Infinite Jest (199 page)

‘Well Geoffrey man it’s a totally private decision to admit the Disease, nobody can
go tell another man he’s—’

‘But indulge me for a moment. By AA’s own professed logic, everyone ought to be in
AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you
say you do
not
have a Substance-problem, in other words if you
deny
that you have a Substance-problem, why then you’re by definition in
Denial,
and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone
who can admit his problem.’

‘…’

‘Don’t look at me like that. Show me the flaw in my reasoning. I beg you. Show me
why not everyone should be in AA, given the way AA regards those who don’t believe
they belong there.’

‘…’

‘And now you don’t know what to say. There’s no cockle-warming cliché that applies.’

‘The slogan I’ve heard that might work here is the slogan
Analysis-Paralysis
.’

‘Oh lovely. Oh very nice. By all means don’t
think
about the validity of what they’re claiming your life hinges on. Oh do not ask what
is
it. Do not ask not whether it’s not insane. Simply open wide for the spoon.’

‘For me, the slogan means there’s no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about
the Program. Surrender To Win, Give It Away To Keep It. God As You Understand Him.
You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing. Trust me because I been there,
man. You can analyze it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause
to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and
do the best you can.’

‘AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the
inadvisability of all such questions.’

‘I ain’t AA Day man. No one like individual can respond for AA.’

‘Am I out of line in seeing something totalitarian about it? Something dare I say
un-American? To interdict a fundamental doctrinal question by invoking a doctrine
against questioning? Wasn’t this the very horror the Madisonians were horrified of
in 1791? Amendments I and IX? My Grievance is disallowed because my Petition for Redress
is a priori interdicted by the inadvisability of all Petitioning?’

‘I’m about to get fucking lapped here I’m so not-following. You honestly don’t see
what’s a little whacked-out about what you’re saying about Denial?’

‘I’m thinking your failure to engage me on the question itself means either I’m right,
and AA’s whole Belonging-versus-Denial matrix is constructed on logical sand, in which
case
horror,
or else it means you’re stupefied with condescending pity for me for some reason
I fail to grasp, doubtless because of Denial, in which case the look on your face
right now is the same weary patience that makes me want to
scream
in meetings.’

‘So scream. They can’t kick you out.’

‘How comforting.’

‘This is a thing I do know. They can’t kick you out.’

91.
Pillow-biter
’s a North Shore term, one Gately grew up with, and it and the
f
-term are the only terms for male homosexuals he knows, still.

92.
Diane Prins, Perth Amboy NJ.

93.
An anxiety-fest captured nicely by the banner-shaped posters deLint used to have
D. Harde put up each fall over the senior-locker sections of both locker rooms that
had
WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT
until some of the other prorectors went to Schtitt and got him to make deLint take
them down.

94.
It’s surely been spelled out already that prorectors teach one marginal class per
term and serve as on-court assistants to Schtitt’s
Lebensgefährtin
Aubrey deLint, and that their existence at E.T.A. is marginal and low-prestige and
their spiritual state on the low continuum between embittered and accepting, and for
many of the more neurasthenic E.T.A. students the prorectors are kind of repellent
the way hideously old people are repellent, reminding the students of the kind of
low-prestige purgatorial fate that awaits the marginal and low-ranked jr. player;
and while a couple of the prorectors are feared, none of them is all that much respected,
and they’re avoided, and stick together with one another and keep to themselves and
seem on the whole sad, with that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and
reality-avoidance about them.

95.
Pink
being Microsoft Inc.’s first post-Windows DOS, quickly upgraded to Pink
₂
when InterLace took everything 100% interactive and digital; by Y.D.A.U. it’s kind
of a dinosaur, but it’s still the only DOS that’ll run a Mathpak\EndStat tree without
having to stop and recompile every few seconds.

96.
A kind of prorectorishly sad post in Amateur Sports Administration at tiny Throppinghamshire
Provincial College in Fredericton N.B., C.T.’s undergrad alma mater.

