Infinite Jest (165 page)

Diehl looks at McDade and then says there's also disparaging news about the .44 Item, that by everybody's reconstruction of events it's more than likely Lenz might have promoted the Item up off the lawn when he legged it off the E.M.P.H.H. complex just ahead of the Finest. Because it's fucking vanished, and nobody'd have rat-holed it and not given it up knowing what's at stake for the good old G-Man in the deal. Gately makes a whole new kind of noise.

McDade says the more upbeat news is that Lenz has been possibly spotted, that Ken E. and Burt F. Smith had seen what looked like either R. Lenz or C. Romero after a wasting illness on their way back from wheeling Burt F.S. to a meeting in Kenmore Square, mostly from the side of the back they'd seen him, wearing a back-split tux and sombrero w/ balls, and apparently officially relapsed, back Out There, drunk as a maroon, so totally legless when they saw him he was doing a drunk's old hurricane-walk, fighting his way from parking meter to parking meter and clinging to each parking meter. Wade McDade here thinks to insert that the confirmed scuttlebutt is that E.M.P.H.H. is getting ready to rent out Unit #3 to a long-term mental-health agency caring for people with incapacitating agoraphobia, and that everybody at the House is speculating on what a constantly crowded and cabin-feverish place that's going to be, what with the terribleness of the predicted winter coming up. Diehl says his nasal sinus can always tell when it's going to snow, and his sinus is starting to predict at least flurries for maybe as early as tonight. They never think to tell Gately what day it is. That Gately can't communicate even this most basic of requests makes him want to scream. McDade, in what's either an intimate aside or a knife-twist at a Staffer who's in no position to enforce anything, confides that he and Emil Minty are arranging with Parias-Carbo — who works for an Ennet House alum at All-Bright Printing down near the Jackson-Mann School — for engraved-looking formal invitations for the agoraphobic folks in Unit #3 to all just come on out and over to Ennet House for a crowded noisy outdoor Welcome-to-the-E.M.P.H.H.-Neighborhood bash. And now Gately knows for sure it was McDade and Minty that put the HELP WANTED sign up under the window of the lady in Unit #4 that shouts for Help. The general level of tension in the room increases. Gavin Diehl clears his throat and says everybody says to say Gately's like wicked missed back at the House and everybody said to say ' 's up?' and that they hope the G-Man's up and back kicking residential ass very soon; and McDade produces an unsigned Get Well card from his pocket and puts it carefully through the railing's bars, where it lies next to Gately's arm and begins to open up from being folded and shoved in a pocket. It's clear the thing was shoplifted.

It's probably the pathetic unsigned folded hot card, but Gately's suddenly stricken by the heat of the waves of self-pity and resentment he feels about not only the card but about the prospect of these booger-chewing clowns not standing up to eyewitness for his se offendendo after he just tried to do his sober job on one of their behalf and is now lying here in a level of increasing dextral discomfort these limp punks couldn't imagine if they tried, getting ready to have to say no to grinning Pakistanis about his Disease's drug of choice with an invasive tube down his mouth and no notebook after he asked for one, and needing to shit and to know the day and no big black nurse in view, and unable to move — it suddenly seems awful starry-eyed to be willing to look on the course of events as evidence of the protection and care of a Higher Power — it's a bit hard to see why a quote Loving God would have him go through the sausage-grinder of getting straight just to lie here in total discomfort and have to say no to medically advised Substances and get ready to go to jail just because Pat M. doesn't have the brass to make these selfish bottom-feeding dipshits stand up and do the right thing for once. The resentment and fear make cords stand out on Gately's purple neck, and he looks ferocious but not at all jolly. — Because what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn't, and He gets you straight just so you can feel all the more keenly every bevel and edge of the special punishments He's got lined up for you? — Because why the fuck say no to a whole rubber bulbful of Demerol's somnolent hum, if these are the quote rewards of sobriety and rabidly-active work in AA? The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing. Way beyond anything he'd felt when hapless Canadians punched or shot him. This was a sudden total bitter impotent Job-type rage that always sends any sober addict falling back and up inside himself, like vapor up a chimney. Diehl and McDade were backing away from him. As well they fucking might. Gately's big head felt hot and cold, and his pulse-line on the overhead monitor started to look like the Rockies.

