Infinite Jest (117 page)

A lot of people are appearing out of the dark and walking by to go in for the Curfew.
They all seem afraid and scowl to pretend they’re not shy. The men have their hands
in their coat pockets and the females have their hands at their coats’ throats, keeping
them shut. One young person Mario’s never seen sees him struggling with the police
lock and helps him disengage the bar and get the lead block into his backpack. Just
that little bit of help that makes the difference. Mario is suddenly so sleepy he’s
not sure he can get up the hill to go home. The musics that played at the beginning
of Madame Psychosis’s career are the exact same that played to the end, what sounds
so unacceptable without her there.

Mario’s forward list is perfect for walking up hills, however. His pelvis’s salve
makes a sound but doesn’t hurt. In the big protruding window of Ennet’s House’s Headmistress’s
office that the window overlooks the Avenue and the train tracks and the Ngs’ clean
Father and Son Grocery, where they give Mario yellow tea in the
A.M.
when he comes by when it’s cold, the last thing Mario can see, before the hillside’s
trees close behind him and reduce the Ennet House to shattered yellow lighting, is
a wide square-headed boy bent over something he’s writing at the Headmistress’s black
desk, licking a pencil-end and hunched all uncomfortably with one arm curled out around
what he’s writing in, like a slow boy over a class theme at Rindge and Latin Special.

Live-in Staffers’ evening duties are divided pretty evenly between the picayune and
the unpleasant. Somebody has to hit the area meetings to verify residents’ attendance,
while somebody else has to miss a nightly meeting to man the empty House and phones
and do the picayune Daily Log. After the meetings let out, Gately’s supposed to do
a head-count every hour and make a Log-entry on who all’s there and what’s going on.
Gately has to do a Chore-patrol and Log-entry on Chore-performance and nail down tomorrow’s
Chore-assignments off the weekly sheet. The residents need to have everything expected
of them spelled out in advance so they can’t bitch if they get popped for something.
Then people who haven’t performed on their Chore have to be told they’re on a week’s
Restriction, which tends to be unpleasant. Gately has to unlock Pat’s cabinets and
get the key to the meds locker and open the meds locker. Residents on meds respond
to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener.
They just like materialize. Gately has to dispense oral insulin and Virus-meds and
pimple medicine and antidepressants and lithium to the residents who materialize for
meds, and then he has to enter everything in the Medical Log, which the M. Log is
an incredible fucking mess. He has to get out Pat’s Week-At-A-Glance book and print
out her next day’s appointments on a sheet of paper in block letters, because Pat
finds her own palsied handwriting impossible to read. Gately has to confer with Johnette
Foltz about how different residents conducted themselves at St. E.’s Sharing and Caring
and Brookline’s B.Y.P. and a Women’s NA Step down in East Cambridge they let a couple
of the senior females go to, and then Log all the data. Gately has to go up and check
on Kate G., who claimed to be too sick to hit AA again tonight and has been in bed
in her room more or less steadily for three days, reading somebody called Sylvia Plate.
Going up onto the women’s side of the upstairs is an incredible pain in the ass because
he has to unlock a little steel cage over a little button at the bottom of their stairway
by the back office and press the button to sound an upstairs buzzer and shout up the
stairs ‘Male on the floor’ and then give the female residents as much time as they
need to get decent or whatever before he can come up. Going up there has been educational
for Gately because he’d always had this idea that women’s areas were essentially cleaner
and pleasanter than men’s areas. Having to verify the Chore in the women’s two bathrooms
smashed his longstanding delusion that women didn’t go to the bathroom with the same
appalling vigor that men did. Gately’d done a fair amount of cleaning up after his
mother, but he’d never much thought of her as a woman. So the whole unpleasant thing’s
been an education.

Gately has to check on Doony Glynn, who has recurrent diverticulitis and has to lie
fetal on his bunk when he gets an attack and has to be brought Motrin and a SlimFast
shake that Gately had to make with 2% milk because there was no skim left, and then
Food Bank crackers and a tonic out of the basement’s machine when Glynn can’t drink
the 2% shake, and then Log Glynn’s comments and condition, neither of which are good.

Somebody has made those disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things in the kitchen
and then not cleaned up after themselves, and Gately has to clomp around finding out
who’s responsible and get them to clean it up, and the code about ratting among the
residents is such that you’d think he was a narc all of a sudden. The daily bullshit
here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now
empties him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit. It hadn’t been this way
at the start, the soul-sucking aspect, and Gately every couple minutes wonders again
what he’ll end up doing when his year’s Staff term is up and his soul is sucked out
and he’s sober but without any money and still clueless and has to leave here and
do something back Out There.

