Infinite Jest (148 page)

Or to tell this figure of medical authority to look out behind for a large spider
and thereupon snap her slim neck with one hand and use the telephone console in this
office to summon Fortier and an A.F.R. elite detail directly to this
demi-maison.
Or else to summon directly Steeply and the white-suiting forces of O.N.A.N. The authority
made a spire of her fingers beneath her chin and gazed at Marathe’s cocked head with
a face of respect and sympathy but not solicitude, also which made snapping her neck
with one hand seem a sad choice for Marathe. He pretended that it was necessary to
sniff. Mssrs. Fortier and Broullîme, the A.F.R. others he had known well since the
days of when they stood together tensed at the crossings of many trains, beneath the
sky’s moon—none of them sensed truly that Marathe has lost the belly for this type
of work. That Marathe, he must fight the nausea of the stomach as he pushed the sharpened
handle of the
manche à balai
broomstick through the Antitoi’s insides during the technical interview of the Antitoi,
and later had vomited out into the alley under secrecy. One of the Office’s dogs chewed
at its haunch with great ferocity, in misery. In the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N., M./Mlle.
Hugh/Helen Steeply of the clandestine U.S.O.U.S./U.S.B.S.S. would hide the family
of Marathe in obscure suburban locales, with papers of identity fashioned by specialists
in above reproach and no suspicion; and Marathe, his familiarity with the knowledge
of Québecois insurgency would be comfortably rewarded once
Notre Rai Pays
seceded to alone draw down the wrath of
chanteur-fou
Gentle’s anger. The A.F.R.’s triumph of dissemination of the lethal Entertainment
would ensure Marathe’s valuable welcome by Gentle and his wife’s beloved treatments
for the ventricle and lack of skull. Marathe pictured Gertraude with a helmet and
hook of gold, breathing easily through expensive tubes. The variable of calculus was
how long to remain and work for dissemination against when to jump to the safety of
American welcome. Fortier’s wrath would be implacable at Marathe’s ‘
perdant son coeur,
’
³¹⁴
and it may be far wiser of waiting until Québec had been evicted and the A.F.R. were
fully engaged to reveal his quadrupling for O.N.A.N., Marathe.

Knocking at the Office’s door at the same time as entering came a young girl with
missing teeth, radiating coldness from the exterior outside the
demi-maison,
leaning only her upper half of the body into the office through the doorway she had
opened.

‘Clocking in, boss,’ the young girl stated in the flat nasality of Boston U.S.A.

The woman in authority smiled in return. ‘Two more to interview, Johnette, then I’m
off.’

‘Pisser.’

‘Can you let the people in from the shed when they come for Mrs. Lopate?’

The young and inclined girl nodded her slim head. In a nostril a generic diaper-pin
was
transpercé,
which glittered in the fluorescence of the light as she nodded. ‘And Janice says
she’s screwing out of here now and any message for her before she goes.’ The authority
negated with her head at this. The young girl in the door looked down upon Marathe
and said ‘Hey’ or ‘Eh’ in a greeting of neutral emotions. Marathe smiled with desperation
and pretended to sniff. Visible smoke’s odor came through the open door from the noisy
salon beyond it. Marathe decided firmly against the snapping of any necks upon this
visit, because of bodies leaning with suddenness into the office unexpectedly. The
torso of the person began to withdraw as suddenly the authority looked up and stated
‘Oh and Johnette?’

The door swung more open once more as the returned upper half replied ‘Yo.’

‘Do me a favor? Clenette H. brought some donie-cartridges down from E.T.A. this afternoon?’

‘Let me guess.’

‘The natives are restless.’ The authority laughed aloud. ‘Something new.’

The torso laughed as well. ‘Did you see McDade’s watching that Korean thing
again
out here?’

‘So can you just run them through after lights-out, as many as you can, check and
make sure they’re appropriate?’

‘No skin, no substances, light drinking only,’ the young girl said in the manner of
reviewing the rehearsal of something learned.

‘As many as you can get through, and leave them on Janice’s desk, and I’ll have her
put them out at the start of the day-shift tomorrow.’

