Infinite Jest (23 page)

Hal’s fingers, long and light brown and still slightly sticky from tincture of benzoin,
⁴⁶
are laced behind his upraised head on the pillow, cupping his own skull, watching
Stan Smith, eyes heavy too. ‘You feel as though you’ll be going through the exact
same sort of suffering at seventeen you suffer now, here, Kent?’

Kent Blott has colored shoelaces on his sneakers with ‘Mr.-Bouncety-Bounce-Program’-brand
bow-biters, which Hal finds extraordinarily artless and young.

Peter Beak snores softly, a small spit-bubble protruding and receding.

‘But Blott surely you’ve considered this: Why are they all still here, then, if it’s
so awful every day?’

‘Not every day,’ Blott says. ‘But pretty often it’s awful.’

‘They’re here because they want the Show when they get out,’ Ingersoll sniffs and
says. The Show meaning the A.T.P. Tour, travel and cash prizes and endorsements and
appearance fees, match-highlights in video mags, action photos in glossy print-mags.

‘But they know and we know one very top junior in twenty even gets all the way to
the Show. Much less survives there long. The rest slog around on the satellite tours
or regional tours or get soft as club pros. Or become lawyers or academics like everyone
else,’ Hal says softly.

‘Then they stay and suffer to get a scholarship. A college ride. A white cardigan
with a letter. Girl coeds keen on lettermen.’

‘Kent, except for Wayne and Pemulis not one guy in there needs any kind of scholarship.
Pemulis’ll get a full ride anywhere he wants, just on test-scores. Stice’s aunts’ll
send him anywhere even if he doesn’t want to play. And Wayne’s headed for the Show,
he’ll never do more than a year in the O.N.A.N.C.A.A.’s.’ Blott’s father, a cutting-edge
E.N.T. oncologist, flew all over the world removing tumors from wealthy mucous membranes;
Blott has a trust fund. ‘None of that’s the point and you guys know it.’

‘They love the game, you’re going to say.’

Stan Smith has switched to backhands.

‘They sure must love something, Ingersoll, but how about for a second I say that’s
not Kent’s point either. Kent’s point’s the misery in that room just now. K.B., I’ve
taken part in essentially that same bitter bitchy kind of session hundreds of times
with those same guys after bad
P.M.
s. In the showers, in the sauna, at dinner.’

‘Very much bitching also in the lavatories,’ Arslanian says.

Hal unsticks his hair from his fingers. Arslanian always has a queer faint hot-doggish
smell about him. ‘The point is it’s ritualistic. The bitching and moaning. Even assuming
they feel the way they say when they get together, the point is notice we were all
sitting there all feeling the same way
together.
’

‘The point is togetherness?’

‘Shouldn’t there be violas for this part, Hal, if this is the point?’

‘Ingersoll, I—’

Beak’s cold-weather adenoids wake him periodically, and he gurgles and his eyes roll
up briefly before they level out and he settles back, seeming to stare.

Hal creatively visualizes that Smith’s velvety backhand is him slo-mo slapping Evan
Ingersoll into the opposite wall. Ingersoll’s parents founded the Rhode Island version
of the service where you order groceries by TP and teenagers in fleets of station
wagons bring them out to you, instead of supermarkets. ‘What the point is is that
we’d all just spent three hours playing challenges against each other in scrotum-tightening
cold, assailing each other, trying to take away each other’s spots on the squads.
Trying to defend them against each other’s assaults. The system’s got inequality as
an axiom. We know where we stand entirely in relation to one another. John Wayne’s
over me, and I’m over Struck and Shaw, who two years back were both over me but under
Troeltsch and Schacht, and now are over Troeltsch who as of today is over Freer who’s
substantially over Schacht, who can’t beat anyone in the room except Pemulis since
his knee and Crohn’s Disease got so much worse, and is barely hanging on in terms
of ranking, and is showing incredible balls just hanging on. Freer beat me 4 and 2
in the quarters of the U.S. Clays two summers ago, and now he’s on the B-squad and
five slots below me, six slots if Troeltsch can still beat him when they play again
after that illness-default.’

‘I am over Blott. I am over Ingersoll,’ Idris Arslanian nods.

‘Well Blott’s just ten, Idris. And you’re under Chu, who’s on an odd year and is under
Possalthwaite. And Blott’s under Beak and Ingersoll simply by virtue of age-division.’

‘I know just where I stand at all times,’ muses Ingersoll.

SyberVision edits its visualization sequences with a melt-filter so Stan Smith’s follow-through
loops seamlessly into his backswing for the exact same next stroke; the transitions
are gauzy and dreamlike. Hal struggles to hike himself up onto his elbows:

‘We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome
to the meaning of
individual.
We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’

‘
E Unibus Pluram
,’ Ingersoll muses.

Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll’s face is completely devoid of eyebrows and
is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. ‘So how can we also
be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris’s
singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge
for his spot again?’

‘I do not require his root, for I am ready.’ Arslanian bares canines.

‘Well that’s the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and
shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed
together?’

‘You’re talking about community. This is a community-spiel.’

‘I think alienation,’ Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he’s talking
to Ingersoll. ‘Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism.’
His upper lip goes up and down over his teeth.

Hal says, ‘In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness.’

Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak’s palsied eyes and little limb-spasms signify
a troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose furiously with the heel of his hand.

‘I miss my dog,’ Ingersoll concedes.

‘Ah.’ Hal rolls onto one elbow to hike a finger into the air. ‘Ah. But then so notice
the instant group-cohesion that formed itself around all the pissing and moaning down
there why don’t you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like
sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering
unites
us. They want to let us sit around and bitch. Together. After a bad
P.M.
set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift
to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.’

