Infinite Jest (133 page)

Fortier bid the A.F.R. methodically to continue the search. Younger volunteers were rolled into the room of storage on a rotating basis to sample each set of cartridges. Aside from some bickering over the Portuguese pornography, the rotation proceeded with valor and care. The plastic-wrapped cadavers began to swell, but the plastic maintained hygienic conditions adequately for viewing samples of the many cartridges in the room of storage. The search and inventory proceeded in a painstaking and slow fashion.

M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search's middle, to help facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy. There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans' field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor.

The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak substitute for respect. As if he were a sickly child, Fortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps flanked steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those standing upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose interior circuitry was responsive to large-bundle neural stimuli from his stumps, which with metal crutches whose bracelets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling parody of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional 'sensitivity' to his 'right' of the 'equal access'; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose. Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice.

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety. A few days before the debacle in which Don Gately got hurt, Joelle had begun to worry obsessively about her teeth. Smoking 'base cocaine eats teeth, corrodes teeth, attacks the enamel directly. Chandler Foss had explained all this to her at supper, showing her his corroded stumps. In her Latin cloth purse now she carried a traveller's brush and expensive toothpaste with alleged enamel-revitalizers and anti-corrosives. Several of the Ennet House residents who'd hit bottom with the glass pipe had no teeth or blackened and disintegrating teeth; the sight of Wade McDade's or Chandler Foss's teeth gave Joelle the fantods like nothing at meetings could. The toothpaste was only recently available over the counter and was a whole level of power and expense above standard smoker's polish.

As she lies on her side beside Kate Gompert's empty bunk, her veil's selvage tucked secure between pillow and jaw, and Charlotte Treat also asleep across the lit room, Joelle dreams that Don Gately, unhurt and mid-South-accented, is ministering to her teeth. He is bibbed in dental white, humming softly to himself, his big hands deft as he plucks instruments from the gleaming chair-side tray. Her chair is dental and canted back, yielding her face up to him, her legs shut tight and stretching up and out before her. Dr. Don's eyes are abstractly kind, concerned for her teeth; and his thick fingers, as he inserts things to hold her open, are gloveless and taste warm and clean. Even the light seems sterilely clean. There is no assistant; the dentist is solo, leaning in above her, humming absent chords as he probes. His head is massive and vaguely square. In the dream she is concerned for her teeth and feels Gately shares her concern. She feels good that he makes no chitchat and probably doesn't know her name. There's very little eye-contact. He is completely intent on her teeth. He is there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor's message. His bib hangs by a necklace of tiny steel balls and could not be whiter, his head haloed with a strap and a polished metal disk attached to the strap just above his eyes, a tiny mirror of stainless steel, clean as the instruments' tray; and the dream's yielding and trustful quality of calm is undercut only by the view of her face in the halo's mirror, the disk like a third eye in Gately's broad clean forehead: because she can see her face, convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, her face all bug-eyes and sunken cheeks, lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes; and as the dentist's warm thick fingers gently draw her lips back she looks up into his head's mirror at long rows of all canine teeth, tapered and sharp, with then more rows of canines behind them, in reserve. The countless rows of the teeth are all sharp and strong and unblackened but tinged at the tips with an odd kind of red, as of old blood, the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat. These are teeth that have been up to things she hasn't known about, she tries to say around the fingers. The dentist hums, probing. In the dream Joelle looks up into Don Gately's forehead's dental mirror's disk and is seized with a fear of her teeth, a terror, and as her spread mouth spreads farther to cry out in fear all she can see in the little round mirror are endless red-stained rows of teeth leading back and away down a pitch-black pipe, and the image of all these rows of teeth in the disk blots out the big dentist's good face as he probes with a hook and says he assures her that these can be saved.

Then, by the time Fortier was able to return to the dismantled shop, they had located a third cartridge emblazed with the embossed smile and letters disclaiming need of happy pursuit, and, after some regretful losses, they had secured and verified it, the samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis.

Fortier was told the story. The cell's young Desjardins had been taking his turn in the viewing rotation, seated with young Tassigny in the room of storage during the hours of early morning, sampling the dregs of unshelved entertainments found in kitchen-can waste bags in the same closet the Anti-tois' cadavers were swelling within. Desjardins had just moments before complained of the wasted time of cartridges scheduled for the coffre d'amas.

Tassigny, who had been in the room of storage with Desjardins, then was saved by the need to leave this room to change the bag of his partial colos-tomy. But, Marathe reported, they had lost Desjardins, and the older and valued Joubet also, who rolled against orders into the room of storage to see why Desjardins had not been sending out the tapes for more tapes to sample. Both were lost. They had not lost more only because someone had thought to wake up Broullîme, whom Fortier had briefed with care on procedures for if the actual Entertainment was found by this viewing. But two were lost — Joubet the red-bearded workhorse, who loved to pop wheelies, and young Desjardins, so filled with the idealism and so young as to be still feeling the phantom pains in his stumps. Rémy Marathe reported that the two had been made comfortable since their loss, allowed to remain in the locked room of storage and view the Entertainment again and again, silent behind the door except when the watch-detail reported the hearing of cries of impatience at the player's rewinder, to rewind. Marathe reported they had declined to come out for water or food, or Joubet — who was diabétique — for his insulin. M. Broullîme estimated that it would be a matter of hours now for Joubet, perhaps maybe one day or two days for Desjardins. Fortier had sadly said 'Bôf and acceptingly shrugged: all knew the sacrifices that might have been required: all viewing details had taken their chances at random in the rotation of viewing.

On Fortier's return, Marathe delivered also the expected bad news of the finding of it: there was no need yet for high-rpm hardware of duplication: the found copy was Read-Only.
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Philosophical, Fortier reminded the A.F.R. that they did now encouragingly know the Entertainment of such power did truly exist, for themselves, and could thus gird their courage and fortitude for the more indirect task of forfeiting hopes of securing a Master copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the auteur's own cartridge, from which all Read-Only copies had presumably been copied.

Thus, he said, now the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview known persons associated with the Entertainment and locating the original maker's duplicable Master copy. None of this would have been worthy of the risk had they not now determined, through the heroic sacrifices of Joubet and Desjardins, that the device for extending O.N.A.N.'s self-destructing logic to its final conclusion lay within their arduous grasp.

Fortier gave numerous orders. The platoon of A.F.R. remained in the closed Anritoi Entertainent shop, behind their lingual window shade. Surveillance on the hated F.L.Q.'s bureau centrale, in the poorly disciplined house on Allston's Rue de Brainerd — this was suspended, the A.F.R. personnel pulled in and relocated to this commandeered Inman Square shop, where Fortier and Marathe and M. Broullîme coordinated phases of activity in this next more arduous and indirect phase, and reviewed tactics also.

The deceased auteur's colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. Their concentration of place worked in the favor of this. An employee at the Academy of Tennis of Enfield had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student already inside for closer work of surveillance. In the Desert, the redoubtable Mile. Luria P------was winning necessary confidences with her usual alacrity. An expensive source in the Subject's former department of the M.I.T. University had reported the Entertainment's probable performer's last known employment — the small Cambridge radio station which Marathe and Beausoleil had pronounced Weee — where she had donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity.

Attentions were to be focused on the cartridge's performer and on the Academy of Tennis of the auteur's estate. The fact that the players of the Academy were to play a provincially-selected team from Quebec would have been easier to exploit had the A.F.R. possessed a tennis player of talent and lower extremities. Inquiries into the composition and travel of the Québecois team were under way from sources at home in Papineau.

On the day of Fortier's return also, the performer's radio program's technical engineer of radio had been acquired in a public but low-risk operation whose success had raised hopeful spirits for the acquisitions of more directly related persons to the Entertainment in this next phase. This person of U.S.A. radio had divulged all he professed to know under the mere descriptive threat of technical-interview procedures. Marathe, the best lay judge of Americans' veracity which the cell possessed, believed the veracity of the engineer; but nevertheless a formal technical interview had proceeded, justified in order to verify. The young and eruption-studded person's report remained consistent two levels past average U.S.A. endurance, the only variance involving several curious claims that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was defensive in bed.

Today, Fortier himself, and Marathe, young Balbalis, R. Ossowiecke — all those with the better English — were thus now therefore making the rounds of all Substance-Difficulty-Rehabilitation facilities in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and demi-maisons within a 25-km. radius. Procedures for expanding the radius of inquiry by factors of two and three had been pre-formulated, teams assembled, lines rehearsed. Joubet and then Desjardins had succumbed and been transported north by van as well with the remains of the Antitois' remains. The U.S.A. student radio engineering person, the veracity of whose limited statements of the Subject's whereabouts Broullîme had verified to within +/— (.35) of assurance well before debriefing-levels incompatible with physical existence, had been allowed several hours to recover, then had become of service as the A.F.R.'s first Subject in field-tests of the samizdat cartridge's motivational range. The room of storage again was utilized for this. His head immobilized with some straps, the test Subject had viewed the Entertainment twice at gratis, without the application of any motivational inquiry. For inquiry into the degree of motivation the cartridge will induce, M. Broullîme had rolled himself blindfolded into the room of storage holding an orthopedic saw and informed the Subject of the test that, as of beginning now, each subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from the Subject's extremities. And handed the Subject the orthopedic saw in question, also. Broullîme's explanation to Fortier was that thus a matrix could be created to compute the statistical relation between (n) the number of times the Subject replayed the Entertainment and (t) the amount of time he took to decide and remove a digit for each subsequent (n +1) viewing. The goal was to confirm with statistical assurance the Subject's desire for viewing and reviewing as incapable of satiation. There could be no index of diminishing satisfaction as in the econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. For the samizdat Entertainment's allure to be macro-politically lethal, the ninth digit of extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second. Broullîme, personally he had some skepticism about this. But this was Broullîme's function in his role in the cell: expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur.

And then naturally also a wider range of field-test Subjects would then be required, to verify that this Subject's responses were not merely subjective and typical only of a certain sensibility of entertainment-consumer. The bus window yielded a faint and ghostly reflection of Fortier, and, through that faint view, the lights of urban life outside the bus. Somerville Massachusetts U.S.A.'s Phoenix House administrative person had listened to Fortier's delivery with shows of great compassion, then explained with patience that they were unable to admit addicted persons for whom English was the secondary language. D 'accord, though he was pretending disappointment. Fortier had been able to see the admitted addicts of Phoenix House holding a gathering in the room of living outside the office door: no person among them wore a veil of facial concealment, and so c'est ça. Four small teams were at this moment rolling through the streets and small streets and alleys of the unpleasant district of the Antitoi establishment, for the purpose of acquiring additional Subjects for M. Broullîme for the time when the Subject's digits were expended. The Subjects for suitability had to be passively undefended enough to be acquired publicly with quiet, yet not damaged in the brains or under the influence of the many of the district's intoxicant compounds. The A.F.R. were highly trained in patience and to be disciplined.