Infinite Jest (208 page)

210.
Hal and Mario have long since had to accept
^a
the fact that Avril, at 50+, is still endocrinologically compelling to males.

^a.
‘Accept’ isn’t the same as ‘be crazy about,’ of course.

211.
As with the neuro-gastric thing, only Ted Schacht and Hal know that Pemulis’s deepest
dread is of academic or disciplinary expulsion and ejection, of having to schlepp
back down Comm. Ave. into blue-collar Allston diploma- and ticket-outless, and now
in his final E.T.A. year the dread’s increased many-fold, and is one reason Pemulis
takes such elaborate precautions in all extracurriculars—making a Substance-customer
explicitly suborn him, etc.—and is why Hal and Schacht presented him on his last birthday
with the poster over Pemulis’s room’s console that has a careworn large-crowned King
sitting on his throne stroking his chin and brooding, with the caption: YES, I’M PARANOID—BUT
AM I PARANOID
ENOUGH?

212.
Though it’s unmentioned, everyone in the waiting room except Ann Kittenplan is keenly
aware that Lord and Postal Weight are Pemulis’s charges, Penn and Ingersoll Ax-handle’s;
plus that neither Struck nor Troeltsch seems to have been summoned for potential discipline.

213.
Since tennis courts are laid side to side and played on by hard-hitting but fallible
humans, errant shots are always going off sticks’ frames and net-posts and even fences
and bouncing and rolling into other people’s territory. In starting at usually the
quarter-final rounds of serious tournaments there are ballboys to retrieve them. In
early rounds and practice, though, the delicate etiquette is that you suspend play
and get other people’s balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them
back over to the court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell
‘Sorry!’ or ‘A little help on Three?’ or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally
incapable of doing this, asking for help with errant balls. They both have to hold
everything and go and run all the way over to some other court, halting at each intervening
court to wait for a point to be finished, to get their own balls. It’s a curious inability
to request aid that no amount of negative reinforcement from Tex Watson or Aubrey
deLint can seem to correct.

214.
Where it’s a non-overhead run-back-to-the-baseline-after-an-offensive-lob-then-run-all-the-way-back-up-and-tap-the-netcord-with-your-stick-just-as-Nwangi-or-Thode-hits-another-offensive-lob-over-your-head-you-have-to-run-back-and-get-successfully-back-or-they-pile-extra-lobs-onto-your-regular-allotment
pure pain-fest.

215.
A Clipperton-level legend involves the now long-gone little E.T.A. who in Y.W.-Q.M.D.
had called MA’s Department of Social Services and characterized disciplinary Pukers
as child abuse, resulting in the appearance at the portcullis of two stitchy-mouthed
and humorless D.S.S.-ladies who hung creepily around all day and required Schtitt’s
actually confining Aubrey deLint to his room, so purply furious was deLint with the
kid who’d dropped the dime.

216.
No clue.

217.
Hal had missed out on the soft grass, clay, and Har-Tru surfaces of the Jr. Slams,
because a singular disadvantage of attending a North American academy is that O.N.A.N.T.A.
rules for Jr. Slams permit just one entrant per academy in each age-division, and
John Wayne got the nods.

218.
The late J. O. Incandenza’s Meniscus Optical Products Ltd.’s development of those
weird wide-angle rear-view mirrors on the sides of automobiles that so diminish the
cars behind you that federal statute requires them to have printed right on the glass
that Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, which little imprints Incandenza
found so disconcerting that he was kind of shocked when U.S. automakers and importers
bought rights on the mirrors, way back, for Incandenza’s first unsettling entrepreneurial
payday—E.T.A.s like to postulate that the mirrors had been inspired by the always-foreshortened
Charles Tavis.

219.
Extremely annoying host of InterLace Spontaneous-Dissemm. children’s program.

220.
^®
CardioMed Fitness Products, a fourth-generation StairMasterish thing except set more
to resemble a down-escalator somehow dickied to a sadistically high number of r.p.m.s,
so that the exerciser has to sort of run climbing for his life to avoid getting hurled
backwards all the way across the office by the machine, which is what accounts for
the big square weight-room floor-mat attached to the cleared expanse of office wall
opposite the rear of the machine, which Tavis had moved up to from his StairMaster
after a frightening cholesterol-count report, and had had kind of a tricky time with
at first, once requiring a back-brace.

