Infinite Jest (41 page)

A good muddy juice fills Joelle's mouth with spit that's as good as the juice, and her linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her breath, and, perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don't know they know her voice, she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine some of her purse's untouched Material, raise the veil and set free the encaged rapacious thing inside to breathe the only uncloth'd gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and sad; she looks like death, her mascara's all over the place; no one can tell. The plastic Pepsi bottle and glass cigar tube and lighter and packet of glycine bags are a shape in the corner of the rain-darkened cloth purse that rests on the floor just below her dangling clogs. Molly Notkin is standing with Rutherford Keck and Crosby Baum and a radically bad-postured man before the school-supplied Infernatron viewer. Baum's wide back and pompadour obscure whatever's on the screen. Academics' voices sound nasal, with a cultivated stutter at sentences' start. A good many of James O. Incandenza's films were silent. He was a self-acknowledged visual filmmaker. His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light. That insufferable child actor Smothergill used to contort his face at the boy and he'd just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums that Miriam Prickett would resolve in the bathroom somehow. An old Latin-revival CD issues at acceptable volume from the speakers screwed into planters and hung with thin chains from each corner of the cream ceiling. Another large loose group is dancing in the cleared space between the cluster of directorial chairs and the bedroom door, most favoring Y.D.A.U.'s Minimal Mambo, this autumn's East Coast anticraze, the dancers appearing to be just this side of standing still, the subtlest possible hints of fingers snapping under right-angled elbows. Orin Incandenza, she has not forgotten, had a poor mottled swollen elbow above a forearm the size of a leg of lamb. He had switched neatly from arm to leg. Joelle was Orin Incandenza's only lover for twenty-six months and his father's optical beloved for twenty-one. A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis — hired by M.I.T. after her time. The better dancers' movements are so tiny they are evocative and compel watching, their near-static mass curdled and bent somehow subtly around one beautiful young woman, quite beautiful, her back undulating minimally in a thin tight blue-and-white-striped sailorish top as she alludes to a cha-cha with maracas empty of anything to rattle, watching herself almost dance in the full-length mirror of quality plate that after Orin left Joelle had forbidden Jim to hang and had slid beneath her bed face-down; now it's the west wall's framed mirror, hung between two empty ornate gilt frames Notkin thinks she's been retroironic by having the frames themselves framed, in rather less ornate frames, in wry allusion to the early-Experialist fashion of making art out of the accessories of artistic presentation, the framed frames hanging not quite evenly on either side of the mirror he'd cut for the scenes of that last ghastly thing he'd made her stand before, reciting in the openly empty tones she'd gone on to use on-air; the girl stands transfixed in alternating horizontal blue and white, then vertically sliced by bar-cut sunlight, diced, drunk, so wrecked on good vintage her lips hang slack and the reflected cheeks' muscles have lost all integrity and the cheeks jiggle like the outstanding paps in her little sailor's top. Apocalyptic rouge and a nose-ring that's either electrified or is catching bits of light from the window. She is watching herself with unselfconscious fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom. This absence of shame at the self-obsession. Is she Canadian? Mirror-cult? Not possibly a U.H.I.D.: the bearing's all wrong. But now, whispered to by a near-motionless man in an equestrian helmet, she turns abruptly falling away from her own reflection to explain, not to the man so much as no one in particular, the whole dancing mass: I was just looking at my tits she says looking down at herself aren't they beautiful, and it's moving, there's something so heartbreakingly sincere in what she says Joelle wants to go to her, tell her it is and will be completely all right, she's pronounced beautiful like the earlier interested in four syllables, splitting the diphthong, betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave, the girl raising her striped arms in triumph or artless thanks for being constructed this way, these 'tits,' built by whom and for whom never occurring, artlessly ecstatic, she is not drunk Joelle now sees but has taken Ecstasy, Joelle can see, from the febrile flush and eyes jacked so wide you can make out brain-meat behind the balls' poles, a.k.a. X or MDMA, a beta-something, an early synthetic, emotional acid, the Love Drug so-called, big among the artistic young under say Bush and successors, since fallen into relative disuse because its pulverizing hangover has been linked to the impulsive use of automatic weapons in public venues, a hangover that makes a freebase hangover look like a day at the emotional beach, the difference between suicide and homicide consisting perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage's door: Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent? There was nothing coherent in the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she'd repeated over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram. He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put her cat in a microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the cat ended up all over the woman's kitchen's walls. How would you rig the thing so it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt? She cannot remember thinking of it once in four years. Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens? The woman in love with her own breasts is being congratulated with the subtlest possible allusions to clapping hands from barely animate dancers with their glass tulips held between their teeth, and Vogelsong of Emerson College tries suddenly to stand on his head and is immediately ill in a spreading plum-colored ectoplasm the dancers do not even try to evade the spread of, and Joelle applauds the Xtatic woman as well, because they are, Joelle admits freely, the paps, they are attractive, which in the Union is designated Compelling Within Compatible Relative Limits; Joelle has no problem seeing beauty approved, within compatible relative limits; she feels not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow every last drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages; and she lets herself slide forward from Méliès' lap, a tiny fall, leading with her lumpy purse and glass of matte apple juice toward the door beyond the lines of a becalmed conga and door-way'd huddles of a warm and well-felt theoretical party. And then, again, delays, dithers, and the easement to the bathroom is blocked. She is the only veiled woman here, and an academic generation ahead of most of these candidates, and rather feared, even though not many know she is an Aural Personality, feared for quitting instead of failing, and because of the connection of the memory of Jim, and she is given a certain wide social berth, allowed to delay and orbit and stand unengaged at the fringes of shifting groups, obliquely glanced at, veil going concave at each inbreath, waiting with hip-shot nonchalance for the bathroom off the bedroom to clear, lac-carino the Chaplin-archivist and a jaundice-yellow older man have gone into Molly's bedroom and left the door ajar, waiting nonchalantly, ignoring the foreign academic who wishes to know where she works with that veil, turning from him, rudely, brain heaving in its bone-box, memorizing every detail like collecting empty shells, sipping cloudy juice under neatly lifted corners of veil, now looking at instead of through the translucent cloth, the Improbably Deformed's equivalent of closing the eyes in concentration on sound, letting the Very Last Party wash over her, passed gracefully by different mingling guests and once or twice almost touched, seeing only inrushing and then billowing white, listening to different mingling voices the way the unveiled young taste wine.

