Infinite Jest (166 page)

The wet start Gately finally wakes with jars his shoulder and side and sends a yellow
sheet of pain over him that makes him almost scream into the window’s light. For about
a year once at age twenty in Malden he’d slept most nights in a home-built loft in
the dorm of a certain graduate R.N.-nursing program in Malden, with a ragingly addicted
R.N.-nursing student, in the loft, which you needed a five-rung ladder to get up into
this loft and the thing was only a couple of feet under the ceiling, and every
A.M.
Gately’d awake out of some bad dream and sit up with a jolt and thwack his head against
the ceiling, until after some time there was a permanent concavity in the ceiling
and a flattish spot in the curve of the top of his forehead he can still feel, lying
here blinking and holding his head with his good left hand. For a second, blinking
and red with
A.M.
fever, he thinks he sees Ferocious Francis G. in the bedside chair, chin freshly
shaved and dotted with bits of Kleenex, posture stolid, his old man’s saggy little
tits rising slowly under a clean white T-, smiling grimly around blue tubes and an
unlit cigar between his teeth and saying ‘Well kid at least you’re still on this side
of the fuckin’ sod, I guess there’s something to be said for that there. And are you
as yet sober, then?’ the Crocodile says coolly, disappearing and then not reappearing
after several blinks.

The forms and sound in the room is really only three White Flaggers Gately’s never
known or connected with that well, but are apparently here stopping in on their way
to work, to show empathy and support, Bud O. and Glenn K. and Jack J. Glenn K. in
daytime wears the gray jumpsuit and complex utility-belt of a refrigeration technician.

‘And who’s the fellow in the hat outside?’ he’s asking.

Gately grunts in a frantic way that suggests the phoneme
ü.

‘Tall, well-dressed, grumpy, cocky-looking, piggy-eyed, wearing a hat. Civil-Service-looking.
Black socks and brown shoes,’ Glenn K. says, pointing out toward the door where there’s
sometimes been the ominous shadow of a hat.

Gately’s teeth taste long-unbrushed.

‘Looking settled in for a stay, surrounded with sports pages and the takeout foods
of many cultures, Laddie,’ says Bud O., who the story from before Gately’s time goes
once hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In he broke her nose
and bent it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired,
as a daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around
with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek—Bud O.’d tagged her with a left
cross—until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which eventually nurtured and supported
Mrs. O. into eventually telling Bud O. to take a flying fuck to the moon and getting
her nose realigned back out front and leaving him for a male Al-Anon in Birkenstock
sandals. Gately’s bowels have gone watery with dread: he has all-too-clear memories
of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A.’s brown shoes, piggy eyes, Stetson w/ feather,
and penchant for Third World takeout. He keeps grunting pathetically.

Unsure how to be supportive, for a while the Flaggers try to cheer Gately up by telling
him CPR jokes. ‘CPR’ is their term for Al-Anon, which is known to Boston AAs as the
‘Church of Perpetual Revenge.’

‘What’s an Al-Anon Relapse?’ asks Glenn K.

‘It is a twinge of compassion,’ says Jack J., who has a kind of a facial tic.

‘But what is an Al-Anon Salute?’ Jack J. asks back.

The three all pause, and then Jack J. puts the back of his hand to his brow and flutters
his lashes martyrishly at the drop-ceiling. They all three of them laugh. They have
no clue that if Gately actually laughs he’ll tear his shoulder’s sutures. One side
of Jack J.’s face goes in and out of a tortured grimace that doesn’t affect the other
side of his face one bit, something that’s always given Gately the fantods. Bud O.
is waggling his finger disapprovingly at Glenn K., to signify an Al-Anon Handshake.
Glenn K. gives a lengthy impression of an Al-Anon mom watching her alcoholic kid marching
in some parade and getting more and more outraged at how everybody’s out of step except
her kid. Gately closes his eyes and moves his chest up and down a few times in a dumbshow
of polite laughter, so they’ll think they’ve cheered him up and screw. The little
thoracic movements make his dextral regions make him want to bite the side of his
hand in pain. It’s like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface
of sleep and then spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again.

After Rémy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back negatively
for all signs of this veiled performer, M. Fortier and Marathe threw into an effect
this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master Entertainment.
This was to acquire members of the immediate family of the
auteur,
perhaps in public.

