Infinite Jest (134 page)

The Troeltsch person said ‘Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?’

Steeply was looking at the side of Poutrincourt’s face as deLint on the other side
was saying ‘But the one we see this most in is Hal.’

The Man o’ War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese
restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. A waiter brought his soup.
The waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible
reason wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He’d been the neat eater
in the family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three.

The Man o’ War Grille is on Prospect Street in Cambridge and its front windows overlook
the heavy foot traffic between Inman and Central Squares. As Matty waited for his
soup he’d seen across the restaurant and out the front’s glass a bag-lady-type older
female in several clothing-layers lift her skirts and lower herself to the pavement
and move her scaggly old bowels right there in full view of passersby and diners both,
then gather all her plastic shopping bags together and walk stolidly out of view.
The pile of bowel movement sat there on the pavement, steaming slightly. Matty’d heard
the college kids at the next table say they didn’t know whether to be totally illed
or totally awed.

A big rangy kid, with a big sharp face and tight short hair and a smile and a shave-twice
jaw since he was fourteen. Now balding smoothly back from a high clear forehead. A
permanent smile that always seemed like he was trying not to but just couldn’t help
it. His Da always formerly saying to Wipe it off.

Inman Square: Little Lisbon. The soup has bits of calamari that make the muscles in
his face flex, chewing.

Now two Brazilians in bellbottoms and tall shoes along the sidewalk across the window
over the diners’ heads, what might be a brewing street-fight, one walking forward
and one walking backward, facing off as they move, each missing the dollop of bowel-movement
on the walk, speaking high-volume street-Portuguese muffled by windows and hot clatter,
but each looking around and then pointing at his own chest like: ‘You saying this
shit to
me?
’ Then the forward man’s sudden charge carrying them both past the window’s right
frame.

Matty’s Da’d come over on a boat from Louth in Lenster in 1989. Matty’d been three
or four. Da’d worked on the Southie docks, coiling lengths of rope as big around as
phone poles into tall cones, and had died when Matty was seventeen, of pancreatic
complaints.

Matty looked up from the roll he was dipping in the soup and saw two underweight interracial
girls moving across the window, one a nigger, neither even looking at the shit everyone’s
stepping around; and then a few seconds behind them Poor Tony Krause, who because
of the trousers and cap Matty didn’t even recognize as Poor Tony Krause until he’d
looked back down and then up again: Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: sucked-out,
hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face’s skin the greenish white of extreme-depth
marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only
by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat’s
hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always reminded him of black-and-white-era
starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, Krause never so much
walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of
space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome given Krause’s spectral mien,
passing across the Grille’s window, his eyes either on or looking right through the
two skinny girls plodding ahead of him, following them out of the window’s right-hand
side.

His Da’d begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A
fook in t’boom
. Matty had complete recall of the whole thing. He’d seen sometimes where persons
that had unpleasant things happen to them as children blocked the unpleasantness out
in their mentality as adults and forgot it. Not so with Matty Pemulis. He remembered
every inch and pimple of every single time. His father outside the little room Matt
and Micky slept in, late at night, the cat’s-eye sliver of lit hallway through the
crack in the door Da’d opened, the door on well-oiled hinges opening with the implacable
slowness of a rising moon, Da’s shadow lengthening across the floor and then the man
his very self weaving in behind it, crossing the moonlit floor in darned socks and
that smell about him that later Matty’d know was malt liquor but at that age he and
Mickey called something else, when they smelled it. Matty lay and pretended to sleep;
he didn’t know why tonight he pretended not to know the man was there; he was afraid.
Even the first time. Micky just five. All the times were the same. Da drunk. Tacking
across the bedroom floor. A certain stealth. Managing somehow never to break his neck
on the toy trucks and tiny cars scattered on the floor, left there that first time
by accident. Sitting on the edge of the bed so his weight changed the bed’s angle.
A big man smelling of tobacco and something else, his breath always audible when drunk.
Sitting on the edge of the bed. Shaking Matty ‘awake’ to the point where Matty’d have
to pretend to wake up. Asking if he’d been asleep, sleeping, there, was he. Tenderness,
caresses that were somehow just over the line from true ethnic-Irish fatherly affection,
the emotional largesse of a man without a Green Card who daily broke his back for
his family’s food. Caresses that were in some vague way just over the line from that
and from the emotional largesse of something else, drunk, when all the rules of mood
were suspended and you never knew from minute to minute whether you were to be kissed
or hit—impossible to say how or even know how they were just over those lines. But
they were, the caresses. Tenderness, caresses, low soft oversweet hot bad breath,
soft apologies for some flash of savagery or discipline from the day. A way of cupping
the pillow-warm cheek and jaw in the hollow of the hand, the huge pinkie finger tracing
the hollow between throat and jaw. Matty’d shrink away: shy are we sone scared are
we? Matty’d shrink away even after he knew the shrinking fear was part of what brought
it on, for Da’d get angry: who are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to
be scared so of our own Da? As if the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more
than a. Can’t a Da show his son some love without being taken for a. As if Matty could
lie here with his food inside him under bedding he’d paid for and think his Da were
no better than a. Is it a fookin you’re scared of, then. You think a Da what comes
in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da has nought on his mind but a fook? As
if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the docks? As if the Da were a. Is that
what you take me for. Is that what you take me for then. Matty shrinking back into
a flattening pillow the Da’d paid for, the springs of the convertible bed singing
with his fear; he shook. Why then so then I’ve a mind to give you just what you’re
thinking t’fear. Take me for. Matty knew early on that his being afraid fueled the
thing somehow, made his Da want to. He was unable not to be afraid. He tried and tried,
cursed himself for a coward and deserving, all but calling his father a. It was years
before he snapped to the fact that his Da’d have
fooked him in t’boom
no matter what he’d done. That the event was laid out before the first slim line
of doorlight broadened, and whatever Matty’d felt or betrayed made no difference.
An advantage to not blocking it out is you can snap to things later, with maturer
perspective; you can come to see no sone on the planet could in any way ask for that,
regardless. At a certain later age he started lying there when his Da shook him and
pretended to sleep on, even when the shakes got to where his teeth clacked together
in a mouth that wore the slight smile Matty’d decided truly sleeping people’s faces
always wore. The harder his father shook him, the tighter Matty’d shut his eyes and
the more set the slight smile and the louder the rasps of the cartoon snores he alternated
with exhaled whistles. Mickey over in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb,
on his side, face to the wall and hidden. Never a word between them about anything
more than the chances of being kissed v. hit. Finally Da’d grab both his shoulders
and flip him over with a sound of disgust and frustration. Matty thought just the
smell of the fear was maybe enough to deserve it, until (later on) he got some maturer
perspective. He remembered the oval sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum
jelly, that special stone-in-pond plop of a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in
an era of Child-Proof caps), hearing his Da muttering as he applied it to himself,
feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him as his Da smeared the stuff roughly
around Matty’s rosebud, his dark star.