Kate Gompert, when he buzzed and went up to the 5-Woman room to look in, had made
a possible sideways comment about hurting herself,
²⁴⁵
and Gately has to call Pat at home about it, and she’s out or not picking up, so
then he has to call the House Manager and relay the verbatim comment and let her interpret
it and tell Gately what action to take and how the comment stands in relation to Gompert’s
Suicide Contract and how the whole thing should be Logged. A resident at Ennet had
hung herself from a heating pipe in the basement a couple years before Gately arrived,
and there are now baroque procedures for monitoring ideation among residents with
psych issues. The number of 5-East at St. Elizabeth’s is on a red card in Pat’s Rolodex.

Gately has to collect the previous week’s counselor-reports and collate them and get
the residents’ files together and get any updates or changes printed out and into
the files for tomorrow’s All-Staff Meeting, where the Staff gets together in Pat’s
office and interfaces on how each resident seems to be doing. Residents have a pretty
good idea that their alumni counselors basically rat them out in toto at each Staff
meeting, which is why counselling sessions tend to be so incredibly dull that only
really grateful giving Ennet alumni are willing to serve as counselors. Filing-organization
is picayune, and for Gately using the back office’s TP array to print stuff out is
unpleasant, mostly because each of his fingers covers almost three keys of the keyboard
and he has to hit each key carefully with the tip of a pen, which sometimes he forgets
to retract the nub of, leaving blue smears on the keys that the House Manager always
gives him an ass-chewing for.

And Gately has to have each newer resident in to the office for at least a couple
minutes to like touch base and see how they’re doing and make it clear they’re regarded
as existing so they can’t just melt into the living room’s decor and disappear. The
newest guy’s still sitting in the linen closet claiming he’s comfortablest there with
the door open and the new ‘helpless’ Amy Johnson hasn’t come back yet. A brand-new
Court-Ordered female, Ruth van Cleve, who looks like one of those people you see in
pictures of African famine, has to fill out Intake forms and go through Orientation,
and Gately goes over the House rules with her and gives her a copy of the Ennet House
Survival Guide, which some resident years gone had written for Pat.

Gately has to answer the phone and tell people who call the office for a resident
that residents can receive calls only on the pay phone in the basement, which he has
to say yes is frequently busy all the time. The House prohibits cellular/mobiles and
has a Boundary about the office phone for residents. Gately has to kick residents
off down there when other residents in line come and complain they’ve exceeded their
five minutes. This also tends to be unpleasant: the pay phone down there is undigital
and unshutoffable and a constant source of aggravation and beefs; every conversation
is life-and-death; crisis down there 24/7. There’s a special way to kick somebody
off a pay phone that’s respectful and nonshaming but also firm. Gately has gotten
good at assuming a blank but not passive expression when residents are abusive. There’s
this look of weary expertise the House Staffers cultivate, then have to flex their
face to get rid of when they’re off-duty. Gately’s gotten so stoic in the face of
abuse that a resident has to mention actual unnatural acts in connection with his
name for Gately to Log the abuse and give out a Restriction. He’s respected and well-liked
by almost all the residents, which the House Manager says causes the veteran Staff
some concern, because Gately’s job is not to be these people’s friend all the time.

Then in the kitchen with the fucking Krispie-treat bowls and pans still a fucking
mess Wade McDade and some other residents were standing around waiting for various
things to toast and boil and McDade was using his finger and pushing the tip of his
nose up so that his nostrils faced straight out at everybody. He was looking piggishly
around and asking if people knew any people where their nose looked like this right
here, and some people said yes, sure, why. Gately checked the fridge and again saw
evidence that his special meatloaf had a secret admirer, it looked like, another big
rectangle cut out of the leftovers he’d carefully wrapped and laid out on the sturdiest
shelf in there. McDade, who Gately struggles daily with the urge to hit McDade so
hard there’d be nothing but eyes and a nose down over the tops of his cowboy boots,
McDade’s telling everybody he’s constructing a Gratitude List at Calvin T.’s tough-love
suggestion and he says he’s decided one of the things he’s grateful for is his nose
don’t look like this here. Gately tries not to judge on the basis of who laughs and
who doesn’t. When Pat’s phone rings and Gately leaves, McDade’s squunching his upper
lip up in his hand and asking people about acquaintance with cleft palates.

Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger
to the wind for potential conflicts and issues and rumors. A subtle art here is maintaining
access to the residents’ gossip-grapevine and keeping on top of rumors without seeming
like you’re inducing a resident to cross the line and actually eat cheese on another
resident. The only thing a resident is actually encouraged to rat out another resident
on here is picking up a Substance. All other-type issues it’s supposed to be Staff’s
job to glean and ferret out etc., to decoct legitimate infractions out of the tides
of innuendo and bullshit complaint 20+ bored crammed-together street-canny people
in detox from wrecked lives can generate. Rumors that so-and-so blew so-and-so on
the couch at 0300, that thus-and-such’s got a knife, that X was using what had to
be some kind of code on the pay phone, that Y’s gone back to carrying a beeper, that
so-and-so’s making book on football out of the 5-Man room, that Belbin had led Diehl
to believe she’d clean up if he made Krispie Treats and then she weaseled out, and
etc. Almost all of it’s picayune and, over time, as it accretes, unpleasant.

Rarely a feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward—just an abrupt loss
of hope. Plus there is the contempt he belies so well with gentleness and caring during
that post-coital period of small sounds and adjustments.

Orin can only give, not receive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of
them think he is a wonderful lover, almost a dream-type lover; and this fuels the
contempt. But he cannot show the contempt, since this would pretty clearly detract
from the Subject’s pleasure.

Because the Subject’s pleasure in him has become his food, he is conscientious in
the consideration and gentleness he shows after coitus, making clear his desire to
stay right there very close and be intimate, when so many other male lovers, the Subjects
say, seem afterward to become uneasy, contemptuous, or distant, rolling over to stare
at the wall or tamping down a smoke before they’ve even stopped twitching.

The hand-model told him very softly how the photograph’s big pink Swiss husband after
coitus hove himself off her and lay there stunned under his stomach’s weight, his
eyes narrowed to piggy slits and the faint smirk on his face that of a gorged predator:
not like the punter: uncaring. As was S.O.P. with Subjects she became then briefly
stricken and anxious and said
no one
must ever know, she could lose her children. Orin administered the standard assurances
in a very soft intimate voice. Orin was resoundingly gentle and caring afterward,
as she could somehow just intuitively
tell
he would be. It was true. It gave him real pleasure to give the impression of care
and intimacy in this interval; if someone asked about his favorite part of the anticlimactic
time after the Subject lay back and glisteningly opened and he could see her eyes
holding him whole, Orin would say his #2 favorite is this post-seminal interval of
clingy vulnerability on the Subject’s part and gentle intimate care on his own.

When the knock on the room door came it seemed like a further grace, for the Subject
had been up on an elbow in bed, exhaling slim tusks of cigarette-smoke from her nose
and starting to ask him to tell her things about his own family, and Orin was stroking
her very tenderly and watching the twin curves of smoke pale and spread and trying
not to shudder at the thought of what the inside of the Subject’s fine nose must look
like, what gray-white tangles of necrotic snot must hang and twine up in there, from
the smoke, whether she had the stomach to look at a hankie she’d used or whether she
balled the thing up and flung it from her with the sort of shudder O. knew
he’d
feel; and when the brisk action of male knuckles sounded against the room’s door
he watched her face whiten from the forehead down as she pleaded that no one must
know of her whoever was there and stabbed out her butt and dove beneath the blankets
as he called out for patience to the door and veered to the bathroom to wrap a towel
around him before he went to it, the sort of bland hotel door you used a card and
not a key for. The defiled, guilty, and frightened married hand-model’s wrist and
hand protruded for a moment from the edge of the bedding and felt the floor for shoes
and clothes, the hand moving like a blind spider and sucking things up under the blankets.
Orin didn’t ask who it was at the door;
he
had nothing to hide. His mood at the door became extraordinarily fine. When the wife
and mother had erased all evidence of herself and heaped the bedding over her so she
could lie there sniffing grayly and imagining that she was hidden from view, just
one lumpy part of a celibate napper’s dishevelled bed, Orin checked the door’s fish-eye
peeper, saw only the hallway’s claret-colored wall opposite, and opened the door with
a smile he felt all the way down to his bare soles. Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Eastern
medical attachés, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything.