Infinite Jest (183 page)

The wrench in the ointment that nobody in Providence has counted on is the picket-and-knuckleduster-wielding
appearance of Brown University’s entire Dworkinite Female Objectification Prevention
And Protest Phalanx outside the Pizzitola Athl. Center’s main gates right at game-time,
two FOPPPs per motorcycle, who blow through the filigreed gates like they were so
much wet Kleenex and storm the arena, plus a division of Brown’s pluckier undergraduate
N.O.W.s who execute a pincer-movement down from the cheap seats up top during the
first time-out, at the precise moment the Brown cheerleaders’ first pyramid-maneuver
ends in a mid-air split that causes the Pizzitola’s scoreboard’s scorekeeper to reel
backward against his controls and blow out both HOME’s and VISITORS’ zeroes, on the
board, just as the FOPPPs’ unmuffled Hawgs come blatting malevolently down through
the ground-level tunnels and out onto the playing floor; and in the ensuing melee
not only are cheerleaders, Pep Squad, and comely Brown U. sirens all either laid out
with picket-signs wielded like shillelaghs or thrown kicking and shrieking over the
burly shoulders of militant FOPPPs and carried off on roaring Hawgs, leaving the Yale
power forward’s delicate nervous system intact if overheated; but two Brown U. Bruin
starters, a center and a shooting guard—both too wrung-out and dazed by a grueling
week of comely-siren-auditioning and -rehearsing to have sense enough to run like
hell once the melee spills out onto the Pizzitola hardwood—are felled, by a FOPPP
knuckleduster and a disoriented referee with a martial-arts background, respectively;
and so when the floor is finally cleared and stretchers borne off and the game resumes,
Yale U. cleans Brown U.’s clock by upwards of 20.

Then so Fackelmann calls up Eighties Bill and arranges to pick up the skeet, which
is $137,500 with the vig, which E.B. gives him in large-denomination pre-O.N.A.N.
scrip in a
GO BROWN BRUINS
gym-bag he’d brought to the game to sit next to the ursine-headed CEO with and now
has less than no use for, but so Fackelmann receives the skeet downtown and blasts
up cheesy Route 1 to Saugus to deliver the skeet and pick up his vig on the vig ($625
U.S.) right away, needing to cop Blues in what’s starting to be the worst way, etc.
Plus Fackelmann’s figuring on maybe a small bonus or at least some emotional validation
from Sorkin for bringing in such a mammoth and promptly-remitted wager. But, when
he gets to the Rte. 1 titty bar at the rear of which Sorkin has his administrative
offices behind an unmarked fire door and all wallpapered in stuff that looks like
ersatz wood panelling, Gwendine O’Shay wordlessly points behind her station at Sorkin’s
personal office door with a terse gesture Fackelmann doesn’t think fits with the up-beatness
of the occasion at all. The door’s got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before
the assassination. Sorkin’s in there working spreadsheets with his special monitor-screen-light-filtering
goggles on. The goggles’ lenses on their long protruding barrels look like lobsters’
eyes on stalks. Gately and Fackelmann and Bobby C never spoke to Sorkin until spoken
to, not out of henchmanish obsequity but because they could never tell what Sorkin’s
cranio-facial vascular condition was or if he could tolerate sound until they verifiably
heard him tolerating his own. (Sound.)

So G. Fackelmann waits wordlessly to hand over Eighties Bill’s skeet, standing there
tall and soft and palely sweating, the overall shape and color of a peeled boiled
egg. When Sorkin hikes an eyebrow at the
GO BRUINS
bag and says the knee-slapping hilarity of the joke escapes him, Fackelmann’s mustache
positively takes off all over his upper lip, and he prepares to say what he always
says when he’s flummoxed, that whatever’s being said is with all due respect a goddamn
lie. Sorkin saves his data and pushes his desk chair back so he can reach all the
way down to the fireproof drawer. The goggles are often used in data-processing sweatshops
and list for a deuce. Sorkin grunts as he hauls out a huge old Mass Lottery box for
Quik-Pick cards and heaves it onto the desk, where it bulges obscenely, filled with
112.5K U.S.—there’s 112.5 fucking K in there, all in ones, 125K minus vig, what Sorkin
via O’Shay believes to be Eighties Bill’s winnings, all in small bills, because Sorkin’s
pissed off and can’t resist making a little like gesture. Fackelmann doesn’t say anything.
His mustache goes limp as his mental machinery starts revving. Sorkin, massaging his
temples, staring up at Fackelmann with his goggles like a crab in a tank, says he
supposes he can’t blame Fax or O’Shay, that he’d have OK’d the bet himself, what with
the neurologic tip on the Yale forward they had. Who could have foreseen thuggish
Feminazis screwing up the ointment. He utters a bit of Gaelic that Fackelmann doesn’t
know but assumes to be fatalistical. He peels six C-notes and an O.N.A.N.ite 25-spot
off a wad the size of an artillery shell and pushes them across the metal desk at
Fackelmann, his vig on the vig. He says What the fuck (Sorkin does), this Eighties
Bill kid’s irrational sentimentalism for Yale will sooner or later catch up with him.
Veteran books tend to be statistically philosophical and patient. Fackelmann doesn’t
even bother to wonder why Sorkin refers to Eighties Bill as ‘kid’ when they’re both
about the same age. But a high-watt bulb is slowly beginning to incandesce over Fackelmann’s
moist head. As in the Faxter starts to conceptualize the overall concept of what must
of happened. He still hasn’t said anything, Pamela Hoffman-Jeep emphasizes. Sorkin
looks Fackelmann over and asks if he’s gained some asymmetrical-type weight, there.
Fackelmann’s left tit does look noticeably bigger than his right, under his sport-coat,
because of the legal envelope with 137 1000s and one 500 in it, the skeet from an
Eighties Bill who thought he’d lost. Just like Sorkin thought E.B.’d
won
. The slight high whine in the room that Sorkin thinks is his Infernatron disk-drive
is really the whine of Fackelmann’s high-speed mentation. His mustache roils like
a cracked whip as he works his own internal mental spreadsheet. 250K in one lumpy
sum represented like 375 sky-blue grams of hydromorphone hydrochloride
³⁷⁶
or like 37,500 10-mg. soluble tablets of the shit, available from a certain rapacious
but discreet Chinatown opiate-dealer who’d only deal synthetic narcs in 100-gram weights—which
all translated, assuming Kite could be persuaded to pack up his D.E.C. 2100 and move
far far away with Fackelmann to help him set up a street-distribution matrix in some
urban market far far away, into close to like let’s see carry the one like 1.9 million
in street-value, which sum meant that Fackelmann and to a lesser jr.-partner extent
Kite could have their chins on their chests for the rest of their days without ever
having to strip another apt., forge another passport, break another thumb. All if
Fackelmann just kept his map shut about O’Shay’s confabulation of Yale/Brown//Brown/Yale,
mumbled something about an I.V.-adulterant causing a sudden and temporary gigantism
in one tit, and blasted out of there straight down Rte. 1 to this one Dr. Wo and Associates,
Hung Toy’s Cold Tea Emporium, Chinatown.

By this time Pamela Hoffman-Jeep had succumbed to the highballs and her own swaddled
warmth and was irreversibly swooned, ice or fillip or no, twitching synaptically and
murmuring to somebody named Monty that he was certainly no kind of gentleman in
her
book. But Gately could chart the rest of Fackelmann’s shit-creek’s course for himself.
When approached by Fackelmann with a
GO BROWN
gym-bag of Dr. Wo’s finest wholesale Dilaudid and invited to decamp with him and
set up a distrib-matrix for their own drug-empire far far away, Kite would have staggered
back in horror at Fackelmann’s obviously not knowing that the bettor Eighties Bill
was in fact none other than the
son of Sixties Bob,
viz. Whitey Sorkin’s personal migrainologist, who Sorkin trusted and confided in
as only a massive I.V.-dose of Cafergot can make you trust and confide, and whom Sorkin
would undoubtedly tell all about the guy’s own son’s huge win on Yale, and who wasn’t
like Ward-and-Wally close with his son, Sixties Bob wasn’t, but naturally kept distant
paternal tabs on him, and would certainly have known that E.B.’d in fact bet Brown
in an attempt to cozy up to the conic CEO, and so would know that there’d been some
kind of mix-up; and also that (Kite’d still be staggering back in horror as all this
added up) plus, even if Sorkin somehow didn’t get told of Eighties Bill’s loss and
Fackelmann’s scam from Sixties Bill, the fact was that Sorkin’s newest savagest U.S.
muscle, Bobby (‘C’) C, old-fashioned smack-addict, copped regular old organic Burmese
heroin from this Dr. Wo on a regular basis, and was sure to hear about 300+ grams
of wholesale Dilaudid bought by a Fackelmann known to be C’s co-employee off Sorkin…
and thus that Fackelmann, who when he came to Kite with the proposition was already
in possession of a Brown-Booster bag full of 37,500 10-mg. Dilaudids and minus Sorkin’s
250K—plus with as Gately later knew only 22K in suicidal-scam-backfire-insurance capital—was
already dead: Fackelmann was a Dead Man, Kite would have said, staggering back with
horror at Fax’s idiocy; Kite’d have said he could smell Fackelmann already biodegrading
from here. Dead as a fucking post, he’d have told Fackelmann, already worrying about
being seen sitting there with him in whatever titty bar they were in when Fax hit
Kite with the proposal. And Gately, watching P.H.-J. sleep, could not only imagine
but Identify fully with how Fackelmann, on hearing Kite say he could smell him dead
and why, with how Fackelmann, instead of taking his bagful of Blues and gluing on
a goatee and immediately fleeing to climes that’d never even fucking
heard
of metro Boston’s North Shore—that the Faxter’d done what any drug addict in possession
of his Substance would do when faced with fatal news and attendant terror: Facklemann’d
made a fucking beeline for their luxury-stripped home and familiar safe-feeling hearth
and had plopped down and immediately fired up the Sterno cooker and cooked up and
tied off and shot up and nailed his chin to his chest and kept it there with staggering
quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally blot out the reality of the fact that he
was going to get demapped if he didn’t take some kind of decisive remedial action
at once. Because, Gately realized even then, this was your drug addict’s basic way
of dealing with problems, was using the good old Substance to blot out the problem.
Also probably medicating his terror by stuffing himself with Peanut M&M’s, which would
explain all the wrappers littering the floor of the corner he hadn’t moved from. That
thus this is why Fackelmann has been squatting moist and silent in a corner of the
living room right outside this very bedroom here for days; this was why the apparent
contradiction of the staggering amount of Substance Fackelmann had in the gym-bag
next to him together with the cornered-toad look of a man in the great fear one associates
with Withdrawal. Charting and thinking, drumming his fingers absently on P.H.-J.’s
unconscious skull, Gately realized he could more than empathize with Fackelmann’s
flight into Dilaudid and M&M’s, but he now realizes that that was the first time it
really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic
creature: a thing that basically hides.