'This is a technologically constituted space.’

'— thing opens tight on Remington in a hideous grandfatherly flannel suit, b & w, straight full-frontal shot in this grainy b & w stuff Bouvier taught him to manipulate the f-stop to mimic that horrid old Super 8, straight full-frontal, staring past the camera, no attempt to disguise he's reading off a prompter, monotone and all, saying "Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal 'Icb bein ein Berliner' was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political," at which point he aims his thumb and finger at his own temple at which point his TA doubles the focal-length so there's this giant —’

'I would die to defend your constitutional right to error, friend, but in this one case you —’

'They used to be less beautiful but then Rutherford said to quit sleeping face-down.’

'No no I'm saying that this, this whole thing, what you and I are discoursing within, is a technologically constituted space.’

'A du nous avons foi au poison.’

'It's good cheese, but I've had better cheese.’

'Mainwaring, this is Kirby, Kirby here's in pain, he's been telling me about it and now he'd like to tell you about it.’

'— complete mystery why Eve Plumb didn't show, it's known she'd re-upped for the part, the whole rest of them were there, even Henderson and that Davis woman as Alice who had to be wheeled out under nurses' care, my God and Peter, looking as if he'd eaten nothing but pastry for the past forty years, Greg with that absurd hairpiece and snakeskin boots, yes but all the kids recognizable, underneath, somehow, this pre-digital insistence on continuity through time that was the project's whole magic and raison, you know this, you're current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And then but now here's this entirely incongruous middle-aged black woman playing Jan!’

'De gustibus non est disputandum.’

'Balls.’

'An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible whiteness that had been in ineluct —’

'The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered. Terribly altered.’

'Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar.’

'You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.’

'— so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the right eye-socket. Then the old socket's fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles me over. It won't stay put.’

'Fucks with the emulsion's gradient so that all the tesseract's angles appear to be right-angled, except in —’

'So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn't have room to stalk or draw a bead, Keck had said they needed a good ten m., so I cocked the hat just so, just ever so slightly, like so, just cocked it over to the side like so and sat down practically on the man's knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps pedigreed carp, and of course you can imagine what —’

'— more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is a priori, whether space as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept.’

'It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like —’

'Because they're emotional more labile at that stage.’

' "So get dentures?" she said. "So get dentures?" '‘

'Who shot The Incision? Who did the cinematography on The Incision?’

'— way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue. A recorded delusion. Duquette says he's lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone.’

'I don't think anyone here would dispute that they're absolutely fetching tits, Melinda.’

'We had blinis with caviar. There were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom cream sauce. He said it was all on him. He said he was treating. There was roast artichoke topped with a sort of sly aiolí. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glace and brandy in snifters you needed two hands to swirl.’

'That coke-addled fag in his Morris Mini.’

The prosthetic film-scholar: 'Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can remember when your Charles was cafe with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin-egg's blue.’

'I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain.’

'I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant.’

'And then it turned out he'd put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing you've ever seen. Everyone, all over, spouting like whales. I'd heard the term projectile vomiting but I never thought that I — you could aim, the pressure was such that you could aim. And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth's like overhang, and he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole horrible staggering spouting groaning —’