Infinite Jest (122 page)

‘Green.’

‘I’b dot touchig dothig, dud worry.’

‘Look at his
head
.’

Her kimono’s shoulders are humped and glassy black in the Montego’s light. Gately’s
brain keeps wanting to go away inside himself. When you start to feel deeply cold
that’s shock and blood-loss. Gately sort of wills himself to stay right here, looks
over past Joelle’s hand at Lenz’s fine shoes. ‘Lenz. You and Green. Get me inside.’

‘Green!’

The circle of stars’ heads’ faces above are all faceless from the headlights’ shadows.
Some car engines have shut off and some haven’t. One of the cars has a twittering
fan-belt. Somebody’s suggesting to call the genuine Finest—Erdedy—which everybody
greets with scorn at his naïveté. Gately’s figuring Staff from the Shed or #4 has
called them or at least dialed down to Security. By the time he was ten only his pinkie-finger
would fit in the dialer’s holes of his mother’s old princess phone; he exerts will
to un-cross his eyes and stay right here; he in the worst way does not want to be
lying here with a gunshot in shock trying to deal with the Finest.

‘I think one of these guys is, like, expired.’

‘No shit Shylock.’

‘
Nobody call
.’ Gately yells it up and out. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit when they stand him
up. ‘Nobody call nobody til you get me in.’ He can smell Green’s leather jacket overhead.
Bits of grass and whatnot drifting down onto him from where Lenz is still brushing
off his clothes, and coins of blood on the street from Green’s nose. Joelle tells
Lenz if he doesn’t cut something out she’s going to hand him his ass. Gately’s whole
right side had gone deadly cold. To Joelle he says, ‘I’m Supervised. I’ll go to jail
sure.’

‘You got fucking eyewitnesses out the ass behind you Don man,’ either McDade or Glynn
says, but it can’t be Glynn, for some reason he tries to bring up inside him. And
it seems like Charlotte T.’s voice saying Ewell’s trying to get in Pat’s office to
call but Gately locked Pat’s door.

‘Nobody call
anyone!
’ Joelle shouts up and out. She smells good.

‘They’re calling!’

‘Get him off the phone! Say prank for Christ’s sake! You hear me?’ Her kimono smells
good. Her voice has a Staff-like authority. The scene out here has changed: Gately’s
down, Madame Psychosis is in charge.

‘We’re going to get him up and we’re going to get him inside,’ she says to the circle.
‘Lenz.’

There’s impending static-crackle and the sound of a serious set of keys.

Her voice is that one Madame lady’s voice on no-subscription radio, from out of nowhere
he’s all of a sudden sure, is where he heard that odd empty half-accented voice before.

‘Secyotty! Hold it
right
thaah.’ It’s at least luckily one of the ex-football E.M. Security guys, that spends
half his shift down at the Life and then goes up and down the streetlet all night
playing with his service baton and singing sea chanties off-key, that’s just impressively
qualified to Come In to AA with them.

Joelle: ‘Erdedy—deal with him.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s the drunk,’ Gately gets out.

Joelle’s looking up at presumably Ken E. ‘Go over and look high-income and respectable
at him. Verbalize at him. Distract him while we get him inside before the real ones
come.’

‘How am I supposed to explain all these prone figures draped over cars?’

‘For Christ’s sake Ken he’s not a mental titan—distract him with something shiny or
something. Get your thumb out of your ass and move.’

Gately’s smile has reached his eyes. ‘You’re Madame on the FM, is how I knew you.’

Erdedy’s squeaky shoe and the obese guy’s radio and keys. ‘Who hold it? As in desist?’

‘Se
cyotty
I said
halt!
’

Green and Lenz bending in, white breath all over and Green’s dripping nose the same
copper smell as Lenz.

‘I knew I knew you,’ Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable.

‘If I could ask you to specify halt from what.’

‘Get his back up here first,’ Green tells Lenz.

‘Not crazy about all this blood,’ Lenz is saying.

Many hands slide under his back; the shoulder blooms with colorless fire. The sky
looks so 3-D you could like dive in. The stars distend and sprout spikes. Joelle’s
warm legs shift with her weight to keep pressure on the pad. The squishing sound Gately
knows means the robe’s soaked through. He wants somebody to congratulate him for not
having thrown up. You can tell some of the stars are nearer and some far, down there.
What Gately’s always thought of as the Big Question Mark is really the Big Dipper.

‘I’m
oddering
desist until who’s in chahge that I can repot the si
chation
.’ The Security guy’s hammered, his name’s Sidney or Stanley and he wears his Security-hat
and baton shopping in the Purity Supreme and always asks Gately how it’s hanging.
His shoes’ uppers are blasted along the feet’s insides the way fat men that have to
walk a lot’s are; his ex-ballplayer’s collops and big hanging gut are one of Gately’s
great motivators for nightly situps. Gately turns his head to throw up a little on
both Green and Joelle, who both ignore it.

‘Oh sorry. Oh shit I hate that.’

Joelle v.D. runs a hand down Gately’s wet arm that leaves a warm wake, the hand, and
then gently squeezes as much of the wrist as she can get her hand around. ‘And Lo,’
she says softly.

‘Jesus his leg’s all bloody too.’

‘Boy do I know guys loved that show you did.’ A tiny bit more throwing up.

‘Now we’re going to lift him very gently and get the feet under.’

‘Here Green man get over here on the south why don’t you.’

