Infinite Jest (148 page)

The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy bear's head and is breathing slowly and evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under the blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-as-California-surfer-dude. The leader inhales gently and says 'The energies I'm feeling in the group are energies of unconditional love and acceptance for Kevin's Inner Infant.' Nobody else says anything, and the leader doesn't seem to need anybody to say anything. He looks down at the cage his hands have made on the bear and keeps subtly changing the shape of the cage. The guy Kevin, whose neck is now not only beet-red but shiny with embarrassed sweat between his shirt-collar and hair's hem, sobs even harder at the affirmation of love and support. The round leader's high hoarse voice had the same blandly kind didactic quality as Rusk's, as if always speaking to a not-too-bright child.

After some more cage-play and deep breathing the leader looks up and around and nods at nothing and says 'Maybe we could all name our feelings right now for Kevin and share how much we're caring for him and his Inner Infant right now, in his pain.’

Various bearded cross-legged guys speak up:

'I love you, Kevin.’

'I'm not judging you, Kevin.’

'Know just how you and the I.I. feel.’

'I'm feeling really close to you.’

'I'm feeling a lot of love for you right now, Kevin.’

'You're crying for two, guy.’

'Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin.’

'I'm not feeling like your crying is one bit unmanly or pathetic, fella.’

It's at this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open-mindedness and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous ('NA') Meeting, which seems already deeply under way and isn't one bit like he's imagined an even remotely hopeful antidrug Meeting would be like. It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing. Not one Substance or symptom of Substance-deprivation has been mentioned so far. And none of these guys looks like they've ever been engaged with anything more substantial than an occasional wine cooler, if he had to guess.

Hal's grim mood deepens as the round man up front now leans precariously over and down and opens a sort of toy-box under the blackboard by his chair and produces a cheap plastic portable CD laser-scanner and sets it on top of the toy-box, where it begins to issue a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music, mostly cello, with sporadic harps and chimes. The stuff spreads through the hot little room like melted butter, and Hal sinks lower in his orange chair and looks hard at the space-and-spacecraft emblem on his NASA glass.

'Kevin?' the leader says over the music. 'Kevin?' The sobbing man's hand lies over his face like a spider, and he doesn't even start to look up until the leader has said several times very blandly and kindly 'Kevin, do you feel okay about looking at the rest of the group?’

Kevin's red neck wrinkles as he looks up at the blond leader through his fingers.

The leader's made the cage again on his poor bear's squashed head. 'Can you share what you're feeling, Kevin?' he says. 'Can you name it?’

Kevin's voice is muffled by the hand he hides behind. 'I'm feeling my Inner Infant's abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,' he says, drawing shuddering breaths. His mauve sweater's shoulders tremble. 'I'm feeling my Inner Infant standing holding the bars of his crib and looking out of the bars . . . bars of his crib and crying for his Mommy and Daddy to come hold him and nurture him.' Kevin sobs twice in an apneated way. One arm holds his lap's bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a little stuffing start to come out of its mouth around its tongue, and a stalactite of that clear thin weepy-type mucus hangs from Kevin's nose just mm. over the throttled bear's head. 'And nobody's coming!' he sobs. 'Nobody's coming. I feel alone with my bear and plastic airplane-mobile and teething ring.’

Everybody's nodding in an affirming and pained way. No two beards are exactly the same fullness and design. A couple other sobs break out across the room. Everyone's bear stares blankly ahead.

The leader's nod is slow and meditative. 'And can you share your needs with the group right now, Kevin?’

'Please share, Kevin,' says a slim guy over by a black filing cabinet who sits like he's a veteran at sitting Indian-style in hard plastic chairs.

The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.

'The work we're here to do,' the leader says over the music, one hand now pressed pensively to the side of his big face, 'is to work on our dysfunctional passivity and tendency to wait silently for our Inner Infant's needs to be magically met. The energy I feel in the group now is that the group is supportively asking Kevin to nurture his Inner Infant by naming and sharing his needs out loud with the group. And I'm feeling how aware we all are how risky and vulnerable need-naming-out-loud must feel for Kevin right now.’

Everybody looks deadly serious. A couple guys are rubbing their bears' bellies pregnantly. The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside him is the inguinal gurgle of two heavy bran muffins swallowed at high speeds w/o liquid. The string of mucus from Kevin's nose trembles and swings. The slender guy who'd asked Kevin please to share is now waggling the arms of his teddy bear in an infantile way. Hal feels a wave of nausea flood his mouth with fresh saliva.

'We're asking you to name what your Inner Infant wants right now more than anything in the world,' the leader's saying to Kevin.

'To be loved and held!' Kevin keens, sobbing harder. His lachrymucus is now a thin silver string joining his nose and the fuzzy top of his bear's head. The bear's expression is seeming creepier to Hal by the second. Hal wonders what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody's Infantile revelation of need. Meanwhile Kevin is saying that his Inner Infant inside him had always hoped that some day his Mom and Dad would be there for him, to hold him and love him. He says but right from the start they'd never been there for him, leaving him and his brother with Hispanic nannies while they devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of psychotherapy and support groups. This takes a while to say, given all the snuffles and wracked spasms. Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone altogether, dead, smooshed by a dysfunc-tionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica Way on the way to Couples Counselling.

At this Hal's slumped head jerks up, his mouth oval with horror. He's all of a sudden realized that this guy who's seated at such an angle that Hal's been able to see only the obliquest portion of his profile is in fact Kevin Bain, his brother Orin's old E.T.A. doubles and chemical-mischief partner Marlon Bain's older brother, Kevin Bain, of Dedham MA, who the last Hal had heard had gotten his M.B.A. at Wharton and cleaned up with a string of Simulated Reality arcades all up and down the South Shore, back during the pre-Subsidized-Time Simulated Reality craze, before InterLace viewers and digital cartridges let you do your own customized Simulating right at home and the novelty wore off.
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The Kevin Bain whose childhood hobby was memorizing IRS capital-depreciation schedules and whose adult idea of a wild time
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had been putting extra marshmallows in his nightly cocoa, and who wouldn't have known a recreational drug if it walked up and poked him in the eye. Hal begins to scan for possible exits. The only door was the one he'd come in, which is in full view of most of the room. There are no windows at all.

Hal's chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This is one of those men's-issues-Men's-Movement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle's stepdad went to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick's grip poke out between his legs and yelling 'Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!’

Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear's head and saying it didn't look like his Inner Infant would ever get its wish. The gooey music's cello sounds like some sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it's in the middle of.

Sure enough, the round man, whose hand's left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor old Kevin Bain to honor and name his I.I.'s wounded wish anyway, to say 'Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love and hold me,' out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain goes ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good old adult mortified embarrassment to it, along with the racking sobs. A couple of the other men in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the arms of their teddy bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt County hydroponic marijuana that Pemulis occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile counterpart at the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so big and plump with high-Delta-9 resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The moist sounds right behind him turn out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Hal keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O. booklet the girl had given him. He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumb-prints on several of the pages, and that two pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal fears is an ancient dried booger, and now that the booklet's cover is dated January in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past, and that it's not impossible that the blandly hostile toothless girl at The Ennet facility had kertwanged him by giving him a dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide.

Kevin Bain keeps repeating 'Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me' in a kind of monotone of pathos. The gradually intensifying lisp in Please is apparently a performative invocation of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other fluids flow and roll. The warm round leader Harv's own eyes are a moist glassy blue. The CD scanner's cello is now into some sort of semi-jazzy pizzicato stuff that seems oxymoronic against the room's mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell that signifies somebody nearby has some athlete's-foot issues to confront, under his socks. Plus it's mystifying that 32A has no windows, given all the smoky-brown fenestra-tion Hal'd seen from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt's beard is one of those small rectangular ones that's easy to keep clear of the cup's rim. The back and side of Kevin Bain's hair has separated into spiky sweat-soaked strands, from the room's heat and the Infant's emotions.

All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told K. Bain's Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn't automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn't exactly sounded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn't consider himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.

The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks Kevin Bain if it feels to his Inner Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to appear cribside to meet his needs.

'No,' Kevin says very quietly. 'No, it doesn't, Harv.’

The leader is idly arranging his bear's splayed arms in different positions, so it looks like the bear's either waving or surrendering. 'Do you suppose you would be able to ask someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?’

The back of Kevin Bain's head doesn't move. Hal's whole digestive tract spasms at the prospect of watching two bearded adult males in sweaters and socks engage in surrogate Infant-hugging. He begins asking himself why he doesn't just fake a hideous coughing fit and flee Q.R.S.-32A with his fist over his face.

Harv's now waggling the bear's arms back and forth and making his voice high and cartoon-characterish and pretending to have his bear ask Kevin Bain's bear if it would maybe point to the man in the group Kevin Bain would most like to have hold and nurture and love him in loco parentis. Hal's spitting quietly down the side of his glass and brooding wretchedly at the fact that he's driven fifty supperless clicks to listen to a globular man in plaid socks pretend his teddy bear's speaking Latin when he looks up from the glass and is chilled to see that Kevin Bain has wiggled his Indian-style way around in his chair and is holding his bear way up by its underarms, just the way a father holds a toddler up for a public spect-op or parade, turning the throttled-looking bear this way and that, scanning the room — as Hal covers part of his face with a hand, pretending to scratch an eyebrow, praying not to be recognized — and finally manipulating the bear's arm so the plump brown fuzzy fingerless hand of the bear's pointing right in Hal's direction. Hal doubles over in a coughing spasm only half-faked, running decision-trees on various ruses for flight.

Just like his younger brother Marlon Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with a dark swart face. He looks sort of like an overdeveloped troll. And he has the same capacity for constant incredible sweating that always made Marlon Bain look to Hal, both on-court and off-, like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade. Except Kevin Bain's little glittery Bain eyes are also red and swollen with public weeping, and he's balding back from the temples in a way that gives him a widow's peak like nobody's business, and doesn't seem to recognize a post-pubescent Hal, and is pointing his bear's blunt hand Hal realizes finally after almost swallowing his plug of Kodiak not at Hal but at the mild-faced square-bearded older guy behind him, who's holding a spoon of vividly pink yogurt in front of his bear's open mouth, just touching its protruding tongue's red corduroy, pretending to be feeding the bear. Hal very casually puts the NASA glass between his legs and gets both hands under his chair-seat and hops the chair bit by bit over and out of the lines of sight and transit between Kevin Bain and the yogurt man. Harv, up front, is making a complex hand-signal to the yogurt man not to speak or move from his back-row orange chair no matter what; and then, as Kevin Bain wriggles cross-legged back around to face front again, Harv smoothly turns the hand-signal into a motion like he's smoothing his hair. The motion then becomes sincere and ruminative as the leader breathes deeply a couple of times. The music's settled back into its original nodding narcosis.