Infinite Jest (54 page)

Schacht and his opponent warm up their groundstrokes with the fluid economy of years
of warming up groundstrokes. They take turns feeding each other some volleys at net
and then each take a ‘couple up,’ lobs, hitting loose easy overheads, slowly adjusting
the idle from half-speed to three-quarter-speed. The knee feels fundamentally all
right, springy. Slow indoor composite surfaces do not like Schacht’s hard flat game,
but they are kind to the knee, which after some days outside on hard cement swells
to about the size of a volleyball. Schacht feels blandly happy down here on 9, playing
in private, way down past the gallery’s panel. There is a nourishing sense of pregnable
space in a big indoor club that you never get playing outside, especially playing
outside in the cold, when the balls feel hard and sullen and come off the stick’s
strung face with an echoless
ping
. Here everything cracks and booms, the grunts and shoe-squeaks and booming
pocks
of impact and curses unfolding across the white-on-green plane and echoing off each
tarp. Soon they’ll all go inside for the winter. Schtitt will yield and let them inflate
the E.T.A. Lung over the sixteen Center Courts; it’s like a barn-raising, inflation-day;
it’s communal and fun, and they’ll take down the central fences and outdoor night-lamps
and unbolt all the posts into sections and stack them and store them, and the TesTar
and ATHSCME guys will come up in vans smoking cigarettes and squinting with weary
expertise at tubes of plans in draftsman-blue, and there’ll be one and sometimes two
ATHSCME helicopters w/ slings and grappling hooks for the Lung’s dome and nacelle;
and Schtitt and deLint will let the younger E.T.A.s get the infrared indoor heaters
out of the same corrugated shed the disassembled fences and lamps will go in, leaf-cutter-ant-
or Korean-like armies of 14- and 16-year-olds carrying sections and heaters and Gore-Tex
swatches and long halo-lithiated bulbs while the 18s get to sit on canvas chairs and
kibitz because they did their leaf-cutter Lung-raising bits at 13-16 already. Two
TesTar guys’ll supervise Otis P. Lord and all this year’s conspicuous tech-wonks in
mounting the heaters and stringing the lights and running coaxial shunts with ceramic
jacks between the Pump Room’s main breaker and the Sunstrand grid and booting up the
circulation-fans and pneumatic hoists that’ll raise the Lung to the inflated shape
of a distended igloo, sixteen courts in four rows of four, enclosed and warmed by
nothing but fibrous Gore-Tex and AC current and an enormous ATHSCME Exhaust-Flow Effectuator
that an ATHSCME crew in one of the ATHSCME helicopters will bring in in a sling and
cable and mount and secure on the Lung’s nipply nacelle at the top of the inflating
dome. And that first night after Inflation, traditionally the fourth Monday of November,
all the upperclass 18s so inclined will crank up the infrareds and get high and eat
low-lipid microwave pizza and play all night, sweating magnificently, sheltered for
the winter atop Enfield’s level-headed hill.

Schacht stands back in the deuce court and lets his guy warm up his serves, oddly
flat and low-margin for a nervous touch-artist. Schacht bloops each return up with
severe backspin so the balls’ll roll back to him and he can serve them back to his
guy, also warming up. The warm-up routine has become automatic and requires no attention.
Way up on #1, Schacht sees John Wayne just plaster a backhand cross-court. Wayne hits
it so hard a little mushroom cloud of green fuzz hangs in the air where ball had met
strings. Their cards were too far to read in the sour-apple light, but you could tell
by the way Port Washington’s best boy walked back to the baseline to take the next
serve that his ass had already been presented to him. In a lot of junior matches everything
past the fourth game or so is kind of a formality. Both players tend to know the overall
score by then. The big picture. They’ll have decided who’s going to lose. Competitive
tennis is largely mental, once you’re at a certain plateau of skill and conditioning.
Schtitt’d say
spiritual
instead of
mental,
but as far as Schacht can see it’s the same thing. As Schacht sees it, Schtitt’s
philosophical stance is that to win enough of the time to be considered successful
you have to both care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all.
⁸⁹
Schacht does not care enough, probably, anymore, and has met his gradual displacement
from E.T.A.’s A singles squad with an equanimity some E.T.A.’s thought was spiritual
and others regarded as the surest sign of dicklessness and burnout. Only one or two
people have ever used the word
brave
in connection with Schacht’s radical reconfiguration after the things with the Crohn’s
Disease and knee. Hal Incandenza, who’s probably as asymmetrically hobbled on the
care-too-much side as Schacht is on the not-enough, privately puts Schacht’s laissez-faire
down to some interior decline, some doom-gray surrender of his childhood’s promise
to adult gray mediocrity, and fears it; but since Schacht is an old friend and a dependable
designated driver and has actually gotten pleasanter to be around since the knee—which
Hal prays fervently that the ankle won’t start being the size of a volleyball itself
at the end of each outdoor day—Hal in a weird and deeper internal way almost somehow
admires and envies the fact that Schacht’s stoically committed himself to the oral
professions and stopped dreaming of getting to the Show after graduation—an air of
something other than failure about Schacht’s not caring enough, something you can’t
quite define, the way you can’t quite remember a word that you know you know, inside—Hal
can’t quite feel the contempt for Teddy Schacht’s competitive slide that would be
a pretty much natural contempt in one who cared so dreadfully secretly much, and so
the two of them tend to settle for not talking about it, just as Schacht cheerfully
wordlessly drives the tow truck on occasions when the rest of the crew are so incapacitated
they’d have to hold one eye closed even to see an undoubled road, and consents w/o
protest to pay retail for clean quarterly urine, and doesn’t say a word about Hal’s
devolution from occasional tourist to subterranean compulsive, substance-wise, with
his Pump Room visits and Visine, even though Schacht deep down believes that the substance-compulsion’s
strange apparent contribution to Hal’s erumpent explosion up the rankings has got
to be a temporary thing, that there’s like a psychic credit-card bill for Hal in the
mail, somewhere, coming, and is sad for him in advance about whatever’s surely got
to give, eventually. Though it won’t be the Boards. Hal’ll murder his Boards, and
Schacht may well be among those jockeying to sit near him, he’d be the first to admit.
On 2 Hal now kicks a second serve to the ad court with so much left-handed top on
it that it almost kicks up over Port Washington’s #2 guy’s head. It’s clearly carnage
up there on Show Courts 1 and 2. Dr. Tavis will be irrepressible. The gallery is barely
even applauding Wayne and Incandenza anymore; at a certain point it becomes like Romans
applauding lions. All the coaches and staff and P.W.T.A. parents and civilians in
the overhead gallery wear tennis outfits, the high white socks and tucked-in shirts
of people who do not really play.

Schacht and his man play.

Both Pat Montesian and Gately’s AA sponsor like to remind Gately how this new resident
Geoffrey Day could end up being an invaluable teacher of patience and tolerance for
him, Gately, as Ennet House Staff.

‘So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichés,’ is what
Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was, again,
at 0825. ‘To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. One day at a time.
Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for
help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming
back.’

Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlepointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch
that just came from Goodwill, purses her lips. ‘You need to ask for some gratitude.’

‘Oh no but the point is I’ve already been fortunate enough to
receive
gratitude.’ Day crosses one leg over the other in a way that inclines his whole little
soft body toward her. ‘For which, believe you me, I’m grateful. I cultivate gratitude.
That’s part of the system of clichés I’m here to live by. An attitude of gratitude.
A grateful drunk will never drink. I know the actual cliché is “A grateful
heart
will never drink,” but since organs can’t properly be said to imbibe and I’m still
afflicted with just enough self-will to decline to live by utter non sequiturs, as
opposed to just good old clichés, I’m taking the liberty of light amendment.’ He gives
with this a look like butter wouldn’t melt. ‘Albeit grateful amendment, of course.’

Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of
dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still. Gately reminds
himself that he too is probably mostly still clueless, still, even after all these
hundreds of days. ‘I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know’ is another of the slogans that
looks so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drops off and deepens like the
lobster-waters off the North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily
A.M.
meditation he always tries to remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House
residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie-slice
of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what’s true and deep, almost
magic, under the shallow surface of what they’re trying to do.

‘I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in
the room. Gratitude-Ups, you could call them. Ask Randy over there if I don’t do them
like clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.’

‘Well it’s true is all,’ Treat sniffs. ‘About gratitude.’

Everybody else except Gately, lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring
this exchange, watching an old InterLace cartridge whose tracking is a little messed
up so that staticky stripes eat at the screen’s picture’s bottom and top. Day is not
done talking. Pat M. encourages newer Staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon
to death as valuable teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, restraint.

Day is not done talking. ‘One of the exercises is being grateful that life is so much
easier
now. I used sometimes to think. I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate
clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn’t. Now I live by the dictates
of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old
Reader’s Digest or Saturday Evening Post
. Easy does it. Remember to remember. But for the grace of capital-g God. Turn it
over. Terse, hard-boiled. Monosyllabic. Good old Norman Rockwell–Paul Harvey wisdom.
I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these clichés. In
a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the
cliché-pool? “No
inflection necessary
”? Too many syllables, probably.’

