Infinite Jest (159 page)

The ceiling was breathing
. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s
Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny
as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put them in a little beach
house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The place was affordable
because it had a big ragged hole in the roof. Origin of hole unknown. Gately’s outsized
crib had been in the beach house’s little living room, right under the hole. The guy
that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick clear polyurethane
sheeting across the room’s ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the hole. The polyurethane
bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole
inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing
polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter
deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole
as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it. He couldn’t
feel the right side of his upper body. He couldn’t move in any real sense of the word.
The hospital room had that misty quality rooms in fevers have. Gately lay on his back.
Ghostish figures materialized at the peripheries of his vision and hung around and
then de-materialized. The ceiling bulged and receded. Gately’s own breath hurt his
throat. His throat felt somehow raped. The blurred figure in the next bed sat up very
still in bed in a sitting position and seemed to have a box on its head. Gately kept
having a terrible repetitious ethnocentric dream that he was robbing the house of
an Oriental and had the guy tied to a chair and was trying to blindfold him with quality
mailing twine from the drawer under the Oriental’s kitchen phone. The Oriental kept
being able to see around the twine and kept looking steadily at Gately and blinking
inscrutably. Plus the Oriental had no nose or mouth, just a smooth expanse of lower-facial
skin, and wore a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs.

What Gately perceived as light-cycles and events all out of normal sequence was really
Gately going in and out of consciousness. Gately did not perceive this. It seemed
to him more like he kept coming up for air and then being pushed below the surface
of something. Once when Gately came up for air he found that resident Tiny Ewell was
seated in a chair right up next to the bed. Tiny’s little slim hand was on the bed’s
crib-type railing, and his chin rested on the hand, so his face was right up close.
The ceiling bulged and receded. The room’s only light was what spilled in from the
nighttime hall. Nurses glided down the hall and past the door in subsonic footwear.
A tall and slumped ghostish figure appeared to Gately’s left, off past the blurred
seated square-head boy’s bed, slumped and fluttering, appearing to rest its tailbone
on the sill of the dark window. The ceiling rounded on down and then settled back
flat. Gately rolled his eyes up at Ewell. Ewell had shaved off his blunt white goatee.
His hair was so completely clean and white it took a faint pink cast from the pink
of his scalp below. Ewell had been discoursing to him for an unknown length of time.
It was Gately’s first full night in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. He didn’t
know what night of the week it was. His circadian rhythm was the least of the personal
rhythms that had been scrambled. His right side felt encased in a kind of hot cement.
Also a sick throb in what he assumed was a toe. He wondered dimly about going to the
bathroom, if and when. Ewell was right in the middle of speaking. Gately couldn’t
tell if Ewell was whispering. Nurses glided across the doorway’s light. Their sneakers
were so noiseless the nurses seemed to be on wheels. A stolid shadow of somebody in
a hat was cast obliquely across the hall’s tile floor just outside the room, as if
a stolid figure were seated just outside the door, against the wall, in a hat.

‘My wife’s personal term for soul is
personality
. As in “There’s something incorrigibly dark in your personality, Eldred Ewell, and
Dewars brings it out.” ’

The hall floor was pretty definitely white tile, with a cloudy overwaxed shine in
the bright fluorescence out there. Some kind of red or pink stripe ran down the center
of the hall. Gately couldn’t tell if Tiny Ewell thought he was awake or unconscious
or what.

