Infinite Jest (62 page)

And so on. By the time it’s down to Boys A-14’s, Troeltsch’s delivery gets terser
even as his attempts at verbiform variety tend to have gotten more lurid, e.g.: ‘LaMont
Chu disembowelled Charles Pospisilova 6–3, 6–2; Jeff Penn was on Nate Millis-Johnson
like a duck on a Junebug 6–4, 6–7, 6–0; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker
like some sort of hors d’oeuvre and bit down 6–4, 7–6, while 14’s A-4 Idris Arslanian
ground his heel into the neck of David Wiere 6–1, 6–4 and P.W.’s 5-man R. Greg Chubb
had to be just about carried off over somebody’s shoulder after Todd Possalthwaite
moonballed him into a narcoleptic coma 4–6, 6–4, 7–5.’

Some of Corbett Thorp’s class on geometric distortions a lot of kids find hard; likewise
deLint’s class, for the software-inept. And though Tex Watson’s overall handle on
Cold-Containment DT-annulation is shaky, his lay-physics survey of combustion and
annulation has some sort of academic validity to it, especially because he some terms
gets Pemulis to guest-lecture when he and Pemulis are in a period of détente. But
the only really challenging prorected class ever for Hal Incandenza is turning out
to be Mlle. Thierry Poutrincourt’s ‘Separatism and Return: Québecois History from
Frontenac Through the Age of Interdependence,’ which to be candid Hal’d never heard
much positive about and had always deflected his Moms’s suggestions that he might
profitably take until finally this term’s schedule-juggling got dicey, and which (the
class) he finds difficult and annoying but surprisingly less and less dull as the
semester wears on, and is actually developing something of a layman’s savvy for Canadianism
and O.N.A.N.ite politics, topics he’d previously found for some reason not only dull
but queerly distasteful. The rub of this particular class’s difficulty is that Poutrincourt
teaches only in Québecois French, which Hal can get by in because of his youthful
tour through Orin’s real-French Pléiade Classics but has never all that much liked,
particularly sound-wise, Québecois being a gurgly, glottal language that seems to
require a perpetually sour facial expression to pronounce. Hal sees no way of Orin’s
knowing he was taking Poutrincourt’s ‘Separatism and Return’ when he called to ask
for help with Separatism, which Orin’s asking for help from him with anything was
strange enough in itself.

‘Bernadette Longley reluctantly bowed to P.W.’s Jessica Pearlberg at 18 A-1 Singles
6–4, 4–6, 6–2, though A-2 Diane Prins hopped up and down on the thorax of Port’s Marilyn
Ng-A-Thiep 7–6, 6–1, and Bridget Boone drove a hot thin spike into the right eye of
Aimee Middleton-Law 6–3, 6–3’; and so on, in classroom after classroom, while instructors
grade quizzes or read or tap a decreasingly patient foot, every Tues./Sat., while
Schacht sketches prenatal dentition-charts in his exam’s margins w/ a concentrated
look, not wanting to embarrass Thode by handing the no-brainer exam in too soon.

Most of the early-Québec stuff about Cartier and Roberval and Cap Rouge and Champlain
and flocks of Ursuline nuns with frozen wimples covered up to like U.N. Day Hal’d
found mostly dry and repetitive, the wig-and-jerkin gentlemanly warfare stilted and
absurd, like slow-motion slapstick, though everyone’d been sort of queasily intrigued
by the way the English Commander Amherst had handled the Hurons by dispensing free
blankets and buckskin that had been carefully coated with smallpox
variola.

‘14’s A-3 Felicity Zweig went absolutely SACPOP on P.W.’s Kiki Pfefferblit 7–6, 6–1,
while Gretchen Holt made PW’s Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever even in
the same room together 6–0, 6–3. At 5, Ann Kittenplan grimaced and flexed her way
to a 7–5, 2–6, 6–3 win over Paisley Steinkamp, right next to where Jolene Criess at
6 was doing to P.W.’s Mona Ghent what a quality boot can do to a toadstool, 2 and
2.’

Saluki-faced Thierry Poutrincourt leans back in her chair and closes her eyes and
presses her palms hard against her temples and stays like that all the way through
every WETA broadcast, which always interrupts her last-period lecture and puts this
section slightly and maddeningly behind Separation & Return’s other section, resulting
in two required lesson-preps instead of one. The sour Saskatchewanese kid next to
Hal has been making impressive schematic drawings of automatic weaponry in his notebook
all semester. The kid’s assigned ROM-diskettes are always visible in his bookbag still
in their wrapper, yet the Skatch kid always finishes quizzes in like five minutes.
It had taken up to the week before Halloween to get through with the B.S. ’67 Levesque-Parti-and-Bloc
Québecois
¹⁰⁹
and early Fronte de la Libération Nationale stuff and up to the present Interdependent
era. Poutrincourt’s lecture-voice has gotten quieter and quieter as history’s approached
its contemporary limit; and Hal, finding the stuff rather more high-concept and less
dull than he’d expected—seeing himself as at his innermost core apolitical—nevertheless
found the Québecois-Separatism mentality almost impossibly convolved and confused
and impervious to U.S. parsing,
¹¹⁰
plus was both com- and repelled by the fact that the contemporary-anti-O.N.A.N.-insurgence
stuff provoked in him a queasy feeling, not the glittery disorientation of nightmares
or on-court panic but a soggier, more furtively nauseous kind of sense, as if someone
had been reading mail of Hal’s that he thought he’d thrown away.

The proud and haughty Québecois had been harassing and even terrorizing the rest of
Canada over the Separation issue for time out of mind. It was the establishment of
O.N.A.N. and the gerrymandering of the Great Convexity (Poutrincourt’s Canadian, recall)
that turned the malevolent attention of Québec’s worst post-F.L.N. insurgents south
of the border. Ontario and New Brunswick took the continental
Anschluss
and territorial Reconfiguration like good sports. Certain far-right fringes in Alberta
weren’t too pleased, but not much pleases an Albertan far-rightist anyway. It was,
finally, only the proud and haughty Québecois who whinged,
¹¹¹
and the insurgent cells of Québec who completely lost their political shit.

Québec’s anti-O.N.A.N. and thus -U.S. Séparatisteurs, the different terrorist cells
formed when Ottawa had been the foe, proved to be not a very nice bunch at all. The
earliest unignorable strikes involved a then-unknown terrorist cell
¹¹²
that apparently snuck down from the E.W.D.-blighted Papineau region at night and
dragged huge standing mirrors across U.S. Interstate 87 at selected dangerous narrow
winding Adirondack passes south of the border and its Lucite walls. Naïvely empiricist
north-bound U.S. motorists—a good many of them military and O.N.A.N.ite personnel,
this close to the Concavity—would see impending headlights and believe some like suicidal
idiot or Canadian had transversed the median and was coming right for them. They’d
flash their high beams, but to all appearances the impending idiot would just flash
his high beams right back. The U.S. motorists—usually not to be fucked with in their
vehicles, historically, it was well known—would brazen it out as long as anyone right-minded
possibly could, but right before apparent impact with the impending lights they’d
always veer wildly and leave shoulderless I-87 and put their arm over their head in
that screaming pre-crash way and go ass-over-teakettle into an Adirondack chasm with
a many-petaled bloom of Hi-Test flame, and the then-unknown Québecois terrorist cell
would remove the huge mirror and truck off back up north via checkpointless back roads
back into the blighted bowels of southern Québec until next time. There were fatalities
this way well into the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad before anyone had any idea
they were diabolic-cell-related. For over twenty months the scores of burnt-out hulls
piling up in Adirondack chasms were regarded as either suicides or inexplicable doze-behind-the-wheel-type
single-car accidents by NNY State Troopers who had to detach their chinstraps to scratch
under their big brown hats over the mysterious sleepiness that seemed to afflict Adirondack
motorists at what looked to be high-adrenaline mountaintop passes. Chief of the new
United States Office of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine pressed, to his later embarrassment,
for a series of anti–driving-when-drowsy Public Service spots to be InterLace-disseminated
in upstate New New York. It was an actual U.S. would-be suicide, a late-stage Valium-addicted
Amway distributor from Schenectady who was at the end of her benzodioxane-rope and
all over the road anyway, and who by historical accounts saw the sudden impending
headlights in her northbound lane as Grace and shut her eyes and floored it right
for them, the lights, never once veering, spraying glass and micronized silver over
all four lanes, this unwitting civilian who ‘SMASHED THE ILLUSION,’ ‘MADE THE BREAKTHROUGH’
(media headlines), and brought to light the first tangible evidence of an anti-O.N.A.N.
ill will way worse than anything aroused by plain old historical Separatism, up in
Québec.

The first birth of the Incandenzas’ second son was a surprise. The tall and eye-poppingly
curvaceous Avril Incandenza did not show, bled like clockwork; no hemorrhoids or gland-static;
no pica; affect and appetite normal; she threw up some mornings but who didn’t in
those days?

It was on a metal-lit November evening in the seventh month of a hidden pregnancy
that she stopped, Avril, on her husband’s long arm as they ascended the maple staircase
of the Back Bay brownstone they were soon to leave, stopped, turned partly toward
him, ashen, and opened her mouth in a mute way that was itself eloquent.

Her husband looked down at her, paling: ‘What is it?’

‘It’s pain.’

It was pain. Broken water had made several steps below them gleam. She seemed to James
Incandenza to sort of turn in toward herself, hold herself low, curl and sink to a
stairstep she barely made the edge of, hunched, her forehead against her shapely knees.
Incandenza saw the whole slow thing in a light like he was Vermeer: she sank steadily
from his side and he bent to hers and she then tried to rise.

‘Wait wait wait wait. Wait.’

‘It’s pain.’

A bit ragged from an afternoon of Wild Turkey and low-temperature holography, James
had thought Avril was dying right before his eyes. His own father had dropped dead
on a set of stairs. Luckily Avril’s half-brother Charles Tavis was upstairs, using
the portable StairMaster he’d brought with him for an extended and emotional-battery-recharging
visit the preceding spring, after the horrible snafu with the video-scoreboard at
Toronto’s Skydome; and he heard the commotion and scuttled out and down and promptly
took charge.

He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb
to whose sides he’d been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached
by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the
same material.
¹¹³
He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the
next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings
of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in sterile palms,
his head cradled by a thumb. Mario had been given the name of Dr. James Incandenza’s
father’s father, a dour and golf-addicted Green Valley AZ oculist who made a small
fortune, just after Jim grew up and fled east, by inventing those quote
X-Ray Specs!
that don’t work but whose allure for mid-’60s pubescent comic-book readers almost
compelled mail-order, then selling the copyrights to New England novelty-industry
titan AcméCo, then promptly in mid-putt died, Mario Sr. did, allowing James Incandenza
Sr. to retire from a sad third career as the Man From Glad
¹¹⁴
in sandwich-bag commercials during the B.S. 1960s and move back to the saguaro-studded
desert he loathed and efficiently drink himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson
stairway.

Anyway, Mario II’s incomplete gestation and arachnoidal birth left the kid with some
lifelong character-building physical challenges. Size was one, he being in sixth grade
about the size of a toddler and at 18+ in a range somewhere between elf and jockey.
There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as
in a hair-raising case of Volkmann’s contracture
¹¹⁵
curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S’s and were usable for rudimentary
knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and
doors could be kicked open and forming a pretend lens-frame to scout scenes through,
plus maybe tossing tennis balls very short distances to players who wanted them, but
not for much else, though the arms were impressively—almost familial-dysautonomically—pain-resistant,
and could be pinched, punctured, singed, and even compressed in a basement optical-device-securing
viselike thing by Mario’s older brother Orin without effect or complaint.

Bradypedestrianism-wise, Mario had not so much club feet as more like
block
feet: not only flat but perfectly square, good for kicking knob-fumbled doors open
with but too short to be conventionally employed as feet: together with the lordosis
in his lower spine, they force Mario to move in the sort of lurchy half-stumble of
a vaudeville inebriate, body tilted way forward as if into a wind, right on the edge
of pitching face-first onto the ground, which as a child he did fairly often, whether
given a bit of a shove from behind by his older brother Orin or no. The frequent forward
falls help explain why Mario’s nose was squished severely in and so flared out to
either side of his face but did not rise from it, with the consequence that his nostrils
tended to flap just a bit, particularly during sleep. One eyelid hung lower than the
other over his open eyes—good and gently brown eyes, if a bit large and protrusive
to qualify as conventionally human eyes—the one lid hung like an ill-tempered windowshade,
and his older brother Orin had sometimes tried to give the recalcitrant lid that smart
type of downward snap that can unstick a dicky shade, but had succeeded only in gradually
loosening the lid from its sutures, so that it eventually had to be refashioned and
reattached in yet another blepharoplasty-procedure, because it was in fact not Mario’s
real eyelid—that had been sacrificed when the fist stuck to his face like a tongue
to cold metal had been peeled away, at nativity—but an extremely advanced blepharoprosthesis
of dermal fibropolymer studded with horsehair lashes that curved out into space well
beyond the reach of his other lid’s lashes and together with the lazy lid-action itself
gave even Mario’s most neutral expression the character of an oddly friendly pirate’s
squint. Together with the involuntarily constant smile.