Infinite Jest (13 page)

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, 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 nanoprocessors, laser chromotography, Virtual-capable
media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic
migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.

Rm. 204, Subdormitory B: Jim Troeltsch, age seventeen, hometown Narberth PA, current
Enfield Tennis Academy rank in Boys’ 18’s #8, which puts him at #2 Singles on the
18’s B-team, has been taken ill. Again. It came on as he was suiting up warmly for
the B-squad’s 0745h. drills. A cartridge of a round-of-16 match from September’s U.S.
Open had been on the small room viewer with the sound all the way down as usual and
Troeltsch’d been straightening the straps on his jock, idly calling the match’s action
into his fist, when it came on. The illness. It came out of nowhere. His breathing
all of a sudden started hurting the back of his throat. Then that overfull heat in
various cranial meatus. Then he sneezed and the stuff he sneezed out was thick and
doughy. It came on ultra-fast and out of the pre-drill blue. He’s back in bed now,
supine, watching the match’s fourth set but not calling the action. The viewer’s right
under Pemulis’s poster of the paranoid king
²¹
that you can’t escape looking at if you want to look at the viewer. Clotted Kleenex
litter the floor around his bed’s wastebasket. The bedside table is littered with
both OTC and prescription expectorants and pertussives and analgesics and Vitamin-C
megaspansules and one bottle of Benadryl and one of Seldane,
²²
only the Seldane bottle actually contains several Tenuate 75-mg. capsules Troeltsch
has incrementally promoted from Pemulis’s part of the room and has, rather ingeniously
he thinks, stashed in bold plain sight in a bedside pill bottle where the Peemster
would never think to check. Troeltsch is the sort that can feel his own forehead and
detect fever. It’s definitely a rhinovirus, the sudden severe kind. He speculated
on if yesterday when Graham Rader pretended to sneeze on J. Troeltsch’s lunch-tray
at the milk-dispenser at lunch if Rader might have really sneezed and only pretended
to pretend, transferring virulent rhinoviri to Troeltsch’s delicate mucosa. He feverishly
mentally calls down various cosmic retributions on Rader. Neither of Troeltsch’s roommates
is here. Ted Schacht is getting the knee’s first of several whirlpools for the day.
Pemulis has geared up and left for 0745 drills. Troeltsch offered Pemulis rights to
his breakfast to fill up his vaporizer for him and call the first-shift nurse for
‘yet more’ Seldane nuclear-grade antihistamine and a dextromethorphan nebulizer and
a written excuse from
A.M.
drills. He lies there sweating freely, watching digitally recorded professional tennis,
too worried about his throat to feel loquacious enough to call the action. Seldane
is not supposed to make you drowsy but he feels weak and unpleasantly drowsy. He can
barely make a fist. He’s sweaty. Nausea/vomiting like not an impossibility by any
means. He cannot believe how fast it came on, the illness. The vaporizer seethes and
burps, and all four of the room’s windows weep against the outside cold. There are
the sad tiny distant-champagne-cork sounds of scores of balls being hit down at the
East Courts. Troeltsch drifts at a level just above sleep. Enormous ATHSCME displacement
fans far up north at the wall and border’s distant roar and the outdoor voices and
pock
of cold balls create a kind of sound-carpet below the digestive sounds of the vaporizer
and the squeak of Troeltsch’s bedsprings as he thrashes and twitches in a moist half-sleep.
He has heavy German eyebrows and big-knuckled hands. It’s one of those unpleasant
opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating
than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep
where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even
as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

It’s literally ‘daydreaming,’ sick, the kind of incomplete fugue you awaken from with
a sort of psychic clunk, struggling up to sit upright, convinced there’s someone unauthorized
in the dorm room with you. Falling back sick on his circle-stained pillow, staring
straight up into the prolix folds of the Turkish blanketish thing Pemulis and Schacht
had Krazy-Glued to the ceiling’s corners, which billows, hanging, so its folds form
a terrain, like with valleys and shadows.

I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can
be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams’ form itself: the sudden
intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with
you all along, even awake: it’s just been…
overlooked;
and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning
your head to look back at what’s been right there all along, the
whole time….
Your first nightmare away from home and folks, your first night at the Academy, it
was there all along: The dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly
damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that there is a distillation
of total evil in this dark strange subdorm room with you, that evil’s essence and
center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone. None of the other
little boys in the room are awake; the bunk above yours sags dead, motionless; no
one moves; no one else in the room feels the presence of something radically evil;
none thrash or sit damply up; no one else cries out: whatever it is is not evil
for them
. The flashlight your mother name-tagged with masking tape and packed for you special
pans around the institutional room: the drop-ceiling, the gray striped mattress and
bulged grid of bunksprings above you, the two other bunkbeds another matte gray that
won’t return light, the piles of books and compact disks and tapes and tennis gear;
your disk of white light trembling like the moon on water as it plays over the identical
bureaus, the recessions of closet and room’s front door, door’s frame’s bolections;
the cone of light pans over fixtures, the lumpy jumbles of sleeping boys’ shadows
on the snuff-white walls, the two rag throw-rugs’ ovals on the hardwood floor, black
lines of baseboards’ reglets, the cracks in the venetian blinds that ooze the violet
nonlight of a night with snow and just a hook of moon; the flashlight with your name
in maternal cursive plays over every cm. of the walls, the rheostats, CD, InterLace
poster of Tawni Kondo, phone console, desks’ TPs, the face in the floor, posters of
pros, the onionskin yellow of the desklamps’ shades, the ceiling-panels’ patterns
of pinholes, the grid of upper bunk’s springs, recession of closet and door, boys
wrapped in blankets, slight crack like a creek’s course in the eastward ceiling discernible
now, maple reglet border at seam of ceiling and walls north and south
no floor has a face
your flashlight showed but didn’t no never did
see
its eyes’ pupils set sideways and tapered like a cat’s its eyebrows’ \ / and horrid
toothy smile leering right at your light all the time you’ve been scanning oh mother
a face in the
floor
mother oh and your flashlight’s beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face
misses it overcorrects then centers on what you’d felt but had seen without seeing,
just now, as you’d so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the
floor
there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you until you knew just
as you felt it didn’t belong and was evil:
Evil
.

And then its mouth opens at your light.

And then you wake like that, quivering like a struck drum, lying there awake and quivering,
summoning courage and spit, roll to the right just as in the dream for the nametagged
flashlight on the floor by the bed just in case, lie there on your shank and side,
shining the light all over, just as in the dream. Lie there panning, looking, all
ribs and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty
clothes, blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny
in the windows’ snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in
the floor, awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated, playing beam over floor again
and again, not sure all night forever unsure you’re not missing something that’s right
there: you lie there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.

The Enfield Tennis Academy has been in accredited operation for three pre-Subsidized
years and then eight Subsidized years, first under the direction of Dr. James Incandenza
and then under the administration of his half-brother-in-law Charles Tavis, Ed.D.
James Orin Incandenza—the only child of a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then
promising young pre-Method actor who, during the interval of J. O. Incandenza’s early
formative years, had become a disrespected and largely unemployable actor, driven
back to his native Tucson AZ and dividing his remaining energies between stints as
a tennis pro at ranch-type resorts and then short-run productions at something called
the Desert Beat Theater Project, the father, a dipsomaniacal tragedian progressively
crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright and with a bitterness
of ambiguous origin but consuming intensity toward the Method school of professional
acting and its more promising exponents, a father who somewhere around the nadir of
his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed basement
workshop and build a promising junior athlete the way other fathers might restore
vintage autos or build ships inside bottles, or like refinish chairs, etc.—James Incandenza
proved a withdrawn but compliant student of the game and soon a gifted jr. player—tall,
bespectacled, domineering at net—who used tennis scholarships to finance, on his own,
private secondary and then higher education at places just about as far away from
the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning. The United States government’s
prestigious O.N.R.
²³
financed his doctorate in optical physics, fulfilling something of a childhood dream.
His strategic value, during the Federal interval G. Ford–early G. Bush, as more or
less the top applied-geometrical-optics man in the O.N.R. and S.A.C., designing neutron-scattering
reflectors for thermo-strategic weapons systems, then in the Atomic Energy Commission—where
his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels
is commonly regarded as one of the big half-dozen discoveries that made possible cold
annular fusion and approximate energy-independence for the U.S. and its various allies
and protectorates—his optical acumen translated, after an early retirement from the
public sector, into a patented fortune in rearview mirrors, light-sensitive eyewear,
holographic birthday and Xmas greeting cartridges, videophonic Tableaux, homolosine-cartography
software, nonfluorescent public-lighting systems and film-equipment; then, in the
optative retirement from hard science that building and opening a U.S.T.A.-accredited
and pedagogically experimental tennis academy apparently represented for him, into
‘après-garde’ experimental- and conceptual-film work too far either ahead of or behind
its time, possibly, to be much appreciated at the time of his death in the Year of
the Trial-Size Dove Bar—although a lot of it (the experimental- and conceptual-film
work) was admittedly just plain pretentious and unengaging and bad, and probably not
helped at all by the man’s very gradual spiral into the crippling dipsomania of his
late father.
²⁴

The tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking Dr. Incandenza’s May–December
²⁵
marriage to one of the few bona fide bombshell-type females in North American academia,
the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and gainly and teetotalling
and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon, the only female academic ever to hold the Macdonald
Chair in Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill University, whom
Incandenza’d met at a U. Toronto conference on Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems, was
rendered even more romantic by the bureaucratic tribulations involved in obtaining
an Exit- and then an Entrance-Visa, to say nothing of a Green Card, for even a U.S.-spoused
Professor Mondragon whose involvement, however demonstrably nonviolent, with certain
members of the Québecois-Separatist Left while in graduate school had placed her name
on the R.C.M.P.’s notorious
‘Personnes à Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement’
List. The birth of the Incandenzas’ first child, Orin, had been at least partly a
legal maneuver.