Infinite Jest (3 page)

‘Surely by
incredible
you meant very very very impressive, as opposed to literally quote “incredible,”
surely,’ says C.T., seeming to watch the coach at the window massaging the back of
his neck. The huge window gives out on nothing more than dazzling sunlight and cracked
earth with heat-shimmers over it.

‘Then there is before us the matter of not the required two but
nine
separate application essays, some of which of nearly monograph-length, each without
exception being—’ different sheet—‘the adjective various evaluators used was quote
“stellar”—’

Dir. of Comp.: ‘I made in my assessment deliberate use of
lapidary
and
effete
.’

‘—but in areas and with titles, I’m sure you recall quite well, Hal: “Neoclassical
Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar,” “The Implications of Post-Fourier
Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema,” “The Emergence of Heroic Stasis
in Broadcast Entertainment”—’

‘ “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality”?’

‘ “A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass”?’

‘ “Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica”?’

Now showing broad expanses of recessed gum. ‘Suffice to say that there’s some frank
and candid concern about the recipient of these unfortunate test scores, though perhaps
explainable test scores, being these essays’ sole individual author.’

‘I’m not sure Hal’s sure just what’s being implied here,’ my uncle says. The Dean
at center is fingering his lapels as he interprets distasteful computed data.

‘What the University is saying here is that from a strictly academic point of view
there are admission problems that Hal needs to try to help us iron out. A matriculant’s
first role at the University is and must be as a student. We couldn’t admit a student
we have reason to suspect can’t cut the mustard, no matter how much of an asset he
might be on the field.’

‘Dean Sawyer means the court, of course, Chuck,’ Athletic Affairs says, head severely
cocked so he’s including the White person behind him in the address somehow. ‘Not
to mention O.N.A.N.C.A.A. regulations and investigators always snuffling around for
some sort of whiff of the smell of impropriety.’

The varsity tennis coach looks at his own watch.

‘Assuming these board scores are accurate reflectors of true capacity in this case,’
Academic Affairs says, his high voice serious and sotto, still looking at the file
before him as if it were a plate of something bad, ‘I’ll tell you right now my opinion
is it wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be fair to the other applicants. Wouldn’t be fair
to the University community.’ He looks at me. ‘And it’d be especially unfair to Hal
himself. Admitting a boy we see as simply an athletic asset would amount to just using
that boy. We’re under myriad scrutiny to make sure we’re not using anybody. Your board
results, son, indicate that we could be accused of using you.’

Uncle Charles is asking Coach White to ask the Dean of Athletic Affairs whether the
weather over scores would be as heavy if I were, say, a revenue-raising football prodigy.
The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds.
I expend energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, empty, my eyes two great
pale zeros. People have promised to get me through this.

Uncle C.T., though, has the pinched look of the cornered. His voice takes on an odd
timbre when he’s cornered, as if he were shouting as he receded. ‘Hal’s grades at
E.T.A., which is I should stress an A
cad
emy, not simply a camp or factory, accredited by both the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
and the North American Sports Academy Association, it’s focused on the total needs
of the player and student, founded by a towering intellectual figure whom I hardly
need name, here, and based by him on the rigorous Oxbridge Quadrivium-Trivium curricular
model, a school fully staffed and equipped, by a fully certified staff, should show
that my nephew here can cut just about any Pac 10 mustard that needs cutting, and
that—’

DeLint is moving toward the tennis coach, who is shaking his head.

‘—would be able to see a distinct flavor of minor-sport prejudice about this whole
thing,’ C.T. says, crossing and recrossing his legs as I listen, composed and staring.

The room’s carbonated silence is now hostile. ‘I think it’s time to let the actual
applicant himself speak out on his own behalf,’ Academic Affairs says very quietly.
‘This seems somehow impossible with you here, sir.’

Athletics smiles tiredly under a hand that massages the bridge of his nose. ‘Maybe
you’d excuse us for a moment and wait outside, Chuck.’

‘Coach White could accompany Mr. Tavis and his associate out to reception,’ the yellow
Dean says, smiling into my unfocused eyes.

‘—led to believe this had all been ironed out in advance, from the—’ C.T. is saying
as he and deLint are shown to the door. The tennis coach extends a hypertrophied arm.
Athletics says ‘We’re all friends and colleagues here.’

This is not working out. It strikes me that
EXIT
signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say
HE LEAVES.
I would yield to the urge to bolt for the door ahead of them if I could know that
bolting for the door is what the men in this room would see. DeLint is murmuring something
to the tennis coach. Sounds of keyboards, phone consoles as the door is briefly opened,
then firmly shut. I am alone among administrative heads.

‘—offense intended to anyone,’ Athletic Affairs is saying, his sportcoat tan and his
necktie insigniated in tiny print—‘beyond just physical abilities out there in play,
which believe me we respect,
want,
believe me.’

‘—question about it we wouldn’t be so anxious to chat with you directly, see?’

