Infinite Jest (147 page)

She deactivated this transmission and stared at her top of the desk for a moment.
Two dogs lay on the floor between her chair and Marathe’s
fauteuil,
one dog of which was licking its private organs. Marathe stifled a shudder and pulled
up his blanket slightly, hunching to minimalize the musculature of health of his upper
torso, also.

‘Good night…,’ Marathe began.

‘Well, don’t go,’ the woman of authority ejaculated from coming out of her reverie
of sadness, giving her seat the rotation to face him. She tried to smile in the professional
manner of U.S.A. ‘After you waited all that time out there. I saw you sharing with
Selwyn. Selwyn tends to show up whenever we’re doing group intakes.’

‘Me, I think he suffers with mental illness.’ Marathe noticed one leg of the woman
was thinner by far of her other leg. He was being driven distracted also by this habit
to pretend to sniff. The false sniffs came from nowhere.

She crossed these legs. Two autos’ horns mightily blew upon the avenue far beyond
the concave window of her desk.

‘This Selwyn, he advised me to stroke your animals, which I have regret but I will
not.’

This woman quietly laughed and leaned forward above the crossed legs. In addition,
one of the dogs had flatulence. ‘You listed your citizenship as Swiss.’

‘I am a residing alien addicted to smack, to scag, and to H, seeking desperately the
residential treatment.’

‘But legally residing? With a Green Card? An O.I.N.S.
³¹¹
Residency Code?’

Marathe from his sportcoat produced the documents M. DuPlessis had arranged with foresight
in the long past.

‘Disabled, also. Also deformed,’ Marathe said, shrugging stoically, inclining his
veil at the dark carpet.

The woman was examining his O.I.N.S. documents with the pursed mouth and face for
poker of O.N.A.N. authorities in all places. One of her hands was twisted in the manner
of a claw. ‘We all come in with issues, Henry,’ she said.

‘Henri. Pardon. Hen
ri
.’

Some woman just outside the door near the
demi-maison
’s front door, she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon. Wet sounds were audible
from beneath the rear leg of the dog with private organs, of which the head hid beneath
the raised leg. The woman of authority had to support the body by placing the hands
on the desk to rise and unlock and lift the door of a black metal cabinet over her
TP and console of her desk. The door of old black metal lifted outward. Marathe committed
to memory the model numbers of this teleputer, which was Indonesian and of cheap cost.

‘Well Henri, Ennet House, in the years I’ve been on Staff here, we’ve had aliens,
resident aliens, E.S.L.’s whose English was worse than yours by a long shot.’ She
stood on the thicker leg to reach into this cabinet deeply for some item. Marathe
took the opportunity of her inattention to commit to his memory the office’s facts.
The office’s door had a decoration of a triangle within a circle, and no bolt of death
for locking, but merely a sadly cheap recess-lock in the knob. Nowhere the small nozzle
of standard 10.525 GHz microwave alarming. The large windows had no small ends of
wires about their frames. This left the possibility only of a magnet-contact alarm,
which if so was difficult to jumper but also possible. Marathe felt himself missing
his wife intensely, which always signalled his deep fatigue. Twice he sniffed.

The woman was speaking into the cabinet to him: ‘… get you to sign some releases for
me so we can make copies of your O.I.N.S. proofs and get an Outtake faxed from your
detox, which was in…?’

‘The Chit Chat Farms Rehabilitation of Pennsylvania State. Last month.’ The A.F.R.’s
data liaison in Montreal had promised to arrange all records without some delay.

‘In, what, Wernersdale, something?’

Marathe cocked his veiled head ever so slightly. ‘Wernersberg of Pennsylvania.’

‘Well we know Chit Chat, we’ve had some Chit Chat graduates come through the House.
Highest… respect.’ Her head was inside the cabinet, with an arm. It appeared difficult
for her to rummage inside the cabinet and keep at the same time her balance. Deciding
the bay windows were the optimal office’s entry if required, Marathe looked at the
woman’s attempt to balance and the old cabinet. Then he blinked slowly. In this cabinet
visibly, in twin stacks near the front of the open cabinet, were many cartridges of
TP entertainment.

