Infinite Jest (124 page)

The players can all do some very serious eating, some of them still in sweaty sweats
with salt-stiff hair, too hungry after three-set
P.M.
s to shower before refueling. Coed tables are quietly discouraged. The Boys 18’s and
the cream of the 16’s are all at the best table. Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, E.T.A.’s
16’s A-1, has just this
P.M.
gone three sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen, E.T.A.’s second-best overall boy,
taking Hal all the way to 7–5 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish
engagement Schtitt had them play out on the West Courts that afternoon for reasons
no one has yet pinned down. The match’s audience had grown steadily as other challenges
got done and people came up from the weight room and showers. News that Stice had
very nearly beaten an Inc nobody but John Wayne has been able to beat has made its
figure-eight way around the tables and serving line and salad bar, and lots of younger
kids keep looking to the best table and Stice, sixteen, crew-cutted and still in his
black Fila sweats with no shirt under the unzipped top, assembling a complex sandwich
on his plate, and they let their eyes widen and postures sag to communicate awe: R.H.I.P.

Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it’s the wrist of an assailant. The
only sound at the table for the first few minutes is of forkwork and mastication and
the slight gasping sounds of people trying to breathe while they eat. You rarely speak
for the first few minutes here, eating. Supper is deadly-serious. Some of the kids
even start in on their trays while still in line at the milk dispenser. Now Coyle
bites in. Wayne has made his entree into a sandwich and lowers and bites. Keith Freer’s
eyes are half closed as his jaw muscles bulge and slacken. Some of the players’ inclined
heads are hard to see over the height of their food. Struck and Schacht, side by side,
bite in sync and chew. The only one at the table not eating like a refugee is Trevor
Axford, who as a small child back in Short Beach CT once fell off his bike onto his
head and received a tiny lesion-type brain injury after which all food everywhere
tastes horrible to him. His clearest explanation of the way food tastes to him is
that it tastes the way vomit smells. He’s discouraged from speaking at meals and holds
his nose while he eats and eats with the neutral joyless expression of somebody dispensing
fuel into his car. Hal Incandenza dismantles the stelliform-mold shape E.T.A. mashed
potatoes come in, mixing baby-boileds in with the mashed. Petropolis Kahn and Eliot
Kornspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit with them—they’re
by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid
a kind of fine mist or spray. Jim Troeltsch keeps holding a clear tumbler of milk
up to the ceiling’s full-spectrum lights and swirling the milk around in the light,
looking at it. Pemulis chews with his mouth open, producing moist noises, a habit
so family-of-origin-ingrained no amount of peer pressure can break him of it.

Eventually The Darkness clears his throat to speak. In the showers he’d gotten up
to the middle of an Xmas story about one of his parents’ epic rows. His parents had
met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS—just outside Liberal
KS on the Oklahoma border—met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this
popular Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a
lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms’ flesh and kept it there
till one of them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm.
Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn’t jerk away and reel
away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white
slugs of burn-scar. They’d toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice
explained. They’d been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how
you defined certain juris-prudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms
they stayed in their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except
for brief sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard
pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard
house in sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags
bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better
during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen
door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice—whom both Mr. Stice
and The Darkness called ‘The Bride’—while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking
intricate multicourse meals she’d feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both
himself and his six siblings as ‘The Brood’) and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded
pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and
of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride’s own. Ortho Stice loves his folks
to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes
highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclassmen with
them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people
have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings
to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out. Troeltsch and Pemulis are
arguing about whether E.T.A.’s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them powdered
milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing, very intent. Hal’s
making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the table
at all times and utensils in his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis
always listens to Stice’s tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his head
in admiration.

‘I’m just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that’s gone
down the disposal.’ Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines. ‘Just look at it.
Who could eat with something like that.’

‘The old man is a son of a bitch that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,’
Stice says, leaning in to bite and chew. The tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree
and unless it’s a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra
carbs. It’s like Pemulis can’t really taste his food unless he mashes it against his
palate. The Academy’s wheat bread is bicycled in by guys in Birkenstock sandals from
Bread & Circus Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it’s got to be not only sugarless
but low in glutens, which Tavis and Schtitt believe promote torpor and excess mucus.
Axford, who lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow
goes down to #5-A, stares stonily into space, his motions less like somebody eating
than like somebody miming eating. Hal’s made an intricate fortification-structure
of his food, complete with turrets and archer-slits, and even though he’s not much
eating or drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his
structure. As the eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give
Hal and Axford tiny sideways looks, the players’ different CPUs humming through Decision
Trees on whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much-rumored showdown with Dr. Tavis
and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho
Stice, might not have shaken Inc and Axhandle along some psychic competitive fault-line,
different guys with different rankings calculating the permuted advantages to themselves
of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though Michael Pemulis,
the other rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford’s expression and Hal’s
excessive swallowing altogether, though possibly studiously ignoring them, staring
meditatively at the squeegees
²⁵⁹
taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled
before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles
his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the tabletop with the other.

