Infinite Jest (179 page)

I may have been dozing. Some more heads came and awaited response and left. I may
have dozed. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to eat if I was not hungry. This
presented itself as almost a revelation. I hadn’t been hungry in over a week. I could
remember when I was always hungry, constantly hungry.

Then at some point Pemulis’s head appeared in the doorway, his strange twin-towered
A.M.
cowlick bobbing as he looked back over each shoulder out into the hall. His right
eye was either twitchy or swollen from sleep; something was wrong with it.

‘Mmyellow,’ he said.

I pretended to shade my eyes. ‘Howdy there stranger.’

It is not Pemulis’s way to apologize or explain or worry that you might think ill
of him. In this he reminded me of Mario. This almost regal lack of insecurity is hard
to put together with his crippling neurasthenia on-court.

‘ ’s up?’ he said, not moving from the doorway.

I could see my asking him where he’d been all week leading to so many different possible
responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating
I could barely get out that I’d just been lying here on the floor.

‘Lying here is all,’ I told him.

‘So I just got told,’ he said. ‘The Petropulator mentioned hysterics.’

It was almost impossible to shrug lying supine on thick shag. ‘See for yourself,’
I said.

Pemulis came all the way in. He became the only thing in the room that understood
itself as basically vertical. He didn’t look very good; his color wasn’t good. He
had not shaved, and a dozen little black bristles jutted from the ball of his chin.
He gave the impression of chewing gum even though he was not chewing gum.

He said ‘Thinking?’

‘The opposite. Thought-prophylaxis.’

‘Feeling a little punk?’

‘Can’t complain.’ I rolled my eyes up at him.

He made a sharp glottal stop. He moved toward the periphery of my vision and fit himself
into the seam of two walls behind me; I heard him sliding down to assume the back-supported
squat he sometimes liked.

The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn. I was thinking of the final film-lecture in
Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms
… and then of C.T.’s misadventure at Himself’s funeral. The Moms had had Himself interred
in her family’s traditional plot in L’Islet Province. I heard a whoop and two crashes
directly overhead. My rib cage contracted and expanded.

‘Incster?’ Pemulis said after a time.

A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave
seems airy and risen and plump, like dough.

‘Hal?’ Pemulis said.

‘Javol.’

‘We’ve got some really important interfacing to do, brother.’

I didn’t say anything. There were too many potential responses, both witty ones and
earnest ones. I could hear Pemulis’s cowlicks brush each wall as he looked to either
side, and the slight sound of a small zipper being played with.

‘I’m thinking we could go someplace discreet and really interface.’

‘I’m a highly tuned horizontal antenna tuned in to you lying right here.’

‘I was meaning could we go somewheres.’

‘So this urgency all of a sudden?’ I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish,
that melodic dip-rise-dip. ‘All week: not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this
about urgency?’

‘Seen your Mums around lately?’

‘Haven’t seen her all week. Doubtless she’s over helping C.T. arrange a weather-venue.’
I paused. ‘I haven’t seen him all week either, come to think,’ I said.

‘The Eschaton’s a no-go,’ Pemulis said. ‘The map’s a mess out there.’

‘We’re going to get an announcement about the Québec kids very soon, I can feel it,’
I said. ‘I’m that highly tuned in this position.’

‘What say let’s skip the sausage-analog and whip down to Steak ’N Sundae and eat.’

There was an extended pause as I ran a response-tree. Pemulis was zipping and unzipping
something with a short zipper. I couldn’t decide. I finally had to choose almost at
random. ‘I’m trying to cut down on patronizing places with “ ’N” in their name.’

‘Listen.’ I heard his knees creak as he leaned in toward the top of my head. ‘About
the
tu-savez-quoi
—’

‘The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That’s definitely off, Mike. Talk
about the map being a mess.’

‘That’s part of what we need to interface about, if you’d get off your literally your
ass here.’

I spent a minute watching the NASA glass fall and rise. ‘Don’t even start, M.M.’

‘What start?’

‘We’re on hiatus, remember? We’re living like Shi’ite Moslems for the thirty days
you miraculously blarneyed the guy into giving us.’

‘Blarney wasn’t why we got it, Inc, is the thing.’

‘And now, what, twenty days to go. We’re going to produce urine like a mullah’s babe,
we agreed.’

‘This isn’t—’ Pemulis started.

I farted, but it didn’t produce a noise. I was bored. I couldn’t remember a time when
Pemulis had bored me. ‘And I do not need you launching temptation-rhetoric my way,’
I said.

Keith Freer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his bare arms crossed.
He was still wearing the weird unitard he slept in, which made him look like someone
who tore phone books in half at a sideshow.

‘Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?’
he said.

‘We’re con
vers
ing here,’ Pemulis told him.

I half sat up. ‘Flesh?’

Freer looked down at me. ‘This is nothing to laugh at I don’t think Hal. There’s I
swear to fucking God a human strip of forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window,
and what looks like two eyebrows, and bits of nose. And now Tall Paul says down in
the lobby Stice was seen coming out of the infirmary wearing something out of Zorro.’

Pemulis was completely vertical, standing again; I could hear his knees as he rose.
‘It’s like a tête-à-tête in here, brother. We’re in here bunkered, mano a—’

‘Stice got stuck to the window,’ I explained, lying all the way back down. ‘Kenkle
and Brandt were going to detach him with warm water from a janitorial bucket.’

Pemulis said ‘How do you get stuck to a window?’

‘Well from the looks it looks like they detached half his face from his head,’ Freer
said, feeling at his own forehead and shuddering a little.

