Infinite Jest (36 page)

‘Alls I know is I put a Hunt’s Pudding Cup in the resident fridge like I’m supposed
to at 1300 and da-da-da and at 1430 I come down all primed for pudding that I paid
for myself and it’s not there and McDade comes on all concerned and offers to help
me look for it and da-da, except if you look I look and here’s the son of a whore
got this big thing of pudding on his chin.’

‘Yeah but except so how can I answer just yes or no to do I want to stop the coke?
Do I think I want to absolutely I think I want to. I don’t have a septum no more.
My septum’s been like fucking dissolved by coke. See? You see anything like a septum
when I lift up like that? I’ve absolutely with my whole heart thought I wanted to
stop and so forth. Ever since with the septum. So but so since I’ve been wanting to
stop this whole time, why couldn’t I stop? See what I’m saying? Isn’t it all about
wanting to and so on? And so forth? How can living here and going to meetings and
all do anything except make me want to stop? But I think I already want to stop. How
come I’d even be here if I didn’t want to stop? Isn’t being here proof I want to stop?
But then so how come I can’t stop, if I want to stop, is the thing.’

‘This kid had a harelip. Where it goes like, you know,
thith.
But his went way up. Further up. He sold bad speed but good pot. He said he’d cover
our part of the rent if we kept his snakes supplied with mice. We were smoking up
all our cash so what’s to do. They ate mice. We had to go into pet stores and pretend
to be real heavily into mice. Snakes. He kept snakes. Doocy. They smelled bad. He
never cleaned the tanks. His lip covered his nose. The harelip. My guess he couldn’t
smell what they smelled like. Or something would have got done. He had a thing for
Mildred. My girlfriend. I don’t know. She probably has a problem too. I don’t know.
He had a thing for her. He’d keep saying shit like, with all these
t-h
’s, he’d go Tho you want to fuck me, Mildred, or what? We don’t hath t’eat each other
or nothin. He’d say shit like this with me right there, dropping mice into these tanks,
holding my breath. The mice had to be alive. All in this godawful voice like somebody’s
holding their nose and can’t say
s.
He didn’t wash his hair for two years. We had like an in-joke on how long he wouldn’t
wash his hair and we’d make X’s on the calendar every week. We had a lot of these
in-type jokes, to help us stand it. We were wasted I’d say 90% of the time. Nine-O.
But he never did the whole time we were there. Wash. When she said we had to leave
or she was taking off and taking Harriet was when she said when I was at work he started
telling her how to have sex with a chicken. He said he had sex with the chickens.
It was a trailer out past the dumpster-dock in the Spur, and he kept a couple chickens
under it. No wonder they ran like hell when anybody came. He’d been like sexually
abusing fowls. He kept talking to her about it, with all
t-h
’s, like You hath to like
thcrew
them on, but when you come they jutht thort of
fly
off of you. She said she drew the line. We left and went to Pine Street shelter and
she stayed for a while till this guy with a hat said he had a ranch in New Jersey
and off she goes, and with Harriet. Harriet’s our daughter. She’s going to be three.
She says it
free,
though. I doubt now the kid’ll ever say a single
t-h
her whole life. And I don’t even know where in New Jersey. Does New Jersey even have
ranches? I’d been in school with her since grade school. Mildred. We were like childhood
sweethearts. And then this guy who got her old cot at the shelter I got lice from.
He moves into her cot and then I start to get lice. I was still trying to deliver
ice to machines at gas stations. Who wouldn’t have to get high just to stand it?’

‘So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer?
I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from
cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So
what is this? You’re
ordering
me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and
enter nine months of low-income treatment for a
disease,
and I’m prescribed prayer? Does the word
retrograde
signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don’t know about? What exactly is the story
here?’

‘Fine, fine. Fine. Just completely fine. No problem at all. Happy to be here. Feeling
better. Sleeping better. Love the chow. In a word, couldn’t be finer. The grinding?
The tooth-grinding? A tic. A jaw-strengthener. Expression of all-around fineness.
Likewise the thing with the eyelid.’

