Infinite Jest (167 page)

Which is what makes it somehow worse that his next, even more unpleasant Joelle van
Dyne pain-and-fever dream takes place in what is, unmistakably and unavoidably, Mrs.
Waite’s kitchen, in great detail, right down to the ceiling’s light-fixture full of
dried bugs, the brimming ashtrays, the bar-graph of stacked
Globe
s, the maddening arrhythmic drip of the kitchen sink and the bad smell—a mixture of
mildew and putrid fruit. Gately is in the ladder-back kitchen chair he used to sit
in, the one with one rung broken, and Mrs. Waite is in her chair opposite, seated
on the thing he thought then was a weird pink doughnut instead of a hemorrhoid pillow,
except in the dream Gately’s feet reach all the way to rest on the floor’s dank tile,
and Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House resident Joelle van D., except without
her veil, and what’s more without any clothes, as in starkers, gorgeous, with that
same incredible body as in the other one except here this time with the face not of
a jowly British
P.M.
but of a total female angel, not sexy so much as angelic, like all the world’s light
had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face. Or something. It
looks like somebody, Joelle’s face, but Gately can’t for the life of him place who,
and it’s not just the distraction of the inhumanly gorgeous naked bod below, because
the dream is not like a sex-dream. Because in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle,
is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. Nobody comes right out and says
so; it’s just understood: Gately’s sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing
with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives,
and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you
into the next life. Gately can’t quite make out if it’s like a monologue or if he’s
asking questions and she’s responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain
woman that kills you is always your next life’s mother. This is how it works: didn’t
he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like
he’d missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death’s having to sit
here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial
Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily
kills you is always someone you love, and she’s always your next life’s mother. This
is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private
troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your
welfare above their own, and why there’s always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness
about their obssessive mother-love: they’re trying to make amends for a murder neither
of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death’s explanation of Death goes
on Gately understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he
understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly
becomes his vision of the Death’s Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until
near the end it’s as if he’s seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky
filter that’s the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face
bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks
Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely
unfocused head and says: Wait.

I was in a zoo. There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo. It was close
to a nightmare and it woke me before 0500h. Mario was still asleep, gently lit by
the window’s view of tiny lights down the hill. He lay very still and soundless as
always, his poor hands folded on his chest, as if awaiting a lily. I put in a plug
of Kodiak. His four pillows brought Mario’s chin to his chest when he slept. I was
still producing excess saliva, and my one pillow was moist in a way I didn’t want
to turn on a light and investigate. I didn’t feel good at all. A sort of nausea of
the head. The feeling seemed worst first thing in the morning. I’d felt for almost
a week as if I needed to cry for some reason but the tears were somehow stopping just
millimeters behind my eyes and staying there. And so on.

I got up and went past the foot of Mario’s bed to the window to stand on one foot.
Sometime during the night heavy snow had begun to fall. I had been ordered by deLint
and Barry Loach to stand on the left foot for fifteen minutes a day as therapy for
the ankle. The countless little adjustments necessary to balance on one foot worked
muscles and ligaments in the ankle that were therapeutically unreachable any other
way. I always felt sort of dickish, standing on one foot in the dark with nothing
to do.

The snow on the ground had a purple cast to it, but the falling and whirling snow
was virgin white. Yachting-cap white. I stood on my left foot for maybe five minutes
tops. The Boards and A.P.s
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were three weeks from tomorrow at 0800 in the C.B.S.
³⁴⁵
auditorium at B.U. I could hear a night-custodial crew rolling a mop-bucket somewhere
on another floor.

This was to be the first
A.M.
without dawn drills since Interdependence Day, and everybody was invited to sleep
in until breakfast. There were to be no classes all weekend.

I’d awakened too early yesterday, too. I’d kept seeing Kevin Bain crawling my way
in my sleep.

I straightened up my bed and put the pillow’s wet side down and put on clean sweatpants
and some socks that didn’t smell foul.

