Infinite Jest (53 page)

Pemulis has nothing left and is spasming dryly over the bucket, his covered Dunlop
gut-strung sticks and gear tumbled just past Schacht’s in the passage. They are the
last guys to get out on court. Schacht is to play #3 singles on the 18’s B team, Pemulis
#6-B. They are undeniably tardy getting out there. Their opponents stand out on the
baselines of Courts 9 and 12 waiting for them to come out and warm up, jittery, stretching
out the way you do when you’ve already stretched out, dribbling fresh bright balls
with their black Wilson widebody sticks. The whole Port Washington Tennis Academy
student body gets free and mandatory Wilson sticks under an administrative contract.
Nothing personal, but no way would Schacht let an academy tell him what brand of stick
to swing. He himself favors Head Masters, which is regarded as bizarre and eccentric.
The AMF-Head rep brings them out to him out of some cobwebby warehouse where they’re
kept since the line was discontinued during the large-head revolution many years back.
Aluminum Head Masters have small, perfectly round heads and a dull blue plastic brace
in the V of the throat and look less like weapons than toys. Coyle and Axford are
always kibitzing that they’ve seen a Head Master for sale at like a flea market or
garage sale someplace and Schacht better get down there quick. Schacht, who’s historically
tight with Mario and with Lyle down in the weight room (where Schacht, since the knee
and the Crohn’s Disease, likes to go even on off-days, to work off discomfort, and
deLint and Loach are always on him about not getting musclebound), has a way of just
smiling and holding his tongue when he’s kibitzed.

‘Are you okay?’

Pemulis says ‘Blarg.’ He wipes at his forehead in a gesture of completion and submits
to being hauled to his feet and stands there on his own with his hands on his hips,
slightly bent.

Schacht straightens and pulls some wrinkles out of the bandage around the brace on
his knee. ‘Take maybe another second. Wayne’s already way up.’

Pemulis sniffs unpleasantly. ‘How come this happens to me every time? This is not
like me.’

‘Happens to some people is all.’

‘This hunched spurting pale guy is not any me I ever recognize.’

Schacht gathers gear. ‘Some people their nerves are in their stomachs. Cisne, Yard-Guard,
Lord, you: stomach men.’

‘Teddy brother man I’m never
once
hungover for a competitive thing. I take elaborate precautions. Not so much as a
whippet. I’m always in bed the night before by 2300 all pink-cheeked and clean.’

As they pass the plastic window behind Court 2 Schacht sees Hal Incandenza try to
pass his serve-and-volley guy with a baroque sideways slice down the backhand side
and miss just wide. Hal’s card’s already flipped to (4). Schacht gives a little toodleoo-wave
that Hal can’t see to acknowledge. Pemulis is in front of him as they go down the
cold passage.

‘Hal’s way up too. Another victory for the forces of peace.’

‘Jesus I feel awful,’ Pemulis says.

‘Things could be worse.’

‘Expand on that, will you?’

‘This wasn’t like that Atlanta stomach-incident. We were enclosed here. No one saw.
You saw that glass; to Schtitt and deLint it’s all a silent movie down here. Nobody
heard thing one. Our guys’ll think we were back here butting heads to get enraged
or something. Or we can tell them I got a cramp. That was a freebie, in terms of stomach-incidents.’

Pemulis is a whole different person before competitive play.

‘I’m fucking inept.’

Schacht laughs. ‘You’re one of the eptest people I know. Get off your own back.’

‘Never remember getting sick as a kid. Now it’s like I make myself sick just from
worrying about getting sick.’

‘Well then there you go. Just don’t think anything thoracic. Pretend you don’t have
a stomach.’

‘I have no stomach,’ Pemulis says. His head stays still when he talks, at least, negotiating
the passage. He carries four sticks, a rough white P.W.T.A. locker-room towel, an
empty ball-can full of high-chlorine Long Island water, nervously zipping and unzipping
the top stick’s cover. Schacht only ever carries three sticks. His don’t have covers
on them. Except for Pemulis and Rader and Unwin and a couple others who favor gut
strings and really need protection, nobody at Enfield uses racquet-covers; it’s like
an antifashion statement. People with covers make a point of telling you they’re valid
and for gut. A similar point of careful nonpride is never having their shirts tucked
in. Ortho Stice used to drill in cut-off black jeans until Schtitt had Tony Nwangi
go over and scream at him about it. Each academy has its own style or antistyle. The
P.W.T.A. people, more or less a de facto subsidiary of Wilson, have unnecessary light-blue
Wilson covers on all their courtside synthetic-strung sticks and big red
W
’s stencilled onto their Wilson synth-gut strings. You have to let your company of
choice spraypaint their logo on your strings if you want to be on their Free List
for sticks, is the universal junior deal. Schacht’s orange Gamma-9 synthetic strings
have AMF-Head Inc.’s weird Taoist paraboloid logo sprayed on. Pemulis isn’t on Dunlop’s
Free List
⁸⁸
but gets the E.T.A. stringer to put Dunlop’s dot-and-circumflex trademark on all
his stick’s strings, as a kind of touchingly insecure gesture, in Schacht’s opinion.

‘I played your guy in Tampa two years ago,’ Pemulis says, sidestepping one of the
old discolored drill-balls that always litter passages behind indoor tarps. ‘Name
escapes.’

‘Le-something,’ says Schacht. ‘Yet another Nuck. One of those names that start with
Le.’ Mario Incandenza, in a pair of little Audern Tallat-Kelpsa’s E.T.A. drill-sweats,
is lurching noiselessly some ten m. behind them in the passage, his police-lock up
and head uncamera’d; he’s framing Schacht’s back in a three-cornered box with his
thumbs and long fingers, simulating the view through a lens. Mario’s been authorized
to travel with the squads to the WhataBurger Invitational for final footage for his
short and upbeat annual documentary—brief testimonials and lighthearted moments and
behind-the-scenes shots and emotional moments on court, etc.—that every year gets
distributed to E.T.A. alumni and patrons and guests at the pre-Thanksgiving fundraising
exhibition and formal fête. Mario is wondering how you could get enough light back
here in a tarp-tunnel to film a tense cold pre-match gladiatorial march behind an
indoor tarp, carrying tennis racquets in your arms like an obscene bouquet, without
sacrificing the dim and diffuse and kind of gladiatorially doomed quality figures
in the dim passage have. After Pemulis has mysteriously won, he’ll tell Mario maybe
a Marino 350 with a diffusion-filter on some kind of overhead cable you could winch
along behind the figures at about twice the focal length, or else use fast film and
station the Marino at the tunnel’s very start and let the figures’ backs gradually
recede into a kind of doomed mist of low exposure.

‘I remember your guy as one big forehand. Nothing but slice off the back. His VAPS
never varies. If you kick the serve over to the backhand he’ll slice it short. You
can come in behind it at like will.’

‘Worry about your own guy,’ Schacht says.

‘Your guy’s got zero imagination.’

‘And you’ve got an empty expanse where your stomach ought to be, remember.’

‘I am a man with no stomach.’

They emerge through flaps in the tarp with hands upraised in slight apology to their
opponents, walk out onto the warmer courts, the slow green eraserish footing of indoor
composite. Their ears dilate into all the sounds in the larger space. Gasps and
thwaps
and
pocks
and sneakers’ squeaks. Pemulis’s court is almost down in female territory. Courts
13 to 24 are Girls’ 18’s A and B, all bobbing ponytails and two-handed backhands and
high-pitched grunts that if girls could only hear what their own grunts sounded like
they’d cut it out. Pemulis can’t tell whether the very muffled applause way down up
behind the gallery-panel is sardonic applause at his finally appearing after several
minutes of vomiting or is sincerely for K. D. Coyle on Court 3, who’s just smashed
a sucker-lob so hard it’s bounced up and racked 3’s tray of hanging lights. Except
for some rubber in his legs Pemulis feels stomachless and tentatively OK. This match
is an all-out must-win for him in terms of the WhataBurger.

The infra-lit courts are warm and soft; the heaters bolted into both walls above the
tarp’s upper hem are the deep warm red of little square suns.

The Port Washington players all wear matching socks and shorts and tucked-in shirts.
They look sharp but effete, a mannequinish aspect to them. Most of the higher-ranked
E.T.A. students are free to sign on with different companies for no fees but free
gear. Coyle is Prince and Reebok, as is Trevor Axford. John Wayne is Dunlop and Adidas.
Schacht is Head Master sticks but his own clothes and knee-supports. Ortho Stice is
Wilson and all-black Fila. Keith Freer is Fox sticks and both Adidas and Reebok until
one of the two companies’ NNE reps catches on. Troeltsch is Spalding and damn lucky
to get that. Hal Incandenza is Dunlop and lightweight Nike hightops and an Air Stirrup
brace for the dicky ankle. Shaw is Kennex sticks and clothes from Tachani’s Big &
Tall line. Pemulis’s entrepreneurial vim has earned him complete freedom of choice
and expense, though he’s barred by deLint and Nwangi from shirts that mention the
Sinn Fein or that extol Allston MA in any way, in competition.

Before going back to the baseline and warming up groundstrokes Schacht likes to take
a little time courtside futzing around, hitting his heads’ frames against strings
and listening for the pitch of best tension, arranging his towel on the back of his
chair, making sure his cards aren’t still flipped from some previous match, etc.,
and then he prefers to sort of snuffle around his baseline for a bit, checking for
dustbunnies of ball-fuzz and little divots or ridges from cold-weather heave, adjusting
the brace on his ruined knee, putting his thick arms out cruciform and pulling them
way back to stretch out the old pecs and cuffs. His opponent waits patiently, twirling
his polybutylene stick; and when they finally start to hit around, the guy’s expression
is pleasant. Schacht always prefers a pleasant match, one way or the other. He really
doesn’t care all that much whether he wins anymore, since first the Crohn’s and then
the knee at sixteen. He’d probably now describe his desire to win as a preference,
nothing more. What’s singular is that his tennis seems to have improved slightly in
the two years since he stopped really caring. It’s like his hard flat game stopped
having any purpose beyond itself and started feeding on itself and got fuller, looser,
its edges less jagged, though everybody else has been improving too, even faster,
and Schacht’s rank has been steadily declining since sixteen, and the staff has stopped
talking even about a top-college ride. Schtitt’s warmed to him, though, since the
knee and the loss of any urge beyond the play itself, and treats Schacht now almost
more like a peer than an experimental subject with something at stake. Schacht is
already in his heart committed to a dental career, and he even interns twice a week
for a root-specialist over at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, in east
Enfield, when not touring.

It strikes Schacht as odd that Pemulis makes such a big deal of stopping all substances
the day before competitive play but never connects the neurasthenic stomach to any
kind of withdrawal or dependence. He’d never say this to Pemulis unless Pemulis asked
him directly, but Schacht suspects Pemulis is physically ’drine-dependent, Preludin
or Tenuate or something. It’s not his business.

Schacht’s supposedly French-Canadian guy is as broad as Schacht but shorter, his face
dark and with a kind of Eskimoid structure to it, at eighteen his hairline recessed
in the sort of way where you just know the kid’s already got hair on his back, and
he warms up with crazy spins, moony top off a western forehand and weird inside-out
shit off a one-hand back, his knees dipping oddly whenever he makes contact and his
follow-through full of the dancerly flourishes that characterize a case of nerves.
A nervous spin-artist can be eaten more or less for lunch, if you hit as hard as Schacht
does, and what Pemulis said is true: the guy’s backhand is always sliced and lands
shallow. Schacht looks over at Pemulis’s guy, a grunter with a moody profile and the
storky look of recent puberty. Pemulis is looking oddly sanguine and confident after
a couple minutes futzing with the cans of water, rinsing out the oral cavity and so
on. Pemulis is maybe going to win, too, despite himself. Schacht figures he can run
in and get one of the twelve-year-olds he Big Buddies to go back into the passage
and empty Pemulis’s bucket on the sly before anybody coming off court sees it. Evidence
of nervous incapacity of any kind gets noted and logged, at E.T.A., and Schacht’s
observed Pemulis having some kind of vested emotional interest in attending the WhataBurger
Inv. over Thanksgiving. He thought Mario’s lurking around in the cold passage scratching
his poor big head over technical lighting problems was kind of funny. There will be
no Lungs or tarps or dim passages at the WhataBurger: the Tucson tournament is outside,
and Tucson cruised around 40° C even in November, and the sun there was a retinal
horror-show on overheads and serves.

Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them, it seems to Pemulis that
Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to
finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior
life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism;
and Schacht doesn’t even have to worry about obsessive training like Inc or Stice
or get sick so often from the physical stress of constant ’drines like Troeltsch or
suffer from thinly disguised psychological fallout like Inc or Struck or Pemulis himself.
The way Pemulis and Troeltsch and Struck and Axford ingest substances and recover
from substances and have a whole jargony argot based around various substances gives
Schacht the creeps, a bit, but since the knee injury broke and remade him at sixteen
he’s learned to go his own interior way and let others go theirs. Like most very large
men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very
small and his real impact on other persons even smaller—which is a big reason he can
sometimes forget to finish his portion of a given substance, so interested does he
become in the way he’s already started to feel. He’s one of these people who don’t
need much, much less much more.