Infinite Jest (59 page)

By Halloween his control was even better than his distance. It wasn’t by accident
that the Special Teams Assistant described it as ‘touch.’ Consider that a football
field is basically just a grass tennis court tugged unnaturally long, and that white
lines at complex right angles still define tactics and movement, the very possibility
of play. And that Orin Incandenza, who tennis-historically had had mediocre passing
shots, had been indicted by Schtitt for depending way too often on the lob he’d developed
as compensation. Like the equally weak-passing Eschaton-prodigy Michael Pemulis after
him, Orin’s whole limited game had been built around a preternatural lob, which of
course a lob is just a higher-than-opponent parabola that ideally lands just shy of
the area of play’s rear boundary and is hard to retrieve and return. Gerhardt Schtitt
and deLint and their depressed prorectors had had to sit eating butterless popcorn
through only one cartridge of one B.U. game to understand how Orin had found his major-sport
niche. Orin was still just only lobbing, Schtitt observed, illustrating with the pointer
and a multiple-replayed fourth down, but now with the leg instead, the only punting,
and now with ten armored and testosterone-flushed factota to deal with what ever return
an opponent could muster; Schtitt posited that Orin had stumbled by accident on a
way, in this grotesquely physical and territorial U.S. game, to legitimate the same
dependency on the one shot of lob that had kept him from developing the courage to
develop his weaker areas, which this unwillingness to risk the temporary failure and
weakness for long-term gaining had been the real herbicide on the carrot of Orin Incandenza’s
tennis. Puberty
Schmüberty,
as the real reason for burning down the inside fire for tennis, Schtitt knew. Schtitt’s
remarks were nodded vigorously at and largely ignored, in the Viewing Room. Schtitt
later told deLint he had several very bad feelings about Orin’s future, inside.

But so by freshman Halloween Orin was regularly placing his punts inside the opponents’
20, spinning the ball off his cleats’ laces so it either hit and squiggled outside
the white sideline and out of play or else landed on its point and bounced straight
up and seemed to squat in the air, hovering and spinning, waiting for some downfield
Terrier to kill it just by touching. The Special Teams Assistant told Orin that these
were historically called coffin-corner kicks, and that Orin Incandenza was the best
natural coffin-corner man he’d lived to see. You almost had to smile. Orin’s Full-Ride
scholarship was renewed under the aegis of a brutaler but way more popular North American
sport than competitive tennis. This was after the second home game, around the time
that a certain Actaeonizingly pretty baton-twirler, invoking mass Pep during breaks
in the action, seemed to begin somehow directing her glittering sideline routines
at Orin in particular. So and then the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship
of Orin’s life took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged
personal phoneme, a love communicated—across grassy expanses, against stadiums’ monovocal
roar—entirely through stylized repetitive motions—his functional, hers celebratory—their
respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle they were both—in their different
roles—trying to make as entertaining as possible.

But so the point was that the accuracy came after the distance. In his first couple
games Orin had approached his fourth-down task as one of simply kicking the ball out
of sight and past hope of return. The dreamy S.T. Assistant said this was a punter’s
natural pattern of growth and development. Your raw force tends to precede your control.
In his initial Home start, wearing a padless uniform that didn’t fit and a wide receiver’s
number, he was summoned when B.U.’s first drive stalled on the 40 of a Syracuse team
that had no idea it was in its last season of representing an American university.
A side-issue. College-sport analysts would later use the game to contrast the beginning
and end of different eras. But a side-issue. Orin had a book-long of 73 yards that
day, and an average hang of eight-point-something seconds; but that first official
punt, exhilarated—the carrot, the P.G.O.A.T., the monovocal roar of a major-sport
crowd—he sent over the head of the Orangeman back waiting to receive it, over the
goalposts and the safety-nets behind the goalposts, over the first three sections
of seats and into the lap of an Emeritus theology prof in Row 52 who’d needed opera
glasses to make out the play itself. It went in the books at 40 yards, that baptismal
competitive punt. It was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time
the Special Teams Asst. said you could have tender and sensitive intercourse during.
The sound of the podiatric impact had silenced a major-sport crowd, and a retired
USMC flier who always came with petroleum-jelly samples he hawked to the knuckle-chapped
crowds in the Nickerson stands told his cronies in a Brookline watering hole after
the game that this Incandenza kid’s first public punt had sounded just the way Rolling
Thunder’s big-bellied Berthas had sounded, the exaggerated WHUMP of incendiary tonnage,
way larger than life.

After four weeks, Orin’s success at kicking big egg-shaped balls was way past anything
he’d accomplished hitting little round ones. Granted, the tennis and Eschaton hadn’t
hurt. But it wasn’t all athletic, this affinity for the public punt. It wasn’t all
just high-level competitive training and high-pressure experience transported inter-sport.
He told Joelle van Dyne, she of the accent and baton and brainlocking beauty, told
her in the course of an increasingly revealing conversation after kind of amazingly
she
had approached
him
at a Columbus Day Major Sport function and asked him to autograph a squooshy-sided
football he’d kicked a hole through in practice—the deflated bladder had landed in
the Marching Terriers’ sousaphone player’s sousaphone and had been handed over to
Joelle after extrication by the lardy tubist, sweaty and dumb under the girl’s Actaeonizingly
imploring gaze—asked him—Orin now also suddenly damp and blank on anything attractive
to say or recite—asked him in an emptily resonant drawl to inscribe the punctured
thing for her Own Personal Daddy, one Joe Lon van Dyne of Shiny Prize KY and she said
also of the Dyne-Riney Proton Donor Reagent Corp. of nearby Boaz KY, and engaged him
(O.) in a slowly decreasingly one-sided social-function-type conversation—the P.G.O.A.T.
was pretty easy to stay in a one-to-one like tête-à-tête with, since no other Terrier
could bring himself within four meters of her—and Orin gradually found himself almost
meeting her eye as he shared that he believed it wasn’t all athletic, punting’s pull
for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing
anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls,
voicing approval as One Soul. He invoked the raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking
out loud here. Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be numerically
distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of
the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what might as well be
God. None of tennis’s prim applause cut short by an umpire’s patrician shush. He said
he was just speculating here, ad-libbing; he was meeting her eye and not drowning,
his dread now transformed into whatever it had been dread of. He said the sound of
all those souls as One Sound, too loud to bear, building, waiting for his foot to
release it: Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear
himself think out there, maybe a cliché, but out there transformed, his own self transcended
as he’d never escaped himself on the court, a sense of a presence in the sky, the
crowd-sound congregational, the stadium-shaking climax as the ball climbed and inscribed
a cathedran arch, seeming to take forever to fall…. It never even occurred to him
to ask her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn’t have to strategize or even
scheme. Later he knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn’t had to promise her
anything, it turned out. It was all for free.

By the end of his freshman fall and B.U.’s championship of the Yankee Conference,
plus its nonvictorious but still unprecedented appearance at Las Vegas’s dignitary-attended
K-L-RMKI/Forsythia Bowl, Orin had taken his off-campus housing subsidy and moved with
Joelle van Dyne the heart-stopping Kentuckian into an East Cambridge co-op three subway
stops distant from B.U. and the all-new inconveniences of being publicly stellar at
a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death in bars over stats and
fealty.

Joelle had done the midnight Thanksgiving dinner at E.T.A., and survived Avril, and
then Orin spent his first Xmas ever away from home, flying to Paducah and then driving
a rented 4WD to kudzu-hung Shiny Prize, Kentucky, to drink toddies under a little
white reusable Xmas tree with all red balls with Joelle and her mother and Personal
Daddy and his loyal pointers, getting a storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon’s incredible
Pyrex collection of every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper
red, little red rectangles floating in the flasks for proof, Orin nodding a lot and
trying incredibly hard and Joelle saying that Mr. van D.’s not once smiling at him
was just His Way, was all, the way his own Moms had Her Way Joelle’d had trouble with.
Orin wired Marlon Bain and Ross Reat and the strabismic Nickerson that he was by all
indications in love with somebody.

