Infinite Jest (145 page)

Joelle scrubbed at the discolored square of fingerprints around the light-switch until
the wet Kleenex disintegrated into greebles.

Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might
be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny
child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested
will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience.

Greebles
had been her own mother’s word for the little bits of sleepy goo you got in your
eyes’ corners. Her own personal Daddy called them ‘eye-boogers’ and used to get them
out for her with the twisted corner of his hankie.

Though it’s not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their
children either.

The cheap glass shade over the ceiling’s light was black with interior grime and dead
bugs. Some of the bugs looked like they might have been from long-extinct species.
The loose grime alone filled half an empty Carefree box. The more stubborn crud would
take a scouring pad and ammonia. Joelle put the shade aside for until she’d shot down
to the kitchen to toss out different boxes of crud and wet Kleenex and grab some serious
Chore-type supplies from under the sink.

Orin had said she was the third-neatnikest person he knew after his Moms and a former
player he’d played with with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a dual diagnosis with
which the U.H.I.D. membership was rife. But at the time the import had missed her.
At that time it had never occurred to her that Orin’s pull toward her could have had
anything either pro or con to do with his mother. Her biggest worry was that Orin
was pulled only by what she looked like, which her personal Daddy’d warned her the
sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out.

Orin hadn’t been anything like her own personal Daddy. When Orin was out of the room
it had never seemed like a relief. When she was home, her own Daddy never seemed to
be out of the room for more than a few seconds. Her mother said she hardly even tried
to talk to him when his Pokie was home. He kind of trailed her around from room to
room, kind of pathetically, talking batons and low-pH chemistry. It was like when
she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa. He was all through the house. He was real present
at all times. His presence penetrated a room and outlasted him there. Orin’s absence,
whether for class or practice, emptied the co-op out. The place seemed vacuumed and
buffed sterile before the cleaning even started, when he went. She didn’t feel lonely
in the place without him, but she did feel alone, what alone was going to feel like,
and she, no one’s fool,
³⁰⁵
was erecting fortifications real early into it.

It was Orin, of course, who’d introduced them. He’d had this stubborn idea that Himself
would want to use her. In the Work. She was too pretty for somebody not to want to
arrange, capture. Better Himself than some weak-chinned academic. Joelle’d protested
the whole idea. She had a brainy girl’s discomfort about her own beauty and its effect
on folks, a caution intensified by the repeated warnings of her personal Daddy. Even
more to the immediate point, her filmic interests lay behind the lens. She’d do the
capturing thank you very much. She wanted to make things, not appear in them. She
had a student filmmaker’s vague disdain for actors. Worst, Orin’s idea’s real project
was developmentally obvious: he thought he could somehow get to his father through
her. That he pictured himself having weighty, steeple-fingered conversations with
the man, Joelle’s appearance and performance the subjects. A three-way bond. It made
her real uneasy. She theorized that Orin unconsciously wished her to mediate between
himself and ‘Himself,’ just as it sounded like his mother had. She was uneasy about
the excited way Orin predicted that his father wouldn’t be able to ‘
resist using
’ her. She was extra uneasy about how Orin referred to his father as ‘Himself.’ It
seemed painfully blatant, developmental-arrest-wise. Plus she felt—only a little less
than she made it sound, on the futon at night, protesting—she’d felt uneasy at the
prospect of any sort of connection with the man who had hurt Orin so, a man so monstrously
tall and cold and remotely hidden. Joelle heard a howl and a crash from the kitchen,
followed by McDade’s tubercular laugh. Twice Charlotte Treat sat up in sleep, glistening
with fever, and said in a flat dead voice something that sounded for all the world
like ‘Trances in which she did not breathe,’ and then fell back, out. Joelle was trying
to pin down a queer rancid-cinnamon smell that came from the back of a closet stuffed
with luggage. It was especially hard to clean when you weren’t supposed to be allowed
to touch any other resident’s stuff.

She might have known from the Work. The man’s Work was amateurish, she’d seen, when
Orin had had his brother—the unretarded one—lend them some of The Mad Stork’s Read-Only
copies. Was
amateurish
the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was
an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with
lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of
dramatic
towardness
—no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.
Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones, the upperclassman
Molly Notkin had said of Incandenza’s early oeuvre. Joelle thought them more like
a very smart person conversing with himself. She thought of the significance of the
moniker ‘Himself.’ Cold.
Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell
—mordant, sophisticated, campy, hip, cynical, technically mind-bending; but cold,
amateurish, hidden: no risk of empathy with the Job-like protagonist, whom she felt
like the audience was induced to regard like somebody sitting atop a dunk-tank. The
lampoons of ‘inverted’ genres: archly funny and sometimes insightful but with something
provisional about them, like the finger-exercises of someone promising who refused
to really sit down and play something to test that promise. Even as an undergrad Joelle’d
been convinced that parodists were no better than camp-followers in ironic masks,
satires usually the work of people with nothing new themselves to say.
³⁰⁶
‘
The Medusa v. the Odalisque
’—cold, allusive, inbent, hostile: the only feeling for the audience one of contempt,
the meta-audience in the film’s theater presented as objects long before they turn
to blind stone.

