Infinite Jest (202 page)

‘The Subject cited polls from when they were still bothering to take polls up there
that said like upwards of four-fifths of all Canadians wanted out of O.N.A.N. and
hoped President Gentle had a ghastly accident in his UV-booth, et cetera.’

‘So the second and final question concerns this shift from anti-Canadian Québecer
nationalism to anti-O.N.A.N. Canadian nationalism.’

‘What I was thinking is is this maybe a textbook case of Johnny-Gentle-type-find-an-enemy-for-a-divided-nation-to-come-together-by-blaming-and-hating
theory in action? Is this somehow Québec like circling its wagons with Alberta and
all the other provinces in the face of a common enemy?’

‘…’

‘Hal?’

‘You could always point out to the profiler that there’s a nice little irony to Gentle’s
strategy ending up bringing Canada together at our expense, when it was pretty obviously
meant to bring us together at Canada’s expense.’

‘But you sound like you think the more deeply pondered response would be something
else.’

‘All I know is some very basic schoolboy history from Poutrincourt’s class. And from
the advantage of occasional contact with the Moms.’

‘Hit me.’

‘The historical record indicates pretty clearly that the one and only nationalism
in the Québecois soul is Québecois nationalism. It’s been “Nous v. La Plupart Toujours,”
and the more so the farther out on the fringes you get. I can’t see the Séparatisteurs
considering Québec a true part of Canada any more than Lesotho saw itself as part
of SOUTHAF. Poutrincourt keeps thumping the fact that there’s no valid comparison
between Québec and our own antebellum South. Why do you think Meech Lake III
^h
failed? It’s because at root they’ve never seen themselves as anything other than
hostages of Ottawa and the Anglophone provinces. Even moderate Séparatisteurs like
Parizeau spoke of the final surrender on the Plains of Abraham as a kind of forced
property-transfer, the whole original war
ⁱ
as one in which French-Canadians weren’t the losers so much as the spoils. Booty.’

‘This all checks with the Subject’s take.’

‘The impression I get is that Québec’s hatred of anglophone Canada transcends anything
they could work up against O.N.A.N. Just mention 1759 and the Moms’s lips disappear.
Pemulis and Axford keep coming early and putting a big gothic
1759
on the blackboard before G&M
^j
just to watch the Moms’s lips disappear when she comes in and sees it.’

‘My sense is the Subject concurs on the hatred-assessment. They want plain out, always
have. Health-care and NAFTA be damned. That’s why they sabotaged all three Meech Lake
Accords, she says. She seems to imply the anti-O.N.A.N. thing is some sort of anomalous
dodge or something.’

‘I’ve got to confess a sort of curiosity now about this profiler you just last week
were preparing to fend off about Himself. Not to mention comparing her to defensive
linemen. Rubensian was never your type, I didn’t think.’

‘…’

‘Plus any Subject you’re bothering about even giving the impression of depth to. This
is more work than your type of Subject tends to demand, usually, isn’t it?’

‘…’

‘This is something else that isn’t you. You’ve never exactly been shy about discussing
Subjects with me.’

‘It’s complex. She’s grown on me.’

‘It’s this certain
way
she takes notes on your explanation of Coffin-Corner punts.’

‘It’s complicated. There’s a lot I’m not saying. She’s got levels. I’ve discovered
levels and dimensions to her I didn’t know were originally there.’

‘Oh O.,
please
don’t let it just be you’ve just discovered she’s married with little kids. That’s
not it by any chance is it? Please let it be something other than little kids.’

‘…’

‘Let it be something other than the hordes of other Subjects I’ve sat and listened
to excruciatingly detailed sadistic blow-by-blow Strategic accounts of. Orin “Home-wrecker”
Incandenza, this is what the team calls you, in like jest? You sick pup.’

‘
I’m
a sick pup?
I’m
the sick one?’

‘… Wants to blame her, won’t admit it, needs to, won’t admit it, sweepingly blames
the whole affair of Himself on her, won’t interface with her or worse even acknowledge
her, resents even the fact she forgives things like you and Marlon Bain killing her
dog—’

‘—a hit-and-run-and-back-up-and-hit-again driver, I
told
you rep—’

‘—pretends he gets the most retardate PR staffer he can make hold the crayon to send
grotesque solecistic pseudo-impersonal replies to her pathetic letters. Jethro Bodine,
O.? Jethro
Bodine?
’

‘A private chuckle. She’d never get it.’

‘Disowns her—worse, sicker, tells himself he’s convinced himself she doesn’t even
exist, as if she never existed, but by some coincidence has this rapacious fetish
for young married mothers he can strategize into betraying their spouses and maybe
damaging their kids for all time, and has this apparently even more rapacious compulsive
need to call the blood-relative he hasn’t even seen in four years and tell him all
about every Subject and Strategy, blow-by-blow, long distance, in nanomicroscopic
detail. Let’s stop and ponder
this
all for a moment, O., what say?’

‘I’m letting all this be just water off a duck’s back. I can tell it’s the tooth talking.
I can remember the stress of the place. All I can say is that trust me here: this
Moment
Subject is like strickenly dissimilar from what you’re indicting. The levels and
circumstances aren’t the ones you’re so anxious to call rapacious. Is all I can say
at this juncture.’

‘Why do I suspect it’s simply that you tried to make the big X with her and she demurred
and this simply piqued your interest? During my can’t-miss nail-interval you were
saying how enormous interior linemen were making comments about her bottom being so
huge and soft you could whack it over and over with a car antenna and not hurt it.’

