Infinite Jest (21 page)

‘Tard tard tard,’ Stice says.

Group empathy is expressed via sighs, further slumping, small spastic gestures of
exhaustion, the soft clanks of skulls’ backs against the lockers’ thin steel.

‘My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so
tired.’

‘I’m waiting til the last possible second to even breathe. I’m not expanding the cage
till driven by necessity of air.’

‘So tired it’s out of
tired
’s word-range,’ Pemulis says. ‘
Tired
just doesn’t do it.’

‘Exhausted, shot, depleted,’ says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the
heel of his hand. ‘Cashed. Totalled.’

‘Look.’ Pemulis pointing at Struck. ‘It’s trying to think.’

‘A moving thing to see.’

‘Beat. Worn the heck out.’

‘Worn the
fuck
-all out is more like.’

‘Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.’

‘None even come close, the words.’

‘Word-inflation,’ Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and
clears. ‘Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker.
Like grade-inflation.’

‘Should be so lucky,’ says Struck, who’s been on academic probation since fifteen.

Stice is from a part of southwest Kansas that might as well be Oklahoma. He makes
the companies that give him clothes and gear give him all black clothes and gear,
and his E.T.A. cognomen is ‘The Darkness.’

Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. ‘Hyperbolicker?’

‘My daddy as a boy, he’d have said “tuckered out” ’ll do just fine.’

‘Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.’

‘Phrases and clauses and models and structures,’ Troeltsch says, referring again to
a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget. ‘We need an inflation-generative
grammar.’

Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out
at Troeltsch: ‘Generate this.’

‘Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this,’ Struck says. ‘E.T.A.’s best
minds on the problem. Whole thesauruses digested, analyzed.’ Makes a sarcastic motion.
‘Hal?’

One semion that still works fine is holding your fist up and cranking at it with the
other hand so the finger you’re giving somebody goes up like a drawbridge. Though
of course Hal’s mocking himself at the same time. Everybody agrees it speaks volumes.
Idris Arslanian’s shoes and incisors appear briefly in the doorway’s steam, then withdraw.
Everyone’s reflection is sort of cubist in the walls’ shiny tiling. The name handed
down paternally from an Umbrian five generations past and now much diluted by N.E.
Yankee, a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding,
Hal is the only extant Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic. His late father had
been as a young man darkly tall, high flat Pima-tribe cheekbones and very black hair
Brylcreemed back so tight there’d been a kind of enforced widow’s peak. Himself had
looked ethnic, but he isn’t extant. Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish,
only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unburnable even w/o sunscreen, his
untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. His
sleekness isn’t oily so much as moist, milky; Hal worries secretly that he looks half-feminine.
His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war: Hal’s eldest brother
Orin had got the Moms’s Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype, the deep-socketed and lighter-blue
eyes, the faultless posture and incredible flexibility (Orin was the only male anybody
at E.T.A.’d ever heard of who could do a fully splayed cheerleader-type split), the
rounder and more protrusive zygomatics.

Hal’s next-oldest brother Mario doesn’t seem to resemble much of anyone they know.

On most of the nontravel days that he doesn’t Big Buddy with his charges, Hal will
wait till most everybody’s busy in the sauna and shower and stow his sticks in his
locker and stroll casually down the cement steps into E.T.A.’s system of tunnels and
chambers. He has some way he can casually drift off and have quite a while go by before
anyone even notices his absence. He’ll often stroll casually back into the locker
room just as people are slumped on the floor in towels discussing fatigue, carrying
his gear bag and substantially altered in mood, and go in when most of the littler
kids are in there peeling Pledge-husks off their limbs and taking their turn showering,
and shower, using one of the kids’ shampoo out of a bottle shaped like a cartoon character,
then hike the head back and apply Visine in a Schacht-free stall, gargle and brush
and floss and dress, usually not even needing to comb his hair. He carries Visine
AC, mint-flavored floss, and a traveller’s toothbrush in a pocket of his Dunlop gear
bag. Ted Schacht, big into oral hygiene, regards Hal’s bag’s floss and brush as an
example to them all.

‘So tired it’s like I’m almost high.’

‘But not pleasantly high,’ Troeltsch says.

‘It’d be a pleasanter tiredness-high if I didn’t have to wait till fucking 1900 to
start all this studyin’,’ Stice says.

‘You’d think Schtitt could at least not turn up the juice the week before midterms.’

‘You’d think that the coaches and the teachers could try and get together on their
scheduling.’

‘It’d be like a pleasant fatigue if I could just go up after dinner and hunker on
down with the mind in neutral and watch something uncomplex.’

‘Not have to worry about prescriptive forms or acutance.’

‘Kick back.’

‘Watch something with chase scenes and lots of stuff blowing up all over the place.’

‘Relax, do bongs, kick back, look at lingerie catalogues, eat granola with a great
big wooden spoon,’ Struck says wistfully.

‘Get laid.’

‘Just get one night off to like R and R.’

‘Slip on the old environmental suit and listen to some atonal jazz.’

‘Have sex. Get laid.’

‘Bump uglies. Do the nasty. Haul ashes.’

‘Find me one of them Northeast Oklahoma drive-in burger-stand waitresses with the
great big huge titties.’

‘Those enormous pink-white French-painting tits that sort of like
tumble
out.’

‘One of those wooden spoons so big you can barely get your mouth around it.’

‘Just one night to relax and indulge.’

Pemulis belts out two quick verses of Johnny Mathis’s ‘Chances Are,’ left over from
the shower, then subsides to examine something on his left thigh. Shaw has a spit-bubble
going, growing to such exceptional size for just spit that half the room watches until
it finally goes at the same moment Pemulis breaks off.

Evan Ingersoll says ‘We get off Saturday for Interdependence Day Eve, though, the
board said.’

Several upperclass heads are cocked up at Ingersoll. Pemulis makes a bulge in his
cheek with his tongue and moves it around.

‘Flubbaflubba’: Stice makes his jowls fly around.

‘We get off classes is all. Drills and challenges go merrily on, deLint says,’ Freer
points out.

‘But no drills Sunday, before the Gala.’

‘But still matches.’

Every jr. player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continentally, except
Pemulis, Yardley and Blott.

There’d be clear evidence that T. Schacht’s still in one of the toilet stalls off
the showers even if Hal couldn’t see the tip of one of Schacht’s enormous purple shower
thongs under the door of the stall right by where the shower-area entryway cuts into
his line of sight. Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors.
The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows
on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial
type of waiting, almost religious. Luther’s shoes on the floor beneath the chamber
pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther’s 16th-century shoes, awaiting epiphany.
The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station
johns, heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush. Women’s
slippers, centurions’ dusty sandals, dock-workers’ hobnailed boots, Popes’ slippers.
All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping. Huge shaggy-browed men in
skins hunched just past the firelight’s circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting.
Schacht suffered from Crohn’s Disease,
⁴³
a bequest from his ulcerative-colitic dad, and had to take carminative medication
with every meal, and took a lot of guff about his digestive troubles, and had developed
of all things arthritic gout, too, somehow, because of the Crohn’s Disease, which
had settled in his right knee and caused him terrible pain on the court.

Freer’s and Tall Paul Shaw’s racquets fall off the bench with a clatter, and Beak
and Blott move fast to pick them up and stack them back on the bench, Beak one-handed
because the other hand is keeping his towel fastened.

‘Because so that was let’s see,’ Struck says.

Pemulis loves to sing around tile.

Struck’s hitting his palm with a finger for either emphasis or ordinal counting. ‘Close
to let’s call it an hour run for the A-squads, an hour-fifteen drills, two matches
back to back.’

‘I only played one,’ Troeltsch injects. ‘Had a measurable fever in the
A.M.
, deLint said to throttle down today.’

‘Folks that went three sets only played one match, Spodek and Kent for an instance,’
Stice says.

‘Funny how Troeltsch how his health always seems to rally when
A.M.
drills get out,’ Freer says.

‘—like conservatively two hours for the matches. Conservatively. Then half an hour
on the machines under fucking Loach’s beady browns, sitting there with the clipboard.
That’s let’s call it five hours of vigorous nonstop straight-out motion.’

‘Sustained and strenuous exertion.’

‘Schtitt’s determinated this year we ain’t singing no silly songs at Port Washington.’

John Wayne hasn’t said one word this whole time. The contents of his locker are neat
and organized. He always buttons his shirt all the way up to the top button as if
he were going to put on a tie, which he doesn’t even own. Ingersoll’s also getting
dressed out of his underclassman’s small square locker.

Stice says ‘Except they seem to forget we’re still in our puberty.’

Ingersoll is a kid seemingly wholly devoid of eyebrows, as far as Hal can see.

‘Speak for yourself, Darkness.’

‘I’m saying how stressing the pubertyizing skeleton like this, it’s real short-sighted.’
Stice’s voice rises. ‘ ’m I supposed to do when I’m twenty and in the Show playing
nonstop and I’m skeletally stressed and injury-proned?’

‘Dark’s right.’

A curled bit of cloudy old Pledge-husk and a green thread from a strip of GauzeTex
wrap are complexly entwined in the blue fibers of the carpet near Hal’s left ankle,
which ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue tinge. He keeps flexing the ankle whenever
it occurs to him to. Struck and Troeltsch spar briefly with open hands, feinting and
bobbing their heads, both still seated on the floor. Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck,
Rader, and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands,
as per Academy mandate. Struck’s shoulders and neck have furious purple inflammations;
Hal had also noticed a boil on the inside of Schacht’s thigh, when Ted’d sat down.
Hal’s face’s reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then
if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical
twang in the next tile. That post-shower community feeling is dissipating. Even Evan
Ingersoll looks quickly at his watch and clears his throat. Wayne and Shaw have dressed
and left; Freer, a major Pledge-devotee, is at his hair in the mirror, Pemulis also
rising now to get away from Freer’s feet and legs. Freer’s eyes have a protrusive
wideness to them that the Axhandle says makes Freer always look like he’s getting
shocked or throttled.

And time in the
P.M.
locker room seems of limitless depth; they’ve all been just here before, just like
this, and will be again tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the
bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows.

‘I’m thinking it’s Tavis,’ Freer says to them all in the mirror. ‘Where there’s excess
work and suffering can fucking Tavis be far behind.’

‘No, it’s Schtitt,’ Hal says.

‘Schtitt was short a few wickets out of the old croquet set long before he got hold
of us, men,’ Pemulis says.

‘Peemster and Hal.’

‘Halation and Pemurama.’

Freer purses his little lips and expels air like he’s blowing out a match, blowing
some tiny grooming-remnant off the big mirror’s glass. ‘Schtitt just does what he’s
told like a good Nazi.’

‘What the
hail
is that supposed to mean?’ asks a Stice who’s well known for asking How High Sir
when Schtitt says Jump, now feeling at the carpet around him for something to throw
at Freer. Ingersoll tosses Stice a woppsed-up towel, trying to be helpful, but Stice’s
eyes are on Freer’s in the glass, and the towel hits him on the head and sits there,
on his head. The room’s emotions seem to be inverting themselves every couple seconds.
There’s half-cruel laughter at Stice as Hal struggles to his feet, rising in careful
stages, putting most of his weight on the good ankle. Hal’s towel falls off as he
does his combination. Struck says something that’s lost in the roar of a high-pressure
toilet.

The feminized American stood at a slight angle to Marathe upon the outcropping. He
stared out at the dusk-shadow they were now inside, and as well the increasingly complicated
twinkle of the U.S.A. city Tucson, seeming slackly transfixed, Steeply, in the way
vistas too large for the eye to contain transfix persons in a kind of torpid spectation.

Marathe seemed on the edge of sleep.

Even the voice of Steeply had a different timbre inside the shadow. ‘They say it’s
a great and maybe even timeless love, Rod Tine’s for your Luria person.’