Infinite Jest (212 page)

The point is that I defy you to imagine how it felt later that day to stand there
with Orin in the HmH living room before the prone and piteously weeping Mrs. Incandenza
and listen to Orin try to construct a version of events in which he and I had sensed
somehow that S. Johnson was dying for a good brisk August walk and were walking him
down Commonwealth,
^b
saying there we were walking good old S. Johnson demurely down the sidewalk when
a hit-and-run driver not only swerved up onto the sidewalk to run the dog down but
then backed up and ran him over again and backed up and ran him over again, and on
and on, so more like a
pulverize
-and-run driver, while Orin and I had stood there too paralyzed with horror and grief
even to think of noticing the make and color of the car, much less the fiend’s license
plate. Mrs. Incandenza on her knees (there’s something surreal about a very tall woman
on her knees), weeping and pressing her hand to her collarbone but nodding in confirmation
at every syllable of Orin spinning this pathetic lie, O. holding up the leash and
collar (and nubbin) like Exhibit A, with me next to him wiping my forehead and wishing
the immaculately polished and sterilized hardwood floor would swallow up the whole
scene in toto.

… (7) Ms. Steeples, to my way of thinking, the word “abuse” is vacuous. Who can define
“abuse”? The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity
of the abuse becomes part of the abuse. Thanks over the decades to the energetic exercise
of your own profession, Ms. Steeley, we have all heard ACOAs and AlaTeens and ACONAs
and ACOGs and WHINERS relate clear cases of different kinds of abuse: beatings, diddlings,
rapes, deprivations, domineerment, humiliation, captivity, torture, excessive criticism
or even just utter disinterest. But at least the victims of this sort of abuse can,
when they have dredged it back up after childhood, confidently call it “abuse.” There
are, however, more ambiguous cases. Harder to profile, one might say. What would you
call a parent who is so neurasthenic and depressive that any opposition to his parental
will plunges him into the sort of psychotic depression where he does not leave his
bed for days and just sits there in bed cleaning his revolver, so that the child would
be terrified of opposing his will and plunging him into a depression and maybe causing
him to suicide? Would that child qualify as “abused”? Or a father who is so engrossed
by mathematics that he gets engrossed helping his child with his algebra homework
and ends up forgetting the child and doing it all himself so that the child gets an
A in Fractions but never in fact learns fractions? Or even say a father who is extremely
handy around the house and can fix anything, and has the son help him, but gets so
engrossed in his projects (the father) that he never thinks to explain to the son
how the projects actually get done, so that the son’s “help” never advances past simply
handing the father a specified wrench or getting him lemonade or Phillips-head screws
until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica
Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and
the son never learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, and when things malfunction
around his own one-room home he has to hire contemptuous filthy-nailed men to come
fix them, and feels terribly inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy
but because this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything
that was independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male. Would you cry
“Abuse!” if you were the unhandy son, looking back? Worse,
could
you call it abuse without feeling that you were a pathetic self-indulgent piss-puddle,
what with all the genuine cases of hair-raising physical and emotional abuse diligently
reported and analyzed daily by conscientious journalists (and profiled?)?

I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad
in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented
and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved
in their children’s lives, profligate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive
criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval
of their children, conforming to every last jot/tittle in any conceivable definition
of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were
(a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed
or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f)
neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some
conjunctive permutation of (a)… (g).

Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children
who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel
they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into
having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?

Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately
beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow
that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really
magnificent mother? Probably not.

But could such a mother then
really
be all that magnificent, if that’s the child’s view of himself?

I am not speaking about my own mother, who was decapitated by a plummeting rotorblade
long before she could have much effect one way or the other on my older brother and
innocent younger sister and me.

I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although
the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable
with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not
right,
is the only way to put it. Something
creepy,
even on the culturally stellar surface. For instance, after Orin had pretty clearly
killed her beloved dog S. Johnson in a truly awful if accidental way, and then had
tried to evade responsibility for it with a lie that a parent far less intelligent
than Avril could have seen right through, Mrs. Inc’s response was not only not conventionally
abusive, but seemed almost too unconditionally loving and compassionate and selfless
to possibly be true. Her response to Orin’s pathetic pulverize-and-run-driver lie
was not to act credulous so much as to act as if the entire grotesque fiction had
never reached her ears. And her response to the dog’s death itself was bizarrely furcated.
On the one hand, she mourned S. Johnson’s death very deeply, took the leash and collar
and canine nubbin tenderly and arranged lavish memorial and funeral arrangements,
including a heartbreakingly small cherrywood coffin, cried in audible private for
weeks, etc. But the other half of her emotional energies went into being overly solicitous
and polite toward Orin, upping the daily compliment-and-reinforcement-dose, arranging
for favorite foods at E.T.A. meals, having his favorite little tennis appurtenances
appear magically in his bed and locker with loving notes attached, basically making
the thousands of little gestures by which the technically stellar parent can make
her child feel particularly valued
^c
—all out of concern that Orin
in no way
think she resented him for S. Johnson’s death or blamed him or loved him less in
any way because of the whole incident. Not only was there no punishment or even visible
pique, but the love-and-support-bombardment
increased
. And all this was coupled with elaborate machinations to keep the mourning and funeral
arrangements and moments of wistful dog-remembrance hidden from Orin, for fear that
he might see that the Moms was hurt and so feel bad or guilty, so that in his presence
Mrs. Inc became even more cheerful and loquacious and witty and intimate and benign,
even suggesting in oblique ways that life was now somehow suddenly
better
without the dog, that some kind of unrecognized albatross had been somehow removed
from her neck, and so on and so forth.

What does a trained analyst of our cultural profile’s soft contours like yourself
make of this, Mrs. Starksaddle? Is it mind-bogglingly considerate and loving and supportive,
or is there something…
creepy
about it? Maybe a more perspicuous question: Was the almost pathological generosity
with which Mrs. Inc responded to her son taking her car in an intoxicated condition
and dragging her beloved dog to its grotesque death and then trying to lie his way
out of it, was this generosity for Orin’s sake, or for Avril’s own? Was it Orin’s
“self-esteem” she was safeguarding, or her own vision of herself as a more stellar
Moms than any human son could ever hope to feel he merits?

When Orin does his impression of Avril—which I doubt you or anyone else can get him
to do anymore, though it was a party-stopper back in our days at the Academy—what
he will do is assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily toward you
until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and
your breaths mingle. If you can get to experience it—the impression—which will seem
worse to you: the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth and love with
which it’s effected?

For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly
repellent not in spite of his charity but
because
of it: on some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not
as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate
his own virtue. What’s creepy and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly
needs
privation and suffering to continue, since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead
of the ends to which the virtue is ostensibly directed.

Everything Orin’s mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent.
I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up.

But if, Ms. Bainbridge, you have yielded your own charms to Orin, and if Orin strikes
you as a wonderfully gifted and giving lover—which by various accounts he is—not just
skilled and sensuous but magnificently generous, empathic, attentive, loving—if it
seems to you that he does, truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure,
you might wish to reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as
philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling.

^a.
This tendency to involuted abstraction is sometimes called “Marijuana Thinking”;
and by the way, the so-called “Amotivational Syndrome” consequent to massive Bob Hope–consumption
is a misnomer, for it is not that Bob Hope-smokers lose interest in practical functioning,
but rather Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that
seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical functioning, and the mental
labor of finding one’s way out consumes all available attention and makes the Bob
Hope–smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and amotivated sitting there, when
really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth. Note that the overwhelming
hunger (the so-called “munchies”) that accompanies cannabis intoxication may be a
natural defense mechanism against this kind of loss of practical function, since there
is no more practical function anywhere than foraging for food.

^b.
Now, Orin had never once walked S. Johnson. Orin was not even all that keen on S.
Johnson, because the dog was always trying to mate with his left leg. And anyway,
S. Johnson was very much Mrs. Incandenza’s dog, and was normally exercised only by
Mrs. Incandenza, and at rigidly specific times of day.

^c.
Yes—all right—this may start to touch on it: not “valu
able
” but “val
ued
.”

270.
^®
The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH.

271.
(including K. McKenna, who claims to have a bruised skull but does not in fact have
a bruised skull)

272.
This is why Ann Kittenplan, way more culpable for Eschaton-damage than any of the
other kids, isn’t down here on the punitive cleanup crew, is that it’s become a defacto
Tunnel Club operation. LaMont Chu was nominated to tell her she could blow it off
and they’d mark her down as present, which was just fine with Ann Kittenplan, since
even the butchest little girls don’t seem to have this proto-masculine fetish for
enclosure underneath things.

273.
= Stars, shooting stars, falling stars.

274.
Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom
réflechis
instead of the more textbook
réflexes,
and does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy, though her accent is without
the long moany suffixes of Marathe, and but anyway it is for certain that a certain
‘journalist’ will be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.’s Clipper-proof line
for the unexpurgated files on one ‘Poutrincourt, Thierry T.’

275.
Using
s’annuler
instead of the more Québecois
se détruire
.

276.
Using the vulgate Québecois
transperçant,
whose idiomatic connotation of doom Poutrincourt shouldn’t have had any reason to
think the Parisian-speaking Steeply would know, which is the slip that indicates that
Poutrincourt’s figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even
a female, which Poutrincourt’s probably known ever since Steeply’d lit his Flanderfume
with the elbow of his lighter-arm
out
instead of
in,
which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do, and which together with the
electrolysis-rash comprises the only real chink in the operative’s distaff persona,
and would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to
notice the significance of.