Freshman New Year’s Eve in Shiny Prize, far from the O.N.A.N.ite upheavals of the
new Northeast, the last
P.M.
Before Subsidization, was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest very small amounts
of cocaine. Orin had exited his own substance-phase about the time he discovered sex,
plus of course the N./O.N.A.N.C.A.A.-urine considerations, and he declined it, the
cocaine, but not in a judgmental or killjoy way, and found he liked being with his
P.G.O.A.T. straight while she ingested, he found it exciting, a vicariously on-the-edge
feeling he associated with giving yourself not to any one game’s definition but to
yourself and how you unjudgmentally feel about somebody who’s high and feeling even
freer and better than normal, with you, alone, under the red balls. They were a natural
match here: her ingestion then was recreational, and he not only didn’t mind but never
made a show of not minding, nor she that he abstained; the whole substance issue was
natural and kind of free. Another reason they seemed star-fated was that Joelle had
in her sophomore year decided to concentrate in Film/Cartridge, academically, at B.U.
Either Film-Cartridge Theory or Film-Cartridge Production. Or maybe both. The P.G.O.A.T.
was a film fanatic, though her tastes were pretty corporate: she told O. she preferred
movies where ‘a whole bunch of shit blows up.’
¹⁰¹
Orin in a low-key way introduced her to art film, conceptual and highbrow academic
avant- and après-garde film, and taught her how to use some of InterLace’s more esoteric
menus. He blasted up the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork’s own
Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,
which had a major impact on her. Right after Thanksgiving Himself let the P.G.O.A.T.
understudy with Leith on the set of
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick
in return for getting to film her thumb against a plucked string. After an only mildly
disappointing sophomore season O. flew with her to Toronto to watch part of the filming
of
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun.
Himself would take Orin and his beloved out after dailies, entertaining Joelle with
his freakish gift for Canadian-cab-hailing while Orin stood turtle-headed in his topcoat;
and then later Orin would shepherd the two of them back to their Ontario Place hotel,
stopping the cab to let them both throw up, fireman-carrying Joelle while he watched
The Mad Stork negotiate his suite by holding on to walls. Himself showed them the
U. Toronto Conference Center where he and the Moms had first met. This might have
been the end’s start, gradually, in hindsight. Joelle that summer declined a sixth
summer at the Dixie Baton-Twirling Institute in Oxford MS and let Himself give her
a stage name and use her in rapid succession in
Low Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to Desire,
and
Safe Boating Is No Accident,
travelling with Himself and Mario while Orin stayed in Boston recuperating from minor
surgery on a hypertrophied left quadriceps at a Massachusetts General Hospital where
no fewer than four nurses and P.T.s in the Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation
from their husbands, with custody.

The P.G.O.A.T.’s real ambitions weren’t thespian, Orin knew, is one reason he hung
in so long. Joelle when he’d met her already owned some modest personal film equipment,
courtesy of her Personal Daddy. And she now had access to nothing if not serious digital
gear. By Orin’s sophomore year she no longer twirled or incited Pep in any way. In
his first full season she stood behind various white lines with a little Bolex R32
digital recorder and BTL meters and lenses, including a bitching Angenieux zoom O.’d
gone and paid for, as a gesture, and she shot little half-disk-sector clips of #78,
B.U. Punter, sometimes with Leith in attendance (never Himself), experimenting with
speed and focal length and digital mattes, extending herself technically. Orin, despite
his interests in upgrading the P.G.O.A.T.’s commercial tastes, was himself pretty
luke-warm on film and cartridges and theater and pretty much anything that reduced
him to herd-like spectation, but he respected Joelle’s own creative drives, to an
extent; and he found out that he really did like watching the football footage of
Joelle van Dyne, featuring pretty much him only, strongly preferred the little .5-sector
clips to Himself’s cartridges or corporate films where things blew up while Joelle
bounced in her seat and pointed at the viewer; and he found them (her clips of him
at play) way more engaging than the grainy overcluttered game- and play-celluloids
the Head Coach made everybody sit through. Orin liked to adjust the co-op’s rheostat
way down when Joelle wasn’t home and haul out the diskettes and make Jiffy Pop and
watch her little ten-second clips of him over and over. He saw something different
each time he rewound, something more. The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing
flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt.
It only happened when he watched them alone. Sometimes he got an erection. He never
masturbated; Joelle came home. Still in the last stages of a late puberty and the
prettiness getting visibly worse day by day, Joelle had been maiden, still, when Orin
met her. She’d been shunned theretofore, both at B.U. and Shiny Prize–Boaz Consolidated:
the beauty had repelled every comer. She’d devoted her life to her twirling and amateur
film. Disney Leith said she had the knack: her camera-hand was rock-steady; even the
early clips from the start of the Y.W. season looked shot off a tripod. There’d been
no audio in the sophomore clips, and you could hear the high-pitched noise of the
cartridge in the TP’s disk drive. A cartridge revolving at a digital diskette’s 450
rpm sounds a bit like a distant vacuum cleaner. Late-night car-noises and sirens drifted
in through the bars from as far away as the Storrow 500. Silence was not part of what
Orin was after, watching. (Joelle housekeeps like a fiend. The place is always sterile.
The resemblance to the Moms’s housekeeping he finds a bit creepy. Except Joelle doesn’t
mind a mess or give anybody the creeps worrying about hiding that she minds it so
nobody’s feelings will be hurt. With Joelle the mess just disappears sometime during
the night and you wake up and the place is sterile. It’s like elves.) Soon after he
started watching the clips in his junior year, Orin had blasted up Comm.’s hill and
brought Joelle back a Bolex-compatible Tatsuoka recorder w/ sync pulse, a cardioid
mike, a low-end tripod w/ a barney to muffle the Bolex’s whir, a classy Pilotone blooper
and sync-pulse cords, a whole auracopia. It took Leith three weeks to teach her to
use the Pilotone. Now the clips had sound. Orin has trouble not burning the Jiffy
Pop popcorn. It tends to burn as the foil top inflates; you have to take it off the
stove before the foil forms a dome. No microwave popcorn for Orin, even then. He liked
to dim the track-lights when Joelle was out and haul out the cartridge-rack and watch
her little ten-second clips of his punts over and over. Here he is back against Delaware
in the second Home game of Y.T.M.P. The sky is dull and pale, the five Yankee Conference
flags—U. Vermont and UNH now history—are all right out straight with the gale off
the Charles for which Nickerson Field is infamous. It’s fourth down, obviously. Thousands
of kilos of padded meat assume four-point stances and chuff at each other, poised
to charge and stave. Orin is twelve yards back from scrimmage, his cleated feet together,
his weight just ahead of himself, his mismatched arms out before him in the attitude
of the blind before walls. His eyes are fixed on the distant grass-stained Valentine
of the center’s ass. His stance, waiting to receive the snap, is not unlike a diver’s,
he sees. Nine men on line, four-pointed, poised to stave off ten men’s assault. The
other team’s deep back is back to receive, seventy yards away or more. The fullback
whose sole job is to keep Orin from harm is ahead and to the left, bent at the knees,
his taped fists together and elbows out like a winged thing ready to hurl itself at
whatever breaches the line and comes at the punter. Joelle’s equipment isn’t quite
pro-caliber but her technique is very good. By junior year there’s also color. There’s
only one sound, and it is utter: the crowd’s noise and its response to that noise,
building. Orin’s back against Delaware, ready, his helmet a bright noncontact white
and his head’s insides scrubbed free for ten seconds of every thought not connected
to receiving the long snap and stepping martially forward to lob the leather egg beyond
sight at an altitude that makes the wind no factor. Madame P.G.O.A.T. gets it all,
zooming in from the opposite end zone. She gets his timing; a punt’s timing is minutely
precise, like a serve’s; it’s like a solo dance; she gets the ungodly WHUMP against
and above the crowd’s vowel’s climax; she captures the pendular 180-arc of Orin’s
leg, the gluteal follow-through that puts his cleat’s laces way over his helmet, the
perfect right angle between leg and turf. Her technique is superb on the Delaware
debacle Orin can just barely take reviewing, the one time all year the big chuffing
center oversnaps and arcs the ball over Orin’s upraised hands so by the time he’s
run back and grabbed the crazy-bouncing thing ten yards farther back the Delaware
defense has breached the line, are through the line, the fullback supine and trampled,
all ten rushers rushing, wanting nothing more than personal physical contact with
Orin and his leather egg. Joelle gets him sprinting, a three-meter lateral burst as
he avoids the first few sets of hands and the beefy curling lips and but is just about
to get personally contacted and knocked out of his cleats by the Delaware strong safety
flying in on a slant from way outside when the tiny .5-sector of digital space each
punt’s programmed to require runs out and the crowd-sound moos and dies and you can
hear the disk-drive stalled at the terminal byte and Orin’s chin-strapped plastic-barred
face is there on the giant viewer, frozen and High-Def in his helmet, right before
impact, zoomed in on with a quality lens. Of particular interest are the eyes.