The closest Mario comes to snoring is a thin sound he makes at the back of his throat.
The sound is as if he’s drawing out the word
key
over and over. It’s not an unpleasant sound. I estimated a good 50 cm. of snow on
the ground, and it was really coming down. In the purple half-light the West Courts’
nets were half-buried. Their top halves shuddered in a terrible wind. All over the
subdormitory I could hear doors rattling slightly in their frames, as they did only
in a bad wind. The wind gave the snowfall a swirling diagonal aspect. Snow was hitting
the exterior of the window with a sandy sound. The basic view outside the window was
that of a briskly shaken paperweight—the kind with the Xmas diorama and shakeable
snow. The grounds’ trees, fences and buildings looked toylike and miniaturized somehow.
In fact it was hard to distinguish new snow falling from extant snow simply whirling
around in the wind. It only then occurred to me to wonder whether and where we would
play today’s exhibition meet. The Lung wasn’t yet up, but the sixteen courts under
the Lung wouldn’t have accommodated more than an A-only meet anyway. A kind of cold
hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash
of this hope was an even worse feeling than before: I couldn’t remember ever actively
hoping not to have to play before. I couldn’t remember feeling strongly one way or
the other about playing for quite a long time, in fact.

Mario and I had begun to make a practice of keeping the phone console’s power on at
night but turning off the ringer. The console’s digital recorder had a light that
pulsed once for each incoming message. The double flash of the recorder’s light set
up an interesting interference pattern with the red battery-light on the ceiling’s
smoke detector, the two lights flashing in synch on every seventh phone-flash and
then moving slowly apart in a visual Doppler. A formula for the temporal relation
between two unsyncopated flashes would translate spatially into the algebraic formula
for an ellipse, I could see. Pemulis had poured a terrific volume of practical pre-Boards
math into my head for two weeks, taking his own time and not asking for anything in
return, being almost suspiciously generous about it. Then, since the Wayne debacle,
the little tutorials had ceased and Pemulis himself had been very scarce, twice missing
meals and several times taking the truck for long periods without checking with any
of the rest of us about our truck-needs. I didn’t even try to factor in the rapid
single flash of the phone’s power-unit display on the side of the TP; this would make
it some sort calculus thing, and even Pemulis had conceded that I was not hardwired
for anything past algebra and conic sections.

Every November, between I. Day and the WhataBurger Invitational in Tucson AZ, the
Academy holds a semipublic exhibition meet for the ‘benefit’ of E.T.A.’s patrons and
alumni and friends in the Boston area. The exhibition is followed by a semiformal
cocktail party and dance in the dining hall, where players are required to appear
showered and semiformal and available for social intercourse with patrons. Some of
them all but check our teeth. Last year Heath Pearson had appeared for the gala in
a red vest and bellboy’s cap and furry tail, carrying a little organ and inviting
patrons to grind the organ while he capered around chattering. C.T. was unamused.
The whole Fundraiser is a Charles Tavis innovation. C.T. is far better at public relations
and pump-priming than was Himself. The exhibition and gala are possibly the climax
of C.T.’s whole administrative year. He’d determined that mid-November was the best
time for a fundraiser, with the weather not yet bad and the tax-year drawing to a
close but the U.S. holiday season, with its own draining system of demands on goodwill,
not yet under way. For the past three fiscal years, the Fundraiser’s proceeds have
all but paid for the spring’s Southeast tour and the European
terre-batu-
fest of June–July.

