Infinite Jest (8 page)

‘I don’t mind,’ Hal said softly. ‘I could wait forever.’

‘That’s what you think,’ the voice said. The connection was cut. It had been Orin.

‘Hey Hal?’

The light in the room was a creepy gray, a kind of nonlight. Hal could hear Brandt
laughing at something Kenkle had said, off down the hall, and the clank of their janitorial
buckets. The person on the phone had been O.

‘Hey Hal?’ Mario was awake. It took four pillows to support Mario’s oversized skull.
His voice came from the tangled bedding. ‘Is it still dark out, or is it me?’

‘Go back to sleep. It isn’t even six.’ Hal put the good leg into the sweatpants first.

‘Who was it?’

Shoving three coverless Dunlop widebodies into the gear bag and zipping the bag partway
up so the handles had room to stick out. Carrying all three bags back over to the
console to deactivate the ringer on the phone. He said, ‘No one you know, I don’t
think.’

Though only one-half ethnic Arab and a Canadian by birth and residence, the medical
attaché is nevertheless once again under Saudi diplomatic immunity, this time as special
ear-nose-throat consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q———, the Saudi Minister
of Home Entertainment, here on northeastern U.S.A. soil with his legation to cut another
mammoth deal with InterLace TelEntertainment. The medical attaché turns thirty-seven
tomorrow, Thursday, 2 April in the North American lunar Y.D.A.U. The legation finds
the promotional subsidy of the North American calendar hilariously vulgar. To say
nothing of the arresting image of the idolatrous West’s most famous and self-congratulating
idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper,
a hilariously apposite image popular in the news photos of so many international journals.

The attaché’s medical practice being normally divided between Montreal and the Rub’
al Khali, it is his first trip back to U.S.A. soil since completing his residency
eight years ago. His duties here involve migrating with the Prince and his retinue
between InterLace’s two hubs of manufacture and dissemination in Phoenix, Arizona
U.S.A. and Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A., respectively, offering expert E.N.T. assistance
to the personal physician of Prince Q———. The medical attaché’s particular expertise
is the maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in intestinal flora. Prince Q———(as
would anyone who refuses to eat pretty much anything but Töblerone) suffers chronically
from
Candida albicans,
with attendant susceptibilities to monilial sinusitis and thrush, the yeasty sores
and sinal impactions of which require almost daily drainage in the cold and damp of
early-spring Boston, U.S.A. A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness nonpareil
with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attaché is known among the shrinking
upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast, his staggering
fee-scale as wholly
ad valorem
.

Saudi consulting fees, in particular, are somewhere just past obscene, but the medical
attaché’s duties on this trip are personally draining and sort of nauseous, and when
he arrives back at the sumptuous apartments he had his wife sublet in districts far
from the legation’s normal Back Bay and Scottsdale digs, at the day’s end, he needs
unwinding in the very worst way. A more than averagely devout follower of the North
American sufism promulgated in his childhood by Pir Valayat, the medical attaché partakes
of neither kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid. When he
arrives home after evening prayers, he wants to look upon a spicy and 100%
shari’a-halal
dinner piping hot and arranged and steaming pleasantly on its attachable tray, he
wants his bib ironed and laid out by the tray at the ready, and he wants the living
room’s teleputer booted and warmed up and the evening’s entertainment cartridges already
selected and arranged and lined up in dock ready for remote insertion into the viewer’s
drive. He reclines before the viewer in his special electronic recliner, and his black-veiled,
ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening any constrictive clothing,
adjusting the room’s lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head
so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below
his chin, that he may enjoy his hot dinner without having to remove his eyes from
whatever entertainment is up and playing. He has a narrow imperial-style beard which
his wife also attends and keeps free of detritus from the tray just below. The medical
attaché sits and watches and eats and watches, unwinding by visible degrees, until
the angles of his body in the chair and his head on his neck indicate that he has
passed into sleep, at which point his special electronic recliner can be made automatically
to recline to full horizontal, and luxuriant silk-analog bedding emerges flowingly
from long slots in the appliance’s sides; and, unless his wife is inconsiderate and
clumsy with the recliner’s remote hand-held controls, the medical attaché is permitted
to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night’s sleep, still
right there in the recumbent recliner, the TP set to run a recursive loop of low-volume
surf and light rain on broad green leaves.

Except, that is, for Wednesday nights, which in Boston are permitted to be his wife’s
Arab Women’s Advanced League tennis night with the other legation wives and companions
at the plush Mount Auburn Club in West Watertown, on which nights she is not around
wordlessly to attend him, since Wednesday is the U.S.A. weekday on which fresh Töblerone
hits Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Newbury Street’s import-confectioners’ shelves,
and the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment’s inability to control his appetites
for Wednesday Töblerone often requires the medical attaché to remain in personal attendance
all evening on the bulk-rented fourteenth floor of the Back Bay Hilton, juggling tongue-depressors
and cotton swabs, nystatin and ibuprofen and stiptics and antibiotic thrush salves,
rehabilitating the mucous membranes of the dyspeptic and distressed and often (but
not always) penitent and appreciative Saudi Prince Q———. So on 1 April, Y.D.A.U.,
when the medical attaché is (it is alleged) insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an
ulcerated sinal necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive
pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, and is by high-volume
fiat replaced at the royal bedside by the Prince’s personal physician, who’s summoned
by beeper from the Hilton’s sauna, and when the damp personal physician pats the medical
attaché on the shoulder and tells him to pay the pique no mind, that it’s just the
yeast talking, but to just head on home and unwind and for once make a well-deserved
early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the attaché does get home, at like
1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are empty, the living room lights undimmed,
dinner unheated and the attachable tray still in the dishwasher and—worst—of course
no entertainment cartridges have been obtained from the Boylston St. InterLace outlet
where the medical attaché’s wife, like all the veiled wives and companions of the
Prince’s legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account. And even if he weren’t far
too exhausted and tightly wound to venture back into the damp urban night to pick
up entertainment cartridges, the medical attaché realizes that his wife has, as always
on Wednesdays, taken the car with the diplomatic-immunity license plates, without
which your thinking alien wouldn’t even dream of trying to park publicly at night
in Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.

The medical attaché’s unwinding-options are thus severely constricted. The living
room’s lavish TP receives also the spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace Subscription
Pulse-Matrix, but the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses from the
service are so technologically and cryptographically complex that the attaché has
always left the whole business to his wife. On this Wednesday night, trying buttons
and abbreviations almost at random, the attaché is able to summon up only live U.S.A.
professional sports—which he has always found brutish and repellent—Texaco Oil Company–sponsored
opera—which the attaché has seen today more than enough of the human uvula thank you
very much—a redisseminated episode of the popular afternoon InterLace children’s program
‘Mr. Bouncety-Bounce’—which the attaché thinks for a moment might be a documentary
on bipolar mood disorders until he catches on and thumbs the selection-panel hastily—and
a redisseminated session of the scantily clad variable-impact early-
A.M.
‘Fit Forever’ home-aerobics series of the InterLace aerobics-guru Ms. Tawni Kondo,
the scantily clad and splay-limbed immodesty of which threatens the devout medical
attaché with the possibility of impure thoughts.

The only entertainment cartridges anywhere in the apartment, a foul-tempered search
reveals, are those which have arrived in Wednesday’s U.S.A. postal delivery, left
on the sideboard in the living room along with personal and professional faxes and
mail the medical attaché declines to read until it’s been pre-scanned by his wife
for relevant interest to himself. The sideboard is against the wall opposite the room’s
electronic recliner under a triptych of high-quality Byzantine erotica. The padded
cartridge-mailers with their distinctive rectangular bulge are mixed haphazardly in
with the less entertaining mail. Searching for something to unwind with, the medical
attaché tears the different padded mailers open along their designated perforations.
There is an O.N.A.N.M.A. Specialty Service film on actinomycete-class antibiotics
and irritable bowel syndrome. There is 1 April Y.D.A.U.’s CBC/PATHÉ North American
News Summary 40-minute cartridge, available daily by a wife’s auto-subscription and
either transmitted to TP by unrecordable InterLace pulse or express-posted on a single-play
ROM self-erasing disk. There is the Arabic-language video edition of April’s
Self
magazine for the attaché’s wife,
Nass
’s cover’s model chastely swathed and veiled. There is a plain brown and irritatingly
untitled cartridge-case in a featureless white three-day standard U.S.A. First Class
padded cartridge-mailer. The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in
Arizona U.S.A., and the return-address box has only the term ‘
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!,
’ with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink, instead of a return address
or incorporated logo. Though by birth and residence a native of Québec, where the
language of discourse is not English, the medical attaché knows quite well that the
English word
anniversary
does not mean the same as
birthday
. And the medical attaché and his veiled wife were united in the eyes of God and Prophet
not in April but in October, four years prior, in the Rub’al Khali. Adding to the
padded mailer’s confusion is the fact that anything from Prince Q———’s legation in
Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. would carry a diplomatic seal instead of routine O.N.A.N.
postage. The medical attaché, in sum, feels tightly wound and badly underappreciated
and is prepared in advance to be irritated by the item inside, which is merely a standard
black entertainment cartridge, but is wholly unlabelled and not in any sort of colorful
or informative or inviting cartridge-case, and has only another of these vapid U.S.A.-type
circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration- and duration-codes
are supposed to be embossed. The medical attaché is puzzled by the cryptic mailer
and face and case and unlabelled entertainment, and preliminarily irritated by the
amount of time he’s had to spend upright at the sideboard attending to mail, which
is not his task. The sole reason he does not throw the unlabelled cartridge in the
wastecan or put it aside for his wife to preview for relevance is because there are
such woefully slim entertainment-pickings on his wife’s irritating Americanized tennis-league
evening away from her place at home. The attaché will pop the cartridge in and scan
just enough of its contents to determine whether it is irritating or of an irrelevant
nature and not entertaining or engaging in any way. He will heat the prepared
halal
lamb and spicy
halal
garnish in the microwave oven until piping-hot, arrange it attractively on his tray,
preview the first few moments of the puzzling and/or irritating or possibly mysteriously
blank entertainment cartridge first, then unwind with the news summary, then perhaps
have a quick unlibidinous look at
Nass
’s spring line of sexless black devout-women’s-wear, then will insert the recursive
surf-and-rain cartridge and make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, hoping
only that his wife will not return from her tennis league in her perspiration-dampened
black ankle-length tennis ensemble and remove his dinner tray from his sleeping neck
in a clumsy or undeft fashion that will awaken him, potentially.