Infinite Jest (149 page)

Chu’s still just standing there. ‘I can’t think what to say.’

‘That happens to me all the time.’

‘The minute your invitation became official my mind went blank.’

‘That can happen.’

‘There’s just this staticky blank field in there now.’

‘I know just what you mean.’

They stand there silent, the camera’s mechanism emitting a tiny whir.

Mario says ‘You just got out of the shower, I can tell.’

‘I was talking with good old Lyle downstairs.’

‘Lyle’s terrific!’

‘I was going to just whip right over into the showers, but the locker room’s got this,
like, odor.’

‘It’s always great to talk with good old Lyle.’

‘So I came up here.’

‘Everything you’re saying is very good.’

LaMont Chu stands there a moment looking at Mario, who’s smiling and Chu can tell
wants to nod furiously, but can’t, because he needs to keep the Bolex steady. ‘What
I was doing, I was filling Lyle in on the Eschaton debacle, telling him about the
lack of hard info, the conflicted rumors that are going around, about how Kittenplan
and some of the Big Buds are going to get blamed. About disciplinary action for the
Buds.’

‘Lyle’s just an outstanding person to go to with concerns,’ Mario says, fighting not
to nod furiously.

‘Lord’s head and Penn’s leg, the Postman’s broken nose. What’s going to happen to
the Incster?’

‘You’re acting perfectly natural. This is very good.’

‘I’m asking if you’ve heard from Hal what they’re going to do, if he’s in on the blame
from Tavis. Pemulis and Kittenplan I can see, but I’m having trouble with the idea
of Struck or your brother taking discipline for what happened out there. They were
strictly from spectation for the whole thing. Kittenplan’s Bud is Spodek, and she
wasn’t even out there.’

‘I’m getting all this, you’ll be glad to know.’

Chu is now looking at Mario, which for Mario is weird because he’s looking through
the viewfinder, a lens-eye view, which means when Chu looks down from the lens to
look at Mario it looks to Mario like he’s looking down south somewhere along Mario’s
thorax.

‘Mario, I’m asking if Hal’s told you what they’re going to do to anybody.’

‘Is this what you’re saying, or are you asking me?’

‘Asking.’

Chu’s face looks slightly oval and convex through the lens’s fish-eye, a jutting aspect.
‘So what if I want to use this that you’re saying for the documentary I’ve been asked
to make?’

‘Jesus, Mario, use whatever you want. I’m just saying I have conscience-trouble with
the idea of Hal and Troeltsch. And Struck didn’t even seem like he was conscious for
the debacle itself.’

‘I should tell you I feel like we’re getting the totally real LaMont Chu here.’

‘Mario, camera to one side, I’m standing here dripping asking you for Hal’s impressions
of when Tavis called them in, as in did he give you impressions. Van Vleck at lunch
said he yesterday saw Pemulis and Hal coming out of Tavis’s office with the Association
urine-guy holding them both by the ear. Van Vleck said Hal’s face was the color of
Kaopectate.’

Mario directs the lens at Chu’s shower-thongs so he can look over the viewfinder at
Chu. ‘Are you saying this, or is this what happened?’

‘That’s what I’m asking
you,
Mario, if Hal told you what happened.’

‘I follow what you’re saying.’

‘So you asked whether I was asking, and I’m asking you about it.’ Mario zooms in very
tight: Chu’s complexion is a kind of creamy green, with not one follicle in view.
‘LaMont, I’m going to find you and tell you whatever Hal tells me, this is so good.’

‘So then you haven’t talked to Hal?’

‘When?’

‘Jesus, Mario, it’s like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.’

‘This is going very well!’

Someone gargling. Guglielmo Redondo’s voice going through the rosary, it sounds like,
just inside his and Esteban Reynes’s door. The Clipperton Suite in East House had
had a bright-yellow strip of B.P.D. plastic for over a month, he remembers. The Boys
Room door a different kind of wood than the room doors. The Clipperton Suite had a
glued picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton’s ring at the net. The roar
of a toilet and a stall door’s squeak. The Academy’s plumbing is high-pressure. It
takes Mario longer to walk down a set of stairs than to walk up. Red primer stains
his hand, he has to hold the railing so tight.

