Infinite Jest (160 page)

Gately has no idea how Ewell feels about him making no responses, whether Ewell doesn’t
like it or even notices it or what. He can breathe OK, but something in his raped
throat won’t let whatever’s supposed to vibrate to speak vibrate.

‘Finally, on the day before my gastroenterologist appointment, when my mother was
down the street at a speculum party, I crept downstairs from my sick bed and stole
over a hundred dollars from a shoebox marked I.B.E.W. LOCAL 517 PETTY SLUSH in the
back of my father’s den’s closet. I’d never dreamed of resorting to the shoebox before.
Stealing from my own parents. To remit funds I’d stolen from dull-witted boys with
whom I’d stolen them from adults I’d lied to. My feelings of fear and despicability
only increased. I now felt ill for real. I lived and moved in the shadow of something
dark that hovered just overhead. I vomited without aid of emetic, now, but secretly,
so I could return to school; I couldn’t face the prospect of a whole Christmas vacation
of swarthy sentries pounding their palms outside the house. I converted my father’s
union’s bills to small change and paid off the Money-Stealers’ Club and got pummelled
anyway. Apparently on general bad-element principles. I discovered the latent rage
in followers, the fate of the leader who falls from the mob’s esteem. I was pummelled
and given a savage wedgie and hung from a hook in my school locker, where I remained
for several hours, swollen and mortified. And going home was worse; home was no refuge.
For home was the scene of the third-order crime. Of theft cubed. I couldn’t sleep.
I tossed and turned. There were night terrors. I was unable to eat, no matter how
long after supper I had to stay at the table. The more worried about me my parents
became, the greater my shame. I felt a shame and personal despicability no third-grader
should have to feel. The holidays were not jolly. I looked back over the autumn and
failed to recognize anyone named Eldred K. Ewell Jr. It no longer seemed a question
of insanity or dark parts of me. I had stolen from neighbors, slum-children, and family,
and bought myself sweets and toys. Under any tenable definition of
bad,
I was bad. I resolved to toe the virtuous line from then on. The shame and horror
was too awful: I had to remake myself. I resolved to do whatever was required to see
myself as good, remade. I never knowingly committed another felony. The whole shameful
interval of the Money-Stealers’ Club was moved to mental storage and buried there.
Don, I’d forgotten it ever happened. Until the other night. Don, the other night,
after the fracas and your display of reluctant
se offendendo,
³³⁷
after your injury and the whole aftermath… Don, I dreamed the whole mad repressed
third-grade interval of grandiose perfidy all over again. Vividly and completely.
When I awoke, I was somehow minus my goatee and my hair was center-parted in a fashion
I haven’t favored for forty years. The bed was soaked, and there was a gnawed-looking
cake of McDade’s special anti-acne soap in my hand.’

Gately starts to short-term recall that he was offered I.V.-Demerol for the pain of
his gunshot wound immediately on admission to the E.R. and has been offered Demerol
twice by shift-Drs. who haven’t bothered to read the HISTORY OF NARCOTICS DEPENDENCY
NO SCHEDULE C-IV + MEDIC. that Gately’d made Pat Montesian swear she’d make them put
in italics on his file or chart or whatever, first thing. Last night’s emergency surgery
was remedial, not extractive, because the big pistol’s ordnance had apparently fragmented
on impacting and passed through the meters of muscle that surrounded Gately’s Humorous
ball and Scalpula socket, passing through and missing bone but doing great and various
damage to soft tissues. The E.R.’s Trauma Specialist had prescribed Toradol-IM
³³⁸
but had warned that the pain after the surgery’s general anesthetic wore off was
going to be unlike anything Gately had ever imagined. The next thing Gately knew he
was upstairs in a Trauma Wing room that trembled with sunlight and a different Dr.
was speculating to either Pat M. or Calvin T. that the invasive foreign body had been
treated with something unclean, beforehand, possibly, because Gately’s developed a
massive infection, and they’re monitoring him for something he heard as
Noxzema
but is really toxemia. Gately also wanted to protest that his body was 100% American,
but he seemed temporarily unable to vocalize aloud. Later it was nighttime and Ewell
was there, intoning. It was totally unclear what Ewell wanted from Gately or why he
was choosing this particular time to share. Gately’s right shoulder was almost the
same size as his head, and he had to roll his eyes up and over like a cow to see Ewell’s
hand on the railing and his face floating above it.

