Infinite Jest (16 page)

‘Well,’ the doctor said slowly, nodding to indicate he had heard the feelings the
young woman was expressing, ‘Well, I’m happy to discuss treatment options with you,
Katherine. But I have to say right now I’m curious about what you started it sounded
like to me to maybe start to indicate what might have occurred, something, two weeks
ago to make you feel these feelings now. Would you be comfortable talking to me about
it?’

‘Either ECT or you could just sedate me for a month. You could do that. All I’d need
is I think a month at the outside. Like a controlled coma. You could do that, if you
guys want to help.’

The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.

And she gave him back a frightening smile, a smile empty of all affect, as if someone
had contracted her circumorals with a thigmotactic electrode. The teeth of the smile
evidenced a clinical depressive’s classic inattention to oral hygiene.

She said ‘I was thinking I was about to say you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you.
But then I remembered where I am.’ She made a small sound that was supposed to be
laughter; it did sound jagged, dentate.

‘I was going to say I’ve thought sometimes before like the feeling maybe had to do
with Hope.’

‘Hope.’

Her arms had been crossed over her breasts the whole time, and though the room was
overheated the patient rubbed each palm continually over her upper arms, behavior
one associates with chill. The position and movement shielded her inner arms from
view. The doctor’s eyebrows had gone synclinal from puzzlement without his awareness.

‘Bob.’

‘Bob.’ The doctor was anxious that his failure to have any idea what the girl was
referring to would betray itself and accentuate her feelings of loneliness and psychic
pain. Classic unipolars were usually tormented by the conviction that no one else
could hear or understand them when they tried to communicate. Hence jokes, sarcasm,
the psychopathology of unconscious arm-rubbing.

Kate Gompert’s head was rolling like a blind person’s. ‘Jesus what am I
doing
here. Bob Hope. Dope. Sinse. Stick. Grass. Smoke.’ She made a quick duBois-gesture
with thumb and finger held to rounded lips. ‘The dealers down where I buy it some
of them make you call it Bob Hope when you call, in case anybody’s accessed the line.
You’re supposed to ask is Bob in town. And if they have some they say “Hope springs
eternal,” usually. It’s like a code. One kid makes you ask him to please commit a
crime. The dealers that stay around any length of time tend to be on the paranoid
side. As if it would fool anybody who knew enough to bother to access the band on
the call.’ She seemed decidedly more animated. ‘And one particular guy with snakes
in a tank in a trailer in Allston, he—’

‘So drugs, then, you’re saying you feel may be a factor,’ the doctor interrupted.

The depressed young woman’s face emptied once more. She engaged briefly in something
the staffers on Specials called the Thousand-Meter Stare.

‘Not “
drugs,
” ’ she said slowly. The doctor smelled shame in the room, sour and uremic. Her face
had become distantly pained now.

The girl said: ‘Stopping.’

The doctor felt comfortable saying once again that he was not sure he understood what
she was trying to share with him.

She now went through a series of expressions that made it clinically impossible for
the doctor to determine whether or not she was entirely sincere. She looked either
pained or trying somehow to suppress hilarity. She said ‘I don’t know if you’ll believe
me. I’m worried you’ll think I’m crazy. I have this thing with pot.’

‘Meaning marijuana.’

The doctor was oddly sure that Kate Gompert pretended to sniff instead of engaging
in a real sniff. ‘Marijuana. Most people think of marijuana as just some minor substance,
I know, just like this natural plant that happens to make you feel good the way poison
oak makes you itch, and if you say you’re in trouble with Hope—people’ll just laugh.
Because there’s much worse drugs out there. Believe me I know.’

‘I’m not laughing at you, Katherine,’ the doctor said, and meant it.

