Infinite Jest (171 page)

‘Jesus, and you’ve just been sitting here all this time.’

‘Well shit I was embarrassed. And it never got quite bad enough to yell out. I kept
thinking if it gets a little worse I’ll go on and yell out. And then along about 03
I quit feeling the forehead altogether.’

‘You’ve just been sitting here waiting for someone to happen along. Chanting quietly
to keep up your courage.’

‘I was just praying like hell it wouldn’t be Pemulis. God only knows what that son
of a whore’d’ve thunk of to do to me here all helpless and immobilated. And Troeltsch
is sawing logs just inside that door there, with his fucking mike and cable and ambitions.
I’ve been praying he don’t wake up. And let’s don’t even
mention
that son of a bitch Freer.’

I looked at the door. ‘But that’s Axhandle’s single. What would Troeltsch be doing
sleeping in Axhandle’s room?’

Ortho shrugged. ‘Trust that I’ve had plenty of time to listen and identify different
folks’ snores, Inc.’

I looked from Stice to Axford’s door and back. ‘So you’ve just been sitting here listening
to sleep-noises and watching your breath expand and freeze on the window?’ I said.
Imagining it seemed somehow unendurable: me just sitting there, stuck, well before
sunrise, alone, too embarrassed to call out, my own exhalations fouling the window
and denying me even a view to divert attention from the horror. I stood there horrified,
admiring The Darkness’s ballsy calm.

‘There was a kind of real bad half-hour when my upper lip up and got stuck too, in
the breath, when the breath froze. But I breathed the sucker loose. I breathed real
hot and fast. Goddamn near hyper-v’d. I was scared if I passed out I’d slump on forward
and the whole face’d get stuck. Goddamn forehead’s bad enough.’

I put my toothbrush and NASA glass down on the cantilevered vent-module. Rooms’ vents
were recessed, hallway-vents protrusive. E.T.A.’s annular heating system produced
a lubricated hum I had stopped really hearing years ago. The Headmaster’s House still
had oil heat; it always sounded like a maniac was hammering at the pipes far below.

‘Dark, prepare yourself mentally,’ I said. ‘I’m going to help pull you loose.’

Stice didn’t seem to hear this. He seemed oddly preoccupied for a man occlusively
sealed to a frozen window. He was feeling at the back of his head with real vigor,
which is what he did when he was preoccupied. ‘You believe in shit, Hal?’

‘Shit?’

‘I don’t know. Little-kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit.’

‘Just going to get around behind you and yank and we’ll pop you right off,’ I said.

‘Somebody did come by before,’ he said. ‘There was somebody standing back there about
maybe an hour back. But he just stood there. Then he went away. Or… it.’ A full-body
shiver.

‘It’ll be like that last little bit of ankle-tape. We’ll pull you back so hard and
fast you won’t feel a thing.’

‘I’m getting these real unpleasant memories of that piece of Ingersoll’s tongue on
Nine’s net-post that stayed there til spring.’

‘This is no saliva-and-subzero-metal situation, Dark. This is some freakish occlusive
seal. Glass doesn’t conduct heat like metal conducts heat.’

‘There ain’t too fucking much heat involved in this window right here, buddy-ruff.’

‘And I’m not sure what you mean,
paranormal
. I believed in vampires when I was small. Himself allegedly used to see his father’s
ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow
spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn’t speaking sometimes when I was sitting
right there speaking to him. So we kind of wrote it all off. Orth, I guess I don’t
know what to think about paranormal shit.’

‘Then plus I think something bit me. On the back of the head here, some bug that knew
I was helpless and couldn’t see.’ Stice dug again at the red area behind his ear.
There was a kind of weltish bump there. It wasn’t in a vampire-related area of the
neck.

‘And good old Mario says he’s seen paranormal figures, and he’s not kidding, and Mario
doesn’t lie,’ I said. ‘So belief-wise I don’t know what to think. Subhadronic particles
behave ghostishly. I think I withhold all prejudgment on the whole thing.’

‘Well all right then. It was good it was you come by then.’

‘The big thing’s going to be to stiffen the old neck, Dark, to avoid whiplash. We’ll
pull you off there like a cork from a bottle of Moët.’

‘Pull my sorry ass off here, Inc, and I’ll take and show you some parabnormal shit
that’ll shake your personal tree but good,’ Stice said, bracing. ‘ ’n’t said nothing
to nobody but Lyle about it, and I’m sick of the secretness of it. You won’t pre-formulize
any judgments, Inc, I know.’

‘You’re going to be fine,’ I said. I got right behind Stice and bent slightly and
got an arm around his chest. His wooden chair creaked as I braced my knee against
it. Stice began breathing fast and hard. His parotitic jowls flapped a little as he
breathed. Our cheeks were almost pressed together. I told him I was going to pull
on the count of Three. I actually pulled on Two, so he couldn’t brace himself. I pulled
back as hard as I could, and after a stutter of resistance Stice pulled back with
me.

There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head
back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh
half a meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort
of elastic from hell. The dermis of Stice’s forehead was still stuck fast, but the
abundant loose flesh of Stice’s bulldog face had risen and gathered to stretch and
connect his head to the window. And for a second I saw what might be considered Stice’s
real face, his features as they would be if not encased in loose jowly prairie flesh:
as every mm. of spare flesh was pulled up to his forehead and stretched, I got a glimpse
of Stice as he would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine-featured, and
slightly rodential face, aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window
from beneath the pink visor of stretched spare skin.

All this took place in less than a second. For just an instant we both stayed there,
straining backward, listening to the little Rice-Krispie sound of his skin’s collagen-bundles
stretching and popping. His chair was leaning way back on its two rear legs. Then
Stice shrieked in pain: ‘Jesus God put it
back!
’ The little second face’s blue eyes protruded like cartoon eyes. The fine little
thin-lipped second mouth was a round coin of pain and fear.

‘Put it back put it back put it back!’ Stice yelled.

I couldn’t just let go, though, for fear that the elastic stretch would snap Stice
forward into the window and send his face through the glass. I eased him forward,
watching the chair’s front legs descend slowly to the floor; and the tension of the
forehead’s skin decreased, and Stice’s full fleshy round face reappeared over the
small second face, and covered it, and we eased him forward until nothing but a few
centimeters of decollagenated forehead-skin hanging and sagging at about eyelash-level
remained as evidence of the horrific stretch.

‘Jesus God,’ Stice panted.

‘You are really and truly stuck, Orth.’

‘Fuck me
skating
did that ever hurt.’

I tried to rotate a kink out of my shoulder. ‘We’re going to have to thaw it off,
Dark.’

‘You’re not getting close to this forehead with a saw, bud. I’ll set right-cheer till
spring first, see if I don’t.’

Then Jim Troeltsch’s towering
A.M.
-cowlick and then face and fist emerged through Axford’s doorway just over Stice’s
hunched shoulder. Stice had been right. Being in somebody else’s room even after Lights
Out was an infraction; staying there overnight was too far out even to mention in
the regulations. ‘Reports of screaming have reached us here in the Eyewitness News-Center,’
Troeltsch said into his fist.

‘The fuck out of here, Troeltsch,’ Stice said.

‘
Thaw,
Ortho. Warm water. Heat the window. Hot water. Dissolve the adhesion. Heating pad.
Hot pack from Loach’s office or something.’

‘Loach’s door can’t be dickied,’ Stice said. ‘Don’t wake him up on Fundraiser day
yet.’

Troeltsch extended the fist. ‘Reports of high-pitched screams have led this reporter
to an unfolding scene of dramatic crisis, and we’re going to attempt to get a word
with the youngster at the center of all the commotion.’

‘Tell him to pipe down and get back with that hand or so help me Jesus, Hal.’

‘The Darkness accidentally put his forehead against the window here when it was wet
and it froze and he’s been out here stuck all night,’ I told Troeltsch, ignoring the
big fist he held to my face. I squeezed Stice’s shoulder. ‘I’ll go get Brandt to rig
something warm.’

It was as if some tacit agreement had been reached not even to bring up Troeltsch’s
being in Axford’s room or where Axford was. It was hard to know which would be more
disturbing, Axford’s not being in his room all night or Axford being in there behind
the ajar door, meaning Troeltsch and Axford had both spent the night in one small
single with exactly one bed. The universe seemed to have aligned itself so that even
acknowledging it would violate some tacit law. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to any appearance
of impropriety or unthinkable possibilities. It was hard to imagine he’d be this obnoxious
if he felt he had something to be discreet about. He was standing on tiptoe to see
over the window’s breath-line, one hand cupped over his ear as if to hold a headset.
He whistled softly. ‘Plus in addition now reports of mind-boggling snowfall are coming
in to the News-Center.’

I grabbed my toothbrush and NASA glass from the vent’s protrusion; since the Betel
Caper,
³⁵²
only the worst kind of naïf leaves his toothbrush unattended around E.T.A. ‘Keep
an eye on Stice and my NASA glass right there, Jim, if you would.’

‘Any comment on the mixture of pain, cold, embarrassment, and weather-related feelings
you must be feeling, Mr. Stice is it?’

‘Don’t leave me immobilated with Troeltsch, man, Hal. He’s going to make me talk to
his hand.’

‘A weather-related drama unfolding around the original plight of an embarrassed man
trapped by his own forehead,’ Troeltsch was saying into his fist, facing his own reflection
in the window, trying with the other big hand to quash the cowlick, as I trotted and
slid to a stop in my socks just past the door to the stairwell.

Kenkle and Brandt were ageless in the special desiccated way janitors are ageless,
somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. They were inseparable and essentially unemployable.
Boredom had years ago led us to Lateral Alice Moore’s minimally crypto-protected employee
files, and Brandt’s file had listed his S.-B. I.Q. as Submoronic-to-Moronic. He was
bald and somehow at once overweight and wiry. Both right and left temples carried
red jagged surgical scars of unknown origin. His affective range consisted of different
intensities of grin. He lived with Kenkle in an attic apartment in Roxbury Crossing
overlooking Madison Park High School’s locked and cordoned playground, famed site
of unsolved ritual mutilations in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. His major
attraction for Kenkle seemed to consist in the fact that he neither walked away nor
interrupted when Kenkle was speaking. Even in the stairwell I could hear Kenkle discoursing
on their Thanksgiving plans and directing Brandt’s mop-work. Kenkle was technically
black, as in Negroid, though he was more the burnt-sienna color of a spoiled pumpkin.
But his hair was a black person’s hair, and he wore it in thick dreadlocks that looked
like a crown of wet cigars. An academic diamond in the very rough Roxbury Crossing,
he’d received his doctorate in low-temperature physics from U.Mass. at twenty-one
and taken a prestigious sinecure at the U.S. Office of Naval Research, then at twenty-three
had been court-martialed out of the O.N.R. for offenses that changed each time you
asked him. Some event between twenty-one and twenty-three seemed to have broken him
at several strategic points, and he’d retreated from Bethesda back to the front stoop
of his old Roxbury Crossing apartment building, where he read Ba’hai texts whose jackets
he covered with intricately folded newspaper, and spat spectacular parabolas of quivering
phlegm into New Dudley Street. He was dark-freckled and carbuncular and afflicted
with excess phlegm. He was an incredible spitter, and alleged his missing incisors
had been removed ‘for facilitating the expec-toratory process.’ We all suspected he
was either hypomanic or ’drine-addicted or both. His expression was very serious at
all times. He discoursed nonstop to poor Brandt, using spit as a sort of conjunction
between clauses. He spoke loudly because they both wore earplugs of expanding foam—people’s
nightmare-cries gave them the fantods. Their custodial technique consisted of Kenkle
spitting with pinpoint accuracy onto whatever surface Brandt was to clean next and
Brandt trotting like a fine hunting dog from glob to glob, listening and grinning,
laughing when appropriate. They were moving away from me down the hall toward the
second floor’s east window, Brandt making great shining arcs with his doll’s-head
mop, Kenkle pulling the gunmetal bucket and lobbing signifying phlegm over Brandt’s
bent back.

‘And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt—Christmas—Christmas morning—What
is the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface,
for a child?—A present, Brandt—Something you have not earned and which formerly was
out of your possession is now in your po-ssession—Can you sit there and try to say
there is no symbolic rela-tion between unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing
a young lady?’

Brandt bobbed and mopped, uncertain whether to laugh.

Himself had met Kenkle and Brandt on the T (Kenkle and Brandt apparently rode the
T at night, recreationally), trying somehow to make it up to Enfield from the Back
Bay via the Orange Line,
³⁵³
and somewhat the worse for wear. Kenkle and Brandt not only got Himself onto the
right color train and kept him propped up between them all the way up the eternity
of Comm. Ave., they’d seen him safely down the T-stop’s steep iron stairs and across
traffic and up the hill’s serpentine driveway to the portcullis, and had been invited
in at 0200 by Himself to continue whatever low-temperature discussion he and Kenkle
had been having as Brandt carried Himself up the hill in a fireman’s carry (Kenkle
recalls that night’s discussion being about the human nose as an erectile organ, but
the only really sure bet is that it was one-sided); and the duo had ended up being
cast as black-veiled Noh-style attendants in Himself’s
Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony,
and had been menially employed at E.T.A. ever since, though always on the graveyard
shift, since Mr. Harde loathed Kenkle with a passion.