The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was he liked to unwrap
her cocoon of blankets and climb in with her and spoon in real tight, fitting his
bulk up close against all her soft concave places, and then go to sleep with his face
in her nape. It bothered Gately that he could empathize with Fackelmann’s desire to
hide and blot out, but in the retrospect of memory now it bothers him more that he
didn’t lie there up next to the comatose girl being bothered for more than a few minutes
before he felt the familiar desire that blots out all bother, and that that night
he had unwrapped the cocoon of bedding and arisen so automatically in service of this
desire. And feels the worst of all that he’d lumbered out of the bedroom in just jeans
and belt out to the gloaming living room where Fackelmann was hunched moist and smeary-mouthed
in the corner next to a mountain of 10 mg. Dilaudids and his mixing bowl of distilled
water and works-kit and Sterno unit, that Gately had lumbered so automatically out
to Fackelmann under the pretense—to himself, too, the pretense, was the worst thing—the
pretense that he was just going to check on poor old Fackelmann, to maybe try and
convince him to take some kind of action, go penitent to Sorkin or flee the clime
instead of just hiding there in the corner with his mind in neutral and his chin on
his chest and a stalactite of chocolated drool from his lower lip lengthening. Because
he knew that the first thing Fackelmann would do when Gately left P.H.-J. and lumbered
out to the defurnished living room would be to fumble in his GoreTex works-kit for
a new factory-wrapped syringe and invite Gately to hunker on down and get right with
the planet. I.e. ingest some of this mountain of Dilaudid, to keep Fackelmann company.
Which to Gately’s shame he did, had done, and no part of the reality of Fackelmann’s
creek and the need for action had even been brought up, so intent were they on the
Blues’ somnolent hum, blotting everything out, while Pamela Hoffman-Jeep lay wrapped
tight in the other room dreaming of damsels and towers—Gately did, he remembers vividly,
he let Fackelmann fix them both up but good, and told himself he was doing it to keep
Fackelmann company, like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed
it was true.

Little entr’actes of feverish dreams punctuate memories and being conscious, like.
He dreams he’s riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing
again and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The
dream goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and
sweats as he lies there, stuck in it. Gately comes sharply around when he feels the
little rough tongue on his forehead—not unlike Nimitz the M.P.’s little pet kitten’s
hesitant tongue, when the M.P. had still had the kitten, before the mysterious period
when the kitten disappeared and the garbage disposal wouldn’t run right for days and
the M.P. sat hungover with his notebook at the kitchen table with his blond head in
his hands, just sat there for several days, and Gately’s Mom went around pale as hell
and wouldn’t go near the kitchen sink for days, and rushed to the bathroom when Gately
finally asked what was the deal with the garbage disposal and where was Nimitz. When
Gately gets his eyelids unstuck, though, the tongue is not even close to being Nimitz’s.
The wraith is back, right by the bed, dressed like before and blurred at the edges
in the hat-shadowed spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another, younger,
way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top
who’s leaning way over Gately’s railing and… fucking
licking Gately’s forehead
with a rough little tongue, and as Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy’s map—no
man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived—he has just enough time to realize the
wraith’s breath has no warmth to it, or smell, before both wraiths vanish and a blue
forked bolt of pain from his sudden striking-out sends him back against his hot pillow
with an arched spine and a tube-impeded scream, his eyes rolling back into the dove-colored
light of whatever isn’t quite sleep.