Infinite Jest (25 page)

‘Now the big question of character is do we let a fluke of a probably one-in-a-hundred
lapse in concentration make us throw up our faggy hands and go dragging characterlessly
back to our dens to lick the whimpering wounds, or do we narrow our eyes and put out
the chin and say Pemulis we say we say Pemulis, Double or Nothing, when the odds remain
so almost crazily stacked in our favor today.’

‘So they do it on purpose?’ Beak is asking. ‘Try to make us hate them?’

Limits and rituals. It’s almost time for communal dinner. Sometimes Mrs. Clarke in
the kitchen lets Mario ring a triangle with a steel ladle while she rolls back the
dining-room doors. They make the servers wear hairnets and little Ob/Gynish gloves.
Hal could take out the plug and nip down into the tunnels, maybe not even all the
way down into the Pump Room. Be only twenty minutes late. He’s thinking in an abstract
absent way about limits and rituals, listening to Blott give Beak his aperçu. Like
as in is there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong
desire. He has to sit up to spit in the wastebasket. There is a twinge in a tooth
on his mouth’s left side.

In mid-October Y.D.A.U., Hal had invited Mario for a post-prandial stroll, and they
were strolling the E.T.A. grounds between the West Courts and the hillside’s tree-line,
Hal with his gear bag. Mario could sense that Hal wanted to be able to go off by himself
briefly, so he contrived (Mario did) to be very interested in some sort of leaf-and-twig
ensemble off the path, and let Hal sort of melt away down the path. The whole area
running along the tree-line and the thickets of like shrubbery and stickery bushes
and heaven knew what all was covered with fallen leaves that were dry but had not
yet quite all the way lost their color. The leaves were underfoot. Mario kind of tottered
from tree to tree, pausing at each tree to rest. It was @ 1900h., not yet true twilight,
but the only thing left of the sunset was a snout just over Newton, and the places
under long shadows were cold, and a certain kind of melancholy sadness was insinuating
itself into the grounds’ light. The staggered lamps by the paths hadn’t come on yet,
however.

A lovely scent of illegally burned leaves wafting up from East Newton mixed with the
foody smells from the ventilator turbines out of the back of the dining hall. Two
gulls were in one place in the air over the dumpsters over by the rear parking lot.
Leaves crackled underfoot. The sound of Mario walking in dry leaves was like: crackle
crackle crackle stop; crackle crackle crackle stop.

An Empire Waste Displacement displacement vehicle whistled past overhead, rising in
the start of its arc, its one blue alert-light atwinkle.

He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West
Courts’ fencing. From deeper inside the thickets on the lip of the hillside came a
tremendous crackling and thrashing of underbrush and trailing willow-branches, and
who should heave into unexpected view but the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, a sixteen-year-old
out of Montclair NJ, #1 Singles on the Girls 16’s-A squad and two hundred kilos if
she was a kilo. Southpaw, one-hander off the backhand side, a serve Donnie Stott likes
to clock with radar, and chart. Mario’s filmed the U.S.S. Millicent Kent for staff-analysis
on several occasions. They exchange hearty Hi’s. One of only a couple female E.T.A.s
with visible veins in her forearms, object of a fiercely-wagered-on bench-press challenge
against Schacht, Freer, and Petropolis Kahn that M. Pemulis had organized last spring,
in which she’d topped Kahn and Freer refused to show and Schacht finally beat her
but doffed his cap. Out for a staff-ordered weight-management post-dinner stroll,
squeezing Penn 5’s in both hands, in E.T.A. sweat pants and with an enormous violet
bow either Scotch-taped or glued to the blunt rounded top of her hair. She told Mario
she’d just seen the strangest thing farther back deeper in the thickets off the lip.
Her hair was tall and rounded off in the shape of a kind of pill, not unlike a papal
hat or a British constable’s tall hat. Mario said the bow looked terrific, and what
a surprise to come face to face like this out here in the chill dusk. Bridget Boone
had said the U.S.S. Millicent Kent’s coiffure looked like a missile protruding from
its silo in preparation for launch. The last of the sun’s snout was setting just over
the tip of the U.S.S. Millicent’s hair, which was almost osseously hard-looking, composed
of dense woven nests of reticulate fibers like a dry loofa sponge, which she said
over the summer a home-perm had misfired and left her hair a system of reticulate
nests, and was only now loosening up enough even to attach a bow to. Mario said that
well the bow set her off to a T, was all he had to say on the matter. (He hadn’t literally
said ‘chill dusk.’) The U.S.S.M.K. said she’d been amusing herself beating her way
through one of the brambly thickets Mrs. Incandenza had—when she’d still spent time
outdoors at all—planted to discourage part-time employees from short-cutting up the
hillside to E.T.A., and had come upon a Husky VI-brand telescoping tripod, new and
dully silvery-looking and set up on its three legs, right in the middle of the thicket.
For no visible reason and with no footprints or visible evidence of path-beating anywhere
around except the U.S.S. Millicent’s own. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent stowed a tennis
ball in each hip pocket and took Mario’s claw and said here to walk this way and she’d
show him real quick, and get his like feedback on the issue, and plus have a witness
when they got back and she told people about it. Mario said the Husky VI came with
its own pan head and cable release. With the girl supporting him with one hand and
beating an easement through the brush with the other they proceeded deeper into the
thicket on the lip. The outdoor light was now the same hue as U.S.S.M.K.’s hairbow.
She said she swore to God it was around here someplace. Mario said his late dad had
used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky back in his early days of making art-films,
when he also used a homemade dolly and sandbags and halogen spots instead of kliegs.
Several different species and types of birds were twittering.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that off the record she’d always felt he had
the longest lushest prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents, three if you counted
Australia. Mario thanked her kindly, calling her Ma’am and trying to fake a Southern
accent.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent said she wasn’t sure what were her old footprints from finding
the thicket with the tripod and what were their more recent footprints from trying
to find the old footprints, and that she was worried because it was starting to get
dark and they might not be able to find it and then Mario wouldn’t believe she’d seen
something as batshit-sounding as a gleaming silvery tripod all set up for no reason
in the middle of nowheresville.

Mario said he was pretty sure that Australia was a continent. Walking, he came up
to around the bottom of U.S.S. Millicent’s ribcage.

Mario heard crackling and thrashing from some other thicket nearby but was certain
it wasn’t Hal, since Hal very rarely made a lot of motion-noise either outside or
in-.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that though she was an admittedly great player,
w/ an overwhelming haul-ass-up-to-the-net-and-loom-over-it-like-a-titan game in the
Betty Stove/Venus Williams power-game tradition, and headed for an almost limitless
future in the Show, she’d confide in him in private out here that she’d never really
loved competitive tennis, that her real love and passion was modern interpretive dance,
at which she admittedly had less unconsciously native gifts and talents to bring to
bear, but which she loved, and had spent just about all her off-court time as a little
girl practicing in a leotard in front of a double-width mirror in her room at home
in suburban Montclair NJ, but that tennis was what she had limitless talent at and
got emotional strokes and tuition-waiver boarding-school offers in, and that she’d
been desperate to get into a boarding school. Mario asked if she could recall if the
Husky-VI tripod had been the TL one with waffle-gridded rubber tips on the legs and
a 360° pan head or the SL one with unwaffled tips and only a 180° pan head that swiveled
in an arc instead of a full circle. The U.S.S. Millicent revealed that she’d accepted
a scholarship to E.T.A. at age nine for the sole reason of getting away from her father.
She referred to her father as her Old Man, which you can just tell she capitalizes.
Her mother had left home when the U.S.S. Millicent was only five, running off very
abruptly with a man sent by what had then been called Con-Edison to do a free home-energy-efficiency
assessment. It had been six years since she’d laid an eyeball on her Old Man, but
to the best of her recall he was almost three meters tall and morbidly obese, which
had been why every mirror and bathtub in the house had been double-width. One older
sister who’d been deeply involved in synchronized swimming had got pregnant and married
in high school soon after her mother’s departure.

All this time there’s been more crackling and crashing off up the hillside. Mario
has trouble on any kind of declined grade. Some sort of bird’s sitting in the top
branch of a little tree and looking at them without saying anything. Mario thinks
suddenly of a joke he remembers hearing Michael Pemulis tell:

‘If two people get married in West Virginia and then pull up stakes and move to Massachusetts
and then if they decide they want to get a divorce, what’s the biggest problem getting
a divorce?’

The U.S.S.M.K. says her other older sister had at just fifteen joined the Ice Capades
of all things, and was in the back-up-like chorus where the biggest artistic challenge
was not bumping into people and either falling or making them fall.

‘Getting a divorce from your sister, because in West Virginia Pemulis said a lot of
people who get married are brother and sister.’

‘Hold my hand.’

‘He was only joking, though.’

By now the light was about the same color as the ash and clinkers in the bottom of
a Weber Grill. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was leading them in a set of slightly diminishing
circles. Then, she said, at age eight she came home early from after-school drills
at the U.S.T.A. Jr. Facility in Passaic NJ looking forward to slipping into the old
leotard and getting in some modern interpretive dancing up in her room, only to come
home suddenly and find her father wearing her leotard. Which needless to say didn’t
fit very well. And with the small front portion of his huge bare feet squeezed into
a pair of strapless pumps Mrs. Kent had left behind in her haste. In the dining room
he’d moved all the furniture over to the side of, in front of the really wide mirror,
in a grotesquely tiny and bulging violet leotard, capering. Mario says violet’s really
the U.S.S. Millicent’s color. She says that was the exact creepy word for it:
capering.
Pirouetting and rondelling. Simpering, as well. The crotch of her leotard looked
like a slingshot, it was so deformed. He hadn’t heard her come in. U.S.S. Millicent
asked Mario if he’d ever seen a girl’s yin-yang before. Obscene mottled hirsute flesh
had pooched and spilled out over every centimeter of the leotard’s perimeter, she
recalled. She’d had a voluptuous figure even at eight, she told Mario, but the Old
Man was in a whole different-sized ballpark altogether. Mario kept saying Golly Ned,
all he could think of to say. His flesh jiggled and bounced as he capered. It was
repellent, she said. There was no sign of a Husky VI or any other model of tripod
in any of the thickets and boscages. Her literal term for it was ‘yin-yang.’ But her
Old Man wasn’t just a cross-dressing transvestite, she said; it turned out they always
had to be a
relative’s
female clothes. She said she always used to wonder why her sisters’ one-pieces and
figure-skating skirts always looked so askewly baggy and elastic-shot, since the sisters
didn’t exactly wear tiny little malnourished sizes themselves. The Old Man didn’t
hear her come in and he capered and jetéed for several more minutes until she happened
to catch his simpering eye in the mirror, she said. That’s when she knew she had to
get away, she said. And Mario’s own old man’s Admissions lady had called out of the
blue that very evening, she said. Like it had been fate. Serendipity. Kismet.

‘Yin-yang,’ Mario offered, nodding. The U.S.S. Millicent’s hand was large and hot
and at the level of sogginess of a bathmat that’s been used several times in a row
in quick succession.

Her second-oldest sister, many years later, had informed the U.S.S.M.K. that the first
time anybody’d had any inklings about the Old Man was an episode when the older sister
was very small and Mrs. K. had sewed her a special costume complete with gold-lamé
bow & arrow for playing Cupid in the school Valentine’s Day pageant, and the sister’s
school had got out early one day after an asbestos scare and she’d come unexpectedly
home and found the Old Man in the basement rumpus room in tiny wings and hideously
distended diaper striking a pose from a rather well-known Titian oil in the Met’s
High Renaissance Wing, and had struggled with denial and own-perceptions-doubting
for quite some time thereafter, until a hysterical episode during rehearsals for an
Ice Capades Valentine’s Day number brought all the feelings surging up and broke the
denial, and the Ice Capades’ Employee Assistance Office counselling staff helped her
start to work it all through.

At which point U.S.S. Millicent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later
turned out to be poison sumac and turned with a strange glint in the one eye that
wasn’t in pine-shadow and crushed Mario’s large head to the area just below her breasts
and said she needed to confess that Mario’s eyelashes and vest with extendable police
lock he used for staying upright in one place had for quite some time now driven her
right around the bend with sensual feeling. What Mario perceived as a sudden radical
drop in the prevailing temperature was in fact the U.S.S. Millicent Kent’s sexual
stimulation sucking tremendous quantities of ambient energy out of the air surrounding
them. Mario’s face was so squashed against the U.S.S. Millicent’s thorax that he had
to contort his mouth way out to the left to breathe. U.S.S.M.K.’s hairbow became detached
and fluttered down through Mario’s sightline like a giant crazed violet moth. U.S.S.M.K.
was trying to undo Mario’s corduroys but was frustrated by the complex system of snaps
and fasteners at the bottom of his police lock’s Velcro vest, which overlapped his
trouser’s own fasteners, and Mario tried to reconfigure his mouth somehow to both
breathe and warn the U.S.S.M.K. that he was incredibly ticklish in the area of the
bellybutton and directly below. He could now start to hear his brother Hal somewhere
to the above and east, calling Mario’s name at a moderate volume. The U.S.S. Millicent
Kent was saying there was no way Mario could be any more nervous than she was about
what was happening between them. It’s true that the sounds of Mario sucking air out
of a severely leftward-contorted mouth could have been interpretable as the heavy
breathing of sexual stimulation. It was when the U.S.S. Millicent wrapped one arm
around his shoulder for leverage and forced her other hand up under the hem of the
tight vest and then down inside the trousers and briefs, rooting for a penis, that
Mario became so ticklish that he began to double up, clearing his face of U.S.S. Millicent’s
front and laughing out loud in such a distinctive high-pitched way that Hal had no
trouble beelining right upon them, compromised though his navigational systems were
after fifteen or so secret minutes alone in the fragrant pines.