Infinite Jest (130 page)

‘Wasn’t that pretty,’ he said blandly.

Steeply rooted for a hankie. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Hal’s in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight-out
killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne,’ deLint said. ‘This is why you don’t stay
back or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep
you trying, running. He yanks you around. Always two or three shots ahead. He won
that point on the deep forehand after the serve—the second he had Stice wrong-footed
you could see the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in advance,
and without the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn’t need pace, we’ve helped him
find.’

‘When might I get a chance to talk to him?’

‘Incandenza took a lot of bringing along. He didn’t used to quite have the complete
game to be able to do this. Slice the court up into sections and chinks, then all
of a sudden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he’s been setting
up the angle since the start of the point. It makes you think of chess.’

The journalist blew her red nose. ‘ “Chess on the run.” ’

‘Nice term.’

Hal went into his service motion to the ad court.

‘Do the students play chess here?’

A mirthless chuckle. ‘No time.’

‘Do you play chess?’

Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal’s second serve; mild applause.

‘I don’t have time to play anything,’ deLint said, filling in a square. You could
tell by the sound that the other boy’s racquet was strung tighter than Hal’s.

‘When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do.’

The journalist’s rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. ‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s not my decision. My guess is you don’t. Dr. Tavis didn’t already tell you?’

‘I really couldn’t tell what he was telling me.’

‘We’ve never had a kid here interviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds,
versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in.’

‘I’m here for background only, for your alumnus, the punter.’

DeLint was making his lips look like he was whistling even though no whistling-sound
was emerging. ‘We’ve never let somebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while
he’s still in training and inculcation.’

‘Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why? What if the boy
wants to chat with me about his brother’s transition from tennis to football?’

DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a way that was supposed
to let you know you had very little of his attention. ‘Talk to Tavis about it.’

‘I was in there for over two hours.’

‘You pick up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into
a Yes-No corner where you can finally say I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty
minutes if you’re sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people.
The answer’s not for me to officially say, but I’m guessing a No. The Boston press
guys come around after a big event, they get match results and physical stats and
hometowns and nothing more.’

‘
Moment
is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some sportswriter with
a cigar and a deadline.’

‘It’s a command-decision, babe. I’m not in command. I know they teach us to teach
that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.’

‘I’m here only for the human-interest perspective of a talented boy on his talented
brother’s bold transition to a major sport where he’s shown himself to be even more
talented. One exceptional brother on another. Hal is not the profile’s focus.’

‘Get Tavis in the right corner and he’ll tell you about seeing and being seen. These
kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. Schtitt’s thing is self-transcendence
through pain. These kids—’ gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that
stopped rolling well inside the service line; mild applause—‘they’re here to get lost
in something bigger than them. To have it stay the way it was when they started, the
game as something bigger, at first. Then they show talent, start winning, become big
fish in their ponds out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside
the game and see. Fucks with a junior’s head, talent. They pay top dollar to come
here and go back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and
develop. To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what
they can do when the eyes are off them. They didn’t come here to get read about as
some soft-news item or background. Babe.’

DeLint read Steeply’s expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair
protruded from one of her nostrils, which deLint found repellent. She said, ‘Were
you ever written about, as a player?’

DeLint smiled coolly at his charts. ‘Never had the sort of ranking or promise this
issue’d even come up for me.’

‘But some of these do. Hal’s brother did.’

DeLint felt along his lip’s outline with his pencil, sniffed. ‘Orin was OK. Orin was
essentially a one-trick pony as a player. And between you and me and the fence he
was kind of a head-case. His game left here on the downswing. Now his little brother’s
got a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls—Kent,
Caryn and Sharyn here,’ indicating the Vaught-apparition below them. ‘The really gifted
ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the Show—’

‘Meaning professional you mean.’

‘In the Show they’ll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at
and poked at and discussed, and then some. For now they’re here to get to be the ones
who look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.’

‘But even you call it “The Show.” They’ll be entertainers.’

‘You bet your ass they will be.’

‘So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses
of entertaining an audience, get them used to being seen?’

The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint
made kind of a show of putting his clipboard down. ‘Assume wrongly for a second that
I can speak for the Enfield Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here for the
best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never.
If they can get that inculcated, the Show won’t fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they
can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see
only them and want only them and the game’s incidental to you, for you it’s about
entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated
right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after
winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to
stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not
you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it’s what you do.’

‘We chew statues?’

‘Whether you mean to or no. You,
Moment, World Tennis, Self,
InterLace, the audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking
literally.
It’s the nature of the game. It’s the machine they’re all dying to throw themselves
into. They don’t know the machine. But we do. Gerhardt’s teaching them to see the
ball out of a place inside that can’t be chewed. It takes time and total focus. The
man’s a fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you want to profile somebody.’

‘And I’m not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this
inside chew-proof place. It’s a secret place.’

Hal mishit a second serve and it flew off his frame and way down to where the girls
were sending each other squeaks and lobs, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6–5,
and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation.
DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice’s direction.
Hal chipped his balls out along the baseline and made some small adjustments in his
cross-hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the nastier
kids applauded Hal’s mishit a little.

‘Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it’s not my command-decision. I
wouldn’t get sardonic with Tavis, though.’

‘But if it were. Your command.’

‘Lady, if it was me you’d be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down
there is as far in as you’d get. You’re coming into a little slice of space and/or
time that’s been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities
you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game,
never gets hit, doesn’t even wear pads. A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? A more
dramatic story, geopolitics, privation, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even.
A more complete game. Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top Five
if he doesn’t fuck up or burn down. Wayne’s your ideal food-group. Which is why we’ll
keep you off him as long as he’s here.’

The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of
gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. ‘Carved out of what, though,
this place?’

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment
Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. Marlon K. Bain

Saprogenic Greetings, Inc.

BPL-Waltham Bldg.

1214 Totten Pond Road

Waltham, MA, 021549872/4.

November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

In Phoenix on other business, it has been my good fortune to meet your adolescent
friend, Mr. Orin J. Incandenza, and to have become intrigued with the possibilities
of a profile of the Incandenza family and its accomplishments in not only sports but
wide-ranging topics such as independent film circa metropolitan Boston, past and present.

I am writing to ask for your cooperation in contacting you with questions which you
could answer in writing, as I am informed by Mr. Orin Incandenza you dislike to meet
people outside your home and office.

I am hoping to hear from you in response to this request at your earliest convenience,

Etc. etc. etc.

Saprogenic Greetings
^*

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

Ms. Helen Steepley

And So On

November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Ms. Steepley:

Fire away.

V.D.,

MK Bain

Saprogenic Greetings/ACMÉ

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment
Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. MK Bain

Saprogenic Greetings Inc.

BPL-Waltham Bldg.

1214 Totten Pond Road

Waltham, MA, 021549872/4.

November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

Q, Q, Q (Q, Q[Q], Q, Q, Q), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q.
²⁶⁹

Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud—at more
or less the same time the hilltop’s bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level
for tennis—are E.T.A.’s abundant tunnels. There are access tunnels and hallway tunnels,
with rooms and labs and Pump Room’s Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels and
storage tunnels and little blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels.
Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that’s more generally ovoid
than anything else.

11/11, 1625h., LaMont Chu, Josh Gopnik, Audern Tallat-Kelpsa, Philip Traub, Tim (‘Sleepy
T.P.’) Peterson, Carl Whale, Kieran McKenna—the bulk of the ambulatory sub-14 male
Eschatonites—plus ten-year-old Kent Blott—are 26 meters directly below the Hal/Darkness
match’s Show Court with Glad Handle-Tie
²⁷⁰
trashbags and B.P. low-diffusion compact mercuric flashlights. Plus Chu has a clipboard
with a pen attached to its clamp with twine. The sounds of competitive sneaker-movement
and spectatorial bleacher-squeaks on the surface, travelling down through meters of
compacted crud and polymerized cement tunnel-ceiling w/ parget-layer, sound rather
like the stealthy dry scuttle of rodents, vermin. And this heightens the excitement
that’s part of why they’re really down here.

One part of the reason they’re down here is that small U.S. boys seem to have this
fetish for getting down in the enclosed fundaments underneath things—tunnels, caves,
ventilator-shafts, the horrific areas beneath wooden porches—rather the way older
U.S. boys like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge
swaths of territory, this latter fetish accounting for why E.T.A.’s hilltop site is
one of its trump-cards in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Eastern-seaboard
academies.

Another part is a semi-punitive shit detail in which certain players—judged to have
been involved in the recent Eschaton nonstrategic-combat debacle, but who are uninjured
²⁷¹
and not in the much severer hot water that the Big Buddies on the scene are in—have
been punitively remanded below ground in
P.M.
shifts on what’s supposed to constitute an unpleasant chore, to scout out the tunnelled
route the TesTar All-Weather Inflatable Structures Corp.’s professional guys will
have to take as they haul out from the Lung-Storage Room the fiberglass struts and
crosspieces and dendriurethane folds that compose the Lung, for erection of the Lung,
when the E.T.A. administration finally decides that the late-fall weather has gone
beyond character-building and become an impediment to development and morale. This
will be soon. Because the prorectors live in rooms off the larger tunnels and F. D.
V. Harde’s Physical Plant and Maintenance guys have their offices and supplies down
here, and because Dr. James Incandenza’s old optics and editing facilities are down
here off one of the main tunnels and get used for Leith/Ogilvie classes in entertainment
production and for optical science tutorials etc., and because a couple of the secondary
and off-tunnels are used for temporary storage by departing seniors who can’t tote
eight or more years’ worth of accumulated stuff in one post-graduate load—especially
if they jet off to some novitiate-pro Satellite circuit for the summer, because that
means air travel, two bags plus gear, max—some of the tunnels become badly littered
in the warm season with trash-type material. And sometimes there’s bulky-possession-type
overflow from the little curved storage tunnels off the prorectors’ hallway. Smaller
kids are perfect for recons into low narrow tunnels partly blocked with dross, and
even though it’s no secret around E.T.A. that the smaller boys spend a fair amount
of time down in the tunnels anyway, a retributive aspect is lent to this recon-detail
by making the kids take down Handle-Tie trashbags to clear away littered exam papers
and lab-handouts, calculator-batteries and banana peels and Kodiak smokeless-tobacco
tins and spirals of synthetic-gut racquet-string, and Maintenance guys’ hideous cigar-butts—Sleepy
T.P. finds two bright Trojan wrappers just off the prorectors’ hallway-tunnel, and
then a couple meters farther along the floor the vermiform gleam of an actual condom,
and there’s some high-register debate about whether it’s a used condom or not, and
poor old Kent Blott is finally put in charge of picking it up and putting it in a
trashbag, just in case it’s a used condom—and empty boxes of complimentary corporate
gear, and full boxes of faggy or poorly-absorbent gear nobody wants, and Habitant
can-wrappers, and senior trunks and dorm-sized fridgelettes, etc.; and also to move
whatever boxes they can heft, clear them out of the TesTar guys’ access-route into
the Lung-Storage and Pump Rooms; and LaMont Chu is supposed to note the location of
any boxes or objects too bulky for them to move out of the way, and beefy custodial
guys will be dispatched to handle them as they see fit.