The exhibition meet involved both genders’ A and B teams and was always against some
foreign junior squad, to give the whole Fundraising affair a patriotic kicker. The
gentle fiction was that the meet was just one stop for the foreign squad on a whole
vague general U.S. tour, but in truth C.T. usually flew the foreigners in special,
and at some expense. We had in the past done battle with teams from Wales, Belize,
the Sudan, and Mozambique. Cynics might point to an absence of tennis juggernauts
among the opponents. Last year’s Mozambique thing was a particular turkey-shoot, 70–2,
and there’d been an ugly xeno-racist mood among some of the spectators and patrons,
a couple of whom cheerily compared the meet to Mussolini’s tanks rolling over Ethiopian
spearchuckers. Y.D.A.U.’s opponents were to be the Québec Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman
Cup teams, and their arrival from M.I.A.-D’Orval
³⁴⁶
was keenly anticipated by Struck and Freer, who claimed that the Québecois Jr. Wightman
girls were normally sequestered and saw very few coed venues and would be available
for broadening intercultural relations of all kinds.

It was improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan in this kind
of snow, though.

The wind also produced a desolate moaning in all the ventilation ducts. Mario said
‘key’ and sometimes ‘ski,’ drawing them out. It occurred to me that without some one-hitters
to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day
feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any
meaning. I stood on one foot for a couple more minutes, spitting into a coffee can
I’d left on the floor near the phone from the night before. The implied question,
then, would be whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of
the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling. The Penn 4 that was
my hand-strengthening ball for November was on the sill against the window. I’d neither
carried nor squeezed my ball for several days. No one seemed to have noticed.

Mario cedes me full control over the phone’s ringer and answering machine, since he
has trouble holding the receiver and the only messages he ever gets are In-House ones
from the Moms. I enjoyed leaving different outgoing messages on the machine. But I
refused ever to back the messages with music or digitally altered bits of entertainment.
None of the E.T.A. phones was video-capable—another C.T. decision. Under C.T. the
Academy’s manual of honor codes, rules, and procedures had almost tripled in length.
Probably our room’s best message ever was Ortho Stice doing his deadly C.T.-impression,
taking 80 seconds to list possible reasons why Mario and I couldn’t answer the phone
and outlining our probable reactions to all possible caller-emotions provoked my our
unavailability. But at 80 seconds the thing wore thin after a while. Our outgoing
this week was something like ‘This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose
body is not now able…,’ and so on, and then the standard invitation to leave a message.
It was honesty and abstinence week, after all, and this seemed a more truthful message
to leave than the pedestrian ‘This is Hal Incandenza…,’ since the caller would pretty
obviously be hearing a digital recording of me rather than me. This observation owed
a debt to Pemulis, who for years and with several different roommates has retained
the same recursive message—‘This is Mike Pemulis’s answering machine’s answering machine;
Mike Pemulis’s answering machine regrets being unavailable to take a first-order message
for Mike Pemulis, but if you’ll leave a second-order message at the sound of the clapping
hand, Mike Pemulis’s answering machine will…,’ and so on, which has worn so thin that
very few of Pemulis’s friends or customers can abide waiting through the tired thing
to leave a message, which Pemulis finds congenial, since no really relevant caller
would be fool enough to leave his name on any machine of Pemulis’s anyway.

Plus it was also creepy that, when the face’s effulgence becomes the boiled white
of the Trauma Wing ceiling as he comes up with a start up for air, the apparently
real nondream Joelle van D. is leaning over the bed’s crib-railing, wetting Gately’s
big forehead and horror-rounded lips with a cool cloth, wearing sweatpants and a sort
of loose brocaded hulpil whose lavender almost matches the selvage on her clean veil.
The hulpil’s neckline is too high for there to be much cleavage-action as she leans
over him, which Gately regards as probably kind of a mercy. The two brownies Joelle’s
got in her other hand (and her nails are bitten down to the ragged quick, just like
Gately’s) she says she liberated from the nurses’ station and brought down for him,
since Morris H. meant them for him and they’re by all just rights his. But she can
see he’s in no shape to swallow, she says. She smells like peaches and cotton, and
there’s a sweet evil whiff of the discount Canadian gaspers so many of the residents
smoke, and underneath those smells Gately can detect that she’s got on a bit of perfume.
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