Infinite Jest (157 page)

Room 32A’s wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the
muffled voices were behind this one. The Meeting was listed in the book as starting
at 1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some
sort of pre-Meeting orientation for people who’ve come for the first time, sort of
tentatively, just to scout the whole enterprise out, so he doesn’t knock.

He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he’s straightening a bow
tie before he enters a strange room.

And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doorknobs on the Quabbin Recovery Systems
doors are the same as at E.T.A.—flat bars of brass toggle-bolted to the latch mechanism,
so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the door.

But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn’t near big enough to create a mood
of anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or ten adult middle-class males are in the
warm room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of
the men has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same
way, that Indian cross-legged style with their hands on their knees and their feet
under their knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere
in sight. Hal eases the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair,
all the time conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet. The chairs are placed
in no discernible order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room’s own colors,
walls and ceiling the color of Thousand Island dressing—a color-scheme with unplaceable
but uneasy associations for Hal—and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the
warm air in 32A is stuffy with CO
₂
and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged bodies not wearing
footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room
after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta.

The only guy in the Meeting to acknowledge Hal’s entrance is at the front of the room,
a man Hal would have to call almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and
globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks
plaid and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously
backward in his chair any minute, smiling warmly at Hal’s winter coat and NASA glass
as Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man’s chair is positioned under
a small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face
it, and the man holds a Magic Marker in one hand and holds what looks quite a bit
like a teddy bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit Norwegian
sweater the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he’s got the
blond eyebrows and creepy blond eyelashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian
blond, and his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a truncated
star. The morbidly round blond man’s pretty clearly the leader of the Meeting, possibly
a high-ranking official of Narcotics Anonymous, whom Hal could casually approach about
tracts and texts to buy and study, afterward.

Another middle-aged guy up near the front is crying, and he too holds what looks like
a bear.

The blond brows hike up and down as the leader says ‘I’d like to suggest we men all
hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin’s Inner
Infant expressing his grief and loss.’

They’re all at subtly different angles to Hal, who’s slumped low over by the wall
in the second-to-last row, but it turns out after some subtle casual neck-craning
that, sure enough, all these middle-class guys in at least their thirties are sitting
there clutching teddy bears to their sweatered chests—and identical teddy bears, plump
and brown and splay-limbed and with a little red corduroy tongue protruding from the
mouths, so the bears all look oddly throttled. The room is menacingly quiet now except
for the sibilance of the heating vents and the sobbing guy Kevin, and the plip of
Hal’s saliva hitting the bottom of the empty glass rather more loudly than he might
have wished.

The back of the crying guy’s neck is turning redder and redder as he clutches his
bear and rocks on his hams.

Hal sits with his leg crossed good-ankle-on-knee and joggles his white hightop and
looks at his callused thumb and listens to the Kevin guy sob and snuffle. The guy
wipes his nose with the heel of his hand just like the littler Buddies at E.T.A. Hal
figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the
Meeting is probably on the verge of coming around to talking explicitly about drugs
and how to give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched
and bereft, or maybe at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness
of giving up drugs to continue before the old nervous system and salivary glands returned
to normal. Even though
Inner Infant
sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Dolores Rusk’s dreaded
Inner Child,
Hal’d be willing to bet that here it’s some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous
sobriquet for like ‘limbic component of the CNS’ or ‘the part of our cortex that’s
not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been pulling
us through the day, secretly’ or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal
wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data,
hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.

The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy
bear’s head and is breathing slowly and evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under the
blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-as-California-surfer-dude.
The leader inhales gently and says ‘The energies I’m feeling in the group are energies
of unconditional love and acceptance for Kevin’s Inner Infant.’ Nobody else says anything,
and the leader doesn’t seem to need anybody to say anything. He looks down at the
cage his hands have made on the bear and keeps subtly changing the shape of the cage.
The guy Kevin, whose neck is now not only beet-red but shiny with embarrassed sweat
between his shirt-collar and hair’s hem, sobs even harder at the affirmation of love
and support. The round leader’s high hoarse voice had the same blandly kind didactic
quality as Rusk’s, as if always speaking to a not-too-bright child.

After some more cage-play and deep breathing the leader looks up and around and nods
at nothing and says ‘Maybe we could all name our feelings right now for Kevin and
share how much we’re caring for him and his Inner Infant right now, in his pain.’

Various bearded cross-legged guys speak up:

‘I love you, Kevin.’

‘I’m not judging you, Kevin.’

‘Know just how you and the I.I. feel.’

‘I’m feeling really close to you.’

‘I’m feeling a lot of love for you right now, Kevin.’

‘You’re crying for two, guy.’

‘Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin.’

‘I’m not feeling like your crying is one bit unmanly or pathetic, fella.’ It’s at
this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open-mindedness
and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous (‘NA’) Meeting, which
seems already deeply under way and isn’t one bit like he’s imagined an even remotely
hopeful antidrug Meeting would be like. It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology
encounter thing. Not one Substance or symptom of Substance-deprivation has been mentioned
so far. And none of these guys looks like they’ve ever been engaged with anything
more substantial than an occasional wine cooler, if he had to guess.