‘I’m oddering the whole sitchation halt it
right
thaah whey
aah
.’

Lenz and Green’s shoes coming together and moving apart at either side of Gately,
faces coming down in a fish-eye lens, lifting:

‘Ready?’

Year of the Depend
Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or
w/o console, Pink
₂
, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri-
and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def
you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx
CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors,
laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding,
killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar
stressae. Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50%
of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorbable
at home on couches. Ms. Tawni Kondo’s immensely popular exercise program spontaneously
disseminated daily in all three O.N.A.N. time zones at 0700h., a combination of low-impact
aerobics, Canadian Air Force calisthenics, and what might be termed ‘cosmetic psychology’—upwards
of 60 million North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a mass
choreography somewhat similar to those compulsory
A.M.
tai chi slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China—except that the Chinese assemble
publicly together. One-third of those 50% of metro Bostonians who still leave home
to work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid
entertainment now absorbed at home: pulses, storage cartridges, digital displays,
domestic decor—an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes.

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the
hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call
bad what no one can imagine being without.

But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the
dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole
new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice.

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa
schedule of public spectation opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to
be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers’ Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas
explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete
vector splatting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving
their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the
circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around
the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see. Hence
the apotheosis and intricate pecking-order of Boston street musicians, the best of
whom now commute to work in foreign autos. The nightly chance to crank back the drapes
and face out into the streets at 0000h., when all street-parked vehicles have to switch
sides and everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching. Street fights,
supermarket-checkout confrontations, tax-auctions, speeders stopped for ticketing,
coprolaliac Touretters on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. The fellowship
and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of eyes all not
at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way. Q.v. the crowd-control headaches
at crime-scenes, fires, demonstrations, rallies, marches, displays of Canadian insurgency;
crowds brought together now so quickly, too quickly even to see them, a kind of visual
inversion of watching something melt, the crowds collect and are held tight by an
almost seemingly nucleic force, watching together. Almost anything can do it. Street
vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted figures in wheelchairs with hand-lettered
signs outlining entitlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, charismatic preachers
with portable PAs. Hardcore pan-handlers stem like they’re selling nostrums to small
crowds; the best pan-handling now verges on stand-up comedy, and is rewarded by watching
crowds. Cultists in saffron with much percussion and laser-jet leaflets. Even some
old-style Eurobeggars, black-browed persons in striped leggings, mute and aloof. Even
local candidates, activists, advocates and grass-roots aides have returned full-circle
to the public stump—the bunting-hung platform, the dumpster-lid, vehicles’ roofs,
awnings, anything overhead, anything raised to a crowd-collecting public view: people
climb and declaim, drawing crowds.

One top Back Bay public spect-op every November is watching expressionless men in
federal white and municipal cadet-blue drain and scrub the Public Gardens’ man-made
duck pond for the upcoming winter. They drain it sometime in November every year.
It’s publicly unannounced; there’s no fixed schedule; long shiny trucks just all of
a sudden appear in a ring at pond’s rim; it’s always a weekday c. mid-November; it’s
also always somehow a gray raw sad windy Boston day, gulls cartwheeling in a sky the
color of dirty glass, people mufflered and with new gloves on. Not your ideal sylvan-type
day for conventional lounging or public spectation. But a massive crowd always collects
and thickens in a dense ring along the banks of the Public Gardens’ pond. The pond
has ducks. The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by
the wind, geometrically round and banked with lawn-quality grass and shrubbery in
even-spaced clumps, with park-type benches between the shrubs overhung by white-barked
willows who’ve now wept their yellow autumn grit onto the green benches and grass
banks where an arc of crowd now forms and thickens, watching duly designated authorities
commence to drain the pond. Some of the pond’s flightier ducks have already decamped
for points south, and more leave on some phylogenic cue just as the shiny trucks pull
up, but the main herd remains. Two private planes fly in lazy ellipses just under
the cloud-cover overhead, banners strung out behind them advertising four different
levels of comfort and protection from Depend. The wind keeps blowing the banners sideways,
möbiusizing them and then straightening them back out with the loud pop of flags unfurling.
From the ground the engines and banners’ pops are too faint to hear above the crowd-noise
and ducks and wind’s mean whistle. The swirling groundwind’s so bad that U.S. Chief
of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine, standing with his hands at the small of his back
at a window on the eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking
southwest and down at the concentric rings of pond and crowd and trucks, can see wind-driven
leaves and street-grit swirling right outside and pecking at this very window he stands
before, massaging his coccyx.

Dr. James O. Incandenza, filmmaker and almost a scopophile about spect-ops and crowds,
never once missed this spectacle, when alive and in town. Hal and Mario have both
been to a few. So have several Ennet residents, though some of them weren’t in much
of a position to remember. It seems as if everyone in metro Boston’s seen at least
one pond-draining. It’s always the same sort of grim windy Northeast November day
where if you were at home you’d be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen, listening
to the wind and glad of home and hearth. Every year Himself came was the same. The
deciduous trees were always skeletal, the pines palsied, the willows wind-whipped
and nubbly, the grass dun and crunchy underfoot, the water-rats always seeing the
big drainage-picture first and gliding like night to the cement sides to flee. Always
a crowd in thickening rings. Always rollerblades on the Gardens’ paths, lovers joined
at the hand, Frisbee in the distance on the rim of the Gardens’ other side’s hillside’s
slope, which faces away from the pond.