Infinite Jest (37 page)

Her silhouette leans and says ‘And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.

‘And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.

‘And We said:

‘Look at that fucker
Dance.
’

A toneless male voice is then cued in to say It’s Sixty Minutes More Or Less With
Madame Psychosis On YYY-109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band. The different sounds
are encoded and pumped by the student engineer up through the building’s corpus and
out the roof’s aerial. This aerial, low-watt, has been rigged by the station’s EM-wienies
to tilt and spin, not unlike a centrifugal theme-park-type ride, spraying the signal
in all directions. Since the B.S. 1966 Hundt Act, the low-watt fringes of the FM band
are the only part of the Wireless Spectrum still licensed for public broadcast. The
deep-water green of FM tuners all over the campus’s labs and dorms and barnacled clots
of grad apartments align themselves slowly toward the spatter’s center, moving toward
the dial’s right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can’t even see.
Ratings are minor-league by the pre-InterLace broadcast standards of yore, but they
are rock-solid consistent. Audience demand for Madame Psychosis has been, from the
very start, inelastic. The aerial, inclined at about the angle of a 3-km. cannon,
spins in a blurred ellipse—its rotary base is elliptical because that’s the only shape
the EM-wienies could rig a mold for. Obstructed on all sides by the tall buildings
of East Cambridge and Commercial Drive and serious Downtown, though, only a couple
thin pie-slices of signal escape M.I.T. proper, e.g. through the P.E.-Dept. gap of
barely used lacrosse and soccer fields between the Philology and Low-Temp Physics
complexes on Mem. Dr. and then across the florid-purple nighttime breadth of the historic
Charles River, then through the heavy flow of traffic on Storrow Dr. on the Chuck’s
other side, so that by the time the signal laps at upper Brighton and Enfield you
need almost surveillance-grade antennation to filter it in out of the EM-miasma of
cellular and interconsole phone transmissions and TPs’ EM-auras that crowd the FM
fringes from every side. Unless, that is, your tuner is lucky enough to be located
at the apex of a tall and more or less denuded hill, in Enfield, in which case you
find yourself right in YYY’s centrifugal line of fire.

Madame Psychosis eschews chatty openings and contextual filler. Her hour is compact
and no-nonsense.

After the music fades, her shadow holds collated sheets up and riffles them slightly
so the sound of paper is broadcast. ‘Obesity,’ she says. ‘Obesity with hypogonadism.
Also morbid obesity. Nodular leprosy with leonine facies.’ The engineer can see her
silhouette lift a cup as she pauses, which reminds him of the Millennial Fizzy in
his bookbag.

She says ‘The acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. The enuretic, this year of all years.
The spasmodically torticollic.’

The student engineer, a pre-doctoral transuranial metallurgist working off massive
G.S.L. debt, locks the levels and fills out the left side of his time sheet and ascends
with his bookbag through a treillage of interneural stairways with semitic ideograms
and developer-smell and past snack bar and billiard hall and modem-banks and extensive
Student Counseling offices around the rostral lamina, all the little-used many-staired
neuroform way up to the artery-red fire door of the Union’s rooftop, leaving Madame
Psychosis, as is S.O.P., alone with her show and screen in the shadowless chill. She’s
mostly alone in there when she’s on-air. Every so often there’s a guest, but the guest
will usually get introduced and then not say anything. The monologues seem both free-associative
and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares. There’s no telling what’ll be up
on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and
film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist
celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/Buñuel and
-down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian
guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy
of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah,
De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s
8½.
Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and après-garde digital
cartridges, anticonfluential cinema,
⁶¹
Brutalism, Found Drama, etc. Also highly literate on U.S. sports, football in particular,
which fact the student engineer finds dissonant. Madame takes one phone call per show,
at random. Mostly she solos. The show kind of flies itself. She could do it in her
sleep, behind the screen. Sometimes she seems very sad. The engineer likes to monitor
the broadcast from a height, the Union’s rooftop, summer sun and winter wind. The
more correct term for an asthmatic’s inhaler is ‘nebulizer.’ The engineer’s graduate
research specialty is the carbonated translithium particles created and destroyed
billions of times a second in the core of a cold-fusion ring. Most of the lithioids
can’t be smashed or studied and exist mostly to explain gaps and incongruities in
annulation equations. Once last year, Madame Psychosis had the student engineer write
out the home-lab process for turning uranium oxide powder into good old fissionable
U-235. Then she read it on the air between a Baraka poem and a critique of the Steeler
defense’s double-slot secondary. It’s something a bright high-schooler could cook
and took less than three minutes to read on-air and didn’t involve one classified
procedure or one piece of hardware not gettable from any decent chemical-supply outlet
in Boston, but there was no small unpleasantness about it from the M.I.T. administration,
which it’s well-known M.I.T. is in bed with Defense. The hot-fuel recipe was the one
bit of verbal intercourse the engineer’s had with Madame Psychosis that didn’t involve
straight levels and cues.