‘It was in the fall term of third grade as a child that I found myself fallen in with
the bad element. They were a group of tough blue-collar Irish lads bussed in from
the East Watertown projects. Runny noses, home-cut hair, frayed cuffs, quick with
their fists, sports-mad, fond of sneaker-hockey on asphalt,’ Ewell said, ‘and yet,
strangely, I, unable to do even one pull-up in the President’s Physical Fitness Test,
quickly became the leader of the pack we all fell into. The blue-collar lads all seemed
to admire me for attributes that were not clear. We formed a sort of club. Our uniform
was a gray skallycap. Our clubhouse was the dugout of a Little League diamond that
had fallen into disuse. Our club was called the Money-Stealers’ Club. At my suggestion
we went with a descriptive name as opposed to euphemistic. The name was mine. The
Irish lads acquiesced. They viewed me as the brains of the operation. I held them
in a kind of thrall. This was due in large part to my capacity for rhetoric. Even
the toughest and most brutish Irish lad respects a gilded tongue. Our club was formed
for the express purpose of undertaking a bunko operation. We went around to people’s
homes after school, ringing the doorbell and soliciting donations for Project Hope
Youth Hockey. There was no such organization. Our donation-receptacle was a Chock
Full O’ Nuts can with PROJECT HOPE YOUTH HOCKEY written on a strip of masking tape
wrapped around the can. The lad who made the receptacle had spelled
PROJECT
with a
G
in the first draft. I ridiculed him for the error, and the whole club pointed at
him and laughed. Brutally.’ Ewell kept staring at the crude blue jailhouse square
and canted cross on Gately’s forearms. ‘Our only visible credentials were kneepads
and sticks we’d purloined from the P.E. stockroom. By my order, all were held carefully
to conceal the
PPTY W. WTTN ELEM SCH
emblazoned down the side of every stick. One lad had a goalie mask on under his skallycap,
the rest kneepads and carefully held sticks. The kneepads were turned inside-out for
the same reason. I couldn’t even skate, and my mother absolutely forbade rough play
on asphalt. I wore a necktie and combed my hair carefully after each solicitation.
I was the spokesperson. The mouthpiece, the bad lads called me. They were Irish Catholics
all. Watertown from east to west is Catholic, Armenian, and Mixed. The Eastside boys
all but genuflected to my gift for bullshit. I was exceptionally smooth with adults.
I rang doorbells and the lads arrayed themselves behind me on the porch. I spoke of
disadvantaged youth and team spirit and fresh air and the meaning of competition and
alternatives to the after-school streets’ bad element. I spoke of mothers in support-hose
and war-injured older brothers with elaborate prostheses cheering disadvantaged lads
on to victory against far better-equipped teams. I discovered that I had a gift for
it, the emotional appeal of adult rhetoric. It was the first time I felt personal
power. I was unrehearsed and creative and moving. Hard-case homeowners who came to
the door in sleeveless Ts holding tallboys of beer with stubble and expressions of
minimal charity were often weeping openly by the time we left their porch. I was called
a fine lad and a good kid and a credit to me Mum and Da. My hair was tousled so often
I had to carry a mirror and comb. The coffee can became hard to carry back to the
dugout, where we hid it behind a cinderblock bench-support. We’d netted over a hundred
dollars by Halloween. This was a serious amount in those days.’

Tiny Ewell and the ceiling kept receding and then looming in, bulging roundly. Figures
Gately didn’t know from Adam kept popping in and out of fluttery view in different
corners of the room. The space between his bed and the other bed seemed to distend
and then contract with a slow sort of boinging motion. Gately’s eyes kept rolling
up in his head, his upper lip mustached with sweat. ‘And I was revelling in the fraud
of it, the discovery of the gift,’ Ewell was saying. ‘I was flushed with adrenaline.
I had tasted power, the verbal manipulation of human hearts. The lads called me the
gilded blarneyman. Soon the first-order fraud wasn’t enough. I began secretly filching
receipts from the club’s Chock Full O’ Nuts can. Embezzling. I persuaded the lads
it was too risky to keep the can in the open-air dugout and took personal charge of
the can. I kept the can in my bedroom and persuaded my mother that it contained Christmas-connected
gifts and must under no circumstances be inspected. To my underlings in the club I
claimed to be rolling the coins and depositing them in a high-interest savings account
I’d opened for us in the name Franklin W. Dixon. In fact I was buying myself Pez and
Milky Ways and
Mad
magazines and a Creeple Peeple-brand Deluxe Oven-and-Mold Set with six different
colors of goo. This was in the early 1970s. At first I was discreet. Grandiose but
discreet. At first the embezzlement was controlled. But the power had roused something
dark in my personality, and the adrenaline drove it forward. Self-will run riot. Soon
the club’s coffee can was empty by each weekend’s end. Each week’s haul went toward
some uncontrolled Saturday binge of puerile consumption. I doctored up flamboyant
bank statements to show the club, in the dugout. I got more loquacious and imperious
with them. None of the lads thought to question me, or the purple Magic Marker the
bank statements were done in. I was not dealing with intellectual titans here, I knew.
They were nothing but malice and muscle, the worst of the school’s bad element. And
I ruled them. Thrall. They trusted me completely, and the rhetorical gift. In retrospect
they probably could not conceive of any sane third-grader with glasses and a necktie
trying to defraud them, given the inevitably brutal consequences. Any
sane
third-grader. But I was no longer a sane third-grader. I lived only to feed the dark
thing in my personality, which told me any consequences could be forestalled by my
gift and grand personal aura.

