Infinite Jest (177 page)

I lay on my back on the carpet of Viewing Room 5, still on the second floor, fighting
the sense that I’d either never been here before or had spent lifetimes just here.
The entire room was panelled in a cool yellow shimmering material called Kevlon. The
viewer took up half the south wall and was dead and gray-green. The carpet’s green
was close to this color, too. The instructional and motivational cartridges were in
a large glass bookcase whose central shelves were long and whose top and bottom shelving
tapered down to almost nothing.
Ovoid
would convey the case’s shape. I had the NASA glass with my toothbrush in it balanced
on my chest. It rose whenever I inhaled. I’d had the NASA glass since I was a little
boy, and its decal of white-helmeted figures waving authoritatively through the windows
of a prototype shuttle was faded and incomplete.

After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson put his wet-combed head in the door and said LaMont
Chu wanted to know whether what was happening outside qualified as a blizzard. It
took over a minute of my not saying anything for him to go away. The ceiling panels
were grotesquely detailed. They seemed to come after you like some invasive E.T.A.
patron backing you up against the wall at a party. The ankle throbbed dully in the
snowstorm’s low pressure. I relaxed my throat and simply let the excess saliva run
post-nasally back and down. The Moms’s mother had been ethnic Québecois, her father
Anglo-Canadian. The term used in the
Yale Journal of Alcohol Studies
for this man was
binge-drinker
. All my grandparents were deceased. Himself’s middle name had been Orin, his father’s
own father’s name. The V.R.’s entertainment cartridges were arrayed on wall-length
shelves of translucent polyethylene. Their individual cases were all either clear
plastic or glossy black plastic. My full name is Harold James Incandenza, and I am
183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet. Himself designed the Academy’s indirect lighting,
which is ingenious and close to full-spectrum. V.R.5 contained a large couch, four
reclining chairs, a midsized recumbency, six green corduroy spectation-pillows stacked
in a corner, three end tables, and a coffee table of mylar with inlaid coasters. The
overhead lighting in every E.T.A. room came from a small carbon-graphite spotlight
directed upward at a complexly alloyed reflecting plate above it. No rheostat was
required; a small joystick controlled the brightness by altering the little spot’s
angle of incidence to the plate. Himself’s films were arranged on the third shelf
of the entertainment-case. The Moms’s full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza,
Ed.D., Ph.D. She is 197 cm. tall in flats and still came up only to Himself’s ear
when he straightened and stood erect. For almost a month in the weight room, Lyle
had been saying that the most advanced level of Vaipassana or ‘Insight’ meditation
consisted in sitting in fully awakened contemplation of one’s own death. I had held
Big Buddy sessions in V.R.5 throughout the month of September. The Moms had grown
up without a middle name. The etymology of the term
blizzard
is essentially unknown. The full-spectrum lighting system had been a labor of love
from Himself to the Moms, who’d agreed to leave Brandeis and head up the Academy’s
academics and had an ethnic Canadian’s horror of fluorescent light; but by the time
the system had been installed and de-bugged, the gestalt of the Moms’s lumiphobia
had extended to all overhead lighting, and she never used her office’s spot-and-plate
system.

Petropolis Kahn put his large shaggy head in and asked what was all this brooha upstairs,
the thumps and cryings-out. He asked whether I was going to breakfast. The scuttlebutt
on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said. I closed my eyes
and recalled that I’d known Petropolis Kahn for three years and three months. Kahn
went away. I could feel his head’s withdrawal from the doorway: a very slight suction
in the room’s air. I needed to fart but had not so far farted. The atomic weight of
carbon is 12.01 and change. A small and carefully monitored game of Eschaton slated
for the mid-
A.M.
, with (according to rumor) Pemulis himself as game-master, was certain to be snowed
out. It had begun to occur to me, driving back from Natick on Tuesday, that if it
came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing
to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant
way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me. The founder of the sub-14’s’
Tunnel Club had been Heath Pearson as a very little boy. The rumor that Pemulis himself
would don the beanie for the next Eschaton came from Kent Blott; Pemulis had been
avoiding me ever since I returned from Natick on Tuesday—as if he sensed something.
The woman behind the register at the Shell station last night had recoiled as I approached
to present my card before pumping, as if she too had seen something in my expression
I hadn’t known was there. The
North American Collegiate Dictionary
claimed that any ‘very heavy’ snowstorm with ‘high winds’ qualified as a blizzard.
Himself, for two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I spoke:
I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking. Mario averred that Himself
had never accused him of not speaking. I tried to recall whether I had ever brought
the subject up with the Moms. The Moms was at pains to be completely approachable
on all subjects except Himself and what had been going on between her and Himself
as Himself withdrew more and more. She never forbade questions about it; she just
got so pained and blurry-faced that you felt cruel asking her anything. I considered
whether Pemulis’s cessation of the math-tutorials was perhaps an oblique affirmation,
a kind of You Are Ready. Pemulis often communicated in a kind of esoteric code. It
was true that I had kept mostly to myself in the room since Tuesday. The condensed
O.E.D.,
in a rare bit of florid imprecision, defined
blizzard
as ‘A furious blast of frost-wind and blinding snow in which man and beast frequently
perish,’ claiming the word was either a neologism or a corruption of the French
blesser,
coined in English by a reporter for Iowa’s
Northern Vindicator
in B.S. 1864. Orin alleged in Y.T.M.P. that when he took the Moms’s car in the morning
he sometimes observed the smeared prints of nude human feet on the inside of the wind-shield.
V.R.5’s heating duct’s grille gave off a sterile hiss. All up and down the hall were
sounds of the Academy coming to life, making competitive ablutions, venting anxiety
and complaints at the possible blizzard outside—wanting to play. There was heavy foot-traffic
in the third-floor hall above me. Orin was going through a period where he was attracted
only to young mothers of small children. A hunched way: she hunches; you hunch. John
Wayne had had a violent allergic reaction to a decongestant and had commandeered the
WETA microphone and publicly embarrassed himself on Troeltsch’s Tuesday broadcast,
apparently, and had been taken to St. Elizabeth’s overnight for observation, but had
recovered quickly enough to come home and then finish ahead even of Stice in Wednesday’s
conditioning run. I missed the entire thing and was filled in by Mario on my return
from Natick—Wayne had apparently said unkind things about various E.T.A. staff and
administration, none of which anyone who knew Wayne and all he stood for had taken
seriously. Relief that he was OK had dominated everyone’s accounts of the whole incident;
the Moms herself had apparently stayed by Wayne’s side late into the night at St.
E.’s, which Booboo felt was estimable and just like the Moms. Simply imagining the
total number of times my chest will rise and fall and rise. If you want prescriptive
specificity you go to a hard-ass: Sitney and Schneewind’s
Dictionary of Environmental Sciences
required 12 cm./hour of continuous snowfall, minimum winds of 60 kph., and visibility
of less than 500 meters; and only if these conditions obtained for more than three
hours was it a blizzard; less than three hours was ‘C-IV Squall.’ The dedication and
sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even
to think about.

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could
actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for
years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at
the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental
to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.
Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight
from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?
This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age
when the questions
why
and
to what
grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped
for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original
sense of
addiction
involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one’s
life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts.
It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt
about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether
his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling
to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only
feigning
feigning. I kept thinking of the Film and Cartridge Studies professor’s final soliloquy
in Himself’s unfinished
Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available
Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency,
the sour parody of academia that the Moms had taken as an odd personal slap. I kept
thinking I really should go up and check on The Darkness. There seemed to be so many
implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and
taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell
door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the
floor.

I was on the floor. I felt the Nile-green carpet with the back of each hand. I was
completely horizontal. I was comfortable lying perfectly still and staring at the
ceiling. I was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality.
Charles Tavis is probably not related to the Moms by actual blood. Her extremely tall
French-Canadian mother died when the Moms was eight. Her father left their potato
farm on ‘business’ a few months later and was gone for several weeks. He did this
sort of thing with some frequency. A binge-drinker. Eventually there would be a telephone
call from some distant province or U.S. state, and one of the hired men would go off
to bail him out. From this disappearance, though, he returned with a new bride the
Moms had known nothing about, an American widow named Elizabeth Tavis, who in the
stilted Vermont wedding photo seems almost certainly to have been a dwarf—the huge
square head, the relative length of the trunk compared to the legs, the sunken nasal
bridge and protruding eyes, the stunted phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon’s
right thigh, one khaki-colored cheek pressed affectionately against his belt-buckle.
C.T. was the infant son she’d brought to the new union, his father a ne’er-do-well
killed in a freak accident playing competitive darts in a Brattleboro tavern just
as they were trying to adjust the obstetric stirrups for the achondroplastic Mrs.
Tavis’s labor and delivery. Her smile in the wedding photo is homodontic. According
to Orin, though, C.T. and the Moms claim Mrs. T. was not a true homodont the way—for
instance—Mario is a true homodont. Every single one of Mario’s teeth is a second bicuspid.
So it was all rather up in the air. The account of the disappearance, darts-accident,
and dental incongruity comes from Orin, who claimed to have decocted it all out of
an extended one-sided conversation he had with a distraught C.T. in the waiting room
of Brigham and Women’s OB/GYN while the Moms was prematurely delivering Mario. Orin
had been seven years old; Himself had been in the delivery room, where apparently
Mario’s birth was quite a touch-and-go thing. The fact that Orin was our one and only
source for data shrouded the whole thing in further ambiguity, as far as I was concerned.
Pinpoint accuracy had never been Orin’s forte. The wedding photo was available for
inspection, of course, and confirmed Mrs. Tavis as huge-headed and wildly short. Neither
Mario nor I had ever approached the Moms on the issue, possibly out of fear of reopening
psychic wounds from a childhood that had always sounded unhappy. All I knew for sure
was that I had never approached her about it.

For their part, the Moms and C.T. have never represented themselves as anything other
than unrelated but extremely close.

The attack of panic and prophylactic focus’s last spasm now suddenly almost overwhelmed
me with the intense horizontality that was all around me in the Viewing Room—the ceiling,
floor, carpet, table-tops, the chairs’ seats and the shelves at their backs’ tops.
And much more—the shimmering horizontal lines in the Kevlon wall-fabric, the very
long top of the viewer, the top and bottom borders of the door, the spectation pillows,
the viewer’s bottom, the squat black cartridge-drive’s top and bottom and the little
push-down controls that protruded like stunted tongues. The seemingly endless horizontality
of the couch’s and chairs’ and recumbency’s seats, the wall of shelves’ every line,
the varied horizontal shelving of the ovoid case, two of every cartridge-case’s four
sides, on and on. I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality
piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich. I felt awakened to
a basic dimension I’d neglected during years of upright movement, of standing and
running and stopping and jumping, of walking endlessly upright from one side of the
court to the other. I had understood myself for years as basically vertical, an odd
forked stalk of stuff and blood. I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed,
now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.