Infinite Jest (137 page)

One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton-Wellesley
Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil engineer
whose hobby was model trains—like from Lionel Trains Inc., etc.—for which he erected
incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement recreation
room. His wife brought photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and track
into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from
psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had had no reason
to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning hair and hands that he held
very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a patch of 3-In-1-brand
oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement
rec room in Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond
all human endurance, and stayed that way. He’d never once tried suicide, though he
confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was very devoted
and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She was very devout. The psychotically
depressed man, too, went to daily Mass when he was not institutionalized. He prayed
for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking
medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself,
or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try.
They’d tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitors,
²⁸³
the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They’d scanned his lobes and affective
matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved
It
. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are beyond human aid. The man’s
case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and
to Mass and building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while
feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond her ability
to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man and his wife must be possessed
of a courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. But in her toxified soul Kate
Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying
toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence
total except for the sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid
into place, the man’s head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming
for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.

The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a place on
Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurgery where they supposedly
went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the brain that
causes all sentiment and feeling. The man’s fondest dream was anhedonia, complete
psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the
dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man’s life enough meaning for him
to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled
from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she
him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while
she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.

The couple had gotten Kate Gompert’s mother’s address and had sent Kate an Xmas card
the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that
she was in their prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn’t know
whether Mr. Ernest Feaster’s limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved
anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives
on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which
the present was not.

Ms. Ruth van Cleve’s first day off new residents’ three-day House Restriction. Allowed
now to hit meetings outside Enfield if accompanied by some more senior resident the
Staff judges safe. Ruth van Cleve in spike heels walking alongside a psychotically
depressed Kate Gompert on Prospect just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little
after 2200h., yammering nonstop.

Ruth van Cleve is shaping up to be excruciating for Kate Gompert to be around. Ruth
van Cleve hails from Braintree on the South Shore, is many kilos underweight, wears
brass-colored lipstick, and has dry hair teased out in the big-hair fashion of decades
past. Her face has the late-stage Ice
^284-
addict’s concave long-jawed insectile look. Her hair is a dry tangled cloud, with
tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak underneath. Joelle v.D.’d said it almost
looked like Ruth van Cleve’s hair grew her head instead of the other way around. Kate
Gompert’s hair is butcher-block cut and has recognizable color, at least.

Kate Gompert hasn’t slept in four nights, and her slumped progress up the Prospect
sidewalk resembles the lazy tack of a boat in no rush. Ruth van Cleve talks nonstop
into her right ear. It’s around 2200h. on Saturday and the sodium streetlights keep
going off and then on again with a stuttered hum, some connection in them loose somewhere.
Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman
Square also crowd the sidewalk’s edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby
in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just
heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected
floating heads. In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in wheelchairs with creative
receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered invitations to help them.

An oral narrative begins to emerge. Ms. Ruth v.C. has been remanded to Ennet House
by D.S.S. and Family Court after her newborn baby was discovered in a Braintree MA
alley swaddled in WalMart advertising circulars whose Harvest Moon Value Specials
had expired 11/01, a Sunday. Ruth van Cleve had rather unshrewdly left the hospital
I.D. bracelet with its D.O.B. and her own name and Health Card # on the discarded
infant’s wrist. The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator,
attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine
²⁸⁵
it received for in-utero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can only speculate
about.
²⁸⁶
The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care
of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van
Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.

What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without
any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front
of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she’s moving
forward, her whole self, when all she’s capable of concentrating on is one foot and
then the other foot. Heads glide by in the darkened windows. Some of the Latino males
in the vicinity do a kind of sexual checking-out as they pass—even though underweight
and dry-haired and kind of haggish, Ruth van Cleve’s manner and attire and big hair
broadcast that she’s all about sexuality and sex.

A negative thing about opting for recovery in NA instead of AA is availability and
location of meetings. In other words fewer NA meetings. On a Saturday night you could
stand on the roof of Ennet House in Enfield and be hard-pressed to spit in any direction
without hitting some AA venue nearby. Whereas the closest Saturday-
P.M.
NA meeting is N. Cambridge’s Clean and Serene Group, infamous for cross-talk and
chair-throwing, and the thing’s Beginner’s Mtng. goes from 2000 to 2100h. and the
regular from 2100 to 2200h., purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so
many drug addicts suffer weekly, Saturday still being the week’s special mythic Party-Night
even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24/7/365.
But from Inman Square back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike—hoof up Prospect to Central
Sq. and take the Red Line all the way to Park Street station and then the maddening
Green Line B Train forever west on Comm. Ave.—and it’s now after 2215h., meaning Kate
Gompert has 75 minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty
and yammering newcomer beside her back for Curfew. Ruth van Cleve’s chatter is as
listener-interest-independent as anything Kate Gompert’s heard since Randy Lenz got
invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left, which was who
knows how many days or weeks ago.