Hal’s grim mood deepens as the round man up front now leans precariously over and
down and opens a sort of toy-box under the blackboard by his chair and produces a
cheap plastic portable CD laser-scanner and sets it on top of the toy-box, where it
begins to issue a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music, mostly cello, with
sporadic harps and chimes. The stuff spreads through the hot little room like melted
butter, and Hal sinks lower in his orange chair and looks hard at the space-and-spacecraft
emblem on his NASA glass.

‘Kevin?’ the leader says over the music. ‘Kevin?’ The sobbing man’s hand lies over
his face like a spider, and he doesn’t even start to look up until the leader has
said several times very blandly and kindly ‘Kevin, do you feel okay about looking
at the rest of the group?’

Kevin’s red neck wrinkles as he looks up at the blond leader through his fingers.

The leader’s made the cage again on his poor bear’s squashed head. ‘Can you share
what you’re feeling, Kevin?’ he says. ‘Can you name it?’

Kevin’s voice is muffled by the hand he hides behind. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant’s
abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,’ he says, drawing shuddering breaths.
His mauve sweater’s shoulders tremble. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant standing holding
the bars of his crib and looking out of the bars… bars of his crib and crying for
his Mommy and Daddy to come hold him and nurture him.’ Kevin sobs twice in an apneated
way. One arm holds his lap’s bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a little stuffing
start to come out of its mouth around its tongue, and a stalactite of that clear thin
weepy-type mucus hangs from Kevin’s nose just mm. over the throttled bear’s head.
‘And nobody’s
coming!
’ he sobs. ‘Nobody’s coming. I feel alone with my bear and plastic airplane-mobile
and teething ring.’

Everybody’s nodding in an affirming and pained way. No two beards are exactly the
same fullness and design. A couple other sobs break out across the room. Everyone’s
bear stares blankly ahead.

The leader’s nod is slow and meditative. ‘And can you share your needs with the group
right now, Kevin?’

‘Please share, Kevin,’ says a slim guy over by a black filing cabinet who sits like
he’s a veteran at sitting Indian-style in hard plastic chairs.

The music’s still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.

‘The work we’re here to do,’ the leader says over the music, one hand now pressed
pensively to the side of his big face, ‘is to work on our dysfunctional passivity
and tendency to wait silently for our Inner Infant’s needs to be magically met. The
energy I feel in the group now is that the group is supportively asking Kevin to nurture
his Inner Infant by naming and sharing his needs out loud with the group. And I’m
feeling how aware we all are how risky and vulnerable need-naming-out-loud must feel
for Kevin right now.’

Everybody looks deadly serious. A couple guys are rubbing their bears’ bellies pregnantly.
The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside him is the inguinal gurgle of
two heavy bran muffins swallowed at high speeds w/o liquid. The string of mucus from
Kevin’s nose trembles and swings. The slender guy who’d asked Kevin please to share
is now waggling the arms of his teddy bear in an infantile way. Hal feels a wave of
nausea flood his mouth with fresh saliva.

‘We’re asking you to name what your Inner Infant wants right now more than anything
in the world,’ the leader’s saying to Kevin.

‘
To be loved and held!
’ Kevin keens, sobbing harder. His lachrymucus is now a thin silver string joining
his nose and the fuzzy top of his bear’s head. The bear’s expression is seeming creepier
to Hal by the second. Hal wonders what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and
leaving right in the middle of somebody’s Infantile revelation of need. Meanwhile
Kevin is saying that his Inner Infant inside him had always hoped that some day his
Mom and Dad would be there for him, to hold him and love him. He says but right from
the start they’d never been there for him, leaving him and his brother with Hispanic
nannies while they devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of psychotherapy
and support groups. This takes a while to say, given all the snuffles and wracked
spasms. Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone altogether,
dead, smooshed by a dysfunctionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica
Way on the way to Couples Counselling.

At this Hal’s slumped head jerks up, his mouth oval with horror. He’s all of a sudden
realized that this guy who’s seated at such an angle that Hal’s been able to see only
the obliquest portion of his profile is in fact Kevin Bain, his brother Orin’s old
E.T.A. doubles and chemical-mischief partner Marlon Bain’s older brother, Kevin Bain,
of Dedham MA, who the last Hal had heard had gotten his M.B.A. at Wharton and cleaned
up with a string of Simulated Reality arcades all up and down the South Shore, back
during the pre-Subsidized-Time Simulated Reality craze, before InterLace viewers and
digital cartridges let you do your own customized Simulating right at home and the
novelty wore off.
³³⁵
The Kevin Bain whose childhood hobby was memorizing IRS capital-depreciation schedules
and whose adult idea of a wild time
³³⁶
had been putting extra marshmallows in his nightly cocoa, and who wouldn’t have known
a recreational drug if it walked up and poked him in the eye. Hal begins to scan for
possible exits. The only door was the one he’d come in, which is in full view of most
of the room. There are no windows at all.

Hal’s chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This
is one of those men’s-issues-Men’s-Movement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle’s stepdad went
to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick’s grip poke
out between his legs and yelling ‘Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!’

Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear’s head and saying it didn’t
look like his Inner Infant would ever get its wish. The gooey music’s cello sounds
like some sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it’s in the middle of.