The special hush of lobby carpet, and smells of Benson & Hedges brand cigarettes in
the reception area off the lobby. The little hall doors that are always closed and
never locked. The rubber sheaths on the knobs. Benson & Hedges cost $5.60 O.N.A.N.
a pack at Father & Son grocery down the hill. Lateral Alice Moore’s desk’s plaque’s
DANGER: THIRD RAIL
light is unilluminated, and her word-processing setup wears its cover of frosted
plastic. The blue chairs have the faint imprints of people’s bottoms. The waiting
room is empty and dim. Some light from the lit courts outside. From under double doors
is lamplight, much attenuated by double doors, from the Headmaster’s office, which
Mario doesn’t explore; Tavis is unnerved into such gregarity around Mario it’s awkward
for all parties.
³¹⁶
If you asked Mario whether he got on with his Uncle C.T. he’d say: Sure. The Bolex’s
light-meter is in the No Way range. Most of the waiting area’s available light comes
from the doorless Dean of Females’s office. Meaning the Moms is: In.

Heavy shag carpet is especially treacherous for Mario when he’s top-heavy with equipment.
Avril Incandenza, a fiend for light, has the whole bank of overheads going, two torchères
and some desk lamps, and a B&H cigarette on fire in the big clay ashtray Mario’d made
her at Rindge and Latin School. She is swivelled around in her swivel-chair, facing
out the big window behind her desk, listening to someone on the phone, holding the
transmitter violin-style under her chin and holding up a stapler, checking its load.
Her desk has what looks like a skyline of stacks of file folders and books in neat
cross-hatched stacks; nothing teeters. The open book on top facing Mario is Dowty,
Wall and Peters’s seminal
Introduction to Montague Semantics,
³¹⁷
which has very fascinating illustrations that Mario doesn’t look at this time, trying
to film the cock of the Moms’s head and the phone’s extended antenna against the cumulus
of her hair from behind, capturing her back unawares.

But the sound of Mario entering even a shag-carpeted room is unmistakable, plus she
can see his reflection in the window.

‘Mario!’ Her arms go up in a V, stapler open in one hand, facing the window.

‘The Moms!’ It’s a good ten meters past the seminar table and viewer and portable
blackboard to the far part of the office where the desk is, and each step on the deep
shag is precarious, Mario resembling a very old brittle-boned man or someone carrying
a load of breakables down a slick hill.

‘Hel
lo!
’ She’s addressing his reflection in the quartered window, watching him put the treadle
down carefully on the desk and struggle with the pack on his back. ‘Not you,’ she
tells the phone. She points the stapler at the image of the Bolex on the image of
his head. ‘Are we On-Air?’

Mario laughs. ‘Would you like to be?’

She tells the phone she’s still here, that Mario’s come in.

‘I don’t want to intercept your call.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’ She talks past the phone at the window. She rotates her swivel-chair
to face Mario, the receiver’s antenna describing a half moon and now pointing up at
the window behind her. There are two blue chairs like the reception-area chairs in
front of her desk; she doesn’t indicate to Mario to sit. Mario’s most comfortable
standing and leaning into the support of the police lock he’s trying to detach from
his canvas plastron and lower, shucking the pack off his back at the same time. Avril
looks at him like the sort of stellar mother where just looking at her kid gives her
joy. She doesn’t offer to help him get the lock’s lead brace out of the pack because
she knows he’d feel completely comfortable asking for her help if he needed it. It’s
like she feels these two sons are the people in her life with whom so little important
needs to be said that she loves it. The Bolex and support-yoke and viewfinder over
his forehead and eyes give Mario an underwater look. His movements, setting and bracing
his police lock, are at once graceless and deft. The lit Center Courts, now empty,
are visible out the left side of Avril’s window, if you lean far forward and look.
Someone has forgotten a gear bag and pile of sticks out by the net-post of Court 17.

Silences between them are totally comfortable. Mario can’t tell if the person on the
phone is still talking or if Avril just hasn’t put the dead phone down. She still
holds the black stapler. Its jaws are open and it looks alligatorish in her hand.

‘Is this you passing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am
I a subject, tonight?’

‘You can be a subject, Moms.’ He moves the big head around in a weary circle. ‘I get
tired from wearing this.’

‘It gets heavy. I’ve held it.’

‘It’s good.’

‘I remember his making that. He took such care making that. It’s the last time I believe
he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly.’

‘It’s terrific!’

‘He took weeks putting everything together.’

He likes to look at her, too, leaning in and letting her know he likes looking. They
are the two least embarrassable people either of them knows. She’s rarely here this
late; she has a big study at the HmH. The only thing that ever shows she’s tired is
that her hair gets a sort of huge white cowlick, like a rolling ocean comber of hair,
and just on one side, the side with the phone, sticking up and touching the antenna.
Her hair has been pure white since Mario can first remember seeing her looking down
at him through the incubator’s glass. Pictures of her own father’s hair were like
that. It goes down the middle of her back against the chair and down both arms, hanging
off the arms near the elbow. Its part shows her pink scalp. She keeps the hair very
clean and well-combed. She has one of Mr. deLint’s big whistles around her neck. The
big cowlick casts a bent shadow on the sill of the window. There’s a maple-leaf flag
and a 50-star U.S.A. flag hanging limp off brass poles on either side of the window;
in an extreme corner are fleur-de-lis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks. C.T.’s
office has an O.N.A.N. flag and a 49-star U.S.A. flag.
³¹⁸

‘I had quality interface dialogue with LaMont Chu upstairs. But I made the girl Felicity,
the really thin one—she got upset. She said only a towel.’

‘Felicity will be just fine. So you’re just strolling. Peripatetic footage.’ She refuses
to adjust syntax, to speak in any way down to him, it’d be beneath him, though he
seems not to mind when most people do it, speak down.

Nor will she ask about the burn on his pelvis unless he brings it up. She’s careful
to keep her oar out of Mario’s health stuff unless he brings things up, out of concern
that it might be taken as intrusive or smothering.

‘I saw your lights. Why is the Moms here, still, I thought to myself.’ She made as
if to clutch her head. ‘Don’t ask. I’ll starting whingeing. Tomorrow’s going to be
hellishly busy.’ Mario didn’t hear her say goodbye to the man as she put down the
phone so the antenna now points at Mario’s chest. She’s putting out the nub of the
Benson & Hedge against the rooster-comb holder he’d squeezed and karate-chopped and
put down the bowl’s center, when he made it, after she’d said she wanted it to be
an ashtray. ‘You give me such pleasure standing there, all outfitted for work,’ she
said. ‘
Aprowl
.’ She ground individual sparks out in the bowl. She had the idea that her smoking
around Mario made him worry, though he’d never said anything about it one way or the
other. ‘I have a breakfast engagement at 07, which means I have to do final swotting
and whacking for morning classes now, so I just lurched back over here to do it instead
of carrying everything back and forth.’

‘Are you tired?’

She just smiled at him.

‘This is off.’ Pointing at his head. ‘I turned it off.’

To look at them, you’d never guess these two persons were related, one sitting and
one standing canted forward.

‘Will you eat with us? I hadn’t even thought of dinner until I saw you. I don’t even
know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders.
³¹⁹
Turkey cartilage. Your bag is by the radio. Will you stay again? Charles is still
in conference, I believe, he said.’

‘About the debracle with the Eschaton and the Postman’s nose?’

‘A person from a magazine has come to do a piece of reportage on your brother. Charles
is speaking to her in lieu of any of the students. You may speak to her about Orin
if you like.’

‘She’s been
aprowl
for Hal, Ortho said.’

Avril has a certain way of cocking her fine head at him.

‘Your poor Uncle Charles has been with Thierry and this magazine person since this
afternoon.’

‘Have you talked to him?’

‘I’ve been trying to buttonhole your brother. He’s not in your room. The Pemulis person
was seen by Mary Esther taking their truck before Study Period. Is Hal with him, Mario?’

‘I haven’t seen Hal since lunchtime. He said he’d had a tooth thing.’

‘I didn’t even find out he’d been to see Zeggarelli until today.’

‘He asked about how the burn on my pelvis is.’

‘Which I won’t ask about unless you’d care to discuss how it’s coming along.’

‘It’s fine. Plus Hal said he wishes I’d come back and sleep there.’

‘I left two messages asking him to let me know how the tooth was. Love-o, I feel bad
I wasn’t there for him. Hal and his teeth.’

‘Did C.T. tell what happened? Was he upset? Was that C.T. on the phone you were with?’
Mario can’t see why the Moms would call C.T. on the phone when he was in there right
across the hall behind his doors. When she didn’t smoke a lot of the time she held
a pen in her mouth; Mario didn’t know why. Her college mug has about a hundred blue
pens in it, on the desk. She likes to square herself in her chair, sitting up extra
straight and grasping the chair’s arms in a commanding posture. She looks like something
Mario can’t place when she does this. He keeps thinking the word
typhoon
. He knows she’s not trying to consciously be commanding with him.