Infinite Jest (128 page)

‘Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that. As if he were stuck wondering. As if
there was something he’d forgotten.’

‘Misplaced. Lost.’

‘Misplaced.’

‘Lost.’

‘Misplaced.’

‘As you wish.’

0245h., Ennet House, the hours that are truly wee. Eugenio M., voluntarily filling
in for Johnette Foltz on Dream Duty, is out in the office playing some sort of hand-held
sports game that blips and tweets. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy and
Bruce Green are in the living room with the lights mostly out and the old jumpy-picture
D.E.C. viewer on. Cartridges not allowed after 0000h., to encourage sleep. Sober cocaine-
and stimulant-addicts sleep pretty well by the second month, straight alcoholics by
the fourth. Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for
the first year. Though Bruce Green is asleep and would be in violation of the no-lying-on-the-couch
rule if his legs weren’t twisted over and his feet on the floor. All the Ennet House
viewer gets on Spontaneous Dissemination is basic InterLace, and from 0200 to 0400
InterLace NNE downloads for the next dissemination-day and cuts all transmissions
except one line’s four straight redissemms of ‘The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,’
and when Mr. Bouncety-Bounce appears in his old cloth-and-safety-pin diaper and paunch
and rubber infant-head mask he is not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for the
sleepless adult. Ken Erdedy has started to smoke cigarettes and sits smoking, joggling
one leather slipper. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day are on the nonleather couch. Kate
Gompert sits cross-legged on the couch with her head all the way forward so her forehead
touches her foot. It looks like some kind of spiritually advanced yoga position or
stretching exercise, but it’s really just the way Kate Gompert has been sitting on
the sofa all night every night since Wednesday’s free-for-all unpleasantness with
Lenz and Gately in the streetlet, from which the whole House is still reeling and
spiritually palsied. Day’s bare calves are completely hairless and look sort of absurd
with dress shoes and black socks and a velour bathrobe, but Day’s proven kind of admirably
resistant to caring what other people think, in a way.

‘Like you really care.’ Kate Gompert’s voice is toneless and hard to hear because
it issues from out of the circle formed by her crossed legs.

‘It isn’t a question of caring or not caring,’ Day says quietly. ‘I meant only that
I identify to an extent.’

Gompert’s sarcastic chuff of air raises a section of her unwashed bangs.

Bruce Green doesn’t snore, even with his nose broken and cross-hatched in white tape.
Neither he nor Erdedy is listening to them.

Day speaks softly and doesn’t cross his legs to incline over to the side toward her.
‘When I was a little boy—’

Gompert chuffs air again.

‘—just a boy with a violin and a dream and special roundabout routes to school to
avoid the boys who took my violin case and played keep-away over my head with it,
one summer afternoon I was upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother,
alone, practicing my violin. It was very hot, and there was an electric fan in the
window, blowing out, acting as an exhaust fan.’

‘I know from exhaust fans, believe you me.’

‘The direction of flow is beside the point. It was on, and its position in the window
made the glass of the upraised pane vibrate somehow. It produced an odd high-pitched
vibration, invariant and constant. By itself it was strange but benign. But on this
one afternoon, the fan’s vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing
on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen
in my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of
this resonance that produced it.’

‘A thing.’

‘As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing
out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say
large, dark, shape,
and
billowing,
what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest
inkling was there.’

‘But it was inside you, though.’

‘Katherine, Kate, it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and
given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the
fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible
than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room.’

‘Was it triangular? The shape? When you say
billowing,
do you mean like a triangle?’

‘Shapeless. Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean
only
shape, dark,
and either
billowing
or
flapping.
But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had
become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random
bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly.’

A mirthless laugh into the ankle. ‘Alcoholics Anomalous.’

Day hasn’t switched legs or moved, and he isn’t looking at her ear or her scalp, which
are in view. ‘In just the way any child will probe a wound or pick at a scab I returned
shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the resonance
again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind
again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too
large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution,
cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever
confronted.’

‘But you still forgot and went back up there and brought it back. And it was inside
you.’

Completely incongruously, Ken Erdedy says ‘His head’s shaped like a mushroom.’ Day
has no idea what he was referring to or talking about.

‘Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape
began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran
from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it
did not recede.’

‘The triangular horror.’

‘It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year.
I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up
billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But
not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would
rise inside me.’

It isn’t like a real interface or conversation. Day doesn’t seem to be addressing
anybody in particular. ‘The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year
of college. I attended Brown University in Providence RI, graduating
magna cum laude.
One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time
in years.’

‘But there was an inevitability-feeling about it, too, when it came.’

‘It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no
possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older.’