‘Hallie I never said any such fucking thing. You pulled that out of the air. And
I’m
sick?’

‘You said she was obese.’

‘I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was
something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this sudden flash of understanding
how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention
queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant.’

‘And she declined a casual advance, and showed you pictures of her like enormous offspring,
and you came to attention.’

‘With a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome, like big pretty
girls get.’

‘I’m going to have to keep her away from this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he
really is a Rubensophile. After
P.M.
s when we sit around he’ll go on and on about enormous breasts and melon bellies and
quivering laps until we’re all grimacing and pinching our nose-bridges. And whatever
you meant was not
lissome
.’

‘The reserve QB who’s next to me in these godawful pre-game costumed swoop-and-glides
said something I liked. Helen passed him in the locker room and he—do you want to
hear this?’

‘She was in the locker room?’

‘It’s the law. The pros aren’t a PR-gulag. He said she had a face that’d break your
heart and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed over to your aid as you
pitched over sideways grabbing your chest.’

‘That is a pretty good one, O.’

‘But so far we concur on the basic oddness, it sounds like. If the radicals want Québec
loose from Canada still, and that’s always been the priceless pearl, why like dissipate
themselves trying to wreak mayhem down here almost the precise moment Interdependence
is declared? ’ce pas?’

‘I’d rather just agree it’s a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt
and grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we hit the truck.’

‘Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different
Separatist flanges?’

‘Not according to Poutrincourt they don’t.’

‘So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Québec Go or we stick knives
in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on Rue Sherbrooke during St.
Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and
stretch mirrors across U.S. highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monuments
and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and dicky
with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot O.N.A.N.ite
V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from injecting anaerobic toxins into
jars of Planters peanuts?’

‘The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.’

‘Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what’s the political motivation for the
about-face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound soberly considered.’

‘Orin, I’m trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with
your choice of me as co-ponderer.’

‘All—’

‘I’m a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I’m a student at a tennis academy
that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with
yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor
circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but
one, by design. I’m sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it
you hope to get from me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding
line of patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been seduced
into believing it’s really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians.
Of fringe
anybody
. How consistent do the Brazilian
Nuevo Contras
’ objectives look? The
Noie Störkraft
’s? Shining Path’s? The Belgian CCC’s’? Pro-Life assault squads? The
Ez-ed-Dean-el-Qassan?
P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists’ objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?’
^k

‘
Poor
C.U.S.P.s?’

‘Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term
wacko
and leave it at that? Why not tell her you’re a radically simple and somewhat sick
young man who kicks balls really high in the air for a living?’

‘All I—’

‘Why not just say
who cares?
This stuff isn’t about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you
say you’ve erased from all RAM. Why not tell the damn truth for once?’

‘
Me
tell the truth?
Me
lie?’

‘What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT entrance-test
on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance exam? You have to place above a certain
percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery right next to the
bassinet? Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can
you be that sick that you can’t even admit it over the fucking
phone?
’

‘…’

‘Or what?’

‘…’

‘I’m sorry, O. I apologize.’

‘Think nothing of it. I know you didn’t mean it.’

‘I hate losing the temper.’

‘You don’t sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.’

Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. ‘These tooth-episodes make me feel like that
wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.’

‘That chew’s going to eat right through your membranes. It’s a vicious vice. I’m urging
in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.’

Michael Pemulis cracks Hal’s door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder
in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and his right eye gets wobbly
in this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting
cap, gold epaulets of fake naval braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that
lights up in sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in
he brings his other arm in over from behind like it’s not his arm, his hand in the
shape of a claw just over his head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling
him back out into the hall. W/ an eye-rolling look of fake terror.

Hal is hunched, examining his finger for eye-material. ‘In all the excitement we’ve
neglected the most obvious response, then, O. Your answer for the exam, and then I
can go dry the ankle.’ He can hear Pemulis asking Petropolis Kahn and Stephan Wagenknecht
something off down the hall through the cracked door.

‘I think I already tried the obvious response on her, but hit me.’

‘Pemulis just made his first pass and left the door ajar. I’m sitting here nude in
a draft through an open door neglecting the maybe deceptively obvious fact that something
like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity’s northern border runs contiguous to Québec.’

‘Exactamundo.’

‘So that so what if Ottawa didn’t formally subjoin the Concavity to any particular
province. Really big favor, I’m sure. Because the map speaks for itself. Bits of western
New Brunswick and a smidgeon of Ontario aside, the Concavity—the physical fact and
fallout of the Concavity—it’s Québec’s problem. Something like 750 clicks of border
along the Concavity, with attendant seepage, for Notre Rai Pays.’

‘Yes plus the brunt of the airborne wastes from the high-altitude ATHSCMEs, plus being
the province that gets splatted when the E.W.D. vehicles overshoot the Concavity.
This is what I tried right off the bat on her.’

‘So what’s the puzzle. Put yourself in Québec’s shoes. Once again they get the gooey
end of the Canadian dipstick. It’s mostly now western Québecer kids the size of Volkswagens
shlumpfing around with no skulls. It’s Québecers with cloracne and tremors and olfactory
hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead.
It’s eastern Québec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely asymmetrical
snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their
driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant-depredations and the
corrosive fogs.’