‘But I did
too
try. I been trying all
month.
I been on four interviews. They didn’t none of them start till 11, and I’m like what’s
the point get up early sit around here I don’t have to be down there till 11? I filled
out applications
ever
day. Where’m I suppose to go? You can’t kick me out just for the moth—they don’t call
me back if I’m
trying.
Snot my
fault.
Go on and ask Clenette. Ask that Thrale girl and them if I ain’t been trying. You
can’t.
This is just so
fucked up.

‘I
said
where’m I suppose to
go
to?’

‘I’m on a month’s Full-House Restriction for using freaking mouthwash? Newsflash:
news bulletin: mouthwash is for spitting out! It’s like 2% proof!’

‘It’s about somebody
else
’s farting, why I’m here.’

‘I’ll gladly identify myself if you’ll first simply explain what it is I’m identifying
myself
as.
This is my position. You’re requiring me to attest to facts I do not possess. The
term for this is “duress.” ’

‘So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?’

‘I’ll come back when you’re free.’

‘It’s back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.’

‘First just let me say one thing.’

‘Open me anothowone of those boy and I’ll tell you the highlight of that season of
my season tickets was I got to see that incwedible son of a bitch set his fiwst wecord
in the flesh. It was y’bwother’s Cub Scout twoop outing you wouldn’t join because
I wemember this you w’afwaid you’d lose the online time in fwont of the TP. Wemember?
Well I’ll always wemember this one day, boy. It was against Sywacuse, what, eight
seasons back. The little son of a bitch had a long of seventy-thwee that day and a
avewage of sixty-fwigging-nine.
Seventy-thwee
for Chwist’s sake. Open me anothowone, boy, use the exowcise. I wecall the sky was
cloudy. When he punted you spent a weal long time studying the sky. They weally hung.
He had a long hang-time of eight-point-thwee seconds that day. That’s sewious hanging,
boy. Me I nevewit five in my day. Chwist. The whole twoop said they never heawd anything
like the sound of the son of a bitch’s seventy-thwee. Won Wichardson, you wemember
Wonnie, the twoop-leadawhateva, petwoleum jelly salesman outta Bwookline, Wonnie’s
a wetired pilot from the Sewvice, from a bomma-squadwon, Wonnie we’s down at t’pub
that night Wonnie says he says that seventy-thwee sounded just like fucking
bombs
sounded, that kind of cwacking WHUMP, when they hit, to the boys in the squadwon
in the planes when they let them go.’

The radio show right before Madame Psychosis’s midnight show on M.I.T.’s semi-underground
WYYY is ‘Those Were the Legends That Formerly Were,’ one of those cruel tech-collegiate
formats where any U.S. student who wants to can dart over from the super-collider
lab or the Fourier Transforms study group for fifteen minutes and read on-air some
parodic thing where he’d pretend to be his own dad apotheosizing some sort of thick-necked
historic athletic figure the dad’d admired and had by implication compared with woeful
distaste to the pencil-necked big-headed asthmatic little kid staring up through Coke-bottle
lenses from his digital keyboard. The show’s only rule is that you have to read your
thing in the voice of some really silly cartoon character. There are other, rather
more exotic patricidal formats for Asian, Latin, Arab, and European students on select
weekend evenings. The consensus is Asian cartoon characters have the silliest voices.

Albeit literally sophomoric, ‘Those Were the Legends…’ is a useful drama-therapy-type
catharsis-op—M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd,
geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless,
dick-nose, pencil-neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist’s kill-jar
broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground—and the show pulls
down solid FM ratings, though a lot of that’s due to reverse-inertia, a Newton’s-II-like
backward shove from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M–F 0000h.–0100h.,
which it precedes.