The woman said ‘And we’ve been Disabled-Accessible since the beginning. One of only
a handful of Houses in the metro area that are fully equipped to take disabled clients,
I assume they told you down at Chit Chat.’ The wall banged with the impact of boisterousness
in the outside room, and somebody either laughed or was in pain. Marathe sniffed.
The woman was continuing to speak: ‘… why I got to come here in the first place. Which
I came in in a chair, too, originally, by the way.’ She teetered back out from the
cabinet with a folder of Manila. ‘At the time I declared up and down I was too disabled
to kneel and pray, to give you an idea of where I was at.’ She laughed gaily. She
was attractive.

‘Me,’ Marathe responded, ‘I will attempt to pray at a moment’s order.’ Aiding the
ruse of application, he and Fortier discovered, was that U.S.A. recovery from the
addictions was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying
of orders. The A.F.R. had reviewed cartridges of antique U.S.A. programming, which
they had found through luck in the inventory of Antitoi, and had watched to learn
many things. But casting his veiled face desperately upward while saying allowed that
Marathe could scan along the plastic cases of cartridges’ spines. Among the small-of-font
titles such as
Focal Length Parameters X-XL
and
Drop Volley Ex. II
were two cases of plain brown plastic, blank, except for—this was why his veil, it
remained tilted upward for so much longer that he was concerned that this woman of
authority—except for—but it was difficult of sureness, for the office’s light was
the deadening fluorescence of U.S.A., and the cabinet’s mouth in the shadow of the
lid and the cheesecloth veil made less his focus—except maybe for tiny round faces
of embossed smiles upon the brown cases. Marathe felt suddenly the excitement of himself—M.
Hugh Steeply’s wording for this had been
from somewhere blue
.

The authority spoke also: ‘Not to mention U.H.I.D. members, you might want to know.’
Gesturing then at the veil of Marathe neither was mentioning. The woman attempted
to affix a sheet of faint toner to a board with a clip. ‘In fact we have a U.H.I.D.
member in early residency right now.’

Marathe blinked twice more. He said ‘I am deformed, me.’

‘She might be able to help you adjust, identify. Be good for her, too.’ Marathe had
begun locking down in RAM every detail of every moment since his entering the Ennet
House
demi-maison.
He in another part of his brain considered whether he would report truly first to
M. Fortier or to the Steeply of U.S.B.S.S., whose contact number had always the prefix
of 8000, he had jested. In another part was whether to seem eager for meeting the
Entertainment’s performer here now, a fellow veil. To think of what a desperate addict
would have eagerness in. Marathe was throughout this thinking smiling largely at the
woman, forgetting she could not witness it. ‘This is happy,’ finally he said.

‘Your facial issues—’ the person stated, leaning in over the crossed legs in her chair.
‘Are they connected to your use and abuse? Did they work with you on progression and
Y.E.T.s
³¹²
and owning consequences at Chit Chat?’

Marathe was in little hurry now to leave for returning to chez Antitoi. He utilized
his abilities to recite complex lines of covering-story on addiction while also at
the time reviewed locking down the face and locations of every person at the Ennet
House he had regarded. For they would come here again, the A.F.R., and maybe Services
Without Specificity of Steeply and Tine, as well. He had the ability of splitting
his mind’s thinking along several parallel tracks.

‘The legs—I do an overdose in Berne, which is in my home of Switzerland, while alone,
and I fall down face-down while my legs, they remain how you say tangle, tangled in
the chair on which occurred this injection, fix. A stupid. I lie down without conscious
or to move for many days, and my legs, they—
comment-on-dit?
—they are sleepy, lose the circulating, suffer gangrene, become infectious.’ Marathe
sniffed while stoically shrugging. ‘As well the nose and mouth, from facial squishing
of lying face-down in a position without conscious for days. I die almost. All is
amputated, for my life. I withdraw from the scag, smack, and H, in
l’infirmière.
A result of abuse of the drugs.’

