Infinite Jest (4 page)

‘I
read,
’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I
haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get
in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and
mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.

‘But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions.
Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk
about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated.
I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is
just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.
I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a cre
tus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’

I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care.’

I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging,
eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below
me.

‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ the Director says.

‘I’m fine,’ I tell them, standing. From the yellow Dean’s expression, there’s a brutal
wind blowing from my direction. Academics’ face has gone instantly old. Eight eyes
have become blank discs that stare at whatever they see.

‘Good God,’ whispers Athletics.

‘Please don’t worry,’ I say. ‘I can explain.’ I soothe the air with a casual hand.

Both my arms are pinioned from behind by the Director of Comp., who wrestles me roughly
down, on me with all his weight. I taste floor.

‘What’s
wrong?
’

I say ‘
Nothing
is wrong.’

‘It’s all
right!
I’m
here!
’ the Director is calling into my ear.

‘Get help!’ cries a Dean.

My forehead is pressed into parquet I never knew could be so cold. I am arrested.
I try to be perceived as limp and pliable. My face is mashed flat; Comp.’s weight
makes it hard to breathe.

‘Try to listen,’ I say very slowly, muffled by the floor.

‘What in God’s name are those…,’ one Dean cries shrilly, ‘… those
sounds?
’

There are clicks of a phone console’s buttons, shoes’ heels moving, pivoting, a sheaf
of flimsy pages falling.

‘
God!
’

‘
Help!
’

The door’s base opens at the left periphery: a wedge of halogen hall-light, white
sneakers and a scuffed Nunn Bush. ‘Let him
up!
’ That’s deLint.

‘There is nothing wrong,’ I say slowly to the floor. ‘I’m in here.’

I’m raised by the crutches of my underarms, shaken toward what he must see as calm
by a purple-faced Director: ‘Get a
grip,
son!’

DeLint at the big man’s arm: ‘
Stop
it!’

‘I am not what you see and hear.’

Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds
her palm against her mouth, looking.

‘I’m not,’ I say.

You have to love old-fashioned men’s rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in
the long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble;
these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing;
mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless
trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and a cold tile floor whose mosaic
pattern looks almost Islamic at this close range.

The disorder I’ve caused revolves all around. I’ve been half-dragged, still pinioned,
through a loose mob of Administrative people by the Comp. Director—who appears to
have thought variously that I am having a seizure (prying open my mouth to check for
a throat clear of tongue), that I am somehow choking (a textbook Heimlich that left
me whooping), that I am psychotically out of control (various postures and grips designed
to transfer that control to him)—while about us roil deLint, trying to restrain the
Director’s restraint of me, the varsity tennis coach restraining deLint, my mother’s
half-brother speaking in rapid combinations of polysyllables to the trio of Deans,
who variously gasp, wring hands, loosen neckties, waggle digits in C.T.’s face, and
make
pases
with sheafs of now-pretty-clearly-superfluous application forms.

I am rolled over supine on the geometric tile. I am concentrating docilely on the
question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress,
the place to regain control. My head is cradled in a knelt Director’s lap, which is
soft, my face being swabbed with dusty-brown institutional paper towels he received
from some hand out of the crowd overhead, staring with all the blankness I can summon
into his jowls’ small pocks, worst at the blurred jaw-line, of scarring from long-ago
acne. Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade
of same, trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than
I.

‘He’s fine,’ he keeps saying. ‘Look at him, calm as can be, lying there.’

‘You didn’t see what
happened
in there,’ a hunched Dean responds through a face webbed with fingers.

‘Excited, is all he gets, sometimes, an excitable kid, impressed with—’

‘But the
sounds
he made.’

‘Undescribable.’

‘Like an animal.’

‘
Sub
animalistic noises and sounds.’

‘Nor let’s not forget the
gestures
.’

‘Have you ever gotten
help
for this boy Dr. Tavis?’

‘Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.’

‘This boy is damaged.’

‘Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.’

‘A writhing animal with a knife in its eye.’

‘What were you possibly
about,
trying to enroll this—’

‘And his
arms
.’

‘You didn’t see it, Tavis. His arms were—’

‘Flailing. This sort of awful reaching drumming wriggle.
Waggling,
’ the group looking briefly at someone outside my sight trying to demonstrate something.

‘Like a time-lapse, a flutter of some sort of awful… growth.’

‘Sounded most of all like a drowning goat. A goat, drowning in something viscous.’

‘This strangled series of bleats and—’

‘Yes they
waggled
.’

‘So suddenly a bit of excited waggling’s a crime, now?’

‘You, sir, are in trouble. You are
in trouble
.’

‘His face. As if he was strangling. Burning. I believe I’ve seen a vision of hell.’

‘He has some trouble communicating, he’s communicatively challenged, no one’s denying
that.’

‘The boy needs
care
.’

‘Instead of caring for the boy you send him here to
enroll, compete?
’

‘Hal?’

‘You have not in your most dreadful fantasies dreamt of the amount of
trouble
you have bought yourself, Dr. so-called Headmaster,
educator
.’

‘… were given to understand this was all just a formality. You took him aback, is
all. Shy—’

‘And you, White. You sought to
recruit
him!’

‘—and terribly impressed and excited, in there, without us, his support system, whom
you asked to leave, which if you’d—’

‘I’d only seen him play. On court he’s gorgeous. Possibly a genius. We had no idea.
The brother’s in the bloody NFL for God’s sake. Here’s a top player, we thought, with
Southwest roots. His stats were off the chart. We watched him through the whole WhataBurger
last fall. Not a waggle or a noise. We were watching ballet out there, a mate remarked,
after.’