‘Tell me all about it.’

‘I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not
live with how it felt.’

Gompert’s head isn’t all the way up, but now it’s about halfway up; her forehead has
a major red impression-spot from her ankle-bone. She’s looking roughly halfway between
straight ahead and Day beside her. ‘And there was this idea underneath that you’d
brought it on, that you’d wakened it up. You went back up to the fan that second time.
You like despised yourself for waking it up.’

Day is looking straight ahead. Mr. Bouncety-Bounce’s head is in no way mushroom-shaped,
though it is large and—in the rubber infant-mask—apt to appear to the adult viewer
kind of grotesque. ‘Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering
around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went
away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me.
He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation
I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string
by which I hung suspended over hell itself.’

Green in his sleep cries out something that sounds like ‘For God’s sake no Mr. Ho
don’t light it!’ His swollen black eyes and R.E.M.’s non sequiturs, plus the capering
130-kilo infant on the viewer, plus Day and Gompert conversing while both staring
into space, all backed by the blurps and wonks of Gene M.’s hand-held game in the
office, give the dark living room a dreamy and almost surreal atmosphere.

Day finally uncrosses his legs and switches them. ‘It’s never come back. Over twenty
years. But I’ve not forgotten. And the worst times I have felt since then were like
a day at the foot-masseur’s compared to the feeling of that black sail or wing rising
inside me.’

‘Billowing.’

‘Not the nuts Jesus God not the
nutsss.’

‘
I understood the term
hell
as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what
people meant by
hell
. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings.’

‘Or the corner it came up out of, inside, if they mean a place.’ Kate Gompert is now
looking at him. Her face doesn’t look better but does look different. Her neck’s clearly
stiff from having been contorted.

‘From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,’ Day says, holding
the knee of the leg just crossed, ‘I understood on an intuitive level why people killed
themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I’d surely kill
myself.’

‘Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.’

‘Oh God please,’ Green says very distinctly.

Day says: ‘There is no way it could feel worse.’

Apparently some higher-up had sent Mary Esther Thode out on her little yellow Vespa
with the order for their match; she’d pulled up alongside Stice and Wayne just as
they cleared the Hammond golf course, Hal a good half km. behind them with galumphers
Kornspan and Kahn. Schtitt was inscrutable about the whole thing. The match wasn’t
like a ladder-challenge; Stice and Hal were in different age-divisions this year.
The match was more like maybe an exhibition, and by the second set, as people got
done with the weight room and showers, it was attended like one. The match. Helen
Steeply of
Moment,
possessed of a certain thuggish allure but hardly the pericardium-piercer that Orin
had made her sound like, to Hal, sat through the whole thing, accompanied for the
first set by Aubrey deLint before Thierry Poutrincourt stole his spot on the bleacher.
It was the first high-caliber junior tennis she’d ever seen, she said, the massive
journalist. They played on #6, the best of the east Show Courts. Also the scene of
some of the recent Eschaton’s worst carnage. It was a conditioning-heavy day, a very
light schedule of matches. Bags of smoke burped steadily up from Schtitt’s crow’s
nest high overhead, and sometimes you could hear the weatherman’s pointer tapping
absently on the transom’s iron. The only other thing nearby was down on #10, a challenge
in Girls’ 14’s, two baseliners sending parabolas back and forth: ponytails, an air
of baseline attrition, the ball’s high heavy arc that of a loogy spat for distance.
Shaw and Axford were also way out on #23, warming up. No one paid them or the 14’s
much mind. The bleachers behind the Show Court filled steadily up. Schtitt had Mario
film the whole first set from above, leaning way out over the transom’s railing with
Watson braced and gripping his vest from behind, Mario’s police lock protruding and
casting a weird needly shadow slanted northeast of Court 9’s net.

‘This is the first real match I’ve seen, after hearing so much about the junior tour,’
Helen Steeply told deLint, trying to cross her legs on a cramped bleacher a few tiers
from the top. Aubrey deLint’s smile was notoriously bad, his face seeming to break
into crescents and shards, wholly without cheer. It was almost more like a grimace.
Orders that deLint keep the mammoth soft-profiler in direct sight at all times were
explicit and emphatic. Helen Steeply had a notebook, and deLint was filling in both
players’ names on performance charts Schtitt won’t ever let anyone look at.

The
P.M.
was moving fast from a chilly noon cloud-cover into blue autumn glory, but in the
first set it was still very cold, the sun still pale and seeming to flutter as if
poorly wired. Hal and Stice didn’t have to stretch and barely warmed up at all, after
the run. They’d changed clothes and were both expressionless. Stice was in all-black,
Hal in E.T.A. sweats with his left shoe’s upper bulging distended around his AirStirrup
brace.

