Infinite Jest (104 page)

‘Oh.’

Then he wondered with dread what Stice might have said to her on her way in, re supper.
‘Maybe Pemulis too, I think Pemulis said.’

‘Well do not, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself.’

Echt and Tavis were both standing, now, in there. Their handshake looked, for the
first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going
Sieg Heil
. Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind. Even the meat of the Granny
Smith smelled like perfume.

Three months later, earlier today, before being again summoned, at the dentist’s,
the dentist’s office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory
equivalent of fluorescent light. Hal had felt the cold stab in the gum and then the
slow radial freeze, his face ballooning to become one of the frozen cumuli against
the aftershave-blue of the dental wallpaper’s sky. Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green
eyes that bulged above his mint-blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be,
as he leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light’s corona giving him one of those
malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand on end. Even masked, Zegarelli’s
breath is infamous—E.T.A.s forced for the first time by their E.T.A. Group Plan to
recline below Zegarelli are counselled on how to respire, to inhale when Zegarelli
inhales and exhale right back out with him, to avoid doubling the amount of suffering
Hal’s already gone through, just today.

Charles Tavis is not a buffoon. The thing that’s keeping things so tensely quiet out
here amid all this waiting-room blue is that there are historically at least two Charles
Tavises, the three older boys know. The openly cross-sectional and free-associating
and arms-waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry persona
is really Tavis’s version of social composure, his way of trying to get along with
you. But just ask Michael Pemulis, whose sneakers have been on Tavis’s carpet so often
they’ve left an unvacuumable impression in the checked Antron: when Tavis loses his
composure, when the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unquestioned
place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened, Hal’s openly adjustable uncle
becomes a different man, one not to be fucked with. It’s not necessarily pejorative
to compare a cornered bureaucrat to a cornered rat. The danger-sign to watch out for
is if Tavis suddenly gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems, perspectivally,
to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost
looming over you from across the huge desk. If shit meets administrative fan, kids
coming out of his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing their eyes, not
from tears but from this depth-perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when
there’s shit.

Another alert is when Lateral Alice Moore gets formally buzzed to bring you and the
others in, instead of the office doors ever opening from inside, and when she gets
up and edges over to show you in like you’re some sort of hat-holding salesman, without
once meeting your eye, as if there’s shame. One big family.

The diddle-check seems like it’s degenerated into the girls all getting very excited
and exchanging data on what kinds of animals members of their own biologic families
either imitate or physically resemble, and Avril’s out of sight and silent and apparently
letting them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool
with the back of his hand. Pemulis, in a cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the
hat and looks around himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking
one last look at his lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three
tries to work the outside door’s knob. Ann Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an
expression of almost regal calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone
stepping down off a dais.

And it also seems somehow sinister that she’s apparently been in here all this time,
this Clenette person, one of the nine-month temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed
and so black she’s got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and then pinned up
and the standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip-upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis’s
personal brass wastebaskets into her big cart with its gray canvas sides. The way
she stares at a point just to the side of Hal’s own stare as she and her cart wait
at C.T.’s inner door for Hal and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral
Alice Moore. The cart, like poor Otis Lord’s own game-master’s cart, has a crazy wheel,
and clatters a bit even buried in shag, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses
back along the vestibule’s wall. Neither Schtitt nor deLint is in here, but from the
hiss of Pemulis’s inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before
he takes his eyes from a C.T. who’s sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his
seagrass swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort
of cardioid or else sloppy circle: Tavis’s window-lit shadow now reaches all the way
past the StairBlaster to the red-and-gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which
sits sure enough Rusk, her hose laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next
to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the
sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing
at each other in the blue and black shag, hands in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut
into the black plastic casing of the monitor’s base, Lord not meeting Pemulis’s eye,
and wicked hanging shards of glass from the screen he fell through pointing—some nearly
touching, even—his slim neck and throat, so he has to hold his head very still, despite
the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day-shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind
him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place,
the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly choose to be the sort of person
not to note. Lord’s eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he
can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled; and Pemulis is just finishing
moving his feet precisely into their familiar impressions in the office carpet when
C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly asks the room’s
last occupant—the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer,
severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open inner door in the
room’s southeast corner, so he’s hidden right behind them from the start and there’s
the opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertwang-face from Axford
and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing the urine expert behind them, asking
him very quietly please to close both doors.

