Infinite Jest (103 page)

‘Now the thing with the skull,’ Stice said. Hal had watched gooseflesh rise on Stice’s
arms and legs as he stood under the cold air and faced up and breathed, hugging his
gear to his chest.

‘One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your
skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed
bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be. I’m
doing my best to cast all this in terms the you you are right now can be comfortable
with, Tina. Though I need to tell you I feel uncomfortable adjusting a presentation
toward or down toward anyone in any way, since I’m terribly vain, both as a man and
an educator, about my reputation for candor,’ Tavis said. The audible smile. ‘It is
one of my limitations.’

Stice withdrew without even having to say goodbye to Hal. They were at complete ease
with one another. It had been a bit different the year before, when Hal was still
in Boys’ 16’s. Hal heard Stice say something to somebody out in the lobby. Part of
C.T.’s impression of distance just past the eye’s focal length was the fact that the
two sides of his face didn’t quite go together. It wasn’t as drastic as a stroke-victim’s
face or a deformity; the subtlety of it was part of it, the essential vagueness about
himself that Tavis fought by sort of peeling his skull back and exposing his brain
to you without any sort of warning or invitation; it was part of the man’s preoccupied
frenzy.

Between Ortho Stice’s exit and the Moms’s entry Hal had been flexing the ankle and
watching the swelling shift slightly under the multiple socks. He stood and put his
weight on the ankle experimentally a couple times and then sat back down and flexed
it, watching the swelling very intently. The way he knew suddenly that he was going
to go down and get high in secret in the Pump Room before showering was that it hadn’t
occurred to him to ask The Darkness about making some sort of arrangements to eat
together, since Stice had missed supper too. His viscera were putting out the sound
of one of those teakettles that doesn’t have a whistle and so just rumbles as it boils.
A competitive athlete cannot skip meals without terrific metabolic distress.

After a little while Avril Incandenza, E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs, had lowered
her head under the waiting room’s jamb and come in, looking fresh and totally untouched
by the heat. She had one of the Orientation packets in its customary red-and-gray
binder.

The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the
exact center
of any room she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all
sight. It was part of her, and so to that extent dear to Hal, but it was noticeable
and kind of unsettling. His brother Orin, during a late-night round of Family Trivia,
had once described Avril as The Black Hole of Human Attention. Hal had been pacing,
rising up on the toes of the left foot, trying to gauge the exact level of physical
discomfort he was feeling. That’s when she’d come in. Hal and the Moms always greeted
each other kind of extravagantly. When Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced
to orbiting, and Hal’s pacing became vaguely circular around the waiting room’s perimeter
as Avril rested her tailbone on the receptionist’s desk and crossed her ankles and
produced her cigarette case. Her manner always became very casual and almost sort
of male when she and Hal were alone in a room.

She watched him walk. ‘The ankle?’

He hated himself for exaggerating the limp even slightly. ‘Tender. Sore at the very
worst. More like tender.’

‘No, now, now no need to
cry,
’ C.T. was exclaiming as he knelt at the side of the chair from which little legs
dangled and were spasming around. ‘I didn’t mean
literally
break, as in break open your
head,
Tina. Please let me acknowledge that this is
totally
my fault my dear for presenting what we’ll be up to here in just
exactly
the wrong sort of light.’

Avril had casually produced a 100-mm. rodney from the flat brass case and tamped it
on an unlined knuckle. Hal produced no lighter. Neither of them had looked toward
Tavis’s office’s maw. Avril’s smock-type dress was blue cotton, with a kind of scalloped
white doily around the shoulders and white stockings and painfully white Reebok cross-trainers.

‘I am
horrified
that I’ve made you cry like this.’ Tavis’s voice had assumed that stressed character
of issuing from the end of a long corridor. ‘Just please know that a totally unthreatening
lap is available if you want a lap, is all I can think of to say.’

Avril always smoked with her smoking-arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the
other arm. She would frequently hold a rodney just this same way without lighting
it or even putting it in her mouth. She permitted herself to smoke only in her E.T.A.
office and HmH study and one or two other venues outfitted with air-filtration equipment.
Her posture, that night, with her coccyx against something and looking down the length
of her legs, was awfully close to the way Himself used to stand around. She indicated
C.T.’s door with her head.

‘I gather he’s been in there a while.’

Hal despised even the very slight suggestion of whine that came in: ‘I’ve been waiting
here coming up on an hour.’ And that he liked it a little that she looked pained for
him as her tiny eyebrows (unplucked, just naturally tiny and arched) went up.

‘You’ve had nothing to eat, then, yet?’

‘I was
summoned
.’

Tavis’s voice in there: ‘I’ll invite you right here and now to sit in my lap and let
me make such soothing sounds as There There There.’

‘Want my Mommy and
Daddy
.’

Avril said, ‘That’s the old tum making those sounds then, and not the air conditioner?’
with that smile that was also a kind of wince.

‘Couldn’t even
start
to describe the sounds coming from down there, like that whistleless kettle Himself
used to leave on when—’

An apple appeared from a deep pocket in her smock. ‘Happen to have a spare Granny
Smith here, to tack body to soul while we wait.’

He smiled tiredly at the big green apple. ‘Moms, that’s your apple. That’s all you’re
going to eat between 12 and 23, I happen to know.’

Avril made a distended gesture. ‘Stuffed. Huge lunch with a set of parents not three
hours ago. I’ve been staggering around since.’ Looking at the apple like she had no
idea where it’d even come from. ‘I’ll probably pitch this out.’

‘You will not.’

‘Please,’ rising from the desk’s edge without seeming to use muscles, apple held out
like something distasteful, cigarette down at her side where it would be putting a
hole in the smock if lit. ‘You’d be doing us both a favor.’

