Infinite Jest (76 page)

Because budget and broom-closet constraints make artful transitions between scenes
impractical, Mario has opted for the inter-scenic ‘entr’acte’ device of having Johnny
Gentle, Famous Crooner doing some of his repertoire’s bouncier numbers, with the cabinet-members
undulating and harmonizing Motownishly behind him, and other puppets bouncing in tempo
on- and offstage as the script requires. Audience-wise, most of the E.T.A.s under
twelve, cortexes spangling with once-a-year sweets, have by now emigrated hyperactively
under the long tables’ tablecloths and met up on the dining-hall floor below and begun
navigating on hands and knees the special children’s second world of shins and chairlegs
and tile that exists under long tablecloths, making various sorts of puerile trouble—investigations
from last year’s I. Day are still in progress w/r/t which kid or kids tied Aubrey
deLint’s shoelaces together and Krazy-Glued Mary Esther Thode’s left buttock to the
seat of her chair—but everyone glycemically mature enough to sit still and watch the
cartridge is having a rousing good time, eating chocolate cannolis and twenty-six-layer
baklava and Redi-Whip by itself if they want and homemade Raisinettes and little cream-filled
caramel things and occasionally heckling or cheering ironically, every so often throwing
sweets that stick to the screen, giving the smooth sterile Gentle a sort of carbuncular
look that everyone approves. There is much cracking wise and baritone mimicry of a
President roundly disliked for over two terms now. Only John Wayne and a handful of
other Canadian students sit unhatted, chewing stolidly, faces blurred and distant.
This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. The Canadian boys
remember only hard facts, and the glass-walled Great Convexity whose southern array
of ATHSCME Effectuators blow the tidy U.S.’s northern oxides north, toward home; and
they feel with special poignancy on 11/8 the implications of their being down here,
south of the border, training, in the land of their enemy-ally; and the less gifted
among them wonder whether they’ll ever get to go home again after graduation if a
pro career or scholarship doesn’t pan out. Wayne has a cloth hankie and keeps wiping
his nose.

Mario’s openly jejune version of his late father’s take on the rise of O.N.A.N. and
U.S. Experialism unfolds in little diffracted bits of real news and fake news and
privately-conceived dialogue between the architects and hard-choice-makers of a new
millennial era:

G
ENTLE
: Another piece of pre-tasted cobbler, J.J.J.C.?

P.M. C
AN.
: Couldn’t. Stuffed. Having trouble breathing. I would not say no to another beer,
however.

G
ENTLE
:…

P.M. C
AN.
:…

G
ENTLE
: So we’re sympatico on the gradual and subtle but inexorable disarmament and dissolution
of NATO as a system of mutual-defense agreements.

P.M. C
AN.
[Less muffled than last scene because his surgical mask gets to have a prandial hole]:
We are side by side and behind you on this thing. Let the EEC pay for their oown defendings
henceforth I say. Let them foot some defensive budgets and then try to subsidize their
farmers into undercutting NAFTA. Let them eat butter and guns for their oown for once
in a change. Hey?

G
ENTLE
: You said more than a mouthful right there, J.J. Now maybe we can all direct some
cool-headed attention to our own infraternal affairs. Our own internal quality of
life. Refocusing priorities back to this crazy continent we call home. Am I being
dug?

P.M. C
AN
: John, I am kilometers ahead of you. I happen to have my Term-In-Office-At-A-Glance
book right with me here. Now that the big
frappeurs
are being put doown, we are wondering what is the date I can be pencilling in for
the removals of NATO ICBM
frappeurs
from Manitoba.

G
ENTLE
: Put that pencil away, you good-looking Canadian. I’ve got more long shiny trailer-rigs
full of large men with very short haircuts and white suits than you can shake a maple
leaf at heading for your silos right this very. Those complete totalities of Canada’s
strategic capacity’ll be out of your hair toot sweet.

P.M. C
AN
: John, let me be the first world leader to call you a statesman.