Kieran McKenna’s little porcine snout appeared in a gap under Freer’s arm. He still
wore his stupid full-head gauze wrap for his supposed bruised skull. ‘Did you guys
get to see The Darkness? Gopnik said he looks like a piece of cheese pizza where somebody
tore the cheese off. Gopnik said Troeltsch is charging two bucks a look.’ He ran off
toward the stairwell without waiting for a reply, his pocket jingling madly. Freer
looked at Pemulis and opened his mouth, then apparently reconsidered and followed
off down the hall. We could hear a couple of sarcastic whistles at Freer’s unitard.

Pemulis reappeared at the top of my vision; his right eye was definitely twitching.
‘This is what I meant about going someplace discreet. When have I ever urgently asked
you to dialogue before, Inc?’

‘Certainly not within the last few days, Mike, that’s for sure.’

There was an extended pause. I raised my hands over my face and looked at their shapes
against the indirect lights.

Pemulis finally said ‘Well, I’m going to go make sure I eat before I have to see Stice
without a fucking forehead.’

‘Have an analog for me,’ I said. ‘Let me know if there’s word on the meet. I’ll eat
if I’m going to have to play.’

Pemulis licked his palm and tried to get his cowlicks to behave. From my vantage he
was high overhead and upside-down. ‘So are you going to get up and go up and get dressed
and stand on one foot with that opera thing on at some point? Because I could eat
and then come up. We can tell Mario we need to mano-à-tête.’

Now I was making a cage of my hands and watching the light through its shape as I
rotated it. ‘Will you do me a favor? Get
Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available
Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency
out for me. It’s about a dozen cartridges in from the right on the third shelf down
in the entertainment-case. Cue it up to about 2300, 2350 maybe? The last five minutes
or so.’

‘The third shelf down,’ I said as he scanned, tapping a foot. ‘They’ve got all Himself’s
stuff together on the third shelf.’

He scanned. ‘
Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators? Fun with Teeth? Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend?
I haven’t even heard of half your Dad’s shit that’s here.’

‘It’s
Friend,
not
Fiend
. Either it’s mislabeled or the label’s peeling. And they’re supposed to be alphabetized.
It ought to be right next to
Flux in a Box
.’

‘And me using the poor guy’s lab,’ Pemulis said. He loaded the player and turned on
the viewer, his knees popping again as he squatted to set the cue to 2350. The huge
screen hummed in a low pitch that ascended as it began to warm up, the screen taking
on a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird. Pemulis’s feet were bare and I
looked at the calluses on his heels. He tossed the cartridge’s case carelessly on
a couch or chair behind me and looked down. ‘What the fuck’s
Fun with Teeth
supposed to be about?’

I tried to shrug against the friction of the carpet. ‘Pretty much what it says it’s
about.’ The funeral had been held on 5 or 6 April in St. Adalbert, a small town built
around spud-storage facilities fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity.
We’d all had to fly up by way of Newfoundland because of the volume of waste-displacement
launches that spring. And commercial airlines hadn’t yet had data on high-altitude
Dioxin levels over the Concavity. Cloud-cover prevented our seeing much of the New
Brunswick coast, which I’m told was a mercy. What happened at the funeral service
itself was simply that a circling gull scored a direct white hit on the shoulder of
C.T.’s blue blazer, and that when he opened his mouth in shock at the direct hit,
a large blue-bodied fly flew right into his mouth and was hard to extract. Several
persons laughed. It was no huge or dramatic thing. The Moms probably laughed hardest
of anyone.

The TP’s tracker chugged and clicked, and the viewer bloomed. Pemulis had been wearing
parachute pants and a tam-o’-shanter and lensless spectacles, but no shoes. The cartridge
started close to what I’d wanted to review, the protagonist’s climactic lecture. Paul
Anthony Heaven, all 50 kilos of him, gripping the lectern with both hands so you could
see that he was missing his thumbs, the sad dyed strands combed over his bald spot
visible because he had his head down, reading the lecture in the deadening academic
monotone that Himself so loved. The monotone was the reason why Himself used Paul
Anthony Heaven, a nonprofessional, by trade a data-entry drone for Ocean Spray, in
anything that required a deadening institutional presence—Paul Anthony Heaven had
also played the threatening supervisor in
Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat,
the Massachusetts State Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety in
Safe Boating Is No Accident,
and a Parkinsonian corporate auditor in
Low-Temperature Civics
.

‘Thus the Flood’s real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of hydrophobia
on a pandemic scale,’ the protagonist was reading aloud. Peterson’s
The Cage
was running on a large screen behind the lectern. A number of shots of undergraduates
with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking
at their faces with blank intensity, established that the climactic lecture wasn’t
coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. ‘We thus become,
in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some
essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations
of God,’ the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern’s
text. The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of
audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always
either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap
betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘
auteur
’ pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not
entertaining enough—these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they
do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to
a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitaliadoodles
on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit
³⁶⁶
—‘For while
clinamen
and
tessera
strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while
kenosis
and
daemonization
act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic
askesis
which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead’—in
a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave—and yet all the time weeping,
Paul Anthony Heaven, as an upward hall full of kids all scan their mail, the film-teacher
not sobbing or wiping his nose on his tweed sleeve but silently weeping, very steadily,
so that tears run down Heaven’s gaunt face and gather on his underslung chin and fall
from view, glistening slightly, below the lectern’s frame of sight. Then this too
began to seem familiar.

He hadn’t in the beginning burgled, Gately, as a full-time drug addict, though he
did sometimes promote small valuables from the apartments of the strung-out nurses
he X’d and copped samples from. After the bailout from school, Gately worked full-time
for a time for a North Shore bookmaker, a guy that also owned several titty clubs
down Rte. 1 in Saugus, Whitey Sorkin, that had sort of casually befriended him when
Gately was still playing high-profile ball. His professional association with Whitey
Sorkin continued part-time even after Gately discovered his real B&E vocation, though
he tended more and more toward less taxing nonviolent crime.