The residents, between Gately and the door, wide-eyed, now suddenly parted to let someone pass. At first all Gately could see between them was the kidney-shaped plastic bedpan and a cylindrical syringe-snouted ketchup-bottlish thing with FLEET down the side in cheery green. It took this equipment a second to signify. Then he saw the nurse that came forward bearing the stuff, and his raging heart fell out of him with a thud. Diehl and McDade made hearty-farewell noises and melted out the door with the vague alacrity of seasoned drug-addicts. The nurse was no slot-mouthed penguin or booming mammy. This nurse looked like something out of a racy-nursewear catalogue, like somebody that had to detour blocks out of her way to avoid construction sites at lunchtime. Gately's projected image of his and this gorgeous nurse's union unfolded and became instantly grotesque: him prone and ass-up on the porch swing, she white-haired and angelic and bearing something away in a kidney-shaped pan to the towering pile behind the retirement-cottage. Everything angry in him evaporated as he got ready to just fucking die of mortification. The nurse stood there and twirled the bedpan on one finger and flexed the long Fleet cylinder a couple times and made an arc of clear fluid come out the tip and hang in the win-dowlight, like a gunslinger twirling his six-shooter around to casually show off, smiling in a way that simply snapped Gately's spine. He began to mentally recite the Serenity Prayer. When he moved he could smell his own sour smell. Not to mention the time and pain involved in rolling onto his left side and exposing his ass and pulling his knees to his chest with one arm — 'Hug those knees like they were your Sweetie, is what we say,' she said, putting a terribly soft cool hand on Gately's ass — without jostling the catheter or I.V.s, or the thick taped tube that went down his mouth to God knows where.

I was going to go back up to see about Stice's defenestration, to check on Mario and change my socks and examine my expression in the mirror for unintentional hilarity, to listen to Orin's phone-messages and then the protracted-death aria from Tosca once or twice. There is no music for free-floating misery like Tosca.

I was moving down the damp hall when it hit. I don't know where it came from. It was some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during a match. I'd never felt quite this way off-court before. It wasn't wholly unpleasant. Unexplained panic sharpens the senses almost past enduring. Lyle had taught us this. You perceive things very intensely. Lyle's counsel had been to turn the perception and attention on the fear itself, but he'd shown us how to do this only on-court, in play. Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects. But it wasn't disorienting. The intensity wasn't unmanageable. It was just intense and vivid. It wasn't like being high, but it was still very: lucid. The world seemed suddenly almost edible, there for the ingesting. The thin skin of light over the baseboards' varnish. The cream of the ceiling's acoustic tile. The deerskin-brown longitudinal grain in the rooms' doors' darker wood. The dull brass gleam of the knobs. It was without the abstract, cognitive quality of Bob or Star. The turn-signal red of the stairwell's lit EXIT sign. Sleepy T. P. Peterson came out of the bathroom in a dazzling plaid robe, his face and feet salmon-colored from the showers' heat, and vanished across the hall into his room without seeing me wobbling, leaning against the cool mint wall of the hallway.

But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with an overcog-nitive, bad-trip-like element that I didn't recognize from the very visceral on-court attacks of fear. Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. The concentration of attention did something to it. What didn't seem fresh and unfamiliar seemed suddenly old as stone. It all happened in the space of a few seconds. The familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect. The total number of times I'd schlepped up the rough cement steps of the stairwell, seen my faint red reflection in the paint of the fire door, walked the 56 steps down the hall to our room, opened the door and eased it gently back flush in the jamb to keep from waking Mario. I reexperienced the years' total number of steps, movements, the breaths and pulses involved. Then the number of times I would have to repeat the same processes, day after day, in all kinds of light, until I graduated and moved away and then began the same exhausting process of exit and return in some dormitory at some tennis-power university somewhere. Maybe the worst part of the cognitions involved the incredible volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life. Meal after meal, plus snacks. Day after day after day. Experiencing this food in toto. Just the thought of the meat alone. One megagram? Two megagrams? I experienced, vividly, the image of a broad cool well-lit room piled floor to ceiling with nothing but the lightly breaded chicken fillets I was going to consume over the next sixty years. The number of fowl vivisected for a lifetime's meat. The amount of hydrochloric acid and bilirubin and glucose and glycogen and gloconol produced and absorbed and produced in my body. And another, dimmer room, filled with the rising mass of the excrement I'd produce, the room's double-locked steel door gradually bowing outward with the mounting pressure.... I had to put my hand out against the wall and stand there hunched until the worst of it passed. I watched the floor dry. Its dull shine brightened behind me in the snowlight from the east window. The wall's baby blue was complexly filigreed with bumps and clots of paint. An unmopped glob of Kenkle's spit sat by the corner of V.R.5's door's jamb, quivering slightly as the door rattled in its frame. There were scuffles and thumps from upstairs. It was still snowing like hell.