G
ENTLE
: We North Americans have to stick together, J.J.J.C., especially now, no? Am I off-base?
We’re interdependent. We’re cheek to jowl.

P.M. C
AN
: It is a smaller world, today.

G
ENTLE
: And an even smaller continent.

This segues into an entr’acte, with
continent
squeezed in for
world
in ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ which enjambment doesn’t do the rhythm section
of doo-wopping cabinet girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole
new era.

Though can any guru be held to a standard of like 100% exemption from the human pains
of stunted desire? No. Not 100%. Regardless of level of transcendence, or diet.

Lyle, down in the dark Interdependence Day weight room, sometimes recalls an E.T.A.
player from several years back whose first name was Marlon and whose last name Lyle
never to his knowledge learned.
¹⁵²

The thing about this Marlon was that he was always wet. Arms purling, T-shirt darkly
V’d, face and forehead ever gleaming. Orin’s Academy doubles partner. It had had a
lemony, low-cal taste, the boy’s omniwetness. It wasn’t exactly sweat, because you
could lick off the forehead and more beads instantly replaced what you’d taken. None
of real sweat’s frustratingly gradual accretion. The kid was always in the shower,
always doing his best to stay clean. There were powders and pills and electrical appliqués.
And still this Marlon dripped and shone. The kid wrote accomplished juvenile verses
about the dry clean boy inside, struggling to break the soggy surface. He shared extensively
with Lyle. He confessed to Lyle one night in the quiet weight room that he’d gone
in for high-level athletics mostly to have an excuse of some sort for being as wet
as he was. It always looked like Marlon had been rained on. But it wasn’t rain. It’s
like Marlon hadn’t been dry since the womb. It’s like he leaked. It had been a tormenting
but also in certain ways halcyon few years, in the past. A tormentingly unspecific
hope in the air. Lyle had told this boy everything he had to tell.

It’s raining tonight, though. As so often happens in autumn below the Great Concavity,
P.M.
snow has given way to rain. Outside the weight room’s high windows a mean wind sweeps
curtains of rain this way and that, and the windows shudder and drool. The sky is
a mess. Thunder and lightning happen at the same time. The copper beech outside creaks
and groans. Lightning claws the sky, briefly illuminating Lyle, seated lotus in Spandex
on the towel dispenser, leaning forward to accept what is offered in the dark weight
room. The idle resistance-machines look insectile in the lightning’s brief light.
The answer to some of the newer kids’ complaints about what on earth Lyle can be doing
down there at night in a locked empty weight room is that the nighttime weight room
is rarely empty. The
P.M.
custodians Kenkle and Brandt do lock it up, but the door can be dickied by even the
clumsiest insertion of an E.T.A. meal-card between latch and jamb. The kitchen crew
always wonders why so many meal-cards’ edges always look ravaged. Though the idle
machines are scary and the room smells somehow worse in the dark, they come most at
night, the E.T.A.s who are on to Lyle. They hit the saunas out by the cement stairs
until they’ve got enough incentive on their skin, then they lurk, purled and shiny,
in towels, by the weight room door, waiting to enter one by one, sometimes several
E.T.A.s, dripping in towels, not speaking, some pretending to have other business
down there, lurking in the eye-averted attitudes of like patients in the waiting room
of an impotence clinic or shrink. They have to be real quiet and the lights stay off.
It’s like the administration’ll turn a blind eye as long as you make it plausible
to do so. From the dining hall, whose east wall of windows faces Comm.-Ad., you can
hear very muffled laughter and kibitzing and the occasional scream from Mario’s Interdependent
puppet thing. A quiet slow small stream of yellow-slickered wet-shoed migrations back
and forth between West House and the weight room—people know the slow parts, the times
to duck out and go very briefly down to Lyle, to confer. They dicky the lock and go
in one by one, in towels. Proffer beaded flesh. Confront the sorts of issues reserved
for nighttime’s gurutical tête-à-tête, whispers made echoless by rubberized floors
and much damp laundry.

Sometimes Lyle will listen and shrug and smile and say ‘The world is very old’ or
some such general Remark and decline to say much else. But it’s the way he listens,
somehow, that keeps the saunas full.

Lightning claws the eastern sky, and it’s neat in the weight room’s dark because Lyle
is in a slightly different position and forward angle each time he’s illuminated through
the window up over the grip/wrist/forearm machines to his left, so it looks like there
are different Lyles at different fulgurant moments.

LaMont Chu, glabrous and high-gloss in a white towel and wristwatch, haltingly confesses
to an increasingly crippling obsession with tennis fame. He wants to get to the Show
so bad it feels like it’s eating him alive. To have his picture in shiny magazines,
to be a wunderkind, to have guys in blue I/SPN blazers describe his every on-court
move and mood in hushed broadcast clichés. To have little patches with products’ names
sewn onto his clothes. To be soft-profiled. To get compared to M. Chang, lately expired;
to get called the next Great Yellow U.S. Hope. Let’s not even talk about video magazines
or the Grid. He confesses it to Lyle: he
wants
the hype; he
wants
it. Sometimes he’ll pretend a glowing up-at-net action shot he’s clipping out of
a shiny magazine is of him, LaMont Chu. But then he finds he can’t eat or sleep or
sometimes even pee, so horribly does he envy the adults in the Show who get to have
up-at-net action shots of themselves in magazines. Sometimes, he says, lately, he
won’t take risks in tournament matches even when risks are OK or even called for,
because he finds he’s too scared of losing and hurting his chances for the Show and
hype and fame, down the road. A couple times this year the cold clenched fear of losing
has itself made him lose, he believes. He’s starting to fear that rabid ambition has
more than one blade, maybe. He’s ashamed of his secret hunger for hype in an academy
that regards hype and the seduction of hype as the great Mephistophelan pitfall and
hazard of talent. A lot of these are his own terms. He feels himself in a dark world,
inside, ashamed, lost, locked in. LaMont Chu is eleven and hits with two hands off
both sides. He doesn’t mention the Eschaton or having been punched in the stomach.
The obsession with future-tense fame makes all else pale. His wrists are so thin he
wears his watch halfway up his forearm, which looks sort of gladiatorial.

Lyle has a way of sucking on the insides of his cheeks as he listens. Plates of old
ridged muscle emerge and subside as he shifts his weight slightly on the raised towel
dispenser. The dispenser’s at about shoulder-height for someone like Chu. Like all
good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the
supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment.
It’s like he’s working as hard as you. You both of you, briefly, feel unalone. Lyle
will suck in first one side’s cheek and then the other. ‘You burn to have your photograph
in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Why again exactly, now?’ ‘I guess to be felt about
as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why? I guess
to give my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.’ ‘And how would this do this again?’
‘Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like
this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?’ ‘You feel these men
with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in
magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn
like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’
‘Lyle, don’t they?’ Lyle sucks his cheeks. It’s not like he’s condescending or stringing
you along. He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean
pond. It’s part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking.
‘LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the
gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image,
perhaps. Perhaps the first time:
enjoyment
. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After
the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering,
or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their
privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been
in a magazine, the famous men do not
enjoy
their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease
to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be
good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about
what is true?’ ‘Okeydokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished
with you.’ ‘Maybe I ought to be getting back.’ ‘LaMont, the world is very old. You
have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You
have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there
is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable
feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.’ ‘Animal?’ ‘You burn with hunger
for food that does not exist.’ ‘This is good news?’ ‘It is the truth. To be envied,
admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with
fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy
of fame.’ ‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it? It is not
fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible
and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off
you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.’ ‘Would I sound ungrateful
if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?’ ‘La-Mont, the truth
is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the
stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame
is not the exit from any cage.’ ‘So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or
tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.’ ‘You might consider how escape from a
cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe
I see a drop on your temple, right… there….’ Etc.