‘But I love it
so much
. Sometimes it’s like the center of my life. It does something to me, I know, that’s
not good, and I got told point-blank not to smoke, on the Parnate, because Dr. Garton
said no one knew what certain combinations do yet and it’d be roulette. But after
a while I always think to myself it’s been a while and things will be different somehow
this time if I do, even on the Parnate, so I do again, I start again. I’ll start out
doing just like a couple of hits off a duBois after work, to get me through dinner,
because dinner with my mother and me is—well, but and pretty soon after a while I’m
in my room with the fan pointed out the window all night, doing one-hitters and exhaling
at the fan, to kill the smell, and I make her say I’m not there if anybody calls,
and I lie about what I’m doing in there all night even if she doesn’t ask, sometimes
she asks and sometimes she doesn’t. And then after a while I’m smoking joints at work,
at breaks, going in the bathroom and standing on the toilet and blowing it out the
window, there’s this tiny window up high with the glass frosted and all filthy and
cobwebby, and I hate having my face up next to it, but if I clean it off I’m afraid
Mrs. Diggs or somebody will be able to tell somebody’s been doing something up around
the window, standing there in high heels on the rim of the toilet, brushing my teeth
all the time and using up Collyrium
³⁰
by the bottleful and switching the console to audio and always needing more water
before I answer the console because my mouth’s too dry to talk, especially on the
Parnate, the Parnate makes my mouth dry anyways. And pretty soon I’m totally paranoid
they know I’m stoned, at work, sitting there in the office, high, reeking and I’m
the only one that can’t tell I reek, I’m like so obsessed with Do They Know, Can They
Tell, and then after a while I’m having my mother call in sick for me so I can stay
home after she goes in to work and have the whole place to myself with nobody to worry
about Do They Know, and smoke out the fan, and spray Lysol all over and stir Ginger’s
litter box around so the whole place reeks of Ginger, and smoke and draw and watch
terrible daytime stuff on the TP because I don’t want my mother to see any cartridge-orders
on days I’m supposed to be in bed sick, I start to get obsessed with Does She Know.
I’m getting more and more miserable and fed up with myself for smoking so much, this
is after a couple weeks of it, is all, and I start getting high and thinking about
nothing except how I have to quit smoking all this Bob so I can get back to work and
start saying I’m here when people call, so I can start living some kind of damn
life
instead of just sitting around in pajamas pretending I’m sick like a third-grader
and smoking and watching TP again, and so after I’ve smoked the last of whatever I’ve
got I always say No More, This Is It, and I throw out my papers and my one-hitter,
I’ve probably thrown about fifty one-hitters in dumpsters, including some nice wood
and brass ones, including a couple from Brazil, the land-barge guys must go through
our sector’s dumpster once a day looking to get another good one-hitter. And anyways
I quit. I do stop. I get sick of it, I don’t like what it does to me. And I go back
to work and work my fanny off, to make up for the last couple weeks and get a leg
up on like building momentum for a whole new start, you know?’

The young woman’s face and eyes were going through a number of ranges of affective
configurations, with all of them seeming inexplicably at gut-level somehow blank and
maybe not entirely sincere.

‘And so,’ she said, ‘but then I quit. And a couple of weeks after I’ve smoked a lot
and finally stopped and quit and gone back to really living, after a couple of weeks
this
feeling
always starts creeping in, just creeping in a little at the edges at first, like
first thing in the morning when I get up, or waiting for the T to go home, after work,
for supper. And I try to deny it, the feeling, ignore it, because I fear it more than
anything.’

‘The feeling you’re describing, that starts creeping in.’

Kate Gompert finally took a real breath. ‘And then but no matter what I do it gets
worse and worse, it’s there more and more, this filter drops down, and the feeling
makes the fear of the feeling way worse, and after a couple weeks it’s there all the
time, the feeling, and I’m totally inside it, I’m in it and everything has to pass
through it to get in, and I don’t want to smoke any Bob, and I don’t want to work,
or go out, or read, or watch TP, or go out, or stay in, or either do anything or not
do anything, I don’t want
anything
except for the feeling to go
away
. But it doesn’t. Part of the feeling is being like willing to do anything to make
it go away. Understand that.
Anything
. Do you understand? It’s not wanting to hurt myself it’s wanting to
not hurt
.’

The doctor hadn’t even pretended to try to take notes on all this. He couldn’t keep
himself from trying to determine whether the ambient blank insincerity the patient
seemed to project during what appeared, clinically, to be a significant gamble and
move toward trust and self-revealing was in fact projected by the patient or was somehow
counter-transferred or -projected onto the patient from the doctor’s own psyche out
of some sort of anxiety over the critical therapeutic possibilities her revelation
of concern over drug-use might represent. The time this thinking required looked like
sober and thoughtful consideration of what Kate Gompert said. She was again gazing
at her feet’s interactions with the empty boating sneakers, her face moving between
expressions associated with grief and suffering. None of the clinical literature the
doctor had read for his psych rotation suggested any relation between unipolar episodes
and withdrawal from cannabinoids.

‘So this has happened in the past, prior to your other hospitalizations, then, Katherine.’

Her face, foreshortened by its downward angle, was working in the spread, writhing
configurations of weeping, but no tears emerged. ‘I just want you to shock me. Just
get me out of this. I’ll do anything you want.’

‘Have you explored this possible connection between your cannabis use and your depressions
with your regular therapist, Katherine?’

She did not respond directly as such. Her associations began to loosen, in the doctor’s
opinion, as her face continued to work dryly.

‘I had shock before and it got me out of this. Straps. Nurses with their sneakers
in little green bags. Anti-saliva injections. Rubber thing for your tongue. General.
Just some headaches. I didn’t mind it at
all
. I know everybody thinks it’s horrible. That old cartridge, Nichols and the big Indian.
Distortion. They give you a general here, right? They put you under. It’s not that
bad. I’ll go willingly.’

The doctor was summarizing her choice of treatment-option, as was her right, on her
chart. He had extremely good penmanship for a doctor. He put her
get me out of this
in quotation marks. He was adding his own post-assessment question,
Then what?,
when Kate Gompert began weeping for real.

And just before 0145h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home and uncovered
her hair and came in and saw the Near Eastern medical attaché and his face and tray
and eyes and the soiled condition of his special recliner, and rushed to his side
crying his name aloud, touching his head, trying to get a response, failing to get
any response to her, he still staring straight ahead; and eventually and naturally
she—noting that the expression on his rictus of a face nevertheless appeared very
positive, ecstatic, even, you could say—she eventually and naturally turning her head
and following his line of sight to the cartridge-viewer.

Gerhardt Schtitt, Head Coach and Athletic Director at the Enfield Tennis Academy,
Enfield MA, was wooed fiercely by E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. James Incandenza, just about
begged to come on board the moment the Academy’s hilltop was shaved flat and the place
was up and running. Incandenza had decided he was going to bring Schtitt on board
or bust—this even though Schtitt had then just lately been asked to resign from the
staff of a Nick Bollettieri camp in Sarasota because of a really unfortunate incident
involving a riding crop.

By now, though, pretty much everybody now at E.T.A. feels as though stories about
Schtitt’s whole corporal-punitive thing must have been pumped up out of all sane proportion,
because even though Schtitt still does favor those high and shiny black boots, and
yes the epaulets, still, and now a weatherman’s telescoping pointer that’s a clear
stand-in for the now-forbidden old riding crop, he has, Schtitt, at near what must
be seventy, mellowed to the sort of elder-statesman point where he’s become mostly
a dispenser of abstractions rather than discipline, a philosopher instead of a king.
His felt presence is here mostly verbal; the weatherman’s pointer has not made corrective
contact with even one athletic bottom in Schtitt’s whole nine years at E.T.A.

Still, although he now has all these
Lebensgefährtins
³¹
and prorectors to administer most of the necessary little character-building cruelties,
Schtitt does like his occasional bit of fun, still.

So but when Schtitt dons the leather helmet and goggles and revs up the old F.R.G.-era
BMW cycle and trails the sweating E.T.A. squads up the Comm. Ave. hills into East
Newton on their
P.M.
conditioning runs, making judicious use of his pea-shooter to discourage straggling
sluggards, it’s usually eighteen-year-old Mario Incandenza who gets to ride along
in the sidecar, carefully braced and strapped, the wind blowing his thin hair straight
back off his oversized head, beaming and waving his claw at people he knows. It’s
possibly odd that the leptosomatic Mario I., so damaged he can’t even grip a stick,
much less flail at a moving ball with one, is the one kid at E.T.A. whose company
Schtitt seeks out, is in fact pretty much the one person with whom Schtitt speaks
candidly, lets his pedagogical hair down. He’s not close to his prorectors, particularly,
Schtitt, and treats Aubrey deLint and Mary Esther Thode with a formality that’s almost
parodic. But often of a warm evening sometimes Mario and Coach Schtitt will find themselves
out alone under the East Courts’ canvas pavilion or the towering copper beech west
of Comm.-Ad., or at one of the initial-scarred redwood picnic tables off the path
out behind the Headmaster’s House where Mario’s mother and uncle live, Schtitt savoring
a post-prandial pipe, Mario enjoying the smells of the calliopsis alongside the grounds’
quincunx paths, the sweetish pines and the briers’ yeasty musk coming up from the
hillside’s slopes. And he actually likes the sulphury odor of Schtitt’s obscure Austrian
blend. Schtitt talks, Mario listens, generally. Mario is basically a born listener.
One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget
you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop.
It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be
shy about. That’s why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners,
deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening,
the beaming and bradykinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows
only he can truly feel, here.