Infinite Jest (99 page)

I stood there by the slumped mattress for several moments of a silence so complete
that I could hear the street’s lawnmowers all the way out in the hall, then heard
the sound of my mother pulling out the vacuum cleaner’s retractable cord and plugging
it into the same bedside outlet the steel reading lamps were attached to.

I made my way over the angled mattress and quickly down the hall, made a sharp right
at the entrance to the kitchen, crossed the foyer to the staircase, and ran up to
my room, taking several stairs at a time, hurrying to get some distance between myself
and the vacuum cleaner, because the sound of vacuuming has always frightened me in
the same irrational way it seemed a bed’s squeak frightened my father.

I ran upstairs and pivoted left at the upstairs landing and went into my room. In
my room was my bed. It was narrow, a twin bed, with a headboard of wood and frame
and slats of wood. I didn’t know where it had come from, originally. The frame held
the narrow box spring and mattress much higher off the floor than my parents’ bed.
It was an old-fashioned bed, so high off the floor that you had to put one knee up
on the mattress and clamber up into it, or else jump.

That is what I did. For the first time since I had become taller than my parents,
I took several running strides in from the doorway, past my shelves’ collection of
prisms and lenses and tennis trophies and my scale-model magneto, past my bookcase,
the wall’s still-posters from Powell’s
Peeping Tom
and the closet door and my bedside’s high-intensity standing lamp, and jumped, doing
a full swan dive up onto my bed. I landed with my weight on my chest with my arms
and legs out from my body on the indigo comforter on my bed, squashing my tie and
bending my glasses’ temples slightly. I was trying to make my bed produce a loud squeak,
which in the case of my bed I knew was caused by any lateral friction between the
wooden slats and the frame’s interior’s shelf-like slat-support.

But in the course of the leap and the dive, my overlong arm hit the heavy iron pole
of the high-intensity standing lamp that stood next to the bed. The lamp teetered
violently and began to fall over sideways, away from the bed. It fell with a kind
of majestic slowness, resembling a felled tree. As the lamp fell, its heavy iron pole
struck the brass knob on the door to my closet, shearing the knob off completely.
The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room’s wooden floor
with a loud noise and began then to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end
of the hex bolt stationary and the round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling
it in a spherical orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct
axes, a non-Euclidian figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere:

The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, L’Hôpital’s
solution to Bernoulli’s famous Brachistochrone Problem, the curve traced by a fixed
point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a continuous plane. But since
here, on the bedroom’s floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the circumference
of a circle, the cycloid’s standard parametric equations were no longer apposite,
those equations’ trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order differential
equations.

Because of the lack of resistance or friction against the bare floor, the knob rolled
this way for a long time as I watched over the edge of the comforter and mattress,
holding my glasses in place, completely distracted from the minor-D shriek of the
vacuum below. It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly
schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one
hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities
of annulation.

The night after the chilly and sort of awkward joint Interdependence Day picnic for
Enfield’s Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Somerville’s Phoenix House,
and Dorchester’s grim New Choice juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz
took Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert along with her to this one NA Beginners’ Discussion
Meeting where the focus was always marijuana: how every addict at the meeting had
gotten in terrible addictive trouble with it right from the first duBois, or else
how they’d been strung out on harder drugs and had tried switching to grass to get
off the original drugs and but then had gotten in even terribler trouble with grass
than they’d been in with the original hard stuff. This was supposedly the only NA
meeting in metro Boston explicitly devoted to marijuana. Johnette Foltz said she wanted
Erdedy and Gompert to see how completely nonunique and unalone they were in terms
of the Substance that had brought them both down.

There were about maybe two dozen beginning recovering addicts there in the anechoic
vestry of an upscale church in what Erdedy figured had to be either west Belmont or
east Waltham. The chairs were arranged in NA’s traditional huge circle, with no tables
to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally kicking
over their cups of coffee. Everybody who raised their hand to share concurred on the
insidious ways marijuana had ravaged their bodies, minds, and spirits: marijuana destroys
slowly
but
thoroughly
was the consensus. Ken Erdedy’s joggling foot knocked over his coffee not once but
twice as the NAs took turns concurring on the hideous psychic fallout they’d all endured
both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation,
anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal
and anxiety—the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total
emotional catalepsy—the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results
from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the
couch and not getting up from the couch—and then the endless symptomatic gauntlet
of Withdrawal from delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite,
the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation
of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and
mental confusion and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess production
of saliva—several beginners still holding institutional drool-cups just under their
chins—the generalized anxiety and foreboding and dread, and the shame of feeling like
neither M.D.s nor the hard-drug NAs themselves showed much empathy or compassion for
the ‘addict’ brought down by what was supposed to be nature’s humblest buzz, the benignest
Substance around.

Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms
melancholy
or
anhedonia
or
depression,
much less
clinical depression;
but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmentioned,
to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads, to drift between the peristyle columns
and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs
and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could
bear to look up and name it. Kate Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver
of her forefinger and thumb and shooting herself in the temple and then blowing pretend-cordite
off the barrel’s tip until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off.

As was his custom at meetings, Ken Erdedy said nothing and observed everybody else
very closely, cracking his knuckles and joggling his foot. Since an NA ‘Beginner’
is technically anybody with under a year clean, there were varying degrees of denial
and distress and general cluelessness in this plush upscale vestry. The meeting had
the usual broad demographic cross-section, but the bulk of these grass-ravaged people
looked to him urban and tough and busted-up and dressed without any color-sense at
all, people you could easily imagine smacking their kid in a supermarket or lurking
with a homemade sap in the dark of a downtown alley. Same as AA. Motley disrespectability
was like the room norm, along with glazed eyes and excess spittle. A couple of the
beginners still had the milky plastic I.D. bracelets from psych wards they’d forgotten
to cut off, or else hadn’t yet gotten up the drive to do it.

Unlike Boston AA, Boston NA has no mid-meeting raffle-break and goes for just an hour.
At the close of this Monday Beginners’ Meeting everybody got up and held hands in
a circle and recited the NA-Conference-Approved ‘Just For Today,’ then they all recited
the Our Father, not exactly in unison. Kate Gompert later swore she distinctly heard
the tattered older man beside her say ‘And lead us not into Penn Station’ during the
Our Father.

Then, just as in AA, the NA meeting closed with everybody shouting to the air in front
of them to Keep Coming Back because It Works.

But then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly
and hugging each other. It was like somebody’d thrown a switch. There wasn’t even
very much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see. Rampant,
indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as possible
regardless of whether you’d ever seen them before in your life. People went from person
to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people stooped and short people got up on
tiptoe. Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And the male-to-male
hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that
Erdedy’d always seen as somehow requisite for male-to-male hugs. Johnette Foltz was
almost a blur. She went from person to person. She was racking up serious numbers
of hugs. Kate Gompert had her usual lipless expression of morose distaste, but even
she gave and got some hugs. But Erdedy—who’d never particularly liked hugging—moved
way back from the throng, over up next to the NA-Conference-Approved-Literature table,
and stood there by himself with his hands in his pockets, pretending to study the
coffee urn with great interest.

But then a tall heavy Afro-American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical
cylinder of Afro-American hairstyle peeled away from a sort of group-hug nearby, he’d
spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front of
Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and
leaning in toward Erdedy’s personal trunk-region.

Erdedy raised his hands in a benign No Thanks and backed up further so that his bottom
was squashed up against the edge of the Conference-Approved-Literature table.

‘Thanks, but I don’t particularly like to hug,’ he said.

The fellow had to sort of pull up out of his pre-hug lean, and stood there awkwardly
frozen, with his big arms still out, which Erdedy could see must have been awkward
and embarrassing for the fellow. Erdedy found himself trying to calculate just what
remote sub-Asian locale would be the maximum possible number of km. away from this
exact spot and moment as the fellow just stood there, his arms out and the smile draining
from his face.

‘Say what?’ the fellow said.

Erdedy proffered a hand. ‘Ken E., Ennet House, Enfield. How do you do. You are?’

The fellow slowly let his arms down but just looked at Erdedy’s proffered hand. A
single styptic blink. ‘Roy Tony,’ he said.

‘Roy, how do you do.’

‘What it is,’ Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake-hand behind his neck
and was pretending to feel the back of his neck, which Erdedy didn’t know was a blatant
dis.

‘Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it’s a compound
first name, hyphenated, “Roy-Tony” and then a last name, but well with respect to
this hugging thing, Roy, it’s nothing personal, rest assured.’

‘Assured?’

Erdedy’s best helpless smile and an apologetic shrug of the GoreTex anorak. ‘I’m afraid
I just don’t particularly like to hug. Just not a hugger. Never have been. It was
something of a joke among my fam—’

Now the ominous finger-pointing of street-aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first
at Erdedy’s chest and then at his own: ‘So man what you say you saying I’m a hugger?
You saying you think I go around like to hug?’

Both Erdedy’s hands were now up palms-out and waggling in a like bonhommic gesture
of heading off all possible misunderstanding: ‘No but see the whole point is that
I wouldn’t presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don’t know
you. I only meant to say it’s nothing personal having to do with you as an individual,
and I’d be more than happy to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple-handed
ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake,
but I’m simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’

By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy
by his anorak’s insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of the
Literature table so that Erdedy’s waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and
the fellow’s face was right up in Erdedy’s face in a show of naked aggression: