Infinite Jest (116 page)

spronnnnng.
His aunt at the Winchester breakfast nook, in dazzling winter dawnlight, quietly
doing a word-search puzzle. Two dormer windows are half-blocked by the throbbing rectangles
of the JBLs. Green’s the type that can recognize a JBL speaker and Molson-green bottle
from way far away.

A developed thought coheres: Ho’s voice has the quality of a type of:
ointment.

Any displaced and shaggy Nuck head in these windows chancing to look out into the
yard now would be able to probably see Lenz depositing another chunk of meat in front
of the pet and removing something from up near his shoulder under his topcoat as he’s
melting stealthily all the way around behind the dog to sort of straddle the big dog
from the rear, easing the last of the loaf down in front of the dog, the big dog hunched,
the crunch of Don’s cornflake topping and the goopy sound of a dog eating institutional
meat. The arm comes out from under the coat and goes up with something that looks
like it would glitter if the windows’ yardlight reached far enough. Bruce Green keeps
trying to wave his breath out of the way. Lenz’s fine coat billows around the dog’s
flanks as Lenz braces and leans and gathers the hunched thing’s scruff in one hand
and straightens up with a mighty grunting hoist that brings the animal up onto its
hind legs as its front legs dig frantically at empty air, and the dog’s whine brings
a lei-and-flannel shape to the lit space above one speaker overhead. Green doesn’t
even think of calling out from his shadowed spot, and the moment hangs there with
the dog upright and Lenz behind it, bringing the upraised hand down in front and hard
across the dog’s throat. There’s a lightless arc from the spot Lenz’s hand crossed;
the arc splatters the gate and the sidewalk outside it. The music balloons without
cease but Green hears Lenz say what sounds like ‘How
dare
you’ with great emphasis as he drops the dog forward onto the yard as there’s a high-pitched
male sound from the form at the window and the dog goes down and hits the ground on
its side with the meaty crunch of a 32-kilo bag of Party-Size Cubelets, all four legs
dog-paddling uselessly, the dark surface of the lawn blackening in a pulsing curve
before its jaws that open and close. Green has moved unthinking out of the vanshadow
toward Lenz and now thinks and stops between two trees by the street in front of 416
wanting to call to Lenz and feeling the strangled aphasia people feel in bad dreams,
and so just stands there between the treetrunks with a finger in one ear, looking.
The way Lenz stands over the hull of the big dog is like you stand over a punished
child, at full height and radiating authority, and the moment hangs there distended
like that until there’s the shriek of long-shut windows opening against the Ho and
the dire sound of numerous high-tempo logger’s boots rushing down stairs inside 412.
The creepily friendly bachelor that lived next to his aunt had had two big groomed
dogs and when Bruce passed the house the dogs’ toenails would scrabble on the wood
of the front porch and run with their tails up to the anodized fence as Bruce came
by and jump up and like sort of
play
the metal fence with their paws, excited to see him. To just like set eyes on him.
Lenz’s arm with the knife is up again and ungleaming in the streetlight’s light as
Lenz uses his other hand on the top of the fence to vault the fence sideways and tear-ass
uphill up Brainerd Rd. in the southwest direction of Enfield, his loafers making a
quality sound on the pavement and his open coat filling like a sail. Green retreats
to behind one of the trees as beefy flannel forms with leis shedding petals, their
speech grunty-foreign and unmistakably Canadian, a couple with ukuleles, spill out
like ants over the sagging porch and into the yard, mill and jabber, a couple kneel
by the form of the former dog. A bearded guy so huge a Hawaiian shirt looks tight
on him has picked up the meatloaf’s baggie. Another guy without very much hair picks
what looks like a white caterpillar out of the dark grass and holds it up delicately
between his thumb and finger, looking at it. Yet another huge guy in suspenders drops
his beer and picks up the limp dog and it lies across his arms on its back with its
head way back like a swooned girl, dripping and with one leg still going, and the
guy is either screaming or singing. The original massive Nuck with the baggie clutches
his head to signal agitation as he and two other Nucks run heavily to the slingshot
Montego. A first-floor light in the house across Brainerd lights up and backlights
a figure in a sort of suit and metal wheelchair sitting right up next to the window
in the sideways way of wheelchairs that want to get right up next to something, scanning
the street and Nuck-swarmed yard. The Hawaiian music has apparently stopped, but not
abruptly, it’s not like somebody took it off in the middle. Green has retreated to
behind a tree, which he sort of one-arm-hugs. A thick girl in a horrible grass skirt
is saying ‘Dyu!’ several times. There are obscenities and heavily accented stock phrases
like ‘Stop!’ and ‘There he goes!,’ with pointing. Several guys are running up the
sidewalk after Lenz, but they’re in boots, and Lenz is way ahead and now disappears
as he cuts like a tailback left and disappears down either an alley or a serious driveway,
though you can still hear his fine shoes. One of the guys actually shakes his fist
as he gives chase. The Montego with the twin cam reveals muffler problems and clunks
down off the curb and lays two parentheses as it 180s professionally around in the
middle of the street and peels out up in Lenz’s direction, a very low and fast and
no-shit car, its antenna’s gay lei tugged by speed into a strained ellipse and leaving
a wake of white petals that take forever to stop falling. Green thinks his finger
might be frozen to his ear’s inside. Nobody seems to be gesticulating about anything
about maybe an accomplice. There’s no evidence they’re looking around for any other
unwittingly guilty accessory-type party. Another wheelchaired form has appeared just
behind and to the right of the first seated backlit form across the street, and they’re
both in a position to see Green up against the tree with his hand to his ear so it
looks like he’s maybe receiving communiqués from some kind of earpiece. The Nucks
are still milling around the yard in a way that’s indescribably foreign as the one
Nuck staggers in circles under the weight of the expired dog, saying something to
the sky. Green is getting to know this one tree very well, spread out against its
lee side and breathing into the bark of the tree so his exhaled breath won’t plume
out from behind the tree and be seen as an accomplice’s breath, potentially.

