Infinite Jest (111 page)

What sounds like Lenz chewing gum is really Lenz trying to talk and grind his teeth
together at the same time.

Lenz recalls orally that his stepfather’s blue-vested gut had preceded the conductor
into rooms by several seconds, fob glinting above the watchpocket’s sinister slit.
How Lenz’s mother back in Fall River had made it a point of utilizing Greyhound for
voyages and sojourns, basically to piss her stephusband off.

Lenz discusses how a serious disadvantage to dealing Bing retail is the way customers’ll
show up pounding on your door at 0300 sporting lint in the terms of resources and
putting their arms around your shins and ankles and begging for just a half-gram or
tenth of a gram and offering to give Lenz their kids, like Lenz wants to fucking deal
with anybody’s kids, which these scenes were always constant drags on his spirits.

Green, who’s hoovered his share, says cocaine always seemed like it grabbed you by
the throat and just didn’t let go, and he could relate to why the Boston AAs call
Bing the ‘Express Elevator To AA.’

In a dumpster-lined easement between Faneuil St. and Brighton Ave., Brighton, right
after Green almost steps in what he’s pretty sure is human vomit, Lenz proves logically
why it’s all too likely that Ennet House resident Geoffrey D. is a closet poofta.

Lenz reports how he’s been approached in the past to male-model and act, but that
the male-model and acting profession is pretty much crawling with your closet pooftas,
and it’s no kind of work for a man that’s confronted the ins and outs of his own character.

Lenz speculates openly on how there are purportaged to be whole packs and herds of
feral animals operating in locust-like fashion in the rhythmic lushness of parts of
the Great Concavity to the due northeast, descended reputedly from domestic pets and
abandoned during the relocational transition to an O.N.A.N.ite map, and how teams
of pro researchers and amateur explorers and intrepid hearts and cultists have ventured
northeast of Checkpoints along the Lucited ATHSCMulated walls and never returned,
vanishing in toto from the short-wave E.M. bands, as in like dropping off the radar.

Green turns out to have no conceptions or views on the issues of fauna of the Concavity
at all. He literally says he’s never given it one thought one way or the other.

Whole NNE cults and stelliform subcults Lenz reports as existing around belief systems
about the metaphysics of the Concavity and annular fusion and B.S.-1950s-B-cartridge-type-radiation-affected
fauna and overfertilization and verdant forests with periodic oasises of purportaged
desert and whatever east of the former Montpelier VT area of where the annulated Shawshine
River feeds the Charles and tints it the exact same tint of blue as the blue on boxes
of Hefty SteelSaks and the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets
and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans
but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity,
allegedly, and the idea of infants the size of prehistoric beasts roaming the overfertilized
east Concavity quadrants, leaving enormous scat-piles and keening for the abortive
parents who’d left or lost them in the general geopolitical shuffle of mass migration
and really fast packing, or, as some of your more Limbaugh-era-type cultists sharingly
believe, originating from abortions hastily disposed of in barrels in ditches that
got breached and mixed ghastly contents with other barrels that reanimated the abortive
feti and brought them to a kind of repelsive oversized B-cartridge life thundering
around due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled through the urban grid. Of one
local underground stelliform offshoot from the Bob Hope–worshipping Rastafarians who
smoked enormous doobsters and wove their negroid hair into clusters of wet cigars
like the Rastafarians but instead of Rastafarians these post-Rastas worshipped the
Infant and every New Year donned tie-dyed parkas and cardboard snowshoes and ventured
northward, trailing smoke, past the walls and fans of Checkpoint Pongo into the former
areas of VT and NH, seeking
The Infant
they called it, as if there were only One, and toting paraphernalia for performing
a cultish ritual referred to in oblique tones only as
Propitiating The Infant,
whole posses of these stelliform pot-head reggae-swaying Infant-cultists disappearing
forever off the human race’s radar every winter, never heard or smelled again, regarded
by fellow cultists as martyrs and/or lambs, possibly too addled by blimp-sized doobsters
to find their way back out of the Concavity and freezing to death, or en-swarmed by
herds of feral pets, or shot by property-value-conscious insects, or… (face plum-colored,
finally breathing) worse.