But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself
made the leap to narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong
the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters
move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well
and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had). But even in the
early Work—flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive. She noticed
them only when alone, watching, without Orin and his rheostat’s dimmer, the living
room’s lights up high like she liked them, liked to see herself and everything else
in the room with the viewer—Orin liked to sit in the dark and enter what he watched,
his jaw slackening, a child raised on multi-channel cable TV. But Joelle began—on
repeated viewing whose original purpose was to study how the man had blocked out scenes,
for an Advanced Storyboard course she went the extra click in—she began to see little
flashes of something. The
M v. O.
’s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous combatants’ faces, twisted past recognition
with some kind of torment. Each cut to a flash of pained face had followed the crash
of a petrified spectator toppling over in her chair. Three split-seconds, no more,
of glimpses of facial pain. And not pain at wounds—they never touched each other,
whirling with mirrors and blades; the defenses of both were impenetrable. More like
as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive, up there
on stage, the flashes seemed to suggest. But just three flashes, each almost subliminally
quick. Accidents? But not one shot or cut in the whole queer cold film was accidental—the
thing was clearly s-boarded frame by frame. Must have taken hundreds of hours. Astounding
technical anality. Joelle kept trying to Pause the cartridge on the flashes of facial
torment, but these were the early days of InterLace cartridges, and the Pause still
distorted the screen just enough to keep her from seeing what she wanted to study.
Plus she got the creepy feeling the man had upped the film-speed in these few-frame
human flashes, to thwart just such study. It was like he couldn’t help putting human
flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as
if they compromised him somehow.

Orin Incandenza had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a male-female
way.
³⁰⁷
The first had been shiny-chinned and half blind on Everclear punch, an All-Kentucky
lineman for the Shiny Prize Biting Shoats team back in Shiny Prize KY, at a cookout
to which the Boosters had invited the Pep and Baton girls; and the lineman had looked
like a little shy boy as he confessed, by way of apologizing for almost splashing
her when he threw up, that she was just too Goddamn-all petrifyingly pretty to approach
any other way but liquored up past all horror. The lineman’d confessed the whole team’s
paralyzing horror of the prettiness of varsity Pep’s top twirler, Joelle. Orin confessed
to his private name for her. The memory of that H.S. afternoon remained real strong.
She could smell the mesquite smoke and the blue pines and the YardGuard spray, hear
the squeals of the stock they butchered and cleaned in symbolic prep for the opener
against the N. Paducah Technical H.S. Rivermen. She could still see the swooning lineman,
wet-lipped and confessing, keeping himself upright against an immature blue pine until
the blue pine’s trunk finally gave with a snap and crash.

Until that cookout and confession she’d somehow thought it was her own personal Daddy,
somehow, discouraging dates and male-female approaches. The whole thing had been queer,
and lonely, until she’d been approached by Orin, who made no secret of the fact that
he had balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were concerned.

But it wasn’t even the subjective identification she felt, watching, she felt, somehow,
for the flashes and seeming non-seqs that betrayed something more than cold hip technical
abstraction. Like e.g. the 240-second motionless low-angle shot of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s
‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa,’ which—yes—ground
Pre-Nuptial…
’s dramatic movement to an annoying halt and added nothing that a 15- or 30-second
still shot wouldn’t have added just as well; but on the fifth or sixth reviewing Joelle
started to see the four-minute motionless shot as important for what was absent: the
whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman’s POV,
³⁰⁸
and the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman—or rather his head—was on-screen every moment,
even when split-screened against the titanic celestial marathon seven-card-stud-with-Tarot-cards
game—his rolling eyes and temples’ dents and rosary of upper-lip sweat was imposed
nonstop on the screen and viewer… except for the four narrative minutes the alcoholic
sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio’s Bernini room, and the climactic statue
filled the screen and pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence
of the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his tiresome
ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe
wasn’t just a heavy-art gesture or audience-hostile herring. Freedom from one’s own
head, one’s inescapable P.O.V.—Joelle started to see here, oblique to the point of
being hidden, an emotional thrust, since the mediated transcendence of self was just
what the apparently decadent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as subject.
Here then, after studious (and admittedly kind of boring) review, was an unironic,
almost
moral
thesis to the campy abstract mordant cartridge: the film’s climactic statue’s stasis
presented the theoretical subject as the emotional effect—self-forgetting as the Grail—and—in
a covert gesture almost moralistic, Joelle thought as she glanced at the room-lit
screen, very high, mouth writhing as she cleaned—presented the self-forgetting of
alcohol as inferior to that of religion/art (since the consumption of bourbon made
the salesman’s head progressively swell, horrendously, until by the film’s end its
dimensions exceeded the frame, and he had a nasty and humiliating time squeezing it
through the front door of the Vittorio).

It didn’t much matter once she’d met the whole family anyhow, though. The Work and
reviewings were just an inkling—usually felt on the small manageable bits of coke
that helped her see deeper, harder, and so maybe not even objectively accessible in
the Work itself—a lower-belly intuition that the punter’s hurt take on his father
was limited and arrested and maybe unreal.

With Joelle makeupless and stone-sober and hair up in a sloppy knot, the introductory
supper with Orin and Himself at Legal Seafood up in Brookline
³⁰⁹
betrayed nothing much at all, save that the director seemed more than able to resist
‘using’ Joelle in any capacity—she saw the tall man slump and cringe when Orin told
him the P.G.O.A.T. majored in F&C
³¹⁰
—Jim’d told her later she’d seemed too conventionally, commercially pretty to consider
using in any of that period’s Work, part of whose theoretical project was to militate
against received U.S. commercial-prettiness-conventions—and that Orin was so tense
in ‘Himself’ ’s presence that there wasn’t room for any other real emotion at the
table, Orin gradually beginning to fill up silences with more and faster nonstop blather
until both Joelle and Jim were embarrassed at the fact that the punter hadn’t touched
his steamed grouper or given anyone else space for a word of reply.