Infinite Jest (204 page)

‘Trying to engineer it so that Canada’ll be more than happy to disassociate from them,’
Orin says. ‘And I’m saying I don’t have the background or lobes to even know whether
she might be putting me on, testing my depth.’

‘You’ve always had a special dread of depth-testing.’

‘How about why don’t you just toss me the Bob and Axhandle and me’ll go down and get
things ready and wait for you,’ Pemulis stage-whispers to Hal’s slacks’ bottom, which
is pretty much all that’s visible from under the desk. Hal’s hand comes up out of
the leg-space under the desk and raises one finger and shakes it a little for emphasis.
Pemulis is standing next to the small TP viewer—which is propped up like a large photo
with a buttressy thing that folds out of its back—and the TP’s disk- and cartridge-drive,
which takes up less than a quarter of the desktop and has the phone’s console and
power unit bolted into a receptacle on the drive’s side.

Hal’s voice is muffled and has the strained pitch of someone trying to clear nests
of dust-bunnied wire to find something. ‘Except Orin I don’t see a great deal of pondering
required here. The total anti-U.S. insurgency so far’s been too hapless and small-potato
for her theory to work. The odd pie- and guano-bombardment, stretching mirrors across
lonely roads, even demapping officials and botulizing the occasional peanut jar. None
of this is exactly bringing anyone to his knees. None of this is making Canada or
Québec look like any kind of serious threat.’

Michael Pemulis, his jaunty cap pushed back and his lips pursed as if whistling, but
not whistling, is very casually brushing his hand over the drive and console’s power
unit, as if killing time by casually dusting. His other hand’s jingling pocket-change.
There’s the sound of Hal clunking his head on something under the desk. His bottom
is bony and his belt has missed two loops. The power unit’s toggle’s next to a little
red jewel of a power-light that blinks at the same rate as a smoke alarm when the
toggle’s on ON.

Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his fingers in a little anapestic gallop over the
unit’s top. Orin sounds like he’s sitting up straight. ‘Hallie kid now you’re right
with me, this is where your pondering lobes come in, because that was just my response,
that there was nothing sufficiently more than just an annoying gnat-like annoyance
about the insurgencies, which is where she moved beyond my depth back into 1(a), if
you remember, when she raised this
samizdat
-word in connec—’

^a.
Don’t ask.

^b.
Ibid.

^c.
I.e., the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, a syntactic-integrity PAC Avril
had put together with two or three very dear friends and colleagues around metro Boston.

^d.
The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster’s anti-sclerotic miracle-food craze.

^e.
The then-skinny Eliot Kornspan, before Loach and Freer got hold of him.

^f.
At once high-tech and somehow atavistic, Telegrocery services let you order off your
TP and then have the stuff brought right to your door by college-studenty types, often
within hours, saving one the stress and fluorescent hassle of public food-shopping.
As of Y.D.A.U. it’s still very big in some areas and not all that big in others. The
first Tele-grocery service didn’t even launch in metro Boston until YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/
ITPSFH,O,OM(
s
), and it’s still mostly in Boston a downscale and blue-collar thing, oddly.

^g.
InterLace serves just about all of habitable O.N.A.N.; each nation comprises (roughly
speaking) an entertainment-dissemination ‘Grid.’

^h.
After Meech Lake I, Charlottetown I and II, and Meech Lake II, this was Ottawa’s
fifth and final attempt to placate Québec with a constitutional amendment formalizing
the Gallic province’s right to ‘preserve and promote’ a ‘distinct society and culture.’

^i.
The French and Indian War, known to Québecers as ‘La Guerre des Britanniques et des
Sauvages,’ BS c. 1754–60, at the final battles of which, at the Plains of Abraham
in ’59 and Montreal in ’60, the English and Americans kicked ass and took names in
a large way that’s never quite been forgotten by the Québecois, whose memory for insult
is the stuff of legend. The wily Amherst was there, too, at Ticonderoga and Montreal,
with his trusty smallpox-blankets.

^j.
Grammar and Meaning.

^k.
The Clean U.S. Party of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner.

^l.
The Calgarian pro-Canadian Phalanx.

111.
Hal’s term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because
like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who’s an expatriate
Québecer,
whinge
is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining
except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint.

112.
The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring
Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of southwestern Québec.

113.
Which sinewy stuff is described by the OB-GYN specialist in his DictaChart as ‘neural-gray.’

114.
© B.S. MCMLXII, The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH, sponsor of
the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time (q.v. Note 78). All Rights Reserved.

115.
Volkmann’s contracture’s some kind of severe serpentine deformation of the arms following
a fracture that hadn’t been set right or splinted or where the arm’s been allowed
to stay all woundedly bent in as it heals;
bradyauxesis
refers to some part(s) of the body not growing as fast as the other parts of the
body—Himself and the Moms got plenty familiar with these sorts of congenital-challenge
terms and many more, re Mario, particularly the variations on the medical root
brady,
from the Greek
bradys
meaning slow, such as bradylexia (w/r/t reading), bradyphenia (practical-problem-solving-type
thinking), nocturnal bradypnea (dangerously slow breathing during sleep sometimes,
which is why Mario uses four pillows minimum), bradypedestrianism (obvious), and especially
bradykinesia, an almost gerontologic lentissimo about most of Mario’s movements, an
exaggerated slowness that both resembles and permits extremely close slow attention
to whatever’s being done.