It was only the maturer perspective of years and experience that let Matty find something
to be thankful for, that the Da’d at least used a lube. The origins of the big man’s
clear familiarity with the stuff and its nighttime use not even adult perspective
could illuminate, let Matty snap to, still, now, at twenty-three.

One hears, say,
cirrhosis
and
acute pancreatitis
and thinks of the subject clutching his middle like an old film’s gutshot actor and
slumping quietly over to eternal rest with lids shut and face composed. Matty’s Da’d
died choking on aspirated blood, a veritable fountain of the darkest possible blood,
Matty coated a spray-paint-russet as he held the man’s yellow wrists and Mum lumbered
off down the ward in search of a crash-cart team. Particles aspirated so terribly
fine, like almost atomized, so that they hung in the air like the air itself over
the cribbed bed as the man expired, cat-yellow eyes wide open and face screwed into
the very most godawful rictusized grin of pain, his last thoughts (if any) unknowable.
Matty still toasted the man’s final memory with his first shot, whenever he indulged.
²⁷⁸

First thing after supper Hal drops around to Schtitt’s room off the Comm.-Ad. lobby
to go through the motions of getting some input on just what had gone so terribly
wrong against Stice. Also to get maybe some kind of bead on why he’d had to play The
Darkness publicly in the first place, so close to the WhataBurger. I.e. like what
the exhibition might have signified. This endless tension among E.T.A.s about how
the coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress—is your stock going up or down.
But A. deLint’s the only one in there, working on some sort of oversized spreadsheetish
chart, lying prone and shirtless on the bare floor with his chin in his hand and a
pungent Magic Marker, and says Schtitt has gone off on the cycle somewhere after confections,
but to sit down. Presumably meaning in a chair. So Hal’s subjected to several minutes
of deLint’s take on the match, complete with stats out of the prorector’s head. DeLint’s
back is pale and constellated with red pits of old pimples, though the back’s nothing
compared to Struck’s or Shaw’s back. There’s a cane chair and a wood chair. DeLint’s
liquid-crystal laptop screen pulses grayly on the floor next to him. Schtitt’s room’s
overlit and there’s no dust anywhere, not even in the very corners. Schtitt’s sound
system’s lights are on but nothing’s playing. Neither Hal nor deLint mentions Orin’s
profiler’s presence in the match’s stands, nor the big lady’s long interchange with
Poutrincourt, which had been conspicuous. Stice’s and Wayne’s names are at the top
of the huge chart on the floor, but Hal’s name isn’t. Hal says he can’t tell whether
he’d made some sort of basic tactical error or whether he just wasn’t quite up to
snuff this afternoon or what.

‘You just never quite occurred out there, kid,’ deLint apprises him. He has regressed
certain figures to back this up, this nonoccurrence. His choice of words chills Hal
to the root.

After which, during what’s supposed to be mandatory
P.M.
Study Period, and despite the three chapters of Boards-prep his Boards-prep schedule
calls for, Hal sits alone up in Viewing Room 6, the bad leg out along the couch in
front of him, flexing the bad ankle idly, holding the other leg’s knee to his chest,
squeezing a ball but with the hand he doesn’t play with, chewing Kodiak and spitting
directly into an unlined wastebasket, his expression neutral, watching some cartridges
of his late father’s entertainments. Anyone else looking at him in there tonight would
call Hal depressed. He watches several cartridges all in a row. He watches
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick
and
Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell
and then part of
Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed,
which is maddening because it’s all a monologue from some bespectacled little contemporary
of Miles Penn and Heath Pearson who was almost as ubiquitous as Reat and Bain in Himself’s
work but whose name right now Hal can’t for the life of him recall. He watches parts
of
Death in Scarsdale
and
Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn
and
Various Small Flames
and
Kinds of Pain
. The Viewing Room has insulated panelling behind the wallpaper and is essentially
soundproof. Hal watches half of the ‘
Medusa v. Odalisque
’ thing but takes it out abruptly when people in the audience start getting turned
to stone.

Hal tortures himself by imagining swarthy leering types threatening to torture various
loved ones if Hal can’t come up with the name of the kid in
Valuable Coupon
and
Low-Temperature Civics
and
Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat
.

There are two cartridges on V.R. 6’s glass shelves of Himself getting interviewed
in various arty Community-Access-cable-type forums, which Hal declines to watch.