Infinite Jest (141 page)

He’d got quickly familiarized with Little Lisbon’s networks of alleys and transoms
and back trash-lots, and its (dwindling) population of feral cats and dogs. The area
was fertile in overhead clocks of banks and churches, dictating movements. He carried
his Browning X444 Serrated in its shoulder-holster strapped inside his one sock just
above the spats of the formal footwear he’d taken off the same A Formal Affair, Ltd.
sidewalk display as the tux’s coat. His lighter was in a fluorescent zip-uppable slash
pocket; quality trashbags were plentiful in dumpsters and Land Barges stopped at lights.
The
James Principles of the Gifford Lectures,
its razored-out receptacled heart now quite a bit closer to empty than Lenz would
be comfortable thinking about directly, he had in his hand tucked up under one formal
arm. And the Chinese women scuttled centipedishly abreast, their mammoth shopping
bags held in a right hand and left, respective, so the bags were side by side between
them. Lenz was closing the gap behind them, but gradually and with no little nonchalant
stealth, considering it was hard to walk stealthily when one couldn’t feel one’s feet,
and when one’s eyeglasses darkened automatically whenever one went under a streetlight
and then took their time lightening up again, after, so that no less than two of Lenz’s
vital sensory street-senses were disorientated; but he still managed both stealth
and nonchalance both. He had no clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant
mad of metro Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility. The shopping
bags looked heavy and impressive, their weight making the Chinese women lean in slightly
toward each other. Call it 2214:10h. The Chinese women and then Lenz all passed a
gray-faced woman squatting back between two dumpsters, her multiple skirts hiked up.
Vehicles were packed bumper-flush all along the curb, with myriad double parking also.
The Chinese women passed a man lined up at the curb with a toy bow and arrows, and
when the glasses undarkened Lenz could see him as well as he passed also—the guy wore
a rat-colored suit and was shooting a suction-cup arrow at the side of a For Lease
building and then going up and drawing a miniature chalk circle on the brick around
the arrow, and then another circle around that circle, and etc., as in a what’s the
word. The women paid him no Orientoid mind. The suit’s string tie was also brown in
tone, unlike a rat’s tail. His wall’s chalk was more pinkish. One of the women said
something high-pitched, like an exclamation to the other. Your monkey-languages’ exclamatories
have an explosive ricocheting sound to them. As in a component of
boing
to every word. A window up across the street was producing
The Star-Spanned Banner
all this time. The man had a string tie and fingerless little gloves, and he stepped
back from the wall to examine his pink circles and almost collided with Lenz, and
they both looked at each other and shook their heads like Look at this poor son of
an urban bitch I’m on the same street with.

It was universally well known that your basic Orientoid types carried their earthly
sum-total of personal wealth with them at all times. As in on their person while they
scuttled around. The Orientoid religion prohibited banks, and Lenz had seen mammoth
double-width twine-handled shopping bags in too many tiny Chinese women’s hands not
to have deducted that the Chinese female species of Oriental used shopping bags to
carry their personal wealth. He felt the energy required for the snatch-and-sprint
increasing now with each stride, drawing nonchalantly closer, able now to distinguish
different patterns in the clear like plastic flags they wrapped their little hair
in. The Chinese women. His heartrate speedened to a steady warming gallop. He began
to feel his feet. Adrenaline about what would shortly occur dried his nose and helped
his mouth stop moving around on his face. The Frightful Hog was not and never numb,
and now it stirred in the snowpants slightly with excitement of wits and the thrill
of the hunt. Far from cutting-edge surveillance: the shoe was on the other foot: the
unwitting Oriental women had no idea who they were dealing with, behind them, no idea
he was back there surveilling them and closing the nonchalant gap, stumbling only
slightly after each streetlight’s light. He was in total control of this situation.
And they did not even know there was a situation. Bull’s-eye. Lenz straightened the
mustache with one finger and gave a tiny little Yellow-Brick-Road stutter-skip of
pure controlling glee, his adrenaline invisible for all to see.