97.
It’s both perverse and kind of understandable that getting some sort of college scholarship
(or ‘Ride’), while very few E.T.A.s (and certainly not Orin Incandenza) have any real
kind of financial need, that nevertheless a scholarship is enormously important self-esteem-wise,
since opting for the college-tennis route in the first place is kind of an admission
of defeat and a surrender of dearly held dreams of the professional Show.

98.
And to keep a distant but weirdly beady and obsessive eye on Mario, from whose lordotic
presence in a room Tavis’d flee just as Avril was fleeing from the temptation of overlobbying
Orin on B.U., such that for a few days when both Orin and Mario entered a room there’d
be the sound of a tremendous collision in the hall outside as C.T. and Avril’s flights’
vectors met.

99.
MA Dept. of Revenue.

100.
The way a White Flagger formulates this, e.g., is that 99.9% of what goes on in one’s
life is actually none of one’s business, with the .1% under one’s control consisting
mostly of the option to accept or deny one’s inevitable powerlessness over the other
99.9%, which just trying to parse this out makes Don Gately’s forehead turn purple.

101.
Some of their earliest dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin
had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a strange feeling watching
commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she’d
punched him hard in the arm in a way that just about drove him wild.

102.
International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers.

103.
A quote ‘episode of excessive neuronal discharge manifested by motor, sensory and/or
[psychic] dysfunction, with or without unconsciousness and/or convulsive [movements],’
plus eye-rolling and tongue-swallowing.

104.
In order for O.N.A.N.T.A. academies to qualify as actual schools and not just like
extended-term sports camps, all instructors and prorectors except the Head have to
be listed as more like academic instructors who prorect on the side.

105.
A Dworkinite heavy-leather organization whose membership on the U.S. East Coast was
in the five figures up until the ugly Pizzitola Riots of Providence RI in Y.W.-Q.M.D.
discredited the F.O.P.P.P.s, and fragmented them.

106.
There’s a Viewing Room on each subdorm floor, and room-size TP’s w/ phone consoles
and (if a kid wants) modems are standard issue, but only E.T.A. juniors and seniors
get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms—a two-year-old administrative
concession the credit for which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such a pest of
himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep
the kid from lurking in his office’s waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending
to report on ‘the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights raging here
in quaint and peaceful Enfield’—and none of these viewers (likewise the Viewing Room’s
units) can have motherboard-cards for Spontaneous InterLace Disseminations or for
ROM-caliber games, which broadcasts and videoish games encourage a stuporous passivity
that E.T.A.’s philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids
are enrolled there in the first place.

107.
E.g. the WhataBurger Invitational will allegedly be recorded for fringe-market, order-only
viewing, later this month.

108.
Sometimes, especially in early fall and late spring, this can involve a lapse of
several weeks; WETA doesn’t broadcast when most of the kids are away at some competitive
thing, and Saturday classes are likewise often canceled—this is one reason why so
many prorectors’ classes are relegated by Mrs. A.M.I. to Saturdays.

109.
Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Québecois; the Bloc’s its federal counterpart,
w/ members in Parliament, and so on and so forth.

110.