Mario Incandenza’s nineteenth birthday will be Wednesday 25 November, the day before
Thanksgiving. His insomnia worsens as Madame Psychosis’s hiatus enters its third week
and WYYY tries bringing back poor Miss Diagnosis again, who’s started in on a Pig-Latin
reading of the Revelation of John that makes you so embarrassed for her it’s uncomfortable.
For a couple nights in the HmH living room he tries falling asleep to WODS, an AM-fringe
outfit that plays narcotizing orchestral arrangements of old Carpenters songs. It
makes things worse. It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure
you know.

He gets a serious burn on his pelvis leaning against a hot steel stove talking to
Mrs. Clarke. His hip is swaddled in bandages under Orin’s old corduroys, and there’s
a sucking sound of salve when he walks, late at night, unable to sleep. The birth-related
disability that wasn’t even definitively diagnosed until Mario was six and had let
Orin tattoo his shoulder with the red coil of an immersion heater is called Familial
Dysautonomia, a neurological deficit whereby he can’t feel physical pain very well.
A lot of the E.T.A.s kid him about they should have such problems, and even Hal’s
sometimes felt a twinge of envy about it, but the defect is a serious hassle and actually
very dangerous, see for instance the burnt pelvis, which wasn’t even discovered until
Mrs. Clarke thought she smelled her eggplant overcooking.

At HmH he lies on the air mattress in a tight down bag on the edge of the violet plant-light
with the wind rattling the big east window, listening to buttery violins and what
sounds like a zither. There’s sometimes a scream upstairs, shrill and drawn out, from
where C.T.’s and the Moms’s rooms are. Mario listens closely for whether the sound
ends up as Avril laughing or Avril screaming. She gets night terrors, which are like
nightmares but worse, and which afflict small children and apparently also adults
who eat the day’s biggest meal right before bed.

His nighttime prayers take almost an hour and sometimes more and are not a chore.
He doesn’t kneel; it’s more like a conversation. And he’s not crazy, it’s not like
he hears anybody or anything conversing back with him, Hal’s established.

Hal had asked him when he’ll start coming back to their room to sleep, which made
Mario feel good.

He keeps trying to imagine Madame Psychosis—whom he imagines as being very tall—lying
in an XL beach chair on a beach smiling and not saying anything for days, resting.
But it doesn’t work very well.

He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s states
of mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort
of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing,
even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore.
Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a
dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal
so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference
now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

He hadn’t told the Moms he was going to walk around after he left her office after
their interface: Avril usually tries in a nonintrusive way to discourage Mario from
taking walks at night, because he doesn’t see well at night, and the areas around
the E.T.A. hill are not the best neighborhood, and there’s no skirting the fact that
Mario would be easy prey for just about anybody, physically. And, though one perk
of Familial Dysautonomia is a relative physical fearlessness,
²⁴²
Mario keeps to a pretty limited area during insomniacal strolls, out of deference
to Avril’s worry.
²⁴³
He’ll sometimes walk around the grounds of the Enfield Marine P.H.H. at the bottom
of the hill’s east side because they’re pretty much enclosed, the grounds are, and
he knows a couple of the E.M. Security officers from when his father got them to portray
Boston police in his whimsical
Dial C for Concupiscence;
and he likes the E.M. grounds at night because the different brick houses’ window-light
is yellow lamplight
²⁴⁴
and he can see people on the ground floors all together playing cards or talking
or watching TP. He also likes whitewashed brick regardless of its state of upkeep.
And a lot of the people in the different brick houses are damaged or askew and lean
hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through the windows, and he can feel
his heart going out into the world through them, which is good for insomnia. A woman’s
voice, calling for help without any real urgency—not like the screams that signify
the Moms laughing or screaming at night—sounds from a darkened upper window. And across
the little street that’s crammed with cars everybody has to move at 0000h. is Ennet’s
House, where the Headmistress has a disability and had had a wheelchair ramp installed
and has twice invited Mario in during the day for a Caffeine-Free Millennial Fizzy,
and Mario likes the place: it’s crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective
plastic wrap, but nobody notices anybody else or comments on a disability and the
Headmistress is kind to the people and the people cry in front of each other. The
inside of it smells like an ashtray, but Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House
because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy,
and once he heard somebody say
God
with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort
of way where you could tell they were worried inside.

People from the public can’t be in there after 2300, though, because they have a Curfew,
so Mario just totters past on the broken sidewalk and looks in the ground windows
at all the different people. Every window is lit up with light and some are slid partly
open, and there is the noise of being outside a house full of people. From one of
the upstairs windows facing the street comes a voice going ‘Give it here, give it
here.’ Someone is crying and someone else is either laughing or coughing very hard.
An irritable man’s voice from a kitchen window at the side says something to somebody
else that just said something like ‘So get dentures,’ followed by curse words. Another
upstairs window, over at the side by the wheelchair ramp and the kitchen window where
the ground is soft enough to take the stress of a police lock and lead block nicely,
the upper window has a billowing lengthwise flag for a curtain and an old bumper sticker
on the glass half scraped off so it says
ONE DAY A
in cursive, and Mario is arrested by the quiet but unmistakable sound of a recording
of a broadcast of ‘Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis,’ which Mario
has never taped a show of because he feels it wouldn’t be right for him but is strangely
thrilled to hear someone in Ennet’s thinking enough of to tape and replay. What’s
coming from behind the open window with a billowing flag for a curtain is one of the
old ones, from the Year of the Wonderchicken, Madame’s inaugural year, when she’d
sometimes talk all hour and had an accent. A hard east wind blows Mario’s thin hair
straight back off his head. His standing angle is 50°. A female girl in a little fur
coat and uncomfortable-looking bluejeans and tall shoes clicks past on the sidewalk
and goes up the ramp into Ennet’s back door without indicating she saw somebody with
a really big head standing braced by a police lock on the lawn outside the kitchen
window. The lady had had on so much makeup she’d looked unwell but the wake of her
passage smells very good. For some reason Mario felt like the person behind the flag
in the window was also a female. Mario thinks it might not be out of the question
that she might lend tapes to a fellow listener if he could ask. He usually checks
etiquette questions with Hal, who is incredibly knowledgeable and smart. When he thinks
of Hal his heart beats and his forehead’s thick skin becomes wrinkled. Hal will also
know the term for private tapes made of broadcast things on the air. Perhaps this
lady owns multiple tapes. This one is from ‘Sixty Minutes +/−’ ’s first year, when
Madame still had a slight accent and often spoke on the show as if she were talking
exclusively to one person or character who was very important to her. The Moms revealed
that if you’re not crazy then speaking to someone who isn’t there is termed
apostrophe
and is valid art. Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs
because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters
she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy
P.M.
, stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real.
It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this
way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone
at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable
and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get
mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling
thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea
for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist
dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke
and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only
one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked
down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far
above Mario’s head, and he was unable to understand Lyle’s replies when he tried to
bring the confusion up. And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more
uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up
real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going
to be very patient about helping him change.