There were two ways of going, and
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
were prepared to pursue both these. Less better was the indirect route: surveillance
and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment’s
auteur,
its actress and rumored performer, relatives—if necessary, taking them and subjecting
them to technical interview, leading with hope to the original
auteur
’s cartridge of the Entertainment. This had risks and exposures and was held
abeyant
until the directer route—to locate and secure a Master copy of the Entertainment
on their own—had been exhausted. It was this way that thus they were now still here,
in the Antitois’ shop of Cambridge, to—
comme on dit
—be turning all the stones.

The secret to sprinting in high heels, Poor Tony Krause knew, was to run on one’s
toes, inclined way forward, with so much forward momentum that one stayed well up
on her toes and the heels never came into play. Evidently the wretched Creature behind
him knew this trade-secret too. They careered up Prospect, the Creature’s clutching
hand just mm. away from the trailing boa. Poor Tony held the two purses together tucked
away against his side like a football in U.S. football. Pedestrians moved artfully
aside, long-practiced. Poor Tony saw the pedestrians’ faces very clearly as his odor
preceded him like a shock-wave. A man in a car coat made a smell-face and did a kind
of artful veronica to let the two of them career past. Poor Tony’s breath came in
great ragged stitchy gasps. He had not banked on victim-pursuit. He felt the Creature’s
hand grope for purchase on the remains of his boa. The Donegal cap flew off and was
not mourned. The Thing’s own breathing was also ragged, but the obscenities she hurled
still came from the diaphragm, with conviction and vigor. The other Thing had impacted
a pole with a meaty sound Tony had shuddered to hear. His own father had struck himself
about the head and shoulders as he grieved for his symbolically dead son. The moment
after the impact and the strap gave way, Tony was up on his toes and in full flight,
not banking on pursuit from the other one, this black Creature screaming and just
off his tail. For the first couple blocks the Creature had shouted for
Help
and to
Stop The Bitch,
and Poor Tony, then with a decent lead, had countered by also yelling
Help!
and
For God’s Sake Stop Her,
flummoxing any would-be citizens. An ancient trade-device among Harvard Square crews.
But now the black Creature had closed to within mm., and now it had real hold of the
boa as they careered breathing at full speed on their toes, and Krause unlooped the
thing from his neck with a flourish and sacrificed the boa to the Thing, but the loathsome
Creature’s hand came right back, clutching at the air just over his leather collar,
its ragged breath in his ear, cursing him. Poor Tony grieved in mid-stride at the
thought that the Thing had doubtless just tossed the boa carelessly aside into the
street or gutter. Their shoes’ toes formed complex and variable rhythms on the pavement;
sometimes their footfalls were in sync, then they were not. The Thing stayed agonizingly
just behind. Bold-print signs for FRESH-KILLED CHICKEN and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION flashed
past; Antitoi Entertainment was just over two long north-south blocks distant. Krause
and pursuer both jay-ran through a gridlocked intersection. Poor Tony shouted
Help!
and
Please!
The hand and hissed breath just behind him was like one of those simply horrid dreams
where something unimaginable is chasing you for km. after km. and just before its
talons close on the back of your collar you wake up sitting bolt upright; except this
horrid Creature’s-clutching-hand-just-behind-him scenario went on and on, storefront
and curb and leaping pedestrians all melting together at the periphery due right.
Antitoi Ent.’s discreet back door was accessible by a parking alley that cut west
off Prospect just before Broadway and went west to intersect a smaller and dumpster-lined
north-south alley, one of whose dumpsters (in which Poor Tony had occasionally slept,
when out late and short of train-fare) was within underhand-toss distance of the Canadian
brothers’ rear exit. Poor Tony, purses under arm and the other hand clamped tight
to the wig, calculated that if he could get a reasonable lead on the Creature by the
time they hit the smaller alley the dumpsters would keep It from seeing just which
hopefully unlocked rear door P.T. sought basic human kindly refuge behind. He feinted
around a bodega’s sidewalk fruit display and shot a quick look back, hoping the Creature
would crash itself ass-over-teakettle into the stacked fruit. It did not. It was still
right there, breathing. Its stutter-step around two cardboard tiers of Cape cranberries
was discouragingly deft. This Thing had all too clearly chased persons before. Its
breath had a ragged implacability about it. It was all too clearly in this for the
long haul. It was no longer shouting
Stop
or gutterish obscenities. Poor Tony’s breaths felt flamish. It sounded as if he were
weeping, almost. He tried to shout Help! and could not; he hadn’t the breath to spare;
black specks floated upward through his vision; only certain of the streetlamps worked;
his heartbeat was
zuckungzuckungzuckung
. Poor Tony hurdled a queerly placed cardboard display for something wheelchaired
and heard the Creature vault it also and land lightly on its toes. Its uppers were
not straps and could not dig like the fine Aigners; Tony felt blood on his feet. The
entrance to the parking alley west was between a Tax Preparer’s and something else;
it was right around here; Krause squinted; the black specks were tiny rings with opaque
centers and floated upward through his sight like balloons, lazily; Poor Tony was
post-seizure, infirm, not to mention Withdrawn; his breath came in stitches and half-sobs;
he could barely stay on his toes; he had not consumed food since before the library’s
men’s room stall, which was how many days; he scanned the blurred storefronts ripping
past; an elderly person went down with a noise as the Creature stiff-armed him; somewhere
a rape-whistle blew; the Tax Preparer’s had the odd storefront announcement ON PARLE
LE PORTUGAIS ICI. Its hand’s finger knocked the rim of Tony’s leather collar with
each footfall until it moved up and Poor Tony could feel its fingers in the hair of
the chignon he held clamped to his head with a hand. Poor Tony’s father used to come
home to 412 Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans
and sit in a chair in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask’s
green strings had dug into the head. Its doubtlessly luridly long-nailed fingers were
twining for purchase in his wig’s hair when they hit the Preparer’s and Tony cut a
sharp right, breaking a heel on the pivot but gaining several steps toward a lead
as the Creature’s momentum carried it past the alley’s recessed mouth. Krause whimpered
raggedly and flew west, up on his bloody toes, hearing his breath off both alley walls,
negotiating broken glass and the homeless supine, hearing it back behind him several
steps crying a tight-echoed Stop Motherfucking
Stop!
, with a supine person Krause vaulted lifting a decayed head from the alley floor
to counter with:
Go
.

Having traced—through the strenuous technical interview of the sartorially eccentric
cranio-facial-pain-specialist, whom they had traced through the regrettably fatal
technical interview of the young burglar
³⁰⁰
whose electrical-surge-tolerance proved considerably lower than that of his room’s
computer’s machinery—having traced their best chances at a copy to the hapless Antitois’
establishment, it had taken the A.F.R. then several days to find it there, the real
Entertainment.

A.F.R.’s U.S.A. cell’s leader, Fortier, the son of a Glen Almond glass-blower, had
allowed none of the mirrors to be broken or dismantled. In all other respects, the
search had been methodical and thorough. It was a neat search and also orderly, with
time taken. Because the viewer of the shop was visually dysfunctional, a consumer
TP had been purchased and set up for volunteer viewing in the room of storage off
the shop’s back room. Each cartridge of the shop’s exhaustive shelves was sampled
by a volunteer, then discarded in one of the huge metal
coffre d’amas
in the alley outside the shop’s rear door. A detail had been assigned to roll the
extinguished Antitoi brothers in construction-plastic and place them in a room of
storage off the back room. This was for hygienic purposes. A detail also had procured
an oilskin windowshade for the front door’s glass, also some printed signs which read
CLOSED, ROPAS, and RELACHE. No person had knocked at the door after the first hours,
thus.

Quickly, on the first day, in a liquor box which was damp and smelled, they had found
an example of the rival F.L.Q.’s tactical street-display cartridges, with its crudely
stamped smiling face and the ‘
IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR
’ embossed upon it. And young Tassigny, with characteristic valor, volunteered to
be rolled into the room of storage and strapped in, in order to verify this, and Fortier
allowed this. All had drunk the gesture of a toast to Tassigny and promised to look
after his aged father and fur-traps, and M. Fortier had embraced the young volunteer
and kissed both his face’s cheeks as he was rolled in and fitted by M. Broullîme with
EEG wires and strapped in before the viewer placed in the room of storage.