Infinite Jest (197 page)

'Q-’

'I'm not going to talk about it.’

'Q.’

'No and don't insult my intelligence, I'm not going to talk about why I don't want to talk about it. If this is going to be a Moment article, Hallie's going to read it, and then he'll read it to Booboo, and I'm not talking about The Stork's death or the Moms's stability in a thing where they'll read about it and have to read some authoritative report on my take on it instead of coming to their own terms about it. With it, rather. Terms with, terms about. No, terms with it.’

'...’

'They both might have to wait until they get away from there before they can even realize what's going on, that the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats. All these terms that became cliches — denial, schizogenic, pathogenic family like systems and so on and so forth. A former acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.’

'...’

'I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy years, is all I'll say.' 'Q.’

'The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion, is all I'll say.’

'All right, I'll relate one antidote
^b
that might be more revealing of the Moms's emotional weather than any adjective. Jesus, see, I start explicitly referring to parts of speech just thinking about the whole thing. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.’

'Q.’

'I'm sorry? Right then, one illustrative thing. Which thing to pick. Embarrassment of riches. I'll pick one at random. I think I was maybe twelve. I was in 12's, I know, on that summer's tour. Though I was playing 12's when I was still ten. It was ten to thirteen that I was regarded as gifted, with a tennis future. I began to decline around what should have been puberty. Call me let's say twelve. People were talking about NAFTA and something called the quote Information Turnpike and there was still broadcast TV, though we had a satellite dish. The Academy wasn't even a twinkle in anybody's eye. The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me age ten. We still lived in Weston, known also as Volvoland. The Moms gardened like a fiend out there. This was something else she had to do. Had a thing about. Hadn't gone to indoor plants yet. Called the garden's crops her Green Babies. Wouldn't let us eat the zucchini. Never picked it, it got monstrous and dry and fell off and rotted. Big fun. But her real thing was preparing the garden every spring. She started making lists and pricing supplies and drafting outlines in January. Did I mention her own father had been a potato farmer, at one time a millionaire potato-baron-type farmer, in Quebec?

'But so it's early March. Are those earrings electric, or is it you? How come I've never seen those earrings up to now? I thought women who could bring off copper earrings never wore anything but copper. You should see yourself in this light. Fluorescence isn't kind to most women. It must take an exceptional kind —’

'Q.’

'In the Moms's family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad's plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms's home town's wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country. I'd have to try to recall the town. But so but then so the Moms is out in the cold garden. It's March and it's co-wold. I've got this story down. I've related this incident to several family-type professionals, and not one eyebrow stayed steady among them. This is the sort of antidote that makes pathogenic-systems-pros' eyebrows go all the way up and over their skull and disappear down the back of their neck.’

'So then I'm let's say thirteen, which means Hallie's four. The Moms is in the backyard garden, tilling the infamously flinty New England soil with a rented Rototiller. The situation is ambiguous between whether it's the Moms steering the Rototiller or vice versa. The old machine, full of gas I'd slopped through a funnel — the Moms secretly believes petroleum products give you leukemia, her solution is to pretend to herself she doesn't know what's wrong when the thing won't work and to stand there wringing her hands and let some eager-to-please thirteen-year-old puff out his chest at being able to diagnose the problem, and then I pour the gas. The Rototiller is loud and hard to control. It roars and snorts and bucks and my mother's stride behind it is like the stride of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard, she's leaving drunken staggery footprints behind her in the tilled dirt, behind the thing. There's something about a very very tall woman trying to operate a Rototiller. The Moms is incredibly tall, way taller than everybody except The Stork, who towered even over the Moms. Of course she'd be horrified if she ever brought herself to recognize what she was doing, orchestrating a little kid into handling the gas that she thinks might be cancerous; she doesn't even know she's phobic about gas. She's wearing two pairs of work-gloves and plastic surgery-type bags over her espadrilles, which were the only footwear she could garden in. And a Fukoama microfiltration pollution mask, which you might remember those from that period. Her toes are blue in the dirty plastic bags. I'm a few meters ahead of the Moms, in charge of preemptive rock- and clod-removal. That's her term. Preemptive rock- and clod-removal.

'Now work with me, see this with me. In the middle of this tilling here comes my little brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing some kind of fuzzy red pajamas and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day yellow smile-faces on both toes. We've been at it maybe an hour and half, and the garden's dirt is just about tilled when Hal conies out and down off the pressure-treated redwood deck and comes walking very steadily and seriously toward the border of the garden the Moms had surveyed out with little sticks and string. He has his little hand out, he's holding out something small and dark and he's coming toward the garden as the Rototiller snorts and rattles behind me, dragging the Moms. As he gets closer the thing in his hand resolves into something that just doesn't look pleasant at all. Hal and I look at each other. His expression is very serious even despite that his lower lip is having a sort of little epileptic fit, which means he's getting ready to bawl. That's with a w. I remember the air was gray with dust and the Moms had her glasses on. He holds the thing out toward the Moms's figure. I squint. The thing covering his palm and hanging over the sides of the palm is a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold. Underline big and old. It must have come from some hot furnace-hidden corner of the basement, some corner she must have missed with the flamethrower, after the flooding we had every January thaw. I heft a clod or rock, I'm staring, every follicle I've got is bunched and straining. You could feel the tension, it was like standing down at Sunstrand Plaza when they fired the transformers, every follicle bunches and strains. It was a sort of nasal green, black-speckled, hairy like a peach is hairy. Also some orange speckles. A patch of very bad-news-type mold. Hal looks at me in the noise, his lower lip all over the place. He looks to the Moms, the Moms is intent on a plumb-straight Rototilled line, weaving. The piece is that the mold looks, like, strangely incomplete. As in it dawns on me right then chewed on, Helen. And yes as I squint some sickening hairy stuff is still there like impacted in the kid's front teeth and hairily smeared around the mouth.