‘But then of course eventually Christmas hove into view.’ Gately tries to stop Ewell
and say ‘hove?’ and finds to his horror that he can’t make any sounds come out. ‘The
meaty Catholic Eastside bad-element lads now wanted to tap their nonexistent Franklin
W. Dixon account to buy support-hose and sleeveless Ts for their swarthy blue-collar
families. I held them off as long as I could with pedantic blather on interest penalties
and fiscal years. Irish Catholic Christmas is no laughing matter, though, and for
the first time their swarthy eyes began to narrow at me. Things at school grew increasingly
tense. One afternoon, the largest and swarthiest of them assumed control of the can
in an ugly dugout coup. It was a blow from which my authority never recovered. I began
to feel a gnawing fear: my denial broke: I realized I’d gradually embezzled far more
than I could ever make good. At home, I began talking up the merits of private-school
curricula at the dinner table. The can’s weekly take fell off sharply as holiday expenses
drained homeowners of change and patience. This bear-market in giving was attributed
by some of the club’s swarthier lads to my deficiencies. The whole club began muttering
in the dugout. I began to learn that one could perspire heavily even in a bitterly
cold open-air dugout. Then, on the first day of Advent, the lad now in charge of the
can produced childish-looking figures and announced the whole club wanted their share
of the accrued booty in the Dixon account. I bought time with vague allusions to co-signatures
and a misplaced passbook. I arrived home with chattering teeth and bloodless lips
and was forced by my mother to swallow fish-oil. I was consumed with puerile fear.
I felt small and weak and evil and consumed by dread of my embezzlement’s exposure.
Not to mention the brutal consequences. I claimed intestinal distress and stayed home
from school. The telephone began ringing in the middle of the night. I could hear
my father saying “Hello?
Hello?
” I did not sleep. My personality’s dark part had grown leathery wings and a beak
and turned on me. There were still several days until Christmas vacation. I’d lie
in bed panicked during school hours amid piles of ill-gotten
Mad
magazines and Creeple Peeple figures and listen to the lonely handheld bells of the
Salvation Army Santas on the street below and think of synonyms for
dread
and
doom
. I began to know shame, and to know it as grandiosity’s aide-de-camp. My unspecific
digestive illness wore on, and teachers sent cards and concerned notes. On some days
the door-buzzer would buzz after school hours and my mother would come upstairs and
say “How
sweet,
Eldred,” that there were swarthy and cuff-frayed but clearly good-hearted boys in
gray skallycaps on the stoop asking after me and declaring that they were
keenly
awaiting my return to school. I began to gnaw on the bathroom’s soap in the morning
to make a convincing case for staying home. My mother was alarmed at the masses of
bubbles I vomited and threatened to consult a specialist. I felt myself moving closer
and closer to some cliff-edge at which everything would come out. I longed to be able
to lean into my mother’s arms and weep and confess all. I could not. For the shame.
Three or four of the Money-Stealers’ Club’s harder cases took up afternoon positions
by the nativity scene in the churchyard across from our house and stared stonily up
at my bedroom window, pounding their fists in their palms. I began to understand what
a Belfast Protestant must feel. But even more prospectively dreadful than pummellings
from Irish Catholics was the prospect of my parents’ finding out my personality had
a dark thing that had driven me to grandiose wickedness and left me there.’