels, plus there’s the matter
of the enormous and forever chapped lips; and as a tennis player he is like a less
effective version of John Wayne—he does nothing but blast from the baseline, w/o discernible
spin. He’s a junior from Short Beach CT and under enormous family pressure to continue
the male Axford tradition of attending Yale and is academically so marginal that he
knows his only chance to go to Yale is to play tennis for Yale, which would effectively
blow any chance at a Show-level future, and is high-ranked but has set his competitive
sights on nothing past a Ride-offer to Yale. Though Ingersoll’s informally in Hal’s
Big Buddy contingent, he’s technically in Axhandle’s, they’re both aware; and Hal’s
a little uncomfortable about his relief that none of the real Eschaton casualties
were technically his Buddies.
²¹²
The only real thing Axford and Hal have in common on the court is a curious habit
of refusing to ask for help from other courts when their balls go astray.
²¹³

Pemulis has finally quit with the bobbing and folded the printout scroll of Pink
₂
into a big ragged square and has sidled over to Lateral Alice Moore’s horseshoe-shaped
desk and is bantering with her very casually, looking all around him as he banters,
trying subtly to feel her out re whether maybe one of these WhataBurger Jr. Invitational
invitations stacked cruciform, female athwart male, in Lateral Alice’s IN box concerns
anybody with the male initials M.M.P., by any chance. Pemulis and Moore would be less
tight if she knew he dickied in at night and used her WATS and modem, though she’s
very laid-back and easygoing and not at all like the little framed thing by her name
plaque with a scowling woman saying I’VE GOT ONE NERVE LEFT AND YOU’RE GETTING ON
IT. The little cartoon is just a standard like office-worker gag. She’d summoned them
out of Sixth Hour with the same ancient intercom-and-mike system Troeltsch et al.
get to commandeer for Saturdays’ WETA (Troeltsch has had to be prohibited from playing
with her chair), and her transmitted voice had not been ungentle. Hal’s face’s left
side feels queerly inflated, but then when he runs his right hand over it it’s always
regulation-size. Administrative assistants worth their health benefits are synaptically
evolved to the point where they can banter, accept compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle
ensemble, effortlessly deflect unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass-intensive
on personal-stereo headphones, and word-process effortlessly to the headphones’ backbeat,
all simultaneously. Lateral Alice Moore’s bluish fingertips make her painted nails
ten little sunsets. Lateral Alice Moore’s desk’s chair’s wheels fit on a track with
an electrified third rail, so she can slide from one corner of the horseshoe’s arc
to the other—more or less laterally—at the touch of a cerise desktop button. For post-Delco-incident
legal reasons, the name-plaque on her reception desk has
DANGER: THIRD RAIL
instead of the name Lateral Alice Moore.

Hal can hear Avril saying ‘Now. If I speak to all of you very gently about being touched
by a tall person in an uncomfortable way, will you know what I mean? Have any of you
been kissed or nuzzled or hugged or rubbed or pinched or probed or fondled or in any
way touched by a tall person in a way that’s made you uncomfortable?’ Hal can see
one of his Moms’s stockinged legs, terminating in a trim ankle and a very white Reebok,
extruding from stage-right into the frame of the empty doorway, the Reebok tapping
patiently, and one arm crossed over Avril’s chest, and the other arm’s elbow resting
on that arm and fluttering in and out of view as Avril taps at her teeth with a blue
pen.

‘Gramma pinches my cheek,’ one girl volunteers. She’d actually raised her hand to
be called on, her wrist with its touching little (blue) terry wrist-band. Hal hasn’t
seen so many pigtails and button noses and small berry-shaped mouths convened in one
indoor place in who knows how long. Very few of the sneakered feet reach all the way
to the thick shag in there. Much leg-dangling and absent uncomfortable sneaker-swinging.
A couple fingers in nostrils in absent contemplation. Ann Kittenplan, in her blue
chair, is coolly appraising the little wash-offable tattoos she applies daily to the
knuckles of her hands.

‘Not quite what we’re trying to speak of together right now, Erica,’ from someplace
above the tapping foot and in-and-out arm. Hal knows the register and inflections
of his mother’s voice so well it almost makes him uncomfortable. His left ankle gives
a sick squeak when he flexes it. Cords in his left forearm stand out and subside as
he squeezes his tennis ball. The left side of his face feels like something far away
that means him harm and is coming gradually closer. He can make out just the whistly
fricatives of Charles Tavis’s distant voice from behind his double office doors; it
sounds somehow like he’s speaking to more than one person in there. Charles Tavis’s
office’s inner door also has the I.D.
DR. CHARLES TAVIS
on it, and below that his E.T.A. motto about the man who knows his limitations having
none.

‘She does it really hard,’ rebuts what must be Erica Siress.

‘I’ve seen her do it,’ what sounds like Jolene Criess confirms.

Another: ‘I hate that.’