‘This is your story. This is your first step.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘My legs, my nose and oral. All as a consequence of the progression.
At the Chit Chat, I admit all the things, I realize I am addicted desperately.’ Marathe
was trying to decide if to find ways to make the authority woman briefly leave the
office, so that Marathe might rapidly arm-climb up to the cabinet to regard the smiling
cases of cartridge closely before the cabinet’s locking. Or instead also to return
on pretext to remain and hang roundly in the living room for waiting persons, to find
a glimpse of who is this mentioned resident with her female U.H.I.D. veil; for this
is the purpose of coming to
demi-maisons
M. Fortier gave. Marathe could give the fact of the cartridges to Fortier and the
veiled girl to Steeply, or oppositely. The fatigue returned. But Steeply, before committing
to overt action, will wish for confirmation that those in the cabinet were items of
the true Entertainment, not the blank and joking F.L.Q. displays. There was truly
a faint whirring noise coming from the head, he imagined. Marathe’s sidearm sat in
its holster under the seat of him, hidden by the plaid-colored blanket of his lap.
To easily kill the person in authority was
inutile
at this time of not glimpsing the girl, he had decided, plus impractical of surrounding
witness. Marathe’s
fauteuil
could travel 45 kph on a level surface over short distance. The authority figure
liked to comb at the bright hair with her claw of the deformed hand. She was telling
Marathe the false addict that she found his honesty encouraging and saying to sign
these forms, for releasing. As Marathe signed slowly the name of a deceased Health-Benefits
administrator at the
Caisse de Dépôt et Placement,
³¹³
the woman began to ask about what lengths he believed he was willing to go to.

The whole family was lousy with secrets, she’d decided, was part of the nonturkey
dinner’s sadness. From each other, themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense
that overt eccentricity was the same as openness. I.e. that they were all ‘exactly
as crazy as they seem’—the punter’s phrase.

We’re all a lot more intuitive about our lovers’ families than we are about our own
families, she knew. Charlotte Treat’s face glistened; her cheek’s deep scars were
a more violent red than the rest. Her ribs under the wet Michelob Dry T-shirt were
starting to stand out, her neck to get that skinny stemmy look of katexia. She looked
like a ravaged fowl. Kate Gompert’s bed sat unmade, a copy of some yellow paperback
called
Feeling Good
open face-down on the mattress and starting to curl. Joelle had this weird fear that
Gompert, who made Joelle extremely nervous at the best of times, would come home and
walk in and find Joelle cleaning with her hair in a kerchief and veil damply clinging.
She used the last of the room’s Kleenex dusting all five bedside tables, wiping in
careful rings around objects she wasn’t to touch.

There was then some trickiness in the situation when the
demi-maison
’s woman offered the extension of a place for Marathe. Desperately addicted Henri
the Swiss could sleep upon the Convertisofa in the rear office this very
P.M.
, she said, if he was willing to endure the mess and sometimes insects of the rear
office. The woman had a ripe spot of
sympathique
for the disableds, Marathe could see. For trickiness in the situation, no lines had
been prepared by Fortier to defer this offer of the extension of the spot of treatment
in the
demi-maison.
The woman in authority smiled that she could see in his playing with the
fauteuil
’s wheels the addicted struggle between desperation and denial, she said. Marathe
was rapidly calculating should he falsely accept and remain here for one night to
observe for himself the description of the veiled patient from U.H.I.D., against should
he exit and roll like no person’s business to the nearest place of private telephoning
to alert the A.F.R. at the shop that here at this
demi-maison
were of possibility real cartridges of the Entertainment, perhaps including a duplicatable
Master or the anti-
samizdat
remedy cartridge of F.L.Q.’s allegation, to return to chez Antitoi and return later
in squeaking force to the
demi-maison
and acquire both the cartridges and the veiled performer, if the U.H.I.D. patient
of treatment is revealed as the disguised performer. The engineer of radio had spoken
volubly of this person’s veil and screen. Or calculating also whether to telephone
not Antitoi Entertainment but the 24-hour costless prefix of M./Mlle. Steeply and
convey the very same information instead, finally, first, to
Bureau des Sérvices sans Spécificité,
placing bets on O.N.A.N. and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side
only, conveying his restenotic wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remi
d’Amherst’s Convexity-ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of their lives down
here among U.S.A.’s confusion of choices, demanding hidden protection from Steeply
and high-income medical care for the heart- and head-difficulties of beloved Gertraude.