Infinite Jest (89 page)

Right after their neighbor Mrs. Waite got found by the meter-guy dead, so he must
have been nine, when his Mom was first Diagnosed, Gately had gotten the Diagnosis
mixed up in his head with King Arthur. He’d ride a mop-handle horse and brandish a
trashcan-lid and a batteryless plastic Light-Saber and tell the neighborhood kids
he was Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur’s vessels.
Since the summer now, when he mops Shattuck Shelter floors, he hears the Clopaclopaclop
he used to make with his big square tongue as Sir Osis, then, riding.

And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to
set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and
dim and the same temperature he is.

Hal Incandenza had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth,
where his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented
and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around squeezing a ball
and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and scared. Everything
in there loosened by a great oral rot that the nightmare’s Teddy Schacht wouldn’t
even look at, saying he was late for his next appointment, everyone Hal saw seeing
Hal’s crumbling teeth and looking at their watch and making vague excuses, a general
atmosphere of the splintering teeth being a symptom of something way more dire and
distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about. He was pricing dentures when
he woke. It was about an hour before dawn drills. His keys were on the floor by the
bed with his College Board prep books. Mario’s great iron bed was empty and made up
tight, all five pillows neatly stacked. Mario’d been spending the last few nights
over at HmH, sleeping on an air mattress in the living room in front of Tavis’s Tatsuoka
receiver, listening to WYYY–109 into the wee hours, weirdly agitated about Madame
Psychosis’s unannounced sabbatical from the ‘60 Minutes +/−’ midnight thing where
she’d been an unvarying M-F presence for several years, it seemed like. WYYY had been
evasive and unforthcoming about the whole thing. For two days some alto grad student
had tried to fill in, billing herself as Miss Diagnosis, reading Horkheimer and Adorno
against a background of Partridge Family slowed down to a narcotized slur. At no time
had anyone of managerial pitch or timbre mentioned Madame Psychosis or what her story
was or her date of expected return. Hal’d told Mario that the silence was a positive
sign, that if she’d left the air for good the station would have had to say something.
Hal, Coach Schtitt, and the Moms had all remarked Mario’s odd mood. Mario was usually
next to impossible to agitate.
¹⁸⁰

Now WYYY was back to running ‘Sixty Minutes More or Less’ without anybody at all at
the helm. For the past several nights Mario has lain there in a sarcophagally tapered
sleeping bag of GoreTex and fiberfill and listened to them run the weird static ambient
musics Madame Psychosis uses for background, but now without any spoken voice as foreground;
and the static, momentumless music as subject instead of environment is somehow terribly
disturbing: Hal listened to a few minutes of the stuff and told his brother it sounded
like somebody’s mind coming apart right before your ears.

The Enfield Tennis Academy has an accredited capacity of 148 junior players—of whom
80 are to be male—but an actual Fall Y.D.A.U. population of 95 paying and 41 scholarship
students, so 136, of which 72 are female, right now, for some reason, meaning that
while there’s room for twelve more (preferably full-tuition) junior players, there
ought ideally to be fully sixteen more males than there are, meaning Charles Tavis
and Co. are wanting to fill all twelve available spots with males—plus they wouldn’t
exactly mind, is the general scuttlebutt, if a half dozen or so of the better girls
left before graduation and tried for the Show, simply because housing more than 68
girls means putting some in the male dorms, which creates tensions and licensing-
and conservative-parent-problems, given that coed hall bathrooms are not a good idea
what with all the adolescent glands firing all over the place.

It also means that, since there are twice as many male prorectors as female,
A.M.
drills have to be complexly staggered, the boys in two sets of 32, the girls in three
of 24, which creates problems in terms of early-
P.M.
classes for the lowest-ranked C-squad girls, who drill last.

Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes,
rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring, accommodating changes in drill
schedule consequent to a player’s movement up or down a squad. It’s all the sort of
thing that’s uninteresting unless you’re the one responsible, in which case it’s cholesterol-raisingly
stressful and complex. The stress of all the complexities and priorities to be triaged
and then weighted against one another gets Charles Tavis out of bed in the Headmaster’s
House at an ungodly hour most mornings, his sleep-swollen face twitching with permutations.
He stands in leather slippers at the living-room window, looking southeast past West
and Center Courts at the array of A-team players assembling stiffly in the gray glow,
carrying gear with their heads down and some still asleep on their feet, the first
bit of snout of the sun protruding through the city’s little skyline far beyond them,
the aluminum glints of river and sea, east, Tavis’s hands working nervously around
the cup of hazlenut decaf that steams upward into his face as he holds it, hair unarranged
and one side hanging, high forehead up against the window’s glass so he can feel the
mean chill of the dawn just outside, his lips moving slightly and without sound, the
thing it’s not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound
system with its claws on its chest and four pillows for bradypnea-afflicted breathing
that sounds like soft repetitions of the words
sky
or
ski,
making no unnecessary sound, not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and
have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it’s quite possible
is nothing but Tavis’s imagination, so lips moving w/o sound but breath and cup’s
steam spreading on the glass, and little icicles from the rainy melt of yesterday’s
snow hanging from the anodized gutters just above the window and seen by Tavis as
a distant skyline upside-down. In the lightening sky the same two or three clouds
seem to move back and forth like sentries. The heat comes on with a distant whoom
and the glass against his forehead trembles slightly. A hiss of low static from the
speaker it had fallen into sleep without turning off. The A-team’s array keeps shifting
and melding as they await Schtitt. Permutations of complications.

Tavis watches the boys stretch and confer and sips from the cup with both hands, the
concerns of the day assembling themselves in a sort of tree-diagram of worry. Charles
Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the
successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating
a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

So the best E.T.A. players’ special perk is they get hauled out of bed at dawn, still
crusty-eyed and pale with sleep, to drill in the first shift.

Dawn drills are of course alfresco until they erect and inflate the Lung, which Hal
Incandenza hopes is soon. His circulation is poor because of tobacco and/or marijuana,
and even with his
DUNLOP
-down-both-legs sweatpants and a turtleneck and thick old white alpaca tennis jacket
that had been his father’s and has to be rolled up at the sleeves, he’s sullen and
chilled, Hal is, and by the time they’ve run the pre-stretch sprints up and down the
E.T.A. hill four times, swinging their sticks madly in all directions and (at A. deLint’s
dictate) making various half-hearted warrior-noises, Hal is both chilled and wet,
and his sneakers squelch from dew as he hops in place and looks at his breath, wincing
as the cold air hits the one bad tooth.

By the time they’re all stretching out, lined up in rows along the service- and baselines,
flexing and bowing, genuflecting to nothing, changing postures at the sound of a whistle,
by this time the sky has lightened to the color of Kaopectate. The ATHSCME fans are
idle and the E.T.A.s can hear birds. Smoke from the stacks of the Sunstrand complex
is weakly sunlit as it hangs in plumes, completely still, as if painted on the air.
Tiny cries and a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace downhill to the
east, presumably Enfield Marine. This is the one time of day the Charles doesn’t look
bright blue. The pines’ birds don’t sound any happier than the players. The grounds’
non-pines are bare and canted at circuitous hillside angles all up and down the hill
when they sprint again, four more times, then on bad days another four, maybe the
most hated part of the day’s conditioning. Somebody always throws up a little; it’s
like the drills’ reveille. The river at dawn is a strip of foil’s dull side. Kyle
Coyle keeps saying it’s co-wo-
wold
. All the lesser players are still abed. Today there’s multiple retching, from last
night’s sweets. Hal’s breath hangs before his face until he moves through it. Sprints
produce the sick sound of much squelching; everyone wishes the hill’s grass would
die.

Twenty-four girls are drilled in groups of six on four of the Center Courts. The 32
boys (minus, rather ominously, J. J. Penn) are split by rough age into fours and take
a semi-staggered eight of the East Courts. Schtitt is up in his little observational
crow’s nest, a sort of apse at the end of the iron transom players call the Tower
that extends west to east over the centers of all three sets of courts and terminates
w/ the nest high above the Show Courts. He has a chair and an ashtray up there. Sometimes
from the courts you can see him leaning over the railing, tapping the edge of the
bullhorn with his weatherman’s pointer; from the West and Center Courts the rising
sun behind him gives his white head a pinkish corona. When he’s seated you just see
misshapen smoke-rings coming up out of the nest and moving off with the wind. The
sound of the bullhorn is scarier when you can’t see him. The waffled iron stairs leading
up to the transom are west of the West Courts, all the way across from the nest, so
sometimes Schtitt paces back and forth along the transom with his pointer behind his
back, his boots ringing out on the iron. Schtitt seems immune to all weather and always
dresses the same for drills: the warm-ups and boots. When the E.T.A.s’ strokes or
play’s being filmed for study, Mario Incandenza is positioned on the railing of Schtitt’s
nest, leaning way out and filming down, his police lock protruding into empty air,
with somebody beefy assigned to stand behind him and grip the back of the Velcro vest:
it always scares hell out of Hal because you can never see Dunkel or Nwangi behind
Mario and it always looks like he’s leaning way out to dive Bolex-first down onto
Court 7’s net.

Except during periods of disciplinary conditioning, alfresco
A.M.
drills work like this. A prorector is at each relevant court with two yellow Ball-Hopper-brand
baskets of used balls, plus a ball machine, which machine looks like an open footlocker
with a blunt muzzle at one end pointed across the net at a quartet of boys and connected
by long orange industrial cords to a three-prong outdoor outlet at the base of each
light-pole. Some of the light-poles cast long thin shadows across the courts as soon
as the sun is strong enough for there to be shadows; in summertime players try to
sort of huddle in the thin lines of shade. Ortho Stice keeps yawning and shivering;
John Wayne wears a small cold smile. Hal hops up and down in his capacious jacket
and plum turtleneck and looks at his breath and tries à la Lyle to focus very intently
on the pain of his tooth without judging it as bad or good. K. D. Coyle, out of the
infirmary after the weekend, opines that he doesn’t see why the better players’ reward
for hard slogging to the upper rungs is dawn drills while for instance Pemulis and
the Vikemeister et al. are still horizontal and sawing logs. Coyle says this every
morning. Stice tells him he’s surprised at how little they’ve missed him. Coyle is
from the small Tucson AZ suburb of Erythema and claims to have thin desert blood and
special sensitivity to the wet chill of Boston’s dawn. The WhataBurger Jr. Invitational
is a sort of double-edged Thanksgiving homecoming for Coyle, who at thirteen was lured
from Tucson’s own Rancho Vista Golf and Tennis Academy by promises of self-transcendence
from Schtitt.

Drills work like this. Eight different emphases on eight different courts. Each quartet
starts at a different court and rotates around. The top four traditionally start drills
on the first court: backhands down the line, two boys to a side. Corbett Thorp lays
down squares of electrician’s tape at the court’s corners and they are strongly encouraged
to hit the balls into the little squares. Hal hits with Stice, Coyle with Wayne; Axford’s
been sent down with Shaw and Struck for some reason. Second court: forehands, same
deal. Stice consistently misses the square and gets a low-pH rejoinder from Tex Watson,
hatless and pattern-balding at twenty-seven. Hal’s tooth hurts and his ankle is stiff
and the cold balls come off his strings with a dead sound like
chung
. Tiny bratwursts of smoke ascend rhythmically from Schtitt’s little nest. Third court
is ‘Butterflies,’ a complex VAPS deal where Hal hits a backhand down the line to Stice
while Coyle forehands it to Wayne and then Wayne and Stice cross-court the balls back
to Hal and Coyle, who have to switch sides without bashing into each other and hit
back down the line now to Wayne and Stice, respectively. Wayne and Hal amuse themselves
by making their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so—this is known
around E.T.A. as ‘atom-smashing’ and is understandably hard to do—and the collided
balls sprong wildly out onto the other practice courts, and Rik Dunkel is less amused
than Wayne and Hal are, so, nicely warm now and arms singing, they’re shunted quickly
onto the fourth court: volleys for depth, then for angle, then lobs and overheads,
which latter drill can be converted into a disciplinary Puker if a prorector’s feeding
you the lobs: the overhead drill’s called ‘Tap & Whack’: Hal pedals back, terribly
ankle-conscious, jumps, kicks out, nails Stice’s lob, then has to sprint up and tap
the net’s tape with his Dunlop’s head as Stice lobs deep again, and Hal has to backpedal
again and jump and kick and hit it, and so on. Then Hal and Coyle, both sucking wind
after twenty and trying to stand up straight, feed lobs to Wayne and Stice, neither
of whom is fatiguable as far as anyone can tell. You have to kick out on overheads
to keep your balance in the air. Overhead, Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn and
careful enunciation to call out for everyone to hear that Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza
was letting the ball get the little much behind him on overheads, fears of the ankle
maybe. Hal raises his stick in acknowledgment without looking up. To hang in past
age fourteen here is to become immune to humiliation from staff. Coyle tells Hal between
the lobs they send up he’d love to see Schtitt have to do twenty Tap & Whacks in a
row. They’re all flushed to a shine, all chill washed off, noses running freely and
heads squeaking with blood, the sun well above the sea’s dull glint and starting to
melt the frozen slush from I.-Day’s snow and rain that night-custodians had swept
into little wedged lines up against the lengthwise fences, which grimy wedges are
now starting to melt and run. There’s still no movement in the Sunstrand stacks’ plumes.
The watching prorectors stand easy with their legs apart and their arms crossed over
their racquets’ faces. The same three or four booger-shaped clouds seem to pass back
and forth overhead, and when they cover the sun people’s breath reappears. Stice blows
on his racquet-hand and cries out thinly for the inflation of the Lung. Mr. A. F.
deLint ranges behind the fence with his clipboard and whistle, blowing his nose. The
girls behind him are too bundled up to be worth watching, their hair rubber-banded
into little bouncing tails. Fifth court: serves to both corners of both boxes, catching
each others’ serves and serving them back. First serves, second serves, slice serves,
shank serves, and back-snapping American Twist serves that Stice begs off of, telling
the prorector—Neil Hartigan, who’s 2 m. tall and of so few words everybody fears him
by default—he’s having lower spasms from a mispositioned bed. Then Coyle—he of the
weak bladder and suspicious discharge—gets excused to go back into the eastern tree-line
out of sight of the distaffs and pee, so the other three get a minute to jog over
to the pavilion and stand with their hands on their hips and breathe and drink Gatorade
out of little conic paper cups you can’t put down til they’re empty. The way you flush
out a cottony mouth between drills is you take a mouthful of Gatorade and puff out
your cheeks to make a globe of liquid that you mangle with your teeth and tongue,
then lean out and spit out into the grass and take another drink for real. The sixth
court is returns of serve down the line, down the center, cross-court for depth, then
for placement, then for deep placement, w/ more taped squares; then chipped center-
and cross-returns against a server who follows his serve to the net. The server practices
half-volleys off the chips, although Wayne and Stice are so fast that they’re on top
of the net by the time the return gets to them and they can volley it away at chest-height.
Wayne drills with the casual economy of somebody who’s in about second gear. The urns’
dispensers’ cups can’t stand up, their bottoms are pointy and they’ll spill any liquid
still in them, is why you have to empty them. Between squads Harde’s guys will sweep
the pavilion of dozens of cones.