Infinite Jest (122 page)

DeLint read Steeply's expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair protruded from one of her nostrils, which deLint found repellent. She said, 'Were you ever written about, as a player?’

DeLint smiled coolly at his charts. 'Never had the sort of ranking or promise this issue'd even come up for me.’

'But some of these do. Hal's brother did.’

DeLint felt along his lip's outline with his pencil, sniffed. 'Orin was OK. Orin was essentially a one-trick pony as a player. And between you and me and the fence he was kind of a head-case. His game left here on the downswing. Now his little brother's got a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls — Kent, Caryn and Sharyn here,' indicating the Vaught-apparition below them. 'The really gifted ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the Show — ‘

'Meaning professional you mean.’

'In the Show they'll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at and poked at and discussed, and then some. For now they're here to get to be the ones who look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.’

'But even you call it "The Show." They'll be entertainers.’

'You bet your ass they will be.’

'So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses of entertaining an audience, get them used to being seen?’

The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint made kind of a show of putting his clipboard down. 'Assume wrongly for a second that I can speak for the Enfield Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it's never about being seen. It's never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show won't fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and want only them and the game's incidental to you, for you it's about entertainment and personality, it's about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they'll never be slaves to the statue, they'll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it's what you do.’

'We chew statues?’

'Whether you mean to or no. You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, Inter-Lace, the audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking literally. It's the nature of the game. It's the machine they're all dying to throw themselves into. They don't know the machine. But we do. Gerhardt's teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can't be chewed. It takes time and total focus. The man's a fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you want to profile somebody.’

'And I'm not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this inside chew-proof place. It's a secret place.’

Hal mishit a second serve and it flew off his frame and way down to where the girls were sending each other squeaks and lobs, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6-5, and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation. DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice's direction. Hal chipped his balls out along the baseline and made some small adjustments in his cross-hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the nastier kids applauded Hal's mishit a little.

'Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it's not my command-decision. I wouldn't get sardonic with Tavis, though.’

'But if it were. Your command.’

'Lady, if it was me you'd be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down there is as far in as you'd get. You're coming into a little slice of space and/or time that's been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn't even wear pads. A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? A more dramatic story, geopolitics, privation, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even. A more complete game. Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top Five if he doesn't fuck up or burn down. Wayne's your ideal food-group. Which is why we'll keep you off him as long as he's here.’

The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. 'Carved out of what, though, this place?’

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. Marlon K. Bain Saprogenic Greetings, Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

In Phoenix on other business, it has been my good fortune to meet your adolescent friend, Mr. Orin J. Incandenza, and to have become intrigued with the possibilities of a profile of the Incandenza family and its accomplishments in not only sports but wide-ranging topics such as independent film circa metropolitan Boston, past and present.

I am writing to ask for your cooperation in contacting you with questions which you could answer in writing, as I am informed by Mr. Orin Incandenza you dislike to meet people outside your home and office.

I am hoping to hear from you in response to this request at your earliest convenience, Etc. etc. etc.

Saprogenic Greetings*

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises

Ms. Helen Steepley And So On November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Ms. Steepley: Fire away.

V.D., MK Bain

Saprogenic Greetings/ACME

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. MK Bain Saprogenic Greetings Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

Q, Q, Q (Q, Q[Q], Q, Q, Q), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q.
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Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud — at more or less the same time the hilltop's bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level for tennis — are E.T.A.'s abundant tunnels. There are access tunnels and hallway tunnels, with rooms and labs and Pump Room's Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels and storage tunnels and little blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels. Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that's more generally ovoid than anything else.

11/11, 1625h., LaMont Chu, Josh Gopnik, Audern Tallat-Kelpsa, Philip Traub, Tim ('Sleepy T.P.') Peterson, Carl Whale, Kieran McKenna — the bulk of the ambulatory sub-14 male Eschatonites — plus ten-year-old Kent Blott — are 26 meters directly below the Hal/Darkness match's Show Court with Glad Handle-Tie
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trashbags and B.P. low-diffusion compact mercuric flashlights. Plus Chu has a clipboard with a pen attached to its clamp with twine. The sounds of competitive sneaker-movement and spectatorial bleacher-squeaks on the surface, travelling down through meters of compacted crud and polymerized cement tunnel-ceiling w/ parget-layer, sound rather like the stealthy dry scuttle of rodents, vermin. And this heightens the excitement that's part of why they're really down here.

One part of the reason they're down here is that small U.S. boys seem to have this fetish for getting down in the enclosed fundaments underneath things — tunnels, caves, ventilator-shafts, the horrific areas beneath wooden porches — rather the way older U.S. boys like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge swaths of territory, this latter fetish accounting for why E.T.A.'s hilltop site is one of its trump-cards in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Eastern-seaboard academies.

Another part is a semi-punitive shit detail in which certain players — judged to have been involved in the recent Eschaton nonstrategic-combat debacle, but who are uninjured
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and not in the much severer hot water that the Big Buddies on the scene are in — have been punitively remanded below ground in P.M. shifts on what's supposed to constitute an unpleasant chore, to scout out the tunnelled route the TesTar Ail-Weather Inflatable Structures Corp.'s professional guys will have to take as they haul out from the Lung-Storage Room the fiberglass struts and crosspieces and dendri-urethane folds that compose the Lung, for erection of the Lung, when the E.T.A. administration finally decides that the late-fall weather has gone beyond character-building and become an impediment to development and morale. This will be soon. Because the prorectors live in rooms off the larger tunnels and F. D. V. Harde's Physical Plant and Maintenance guys have their offices and supplies down here, and because Dr. James Incandenza's old optics and editing facilities are down here off one of the main tunnels and get used for Leith/Ogilvie classes in entertainment production and for optical science tutorials etc., and because a couple of the secondary and off-tunnels are used for temporary storage by departing seniors who can't tote eight or more years' worth of accumulated stuff in one post-graduate load — especially if they jet off to some novitiate-pro Satellite circuit for the summer, because that means air travel, two bags plus gear, max — some of the tunnels become badly littered in the warm season with trash-type material. And sometimes there's bulky-possession-type overflow from the little curved storage tunnels off the prorectors' hallway. Smaller kids are perfect for recons into low narrow tunnels partly blocked with dross, and even though it's no secret around E.T.A. that the smaller boys spend a fair amount of time down in the tunnels anyway, a retributive aspect is lent to this recon-detail by making the kids take down Handle-Tie trashbags to clear away littered exam papers and lab-handouts, calculator-batteries and banana peels and Kodiak smokeless-tobacco tins and spirals of synthetic-gut racquet-string, and Maintenance guys' hideous cigar-butts — Sleepy T.P. finds two bright Trojan wrappers just off the prorectors' hallway-tunnel, and then a couple meters farther along the floor the vermiform gleam of an actual condom, and there's some high-register debate about whether it's a used condom or not, and poor old Kent Blott is finally put in charge of picking it up and putting it in a trashbag, just in case it's a used condom — and empty boxes of complimentary corporate gear, and full boxes of faggy or poorly-absorbent gear nobody wants, and Habitant can-wrappers, and senior trunks and dorm-sized fridgelettes, etc.; and also to move whatever boxes they can heft, clear them out of the TesTar guys' access-route into the Lung-Storage and Pump Rooms; and LaMont Chu is supposed to note the location of any boxes or objects too bulky for them to move out of the way, and beefy custodial guys will be dispatched to handle them as they see fit.

This is why a fair number of the smaller E.T.A. males don't see Stice take a set off Hal Incandenza and nearly beat him, is that they were remanded down here by Neil Hartigan right after post-conditioning showers.

As noted already, they don't much mind it, being down here, now in one of the child-size-diametered off-tunnels between the prorectors' hallway and the Lung-Storage Room. The Eschatonites are down here quite a lot anyway. In fact the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys' clubs, the Tunnel Club's unifying raison d'etre is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton (usually only about five a term); and the Club's only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert's Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can't join the Tunnel Club. A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club's least vague raison d'etre has to do with exclusion. The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only ironclad part of the Tunnel Club's charter.
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With the exception of Kent Blott, every boy down here on this detail is an Eschatonite and a member of the Tunnel Club. Kent Blott, ineligible for Eschaton because he's a humanities-type kid and hasn't even taken quadrivial Algebra yet, and excluded from the Club under every incarnation of the eligibility requirements thus far, is down here solely because he was heard to maintain at lunch that he was in the north part of the main tunnel between the Comm.-Ad. locker rooms and the subterranean laundry room this a.m., short-cutting back to his room in West House after drills and a sauna, and claimed to have espied — scuttling out of his mercuric light toward one of the secondary tunnels to Subdorms C and D and the East Courts and this same general tunnel-area they're now in — to have sighted what was either a rat or, he said, what looked even more like a Concavitated feral hamster. So the Es-chatonites are also enthusiastic to be down here for potential rodent-recon, checking out Blott's claim, and they've brought what's either a very nervous or very excited Blott down with them, so they can trace the possible routes Blott said he saw the rodent maybe take, filling their Glad Handle-Ties and noting heavy items along the way, and also so they can immediately encircle and discipline Kent Blott if it turns out he was yanking people's chains. Plus they make Blott be the one to take full trashbags and tie their plastic handles together and drag them back to where the expedition started — the entrance to the large smooth main tunnel by the boys' sauna — since none of them enjoys dragging full trashbags solo through dark tunnels with the rodential squeaking of match play and spectation far above. Chu holds a penlight in his teeth and writes heavy stuff down. They've filled several bags and gotten the lighter shit stacked off back enough to create a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump Room, around which Room hangs a strange sweet stale burny smell that none of them can place. The applause as Hal Incandenza barely takes the first set above sounds down here like faraway rain. The off-tunnel's dark as a pocket, but warm and dry, and there's surprisingly little dust. Ducts and coaxials running along the low ceiling make Whale and Tallat-Kelpsa have to crouch as they walk Point, clearing boxes and trying unsuccessfully to move fridgelettes back out of the way. There are several pockets of small but heavy dorm-size Maytag fridgelettes, the kind of thing no graduate takes with him, panelled in dark wood-grain plastic, some of them old models with three-prong plugs instead of chargers. Some of the empty fridgelettes have been indifferently scrubbed out and have their doors partway open and smell stale. Most of Chu's inventory for beefy-adult removal are either fridgelettes or locked trunks full of what sound like magazines and eight-year accumulations of pennies. The muffled rodential squeak of sneakers far overhead excites the Tunnel Club boys and puts them on edge. Philip Traub keeps making little squeaky noises and secretly tickling the back of people's necks, causing enormous excitement and much stopping and starting and tightly-enclosed whirling around, until Kieran McKenna captures Traub tickling Josh Gopnik in the bright beam of his P.B. light and Gopnik punches Traub in the radial nerve, and Traub clutches his arm and weeps and says he's quitting and going topside — Traub's the youngest kid here except for Blott and is a probationary second-string launcher in most Eschatons — and they have to stop and let Chu note and mark two discarded fridgelettes while Peterson and Gopnik try to distract and amuse Traub into staying and not retreating back up to Nwangi and making a high-pitched stink.