Infinite Jest (162 page)

Gately’s eyes keep rolling up in his head, only partly from pain.

Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being
only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure
about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It’s like a lit gasper was
psychic ballast for him or something. Everything he said to Gately seemed like it
was going to be the last thing he said right before he looked at his watch and slapped
his forehead and left.

Thrust said whatever that Nuck that the residents allege shot him shot him with was
serious ordnance, because there’d been bits of Gately’s shoulder and bowling shirt
all over the complex’s little street. Thrust pointed at the huge bandage and asked
whether they’d talked to Gately yet about was he going to get to keep what was left
of the mutilated shoulder and arm. Gately found that the only audible sound he could
make sounded like a run-over kitten. Thrust mentioned that Danielle S.’d been over
to Mass Rehab with Burt F.S. and had reported how they were doing miraculous things
with prosfeces these days. Gately’s eyes were rolling around in his head and he was
making pathetic little scared aspirated sounds as he pictured himself with a hook
and parrot and patch making piratical ‘Arr Matey’ sounds from the AA podium. He felt
a terrible certainty that the whole nerve-assembly network that connected the human
voice-box to the human mind and let somebody ask for crucial legal and medical feedback
must run through the right human shoulder. All kinds of fucking shunts and crazy interconnections
with nerves, he knew. He imagined himself with one of those solar-cell electric shaver
voice-box prosfeces he has to hold up to his throat (maybe with his hook), trying
to Carry the Message with it from the podium, sounding like an automatic teller or
ROM-audio interface. Gately wanted to know what day the next day was and whether any
of Lenz’s Nucks had been demapped, and what the official capacity of the guy was in
the hat who’d been sitting just outside the door to the room either last night or
the night before, his hat’s shadow cast in a kind of parallelogram across the open
doorway, and if the guy was still there, assuming the sight of the guy’s hatted shadow
had been valid and not phantasmic, and he wondered how they went about cuffing you
if one of your arms’ shoulders was mutilated and the size of your head. If Gately
took anything deeper than a half-breath, a mind-bending sheet of pain goes down his
right side. He even breathed like a sick kitten, more like throbbing than breathing.
Thrust said Hester Thrale had apparently disappeared sometime during the freakas and
never came back. Gately could remember her running screaming off into the urban night.
Thrust said her Alfa Romeo got towed the next
A.M.
right along with Lenz’s bum Duster, and her stuff’s been duly bagged and is on the
porch and everything familiar like that. Thrust said they found this mysteriously
huge stash of high-quality Irish Luggage during the Staff’s search of Lenz’s room,
and the House looks to be fixed for trash- and eviction-bags for the next fiscal year.
Discharged residents’ bagged possessions stay on the porch for three days, and Gately’s
trying to calculate the present date from this fact. Thrust says Emil Minty got a
Full House Restriction for getting observed removing one of Hester Thrale’s undergarments
from her bag on the porch, for reasons nobody much wants to speculate about. Kate
Gompert and Ruth van Cleve supposedly went to hit an NA meeting in Inman Square and
got supposedly mugged and separated, and then only Ruth van Cleve showed up back at
the House, and Pat’s sworn out a P.C. warrant for Gompert because of the girl’s other
psych and suicide issues. Gately discovers he doesn’t even all that much care whether
anybody thought to call Stavros L. at the Shattuck about Gately’s day job. Thrust
smoothed his hair back and said what else let’s see. Johnette Foltz is so far covering
Gately’s shifts and said to say he’s in her prayers. Chandler Foss finished out his
nine months and graduated but came back the next morning and hung around for Morning
Meditation, which has to be a good sign sobriety-wise for the old Chandulator. Jennifer
Belbin did get indicted on the bad-check issue up in Wellfleet Circuit Court, but