Lenz shudders just at the thought of the raging Powerlessness he’d feel, he shares,
lost and disorientated, wandering in circles in blinding white frozen points due north
of all domesticated men, forget the time not even knowing what fucking
date
it was, his breath an ice-beard, with just his tinder and wits and character to live
by, armed just with a Browning blade.

Green opines that if Boston AA is a cult that like brainwashes you, he guesses he’d
got himself to the point where his brain needed a good brisk washing, which Lenz knows
is not an original view, being exactly what big blockheaded Don Gately repeats about
once a diem.

SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D. W.
GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON
AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S AA MTNG. UP TO ABOUT 2329H.,
WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I don’t know why all this shit about wanting to hear about the football all the time.
And I’m not going to make my goddamn muscle. It’s stupid.’

‘Okey-doke.’

‘It’s
inappropriate,
since you like words like that.’

‘But this Sharing and Caring Commitment guy, the Chair, the Sudbury Half-Measures
Avail Us Nothing Group, he had a power about him. The Chair, he said he used to be
a nuclear auditor. For the Defense industry. This man who was very quiet and broken-seeming
and fatherly and strange. There was this kind of broken authority about him.’

‘I know what you mean. I can I.D.’

‘… that seemed
fatherly
somehow.’

‘The sponsor type. My sponsor’s like that, Joelle, in White Flag.’

‘Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Oh. Oh. My mother’s dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy’s still sucking air,
though. That’s how he puts it—still sucking air. In Kentucky.’

‘…’

‘My mother’s a worm-farmer from way back, though.’

‘But so what about this Half Measures guy hit you so hard?’

‘
Harrd
.
Harrrrrd
. Sound it out.’

‘Real funny.’

‘Don well it started out as that he spoke about himself like he used to be somebody
else. Like a whole different person. He said he used to wear a four-piece suit and
the fourth piece was him.’

‘An Allston Group guy says that all the time, that joke.’

‘He had on a real nice white thick-weave cotton shirt opened at the throat and wheat-colored
pants and loafers without socks, which I’m up here ten years Don and I still can’t
follow this thing up here about y’all all wearing nice shoes and then wrecking them
by wearing them without socks.’

‘Joelle, you’re maybe about the last person to be taking somebody’s inventory about
weird ways they dress, under there, maybe.’

‘Kiss my rosy red ass, maybe.’

‘Remind me to Log how it’s real positive to see you coming out of this shell of yours.’

‘Well and I got reservations on this Don but Diehl and Ken are telling me to come
in to you with this issue of what’s like occurring out there which Erdedy says it’s
a Staff-type issue and duh-duh duh-duh.’

‘Had a little coffee tonight have we Foss?’

‘Well Don and like you know and duh-duh.’

‘Take a second. Inhale and blow out. I’m not going anywheres.’

‘Well Don I hate a cheese-nibbler much as the next man but Geoff D. and Nell G. are
out in the living room going around to all the new people asking them to think about
if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that’s too heavy for
him to lift. They’re doing it to everybody that’s new. And that skittery kid Dingley—’

‘Tingley. The new kid.’

‘Well Don he’s sitting in the linen closet with his legs sticking out of the linen
closet with his eyes bugging out with like smoke coming out his ears and duh-duh duh-duh
going like He Can but He Can’t but He Can, respecting the suitcase and duh-duh, and
Diehl says it’s a matter for Staff, it’s a negative thing Day’s doing and Erdedy says
I’m Senior Res. and to go to Staff with it and eat cheese.’

‘Shit.’

‘Diehl said a case this negative and duh-duh, no way it’s like ratting.’

‘No, I appreciate. It ain’t ratting.’

‘Plus I brought in this really good like tollhouse-butterscotch cookie thing Hanley
made a plate of, which Erdedy said it’s not like kissing ass so much as commonplace
decency.’

‘Erdedy’s a community pillar. I got to stay in here with the phone. Maybe you could
tell Geoff and Nell to like waltz on in if they can take time out from torturing the
new people.’