'Be there with me, Helen. Feel the sort of Wagnerish clouds gather. Hallie always said there was always this sense as a kid with the Moms that the whole cosmos was just this side of fulminating into boiling clouds of elemental gas and was being held materially together only through heroic exercise of will and ingenuity on the part of the Moms.

'Everything slows waaay down. She's coming around with the machine at the end of a row and sees Hallie wearing his happy-slippers outside in the cold, which just in itself is enough to gut-shot the cosmos as far as she's concerned, usually. Now we're seeing the Rototiller get shut down as she bends way down to where I'd showed her the choke. The machine diesels a little and farts some blue smoke. The machine sucks the nub of its starter-rope into itself. I can feel the voltage like I'm still there. Post-racket tingling quiet descends. There's the tentative chirp of a bird. The Moms comes toward Hal standing there in his little red coat. She's tucking a wisp of hair back under the special plastic cap's elastic. Her hair at that time was dark brown, she's addressing him, she has an unbelievably humiliating little family pet name for the kid that I'll show him the mercy of never telling anybody.

'But so she's coming over. Hal is standing there. Holds the horrific patch of fungus out. The Moms sees at first only her child holding something out, and like all moms hardwired for motherhood she reaches to take whatever her baby holds out. The one sort of case where she wouldn't check before reaching out toward something held out.’

'Q.’

'The Moms though now stops just inside the border of string and she squints, her glasses have dust, she starts to see and process just what it is the kid's holding out to her. Her hand's outstretched in the air over the garden's string and she stops.

'Hallie takes one step forward, arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes "I ate this."

'The Moms says she begs his pardon.

'Helen, you decide. But consider the fragility of the obsesso-compulsive's control. The terrible life-ruling phobias. Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision, and untidiness, which you can't get much untidier than basement-mold.’

'q.’

'The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time.

' "I ate this" Hal goes, he's still holding the thing out, not crying, a kind of clinical grimness to him about it, like the mold's some audit it's his job to show her. And do you want to know if she touched it?’

'Q.’

'It suddenly occurs to me that if you want stuff on the Moms and The Mad Stork you could contact Bain. He practically lived with us in Weston. As like a secondary source. I'm sure he'd discuss the Moms's foibles all you want. The man still practically holds up a crucifix at any mention. His little greeting-card company has just been bought up by a huge novelty concern, so I'm sure he's in his big room lying there having palm-fronds waved and his forehead wiped, feeling flush and voluble. I guess I'd rather you didn't ask him about my foibles, but he's inexhaustible on the subject of the Moms and O.C.D. He never leaves home, which home is one room, the converted Children's Reading Room of what used to be the Waltham Public Library, which is the whole third floor. He learned from the Moms how to minimize doorways to traverse. I'm afraid he's not InterNetted and has an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail. His snail-mail address is Marlon K. Bain, Saprogenic Greetings Inc., BPL-Waltham Bldg., 1214 Totten Pond Road, Waltham MA 021549872/4. It'd also be good if you could avoid mentioning the number 2 to him. He has problems with the number 2. I don't know if his not leaving home is similar to the Moms's not leaving home. This is the most I've thought about the Moms in a dog's age, to be honest with you. You have this way of getting stuff out of me. It's like you do nothing but sit there with that cigarette and you're all I can see and all I want is to please you. It's like I can't help it. Is this just good journalism, Helen?’

'Or is there something more going on here, some kind of strange bond I feel between us that sort of like tears down all my normal personal-life boundaries and makes me open totally to you? I guess I have to hope you won't take advantage. Does this all sound like some kind of line? Maybe if it was a line it'd sound less lame. I guess I do wish I could come off more suave. I don't know what else to do except just tell what's going on inside me, even if it sounds lame. I never have any clue what you're thinking about it.’

' "Help! My son ate this!" She screamed the same thing over and over, holding the mold-rhombus up like a torch, running around just inside the string border while I and Hallie staggered back, literally like staggered back, gaping at our first taste of apocalypse, a corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order.

' "Help! My son ate this! My son has eaten this! Help!" she kept screaming, running in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string, and I'm seeing The Mad Stork's face at the glass door over the deck, palms out and thumbs together to make a frame, and Mario my other brother next to him as usual down around his knee, with Mario's face all squished against the glass from supporting his weight, their breath on the window spreading, Hal inside the string finally and trying to follow her, crying, and not impossibly I also crying a little, just from the infectious stress, and those two through the back door's glass just watching, and fucking Booboo also trying to make that frame with his hands, so finally it was Mr. Reehagen next door, who was so-called "friends" with her, who had to come out and over and finally had to hook up the hose/

a. This may be a lie — no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having been any cameras in HmH's kitchen, bathroom, etc.

b. sic.

235
She'd arrayed the photos herself, from her purse, on the dresser; he hadn't had to ask her to; it added to the sense of synchronous mercy, a cosmic kindness balancing out the Jacuzzi's dead bird and the frigidly invasive reporter.

236
E.T.A. shorthand: Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin.

237
The NW-to-NE angle at the former Monteplier VT isn't quite 90°, but it is very close. By the way, the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem triangle is one of those endless-based 25-130-25 triangles that looks so hideous when projected onto one of Corbett Thorp's distorting globes in the Trivium's Cubular Trigonometry.