Randy Lenz says ‘I ain’t got time for this shit.’

Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is trying to look primmer and primmer.
She looks again over to Gately, lying on his back, taking up the living room’s whole
other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa’s square frayed fabric arm-thing, his eyes
almost closed. Only Staff get to lie on the couches.

‘Denial,’ Charlotte finally says, ‘is not a river in Egypt.’

‘Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,’ says Emil Minty.

Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet House six days. He came from
Roxbury’s infamous Dimock Detox, where he was the only white person, which Gately
bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a squished blank smeared flat face,
one requiring like great self-effort to like, and eyes that are just starting to lose
the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Day is a newcomer and a wreck. A red-wine-and-Quaalude
man who finally nodded out in late October and put his Saab through the window of
a Malden sporting goods store and then got out and proceeded to browse until the Finest
came and got him. Who taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity
or historical sociality at some jr. college up the Expressway in Medford and came
in saying on his Intake he also manned the helm of a Scholarly Quarterly. Word for
word, the House Manager had said: ‘
manned the helm
’ and ‘
Scholarly
.’ His Intake estimated that Day’s been in and out of a blackout for most of the last
several years, and his wiring is still as they say a bit frayed. His detox at Dimock,
where they barely have the resources to give you a Librium if you start to D.T., must
have been just real grim, because Geoffrey D. alleges it never happened: now his story
is he just strolled into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home 10+ clicks away
in Malden and found the place too hilariously egregulous to want to ever leave. It’s
the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Gene M. They identify
their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters
in the head.
⁹⁰
Day wears chinos of indeterminate hue, brown socks with black shoes, and shirts that
Pat Montesian had described in the Intake as ‘Eastern-European-type Hawaiian shirts.’
Day’s now on the vinyl couch with Charlotte Treat after breakfast in the Ennet House
living room with a few of the other residents that either aren’t working or don’t
have to be at work early, and with Gately, who’d pulled an all-night Dream Duty shift
out in the front office till 0400, then got temp-relieved by Johnette Foltz so he
could go to work janitoring down at the Shattuck Shelter till 0700, then came and
hauled ass back up here and took back over so’s that Johnette could go off to her
NA thing with a bunch of NA people in what looked like a dune buggy if the dunes in
question were in Hell, and is now, Gately, trying to unclench and center himself inside
by tracing the cracks in the paint of the living room ceiling with his eyes. Gately
often feels a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the
A.M.
, still, even after this long clean. His sponsor over at the White Flag Group says
some people never get over the loss of what they’d thought was their one true best
friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for acceptance and the brass danglers
to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab. The
sponsor, Ferocious Francis G., doesn’t give Gately one iona of shit for feeling some
negative feelings about it: on the contrary, he commends Gately for his candor in
breaking down and crying like a baby and telling him about it early one
A.M.
over the pay phone, the sense of loss. It’s a myth no one misses it. Their particular
Substance. Shit, you wouldn’t need help if you didn’t miss it. You just have to Ask
For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, pray,
Ask For Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of
clichés—Day’s right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering
by the way things seem to him then he’s a dead man for sure. Gately’s already watched
dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail
or die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office
at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and
blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that
the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually
do
. To try and live by instead of just say. But he’ll only get to say it if Day comes
and asks. Personally, Gately gives Geoffrey D. like a month at the outside before
he’s back tipping his hat to parking meters. Except who is Gately to judge who’ll
end up getting the Gift of the program v. who won’t, he needs to remember. He tries
to feel like Day is teaching him patience and tolerance. It takes great patience and
tolerance not to want to punt the soft little guy out into the Comm. Ave. ravine and
open up his bunk to somebody that really desperately wants it, the Gift. Except who
is Gately to think he can know who wants it and who doesn’t, deep down. Gately’s arm
is behind his head, up against the sofa’s other arm. The old D.E.C. viewer is on to
something violent and color-enhanced Gately neither sees nor hears. It was part of
his gifts as a burglar: he can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light.
Even when he was a resident here he’d had this prescient housebreaker’s ability to
screen input, to do sensory triage. It was one reason he’d even been able to stick
out his nine residential months here with twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers,
hoods, whores, fired execs, Avon ladies, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction
workers, vagrants, indignant car salesmen, bulimic trauma-mamas, bunko artists, mincing
pillow-biters, North End hard guys, pimply kids with electric nose-rings, denial-ridden
housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and mokus and grieving and basically
whacked out and producing nonstopping output 24-7-365.