‘I hate it when some adult pats my head like I’m a schnauzer.’

‘The next adult that calls me adorable is in for a really unpleasant surprise let
me tell you.’

‘I hate it when my hair is tousled or smoothed in any way.’

‘Kittenplan’s tall. Kittenplan gives Indian rub-burns after lights-out.’

Avril gives them verbal space, tries gently to steer the topic closer to true Phielyism;
she’s subtle and very good with small children.

‘… that my daddy gives me these small little shoves in the small of the back when
he wants me to go into rooms. It’s like he
influences
me into rooms from behind. This tiny little irritating push, that makes me want to
let him have it in the shin.’

‘Mmmmmm-hmm,’ Avril muses.

It’s impossible not to overhear, because things out in the waiting room right now
are so comparatively silent except for the tinny hiss of Lateral Alice Moore’s disengaged
headphones and the conspiratorial murmur of Michael Pemulis trying to get her to drum
on her chest and describe I-93 South’s Neponset exit-ramp as one very long thin parking
lot. Things are so quiet because the anxiety level in Tavis’s waiting room is high.

‘You’re all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction,’ Ann Kittenplan had said
to Pemulis as they all first answered the intercom’s summons, which was also about
the time that Pemulis started in with the rodential chair-squeaking that made one
half of Kittenplan’s face spasm.

One of the tricky and sinister things about corrective discipline at a tennis academy
is that punishments can take the form of what might look like straight-out athletic
conditioning. Q.v. the drill sergeant telling the recruit to drop and give him fifty,
etc. So but this is why Gerhardt Schtitt and his prorectors are way more feared than
Ogilvie or Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf or any of the regular academics. It’s not
just that Schtitt’s corporal reputation preceded him here. It’s that Schtitt and deLint
make out the daily schedules for
A.M.
drills and
P.M.
matches and resistance-training and conditioning runs. But especially the
A.M.
drills. Certain drills are well known to be nothing more than attitude-adjusters,
designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality for a few minutes. Too
brutal to be assigned on the daily basis that would contribute to genuine aerobic
conditioning, drills like the disciplinary version of Tap & Whack
²¹⁴
are known to the kids simply as Pukers. Puker-drills are really meant to do nothing
but hurt you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to
merit them; but they’re still to all outward appearances exempt from any kind of VIII-Amendment
protest or sniveling calls home to parents, insidiously, since they can be described
to parents and police
²¹⁵
alike as just drills assigned for your overall cardiovascular benefit, with all the
actual sadism completely sub rosa.

Kittenplan’s prediction that the upperclassmen are going to wear the whole brown helmet
for the Eschaton free-for-all is hopefully rebuttable by Pemulis’s observation that
Eschaton’s extracurricular impulse and structure had been firmly in place before any
of them’d even enrolled. All Michael Pemulis had done was codify basic principles
and impose a sort of matrix of decidable strategy. Maybe helped create a mythology
and established, mostly through personal example, a certain level of expectation.
All Hal’d done was act as amanuensis on a lousy manual. The I.-Day Combatants had
been out there of their own volition. Pemulis and Axford’d gotten Hal to write out
most of all this in maximally rhetorical diction, which Pemulis had then embedded
in a Pink
₂
printout so he could carry it around and study it and have it all nailed down before
Tavis tried any boom-lowering. The strategy is to let Pemulis do all the talking but
let Hal interject at will, the voice of reason, good-cop/bad. Axford’s been instructed
to count the Antron fibers between his shoes the whole time they’re in there.

Hal has no idea what it might signify that the Headmaster’s summons hasn’t come for
almost 48 hours. It might be odd that it hadn’t once occurred to him to see Tavis
personally, or to go to HmH and ask the Moms for intercession or info. It’s not like
he had the urge but resisted it; it hadn’t even occurred to him.

For somebody who not only lives on the same institutional grounds as his family but
also has his training and education and pretty much his whole overall raison-d’être
directly overseen by relatives, Hal devotes an unusually small part of his brain and
time ever thinking about people in his family
qua
family-members. Sometimes when he’ll be chatting with somebody in the endless registration-line
for a tournament or at a post-meet dance or something and somebody’ll say something
like ‘How’s Avril getting along?’ or ‘I saw Orin kicking the everliving shit out of
the ball on an O.N.A.N.F.L. highlights cartridge last week,’ there will be this odd
tense moment where Hal’s mind will go utterly blank and his mouth slack and flabby,
working soundlessly, as if the names were words on the tip of his tongue. Except for
Mario, about whom Hal will talk your ear off, it’s almost like some ponderous creaky
machine has to get up and running for Hal even to think about members of his immediate
family as standing in relation to himself. It’s a possible reason Hal avoids Dr. Dolores
Rusk, who always wants to probe him on issues of space and self-definition and something
she keeps calling the ‘Coatlicue Complex.’
²¹⁶