Infinite Jest (79 page)

M
EX. AND
S
OME
O
THER
S
ECS.
: [Various puzzled apprehensive noises.]

T
INE
: I’m sure you’ve all been briefed on the unprecedented but not unopportune crisis
that obtains north of the almost perfectly horizontal line between Buffalo and Northeast
Mass.

T
INE
arranges photos on seal-crested easels: a New Hampshire runoff-ditch running off
stuff a color nobody’s quite ever seen before; a wide-angle horizon-stretching vista
of skull-embossed drums, with short-haired guys in white body-suits walking around
adjusting knobs and reading dials on shiny hand-held devices; a very weird chemical
sunrise, close in hue to the Cabinet members’ lipstick, over some forests in southern
Maine that look way taller and generally lusher than January forests ought properly
to be; a couple indoor-lit snapshots of a multi-eyed infant crawling backwards, its
ear to the carpet, dragging its shapeless head like a sack of spuds. The last display’s
a real heartstringplucker.

A
LL
S
ECS.
: [Various concerned and sympathetic noises.]

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

T
INE
: Gentlemen, let the president just say that no one’s prepared to say they’re quite
sure what’s happened, or just which quote unquote loyal part of the Union or Organization
might reasonably be said to be culpable, but it’s not the administration’s immediate
concern to point the levelling finger of blame or aspersion just yet or right now.
Our concern is to act, to respond, and act and respond decisively. Swiftly. And decisively.

S
EC.
I
NT.
: We’ve come up with some extremely preliminary projections on the costs of detoxifying
and/or deradiating the better part of four U.S. states, sir, and I have to tell you
gentlemen that even with the atmosphere of uncertainty at this point in time of not
yet having a definitive handle on just what kinds and combinations of compounds were—umm—found
there and how wide your—not ‘your’ personally, sir, J.G., ‘your’ just being a shorthand
way for—to say something like I suppose simply ‘the’—how wide
the
dispersal- and toxicity-parameters are shaping up to look—umm—I have to relate that
the figures we’re looking at are almost staggeringly multi-zeroed, sir, gentlemen.

T
INE
: Tighten in and expand on
staggering
if you will, Blaine.

S
EC.
I
NT.
: We’re talking at bare minimum a staggering amount of Private-Sector-caliber guys
in white suits and helmets, not unlike your own helmet, sir, with a commensurately
massive tab for the suits and helmets, plus gloves and throwaway booties, and a lot
of really shiny equipment with a great many knobs and dials. Sir.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

T
INE
: Gentlemen, let’s pay the president the due tribute of proceeding right to the bone
of the matter. I think the president’s position is rendered patently clear by the
pure oxygen he’s been forced to take here with us today. No way we can possibly permit
territory publicly exposed as this befouled and waste-impacted to continue to besmirch
the already tight and tidier territory of a new era’s U.S. of A. The president shudders
at the mere thought. Just the mere thought of it forces him to resort to oxygen.

P
RES.
M
EX.
/S
EC.
M
EX.
/V-C O.N.A.N.: I do not anticipate what options your federal and our continental government
might consider options to this permitting, señors.

O
THER
S
ECS.
: [Tentative puzzled nods and slightly off-key agreement-noises.]

T
INE
: Having been elected and conferred with a mandate on the clear and public anti-waste
platform of the C.U.S.P., the president is inexorably driven to see the only viable
option being to give it away.

S
EC.
S
TATE
: Give it away?

T
INE
: Expressly.

S
EC.
S
TATE
: You mean simply tell the truth? That Johnny’s C.U.S.P. platform necessitates—given
the unfeasibility of shooting national wastes into space, since NASA hasn’t put a
successful launch on in over a decade and the rockets simply fall over and blow up
and become more waste—that—given the amount of additional waste annular fusion’s start-up
is going to start putting in circulation the minute start-up commences—that his platform
all but necessitates the second-tier option of transforming certain vast stretches
of U.S. territory into uninhabitable and probably barbed-wired landfills and fly-shrouded
dumps and saprogenic magenta-fogged toxic-disposal sites? Concede publicly that those
EPA softball games weren’t casual or pick-up in the least? That you allowed Rod the
God here to convince you
¹⁵⁶
to authorize Unspecified Services to undertake massive toxic dumping and skull-softening
against local statute for basically the same hard-choice, Greater-Good-of-the-Union
reasons that prompted Lincoln to suspend the Constitution and jail Confederate activists
without charge for the duration of the last great U.S. territorial crisis? And/or
not least that these particular territories were chosen essentially because New Hampshire
and Maine didn’t let C.U.S.P. on their Independent ballots and the Mayor of Syracuse
had the misfortune to sneeze on the president during a campaign swing? Give away the
entire strategy the two of you have apparently huddled in some sterilized corner and
mapped out? Can this be what you mean by
Give it away,
Rod?

T
INE
: Bôf. Don’t be a maroon, Billingsley. The
it
in the president’s
Give it away
signifies the territory.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaaahhh.

T
INE
: We’re going to give away the whole benighted smirch of ground.

S
EC.
I
NT.
: Export it, one might venture to sally.

T
INE
: It’s a novel and pro-active resource no prior statesman’s had the vision or environmental
cojones to envision. If there’s one natural resource we’ve still got in spades, it’s
territory.

P
RES.
M
EX.
/S
EC.
M
EX.
/V-C O.N.A.N. AND SEVERAL OTHER SECS.: [Attempt to bring eyebrows back down below
hairlines.]

T
INE
: President Gentle’s decided we’re going to reinvent not just government but history.
Torch the past. Manifest a new destiny. Boys, we’re going to institute some serious
intra-O.N.A.N. interdependence.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhh.

T
INE
: Gentlemen, we’re going to make an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain
newly expendable northeast American territories, in return for the
faute-de-mieux
continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to those territories. Allow me to
illustrate what Lur—just what the president means.

T
INE
places two large maps (also courtesy of Ms. Heath’s crafts class) on Govt.-issue
easels. They look both to be of the good old U.S.A. The first map is your more or
less traditional standard issue, with the U.S. looking really big in white and Mexico’s
northern fringes a tasteful ladies’-room pink and Canada’s brooding bottom hem a garish,
almost menacing red. The second North American map looks neither old nor all that
good, traditionally speaking. It has a concavity. It looks sort of like some person
or persons have taken a deep wicked canine-intensive bite out of its upper right bit,
in which an ascending and then descending line has its near-right-angle at what looks
to be the historic and now hideously befouled Ticonderoga NY; and the areas north
of that jagged line look to be that pushy shade of Canadian red, now. Some little
rubber practical-joke-type flies, the blue-bellied kind that live on filth, are stapled
in a raisinesque dispersal over the red Concavity.
TINE
has a trademark telescoping weatherman’s pointer that he plays with instead of using
to point at much of anything.

S
EC.
S
TATE
: A kind of ecological gerrymandering?

T
INE
: The president invites you gentlemen to conceive these two visuals as a sort of before-and-after
representation of ‘projected intra-O.N.A.N. territorial re-allocations,’ or some public
term like that.
Redemisement
’s probably too technical.

S
EC.
S
TATE
: Still respectfully not quite sure we at State see how inhabited territories can
be sold to the public as quote expendable when a decent slice of that public by all
reports inhabits that territory, Rod.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaahh.

T
INE
: The president’s pro-actively chosen not to hedge that high-cost tough-choice possibly
unpopular lonely-at-the-top fact one bit, guys. We’ve been moving forward full-bore
on anticipating various highly involved relocation scenarios. Scenaria? Is it scenarios
or scenaria?
¹⁵⁷
Marty’s on-task on the scenario front. Care to bring us to speed, Marty?

S
EC.
T
RANSP.
: We foresee a whole lot of people moving south really really fast. We foresee cars,
light trucks, heavier trucks, buses, Winnebagos—Winnebaga?—commandeered vans and buses,
and possibly commandeered Winnebagos or Winnebaga. We foresee 4-wheel-drive vehicles,
motorcycles, Jeeps, boats, mopeds, bicycles, canoes and the odd makeshift raft. Snowmobiles
and cross-country skiers and roller-skaters on those strange-looking roller-skates
with only one line of wheels down each skate. We foresee backpack-type folks speed-walking
in walking-shorts and boots and Tyrolean hats and a stick. We foresee some folks just
outright running like hell, possibly, Rod. We foresee homemade wagons piled high with
worldly goods. We foresee BMW war-surplus motorcycles with sidecars and guys in goggles
and leather helmets. We foresee the occasional skateboard. We foresee a strictly temporary
breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened
stampeding animals. We foresee looting, shooting, price-gouging, ethnic tensions,
promiscuous sex, births in transit.

S
EC.
H.E.W.: Rollerblades I think you mean, Marty.

S
EC.
T
RANSP.
: All feedback and input welcome, Trent. Someone junior in the office foresaw hang-gliders.
I don’t foresee demographically significant hang-gliding, personally, at this juncture.
Nor I need to stress do we foresee anything you could call true refugees.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaahh
hhhuuuhhhhhhh
.

T
INE
: Absolutely not, Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like
refugee
is going to be applicable here. I cannot overstress this too assertively. Eminent
nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era’s breed
of new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul
American territory:
bien sûr.

S
EC.
S
TATE
:
Bien sûr?

P
RESS
S
EC.
[w/ queer combination of bangs and bouffant and pair of bifocals on slim bead chain
around neck and resting in cleavage]: Neil over in Spin has been poring through resource
materials. Apparently the term
refugee
can be plausibly denied if both—I’m quoting direct from Neil’s memo here—if both,
a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals
with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a,
naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the
total number of children under six in transit. It’s true that Neil’s key resource
here is Pol and Diang’s
Totalitarian’s Guide to Iron-Fisted Spin,
but they’re thinking this fact can be spun away from without much to-do, over in
Spin.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhuuuhh.

T
INE
: Marty and Jay’s staffs have been day-and-nighting on strategies to forestall anything
like ostensible refugeeism.

P
RESS
S
EC.
[Holding brillantined head at that angle people in bifocals have to, to read]: Anything
bovine with curvy horns gets shot on sight. Rod’s top U.S.O. operatives in shiny trucks
at strategic intervals handing out free toddler-wear courtesy of Sears’ Winnie-the-Pooh
line, to nip nakedness in the bud.

S
EC.
T
REAS.
: Still hammering out the boilerplate on the Sears agreement, Rod.

T
INE
: The president has every confidence, Chet. I believe Marty and Jay were just getting
to the transportational coup de grâce.

S
EC.
T
RANSP.
: We’re soliciting bids for signs for up there making it legal to drive really really
fast in the breakdown lanes.

P
RESS
S
EC.
: South-bound breakdown lanes.

A
LL
S
ECS.
: [Harmonic murmurs.]

S
EC.
S
TATE
: Still don’t see why not just retain cartographic title to the toxified areas, relocate
citizenry and portable capital, use them as our own designated disposal area. Sort
of the back of the hall closet or special wastebasket underneath the national kitchen
sink as it were. Hammer out systems for delivering all national refuse and waste into
the area, cordon it off, keep the rest of the nation edible-off as per Johnny’s platform.