A born net-man, Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther
in a back-brace. He was shorter than Hal but better-built and with quicker feet. A
southpaw with factory-painted W’s on his Wilson Pro Staff 5.8 si’s.

Hal was left-handed too, which complicated strategy and percentages hideously, deLint
told the journalist beside him.

The Darkness’s service motion was in the McEnroe-Esconja tradition, legs splayed,
feet parallel, a figure off an Egyptian frieze, side so severely to the net he’s almost
facing away. Both arms out straight and stiff on the serve’s downswing. Hal bobbed
on his feet’s balls a little in the ad court, waiting. Stice started his service-motion
motion in little segments—it looks a little like bad animation—then grimaced, tossed,
pivoted netward and served it with a hard flat
spang
way out to Hal’s forehand, pulling Hal wide. The finish of Stice’s pivot lets his
momentum carry him naturally up to net, following the serve. Hal lunged for the serve
and chipped a little forehand return down the line and scrambled right to get back
into court. The return was lucky, a feeble chip that just cleared the net’s tape,
so shallow that Stice had to half-volley it at the service line, still moving in,
his backhand two-handed and clumsy for half-volleys; he had to sort of scoop it and
hit up soft so it wouldn’t float out deep. Axiom: the man who has to hit up from the
net is going to get passed. And Stice’s half-volley landed in the ad court squishy
and slow and sat up for Hal, who was waiting for it. Hal’s stick was back for the
forehand, waiting, and there was a moment of total mentation as the ball hung there.
Statistically, Hal was book to pass a left-handed volleyer cross-court off a ball
this ripe, though he also always loved a good humiliating topspin lob, and Stice’s
fractional chance at saving the point was to guess what Hal would do—Stice couldn’t
crowd the net because Hal would put it up over him; he stayed a couple stick-lengths
off the net, leaning for a cross. Everything seemed to hang distended in air now so
clear it seemed washed, after the clouds. The bleachers’ people could feel Hal feel
Stice letting the point go, inside, figuring it lost, knowing he could only guess
and stab, hoping. Little hope of Hal fucking up: Hal Incandenza does not fuck up passes
off floater half-volleys. Hal’s forehand’s wind-up was nicely disguised, prepped for
either lob or pass. When he hit it so hard his forearm’s musculature stood starkly
out it was a pass but not cross-court; he went inside-out on it, a flat forehand as
hard as he could from the baseline’s center back toward Stice’s deuce-sideline. Stice
had finally guessed lob at the start of the stroke and had half-turned to sprint back
for where it would land, and the inside-out pass wrong-footed him; he could do no
more than stand there flat-footed and watching as the fresh ball landed a meter fair
to get Hal back to deuce in the fifth game. There was applause off thirty hands for
the point as a whole, which was faultless and on Hal’s part imaginative, anti-book.
One of very few total inspired points from Incandenza, deLint’s chart would show.
Neither player’s face moved as a couple people shouted for Hal. The basic ten-level
R.A.S.U.
²⁶⁵
from the Universal Bleacher Co. sat right behind the court. At the start it was mostly
staff and the A’s who were running alongside when Thode brought Stice and Hal the
directive to play. But the stands gradually filled as word got down to the locker
rooms that The Darkness was playing 18’s A-2 dead-even in the first set of something
Schtitt had actually dispatched a scooter to order. The bleachers’ E.T.A.s hunched
forward with hands warmed in the crease between hamstrings and calves, or else gloved
and layered and stretched out with their heads and bottoms and heels on three different
levels, watching both sky and play. The lozenges of shadow from the court’s mesh fences
elongated as the sun wheeled southwest to west. Several sets of legs and sneakers
hung swinging from the transom above. Mario allowed himself several reaction-shots
from staff and partisans in the bleachers. Aubrey deLint spent the set with the punter’s
cathected profiler, who allegedly came to see Hal only about Orin but whom Charles
Tavis won’t let see Hal yet, even chaperoned, Tavis’s reasons for the reticence too
detailed for Helen Steeply to understand, probably, but she was watching from the
Show-bleachers’ top row, poised over a notebook, wearing a fuchsia ski cap with a
rooster-comb top instead of a pompom top, blowing into her fist, her weight making
the bleacher below her bow and inclining deLint oddly toward her. For the spectators
not perched on the transom overhead, the players looked waffle-cut by the chain-link
fencing. The green windscreens that wrecked spectation were used only in the spring
in the weeks right after the Lung’s disassembly. DeLint hadn’t stopped talking into
the big lady’s ear.