The Union’s soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy pia-mater pink
except in spots where it’s eroded down to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the
bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions. From the air it looks wrinkled;
from the roof’s fire door it’s an almost nauseous system of serpentine trenches, like
water-slides in hell. The Union itself, the late A.Y. (‘V.F.’) Rickey’s
summum opus,
is a great hollow brain-frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of
Very High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though
the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from
the second floor’s optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take
a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with
them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures
and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy
at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a
kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the
midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish
ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated
pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which
the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both,
had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky
brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal
bone and numinous aura)—which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide
off the steeply curved cerebrum’s edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the
broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached
and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent
to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down
to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

Topside in the bitter river wind, wearing a khaki parka with a fake fur fringe, the
student engineer makes his way and settles into the first intraparietal sulcus that
catches his fancy, makes a kind of nest in the soft trench—the convoluted latex is
filled with those little non-FHC Styrofoam peanuts everything industrially soft is
filled with, and the pia-mater surface gives rather like one of those old beanbag-chairs
of more innocent times—settles in and back with his Millennial Fizzy and inhaler and
cigarette and pocket-size Heathkit digital FM-band receiver under a high-CO night
sky that makes the stars’ points look extra sharp. The Boston
P.M.
is 10°C. The postcentral sulcus he sits in is just outside the circumference of the
YYY aerial’s high-speed spin, so five m. overhead its tip’s aircraft-light describes
a blurred oval, vascularly hued. His FM receiver’s power cells, tested daily against
the Low-Temp Lab’s mercuric resistors, are fresh, the wooferless tuner’s sound tinny
and crisp, so that Madame sounds like a faithful but radically miniaturized copy of
her studio self.

‘Those with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math
majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic.
Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent and chachetic
and anorexic. The Brag’s-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally
wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptotic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat
Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. And the
scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis
Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.’

The pulsing aircraft-alert light of the aerial is magenta, a sharp and much closer
star, now, with his fingers laced behind his head, reclined and gazing upward, listening,
the centrifugal whirl’s speed making its tip’s light trail color across the eyes.
The light’s oval a bloody halo over the very barest of all possible heads. Madame
Psychosis has done U.H.I.D. stuff before, once or twice. He is listening to her read
four levels below the Oblangated Recess that becomes the heating shaft’s nubbin of
spine, ad-lib-style reading from one of the PR-circulars of the Union of the Hideously
and Improbably Deformed, an agnostic-style 12-step support-group deal for what it
calls the ‘aesthetically challenged.’
⁶²
She sometimes reads circulars and catalogues and PR-type things, though not regularly.
Some things take several successive shows to get through. Ratings stay solid; listeners
hang in. The engineer’s pretty sure he’d hang in even if he weren’t paid to. He does
like to settle into a sulcus and smoke slowly and exhale up past the blurred red ellipse
of the aerial, monitoring. Madame’s themes are at once unpredictable and somehow rhythmic,
more like probability-waves for subhadronics than anything else.
⁶³
The student engineer has never once seen Madame Psychosis enter or leave WYYY; she
probably takes the elevator. It’s 22 October in the O.N.A.N.ite year of the Depend
Adult Undergarment.

Like most marriages, Avril and the late James Incandenza’s was an evolved product
of concordance and compromise, and the scholastic curriculum at E.T.A. is the product
of negotiated compromises between Avril’s academic hard-assery and James’s and Schtitt’s
keen sense of athletic pragmatics. It is because of Avril—who quit M.I.T. entirely
and went down to half-time at Brandeis and even turned down an extremely plummy-type
stipended fellowship at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute that first year to design and
assume the helm of E.T.A.’s curriculum—that the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only
athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and
quadrivium of the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition,
⁶⁴
and thus one of the very few extant sports academies that makes a real stab at being
a genuine pre-college school and not just an Iron Curtainish jock-factory. But Schtitt
never let Incandenza forget what the place was supposed to be about, and so Avril’s
flinty
mens-sana
pedagogy wasn’t diluted so much as
ad-valorem
ized, pragmatically focused toward the
corpore-potis
-type goals kids were coming up the hill to give their childhoods for. Some E.T.A.
twists Avril’d allowed into the classic L.A.S. path are e.g. that the seven subjects
of the T and Q are mixed and not divided into Quadrivial Upper-class v. Trivial Ephebic;
that E.T.A. geometry classes pretty much ignore the study of closed figures (excepting
rectangles) to concentrate (also except for Thorp’s Trigonometry of Cubes, which is
elective and mostly aesthetic) for two increasingly brutal semesters on the involution
and expansion of bare angles; that the quadrivial requirement of astronomy has at
E.T.A. become a two-term elementary optics survey, since vision issues are obviously
more germane to the Game, and since all the hardware required for everything from
aphotic to apochromatic lenswork were and are right there in the lab off the Comm.-Ad.
tunnel. Music’s been pretty much bagged. Plus the triviumoid fetish for classical
oratory has by now at E.T.A. been converted to a wide range of history and studio
courses in various types of entertainment, mostly recorded film—again, way too much
of Incandenza’s lavish equipment lying around not to exploit, plus the legally willed
and endowed-for-perpetuity presence on the academic payroll of Mrs. Pricket, Mr. Ogilvie,
Mr. Disney R. Leith, and Ms. Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf, the late founder/director’s
loyal sound engineer, Best Boy, production assistant, and third-favorite actress,
respectively.

Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare
for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers,
albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza’s line, one of the few philosophical
points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was
pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant.