Infinite Jest (19 page)

Marathe slowly shrugged. As usual, he appeared to Steeply as if he were half-asleep.
He ignored the question and said only, shrugging, ‘My time is finite.’

Steeply had also with him a woman’s handbag or purse. ‘And the wife?’ he said, gazing
upward as yet. ‘How’s the wife doing?’

‘Holding her own weight, thank you,’ Marathe said. His tone of his voice betrayed
nothing. ‘And so thus what is it your Offices believe they wish to know?’

Steeply tottered on a leg as he removed one shoe and poured from it grit. ‘Nothing
terribly surprising. A bit of razzle-dazzle up northeast in your so-called Ops-area,
certainly you heard.’

Marathe sniffed. A large odor of inexpensive and high-alcohol perfume came not from
Steeply’s person but from his handbag, which failed to complement his shoes. Marathe
said, ‘Dazzle?’

‘As in a civilian-type individual receives a certain item. Don’t tell me this is news
to you guys. Not on InterLace pulse, this item. Arrives via normal physical mail.
We’re sure you heard, Rémy. A cartridge-copy of a certain let’s call it between ourselves
“the Entertainment.” As in in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.’

‘From somewhere blue?’

The B.S.S. operative had perspired also through his rouge, and his mascara had melted
to become whorish. ‘A person with no political value to anybody except that the Saudi
Ministry of Entertainment made one the hell of a shrill stink.’

‘The medical attaché, the specialist of digesting, you refer to.’ Marathe shrugged
again in that maddening Francophone way that can mean several things. ‘Your offices
wish to ask was the Entertainment’s cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?’

‘Don’t let’s waste your finite time, ami old friend,’ Steeply said. ‘The mischief
happens to occur in metropolitan Boston. Postal codes route the package through the
desert Southwest, and we know your dissemination-scheme’s routing mechanism is proposed
for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here.’ Steeply had worked hard at
feminizing his expressions and gesturing. ‘It would be a bit starry-eyed of O.U.S.
not to think of your distinguished cell, no?’

Beneath Marathe’s windbreaker was a sportshirt whose breast pocket was filled with
many pens. He said: ‘Us, we don’t have the information on even casualties. From this
blue dazzle you speak of.’

Steeply was trying to extract something stubborn from inside his other shoe. ‘Upwards
of twenty, Rémy. Out of commission altogether. The attaché and his wife, the wife
a Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with embassy cards. Couple neighbors or something.
The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going
in before they killed the power.’

‘Local police forces. Gendarmes.’

‘The local constabulary.’

‘The minions of the law of the land.’

‘The local constabulary were shall we say
unprepared
for an Entertainment like this.’ Steeply even removed and replaced his pumps in the
upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other-foot-up-behind-his-bottom way of a feminine U.S.A.
woman. But he appeared huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing
something like sexual despair. He said, ‘The attaché had diplomatic status, Rémy.
Mideast. Saudi. Said to be close to minor members of the royal family.’

Marathe sniffed hard, as if congested of the nose. ‘A puzzling,’ he said.

‘But also a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab émigrés.
Visa lists a residence in Montreal.’

‘And Services Without Specificity wishes maybe to ask were there below-the-surface
connections that make the individual not such a civilian, unconnected. To ask of us
would the A.F.R. wish to make of him the example.’

Steeply was removing dirt from his bottom, swatting himself on the bottom. He stood
more or less directly over Marathe. Marathe sniffed. ‘We have neither digestive medicals
nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action. You have personally seen A.F.R.’s
initial lists. Nor in particular Montreal civilians. We have, as one will say, larger
seafood to cook.’

Steeply was looking out over the desert and city, also, as he swatted at himself.
He seemed to have noticed the
gespenst
-phenomenon of his own shadow. Marathe for some reason pretended again to sniff the
nose. The wind was moderate and constant and of about the temperature of a U.S.A.
clothes-dryer set on Low. It made the shrill whistling sounds. Also sounds of the
blowing grit. Weeds-of-tumbling like enormous hairballs rolled often across the Interstate
Highway of I-10 far below. Their specular perspective, the reddening light on vast
tan stone and the oncoming curtain of dusk, the further elongation of their monstrous
agnate shadows: all was almost mesmerizing. Neither man seemed able to look at anything
but the vista below. Marathe could simultaneously speak in English and think in French.
The desert was the tawny color of the hide of the lion. Their speaking without looking
at one another, facing both the same direction—this gave their conversing an air of
careless intimacy, as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married
couple. Marathe thought this as he opened and closed his upheld hand, making over
the city Tucson a huge and black blossom open itself and close itself.

And Steeply raised his bare arms and held them out and crossed them, maybe as if signalling
for distant aid; this made X’s and pedentive V’s over much in the city Tucson. ‘Still,
Rémy, but born in the hated-by-you Ottawa, this civilian attaché, and connected to
a major buyer of trans-grid entertainment. And follow-up out of the Boston offices
reports possible indications of the victim’s prior possible involvement with the widow
of the
auteur
we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first place. The
samizdat.
’

‘Prior?’

Steeply produced from his handbag Belgian cigarettes of a many-mm. and habitually
female type. ‘Film director’s wife’d taught out at Brandeis where the victim’d done
his residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies’ background
checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse.’ With the
slight pause of which Steeply could excel: ‘Particularly a Canadian pulse.’

‘Involvement of sexuality is what you are meaning, then, not politics.’

Steeply said, ‘This wife herself a Québecer, Rémy, from L’Islet county—Chief Tine
says three years spent on Ottawa’s “
Personnes Qui On Doit
” list. There’s such a thing as political sex.’

‘I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are
not our desire. This is known by you.’ Marathe’s eyes looked nearly closed. ‘And your
tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you. Services Without Specificity, they
have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently.’

Steeply looked down at himself. One of the false breasts (surely false: surely they
would not go as far as the hormonal, Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of
Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. ‘I was asked to secure personal
verification, is all,’ he said. ‘My general sense at the Office is the brass consider
the whole incident a stumper. There’re theories and countertheories. There are even
antitheories positing error, mistaken identity, sick hoax.’ His shrugging, with his
hands on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic. ‘Still: twenty-three human beings
lost for all time: that’d be some hoax, no?’

Marathe sniffed. ‘Asked to verify by our mutual M. Tine? How you call him: “Rod, a
God”?’

(Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N.
and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and
whose stenographer had long doubled as the stenographer-cum-
jeune-fille-de-Vendredi
of M. DuPlessis, former asst. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose
passionate, ill-disguised attachment (Tine’s) to this double-amanuensis—one Mlle.
Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L’Islet, Québec—gave rise to these questions of
the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he ‘doubled’
⁴¹
for Québec out of the love for Luria or ‘tripled’ the loyalties, pretending only
to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of
an irresistible love, it was said.)

‘
The,
Rémy.’ It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts’ directions without pulling
down severely his décolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag
sunglasses and put on the sunglasses. They were embellished with rhinestones and looked
absurd. ‘Rod
the
God.’

Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several
matches to light a cigarette in the wind. The encroachment of true dusk began to erase
his wig’s chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills
east of the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter
for the flame.

It’s a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of
the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust
that forms a uremic-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away
as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free
by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized
Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten
that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters’ whiskered
faces is businesslike and implacable—it’s that implacable-herd expression. They thunder
eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed
by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of
the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

All these territories are now property of Canada.

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that
come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway.
Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing
even remotely vegetablish if in the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a
herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own. If American,
north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border metropolis—Rome
NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered points between them at
which the giant protective ATHSCME fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of
anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of teratogenic Concavity
clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.

The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a
cigarette in the mouth. He said, ‘And you’ll of course report this little interface
of you and me right back to Fortier.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘ ’
n sûr
.’

Steeply got it lit. He was a large and soft man, some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport
athlete now become fat. He appeared to Marathe to look less like a woman than a twisted
parody of womanhood. Electrolysis had caused patches of tiny red pimples along his
jowls and upper lip. He also held his elbow out, the arm holding the match for lighting,
which is how no woman lights a cigarette, who is used to breasts and keeps the lighting
elbow in. Also Steeply teetered ungracefully on his pumps’ heels on the stone’s uneven
surface. He never for a moment turned his back completely at Marathe as he stood on
the lip of the outcropping. And Marathe had his chair’s wheels’ clamps now locked
down tight and a firm grip on the machine pistol’s pebbled grip. Steeply’s purse was
small and glossy black, and the sunglasses he wore had womanly frames with small false
jewels at the temples. Marathe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque
appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors
requested of him.

Steeply now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark glasses. ‘And also that
I just right now asked you if you’d report it, and that you said
bien sûr?
’

Marathe’s laugh had this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not
sincere. He made a mustache of his finger, pretending for some reason to stifle a
need to sneeze. ‘You verify this because of why?’

Steeply scratched under the hem of his blonde wig with (stupidly, dangerously) the
thumb of his hand that held the cigarette. ‘Well you are already tripling, Rémy, aren’t
you? Or would it be quadrupling. We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you’re here with
me now.’

‘But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this, that they have sent
me to pretend I double?’

Marathe’s sidearm, a Sterling UL35 9 mm machine pistol with a Mag Na Port silencer,
did not have a safety. Its fat and texture-of-pebbles grip was hot from Marathe’s
palm, and in turn caused Marathe’s palm to perspire beneath the blanket. From Steeply
there merely was silence.

Marathe said: ‘… have I merely
pretended
to pretend to pretend to betray.’
⁴²

And the desert U.S.A.’s light had become now sad, more than half the round sun gone
behind the Tortolitas. Only now the chair’s wheels and Steeply’s thick legs cast shadows
below the dusk-line, and these shadows were becoming squat and retreating back up
toward the two men.

Steeply did a brief pretend-Charleston, playing with his legs’ shadows. ‘Nothing personal.
You know that. It’s the obsessive caution. Who was it—who once said we get paid to
drive ourselves crazy, the caution thing? You guys and Tine—your DuPlessis always
suspected he tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.’