‘And how will I administer the Ninth Step when it comes time to make amends? How can
I start to make reparations? Even if I could remember the homes of the citizens we
defrauded, how many could still be there, living? The club lads have doubtless scattered
into various low-rent districts and dead-end careers. My father lost the I.B.E.W.
³³⁹
account under the Weld administration and has been dead since 1993. And the revelations
would kill my mother. My mother is very frail. She uses a walker, and arthritis has
twisted her head nearly all the way around on her neck. My wife jealously protects
my mother from all unpleasant facts regarding me. She says someone has to do it. My
mother believes right this minute I’m at a nine-month Banque-de-Genève-sponsored tax-law
symposium in the Alsace. She keeps sending me knitted skiwear that doesn’t fit, from
the rest home.

‘Don, this buried interval and the impost I’ve carried ever since may have informed
my whole life. Why I was drawn to tax law, helping wealthy suburbanites two-step around
their fair share. My marriage to a woman who looks at me as if I were a dark stain
at the back of her child’s trousers. My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal
drinking may have been some instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of despicability,
submerge them in an amber sea.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Ewell said.

Gately was on enough Toradol-IM to make his ears ring, plus a saline drip with Doryx.
³⁴⁰

‘I don’t want to remember despicabilities I can do nothing about. If this is a sample
of the “More Will Be Revealed,” I hereby lodge a complaint. Some things seem better
left submerged. No?’

And everything on his right side was on fire. The pain was getting to be emergency-type
pain, like scream-and-yank-your-charred-hand-off-the-stove-type pain. Parts of him
kept sending up emergency flares to other parts of him, and he could neither move
nor call out.

‘I’m scared,’ from what seemed somewhere overhead and rising, was the last thing Gately
heard Ewell whisper as the ceiling bulged down toward them. Gately wanted to tell
Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D. with Ewell’s feelings, and that if he,
Tiny, could just hang in and tote that bale and put one little well-shined shoe in
front of the other everything would end up all right, that the God of Ewell’s Understanding
would find some way for Ewell to make things right, and then he could let the despicable
feelings go instead of keeping them down with Dewars, but Gately couldn’t connect
the impulse to speak with actual speech, still. He settled for trying to reach his
left hand across and pat Ewell’s hand on the railing. But his own breadth was too
far to reach across. And then the white ceiling came all the way down and made everything
white.

He seemed to sort of sleep. He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds writhing
darkly and screaming on down the beach at Beverly MA, the winds increasing over his
head until Herman the polyurethane vacuole burst from the force, leaving a ragged
inhaling maw that tugged at Gately’s XXL Dr. Dentons. A blue stuffed brontosaurus
was sucked upward out of the crib and disappeared into the maw, spinning. His mother
was getting the shit beaten out of her by a man with a shepherd’s crook in the kitchen
and couldn’t hear Gately’s frantic cries for help. He broke through the crib’s bars
with his head and went to the front door and ran outside. The black clouds up the
beach lowered and roiled, funnelling sand, and as Gately watched he saw a tornado’s
snout emerge from the clouds and slowly lower. It looked as if the clouds were either
giving birth or taking a shit. Gately ran across the beach to the water to escape
the tornado. He ran through the crazed breakers to deep warm water and submerged himself
and stayed under until he ran out of breath. It was now no longer clear if he was
little Bimmy or the grown man Don. He kept coming up briefly for a great sucking breath
and then going back under where it was warm and still. The tornado stayed in one place
on the beach, bulging and receding, screaming like a jet, its opening a breathing
maw, lightning coming off the funnel-cloud like hair. He could hear the tiny tattered
sounds of his mother calling his name. The tornado was right by the beach house and
the whole house trembled. His mother came out the front door, wild-haired and holding
a bloody Ginsu knife, calling his name. Gately tried to call for her to come into
the deep water with him, but even he couldn’t hear his calls against the scream of
the storm. She dropped the knife and held her head as the funnel pointed its pointy
maw her way. The beach house exploded and his mother flew through the air toward the
funnel’s intake, arms and legs threshing, as if swimming in wind. She vanished into
the maw and was pulled spinning up into the tornado’s vortex. Shingles and boards
followed her. No sign of the shepherd’s crook of the man who’d hurt her. Gately’s
right lung burned horribly. He saw his mother for the last time when lightning lit
up the funnel’s cone. She was whirling around and around like something in a drain,
rising, seeming to swim, bluely backlit. The burst of lightning was the white of the
sunlit room when he came up for air and opened his eyes. His mother’s tiny rotating
imago faded against the ceiling. What seemed like heavy breathing was him trying to
scream. The skinny bed’s sheets were soaked and he needed a piss something bad. It
was daytime and his right side was in no way numb, and he was immediately nostalgic
for the warm-cement feeling of when it was numb. Tiny Ewell was gone. His every pulse
was an assault on his right side. He didn’t think he could stand it for even another
second. He didn’t know what would happen, but he didn’t think he could stand it.

Later somebody who was either Joelle van D. or a St. E’s nurse in a U.H.I.D. veil
was running a cold washcloth over his face. His face was so big it took some time
to cover it all. It seemed too tender a touch on the cloth for a nurse, but then Gately
heard the clink of I.V. bottles being changed or R.N.ishly messed with somewhere overhead
behind him. He was unable to ask about changing the sheets or going to the bathroom.
Some time after the veiled lady left, he just gave up and let the piss go, and instead
of feeling wet heat he heard the rising metallic sound of something filling up somewhere
near the bed. He couldn’t move to lift the covers and see what he was hooked up to.
The blinds were up, and the room was so bright-white in the sunlight everything looked
bleached and boiled. The guy with either the square head or the box on his head had
been taken off someplace, his bed unmade and one crib-railing down. There were no
ghostish figures or figures in mist. The hallway was no brighter than the room, and
Gately couldn’t see any shadows of anybody in a hat. He didn’t even know if last night
had been real. The pain kept making his lids flutter. He hadn’t cried over pain since
he was four. His last thought before letting his lids stay shut against the brutal
white of the room was that he’d maybe been castrated, which was how he’d always heard
the term
catheterized
. He could smell rubbing alcohol and a kind of vitamin stink, and himself.

At some point a probably real Pat Montesian came in and got her hair in his eye when
she kissed his cheek and told him if he could just hang in and concentrate on getting
well everything would be fine, that everything at the House was back to normal, more
or less, and essentially fine, that she was so sorry he’d had to handle a situation
like that alone, without support or counsel, and that she realized full well Lenz
and the Canadian thugs hadn’t given him enough time to call anybody, that he’d done
the very best he could with what he’d had to work with and had nothing to feel horrid
about, to let it go, that the violence hadn’t been relapse-type thrill-seeking violence
but simply doing the best he could at that moment and trying to stand up for himself
and for a resident of the House. Pat Montesian was dressed as usual entirely in black,
but formally, as in for taking somebody to court, and her formalwear looked like a
Mexican widow’s. She really had said the words
thug
and
horrid
. She said not to worry, the House was a community and it took care of its own. She
kept asking if he was sleepy. Her hair’s red was a different and less radiant red
than the red of Joelle van D.’s hair. The left side of her face was very kind. Gately
had very little understanding of what she was talking about. He was kind of surprised
the Finest hadn’t come calling already. Pat didn’t know about the remorseless A.D.A.
or the suffocated Nuck: Gately’d tried hard to share openly about the wreckage of
his past, but some issues still seemed suicidal to share about. Pat said that Gately
was showing tremendous humility and willingness sticking to his resolution about nothing
stronger than non-narcotic painkillers, but that she hoped he’d remember that he wasn’t
in charge of anything except putting himself in his Higher Power’s hands and following
the dictates of his heart. That codeine or maybe Percoset
³⁴¹
or maybe even Demerol wouldn’t be a relapse unless his heart of hearts that knew
his motives thought it would be. Her red hair was down and looked uncombed and mashed
in on the side; she looked frazzled. Gately wanted very much to ask Pat about the
legal fallout of the other night’s thug-fracas. He realized she kept asking if he
was sleepy because his attempts to speak looked like yawns. His inability to still
speak was like speechlessness in bad dreams, airless and hellish, horrid.