Infinite Jest (49 page)

The transparent phone sounded from somewhere under the hill of bedding
⁸²
as Hal was on the edge of the bed with one leg up and his chin on its knee, clipping
his nails into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room.
It took four rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out.

‘Mmmyellow.’

‘Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we’ve
had enough shit out of you.’

‘Hello Orin.’

‘How hangs it, kid.’

‘God, please no, please O., not more Separatism questions.’

‘Relax. Never crossed my mind. Social call. Shoot the breeze.’

‘Interesting you should call just now. Because I’m clipping my toenails into a wastebasket
several meters away.’

‘Jesus, you know how I hate the sound of nail clippers.’

‘Except I’m shooting seventy-plus percent. The little fragments of clipping. It’s
uncanny. I keep wanting to go out in the hall and get somebody in here to see it.
But I don’t want to break the spell.’

‘The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can’t miss.’

‘It’s definitely one of those can’t-miss intervals. It’s just like that magical feeling
on those rare days out there playing. Playing out of your head, deLint calls it. Loach
calls it The Zone. Being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated.’

‘Coordinated as God.’

‘Some groove in the shape of the air of the day guides everything down and in.’

‘When you feel like you couldn’t miss if you tried to.’

‘I’m so far away the wastebasket’s mouth looks more like a slot than a circle. And
yet in they go, ka-ching ka-ching. There went another one. Even the misses are near-misses,
caroms off the rim.’

‘I’m sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue
therapist’s ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale
in flames far below. The bathroom’s redwood-panelled and overlooks a precipice. The
sunlight’s the color of the bronze.’

‘But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves
will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest
detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated
can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out,
but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle
of incidence to the sun. Your heart’s in your throat every time you change sides of
the court.’

‘You start to get like a superstitious native. What’s the word
propitiate
the divine spell.’

‘I suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and apotropaic
barn-signs. I’m actually frightened to switch feet right now. I’m clipping off the
tiniest aerodynamically viable clippings possible, to prolong the time on this foot,
in case the magic’s a function of the foot. This isn’t even the good foot.’

‘These can’t-miss intervals make superstitious natives out of us all, Hallie. The
professional football player’s maybe the worst superstitious native of all the sports.
That’s why all the high-tech padding and garish Lycra and complex play-terminology.
The like self-reassuring display of high-tech. Because the bug-eyed native’s lurking
just under the surface, we know. The bug-eyed spear-rattling grass-skirted primitive,
feeding virgins to Popogatapec and afraid of planes.’

‘The new
Discursive O.E.D.
says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins’ throats and pour the blood very carefully
into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors.’

‘I can hear those clippers. Quit with the clippers a second.’

‘The phone’s no longer wedged under my jaw. I can even do it one-handed, holding the
phone in one hand. But it’s still the same foot.’

‘You don’t know from true bug-eyed athletic superstition till you hit the pro ranks,
Hallie. When you hit the Show is when you’ll understand
primitive
. Winning streaks bring the native bubbling up to the surface. Jock straps unwashed
game after game until they stand up by themselves in the overhead luggage compartments
of planes. Bizarrely ritualized dressing, eating, peeing.’

‘Micturation.’

‘Picture a 200-kilo interior lineman insisting on sitting down to pee. Don’t even
ask what wives and girlfriends have to suffer during a can’t-miss winning streak.’

‘I don’t want to hear sexual stuff.’

‘Then there are the players who write down exactly what they say to everybody before
a game, so if it’s a magical can’t-miss-type game they can say exactly the same things
to the same people in the same exact order before the next game.’

‘Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors’ bodies completely with virgin-blood
to preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being
quote “The sated ghost cannot see secret things.” The
Discursive O.E.D.
postulates that this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.’

‘Hey Hallie?’

‘After a burial, rural Papineau-region Québecers purportedly drill a small hole down
from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul,
if it wants out.’

‘Hey Hallie? I think I’m being followed.’

‘This is the big moment. I’ve totally exhausted the left foot finally and am switching
to the right foot. This’ll be the real test of the fragility of the spell.’

‘I said I think I’m being followed.’

‘Some men are born to lead, O.’

‘I’m serious. And here’s the weird part.’

‘Here’s the part that explains why you’re sharing this with your estranged little
brother instead of with anybody whose credulity you’d actually value.’

‘The weird part is I think I’m being followed by… by handicapped people.’

‘Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury’s still out.’

‘Quit with the clipping a second. I’m not kidding. Take the other day. I strike up
a conversation with a certain Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in
a wheelchair behind us. No big deal. Are you listening?’

‘What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing
the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.’

‘But so the conversation goes well and hits it off, Seduction Strategies 12 and 16
are employed, which I’ll tell you about sometime at length. The point is the Subject
and I walk out together hitting it off and there’s another guy in a wheelchair whittling
in the shade of a shop-awning just down the street. OK. Still not necessarily any
kind of deal. But now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park—’

‘Phoenix has trailer parks? Not those silverish
metal
trailers.’

‘So but we get out of the car, and across the park’s lot here’s yet
another
wheelchaired guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel and not making a very good job
of it.’

‘Doesn’t Arizona have more than its share of the old and infirm?’

‘But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for
guys in wheelchairs. And three in an hour’s kind of stretching it, I was thinking.’

‘I always picture you having your little trysts in more domestic suburban settings.
Or else tall motels with exotically shaped beds. Do women in metal trailers even have
small children?’

‘This one had very sweet little twin girls who played very quietly with blocks without
supervision the whole time.’

‘Cockle-warming, O.’

‘And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the
guy’s still there, mired in gravel. And in the distance I could swear he’s got on
some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems
to be a statistically improbable number of wheelchaired figures around, lurking, somehow
just a little too nonchalantly.’

‘Very shy fans, possibly? Some club of leg-dysfunctional people all obsessed in that
shy-fan-like way with one of the first North American sports figures people think
of in connection with the word
leg
?’

‘It’s probably my imagination. A dead bird fell in my jacuzzi.’

‘But now let me ask you a couple questions.’

‘This all wasn’t even why I originally called.’

‘But you brought up trailer parks and trailers. I need to confirm some suspicions—two
points, right in there, ka-ching. Never having been in a trailer, and even the
Discursive O.E.D.
having pretty much of a lacuna where trailer-park trailers are concerned.’

‘And this is the one supposedly nonbats family-member I call. This is who I reach
out to.’

‘It’d be
whom,
I think. But this trailer. This lady you met’s trailer. Confirm or deny the following.
Its carpet was wall-to-wall and extremely thin, a kind of burnt yellow or orange.’

‘Yes.’

‘The living-room or like den area contained some or all of the following: a black
velvet painting featuring an animal; a videophonic diorama on some sort of knickknack
shelf; a needlepoint sampler with some kind of frothy biblical saw on it; at least
one piece of chintz furniture with protective doilies on the arms; a Smoke-B-Gone
air-filtration ashtray; the last couple years’
Reader’s Digests
neatly displayed in their own special inclined magazine rack.’

‘Check on velvet painting of leopard, sampler sofa with doilies, ashtray. No
Reader’s Digests
. This isn’t especially funny, Hallie. The Moms comes out in you in these odd little
ways sometimes.’

‘Last one. The trailer-person’s name. Jean. May. Nora. Vera. Nora-Jean or Vera-May.’

‘…’

‘That was my question.’

‘I guess I’ll have to get back to you on that.’

‘Boy, you really put the small r in
romance,
don’t you.’

‘But why I’m calling.’

‘It’s not clear whether the fragile can’t-miss magic’s still in force on the right
foot. I’m seven for nine, but there’s a whole different feel of somehow deliberately
trying
to get them in.’

‘Hallie, I’ve got somebody from
Moment
fucking magazine out here doing a quote soft profile.’

‘You’ve got what?’

‘A human-interest thing. On me as a human.
Moment
doesn’t do hard sports, this lady says. They’re more people-oriented, human-interest.
It’s for something called quote People Right Now, a section.’

‘
Moment
’s a supermarket-checkout-lane-display magazine. It’s in there with the rodneys and
gum. Lateral Alice Moore reads it. It’s all over C.T.’s waiting room. They did a thing
on the little blind Illinois kid Thorp thought so well of.’

‘Hal.’

‘I think Lateral Alice spends a lot of time in grocery-store checkout lanes, which
if you think about it are almost the ideal environment for her.’

‘Hal.’

‘… Being that she can just locomote sideways right on through.’

‘Hallie, this physically imposing
Moment
girl’s asking all these soft-profilesque family-background questions.’

‘She wants to know about Himself?’

‘Everybody. You, the Mad Stork, the Moms. It’s gradually emerging it’s going to be
some sort of memorial to the Stork as patriarch, everybody’s talents and accomplishments
profiled as some sort of refracted tribute to el Storko’s careers.’

‘He always did cast a long shadow, you said.’

‘Of course and my first thought is to invite her to go piss up a string. But
Moment
’s been in touch with the team. The front office’s indicated a soft profile would
be positive for the team. Cardinal Stadium isn’t exactly groaning under the weight
of all the fannies, winning streak or no. I’ve also thought of referring her to Bain,
let Bain rant at her or send her letters just trying to unparse for quotes’d take
her a month.’

‘
Her
as in female. Not your typical Orin-type subject. A hardened, fast-lane, gum-cracking,
maybe even small-childless journalist-type female, in from New Youok on the red-eye.
Plus you said imposing.’

‘Not all that tough or hard, but physically imposing. Large but not unerotic. A girl
and a half in all directions.’

‘A girl to dominate the space of any trailer she lives in.’

‘Enough with the trailerisms.’

‘The strained quality is me trying to speak and pick caromed toenail-parings up off
the floor at the same time.’

‘This girl’s immune to most of your standard conversational distractions.’

‘You’re afraid you’re losing your touch. An immune girl and a half.’

‘I said distraction not seduction.’

‘You kind of wisely avoid any female who you suspect could beat you up if things came
down to that.’

‘She’s more imposing than like most of our starting backfield. But weirdly sexy. The
linemen are gaga. The tackles keep making all these cracks about does she maybe want
to see their hard profile.’

‘Let’s hope her prose is better than whoever did that human-interest thing on the
blind kid last spring. Have you bounced this new fear of the handicapped off her?’

‘Listen. You of all people should know I have zero intent of forthrightly answering
any stained-family-linen-type questions from anybody, much less somebody who takes
shorthand. Physical charms or no.’

‘You and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Québec and Royal
Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annulation, Himself and Lyle, Himself
and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle,
the Moms and C.T., you v. the Moms, E.T.A., nonexistent films, et cetera.’

‘But you can see how it’s all going to get me thinking. How to avoid being forthright
about the Stork material unless I know what the really forthright answers would be.’