‘Mr. deLint.’

‘Dr. Tavis. Schtitt.’

‘DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt’s henchmen and henchwomen.’

‘I hate them!’ Blott cries out.

‘And you’ve been here this long and you still think this hatred’s an accident?’

‘Purchase a clue Kent Blott!’ Arslanian says.

‘The large and economy-size clue, Blott,’ Ingersoll chimes.

Beak sits up and says ‘God no not with
pliers!
’ and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble.

Hal is pretending incredulity. ‘You guys haven’t noticed yet the way Schtitt’s whole
staff gets progressively more foul-tempered and sadistic as an important competitive
week comes up?’

Ingersoll up on one elbow at Blott. ‘The Port Washington meet. I.D. Day. The Tucson
WhataBurger the week after. They want us in absolute top shape, Blott.’

Hal lies back and lets Smith’s
ballet de se
loosen his facial muscles again, staring. ‘Shit, Ingersoll, we’re all in top shape
already. That’s not it. That’s the least of it. We’re off the charts, shape-wise.’

Ingersoll: ‘The average North American kid can’t even do one pull-up, according to
Nwangi.’

Arslanian points down at his own chest. ‘Twenty-eight pull-ups.’

‘The point,’ Hal says softly, ‘is that it’s not about the physical anymore, men. The
physical stuff’s just pro forma. It’s the heads they’re working on here, boys. Day
and year in and out. A whole program. It’ll help your attitude to look for evidence
of design. They always give us something to hate, really hate together, as big stuff
looms. The dreaded May drills during finals before the summer tour. The post-Christmas
crackdown before Australia. The November freezathon, the snot-fest, the delay in upping
the Lung and getting us under cover. A common enemy.
I
may despise K. B. Freer, or’ (can’t quite resist) ‘Evan Ingersoll, or Jennie Bash.
But
we
despise Schtitt’s men, the double matches on top of runs, the insensitivity to exams,
the repetition, the stress. The loneliness. But we get together and bitch, all of
a sudden we’re giving something group expression. A community voice. Community, Evan.
Oh they’re cunning. They give themselves up to our dislike, calculate our breaking
points and aim for just over them, then send us into the locker room with an unstructured
forty-five before Big Buddy sessions. Accident? Random happenstance? You guys ever
see evidence of the tiniest lack of coolly calculated structure around here?’

‘The structure’s what I hate the most of all,’ Ingersoll says.

‘They know what’s going on,’ Blott says, bouncing a little on his tailbone. ‘They
want
us to get together and complain.’

‘
Oh
they’re cunning,’ Ingersoll says.

Hal curls himself a bit on one elbow to put in a small plug of Kodiak. He can’t tell
whether Ingersoll’s being insolent. He lies there very slack, visualizing Smith pounding
overheads down onto Ingersoll’s skull. Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle’s
diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll—this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless
face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama’s boy from
way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some
impression of himself—that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain
parts of himself he can’t or won’t accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll’s
in the room. He wishes him ill.

Blott and Arslanian are looking at him. ‘Are you OK?’

‘He is tired,’ Arslanian says.

Ingersoll drums idly on his own ribcage.

Hal usually gets secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime
he hasn’t gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit—some rebound
effect from B. Hope’s desiccating action—and his eyes start to water as if he’s just
yawned. The smokeless tobacco started almost as an excuse to spit, sometimes. Hal’s
struck by the fact that he really for the most part believes what he’s said about
loneliness and the structured need for a
we
here; and this, together with the Ingersoll-repulsion and spit-flood, makes him uncomfortable
again, brooding uncomfortably for a moment on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting
high in secret more than on the getting high itself, possibly. He always gets the
feeling there’s some clue to it on the tip of his tongue, some mute and inaccessible
part of the cortex, and then he always feels vaguely sick, scanning for it. The other
thing that happens if he doesn’t do one-hitters sometime before dinner is he feels
slightly sick to his stomach, and it’s hard to eat enough at dinner, and then later
when he does go off and get off he gets ravenous, and goes out to Father & Son Market
for candy, or else floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the Headmaster’s
House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats like such a feral animal
that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see
him pack it away, but then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.

‘So the suffering gets less lonely,’ Blott prompts him.

Two curves down the hall in V.R.5, where the viewer’s on the south wall and doesn’t
get turned on, the Canadian John Wayne’s got LaMont Chu and ‘Sleepy T.P.’ Peterson
and Kieran McKenna and Brian van Vleck.

‘He’s talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,’ Chu tells the other
three. They’re on the floor Indian-style, Wayne standing with his back against the
door, rotating his head to stretch the neck. ‘His point is that progress towards genuine
Show-caliber mastery is slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than
temperament.’

‘Is this right Mr. Wayne?’

Chu says ‘… that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus,
so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like
a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb
up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive
practice and patience and hanging in there.’

‘Plateaux,’ Wayne says, looking at the ceiling and pushing the back of his head isometrically
against the door. ‘With an X.
Plateaux.
’

The inactive viewer’s screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight
down on a cold day. Chu’s cross-legged posture is textbook. ‘What John’s saying is
the types who don’t hang in there and slog on the patient road toward mastery are
basically three. Types. You’ve got what he calls your Despairing type, who’s fine
as long as he’s in the quick-improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits
a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming
to get a little worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because
he hasn’t got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog, and he can’t
stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?’

‘Geronimo!’ the other kids yell, not quite in sync.