The young girl of substitute authority made a curious circle with two of her fingers
in the air of the doorway. Some kind of signal of the hand to the chief authority.
Every finger of the hand of the girl wore a ring of different type. ‘The natives’ll
be grateful, for once.’

‘They’re in the cabinet with the intakes,’ the authority told her.

‘I’ll watch them during Dream Duty, as many as there’s time.’

‘And Johnette?’

Once more the torso reextended inward.

The woman with authority said ‘And keep Emil and Wade from tormenting David K., will
you please?’

Marathe smiled largely as the door closed entirely and the authority made a small
motion of apologies for being interrupted. ‘I do not have these meanings
donie
and
natives,
if I may boldly ask,’ he said. ‘Nor
etier
.’

A laugh of friendliness. It occurred to Marathe that this was a happy person. ‘Donies
are donated goods. Which we depend on more than we’d like. The residents and alums
are always on the lookout. Sometimes we call the current residents the natives; we
mean it as affectionate. That was Johnette, she’s living
³¹⁵
staff. We’ve got two living staff, alums of the house. One’s under the weather, but
Johnette’s—you’ll like Johnette. Johnette’s a keeper.
E.T.A.
is letters, E-T-A.’

Marathe pretended to laugh aloud. ‘I beg a pardon, for I thought some
etier
in the pronunciation of my native Swiss.’

The authority smiled with understanding. ‘E.T.A.’s a private school. We usually get
some residents on up there, part-time. It’s just up the hill.’ Seeing the deep intake
of veil which his inhaling caused for one moment only, the authority expressed surprise
of the face and said ‘But you did know Ennet’s a working house. Residents have a month
to find work, normally.’

Exhaling with care, Marathe gestured faintly as in But of course.

Part of Mario’s footage for the documentary they’re letting him do on this fall’s
E.T.A. consists of Mario just walking around different parts of the Academy with the
Bolex H64 camera strapped to his head and joined by coax cable to the foot-treadle,
which he holds against his sweatered chest with one hand and operates with the other.
At 2100 at night it’s cold out. The Center Courts are brightly lit, but only one court
is being used, Gretchen Holt and Jolene Criess still winding up some sort of marathon
challenge from the
P.M.
session, the hands around their grips bluish and sweaty hair frozen into electrified
spikes, pausing between points to blow noses on sleeves, wearing so many layers of
sweats they look barrel-bodied out there, and Mario doesn’t bother with the change
in film-speed he’d need to record them through the steamed window of Schtitt’s room,
where he is. The room’s noise is deafening.

Coach Schtitt’s room is 106, next to his office on the first floor of Comm.-Ad., past
Dr. Rusk’s office and down a two-corner hall from the lobby.

It’s a big empty room, built for its stereo. Hardwood floor in need of sanding, a
wooden chair and a cane chair, an army cot. A little low table just big enough for
Schtitt’s pipe rack. A folding card table folded up and leaning against the wall.
Acoustic damping-tile on all the walls and nothing decorative hanging or mounted on
the walls. Acoustic tiling on the ceiling also, with a bare overhead light with a
long chain mounted in a dirty ceiling fan with a short chain. The fan never rotates
but sometimes emits a sound of faulty wiring. There’s a faint odor of Magic Marker
in the room. There is nothing upholstered, no pillow on the cot, nothing soft to absorb
or deflect the sound of the equipment stacked on the floor, the black Germanness of
a top-shelf sound system, a Mario-sized speaker in each corner of the room with the
cloth cover removed so each woofer’s cone is exposed and mightily throbbing. Schtitt’s
room is soundproofed. The window faces the Center Courts, the transom and observatory
directly overhead and mangling the shadows of the courts’ lights. The window is right
over the radiator, which when the stereo is off makes odd hollow ringing clanky clunks
as if someone deep underground were having at the pipes with a hammer. The cold window
over the radiator is steamed and trembles slightly with Wagnerian bass.

Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his
head thrown back and arms hanging, hands treed with arteries you can see his slow
pulse in. His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way
Schtitt always has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open
and a dead pipe hangs at an alarming angle from its corner. Mario records him sleeping
for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit.
What’s on and making the window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little
bullet-headed lines down the glass is a duet that keeps climbing in pitch and emotion:
a German second tenor and a German soprano are either very happy or very unhappy or
both. Mario’s ears are extremely sensitive. Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly
loud European opera. He’s shared with Mario several different tales of grim childhood
experiences at a BMW-sponsored ‘Quality-Control-Orientated’ Austrian Akademie to account
for his REM-peculiarities. The soprano leaves the baritone and goes up to a high D
and just hangs there, either shattered or ecstatic. Schtitt doesn’t stir, not even
when Mario falls twice, loudly, trying to get to the door with his hands over his
ears.

The Community-Administration stairwells are narrow and no-nonsense. Red railings of
cold iron whose red is one coat of primer. Steps and walls of raw-colored rough cement.
The sort of sandy echo in there that makes you take stairs as fast as possible. The
salve makes a sucking sound. The upper halls are empty. Low voices and lights from
under the doors on the second floor. 2100 is still mandatory Study Period. There won’t
be serious movement till 2200, when the girls will drift from room to room, congregating,
doing whatever packs of girls in robes and furry slippers do late at night, until
deLint kills all the dormitory lights at the dorms’ main breaker around 2300. Isolated
movement: a door down the hall opens and shuts, the Vaught twins are heading down
the hall to the bathroom at the far end, wearing only an enormous towel, one of their
heads in curlers. One of the falls in Mr. Schtitt’s room had been on the burnt hip,
and squunched salve from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at that side
of the pelvis, though there is zero pain. Three tense voices behind Carol Spodek and
Shoshana Abram’s door, lists of degrees and focal lengths, a study group for Mr. Ogilvie’s
‘Reflections on Refraction’ exam tomorrow. A girl’s voice from he can’t tell which
room says ‘Steep hot beach sea’ twice very distinctly and then is still. Mario is
leaning back against a wall in the hallway, panning idly. Felicity Zweig emerges from
her door by the stairwell carrying a soap-dish and wearing a towel tied at that breast-level,
as if there were breasts, moving toward Mario on her way to the head. She puts her
hand out straight at his head’s camera, a kind of distant stiff-arm as she passes:

‘I’m wearing a towel.’

‘I understand,’ Mario says, using his arms to turn himself around and pointing the
lens at the bare wall.

‘I’m wearing a
towel.
’

Brisk controlled sounds of retching from behind Diane Prins’s door. Mario gets a couple
seconds of Zweig hurrying away in the towel, tiny little bird steps, looking terribly
fragile.

The stairwells smell like the cement they’re made of.

Behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn’s door, is the faint rubbery squeak of somebody moving
around on crutches. Someone in 311 is yelling ‘Boner check! Boner check!’ A lot of
the third floor is for boys under fourteen. The hall carpet up here is ectoplasmically
stained, the expanses of wall between doors hung with posters of professional players
endorsing gear. Someone has drawn a goatee and fangs on an old Donnay poster of Mats
Wilander, and the poster of Gilbert Treffert is defaced with anti-Canadian slurs.
Otis Lord’s door has
Infirmary
next to his name on the door’s name-card. Penn’s room’s door’s card’s name also had
Infirmary
. Sounds of someone talking low to someone who’s sobbing from Beak, Whale, and Virgilio’s
room, and Mario resists an impulse to knock. LaMont Chu’s door next door is completely
covered with magazines’ action-shots of matches. Mario is leaning back to get footage
of the door when LaMont Chu exits the bathroom at this end in a terry robe and thongs
and wet hair, literally whistling ‘Dixie.’

‘Mario!’

Mario gets him bearing down, his calves hairless and muscular, hair-water dripping
onto his robe’s shoulders with each step. ‘LaMont Chu!’

‘What’s happening?’

‘Nothing’s happening!’

Chu stands there just within conversation-range. He’s only slightly taller than Mario.
A door down the hall opens and a head sticks out and scans and then withdraws.

‘Well.’ Chu squares his shoulders and looks into the camera atop Mario’s head. ‘You
want me to say something for posterity?’

‘Sure!’

‘What should I say?’

‘You can say anything you want!’

Chu draws himself way up and looks penetrating. Mario checks the meter on his belt
and uses the treadle to shorten the focal length and adjust the angle of the camera’s
lens slightly downward, right at Chu, and there are tiny grinding adjustment-sounds
from the Bolex.