Pemulis shakes his head very seriously at Troeltsch. ‘Not a chance, brother.’

‘I’m telling you man this milk is powdered.’ Troeltsch peering down into the tumbler,
probing the milk’s surface with a thick finger. ‘Me I can tell from powdered. I have
growing-up domestic confirmed traumas around powdered. The day Mother announced milk
was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, with Father’s
OK. Father knuckling under like Roosevelt at Yalta. My big sister ran away from
home,
and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to powdered, which is
unmistakable if you know what to look for.’

Freer makes a snoring noise.

‘And do I ever know what to look for, to verify.’ Troeltsch is hoarse, and one of
these people who speaks to more than one person at once by looking from one person
to one person to one person; he’s not a born public speaker. ‘Namely your telltale
residues along the sides of the glass, when swished.’ W/ great flourished swishings
of the milk.

‘Except Troeltsch you can turn around and see them fucking loading the bags into the
dispenser every twenty minutes. Bags of milk. That say
MILK
on them, the bags. Liquid, sloshy, hard to handle. It’s milk.’

‘You see bags, you see the word
MILK
. They’re counting on the packaging. Image management. Sensory management.’ Responding
to Pemulis but looking at Struck. ‘Part of some larger overall kertwang. Possible
punishment for the Eschaton thing.’ Eyes going briefly to Hal. ‘Covert vitamins possibly
next. Let’s not even mention saltpeter. Put aside deductions from bags a second. I’m
sticking to facts. Fact: this is verifiably powdered milk.’

‘You’re saying they mix powdered milk and then try and pour it into milk-bags, all
to allay?’

Schacht clears his mouth and swallows mightily. ‘Tavis can’t even regrout tile in
the locker room without calling a Community Meeting or appointing a committee. The
Regrouting Committee’s been dragging along since May. Suddenly they’re pulling secret
0300 milk-switches? It doesn’t ring true, Jim.’

‘And Troeltsch has a cold, he said,’ Freer observes, indicating the little bottle
of Seldane next to Troeltsch’s squeezing-ball, by his plate. ‘You can’t even taste,
Troeltsch, if you got a real cold.’

‘Trevor should have the cold, Axhandle, no?’ Schacht says, tapping carminative capsules
onto his palm from his own amber bottle.

With supper they can choose milk or else cranberry juice, that most carb-caloric of
juices, which froths redly in its own clear dispenser by the salad bar. The milk dispenser
stands alone against the west wall, a big huge 24-liter three-bagger, the milk inserted
in ovaloid mammarial bags into its refrigerated cabinet of brushed steel, with three
receptacles for tumblers and three levers for controlled dispensing. There’s two levers
for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every new E.T.A.
tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into
it. There’s a sign in a kitchen-staffer’s crude black block caps taped to the dispenser’s
façade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS
FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of
a blue dot by a fairly obvious person.
²⁶⁰
The line for seconds on entrees now stretches out past the milk dispenser. The best
thing about satiation and slowing down on the eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis
start in on what you ate and tending to your teeth while you gaze around the airy
room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing behaviors and pathologies with a clear
and sated head. The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow
of the ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against their seatmates’ shoulders. People
protecting their plates. The blurred sexuality and indecisive postures of puberty.
Two marginal male 16’s have their heads directly in the bowls in the salad bar, and
some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different kids are illustrating points
with different gestures. John Wayne and Keith Freer stroll purposefully through the
serpentine crowd and up to the front of the Seconds line and insert themselves in
front of a little boy who’s tearing at a held bagel with great violent movements of
head and neck. The 18-A’s get free buttinskis: R.H.I. literal P., at E.T.A. Jim Struck
spears one of the cherry tomatoes out of Hal’s salad bowl with a savage fork-gesture;
Hal makes no comment.

Troeltsch has run his thick finger around the inside of the tumbler and is holding
the digit out at different guys around the table. ‘Note a certain bluish cast to it.
Traces and remains. Suspicious foam. Minute grains of not quite altogether dissolved
particulate powdered stuff. Powdered always leaves its telltale signs.’

‘Your fucking head is a minute grain, Troeltsch.’

‘Put that finger away.’

‘Tryna
eat
here.’

‘Paranoia,’ Pemulis says, scooping up stray peas with the flat of his knife.

‘Base tuition of 21,700 scooters, not counting,’ Troeltsch says, moving the finger
back and forth in the air—the stuff drying on the finger does not, admittedly, exactly
look appetite-whetting—‘and yet let’s note how the Lung’s not up in spite of rampant
weather and Achilles’-complaints, and today’s lunch a total déjà vu of yesterday’s
lunch, and the bread and bagels they’ve started getting us Day-Old with the yellow
stickers on the bags, and there’s dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in
the halls and lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on
the wall and Stice’s bed moves around, and there’s a
ball machine
in the girls’ lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this
stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—’