Infinite Jest (211 page)

264.
Sic,
but it’s pretty obvious what Marathe means here.

265.
Reinforced Aluminum Spectation Unit.

266.
The occasional upscale parent could be seen exiting Comm.-Ad. and crossing behind
the West Courts’ south fence to the asphalt lot and what were unmistakably parental
autos, all remarkable for their textbook tire-pressure and bristles of cellular antennae
and the absence of any little dust-smiles on their rear or side windows. Charles Tavis
had spent the morning interfacing with parents of those E.T.A. kids injured in I.-Day’s
Eschaton free-for-all. Lateral Alice Moore, for a treat, had been listening to Tavis
and parents on her headphones, while typing, instead of her collection of aerobic
favorites. Struck and Pemulis had cruised by before lunch and blarneyed her into putting
the exchanges on her intercom’s speaker for a couple minutes. You should hear C.T.
enclosed with parents sometime. It was only some of the parents—Todd Possalthwaite’s
dad was on honeymoon in the Azores, and Otis P. Lord’s mother had some inner-ear thing
and the Lords couldn’t fly. But Pemulis and Struck concurred that everyone with any
kind of administration in his blood should hear E.T.A.’s Headmaster with parents and
a placative mission, a master charmer past all social gauge, a Houdini with the manacles
of fact, the interfaces like fluidless seductions—Pemulis said the man’s missed a
genuine calling in sales—everyone practically wanting to smoke a cigarette afterward,
the parents leave weeping, pumping Tavis’s hands—one parent per hand—practically begging
him to accept both their thanks and their apologies for daring to even possibly
think,
even for a
moment
. Then, supporting each other, making their way over Lateral Alice’s third rail and
past the beaming extremely
polite
lads by her desk and out through the pressurized glass lobby doors and down off the
white-pillared neo-Georgian porch and past courts and bleachers and into their well-maintained
autos and out the portcullis and very slowly down the hill’s brick drive before they
even recall they’d forgotten to pop in on their injured kid, sign his cast, feel his
forehead, say Hey.

267.
I.e. ace/double fault, rather like the ratio of strikeouts to walks for a pitcher.

268.
It was like Steeply’d never seen so many left-handed people: both Hal Incandenza
and the boy in black were left-handed, one of the two little girls four courts down
was left-handed, deLint was marking the chart with his left hand. Both A.F.R. turncoat
Rémy Marathe and Québecer triple-operative Luria P———were southpaws, though Steeply
realized that this could hardly be called significant.

269.

Saprogenic Greetings
^*

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

Ms. Helen Steepley

And So On

November Y.D.A.U.

… (1) Orin Incandenza and I played, practiced, and generally hung out through most
of what seemed at the time to be our formative years. We met because I kept encountering
him across the net in the local tennis tournaments we played around metro Boston,
Boys’ 10’s. We were the two best 10-year-old males in Boston. We soon became practice
partners, our mothers driving us every weekday afternoon to a junior development program
at the Auburndale Tennis Club in West Newton. After my own parents were horribly killed
on the Jamaica Way commuter road one morning in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report
helicopter, I became a sort of hanger-on at the Incandenza house out in Weston. When
J.O.I. founded the Academy, I was one of the first matriculants. Orin and I were inseparable
until around age 15, when I reached my own zenith in terms of early puberty and athletic
promise and began to be able to beat him. He took it hard. We were never inseparable
again. We spent quantity time together again briefly for a few months the next year,
during a period when we both experimented heavily with recreational substances. We
both ended up losing enthusiasm for substances after only a couple years, Orin because
he had finally entered puberty and had discovered the weaker sex and found he needed
all his faculties and guile, myself because a couple of really negative methoxy-psychedelic
experiences left me with certain Disabilities that to this day make normal life an
exceptional challenge, and which I tend to blame on having done deadly-serious hallucinogens
at a sort of larval psychological stage during which no N. American adolescent should
be allowed to do hallucinogens. These Disabilities led to my departure from the Enfield
Tennis Academy at 17, prior to graduation, and my withdrawal from competitive junior
tennis and contemporary life as we know it. Orin was largely burned out on tennis
too by 17, though no one in his right mind could have foreseen a defection to organized
U.S. football in his future.

A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism, football, Ms. Steepley, on
my view. The exaggerated breadth of the shoulders, the masked eradication of facial
personality, the emphasis on contact-vs.-avoidance-of-contact. The gains in terms
of penetration and resistance. The tight pants that accentuate the gluteals and hamstrings
and what look for all the world like codpieces. The gradual slow shift of venue to
“artificial surface,” “artificial turf.” Don’t the pants’ fronts look fitted with
codpieces? And have a look at these men whacking each other’s asses after a play.
It is like Swinburne sat down on his soul’s darkest night and designed an organized
sport. And pay no attention to Orin’s defense of football as a ritualized substitute
for armed conflict. Armed conflict is plenty ritualized on its own, and since we have
real armed conflict (take a spin through Boston’s Roxbury and Mattapan districts some
evening) there is no need or purpose for a substitute. Football is pure homophobically
repressed nancy-ism, and do not let O. tell you different.

… (3c) I cannot help you too much with the facts surrounding Dr. Incandenza’s suicide.
I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly way. I was told that in the
year leading up to his death Dr. Incandenza was abusing ethyl alcohol on a daily basis
and was working on a whole new genre of film-cartridge that Orin at the time claimed
was driving Dr. Inc insane.

… (3e) The supposed cause of their separation is that Dr. Incandenza began using her
in his work more and more extensively and eventually asked her to perform in the prenominate
completely radical new type of filmed entertainment that supposedly was driving him
to a breakdown. They supposedly became close, James and Jo-Ellen, though Orin in my
judgment is not a reliable source of information about their relationship.

The only other apposite fact I have—and I have this not from Orin but from an innocent
female relative of mine who was (briefly) in a position to interface with our punter
in an intimate and unguarded way impossible between hetero males—is that some incident
occurred in the Incandenzas’ Volvo involving one of the windows and a word—all I am
given is that O. reports that in the days prior to Dr. Incandenza’s felo de se, a
so-called “word” appeared on a “fogged” “window” of Mrs. Inc’s pale yellow Volvo,
and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions. This is it.

… (5) The “vailed warning” (typo?) you refer to in my postal response to you is simply
that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way. I am not sure I
would stand and point at Orin as an example of a classic pathological liar, but you
have only to watch him in certain kinds of action to see that there can be such a
thing as
sincerity with a motive
. I have no idea what your relationship with Orin is or what your feelings are—and
if Orin wishes it I am afraid I can predict your feelings for him will be strong—so
I shall just tell you that for instance at E.T.A. I saw Orin in bars or at post-tournament
dances go up to a young lady he would like to pick up and use this fail-safe cross-sectional
pick-up Strategy that involved an opening like “Tell me what sort of man you prefer,
and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” Which in a way of course is being
almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but
also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And-I-Transcend-The-Common-Disingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep-Being-This-Wittily,-Transcendently-Open-,-But-Will-Bring-You-Into-This-World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence,
which of course he cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor thing is
itself
a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the
least open man
I know. Spend a little time with Orin’s Uncle Charles a.k.a. “Gretel the Cross-Sectioned
Dairy Cow” Tavis if you want to see real openness in motion, and you will see that
genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette’s syndrome.

It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the
truth as
constructed
instead of
reported.
He came by this idea educationally, is all I will add. He studied for almost eighteen
years at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker I have ever met, and even now
he remains so flummoxed he thinks the way to escape that person’s influence is through
renunciation and hatred of that person. Defining yourself in opposition to something
is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn’t it? I certainly think so. And men who
believe they hate what they really
fear
they
need
are of limited interest, I find.

… Again I will remind you that Orin and I are on the outs a bit at the moment, so
some of my judgments may be temporarily short on charity.

One reason Orin is not a straight-out liar is that Orin is not a particularly skillful
liar. The few times I saw him try consciously to lie were pathetic. This is one reason
why his juvenile recreational-chemical phase passed so quickly compared to some of
our colleagues at E.T.A. If you are going to do serious drugs while you are still
a minor and under your parents’ roof, you are going to have to lie often and lie well.
Orin was a strangely stupid liar. I am recalling there was one afternoon on Mrs. Clarke’s
day off when Mrs. Inc had to go off and overfunction somewhere and Orin was supposed
to baby-sit Mario and Hal, who were at the kind of crazed-toddler age where they would
hurt themselves if they were not closely supervised, and I was over, and Orin and
I decided to dart up to the loft over the Weston house’s garage to smoke a bit of
Bob Hope, which is to say high-resin marijuana, and in the loft, high, wandered disastrously
into the sort of pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope–smokers are always
wandering into and getting trapped in and wasting huge amounts of time
^a
inside an intellectual room they cannot negotiate their way out of, and by the time
we hadn’t resolved the abstract problem that had put us into the labyrinth but just
as always had gotten so hungry we abandoned it and stumbled out and down the loft’s
wooden ladder, the sun was all the way on the other side of the sky over Wayland and
Sudbury, and the whole afternoon had passed without Hal and Mario having received
any protective supervision; and Hal and Mario somehow survived the afternoon, but
when Mrs. Incandenza returned that night she asked Orin what we and the supervised
toddlers had done all afternoon and Orin lied that we had all been right here, respectively
playing and supervising, and Mrs. Incandenza expressed puzzlement to Orin because
she said she had tried to call the house several times that afternoon but was unable
to get through, and Orin replied that while supervising he had herded the toddlers
carefully into rooms with phone-jacks and made calls and had been on the phone several
times for long periods of time for this that or the other thing, was why she had been
unable to get through, at which Mrs. Incandenza (who is extremely tall) had blinked
several times and looked very confused and said that but the phone had not been busy,
it had just rung and rung and rung. At a juncture like this, men and boys get separated
in terms of prevarication, I submit. And all Orin could come up with was a steady
gaze as he said, as if from the Rose Garden: “I have no response to that.” Which incredibly
stupid response he and I found very funny for weeks afterward, especially since Mrs.
Incandenza
never punished
and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility as far as her
children were concerned, and treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery
instead of an exploded lie.

The worst instance of both Orin’s mendacious idiocy and Mrs. Incandenza’s unwillingness
to countenance an idiotic lie came one grisly day soon after Orin had finally gotten
his vehicle operator’s license. O. and I found ourselves with an idle weekday afternoon
off in August after losing early at a synthetic-grass tournament down at Longwood,
and Hal was still alive in what was then Boys’ 10’s and thus a good bit of the E.T.A.
summer community was still down at Longwood, including Mario and Mrs. Incandenza,
who’d been driven down I remember by a sort of swarthily foreign-looking monilial-internist
medical resident Mrs. Inc had introduced as a so-called “dear and cherished friend”
but hadn’t explained how they’d met, and Dr. Incandenza was indisposed and not in
a position to bother anyone that day, I remember, and Orin and I had most of E.T.A.
to ourselves, even the gate’s portcullis unmanned and up, and this being at the acme
of our interest in such things we wasted little time in ingesting some sort of recreational
substance, I cannot recall what kind but I remember them as particularly impairing,
and we decided however that we weren’t yet impaired enough, and decided to drive down
the hill to one of the disreputable liquor stores along Commonwealth Avenue that accepted
your word of honor as proof of age, and we hopped into the Volvo and blasted down
the hill and down Commonwealth Avenue, severely impaired, and wondered in a speculative
way why people on the sidewalks all along Commonwealth seemed to be waving at us and
holding their heads and pointing and jumping wildly up and down, and Orin waving cheerfully
back and holding his own head in a sort of friendly imitation, but it was not until
we got all the way down to the Commonwealth–Brighton Ave. split that the horrible
realization hit us: Mrs. Incandenza often during summer days kept the Incandenzas’
beloved dog S. Johnson leashed to the back of her Volvo within reach of his water
and Science Diet bowls, and Orin and I had peeled out in the car without even thinking
to check for whether S. Johnson was attached to it. I will not try to describe what
we found when we pulled into a parking lot and slunk to the rear of the car. Let’s
call it a nubbin. Let’s say what we found was a leash and collar, and a nubbin. According
to the couple of witnesses who were able to speak, S. Johnson had made a valiant go
of trying to keep up back there for at least a couple blocks down Commonwealth, but
at some point he either lost his footing or got his canine affairs in order and figured
it was his day to shuffle off, and gave up, and hit the pavement, after which the
scene the witnesses described was unspeakable. There was fur and let’s call it material
down the middle of the inside east-bound lane for five or six blocks. What we had
left to take slowly back up the Academy’s hill was a leash, a collar with tags describing
medication-allergies and food-sensitivities, and a nubbin of let’s call it attached
material.