‘—that we’ve known in processing several prior applications through Coach White’s
office that the Enfield School is operated, however impressively, by close relations
of first your brother, who I can still remember the way White’s predecessor Maury
Klamkin wooed that kid, so that grades’ objectivity can be all too easily called into
question—’

‘By whomsoever’s calling—N.A.A.U.P., ill-willed Pac 10 programs, O.N.A.N.C.A.A.—’

The essays are old ones, yes, but they are mine;
de moi
. But they are, yes, old, not quite on the application’s instructed subject of Most
Meaningful Educational Experience Ever. If I’d done you one from the last year, it
would look to you like some sort of infant’s random stabs on a keyboard, and to you,
who use
whomsoever
as a subject. And in this new smaller company, the Director of Composition seems
abruptly to have actuated, emerged as both the Alpha of the pack here and way more
effeminate than he’d seemed at first, standing hip-shot with a hand on his waist,
walking with a roll to his shoulders, jingling change as he pulls up his pants as
he slides into the chair still warm from C.T.’s bottom, crossing his legs in a way
that inclines him well into my personal space, so that I can see multiple eyebrow-tics
and capillary webs in the oysters below his eyes and smell fabric-softener and the
remains of a breath-mint turned sour.

‘… a bright, solid, but very shy boy, we know about your being very shy, Kirk White’s
told us what your athletically built if rather stand-offish younger instructor told
him,’ the Director says softly, cupping what I feel to be a hand over my sportcoat’s
biceps (surely not), ‘who simply needs to swallow hard and trust and tell his side
of the story to these gentlemen who bear no maliciousness none at all but are doing
our jobs and trying to look out for everyone’s interests at the same time.’

I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in the defecatory
posture of all athletes at rest, deLint staring at his huge thumbs, while C.T. in
the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking into his portable phone. I have
been coached for this like a Don before a RICO hearing. A neutral and affectless silence.
The sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense: let
everything bounce off you; do nothing. I’d tell you all you want and more, if the
sounds I made could be what you hear.

Athletics with his head out from under his wing: ‘—to avoid admission procedures that
could be seen as primarily athletics-oriented. It could be a mess, son.’

‘Bill means the appearance, not necessarily the real true facts of the matter, which
you alone can fill in,’ says the Director of Composition.

‘—the appearance of the high athletic ranking, the subnormal scores, the over-academic
essays, the incredible grades vortexing out of what could be seen as a nepotistic
situation.’

The yellow Dean has leaned so far forward that his tie is going to have a horizontal
dent from the table-edge, his face sallow and kindly and no-shit-whatever:

‘Look here, Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn’t be accused
of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here, University
of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn
he won’t speak up for himself, a jock with doctored marks and a store-bought application.’

The Brewster’s-Angle light of the tabletop appears as a rose flush behind my closed
lids. I cannot make myself understood. ‘I am not just a jock,’ I say slowly. Distinctly.
‘My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was
to get me over a rough spot. The grades prior to that are
de moi
.’ My eyes are closed; the room is silent. ‘I cannot make myself understood, now.’
I am speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Call it something I ate.’

It’s funny what you don’t recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I
barely remember—my eldest brother Orin says he can remember being in the home’s backyard
with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden out
of the cold yard. March or early April. The garden’s area was a rough rectangle laid
out with Popsicle sticks and twine. Orin was removing rocks and hard clods from the
Moms’s path as she worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven
thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms
rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall and having to stoop painfully to hold on,
her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He remembers that in the middle
of the tilling I came tear-assing out the door and into the backyard wearing some
sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying, holding out something he said was really unpleasant-looking
in my upturned palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the
cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn’t make it out until
our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what
I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold—Orin posits
from some dark corner of the Weston home’s basement, which was warm from the furnace
and flooded every spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green,
glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange,
red. Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and
some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. ‘I ate this,’ was what
I was saying. I held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty
work, and at first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering;
and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything
spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out—as in how many used
heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports,
backseats, tournament lounges? O. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing
with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand
reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, froze, beginning
to I.D. what it was I held out, countenancing evidence of oral contact with same.
He remembers her face as past describing. Her outstretched hand, still Rototrembling,
hung in the air before mine.

‘I ate this,’ I said.

‘Pardon me?’

O. says he can only remember (
sic
) saying something caustic as he limboed a crick out of his back. He says he must
have felt a terrible impending anxiety. The Moms refused ever even to go into the
damp basement. I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size
and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ’s with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously,
like the report of some kind of audit.

O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety. In his
first memory, the Moms’s path around the yard is a broad circle of hysteria:

‘
God!
’ she calls out.

‘Help! My son ate this!’ she yells in Orin’s second and more fleshed-out recollection,
yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers,
running around and around the garden’s rectangle while O. gaped at his first real
sight of adult hysteria. Suburban neighbors’ heads appeared in windows and over the
fences, looking. O. remembers me tripping over the garden’s laid-out twine, getting
up dirty, crying, trying to follow.

‘God! Help! My son ate this! Help!’ she kept yelling, running a tight pattern just
inside the square of string; and my brother Orin remembers noting how even in hysterical
trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her footprints Native-American-straight, her turns,
inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial, crying ‘My son ate this! Help!’
and lapping me twice before the memory recedes.

‘My application’s not bought,’ I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the
red cave that opens out before closed eyes. ‘I am not just a boy who plays tennis.
I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.