‘This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.’

Orin and Hal’s term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that
makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because
of what the consequences will be for her. It’s like to report any sort of need or
problem is to mug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes:
‘Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.’ ‘What, this old limb? Take it. In the
way all the time. Take it.’ ‘But it’s a
gorgeous
bowel movement, Mario—the living room rug
needed
something, I didn’t know what til right this very moment.’ The special fantodish
chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted,
taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense.
Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went
around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe
and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring
you to shoot.

The Moms held the red binder out to Hal without moving. ‘Have you seen Alice’s new
packets?’ The apple was good-sour but perfumy from the pocket of the Moms’s smock,
and it stimulated a torrent of saliva. The binder had different little informal and
action photos from the waiting-room walls, and offprints of clippings, and three rings
for the packet of guidelines and Honor-Code pledges, all done up by Moore in a Gothic
ital.

Hal looked up from the binder, indicating C.T.’s office with his head. ‘You’re taking
the girl around yourself?’

‘We’re encouragingly short-staffed. Thierry and Donni won their qualifying round at
Hartford, so they’re staying over.’ She leaned way forward and looked in at C.T. so
he could see she was out here. She smiled.

Hal followed her look. ‘The girl’s name’s Tina something and she’ll come up to about
your knee.’

‘Echt,’ Avril said, looking at something on a printout.

Hal looked at her while he chewed. ‘You don’t like her already?’

‘Tina Echt. Pawtucket. Father apparently some sort of unleavened baker, mother a public
relations person for the Red Sox A.A.A. baseball there.’

Hal had to wipe his chin as he smiled. ‘Triple-A. Not A.A.A.’

Avril was leaning forward at the waist with the binder to her breast the way females
hold flat things, still trying to catch the Headmaster’s eye.

Hal said ‘Troeltsch finally has some competition in the repulsive-last-name department.’

‘Lord she is a small one isn’t she.’

‘I can’t see her being more than maybe five.’

‘Oh golly let’s see: age seven, high I.Q., somewhat impoverished-looking M.M.P.I.,
played out of Providence Racquet and Bath in East Providence. Ranked thirty-first
in Eastern 12’s as of June.’

‘She can’t be much taller than her damn stick out there, when she plays. Schtitt’s
going to keep her here what, twelve years?’

‘The girl’s father has been calling about admission for her for over two years, Charles
said.’

‘He was doing that thing about taking skulls apart and she yelled bloody murder.’

Avril’s laugh’s onset was high-pitched and alarming and distinctive, so now at least
C.T. would for sure know the Moms was out here waiting and would wind things up and
maybe get to Hal so Hal could go get high in secret. ‘Well good for her,’ Avril said.

The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore’s desk in a kind of thick ellipse. Every
time his left foot came down he either dipped down or raised up briefly to tip-toe,
flexing the ankle. ‘Ten years here and she’ll lose her mind. If she starts at seven
she’ll either be ready for the Show at fourteen or by fourteen she’ll start getting
that burned-out look that makes you want to wave your hand in front of her face.’

There was the sound of Tavis’s squeaky right Nunn Bush pacing faster, which meant
real conclusion. ‘I’m going to predict it’s probably hard to see yourself as a great
athlete at this stage, Tina, not being able to see over the net yet, but possibly
even harder to see yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people’s attention.
As a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own
limitations in the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself
represents.’

The apple generated tremendous amounts of saliva. ‘He’ll put her in the Show before
menses, there’ll be another enormous fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no
larger than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen
she’ll be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.’ Some old military joke
about apples kept running through. Eat the Apple, Fuck the Core. Hal couldn’t remember
what it was supposed to signify.

The Moms was snapping her fingers silently and working her forehead. ‘There’s some
term for coals reduced to residue after all day in a grill. I’m trying to think.’

Hal hates this. ‘Clinkers,’ he said instantly. ‘From
klinker
low German and
klinckaerd
old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard mass formed
by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.’ He hated
it that she could even dream he’d be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping,
and then that he’s always so pleased to play along. Is it showing off if you hate
it?

‘Clinker.’

‘A grill wouldn’t have clinkers. Charcoal’s refined to burn right down to dust. Clinkers
are sort of metallic, I think. See for example the ring-dash-sound etymology.’

‘I like to suspect this is why so many of our older players like to project me into
this carnival-barker persona with tiny balance sheets revolving in my eyes, that I’m
up-front with every incoming addition to our family that this is where the resources
come from for professional tennis, and for the North American junior development system
for gifted children who want to scale the heights to professionalism or to a competitive
college career, and so ultimately for an Academy like this one’s considerable operating
expenses, and for scholarships like the partial one we’re so happy to be able to offer
your parents for you.’

‘So then perhaps you’d care to join us for dinner. We’ll also have Ms. Echt if she
can stay up that long.’

The core made a very-muffled-cymbal sound in the bottom of Lateral Alice’s wastebasket.
‘I can’t get out of dawns. Wayne and I are supposed to play Slobodan
²²¹
and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Auburndale right after lunch.’

‘Have you had Barry speak to Gerhardt about the ankle not getting better?’

‘The clay’ll be good to it. Schtitt knows all about the ankle.’

‘Well best of British luck to you both.’ Avril’s purse looked more like soft luggage
than like a purse. ‘May I lend you the key to the kitchen, then.’

It’s always the Moms’s left shoulder Hal looks over, whenever he orbits, and his plans
emerged between Avril’s invitations to accept some sort of politeness-act. ‘The Darkness
and I were going to blast down the hill and grab something if and when I ever get
out of here.’