116.
Pretty much the BMW of 16mm. digital-cartridge recorders, brought out in limited
numbers by Paillard Cinématique of Sherbrooke, Québec, CAN, just weeks before its
manufacturing facilities were annularly hyperfloriated and the company went belly-up.

117.
… overshot the place to mention that Mario’s head—in perverse contradistinction to
the arm-trouble—is
hyper
auxetic, and two to three times the size of your more average elf-to-jockey-sized
head and facies.

118.
You’d somehow think that Mario would be thick as thieves with the blue-collar custodial
and kitchen and physical plant/grounds staff, but it’s odd, he and they never have
much to say to each other, and with rare exceptions none of the E.T.A.s including
Mario has anything interpersonal to do with the nine-month part-time halfway-house
rehabilitating workers, who mostly mow and mop and empty trash and load dishes into
the dining hall’s steamer, and who radiate a kind of slitty-eyed reserve that seems
far more sullen and ungrateful than shy.

119.
… also overshot the spot to include that Mario’s a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids
and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise; it’s a source of unending struggle
for Ted Schacht, who tends to avoid Mario because whenever he’s around him he has
to fight the urge to have him open up and submit to scrutiny, which Schacht can well
imagine would hurt his feelings: nobody wants to be an object of clinical interest
like that.

120.
This basic phenomenon being what more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults call
‘Historical Consciousness.’

121.
Eschaton’s pre- and post-procedures are convolved enough so that an actual game gets
gotten up every like month or so at most, almost always on Sunday, but even then not
all twelve of a year’s kids can get the hours off to play, which is why the latitude
and surplus in game-personnel.

122.
O.N.A.N.ite Classroom Cartographic Series W–520–500–268–6
^W
–9
^W
–9
^W
– 14
^W4
, © B.S. 1994, Rand McNally & Company.

123.
Pemulis here, dictating to Inc, who can just sit there making a steeple out of his
fingers and pressing it to his lip and not take notes and wait and like inscribe [
sic
] it anytime in the next week and get it verbatim, the smug turd. Using the Mean-Value
formula for dividing available megatonnage among Combatants whose GNP/Military //
Military/Nuke ratios vary from Eschaton to Eschaton keeps you from needing to crunch
out a new ratio for each Combatant each time, plus lets you multi-regress the results
so Combatants get rewarded for past thermonuclear largesse [occasional verbal flourishes
Hal’s—HJI]. The formula’s also provable by the Extreme Value Theorem, which the EV
Theorem itself has a proof that’s just about the biggest Unit-twisting bitch in the
whole of applied differentiation, but I see Hal grimacing, so we’ll keep it compact,
even though this whole thing is real interesting if you’re interested and whatnot.

Say you’ve got a Combatant and a record of his past GNP/Military // Military/Nuke
ratios. We want to give the Combatant the like exact average of all the past megatonnages
he’s gotten in the past. The exact average is called the ‘Mean Value,’ which ought
to give us a bit of a giggle, given the hostility of the context here.

So then but let A stand for the Mean Value of a Combatant’s constantly fluctuating
ratio and so constantly fluctuating initial megatonnage. We want to find A and give
the Combatant exactly A megatons. How to do it’s pretty elegant, and all you need
for it is two pieces of data: the most his ratio’s ever been and the least it’s ever
been. These two datums [
sic
] are called the Extreme Values of the cn-n function for which A’s the Mean Value,
by the way.

So then but so let ƒ be a continuous non-negative function (meaning the ratio) on
the interval [a, b] (meaning the difference between the least the ratio’s ever been
and the most it’s ever been and whatnot). Are these little explanations aggravating
[
sic
]? Inc’s looking at me like butter would freeze. It’s hard to know what to assume
v. what to explain. I’m trying to be as clear as I can be [
sic
]. And now he’s looking at me like I’m digressing. Why don’t you just pass that certain
item back on over here, Inculator. But so we’ve got ƒ and we’ve got [a, b]. And let
r and R be the smallest and biggest values of the function ƒ(x) on the interval [a,
b]. So now check out the rectangles of height r and height R over the interval [a,
b] in the diagram marked let’s go ahead and mark it say PEEMSTER:

The Mean Value we’re after, A, can now be expressed integrally as the Area of some
intermediate-type rectangle whose height is taller [
sic
] than r but shorter [
sic
] than R. From here on it’s just tit. We need a constant. You always need a constant.
Inc’s nodding his head sarcastically like I think I’m saying something sage. Let d
be any constant, for computational reasons the closer to 1 the better, so like let
d be the size of Hal’s Unit.

Hal Incandenza’s Addendum: In meters.

Michael Pemulis’s Resumption: Very funny. So now, just looking at the wicked-illuminating
PEEMSTER diagram above, you can see that this Area we want: