Infinite Jest (14 page)

It is known that, during the last five years of his life, Dr. James O. Incandenza
liquidated his assets and patent-licenses, ceded control over most of the Enfield
Tennis Academy’s operations to his wife’s half-brother—a former engineer most recently
employed in Amateur Sports Administration at Throppinghamshire Provincial College,
New Brunswick, Canada—and devoted his unimpaired hours almost exclusively to the production
of documentaries, technically recondite art films, and mordantly obscure and obsessive
dramatic cartridges, leaving behind a substantial (given the late age at which he
bloomed, creatively) number of completed films and cartridges, some of which have
earned a small academic following for their technical feck and for a pathos that was
somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.

Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great
loss in at least three worlds. President J. Gentle (F.C.), acting on behalf of the
U.S.D.D.’s O.N.R. and O.N.A.N.’s post-annular A.E.C., conferred a posthumous citation
and conveyed his condolences by classified ARPA-NET Electronic Mail. Incandenza’s
burial in Québec’s L’Islet County was twice delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles.
Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift. Certain leading young
quote ‘après-garde’ and ‘anticonfluential’ filmmakers employed, in their output for
the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, certain oblique visual gestures—most involving
the chiaroscuro lamping and custom-lens effects for which Incandenza’s distinctive
deep focus was known—that paid the sort of deep-insider’s elegaic tribute no audience
could be expected to notice. An interview with Incandenza was posthumously included
in a book on the genesis of annulation. And those of E.T.A.’s junior players whose
hypertrophied arms could fit inside them wore black bands on court for almost a year.

‘I hate this!’ Orin yells out to whoever glides near. He doesn’t loop or spiral like
the showboats; he sort of tacks, the gliding equivalent of snow-plowing, unspectacular
and aiming to get it over ASAP and intact. The fake red wings’ nylon clatters in an
updraft; ill-glued feathers keep peeling off and rising. The updraft is the oxides
from Mile-High’s thousands of open mouths. Far and away the loudest stadium anyplace.
He feels like a dick. The beak makes it hard to breathe and see. Two reserve ends
do some kind of combined barrel-roll thing. The worst is the moment right before they
make the jump off the stadium’s rim. Hands in the top rows reaching and clutching.
People laughing. The InterLace cameras panning and tightening; Orin knows too well
the light on the side that means Zoom. Once they’re out over the field the voices
melt and merge into oxides and updraft. The left guard is soaring up instead of down.
A couple beaks and a claw fall off somebody and go pinwheeling down toward the green.
Orin tacks grimly back and forth. He’s among those who steadfastly refuse to whistle
or squawk. Bonus or no. The stadium loudspeaker’s a steely gargle. You can never hear
it clearly even on the ground.

The sad old ex-QB who now just holds on place-kicks falls in beside Orin’s slow back-and-forth
about 100 meters over the 40. He’s one of the token females, his beak blunter and
wings’ red nongarish.

‘Hate and loathe this with a clusterfucking
passion,
Clayt!’

The holder tries to make a resigned wing-gesture and is almost blown into Orin’s pinfeathers.
‘Almost down! Enjoy the ride! Yo—cleavage-check in 22G, just by the—’ and then lost
in the roar as the first player touches down and sheds the red-feathered promotional
apparatus. You have to scream to even be heard. At some point it starts sounding like
the crowd’s roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something’ll blow.
One of the Broncos in the rear end of a costume takes a header at midfield so it looks
like the thing’s ass went flying off. Orin has told no Cardinal, not even the team’s
counselor and visualization-therapist, about his morbid fear of heights and high-altitude
descent.

‘I punt! I’m paid to punt long, high, well, and always! Making me do personal interviews
on my personal side’s bad enough! But this crosses every line! Why do we stand for
this! I’m an athlete! I’m not a freak-show performer! Nobody mentioned flying at the
trade-table. In New Orleans it was just robes and halos and once a season a zither.
But just once a season. This is fucking awful!’

‘Could be worse!’

Spiralling down toward the line of X’s and the bill-capped guys that help strip the
wings off, runty potbellied volunteer front-office-connected guys who always smirk
in a way you couldn’t quite level the accusation.

‘I’m paid to punt!’

‘It’s worse in Philly!… had fucking water-drops in Seattle for three seaso—’

‘Please Lord, spare the Leg,’ Orin whispers each time just before touchdown.

‘… of how you could be an Oiler! You could be a
Brown
.’

The organopsychedelic muscimole
, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from
Amanita muscaria,
a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom—by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, to be confused
with
phalloides
or
verna
or certain other kill-you-dead species of North America’s
Amanita
genus, as the little kids sit there Indian-style on the Viewing Room floor, glassy-eyed
and trying not to yawn—goes by the structural moniker 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol,
requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per ingestion, making it two to three
times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in the following alterations
in consciousness (not reading or referring to notes in any way): a kind of semi-sleep-like
trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness and increased strength,
heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable distortions in body-image.
This is supposed to be a pre-dinner ‘Big Buddy’ powwow, where the littler kids receive
general big-brotherly-type support and counsel from an upperclassman. Pemulis sometimes
treats his group’s powwows like a kind of colloquium, sharing personal findings and
interests. The viewer’s on Read from the room’s laptop, and the screen’s got block-capitaled
METHOXYLATED BASES FOR PHENYLKYLAMINE MANIPULATION on it, and underneath some stuff
that might as well be Greek to the Little Buds. Two of the kids squeeze tennis balls;
two rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert; one has a hat with a pair of fake antennae
made of tight-coiled spring. More or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what’s
now southern Québec and the Great Concavity, Pemulis tells them, the fly agaric ’shroom
was both loved and hated for its powerful but not always unless carefully titrated
pleasant psycho-spiritual effects. A boy probes at his own navel with great interest.
Another pretends to fall over.

Some of the more marginal players start in as early as maybe twelve, I’m sorry to
say, particularly ’drines before matches and then enkephaline
²⁶
after, which can generate a whole vicious circle of individual neurochemistry; but
I myself, having taken certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences, didn’t
even get downwind of my first bit of Bob Hope
²⁷
until fifteen, more like nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot
of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to consider
a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep,
perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring
nightly and waking me up
in medias
for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration
in performance and rank. Low-grade synthetic Bob or not, the bongs worked like a charm.

In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the
baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I’m in a competitive match, clearly: there
are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though,
maybe, it seems. It’s hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that
bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of
string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form
relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines,
corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net.
I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in
all at once. It’s simply huge. And it’s public. A silent crowd resolves itself at
what may be the court’s periphery, dressed in summer’s citrus colors, motionless and
highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and
safari hats, hands folded over their slacks’ flies. High overhead, near what might
be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair,
whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick
in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that
mess of lines I’m supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left
the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her
neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and
a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.

The umpire whispers Please Play.

We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never
get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession’s practice with a brisk good
cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they’re entering
is a hospital’s fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to
a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake
frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And
this is why a hospital M.D.—who’s usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and
who almost always smells unusually clean and good—approaches any psych patient under
his care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but
sincere concern that’s divided evenly between the patient’s subjective discomfort
and the hard facts of the case.

The doctor who poked his fine head just inside her hot room’s open door and knocked
maybe a little too gently on the metal jamb found Kate Gompert lying on her side on
the slim hard bed in blue jeans and a sleeveless blouse with her knees drawn up to
her abdomen and her fingers laced around her knees. Something almost too overt about
the pathos of the posture: this exact position was illustrated in some melancholic
Watteau-era print on the frontispiece to Yevtuschenko’s
Field Guide to Clinical States.
Kate Gompert wore dark-blue boating sneakers without socks or laces. Half her face
obscured by the either green or yellow case on the plastic pillow, her hair so long-unwashed
it had separated into discrete shiny strands, and black bangs lay like a cell’s glossy
bars across the visible half of the forehead. The psych ward smelled faintly of disinfectant
and the Community Lounge’s cigarette smoke, the sour odor of medical waste awaiting
collection with also that perpetual slight ammoniac tang of urine, and there was the
double bing of the elevator and the always faraway sound of the intercom paging some
M.D., and some high-volume cursing from a manic in the pink Quiet Room at the other
end of the psych-ward hall from the Community Lounge. Kate Gompert’s room also smelled
of singed dust from the heat-vent, also of the over-sweet perfume worn by the young
mental health staffer who sat in a chair at the foot of the girl’s bed, chewing blue
gum and viewing a soundless ROM cartridge on a ward-issue laptop. Kate Gompert was
on Specials, which meant Suicide-Watch, which meant that the girl had at some point
betrayed both Ideation and Intent, which meant she had to be watched right up close
by a staffer twenty-four hours a day until the supervising M.D. called off the Specials.
Staffers rotated Specials-duty every hour, ostensibly so that whoever was on duty
was always fresh and keenly observant, but really because simply sitting there at
the foot of a bed looking at somebody who was in so much psychic pain she wanted to
commit suicide was incredibly depressing and boring and unpleasant, so they spread
the odious duty out as thin as they possibly could, the staffers. They were not technically
supposed to read, do paperwork, view CD-ROMs, do personal grooming, or in any way
divert their attention from the patient on Specials, on-duty. The patient Ms. Gompert
seemed both to be fighting for breath and to be breathing rapidly enough to induce
hypocapnia; the doctor could not be expected not also to notice that she had fairly
large breasts that rose and fell rapidly inside the circle of arms with which she
hugged her knees. The girl’s eyes, which were dull, had registered his appearance
in the doorway, but they didn’t seem to track as he came toward the bed. The staffer
was also employing an emery board. The doctor told the staffer that he was going to
need a few moments alone with Ms. Gompert. It is a sort of requirement that a doctor
whenever possible be reading or at least looking down at something on his clipboard
when addressing a subordinate, so the doctor was looking studiously at the patient’s
Intake and the sheaf of charts and records Med-Netted over from trauma and psych wards
in some other city hospitals. Gompert, Katherine A., 21, Newton MA. Data-clerical
in a Wellesley Hills real estate office. Fourth hospitalization in three years, all
clinical depression, unipolar. One series of electro-convulsive treatments out at
Newton-Wellesley Hospital two years back. On Prozac for a short time, then Zoloft,
most recently Parnate with a lithium kicker. Two previous suicide attempts, the second
just this past summer. Bi-Valium discontinued two years, Xanax discontinued one year—an
admitted history of abusing prescribed meds. Depressions unipolar, fairly classic,
characterized by acute dysphoria, anxiety w/panic, diurnal listlessness/agitation
patterns, Ideation w/w/o Intent. First attempt a CO-episode, garage’s automobile had
stalled before lethal hemotoxicity achieved. Then last year’s attempt—no scarring
now visible, her wrists’ vascular nodes obscured by the insides of the knees she held.
She continued to stare at the doorway where he’d first appeared. This latest attempt
a straightforward meds O.D. Admitted via the E.R. three nights past. Two days on ventilation
after a Pump & Purge. Hypertensive crisis on the second day from metabolic retox—she
must have taken a hell of a lot of meds—the I.C.U. charge nurse had beeped the chaplain,
so the retox must have been bad. Almost died twice this time, Katherine Ann Gompert.
Third day spent on 2-West for observation, Librium reluctantly administered for a
B.P. that was all over the map. Now here on 5, his present arena. B.P. stable as of
the last four readings. Next vitals at 1300h.