The two move in and out of cones of epileptic light from fluttering street-lamps.
Kate Gompert is trying not to shudder as Ruth van Cleve asks her if she knows someplace
you can pick up a good toothbrush cheap. Kate Gompert’s entire spiritual energy and
attention are focused on first her left foot and then her right foot. One of the heads
she does not see, floating in the windows with her own unrecognizable head and Ruth
van Cleve’s cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony
Krause, who’s several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course
step for step, eyeing string purses he imagines contain more than just train-fare
and NA Newcomers’ keychains.

The vaporizer chugs and seethes and makes the room’s windows weep as Jim Troeltsch
inserts a pro-wrestling cartridge in the little TP’s viewer and dons his tackiest
sportcoat and wet-combs his hair down smooth so it looks toupeeish and settles back
on his bunk, surrounded by Seldane-bottles and two-ply facial tissue, preparing to
call the action. His roommates have long since seen what was coming, and screwed.

Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B’s curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted
tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle
around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and
shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped
to diamond-shaped, being careful not to let it fall.

Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in
the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound.

Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on W. Commonwealth on Schtitt’s old BMW,
bound for Evangeline’s Low-Temperature Confections in Newton Center, right at the
bottom of what usually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced and leaning
forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario’s face, in
the sidecar, as Mario too leans way forward into their downhill flight, preparing
to whoop when they bottom out.

Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at
once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business
address on East Tucson AZ’s Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the
stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console’s keys.

‘
AIYEE!
’ cries the man, rushing at the nun, wielding a power tool.

The tough-looking nun yells ‘
AIYEE!
’ right back as she kicks at him expertly, her habit’s skirts whipping complexly around
her. The combatants circle each other warily in the abandoned warehouse, both growling.
The nun’s wimple is askew and soiled; the back of her hand, held out in a bladish
martial-art fist, displays part of a faded tattoo, some wicked-clawed bird of prey.
The cartridge opens like this, in violent medias res, then freezes in the middle of
the nun’s leaping kick, and its title,
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun,
gets matte-dissolved in and bleeds lurid blood-colored light down into the performance
credits rolling across the screen’s bottom. Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin have
come in uninvited and joined Hal in V.R. 6 and are curled up against the arms of the
room’s other recumbency, their feet touching at the soles, Boone eating unauthorized
frozen yogurt from a cylindrical carton. Hal’s turned the rheostat down low, and the
film’s title and credits make their faces glow redly. Bridget Boone extends the confection-carton
over in Hal’s direction in an inviting way, and by way of declining Hal points to
the lump of Kodiak in his cheek and makes a display of leaning out to spit. He appears
to be studying the scrolling credits very closely.

‘So what is this?’ Fran Unwin says.

Hal looks over at her very slowly, then even more slowly raises his right arm and
points around the tennis ball he’s squeezing at the monitor, where the cartridge’s
50-point title is still trickling redly over the credits and frozen scene.

Bridget Boone gives him a look. ‘What’s up your particular butt?’

‘I’m isolating. I came in here to be by myself.’

She has this way that gets to Hal of digging the chocolate yogurt out with the spoon
and then inverting the spoon, turning the spoon over, so that it always enters her
mouth upside-down and her tongue gets to contact the confection immediately, without
the mediation of cold spoon, and for some reason this has always gotten under Hal’s
skin.

‘So then you should’ve locked the door.’

‘Except there aren’t locks on the V.R. doors,
²⁸⁷
as you quite well know.’

Round-faced Frannie Unwin says ‘Sshhh.’

Then too sometimes Boone plays with the laden spoon, makes it fly around in front
of her face like a child’s plane before inverting it and sticking it in. ‘Maybe this
is partly because this is a public room, for everybody, that your thinking person
probably wouldn’t choose to isolate in.’

Hal leans over to spit and lets the spit hang for a while before he lets it go, so
it hangs there slowly distending.