Marathe was charged with this operation’s details, for M. Broullîme was now thrust
into technical trouble-killing on the furthering field-tests of viewer willingness;
for one of the newly acquired test-subjects—this was an eccentrically dressed and
extremely irritating without-home man of the streets in a white wig appropriated with
large bags filled of foreign cookware and extremely small-in-size ladies’ undergarments—was
discovered to have been being severing and pushing beneath the room of storage’s closed
door the severed digits of the second of the newly acquired test-subjects—this was
a mis-dressed and severely weakened or addicted man dressed in the clothing of a gauche
woman, carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature—rather than his own digits, marring
the statistics of Brullîme’s field-experiment to such the extent that M. Fortier was
forced to consider whether to allow Brullîme to conduct a lethal technical interview
of the wigged substituter of digits for reasons of anger only. Substantially, a technical
interview of more importance was to be conducted in the city Phoenix far across the
U.S. to the south, a city’s name Fortier had amusement from, and departed before incoming
weather to attend Mlle. Luria P——in this conducting, leaving the trusted Rémy Marathe
to charge details of the preliminary acquisition.

Marathe, who had made his decision and call, did what he could. A direct assault upon
the Academy of Tennis itself was impossible. A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere
except tall and steep hillsides. Their attack must not be direct. Thus the preliminary
was to acquire and replace the tennis children of Québec, known by the A.F.R. to be
even then en route to U.S.A. soil for gala competition with the tennis children of
this Academy. Marathe selected young Balbalis, the one still with both the legs—albeit
paralyzed and stickishly withered, them—to lead the A.F.R. field-detail which must
intercept the provincial players. Marathe, he stayed at the Cambridge shop of the
Antitois, withdrawing frequently to the jazz nights nearby of Ryle’s restaurant. Balbalis
drove the modified van of Dodge north into the increasingly heavy snowstorm. They
bypassed the Pongo checkpoint at Methuen MA. They would place a large mirror in the
deserted road and delude the tennis bus that it must leave the road to avoid impact;
its own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick. Two teams in the van’s back
assembled the mirror’s components. Balbalis would not allow to stop for this assembly;
the snowfall was worse in the Convexity because of the fans to the south. What used
to be Montpelier in Vermont lay between E.W.D. grids but took bad fallout from the
region of Champlain and was unoccupied and ghostly white with snow. Balbalis permitted
at Montpelier a brief stop for final assembly and for those who were incontinent to
change their bags. Balbalis pressed hard to the former place of St. Johnsbury, where
the mirror was installed across the southbound lanes of the U.S. Interstate #91. Balbalis
did not complain that there were no tracks in the snow of the road to be followed.
He never complained. They arrived well early just south of the checkpoint at which
Provincial Autoroute #55 became the Interstate #91. There was a brief period of the
tension when it appeared that the night-vision attachment for the binoculars had been
misplaced. Balbalis remained cool and it was located. The plan was to intercept the
travelling team of players and allow A.F.R.s to arrive at the place in their stead.
Marathe promised to conceive an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult
beards of the false players. There was no smoking in the van while they waited for
the children tennis players of their country to appear at the checkpoint. The bus
was forced to remain at the checkpoint for several minutes. The bus was large and
chartered and appeared warm within. Above its windshield its lit rectangle of destination
displayed the English word for charter. If the bus survived the swerve from the highway’s
mirror and was operational after the crash of swerving, Balbalis would drive this
bus. There was one brief argument over who would be required to drive the van, for
Balbalis refused to leave the van behind them even if the bus was operational. If
the bus was not operational, no more than six junior children as survivors could be
accommodated in the van. The rest would be allowed to die for
leur rai pays
. Balbalis, he showed no preference one or the other way.

