Infinite Jest (198 page)

76.
Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention
Deficit Disorder—partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on each level
of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even
slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve’s acme was thought at that time to
have A.D.D.—and for a while there’d been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling,
and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see
Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis’s Child Development
Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the
other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted continuum, and for much of the glabrous part of
his childhood Hal’d been classified as somewhere between ‘Borderline Gifted’ and ‘Gifted’—though
part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.’s diagnostic tests weren’t quite
so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the young Hal’s
monomaniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very
life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had
ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally
pleasing—and when he’d committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software
and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite some small part of what
he’d pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there
father, at these times of public performance and pleasure—the Weston MA School District
in the early B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish
competitions called ‘Battle of the Books,’ which these were for Hal pretty much of
a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest—when he’d extracted what was desired from
memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he’d felt almost that
same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost
a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms
who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second
prize, ever.

77.
Granted, Pemulis, over the summer (he boards at E.T.A. during the summer but hasn’t
qualified for the European trip since Y.P.W.), had made and distributed (at cost)
a few copies of a highly amusing low-memory TP game whose graphics featured a picture
of deLint and a mock-up of the hell-panel from H. Bosch’s tryptich
The Garden of Earthly Delights,
which TP game continues to enjoy a select late-night vogue among the sub-16’s.

78.
(Subject to O.N.A.N. Dept. of Weights and Measures Oversight Committee ratification
of final contract between G.F.R. Co., Zanesville OH, and the Bureau of Endorsement
Revenue, United States Office of Unspecified Services, Vienna VA, 15 December Y.D.A.U.)

79.
And, it goes w/o saying, w/o one of those video-recorded suicide notes or fond farewells
from the terminally ill, which digital halloos from beyond the grave were, after a
brief and videophony-like vogue, by the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar used only
by the tasteless and trailer-park tacky, w/ the very tackiest using Tableaux w/ famous
dead Elvis-/Carson-grade celebrities to convey their farewells.

80.
Orin Incandenza knew that Joelle van Dyne and Dr. James O. Incandenza weren’t lovers;
Mrs. Avril Incandenza did not know that they weren’t lovers, although by the time
of Joelle’s acquaintance with him Jim wasn’t in a position to be lovers with anybody,
neurologically speaking, though it’s not clear to Joelle whether Avril even knew this,
since Jim and Avril hadn’t been intimate with each other, i.e. conjugally, for quite
some time, though Jim hadn’t known the precise reason why Avril was so sanguine about
their not being intimate until the incident with the Volvo, where apparently Avril
had been with someone (Orin would not say who or whether he knew who) in the Volvo
and had idly—and disastrously, whether w/ unconscious intent or not—and presumably
post-coitally idly written the person’s first name in the steam of the steamed-up
car window, which name had disappeared with the steam but had reappeared the next
time the window had steamed up, which had been when James had been driving to this
very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal ‘I’m-so-terribly-sorry’
monologue-scene of the last thing he’d done, and then never shown her, and had ordered
the cartridge’s burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he’d
willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity, which Avril’d never have
lowered herself to the level of contesting, but which could hardly be expected not
to have solidified the appearance that they’d been lovers, Joelle and Jim.

81.
‘Theory and Praxis in Peckinpah’s Use of Red,’
Classic Cartridge Studies
vol. IX, nos. 2 & 3, YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(
s
).

82.
Maybe in like psychic opposition to their Moms’s compulsive cleaning thing, both
Orin when he was at E.T.A. and now Hal are horrific slobs. In Hal’s case this is facilitated
by the fact that the third floor of Subdorm C’s prorector is the incredibly lax and
laid-back Corbett Thorp, who may stutter and go in for half-baked motivational experiments
on the younger players but never comes around with a white glove and clipboard. Mario
makes his bed without fail, but you have to keep in mind that it’s not like he’s got
all that much else to do. Hal’s fitted sheet and sheet are Bean-James River flannels
in matching green and black Night Watch plaid, and for a comforter he uses a green
fiberfill winter-camp sleeping bag that’s of unknown origin and price because he got
it for Xmas and it had all the tags removed.

83.
Boston Police Department.

84.
Available on ROM via
[email protected]
or in (remaindered) paperback from Delta/Delacorte division of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-Little,-Brown,
itself a division of Bell Atlantic/TCI.

85.
= no academy affiliation.

86.
The O.N.A.N.T.A. junior tour allows court-side oxygen ever since an unfortunate embolism
in Raleigh NC, Y.W.Q.M.D.

87.
Q.v. Note 24
supra
.

88.
Since claiming rampant and mysterious breakage and then one time having the Dunlop
rep passing through Allston on his way out of Boston from E.T.A. see not one but three
kids on three separate corners hawking shiny new Dunlop sticks in what amounted, Dunlop
charged, almost to Conspiracy to Defraud, in YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(
s
).

89.
The fact that it’s not at all clear day-to-day what this
it
and
caring
mean, or how you can be expected both to care passionately and not care at all, that
huge amounts of internal psychic energy get expended on trying to come to some acceptable
understanding of all this stuff, particularly from 16 to like 18, is not accidental
or a weakness in E.T.A. pedagogy, in Schacht’s opinion, though a sizable contingent
of E.T.A.s view Schtitt as bats and essentially a figurehead and choose to steer more
by head prorector deLint’s clipboard and reductive statistics, which at least afford
you a firm idea of where you stand, comparatively, at all times.

90.

E.g.:

SELECTED SNIPPET FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE HOURS OF D. W. GATELY,
LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF
FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S AA MTNG UP TO ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY
11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I fear I simply have to deny the insinuation that it’s disloyal or ungrateful to
find oneself troubled by certain quite
glaring
inconsistencies in this master quote unquote Program you all seem to expect us simply
to open up and blindly swallow whole and then walk around glazed with our arms right
out straight in front of us parroting, reciting.’

‘Geoff—Geoffrey, man, I don’t think anybody’s trying to insinuate anything over on
you, brother. I know I ain’t trying to.’

‘No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience
that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility
for insinuating anything aloud.’

‘Maybe when I look patient I’m really trying to be patient with myself, for not finishing
school and etcetera and having a hard time keeping up with you.’

‘This AA tactic of masking condescension behind humility….’

‘I guess I’m just sorry for you you’re feeling frustrated with the Program today.
I know there’s lots of days I’m frustrated with it. So I don’t know what to say helpful
to you except what they said to me, to just hang in there.’

‘One Day at a One Day at a One Day.’

‘Brother, that’s just all I know to tell you that’s worked for me. I know for me it
don’t matter if there’s days I fucking
hate
it. I just have to do it. And it don’t help me or anybody else if I go around negativing
on newcomers and trying to take out my issues on trying to fuck them up with God-puzzles.’

‘Mr. Gately Sir, I found myself sitting tonight in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous
Meeting the central Message of which was the importance of going to still more Alcoholics
Anonymous Meetings. This infuriating carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings
only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings.’

‘I hear you.’

‘As if, I mean, what’s supposedly going to be communicated at these
future
meetings I’m exhorted to trudge to that cannot simply be communicated
now,
at
this
meeting, instead of the glazed recitation of exhortations to attend these vague future
revelatory meetings?’

‘I’m doing my best to stay with you here Day man.’

‘And tonight I’m just settling in in yet another uneven-legged chair, cultivating
that glazed passive spectatorial state of mind that is
clearly
what they’re trying to inspire in the ephebe, settling in next to a positively
redolent
Emil M. and trying to hold my poor addled Denial-ridden mind open with all available
main, listening to this ravaged-looking Yalie in yellow slacks detail episodes of
tremens whose gruesomeness interdicted any possible Identification—’

‘I’m remembering I heard Pat tell you that thinking people who are walking ahead of
you are following you is a pretty bad kind of D.T.s, brother.’

‘And I in
formed
her that there’s a well-known surveillance tactic known as the
Box
-surveillance, which involves certain members of the surveillance team establishing
themselves in
front
of the subject.’

‘Except I don’t ever remember you explaining why a sociology teacher weaving his way
from his fourth bar to his fifth bar is important enough for four guys from some you-never-mentioned-what
kind of conspiracy to be pulling this real complex surveillance thing.’

‘…’

‘Except I was interrupting your point you were sharing, I know, and I’m sorry.’

‘Your basic decency is why you’re whom I bring my thoughts to, Don. You know that.’

‘That makes me feel good Day man.’

‘I mean to whom else might I speak? The girl who takes her eye out and fondles it?
Poor Ewell with his obsessive tattoo charts?
Lenz?
’

‘It makes me feel good you think I’m decent to talk to. That’s supposed to be why
I’m here. I sure needed to talk, at the start. Can you remember where you were headed
before I broke i—interrupted?’

‘Something this broken Ivy Leaguer said, some AA sally. He said that only one newcomer
in a million actually trudges into an Alcoholics Anonymous Closed Meeting and in fact
doesn’t belong there.’

‘Meaning doesn’t turn out to have the Disease you mean.’

‘Yes. And that he said that quote if
You
—looking
right
at yours truly, seemingly, with that wearily amused patient expression you all must
practice in front of the mirror—he said that only one newcomer in a million doesn’t
belong here, and if quote
You
think
You’re
that one-in-a-million,
You definitely
belong here. And everyone howled with mirth, stomped their feet and blew coffee through
their noses and wiped their eyes with the backs of their hands and elbowed each other.
Howled with mirth.’

‘But you were, like, unsmiling at it.’

‘And everyone labels as Denial or ingratitude what’s actually
horror,
Don. The
horror
of acknowledging that you do apparently have some sort of problem with mild sedatives
and fine Chianti, and wanting with all sincerity to give every fair chance to a treatment-modality
which millions swear up and down has helped them with their own problem.’

‘You’re talking about AA.’

‘To want very much to believe in it, and to try, and then to your
horror
find the Program riddled with these obvious and idiotic fallacies and reductia ad
absurdum which—’

‘I’m going to need to ask you to try and say that again in words I can follow, Geoffrey,
if you want me to be right there alongside with you. And I’m sorry if that seems descending.’

‘Don, I am sincere when I say I’m
frightened
when I find that there are things about this allegedly miraculous Program’s doctrine
that simply do not follow. That do not cohere. That do not make anything resembling
rational sense.’

‘I’m with you on that one now, brother.’

‘Tonight’s example of the one-in-a-million, say. Don, let me ask you, Don. In all
earnest. Why shouldn’t every human being in the world be in AA?’

‘Now I’m not with you anymore again, Geoffrey.’

‘Don, why doesn’t every featherless biped on earth qualify for AA? By AA’s reasoning,
why isn’t everyone everywhere an alcoholic?’