they’re going to let her finish out her residency at the House before anything goes
to trial, which her P.D. said graduating the House is guaranteed to get her bit cut
in at least half. The Asst. Director had gone up to court with Belbin on her own time.
Doony Glynn’s still laid up with the diveritis thing, and can be neither coaxed nor
threatened out of his fetal position in bed, and the House Manager’s trying to breastwork
through the red tape at Health to get them to OK him admission to St. E.’s even though
he’s got insurance fraud on his yellow sheet, part of his own past-wreckage. A guy
that had gone through the House back when Thrust did and had stayed sober in AA for
four solid years had suddenly out of nowhere slipped up and took The First Drink the
same day as the Lenz freakas, and predictably ended getting totally shitfaced, and
went and fell off the end of the Fort Point pier—like literally took a long walk on
a short pier, apparently—and sank like a rock, and the memorial service is today,
which is why Thrust is going to have to take off in a second here, he says. The new
kid Tingley’s coming out of the linen closet for up to an hour at a time and is taking
solid food and Johnette’s quit lobbying to have the kid sent over to Met State. The
even newer new guy now that’s come in to take Chandler Foss’s spot’s name is Dave
K. and is one grim story to behold, Thrust assures him, a junior executive guy at
ATHSCME Air Displacement, an upscale guy with a picket house and kids and a worried
wife with tall hair, who this Dave K.’s bottom was he drank half a liter of Cuerva
at some ATHSCME Interdependence Day office party and everything like that and got
in some insane drunken limbo-dance challenge with a rival executive and tried to like
limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low, and got his spine all fucked
up in a limbo-lock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy scuttles around the Ennet
House living room like a crab, his scalp brushing the floor and his knees trembling
with effort. Danielle S. thinks Burt F.S. might have batorial ammonia or some kind
of chronic lung thing, and Geoff D.’s trying to get the other residents to sign a
petition to get Burt barred from the kitchen and dining room because Burt can’t cover
his mouth when he coughs, understandably. Thrust says Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are
taking meals in their room and are under orders not to come down or go near any windows,
because of what happened to the map of the Nuck they allegedly stomped and everything
like that. Gately mews and blinks like mad. Thrust says everybody’s being real supportive
of Jenny B. and encouraging her to turn the Wellfleet indictment over to her Higher
Power. The Shed staff are still rolling the catatonic lady’s wheelchair over from
the Shed to the House on scheduled
A.M.
’s, and Thrust says Johnette had to write up Minty and Diehl for putting one of those
gag-arrows that are curved in the middle and look like there’s an arrow through your
head over the catatonic lady’s paralyzed head yesterday and leaving her slumped by
the TP like that all day. Plus Thrale’s panties; so suddenly in twelve hours Minty’s
just one more offense away from getting the Shoe, which Thrust is already personally
shining the tip of his very sharpest shoe, in hopes. The biggest issue at the House
Bitch and Complaint meeting was that earlier this week it turns out Clenette H. had
brung in this whole humongous shitload of cartridges she said they were getting ready
to throw in the dumpster up at the swank tennis school up the hill she works at, and
she promoted them and hauled them down to the House, and the residents all have a
wild hair because Pat says Staff has to preview the cartridges for suitability and
sex before they can be put out for the residents, and the residents are all bitching
that this’ll take forever and it’s just the fucking Staff hoarding the new entertainment
when the House’s TP’s just about on its hands and knees in the entertainment desert
starving for new entertainment. McDade bitched at the meeting that if he had to watch
Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence
one more time he was going to take a brody off the House’s roof.

Plus Thrust says Bruce Green hasn’t shared word one to Staff about his feelings about
anything to do with Lenz or Gately’s embryoglio; that he just sits around waiting
for somebody to read his mind; that his roommates have complained that he thrashes
and shouts about nuts and cigars in his sleep.

Calvin Thrust, four years sober, straddling the backwards chair, keeps inclining himself
ever more forward in the posture of a man who’s at any moment going to push up off
out of the chair and leave. He reports how something deep in the previously hopelessly
arrogant-seeming ‘Tiny’ Ewell seems like it’s broken and melted, spiritually speaking:
the guy shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, was heard weeping in the 5-Man head,
and was observed by Johnette taking out the kitchen trash in secret even though his
Chore this week was Office Windows. Thrust had discovered fine dining in sobriety,
and has the beginning of chins. His hair is slicked back with odorless stuff at all
times, and he has a more or less permanent sore on his upper lip. Gately for some
reason keeps imagining Joelle van Dyne dressed as Madame Psychosis sitting in a plain
chair in the 3-Woman room eating a peach and looking out the open window at the crucifix
atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s prolix roof. The crucifix isn’t big, but it’s up so
high it’s visible from most anywhere in Enfield-Brighton. Sees Joelle delicately pulling
the veil out to get the peach up under it. Thrust says Charlotte Treat’s T-cell count
is down. She’s needlepointing Gately some kind of
GET BETTER A DAY AT A TIME ASSUMING THAT’S GOD’S WILL
doily, but it’s been slow going, because Treat’s developed some kind of goopy Virus-related
eye infection that’s got her bumping into walls, and her counselor Maureen N. at the
Staff Meeting wanted Pat to consider having her transferred to an HIV halfway house
up in Everett that’s got some recovering addicts in there. Morris Hanley, speaking
of T-cells, has baked some cream-cheese brownies for Gately as a nurturing gesture,
but then the twats at the Trauma Wing’s nurses’ station, like,
impounded
them from Thrust when he came up, but he’d had a couple on the way over in the bloodstained
’Vette and he could assure Don that Hanley’s brownies were worth killing a loved one
for and everything like that. Gately feels a sudden rush of anxiety over the issue
of who’s cooking the House supper in his absence, like will they know to put corn
flakes in the meat loaf, for texture. He finds Thrust insufferable and wishes he’d
just fucking go already, but has to admit he’s less conscious of the horrific pain
when somebody’s there, but that that’s mostly because the drowned panic of not being
able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody’s saying is so awful it
sort of dwarfs the pain. Thrust puts his unlit gasper behind his ear where Gately
predicts hair-tonic will render it unsmokable, looks conspiratorially around back
over each shoulder, leans in so his face is visible between two bars of the bed’s
side-railing, and bathes Gately’s face in old eggs and smoke as he leans in and quietly
says that Gately’ll be psyched to hear that all the residents that were at the embryoglio—except
Lenz and Thrale and the ones that aren’t in a legal position to step forward and like
that, he says—he says they’ve most of them all come forward and filed depositions,
that the BPD’s Finest, plus some rather weirder Federal guys with goofy-looking archaic
crew cuts, probably involved because of the like inter-O.N.A.N. element of the Nucks—here
Gately’s big heart skips and sinks—have come around and been voluntarily admitted
inside, on Pat’s written OK, and they took depositions, which is like testifying on
paper, and the depositions look to be basically 110% behind Don Gately and support
a justifiable señorio of either self-defense or Lenz-defense. Several testimonies
indicate the Nucks gave the impression of being under the influence of aggressive-type
Substances. The single biggest problem right now, Thrust says Pat says, is the missing
alleged Item. As in the .44 Item Gately was plugged with’s whereabouts are missing,
Thrust says. The last resident to depose to seeing it was Green, who says he took
it away from the Nuck the nigger girls stomped, whereupon he, Green, says he dropped
it on the lawn. Whereupon it liked vanished from legal view. Thrust says that in his
legal view the Item’s the thing that makes the difference between a señorio of ironshod
self-defense and one of just maybe a huge fucking beef in which Gately got mysteriously
plugged at some indefinite point while rearranging a couple Canadian maps with his
huge bare hands. Gately’s heart is now somewhere around his bare hairy shins, at the
mention of Federal crewcuts. His attempted plea for Thrust to come out and say did
he actually kill anybody
did he
sounds like that crushed kitten again. The pain of the terror is past standing, and
it helps him surrender and quit trying, and he relaxes his legs and decides Thrust
gets to not say whatever he wants, that the reality right this second is that he’s
mute and powerless over Thrust. Thrust leans in and hugs the back of the chair and
says Clenette Henderson and Yolanda Willis are on Full House Restriction in their
room to keep them from coming down and maybe fucking themselves over legally in a
deposition. Because the Nuck with the plaid hat with the ear-flaps and the missing
alleged Item had expired on the spot from a spike heel through the right eye, as he
was getting the shit stomped out of him as only female niggers can stomp, and everything
like that, and Yolanda Willis had very shrewdly left the shoe and spike heel right
there protruding from the guy’s map with her toe-prints all over its insides—meaning
presumably the shoe’s—so producing the Item was going to be in her strong legal interests
too, as well, as Thrust analyzes the legal landscape. Thrust says Pat’s limped around
and appealed to every single resident personally, and everybody’s submitted more or
less voluntarily to a room- and property-search and everything like that, and still
no large-caliber Item has turned up, though Nell Gunther’s hidden Oriental-knife collection
sure made an impression. Thrust predicts it’ll be strongly in Gately’s lego-judicial
interest and everything like that to ransack his brain and mind for where and with
who he last saw the alleged gun. The sun was starting to go down over the West Newton
hills through the double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight
against the far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater vents kept making a sound
like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to get dark out is when the
ceiling breathes. And everything like that.