I lay on my back on the carpet of Viewing Room 5, still on the second floor, fighting the sense that I'd either never been here before or had spent lifetimes just here. The entire room was panelled in a cool yellow shimmering material called Kevlon. The viewer took up half the south wall and was dead and gray-green. The carpet's green was close to this color, too. The instructional and motivational cartridges were in a large glass bookcase whose central shelves were long and whose top and bottom shelving tapered down to almost nothing. Ovoid would convey the case's shape. I had the NASA glass with my toothbrush in it balanced on my chest. It rose whenever I inhaled. I'd had the NASA glass since I was a little boy, and its decal of white-helmeted figures waving authoritatively through the windows of a prototype shuttle was faded and incomplete.

After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson put his wet-combed head in the door and said LaMont Chu wanted to know whether what was happening outside qualified as a blizzard. It took over a minute of my not saying anything for him to go away. The ceiling panels were grotesquely detailed. They seemed to come after you like some invasive E.T.A. patron backing you up against the wall at a party. The ankle throbbed dully in the snowstorm's low pressure. I relaxed my throat and simply let the excess saliva run post-nasally back and down. The Moms's mother had been ethnic Québecois, her father Anglo-Canadian. The term used in the Yale Journal of Alcohol Studies for this man was binge-drinker. All my grandparents were deceased. Himself's middle name had been Orin, his father's own father's name. The V.R.'s entertainment cartridges were arrayed on wall-length shelves of translucent polyethylene. Their individual cases were all either clear plastic or glossy black plastic. My full name is Harold James Incandenza, and I am 183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet. Himself designed the Academy's indirect lighting, which is ingenious and close to full-spectrum. V.R.5 contained a large couch, four reclining chairs, a midsized recumbency, six green corduroy spectation-pillows stacked in a corner, three end tables, and a coffee table of mylar with inlaid coasters. The overhead lighting in every E.T.A. room came from a small carbon-graphite spotlight directed upward at a complexly alloyed reflecting plate above it. No rheostat was required; a small joystick controlled the brightness by altering the little spot's angle of incidence to the plate. Himself's films were arranged on the third shelf of the entertainment-case. The Moms's full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D. She is 197 cm. tall in flats and still came up only to Himself's ear when he straightened and stood erect. For almost a month in the weight room, Lyle had been saying that the most advanced level of Vaipassana or 'Insight' meditation consisted in sitting in fully awakened contemplation of one's own death. I had held Big Buddy sessions in V.R.5 throughout the month of September. The Moms had grown up without a middle name. The etymology of the term blizzard is essentially unknown. The full-spectrum lighting system had been a labor of love from Himself to the Moms, who'd agreed to leave Brandeis and head up the Academy's academics and had an ethnic Canadian's horror of fluorescent light; but by the time the system had been installed and de-bugged, the gestalt of the Moms's lumiphobia had extended to all overhead lighting, and she never used her office's spot-and-plate system.

Petropolis Kahn put his large shaggy head in and asked what was all this brooha upstairs, the thumps and cryings-out. He asked whether I was going to breakfast. The scuttlebutt on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said. I closed my eyes and recalled that I'd known Petropolis Kahn for three years and three months. Kahn went away. I could feel his head's withdrawal from the doorway: a very slight suction in the room's air. I needed to fart but had not so far farted. The atomic weight of carbon is 12.01 and change. A small and carefully monitored game of Eschaton slated for the mid-A.M., with (according to rumor) Pemulis himself as game-master, was certain to be snowed out. It had begun to occur to me, driving back from Natick on Tuesday, that if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me. The founder of the sub-14's’