Q.v. here later in the same day, 11/7, as Hal Incandenza sits on the edge of his unmade
bed, undressed, with the good right leg curled under him and the bad ankle soaking
in a janitor-pail of dissolved Epsom salts, looking through one of Mario’s old Hush
Puppy shoeboxes of letters and snapshots. Saturdays involve classes and drills and
P.M.
matches but no conditioning run or weight circuits. Afternoon’s odd mismatched challenge
matches held on staff-squeegeed Center Courts under a steady metal sunless sky. The
air still damp after lunchtime’s rain. Hal’s own odd match was truncated when C-squadder
Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the service box
in wobbled circles. Hal skipped a quick trip down to the Pump Room and got to shower
nearly solo in the main locker room. Tomorrow’s Interdependence Day communal supper
at E.T.A. is a big deal and includes each person’s own specially selected hat, plus
real dessert, and a post-prandial Mario-made film, and sometimes a sing-along. Hal
and Pemulis, Struck and Axford and Troeltsch and Schacht and sometimes Stice have
their own special private day-before-I.-Day-ritualistic-supper-out-and-trip-to-The-Unexamined-Life
blowout-gala, since Sunday is a day of total mandatory R&R. The untruncated matches
are winding down out there, Hal can hear. The sun is coming out just in time to go
down. The Comm.-Ad. pipes start to moan and sing with crowded showering kids. Pale
net-shadows are starting to elongate acutely across the sidelines of the courts’ north
sides. Mario is more or less the Incandenza family archivist ex officio. Mario has
been closeted with Disney Leith all day preparing things for Sunday’s post-prandial
gala and filmfest. The phone sits mute atop the answering-machine attachment on the
telephone’s power unit’s console. Its antenna is retracted and it simply sits there,
exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones. The phone’s ringer sort of twitters
instead of ringing. The audio-only comm.-system’s power console is bolted to a receptacle
on the side of Hal and Mario’s TP, and its red power light blinks at the slow liquid
rate of a radio tower. The phone and answering machine are hand-me-downs from Orin’s
days at E.T.A., old models of transparent plastic, so you can see everything’s quad-colored
pasta of wires and chips and tin disks. The only message when Hal got in was from
Orin at 1412h. Orin had said he’d just called to ask whether by any chance Hal’d ever
realized that all of Emily Dickinson—as in the Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson, the
canonical agoraphobic poet—that every single one of Ms. Dickinson’s canonical poems
could by sung without loss or syllabic distortion to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose
(of Texas).’ ‘Be
cause
I
could
not
stop
for
Death
He
kin
dly
stopped
for
Me,
’ Orin had sung illustratively onto the recording. ‘I
hope
the
Fa
ther
in
the
skies
Will
lift
his
litt
le
Girl
.’ Actually more like sort of sung. There’d been professional-locker-room sounds in
the background—locker doors banging, bass voices on tile and steel, personal stereos,
hisses of antiperspirant and styling-spritz. The odd enclosed echo of locker rooms
everywhere, junior or pro. ‘On
my
vol
ca
no
grows
the
Grass
A
me
di
ta
tive
spot,
’ and so on. The fleshy pop of a professionally snapped towel on adult skin. A black
man’s falsetto laughter. Orin’s recorded voice said he’d just grabbed an odd free
second to inquire what Hal’s machine might make of this fact.

Hal spits Kodiak tobacco juice into an old rocket-emblazoned NASA glass on the bedside
table, idly and for no special reason riffling through densely packed letters tri-folded
and packed upright, a kind of Rolodex of different mementos and postal correspondence
Mario’s rescued from wastebaskets and recycling bins and dumpsters and quietly saved
in shoeboxes. Mario has no problem with Hal perusing his closet’s stuff. Mario’s closet
has a canvas strap instead of a knob. Ideally there would also be a bucket of very
cold water, and Hal would move the bad ankle from one bucket to the other and back
again. A whistle sounds from down near the girls’ West Courts. Someone little in the
hall outside the closed door shouts ‘Guess again!’ to someone else farther down the
hall. None of the Hush Puppy box’s snail-mail letters are to or from Mario. Mario’s
bed is loosely, unanally made. Hal’s bed is unmade. Hal and Mario’s mother had done
her undergraduate Honors work at McGill on the use of hyphens, dashes, and colons
in E. Dickinson. The Epsom-water whitens his calluses. Unlaundered bedding swims around
him. The phone twitters.
Am
ple
make this bed,
or
Am
ple
make
this
bed
. The phone twitters again.

A MOVING EXAMPLE OF THE SORTS OF PHYSICAL-POST MAIL MRS. AVRIL INCANDENZA HAS SENT
HER ELDEST CHILD ORIN SINCE THE FELO DE SE OF DR. J. O. INCANDENZA, THE SORT OF CHIRPILY
QUOTIDIAN MAIL THAT—HERE’S THE MOVING PART—SEEMS TO IMPLY A CONTEXT OF REGULAR INTER-PARTY
COMMUNICATION, STILL