‘I’ll probably leave out the torturing part if it’s OK with you, Don.’

‘Which by the way here I am looking at this cookie still in your hand, notice.’

‘Jesus, the cookie. Jesus.’

‘Try and relax a little, kid.’

‘I got to stay down with the phones till 2200. Try a plunger and let me know and I
can call Services.’

‘I’m thinking it’d be doing a favor if Staff clued in anybody new that comes in on
the fact that the H-faucet in the shower that its H really stands for
Holy Cow That’s Cold
.’

‘Are you saying in a sideways way there’s some trouble with the water-temp in the
head, McDade?’

‘Don, I’m saying just what I came in here to say. And can I say by the way nice shirt.
My dad used to bowl, too, when he still had a thumb.’

‘I don’t care what the sick bastard told you, Yolanda. Getting on your knees in the
A.M.
to Ask For Help does not mean getting on your knees in the
A.M.
while this sick yutz stands in front of you and unzips his fly and you Ask For Help
into his fly. I’m praying this is not a male resident said this. This is the sort
of thing why same-sex sponsors only are a suggestion. Is that there’s some sick bastards
around the rooms, you get me? Any AA tells a new female in the Program to use his
Unit for her Higher Power, I’d give that guy a wide detour. You get what I’m saying?’

‘And I didn’t even tell you yet how he suggested I should thank the Higher Power at
night.’

‘I’d cross a broad street to avoid an AA like this guy, Yolanda.’

‘And how he said how I always have to be on the south of him, like stay on his south
side, and I have to buy a digital watch.’

‘Holy Christ this is Lenz. Is this Lenz you’re telling me about?’

‘I ain’t use no names in here. All I say he seemed real friendly and fly at first,
and helpful, when I first came, this dude I ain’t say no name.’

‘You have trouble with the part of the Second Step that’s about insanity and you’ve
been using
Randy Lenz
for a sponsor?’

‘This is a nomonous Program, you know what I’m saying?’

‘Jesus, kid.’

Orin (‘O.’) Incandenza stands embracing a putatively Swiss hand-model in a rented
room. They embrace. Their faces become sexual faces. It seems clear evidence of a
kind of benign fate or world-spirit that this incredible specimen had appeared at
Sky Harbor Int. Airp. just as Orin stood with his fine forehead against the glass
of the Gate overlooking the tarmac after actually volunteering to drive Helen Steeply
all the nightmarish way down I-17/-10 to the ghastly glittering unnavigable airport
and the Subject seemed, in the car, not only not especially grateful, and hadn’t let
him so much as place a friendly and supportive palm on her incredible quadricep during
the ride, but had been irritatingly all-business and had continued to pursue lines
of family-linen inquiry he’d all but begged her to quit subjecting him to the inappropriateness
of
²³⁴
—that, as he stood there after having received little other than a cool smile and
a promise to try to say hello to Hallie, with his forehead against the glass of the
Weston back door—or rather the Delta gate window—this incredible specimen had—unbidden,
unStrategized—come up to him and started a lush foreign-accented conversation and
revealed professionally lovely hands as she rooted in her tripolymer bag to ask him
to autograph for her
toddler-age son
a Cardinal-souvenir football she had
right there
(!) in her bag, along with her Swiss passport—as if the universe were reaching out
a hand to pluck him from the rim of the abyss of despair that any real sort of rejection
or frustration of his need for some Subject he’d picked out always threatened him
with, as if he’d been teetering with his arms windmilling at a great height without
even idiotic red wings strapped to his back and the universe were sending this lovely
steadying left hand to pull him gently back and embrace him and not so much console
him as remind him of who and what he was about, standing there embracing a Subject
with a sexual face for his sexual face, no longer speaking, the football and pen on
the neatly made bed, the two of them embracing between the bed and the mirror with
the woman facing the bed so that Orin can see past her head the large hanging mirror
and the small framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed along the wood-grain dresser
below the window,
²³⁵
the tubby-faced man and Swiss-looking kids all smiling trustingly into a nothing
somewhere up and to their right.