Y.D.A.U.’s WYYY late-shift student engineer, unfond of any elevator that follows a
serpentine or vascular path, eschews the M.I.T. Student Union’s elevator. He has an
arrival routine where he skips the front entrances and comes in through the south
side’s acoustic meatus and gets a Millennial Fizzy
^®
out of the vending machine in the sephenoid sinus, then descends creaky back wooden
stairs from the Massa Intermedia’s Reading Room down to about the Infundibular Recess,
past the
Tech Talk Daily
CD-ROM student paper’s production floor and the sick chemical smell of the Read-Only
cartridge-press’s developer, down past the epiglottal Hillel Club’s dark and star-doored
HQ, past the heavier door to the tiled lattice of hallways to the squash and racquetball
courts and one volleyball court and the airy corpus callosum of 24 high-ceiling tennis
courts endowed by an M.I.T. alum and now so little used they don’t even know now where
the nets are, down three more levels to the ghostly-clean and lithium-lit studios
of FM 109–WYYY FM, broadcasting for the M.I.T. community and selected points beyond.
The studio’s walls are pink and laryngeally fissured. His asthma’s better down here,
the air thin and keen, the tracheal air-filters just below the flooring and the ventilators’
air the freshest in the Union.

The engineer, a work-study graduate student with bad lungs and occluded pores, settles
alone at his panel in the engineer’s booth, adjusts a couple needles’ bob, and sound-checks
the only paid personality on the nightly docket, the darkly revered Madame Psychosis,
whose cameo shadow is just visible outside the booth’s thick glass, her screen half-obscuring
the on-air studio’s bank of phones, checking cueing and transition for the Thursday
edition. She is hidden from all view by a jointed trip-tych screen of cream chiffon
that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing panel’s dials
and frames her silhouette. Her silhouette is cleanly limned against the screen, sitting
cross-legged in its insectile microphonic headset, smoking. The engineer always has
to tighten his own headset’s cranial band down from the ‘Those Were’ engineer’s mammoth
parietal breadth. He activates the intercom and offers to check Madame Psychosis’s
levels. He requests sound. Anything at all. He hasn’t opened his can of pop. There
is a long silence during which Madame Psychosis’s silhouette doesn’t look up from
something she looks like she’s collating at her little desk.

After a while she makes some little sounds, little plosives to check for roaring sounds
in exhalations, a perennial problem in low-budget FM.

She makes a long
s
-sound.

The student engineer takes a hit from his portable inhaler.

She says ‘He liked that sort of dreamy, dreaming music that had the rhythm of long
things swinging.’

The engineer’s movements at the panel’s dials resemble someone adjusting the heater
and sound system while driving.

‘The Dow that can be told is not the eternal Dow,’ she says.

The engineer, age twenty-three, has extremely bad skin.

‘Attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object:’

The windowless laryngeal studio is terribly bright. Nothing casts a shadow. Recessed-lit
fluorescence with a dual-spectrum lithiumized corona, developed two buildings over
and awaiting O.N.A.N. patent. The chilly shadowless light of surgical theaters, convenience
stores at 0400. The pink wrinkled walls sometimes look more gynecological than anything
else.

‘Like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.’

The engineer shivers in the bright chill and lights a gasper of his own and tells
Madame Psychosis through the intercom that the whole range of levels is fine. Madame
Psychosis is the only WYYY personality who brings in her own headset and jacks, plus
a triptych screen. Over the screen’s left section are four clocks set for different
Zones, plus a numberless disk someone hung for a joke, to designate the annularized
Great Concavity’s No-Time. The E.S.T. clock’s trackable hand carves off the last few
seconds from the five minutes of dead air Madame Psychosis’s contract stipulates gets
to precede her show. You can see her silhouette putting out the cigarette very methodically.
She cues tonight’s synthesized bumper and theme music; the engineer flicks a lever
and pumps the music up the coaxial medulla and through the amps and boosters packed
into the crawlspaces above the high false ceiling of the corpus callosum’s idle tennis
courts and up and out the aerial that protrudes from the gray and bulbous surface
of the Union’s roof. Institutional design has come a ways from I. M. Pei. M.I.T.’s
near-new Student Union, off the corner of Ames and Memorial Dr.,
⁶⁰
East Cambridge, is one enormous cerebral cortex of reinforced concrete and polymer
compounds. Madame Psychosis is smoking again, listening, head cocked. Her tall screen
will leak smoke for her show’s whole hour. The student engineer is counting down from
five on an outstretched hand he can’t see how she sees. And as pinkie meets palm,
she says what she’s said for three years of midnights, an opening bit that Mario Incandenza,
the least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA, across the river, listening
faithfully, finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling: