Infinite Jest (185 page)

‘Q.’

‘The actor was male. He wasn’t one of Jim’s regulars. But the character I recognize
in the door is epicene.’

‘Q.’

‘Hermaphroditic. Androgynous. It wasn’t obvious that the character was supposed to
be a male character. I assume you can Identify.

‘The other had the camera bolted down inside a stroller or bassinet. I wore an incredible
white floor-length gown of some sort of flowing material and leaned in over the camera
in the crib and simply apologized.’

‘Q.’

‘Apologized. As in my lines were various apologies. “I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly
sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am.” For a real
long time. I doubt he used it all, I strongly doubt he used it all, but there were
at least twenty minutes of permutations of “I’m sorry.” ’

‘Q.’

‘Not exactly. Not exactly veiled.’

‘Q.’

‘The point of view was from the crib, yes. A crib’s-eye view. But that’s not what
I mean by driving the scene. The camera was fitted with a lens with something Jim
called I think an auto-wobble. Ocular wobble, something like that. A ball-and-socket
joint behind the mount that made the lens wobble a little bit. It made a weird little
tiny whirring noise, I recollect.’

‘Q.’

‘The mount’s the barrel. The mount’s what the elements of the lens are arranged in.
This crib-lens’s mount projected out way farther than a conventional lens, but it
wasn’t near as big around as a catadioptric lens. It looked more like an eye-stalk
or a night-vision scope than a lens. Long and skinny and projecting, with this slight
wobble. I don’t know much about lenses beyond basic concepts like length and speed.
Lenses were Jim’s forte. This can’t be much of a surprise. He always had a whole case
full. He paid more attention to the lenses and lights than to the camera. His other
son carried them in a special case. Leith was cameras, the son was lenses. Lenses
Jim said were what he had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself.
He made all his own.’

‘Q.’

‘Well I’ve never been around them. But I know there’s something wobbled and weird
about their vision, supposedly. I think the newer-born they are, the more the wobble.
Plus I think a milky blur. Neonatal nystagmus. I don’t know where I heard that term.
I don’t remember. It could have been Jim. It could have been the son. What I know
about infants personally you could—it may have been an astigmatic lens. I don’t think
there’s much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field. That’s
what you could feel was driving the scene. My face wasn’t important. You never got
the sense it was meant to be captured realistically by this lens.’

‘Q.’

‘I never saw it. I’ve got no idea.’

‘Q.’

‘They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At least that was
in his will.’

‘Q.’

‘It had nothing to do with killing himself. Less than nothing to do with it.’

‘Q.’

‘No I never saw his fucking will. He told me. He told me things.

‘He’d stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn’t take it but he’d
made a promise.’

‘Q.’

‘I don’t know that he ever even got a finished Master. That’s
your
story. There wasn’t anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes. Nothing
like these actual-perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making
something quote too perfect. But as a
joke
. He had a thing about entertainment, being criticized about entertainment v. nonentertainment
and stasis. He used to refer to the Work itself as “entertainments.” He always meant
it ironically. Even in jokes he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for
God’s sake. He’d never carry it that far. A joke.’

‘…’

‘When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling—it
was always ironic—he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying
the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for
people to stand. It was a kind of joke I’d gotten from one of his entertainments,
the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about
the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to
release—it’d paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To
me.’

‘Q.’

‘Jim’s humor was a
dry
humor.’

‘Q.’

‘If it got made and nobody’s seen it, the Master, it’s in there with him. Buried.
That’s just a guess. But I bet you.’

‘…’

‘Call it an
educated
bet.’

‘Q.’

‘…’

‘
Q
, Q,
Q.
’

‘
That’s the part of the joke he didn’t know. Where he’s buried is
itself
buried, now. It’s in your annulation-zone. It’s not even your
territory.
And now if you want the thing—he’d enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh shit yes
very much.’

By a rather creepy coincidence, it turned out that, up in our room, Kyle Dempsy Coyle
and Mario were also watching one of Himself’s old efforts. Mario had gotten his pants
on and was using his special tool to zip and button. Coyle looked oddly traumatized.
He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes wide and his whole body with the slight
tremble of something hanging from the tip of a pipette. Mario greeted me by name.
Snow continued to whirl and eddy outside the window. The position of the sun was impossible
to gauge. The net-posts were now buried almost up to their scorecard attachments.
The wind was piling snow up in drifts against all Academy right angles and then pummelling
the drifts into unusual shapes. The window’s whole view had the gray grainy quality
of a poor photo. The sky looked diseased. Mario worked his tool with great patience.
It often took him several tries to catch and engage the tool’s jaws on the tongue
of his zipper. Coyle, still wearing his apnea-mouthguard, stared at our room’s little
viewer. The cartridge was Himself’s
Accomplice!,
a short melodrama with Cosgrove Watt and a boy no one had ever seen before or since.

‘You woke up early,’ Mario said, smiling up from his fly. His bed was made up drum-tight.

I smiled. ‘Turns out I wasn’t the only one.’

‘You look sad.’

I raised my hand with the NASA glass at Coyle. ‘An unexpected pleasure, K.D.C.’

‘Thtithe fickn meth,’ Coyle said.

I put the glass and toothbrush on my dresser and straightened its doily. I picked
some clothing up and began separating it by smell into wearable and unwearable.

‘Kyle says Jim Troeltsch tore some of Ortho’s face off trying to pull him off a window
his face got glued to,’ Mario said. ‘And then Jim Troeltsch and Mr. Kenkle tried to
put toilet tissue on the ripped parts, the way Tall Paul sometimes puts little bits
of Kleenex on a shaving cut, but Ortho’s face was a lot worse than a shaving cut,
and they used a whole roll, and now Ortho’s face is covered with toilet tissue, and
the tissue’s stuck now, and Ortho can’t get it off, and at breakfast Mr. deLint was
yelling at Ortho for letting them put toilet tissue on it, and Ortho ran to his and
Kyle’s room and locked the door, and Kyle doesn’t have his key since the accident
with the whirlpool.’

I helped Mario on with his police lock’s vest and affixed the Velcro nice and tight.
Mario’s chest is so fragile-feeling that I could feel his heartbeat’s tremble through
the vest and sweatshirt.

Coyle removed the apnea-guard. Strings of white nighttime oral material appeared between
his mouth and the guard as he extracted it. He looked to Mario. ‘Tell him the worst
part.’

I was watching Coyle very closely to see what he planned to do with the sickening
mouthpiece he held.

‘Hey Hal, your phone has messages, and Mike Pemulis came by and asked if you were
up and about.’

‘You haven’t told him the worst part of it,’ Coyle said.

‘Don’t even think about putting that thing down anywhere near my bed, Kyle, please.’

‘I’m holding it away from everything, don’t worry.’

Mario used his tool to zip up the long curved zipper of his backpack. ‘Kyle said there
was a problem with a discharge again—’

‘So I heard,’ I said.

‘—and Kyle says he woke up and Ortho was missing, and Ortho’s bed was missing as well,
so he turned on the light—’

Coyle gestured with the appliance: ‘And lo and fucking-capital-B behold.’

‘—yes
and lo,
’ Mario said, ‘Ortho’s bed is up near the ceiling of their room. The frame has some
way got lifted up and bolted to the ceiling sometime during the night without Kyle
hearing it or waking up.’

‘Until the discharge, that is,’ I said.

‘This is it,’ said Coyle. ‘The tin cans and accusations I’m moving his stuff around
are one thing. I’m going to Lateral Alice for a switch like Troeltsch did. This is
the
straw
.’

Mario said ‘And his bed’s up on the ceiling now, still, and if it falls it’s going
to go right through the floor and fall in Graham and Petropolis’s room.’

‘He’s in there right now all mummified in toilet paper, sulking, with his bed hanging
overhead, with the door locked, so I can’t even get my apnea-guard-cleaning supplies,’
Coyle said.

I’d heard nothing about Troeltsch apparently switching room-assignments with Trevor
Axford. A gigantic wedge of snow slid down a steep part of the roof over our window
and fell past the window and hit the ground below with a huge whump. For some reason
the fact that something as major as a midterm room-switch could have taken place without
my knowing anything about it filled me with dread. There were a few glitters of a
possible incipient panic-attack again.

Mario’s bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis’s burn, unevenly squeezed.
Mario was looking at my face. ‘Is it you’re sad about not getting to play if the Québec
players are canceled?’

‘And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,’
Coyle said disgustedly.

‘Frozen,’ I corrected him. ‘Except but now listen to Stice’s explanation.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said.

‘For the bed hovering.’

Mario looked at Coyle. ‘You said bolted.’

‘I said
presumably
bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that’s possible is bolts.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said.

‘Let him guess,’ Mario told Coyle.

‘The Darkness thinks ghosts.’ Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not
set quite level in his face. ‘Stice’s explanation that he swore me to discretion but
that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he’s been somehow selected or
chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that
resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The
Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural
level, to help his game.’ One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at a different
angle.

‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’ I said.

‘Stice is mentally buckling,’ Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just
out of morning-breath range. ‘He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing,
trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair
and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn’t let me cancel the bet when I
got embarrassed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.’

I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. ‘Did you guys hear sausage-analog
and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?’

Mario asked again if I were sad.

Coyle said ‘I was
down
there. Stice’s map was taking the edge off appetites all over the room. Then deLint
started in yelling at him.’ He was looking at me oddly. ‘I don’t see what’s so funny
about it, man.’

Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack’s straps with practiced
ease.

Coyle said ‘I don’t know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice.
What if they haul him off somewhere, and it’s my fault?’

‘There’s no denying The Dark’s raised his game this fall though.’

‘There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,’ Mario said as I held his hands
carefully and pulled him upright.

‘What if it’s the mental buckling that’s raised his game?’ Coyle said. ‘Does it still
count as buckling?’

Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used.
Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines
with an amateur’s wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would
hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up
until the last phase of his career, Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden
quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism
and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not
people behaving. Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired, Himself had no interest
in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the
fact that it required
non
actors to achieve this stilted artificial I’m-only-acting-here quality was one of
very few things about Himself’s early projects that truly interested academic critics.
But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn’t wanted skilled or believable
acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges,
and this had always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and
technical ingenuity didn’t much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and
one way of looking at Himself’s abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his
last several projects he’d been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S.
audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting
³⁷⁸
that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place.
Getting emotion out of either actors or audiences had never struck me as one of Himself’s
strengths, though I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn’t
see a lot of what was right there.