‘Damn right you were watching ballet out there, White. This boy is a balletic athlete,
a player.’

‘Some kind of athletic savant then. Balletic compensation for deep problems which
you
sir choose to disguise by muzzling the boy in there.’ An expensive pair of Brazilian
espadrilles goes by on the left and enters a stall, and the espadrilles come around
and face me. The urinal trickles behind the voices’ small echoes.

‘—haps we’ll just be on our way,’ C.T. is saying.

‘The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.’

‘—think you could pass off a damaged applicant, fabricate credentials and shunt him
through a kangaroo-interview and inject him into all the rigors of college life?’

‘Hal here
functions,
you ass. Given a supportive situation. He’s fine when he’s by himself. Yes he has
some trouble with excitability in conversation. Did you once hear him try to deny
that?’

‘We witnessed something only marginally
mammalian
in there, sir.’

‘Like hell. Have a look. How’s the excitable little guy doing down there, Aubrey,
does it look to you?’

‘You, sir, are quite possibly ill. This affair is not concluded.’

‘What
ambulance?
Don’t you guys
listen?
I’m telling you there’s—’

‘Hal? Hal?’

‘Dope him up, seek to act as his mouthpiece, muzzling, and now he lies there catatonic,
staring.’

The crackle of deLint’s knees. ‘Hal?’

‘—inflate this publicly in any distorted way. The Academy has distinguished alumni,
litigators at counsel. Hal here is provably competent. Credentials out the bazoo,
Bill. The boy reads like a vacuum.
Digests
things.’

I simply lie there, listening, smelling the paper towel, watching an espadrille pivot.

‘There’s more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.’

And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?

Not for nothing did Orin say that people outdoors down here just scuttle in vectors
from air conditioning to air conditioning. The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side
of my face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri
sheared to blown strands like hair at the rims. The traffic is nothing like Boston.
The stretcher is the special type, with restraining straps at the extremities. The
same Aubrey deLint I’d dismissed for years as a 2-D martinet knelt gurneyside to squeeze
my restrained hand and say ‘Just hang in there, Buckaroo,’ before moving back into
the administrative fray at the ambulance’s doors. It is a special ambulance, dispatched
from I’d rather not dwell on where, with not only paramedics but some kind of psychiatric
M.D. on board. The medics lift gently and are handy with straps. The M.D., his back
up against the ambulance’s side, has both hands up in dispassionate mediation between
the Deans and C.T., who keeps stabbing skyward with his cellular’s antenna as if it
were a sabre, outraged that I’m being needlessly ambulanced off to some Emergency
Room against my will and interests. The issue whether the damaged even have interested
wills is shallowly hashed out as some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead
to hear slices the sky from south to north. The M.D. has both hands up and is patting
the air to signify dispassion. He has a big blue jaw. At the only other emergency
room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back, the psychiatric stretcher
was wheeled in and then parked beside the waiting-room chairs. These chairs were molded
orange plastic; three of them down the row were occupied by different people all of
whom were holding empty prescription bottles and perspiring freely. This would have
been bad enough, but in the end chair, right up next to the strap-secured head of
my stretcher, was a T-shirted woman with barnwood skin and a trucker’s cap and a bad
starboard list who began to tell me, lying there restrained and immobile, about how
she had seemingly overnight suffered a sudden and anomalous gigantism in her right
breast, which she referred to as a titty; she had an almost parodic Québecois accent
and described the ‘titty’s’ presenting history and possible diagnoses for almost twenty
minutes before I was rolled away. The jet’s movement and trail seem incisionish, as
if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade.
I once saw the word
KNIFE
finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom. I have become an infantophile.
I am forced to roll my closed eyes either up or to the side to keep the red cave from
bursting into flames from the sunlight. The street’s passing traffic is constant and
seems to go ‘Hush, hush, hush.’ The sun, if your fluttering eye catches it even slightly,
gives you the blue and red floaters a flashbulb gives you. ‘Why
not?
Why
not?
Why not
not,
then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?’ C.T.’s voice, receding
with outrage. Only the gallant stabs of his antenna are now visible, just inside my
sight’s right frame. I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I
will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond
to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be inversion of standard travel, the ambulance
and ER: I’ll make the journey first, then depart. I think very briefly of the late
Cosgrove Watt. I think of the hypophalangial Grief-Therapist. I think of the Moms,
alphabetizing cans of soup in the cabinet over the microwave. Of Himself’s umbrella
hung by its handle from the edge of the mail table just inside the Headmaster’s House’s
foyer. The bad ankle hasn’t ached once this whole year. I think of John N. R. Wayne,
who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately
and I dig up my father’s head. There’s very little doubt that Wayne would have won.
And Venus Williams owns a ranch outside Green Valley; she may well attend the 18’s
Boys’ and Girls’ finals. I will be out in plenty of time for tomorrow’s semi; I trust
Uncle Charles. Tonight’s winner is almost sure to be Dymphna, sixteen but with a birthday
two weeks under the 15 April deadline; and Dymphna will still be tired tomorrow at
0830, while I, sedated, will have slept like a graven image. I have never before faced
Dymphna in tournament play, nor played with the sonic balls the blind require, but
I watched him barely dispatch Petropolis Kahn in the Round of 16, and I know he is
mine.