Infinite Jest (217 page)

‘That’s just a word.’

^a.
q.v. Note 334
sub
.

322.
Johnette F., whose very first stepmother had been a Chelsea MA police officer, was
conditioned in early childhood to refer to police as ‘police’ or ‘the Law,’ since
most B.P.D. personnel find the street term
the Finest
sardonic.

323.
People outside the Boston AA community always use
The
and say
The Ennet House;
this is one way to always tell somebody new or from outside the community.

324.

17 NOVEMBER—YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Sometimes at odd little times of day the E.T.A. males’ locker room downstairs in Comm.-Ad.
is empty, and you can go in there and sort of moon around and listen to the showers
drip and the drains gurgle. You can feel the odd stunned quality customarily crowded
places have at empty times. You can take your time dressing, flex in front of the
big plate mirror over the sink; the mirror has projecting side-mirrors so you can
check out the old biceps from either side, see the jawline in profile, practice expressions,
try to look all natural and uncomposed so you can try to see what you really might
normally look like to other people. The air in the locker room hangs heavy with the
smells of underarms, deodorant, benzoin, camphonated powder, serious feet, old steam.
Also Lemon Pledge and a slight smell of electrical burn from overused blow-dryers.
Traces of powder and fuller’s earth
^a
on the blue carpeting, down in too deep to get out without a steamer. You can take
a comb out of the big jar of Barbicide on the shelf by the sink, and like a .38-caliber
blow-dryer, and experiment boldly. It’s the best mirror in the Academy, intricately
lit from all perspectives. Dr. J. O. Incandenza knew his adolescents. At slack times,
sometimes head custodian Dave (‘F.D.V.’) Harde can be found in here, taking a tiny
nap on one of the benches that run in front of the lockers, which he claims the benches
do something palliative for his spinal funiculi. More often there’s one of Dave’s
incredibly old and interchangeable menial-task janitors in here running a carpet sweeper
or spraying industrial disinfectant in the urinals. You can go into the shower area
and not turn the water on and sing, really let go. Michael Pemulis’s own vocals sound
pro-quality good to him, but only when he’s surrounded by shower-tile. Sometimes when
it’s empty in here you can catch snatches of voices and intriguing feminine-hygienic
noises from the females’ locker room on the other side of the lockers’ wall.

At most other times of day, your certain type of more delicately constituted E.T.A.
jr. uses the primitive subdorm hall showers and sinks and avoids the packed locker
room at almost all costs. No way Western man ever should have conceived of commodes
and hot showers in the same crowded air-space. T. Schacht can clear out most of a
steamy locker room just by lumbering into a commode-stall and driving the latch home
with a certain purposeful force.

The prorectors have their own showers in a kind of lounge near their rooms in the
secondary tunnel, with a Viewer and recliners and a little fridgelet and a dicky-proof
door.

When M. M. Pemulis came down to dress for
P.M.
s at about 1420h.,
^b
the only people in the locker room were 14-A lobber nonpareil Todd Possalthwaite,
hunched and weeping, and Keith Freer, whom Pemulis was to play and who looked in no
hurry to get dressed and out there to play, and could very possibly have been the
thing that was making Postal Weight weep. The so-called ‘Viking’ was shirtless and
had a towel around his neck and was at the mirror ministering to his skin. He had
high hard white-blond hair and an extremely muscular neck and lower jaw, with a certain
type of protrusive gonions that made his upper face look tapered and sly. His hair
always reminded Hal Incandenza of frozen surf, Hal said. Todd Possalthwaite was near-nude
and hunched on the bench under his locker, his face in his hands, with its nose’s
white bandages visible through spread fingers, weeping softly, shoulders trembling.

Pemulis, who’s Postal Weight’s Big Buddy and sort of lob-and-Eschaton-mentor and genuinely
likes the kid, dropped his gear and gave him a sort of male-affectionate fake one-two
punch like Think Fast. ‘ ’s the nose, Todder?’ Like all of them, Pemulis could do
his locker’s combination by feel, from months and years of constant combination-doing.
He was looking all around himself and the room. Freer made a slight noise when Pemulis
asked the Postman if there was anything he could do.

‘Nothing’s true,’ Postal Weight sobbed, his voice palm-muffled, rocking slightly on
the bench. His locker was open and little-boy cluttered. He was wearing only an unbuttoned
little flannel shirt and a Johnson & Johnson jr. jock strap, and had tiny white feet
^c
and delicate little shell-like toes. He was supposed to be in Donni Stott’s Valley-Map
laugher right now, Pemulis knew.

‘What, metaphysical angst at thirteen?’ Pemulis directs the question to the quote-Viking’s
reflection’s eye in the mirror. Freer’s back is tapered and uncolloped and for a tennis
player’s back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated
applications and defoliations of Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because
he is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of
tanning. He still has his jeans and loafers on, Pemulis sees. Pemulis keeps waiting
for the distinctive attitudinal upswing of two pre-match Tenuate spansules.
^d
Pemulis’s locker is both full and very precisely ordered, practically alphabetized,
like the trunk of an experienced seaman. Disassemblable scale and armamentarium and
mood-altering substances used to be concealed in several factory-concealed niches
in the special system of niche-riddled portable shelving Pemulis had installed at
age 15. Plus small cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the always-remotely-possible
sniffer-dog, when he was a callow youth. This was before the discovery of the ultimate
entrepôt above the false ceiling in Subdorm B’s male hallway.

‘Just a disappointed dinkle.’ Freer’s chuckle tends to be mirthless. ‘What I could
get out of him before the waterworks, Postal Weight’s old man promised him so-and-so
if the kid accomplishes thus-and-such.’ His speech was distorted because he was ballooning
his cheek with his tongue and applying flesh-tinted cream to a possible pimple there.
‘And the Postmaster here feels like he’s held up his side of the accomplishment, and
now I get the drift Daddy’s backing out.’

Possalthwaite’s shoulders continued to tremble as he cried into his hands.

‘In other words welching you’re saying the Dad is,’ Pemulis said to Freer.

‘I gather now the Dad’s trying to restructure the original deal all of a sudden.’

Pemulis undid his belt. ‘The dangled carrot’s snatched away, the brass ring plays
hard to get, to coin a maxim.’

‘Something about Disney World, before the wa-wa started.’

Pemulis removed his nonplay sneakers by scraping downward at one heel with the other
sneaker’s toe, looking down into the tender little whorl in the center of Possalth-waite’s
hair. He’d never be so ephebic as to verbally ask Freer if he had plans to suit up
so they could get out there; he’d never let Freer think he was renting Freer space
in his head before the match started. ‘Postman, is this because of the Eschaton incident?
Is it because of the nose? Because I can get on the horn and tell old Postal Weight
Sr. they’re blaming nobody under 17, it turns out, you should tell him, Todder. There’s
whole land-barges of shit, but none of it’s spraying in you guys’s direction, you
should take comfort.’

‘
Nothing’s true,
’ Possalthwaite keened, not looking up, muffled, flat-nippled, fatless in the young
gut, feet spectral below his legs’ brown, rocking, shaking his head, looking terribly
young and innocently vulnerable, sort of pre-moral. Little white strips of bandage
protuded from his palms’ outer edges, from I.-Day’s apocalypse.

‘Well, not much is
fair,
anyway,’ Pemulis conceded. The Viking made a noise at himself.

Pemulis calls Postal Weight’s father up on-screen. Minneapolis-area developer. Malls,
corporate parks, bustling places at the edges of roaring beltways. Late forties, slim,
an overmanaged tan, a little oversharp in the dress dept., with a motivational-seminar-type
hard-sell charm. A dagger of a Dad, with a pencil mustache and blinding shoe-leather.
He tried to conjure an image of this paternal figure hitting Keith Freer on the noggin
with a rolling pin and a bald cartoon lump rising from Freer’s skull. (Pemulis calculates
a win or even three-setter w/ Freer would mean a place on the WhataBurger plane, is
why he’s willing to violate a kind of personal honor-code and take pre-match Tenuate,
which even with the 36-hour-elimination curve is kind of cavalier, given that he and
Inc’d escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that
he’d tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John
Wayne, and Avril is kind of a coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-be-fucked-with administrative
figure, and along with C. [‘Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Cow’] Tavis isn’t exactly a
fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation
incident. The ’drines didn’t seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of stomachless
competitive verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a kind of
enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he’s facing into a warm wind.)
Pemulis had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T-shirt
gone permanent yellow under the arms.

‘Nothing’s fair because nothing’s
true,
’ Possalthwaite wept into his palms. His little flannel shoulders shook.

Something old in one of the shower drains sighed and gurgled, a nauseous sound.

‘Buck up.’ Pemulis was removing all necessary match-articles and refolding them and
placing them in his noncomplimentary Dunlop gear-bag with military precision. He put
a foot on the bench and looked briefly to either side. ‘Because if that’s your burr
then rest in my assurance, Postalcode: certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true.’

Freer had made a pincer of his fingers and was at the other cheek. ‘Let him cry. Let
baby have his dinkle. Piss and moan. Thirteen for Christ’s sake. A kid thirteen hasn’t
even been in the same room with real disappointment yet. Hasn’t even locked eyes across
a room with real disillusion and and frustration and pain. Thirteen: pain’s a rumor.
What’s the word. Angst. Baby wouldn’t know genuine-article angst if it walked up and
got him in a headlock.’

‘Not like real true real possible-little-cheek-pimple angst, Vike, hey?’

‘Flip it over and squat, Pemulis,’ without bothering to look. Both Pemulis and Freer
had pronounced a hard
g
in
angst,
Hal would have observed. The Viking contorted his mouth and raised his big chin to
check the flesh of his jaw, turning slightly to use the side-mirrors as well.

Pemulis smiled broadly, trying to envision Keith Freer sitting in a canvas restraint-wrap
in full lotus, staring blankly, hitting all the high notes in ‘No Business Like Show
Business’ as orderlies in boiled whites and prim nurses in bent hats stand around
snapping their fingers, clean white cheap institutional-care sneakers tapping noiselessly
through all eternity. He was down to chinos and bare light-brown feet. He considered
a blue T-shirt with a black wolf-spider on it v. a coincidentally red-on-gray T-shirt
that had ‘Vodka is the Enemy of Production’ in presumably Russian. His good four Dunlop
sticks were stacked on the bench to Possalthwaite’s left. He picked up two and tested
the strings’ tension by hitting the side of one stick’s head against the the strung
face of the other and listening to the strings and then switching sticks and repeating
the process. The exact right tension has a certain pitch. Midsized Dunlop Enqvist
TL Composites. $304.95 U.S. retail. Real catgut strings have a kind of a dentalish
sweet stink. The dot-and-circumflex logo. He didn’t much look at Possalthwaite. He
chose the Cyrillic shirt with the bottle-glyph. He rolled it up and put his head through
the head-hole first, his late great Da’s old-fashioned way. The upscaler kids here
all did the arm-holes first. Then they did the head. You can also tell the scholarship
kids because for some reason they put on a sock and a shoe and then a sock and a shoe.
See for instance Wayne, who’d been in their room right after lunch when Pemulis had
made the decision to come up for some pre-match Tenuate. Wayne’s room was right nearby
and he was standing there over Troeltsch’s pharmacopic bedside table with no shirt
and wet hair, rheumy-eyed and shiny-nostriled from moisturizer on his Kleenex-chafed
nostrils. The Viking was squeezing a damp tennis ball with his left hand while he
scanned his forehead by mostly feel. Pemulis’s psychic counter-strategy was not to
appear in any hurry to dress and stretch and get out there either. Pemulis—who feared
and hated unauthorized people being in his room, and who was constantly on Schacht’s
back about forgetting to lock up when he left, and who wasn’t intimidated by Wayne’s
talent and success and affectless reserve, but was cautious around him, John Wayne,
sort of the way a formidable predator will be unintimidated but cautious around another
formidable predator, particularly since the virtuosic but tense performance in a certain
administrative office a week ago, which had been mentioned by neither man—had coolly
asked Wayne if he could help him, and Wayne had just as coolly not looked up from
rattling through sickly Jim Troeltsch’s bedside table’s stuff and said he’d come in
for some of Troeltsch’s Seldane
^e
, which Pemulis had indeed heard Troeltsch at breakfast describing to a nose-blowing
Wayne as the battlefield-nuke of antihistamines that didn’t make you too drowsy to
function at an incredibly high level of function. Pemulis adjusted his jock’s rear
straps, trying to remember this Wayne-memory’s point. Wayne had wanted a clear head
and high pulmonary function because he was down to play the Syrian Satelliter in an
informal exhibition at 1515h. Wayne hadn’t offered this explanation; Pemulis got it
off the e-board. One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne’s unauthorized
presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn’t
impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis’s hand in the Olde-English-fonted
leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TPs’ communal e-board for
11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to
the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294
times. The point was that the half-dressed Wayne had been standing there with one
foot bare and one in a sock and shoe. Pemulis shook his head slightly and looked down
at Possalthwaite and tried to gather spit.