‘You can’t say it’s only a U.S. thing,’ Steeply said again. ‘I went through school
when multiculturalism was inescapable. We read about the Japanese and Indonesians,
for example, having a mythic figure. I forget its name. Oriental myth. It’s a woman
covered with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.’

‘This type of passive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived
deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a hairy culture.’

‘These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon her
by some body of water combing her body-hair and singing. And they have sex with her.
Apparently she’s simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even the
young Oriental men who know of the myths can’t resist, according to the myths.’

‘And are rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,’ Marathe said. When
now he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe,
at a St. Remi-d’Amherst outdoor rink, M. Marathe’s breath visible and his pacemaker
a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan.

‘Killed outright, usually. The pleasure’s too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills
them.
M-o-r-t-s.
’

Marathe sniffed.

‘The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them,
they go ahead anyway.’

Marathe coughed.

Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bioluminescent. They
seemed very intent, flying past the outcropping and darting jaggedly off on a course,
on their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe think
of playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men
were silent. This is the time of false dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The
softest light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan vistas
around them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of the lap
was covered in burrs and small spiked seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began
to rustle with life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars
fluttering like banked flames above a low-resolution seepage of glow. But none of
the pinkening of genuine dawn.

Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and
les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little.
It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with
Marathe’s betrayal, despite language.
²²²
The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his
nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. According
to Steeply, Steeply’s B.S.S. superiors did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply
knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this fact back from his superiors.
It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one’s superiors,
Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know.
M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his
skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist
and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Québec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney
‘the God’ Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a railroad
spike through Gertraud’s boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both.

The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. ‘A false dawn.’

‘No,’ Steeply said, ‘but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.’

‘
L’Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse.
’ Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation
and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not
an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe.

Steeply said ‘The multicultural myth being that the Odalisk’s so beautiful that mortal
Québecois eyes can’t take it. Whoever looks at her turns into a diamond or gem.’

‘In most versions an opal.’

‘A Medusa in reverse, one might say.’

Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed.
²²³

Marathe said ‘The Greeks, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I
think beauty and pleasure, these were not fatal temptations for the Greek type.’

‘Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk’ said Steeply. He was smoking
either his last or one of his purse’s pack’s last cigarettes—the American’s habit
to throw the butts off the outcropping had prevented Marathe from counting the consumed
butts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not biodegrade
for the environment. The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other.

A hidden bird twittered.

‘The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.’

‘And haven’t we come a long way,’ Steeply said ironically.

‘This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type’s temptation,
I think.’

‘Whereas your type’s a man of only actions, ends,’ Steeply said, with Marathe could
not tell whether irony or maybe not.

The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of
overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down
sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of
the night’s bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The
distant construction site’s payloaders were urine-colored and appeared frozen in the
middle of various actions. It was still chill. Marathe’s teeth had a palpable film
on them, of perhaps a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun’s top arc
was appearing, and Marathe could cast no shadow yet on the shale behind them.

Rémy Marathe’s resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the
heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left.
All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed.
Steeply manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his right arm to cradle
the left elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed. The little
wens of his field-persona’s electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor
of Steeply’s face, which appeared both puffy and drawn.

The cloudless sky above the east’s Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink
of an unhealed burn. The whole imperceptibly lightening scene of the vistas had a
stillness about it that suggested photography. Marathe had long ago placed his watch
in his windbreaker’s pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining
that his interface dictated its own period and time; Marathe had chosen to indulge
this.

Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose
of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence. ‘You could seat yourself briefly,
if you have fatigue. The shoes’ straps…’ He gestured slightly.