Gately dreamed he was with Ennet House resident Joelle van Dyne in a Southern motel
whose restaurant’s authoritarian sign said simply EAT, in the U.S. South, in high
summer, brutally hot, the foliage outside the room’s broken windowscreen a parched
khaki, the air glassy with heat, the ceiling fan rotating at a second-hand’s rate,
the room’s bed a lavish four-poster, tall and squishy, the bedspread nubbly, Gately
supine with his side on fire while newcomer Joelle v.D. raises her veil slightly to
lick the sweat off his lids and temples, whispering so the veil flutters around and
fans him, promising him a
P.M.
of near-terminal pleasures, undressing at the foot of the old tall bed, slowly, her
loose light clothes moist with sweat and falling easily to the bare floor, and an
incredible female body, an inhuman body, the sort of body Gately’s only ever seen
with a staple in its navel, a body like something you’d win in a raffle; and a fifth
post forms on the four-poster, so to speak, which erect post’s long-dormant height
obscures the nude newcomer’s figure; and then when she moves around out of the pulsing
shadow to lean in close and press her inhuman body’s face right up intimately close
to his, she removes the veil, and on top of this body to die for is the unveiled historical
likeness of fucking
Winston Churchill,
complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl, and the ghastliness of the shock
makes the rest of Gately’s body go rigid, the pain of which wakes him with a jolted
attempt to sit up that itself causes such a blast of pain that he half passes back
out again and lies there with rolling eyes and a round mouth.

Gately’s also powerless over memories of the older-type lady that had been their neighbor
when he and his mother shared bed and board with the M.P. A Mrs. Waite. There was
no Mr. Waite. The smeared window of the little empty garage the M.P. kept his weights
in was right next to the spiny neglected garden Mrs. Waite kept in the narrow strip
between the two houses. Mrs. Waite’s house had been shall we say indifferently maintained.
Mrs. Waite’s house had made the Gately house look like the Taj. There was something
wrong about Mrs. Waite. None of the parents said what it was, but none of the kids
were allowed to play in her yard or ring her bell on Halloween. Gately never got clear
on what was supposed to be wrong about her, but the little poor neighborhood’s psyche
throbbed with something dire about Mrs. Waite. Older kids drove across her lawn and
shouted shit that Gately never quite made out, at night. The littler kids thought
they had it: they were pretty sure Mrs. Waite was a witch. Yes, she did look a little
witchy, but who over like fifty didn’t? But the big thing was she kept jars of stuff
she’d jarred herself in her little garage, brown-green viscous nameless vegetoid stuff
in mayonnaise jars stacked on steel shelves and rusty-lidded and bearded with dust.
The littler kids snuck in and broke some of the jars and stole one and ran away in
mortal terror to break it elsewhere and then run again. They dared each other to ride
their bikes in tiny diagonals across the edge of her lawn. They told each other stories
of seeing Mrs. Waite in a pointy hat roasting missing kids whose pictures were on
milk-cartons and pouring the juice into jars. Some of the bigger littler kids even
tried that inevitable gag of putting a paper bag full of dog shit on her stoop and
lighting it. It was somehow a further indictment of Mrs. Waite that she never complained.
She rarely left her house. Mrs. Gately would never say what was wrong about Mrs. Waite
but absolutely forbade Don to fuck with her in any way. Like Mrs. Gately was in any
position to enforce any, like, forbiddings. Gately never fucked with Mrs. Waite’s
stored jars or rode across her lawn, and never much joined in on the witch-stories,
which who needed witches to fear and despise when you had the good old M.P. right
there at the kitchen table. But he was still scared of her. When he’d once seen her
gnarly-eyed face up against the smeared garage window one
P.M.
when he had left the M.P. to beating Mrs. Gately and gone out to lift weights he
screamed and almost dropped the bench-press bar on his Adam’s apple. But over the
long haul of a low-stimulation North Shore childhood, he’d gradually developed a slight
relationship with Mrs. Waite. He’d never all that much liked her; it wasn’t like she
was this lovable but misunderstood old lady; it’s not like he ran to her dilapidated
house to confide in her, or bond. But he went over once or twice, maybe, under circumstances
he’d forgot, and had sat in her kitchen, interfaced a little. She was lucid, Mrs.
Waite, and apparently continent, and there was no pointy hat anywhere in sight, but
her house smelled bad, and Mrs. Waite herself had swollen veiny ankles and little
white bits of that dried paste at the corners of her mouth and about a million newspapers
stacked and mildewing all over the kitchen, and the old lady basically radiated whatever
mixture of unpleasantness and vulnerability it was that made you want to be cruel
to people. Gately was never cruel to her, but it’s not like he loved her or anything.
When Gately went over there the couple times it was mostly when the M.P. was canning
chowder and his mother had passed out in vomit she expected somebody else to clean
up, and he probably wanted to act out his kid’s anger by doing something Mrs. G.’d
pathetically tried to forbid. He didn’t eat much of whatever Mrs. Waite offered. She
never offered him viscous material from a jar. His memories of whatever they discussed
are unspecific. She hung herself, eventually, Mrs. Waite—as in eliminated her own
map—and because it was fall and cool she wasn’t found for maybe weeks after. It wasn’t
Gately who found her. A meter-reader guy found her several weeks after Gately’s eighth
or ninth birthday. Gately’s birthday was the same week as several other kids’s in
the neighborhood, by some chance. Usually Gately’d have his party over with some of
the other kids that were having their birthdays with a party. Hats and Twister, X-Men
videos, cake on Chinette plates, etc. Mrs. Gately was together enough to come a couple
times. In retrospect, the other kids’ parents let Gately have birthdays with them
because they’d felt sorry for him, he’s involuntarily realized. But at some sober
neighbors’ party, part of which was for his own eighth or ninth birthday, he remembers
how Mrs. Waite had left her house and come rung the sober neighbor’s bell and had
brought a birthday cake. For the birthday. A neighborly gesture. Gately’d spilled
the beans on the annual mass party at a kitchen-table interface with her. The cake
was uneven and slightly tilted to one side, but it was dark chocolate and decorated
with four cursive names and had clearly been made with care. Mrs. Waite had spared
Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially
for him. But it was. Mrs. Waite had saved up for a long time to afford to make the
cake, Gately knew. He knew she smoked like a chimney and had given up cigarettes for
weeks to save up for something; she wouldn’t tell him what; she’d tried to make her
scary eyes twinkle when she wouldn’t tell; but he’d seen the mayonnaise jar full of
quarters on a pile of papers and had wrestled with himself over promoting it, and
won. But there were only like nine candles on the cake when the party’s Mom brought
it in, and a couple of the kids having birthdays were like twelve, was the private
tip-off on who the cake was really for. The party’s Mom had taken the cake at the
door and said Thank You but had neglected to invite Mrs. Waite in. Gately was in a
position during Twister in the garage to see Mrs. Waite walking back home across the
street, slowly but very straightly and dignified and upright. A lot of the kids went
to the garage door to look: Mrs. Waite had rarely been seen outside her house before,
and never off her property. The sober Mom brought the cake in the garage and said
it was a Touching Gesture from Mrs. Waite across the street; but she wouldn’t let
anybody eat the cake or even come close enough to it to blow out the nine candles.
The candles didn’t all match. The candles burned down far enough so that there was
a smell of burnt frosting before they went out. The cake sat tilted by itself in a
corner of the clean garage. Gately didn’t defy the sober Mom or any of the kids and
eat a piece of the cake; he didn’t even go near it. He didn’t join in the delicious
whispery arguments about what kind of medical waste or roasted-kid renderings were
in the cake, but he didn’t stand up and argue with the other kids about the fact of
the poisoning, either. Before the party climaxed and the other kids that had got presents
opened their presents, the sober Mom had taken the cake into the kitchen when she
thought nobody was watching and threw it out in the wastebasket. Gately remembers
the cake must have landed upside-down, because the unfrosted side was facing up in
the wastebasket when he snuck in and had a look at the cake. Mrs. Waite had disappeared
back inside her house way before the Mom threw the cake away. There’s no way she could
have seen the Mom take the uneaten cake back inside the house. A couple days later
Gately had promoted a couple packs of Benson & Hedges 100s from a Store 24 and put
them in Mrs. Waite’s mailbox, where junk mail and utility bills were already piling
up. He sometimes rang the bell but never saw her. Her bell had been a buzzer instead
of a bell, he remembers. She got found by a frustrated meter-reader some indefinite
number of weeks after that. The circumstances of her death and discovery became more
dark myth for the littler kids. Gately wasn’t so into self-torture as to think the
cake getting not eaten and getting thrown out was in any way connected with Mrs. Waite
hanging herself. Everybody had their own private troubles, Mrs. Gately had explained
to him, and even at that age he could see her point. It’s not like he’d like mourned
Mrs. Waite, or missed her, or even thought about her even once for many years after
that.