221.
The Satellite pro Hal’d gotten a set from, a barrel-chested Latvian who thought Hal’s
name was
All
.

222.
N.b. again that Marathe’s native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic Parisio/European
French but cont. id. Québecois French, which is about on a par with Basque in terms
of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninflected
grammatical features, an inbred and obstreperous dialect, and which in fact Steeply
barely got an ‘Acceptable’ in, in U.S.O. technical-interview training in Vienna /
Falls Church VA, and which does not admit of easy coeval expression in English.

223.
Viz. at the allusion to the supposed
samizdateur
’s anticonfluential and meta-entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque
thing, which in fact the play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into
a series of what are called ‘Fast Fourier Transforms,’ though what the hell ‘ALGOL’
is is anybody’s guess, unless it’s not an acronym but some actual Québecois term,
‘
l’algol,
’ which if so it isn’t in any dictionaries or on-line lexical sources anywhere in
the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid.

224.
Q.v. William James on ‘… that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding
a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done,’ the line
that actually snapped Lenz to what he was up to when he chanced to read it in a huge
large-print edition he’d found behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet
living room of something called
The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion,
by William James (obviously), available in EZC large-font print from Microsoft/NAL–Random
House–Ticknor, Fields, Little, Brown and Co., © Y.T.M.P., a volume that’s come to
mean a great deal to Lenz.

225.
^®
The Mobil Chemical Co.’s Consumer Products Branch’s Plastics Division, Pittsford
NNY.

226.
^®
Ibid.

227.
A.k.a. Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture
several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled
sap across the back of the skull.

228.
National Security Agency, absorbed w/ A.T.F. and D.E.A., C.I.A. and O.N.R. and Secret
Service into the ambit of the Office of Unspecified Services.

229.
The A.A.O.A.A., Unspecified Services’ most elite and least specific division, which
on Hugh Steeply’s latest field-assignment is paying his salary, though his checks
and alimony’s garnishment are routed through something called the ‘Foundation for
Continental Freedom,’ which one fervently hopes is a shell/dummy.

230.
Charlestown/Southie street term for meters.

231.
Powdered vitamin B
₁₂
, convincingly bitter and talc-textured, which Lenz has always preferred B
₁₂
to Manitol as a cut because Manitol gives him this allergic thing where he got very
tiny red bumps with weird pale caps on his fingertips.

232.
Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine’s broken down into benzoylecgonine,
methanol, ecgonine, and benzoic acid, and one reason not everybody is wired to enjoy
Crosbulation is that the process is essentially toxic and can yield unpleasant neurosomatic
fallout in certain systems: e.g. in Don Gately’s neurosystem, spider angiomas and
a tendency to pluck at the skin on the backs of his hands, due to which tendency he’s
always loathed and hated coke and most cokeheads; in Bruce Green’s system, binocular
nystagmus and a walloping depression even while the coke-high’s still on that accounts
for the tendency toward fits of weeping with his nystagmic face hidden in the crook
of his big right arm; in Ken Erdedy an unstoppable rhinorrhagia that sent him to the
Emergency Room both times he ever did cocaine; in Kate Gompert blepharospecticity
and now instant cerebral hemorrhage because she’s on Parnate, an M.A.O.-inhibiting
antidepressant; in Emil Minty a ballism so out-of-control he snorted Bing only once.
Hemispasms of the oral labia are a common effect of coke-hydrolysis, one mild enough
so that people can get them and still enjoy Bing very much; the spasming can range
from a mild gnawing/writhing affect in Lenz, Thrale, Cortilyu, and Foss to an alternating
series of Edvard Munch–Jimmy Carter–Paliacci–Mick Jagger–like expressive contortions
so severe that everyone in a room except for them is embarrassed. In former cokehead
Calvin Thrust, hydrolysis had caused a priapism that led directly to his early choice
of career. Randy Lenz also gets nystagmus, but of the right eye only, as well as vascular
constriction, diuresis extremus, phosphenism, compulsive tooth-grinding, megalomania,
phobophobia, euphoric recall, delusions of persecution and/or homicidal envy, sociosis,
postnasal drip, a mild priapism that makes the diuresis a dicey and gymnastic affair,
occasional acne rosea and/or rhinophyma, and—especially if there’s synergism from
almost a whole pack of filterless Winstons and four cups of nipple-hardeningly strong
and alkaline B.Y.P. coffee—confabulation concurrent with a manic garrulousness sufficient
to cause lingual tendinitis, pulmonary phasece, and a complete inability to send from
his presence anyone who seems at all willing to listen to him.

233.
A.k.a. lignocaine, xylocaine-L, a diethylamino-oxylidide compound used as a dental
and maxillofacial anesthetic, the world’s best Bing-cut because it numbs and produces
a bitter drip just like the Bingster, and also even temporarily heightens the rush
of I.V. coke, though if it’s ’based it tastes nothing like oxidized coke, and it’s
also more expensive than Manitol or B
₁₂
and harder to get because it’s prescription, meaning the orthodontist was a very
popular fellow with dealers indeed.

234.

TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENTS FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE
MOMENT
MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINAL PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY
PUTATIVE
MOMENT
MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE WRITER HELEN STEEPLY—NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I’m not going to talk about why I don’t talk to the Moms anymore.’

‘Q.’

‘Or The Mad Stork’s adventures in the mental-health community, either.’

‘Q.’

‘We’re not off to a good start here, ma’am, no matter how lovely you’re looking in
that pantsuit.’

‘Q.’

‘Because the question doesn’t mean anything is why.
Insane
is just like a catch-term, it doesn’t describe anything, it isn’t a reason for anything.
The Stork was a full-blown demented alcoholic for the last three years of his life,
and he put his head in the microwave, and I think just in terms of unpleasantness
you’d have to be sort of insane to kill yourself in such a painful way. So but was
he insane. In the last five years of his life he put together a tennis academy and
got together a national-caliber coaching staff and U.S.T.A. accreditation and sanction
and multi-Grid funding and set up the start of an endowment for E.T.A., and also came
up with that new kind of window glass that doesn’t fog or smudge from people touching
it or breathing on it and drawing little finger-oil faces on it, then sold it to Mitsubishi,
and also managed the revenues from all his previous patents, plus of course drank
himself blind on a daily basis and then needed at least two hours to sit there naked
under a scratchy blanket and shake, and went around impersonating various kinds of
health-care professionals during the periods he believed he was a health-care professional,
from when he had the delirium-tremen-type career delusions, and
in his spare time
made in-depth documentaries and a dozen art-films that people are still writing doctoral
theses on. So was he insane? It’s true, the
New Yorker
guy, the film guy who replaced the guy who replaced Rafferty, what was his name,
it’s true he kept saying the films were like the planet’s most psychotic psyche working
out its shit right there on the screen and asking you to pay to watch him. But you
have to remember that that guy got third-degree burned by the whole Found Drama scam.
That guy was one of the high-caliber critics who said in print that here Incandenza
had put drama ahead three or four leaps in one visionary leap, and after The Stork
finally couldn’t keep a straight face anymore and spilled the beans on NPR radio during
a ‘Fresh Air’ dramaturgy-panel the
New Yorker
guy dropped from critical sight for like a year and then when he came back he had
it in for Himself in a very big way, which is understandable.’

‘Q.’

‘What I started to say is if quote unquote sources you cannot name say the reason
I’m not in contact is I claim the Moms is insane, well, what is
insane
supposed to mean. Do I trust her I do not. Do I want to be in association with her
in any way—that is a neg. Do I think she’s irretrievably bats? One of her best friends
is the E.T.A. counselor, Rusk, with doctorates in both Gender and Deviance. Does she
think the Moms is bats?’