Infinite Jest (19 page)

And time in the p.m. locker room seems of limitless depth; they've all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows.

T'm thinking it's Tavis,' Freer says to them all in the mirror. 'Where there's excess work and suffering can fucking Tavis be far behind.’

'No, it's Schtitt,' Hal says.

'Schtitt was short a few wickets out of the old croquet set long before he got hold of us, men,' Pemulis says.

'Peemster and Hal.’

'Halation and Pemurama.’

Freer purses his little lips and expels air like he's blowing out a match, blowing some tiny grooming-remnant off the big mirror's glass. 'Schtitt just does what he's told like a good Nazi.’

'What the hail is that supposed to mean?' asks a Stice who's well known for asking How High Sir when Schtitt says Jump, now feeling at the carpet around him for something to throw at Freer. Ingersoll tosses Stice a woppsed-up towel, trying to be helpful, but Slice's eyes are on Freer's in the glass, and the towel hits him on the head and sits there, on his head. The room's emotions seem to be inverting themselves every couple seconds. There's half-cruel laughter at Stice as Hal struggles to his feet, rising in careful stages, putting most of his weight on the good ankle. Hal's towel falls off as he does his combination. Struck says something that's lost in the roar of a high-pressure toilet.

The feminized American stood at a slight angle to Marathe upon the outcropping. He stared out at the dusk-shadow they were now inside, and as well the increasingly complicated twinkle of the U.S.A. city Tucson, seeming slackly transfixed, Steeply, in the way vistas too large for the eye to contain transfix persons in a kind of torpid spectation.

Marathe seemed on the edge of sleep.

Even the voice of Steeply had a different timbre inside the shadow. 'They say it's a great and maybe even timeless love, Rod Tine's for your Luria person.’

Marathe grunted, shifting slightly in the chair.

Steeply said 'The sort that gets sung about, the kind people die for and then get immortalized in song. You got your ballads, your operas. Tristan and Isolde. Lancelot and what's-her-name. Agamemnon and Helen, Dante and Beatrice.’

Marathe's drowsy smile continued upward to become a wince. 'Narcissus and Echo. Kierkegaard and Regina. Kafka and that poor girl afraid to go to the postbox for the mail.’

'Interesting choice of example here, the mailbox.' Steeply pretended to chuckle.

Marathe came alert. Take off your wig and be shitting inside it, Hugh Steeply B.S.S. And the ignorance of you appalls me. Agamemnon had no relation with this queen. Menelaus was husband, him of Sparta. And you mean Paris. Helen and Paris. He of Troy.’

Steeply seemed amused in the idiotic way: 'Paris and Helen, the face that launched vessels. The horse: the gift which was not a gift. The anonymous gift brought to the door. The sack of Troy from inside.’

Marathe rose slightly on his stumps in the chair, showing some emotions at this Steeply. 'I am seated here appalled at the naïveté of history of your nation. Paris and Helen were the excuse of the war. All the Greek states in addition to the Sparta of Menelaus attacked Troy because Troy controlled the Dardanelles and charged the ruinous tolls for passage through, which the Greeks, who would like very dearly the easy sea passage for trade with the Oriental East, resented with fury. It was for commerce, this war. The one-quotes "love" one-does-not-quote of Paris for Helen merely was the excuse.’

Steeply, genius of interviewing, sometimes affected more than usual idiocy with Marathe, which he knew baited Marathe. 'Everything reduces itself to politics for you guys. Wasn't that whole war just a song? Did that war even really take place, that anybody knows of?’

'The point is that what launches vessels of war is the state and community and its interests,' Marathe said without heat, tiredly. 'You only wish to enjoy to pretend for yourself that the love of one woman could do this, launch so many vessels of alliance.’

Steeply was stroking the perimeters of the mesquite-scratch, which made his shrug appear awkward. 'I don't think I'd be so sure. Those around Rod the God say the man would die twice for her. Say he wouldn't have to even think about it. Not just that he'd let the whole of O.N.A.N. come down, if it came to that. But'd die.’

Marathe sniffed. 'Twice.’

'Without even having to pause and think,' Steeply said, stroking at his lip's electrolysistic rash in a ruminative fashion. 'It's the reason most of us think he's still there, why he's still got President Gentle's ear. Divided loyalties are one thing. But if he does it for love — well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political, wouldn't you say?' Steeply smiled broadly down at Marathe.

Marathe's own betrayal of A.F.R.: for medical care for the conditions of his wife; for (Steeply might imagine to think) love of a person, a woman. 'Tragic saying as if Rodney Tine of Nonspecificity were not responsible for choosing it, as the insane are not responsible,' said Marathe quietly.

Steeply now was smiling even more broadly. 'It has a kind of tragic quality, timeless, musical, that how could Gentle resist?’

Marathe's tone now became derisive despite his legendary sangfroid in matters of technical interviews: 'These sentiments from a person who allows them to place him in the field as an enormous girl with tits at the cock-eyed angle, now discoursing on tragic love.’

Steeply, impassive and slackly ruminative, picked at the lipstick of the corner of his mouth with a littlest finger, removing some grain of grit, gazing out from their shelf of stone. 'But sure. The fanatically patriotic Wheelchair Assassins of southern Quebec scorn this type of interpersonal sentiment between people.' Looking now down at Marathe. 'No? Even though it's just this that has brought you Tine, yours for Luria to command, should it ever come to that?’

Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. 'Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, "fanatic," do they teach you it comes from the Latin for "temple"? It is meaning, literally, "worshipper at the temple."

'Oh Jesus now here we go again,' Steeply said.

'As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. 'Herrrrrre we go.’

Marathe ignored this. 'Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’

'How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’

'You U.S.A.'s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self.’

Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: 'Ohh . . . Can-ada.. ..’

Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. 'Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?’

The A.F.R.'s extensive file on Steeply included mention of his recent divorce. Marathe already had informed Steeply of the existence of this file. He wondered how badly Steeply doubted what he reported, Marathe, or whether he assumed its truth simply. Though the persona of him changed, Steeply's car for all field assignments was this green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for aspirin upon its side — the file knew this stupidity — Marathe was sure the sedan with its aspirin advertisement was somewhere below them, unseen. The fanatically beloved car of M. Hugh Steeply. Steeply was watching or gazing at the darkness of the desert floor. He did not respond. His expression of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these.

Marathe said, 'This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?’

'This from a man who —’

Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. 'For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.'s? What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Québecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?’

Steeply's face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Québecers found repellent on Americans. 'But you assume it's always choice, conscious, decision. This isn't just a little naïve, Rémy? You sit down with your little accountant's ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?’

'The alternatives are —’

'What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?’

Marathe's sniff held disdain. 'Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.’

A silence ensued this.

Marathe shifted in his chair. 'In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.’

Another silence ensued. Steeply, who had made his early career with Unspecified Services conducting technical interviews,
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used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface. Here it defused Marathe. Marathe felt the ironies of his position. One strap of Steeply's prostheses' brassiere had slipped into view below his shoulder, where it cut deeply into his flesh of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of creosote, but much less strongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe had smelled at close range. Steeply's back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said:

'You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: "tragically, unvoluntarily, lost."

Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field Operative Steeply may not have been truly sneering. The city Tucson's lume appeared a bleached and ghostly white in the unhumid air. Crepuscular animals rustled and perhaps scuttled. Dense and unbeautiful spider webs of the poisonous U.S.A. species of spider Black Widow were beneath the shelf and the incline's other outcroppíngs. And when the wind hit certain angles in the mountainside it moaned. Marathe thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs.
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He attempted in English to sing:

' "Ob Say, Land of the Free." ‘

And they both could feel this queer dry night-desert chill descend with the moon's gibbous rise — a powdery wind down below making dust to shift and cactus needles whistle, the sky's stars adjusting to the color of low flame — but were themselves not yet chilled, even Steeply's sleeveless dress: he and Marathe stood and sat in the form-fitting astral spacesuit of warmth their own radiant heat produced. This is what happens in dry night climes, Marathe was learning. His dying wife had never once left southwestern Quebec. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulents' remote embryonic dissemina-tory Ops base down here in Southwest U.S.A. seemed to him like the surface of the moon: four corrugated Quonsets and kiln-baked earth and air that swam and shimmered like the area behind jet engines. Empty and dirty-windowed rooms, doorknobs hot to touch and hell-stench inside the empty rooms.

Steeply was continuing saying nothing while he tamped down another of his long Belgian cigarettes. Marathe continued to hum the U.S.A. song, all over the map in terms of key.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

'Because none of them really meant any of it,' Hal tells Kent Blott. 'The end-of-the-day hatred of all the work is just part of the work. You think Schtitt and deLint don't know we're going to sit in there together after showers and bitch? It's all planned out. The bitchers and moaners in there are just doing what's expected.’

'But I look at these guys that've been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering, hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel tired and suffer, I feel this what, dread, this dread, I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance at a like a pro career that I'm starting to get this dready feeling a career in the Show means even more suffering, if I'm skele-tally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I get there.’

Blott's on his back on the shag carpet — all five of them are — stretched out splay-limbed with their heads up supported on double-width velourish throw-pillows on the floor of V.R.6, one of the three little Viewing Rooms on the second floor of the Comm.-Ad. Bldg., two flights up from the locker rooms and three from the main tunnel's mouth. The room's new cartridge-viewer is huge and almost painfully high-definition; it hangs flat on the north wall like a large painting; it runs off a refrigerated chip; the room's got no TP or phone-console; it's very specialized, just a player and viewer, and tapes; the cartridge-player sits on the second shelf of a small bookcase beneath the viewer; the other shelves and several other cases are full of match-cartridges, motivational and visualization cartridges — InterLace, Tat-suoka, Yushityu, SyberVision. The 300-track wire from the cartridge-player up to the lower-right corner of the wall-hung viewer is so thin it looks like a crack in the wall's white paint. Viewing Rooms are windowless and the air from the vent is stale. Though when the viewer's on it looks like the room has a window.