Infinite Jest (97 page)

The diddle-check seems like it's degenerated into the girls all getting very excited and exchanging data on what kinds of animals members of their own biologic families either imitate or physically resemble, and Avril's out of sight and silent and apparently letting them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool with the back of his hand. Pemulis, in a Cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the hat and looks around himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking one last look at his lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three tries to work the outside door's knob. Ann Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an expression of almost regal calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone stepping down off a dais.

And it also seems somehow sinister that she's apparently been in here all this time, this Clenette person, one of the nine-month temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed and so black she's got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and then pinned up and the standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip-upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis's personal brass wastebaskets into her big cart with its gray canvas sides. The way she stares at a point just to the side of Hal's own stare as she and her cart wait at C.T.'s inner door for Hal and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral Alice Moore. The cart, like poor Otis Lord's own game-master's cart, has a crazy wheel, and clatters a bit even buried in shag, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses back along the vestibule's wall. Neither Schtitt nor deLint is in here, but from the hiss of Pemulis's inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before he takes his eyes from a C.T. who's sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle: Tavis's window-lit shadow now reaches all the way past the StairBlaster to the red-and-gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which sits sure enough Rusk, her hose laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black shag, hands in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing of the monitor's base, Lord not meeting Pemulis's eye, and wicked hanging shards of glass from the screen he fell through pointing — some nearly touching, even — his slim neck and throat, so he has to hold his head very still, despite the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day-shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly choose to be the sort of person not to note. Lord's eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled; and Pemulis is just finishing moving his feet precisely into their familiar impressions in the office carpet when C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly asks the room's last occupant — the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open inner door in the room's southeast corner, so he's hidden right behind them from the start and there's the opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertwang-face from Axford and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing the urine expert behind them, asking him very quietly please to close both doors.

PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL

'You can't say it's only a U.S. thing,' Steeply said again. 'I went through school when mu!ticulturalism was inescapable. We read about the Japanese and Indonesians, for example, having a mythic figure. I forget its name. Oriental myth. It's a woman covered with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.’

'This type of passive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a hairy culture.’

'These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon her by some body of water combing her body-hair and singing. And they have sex with her. Apparently she's simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even the young Oriental men who know of the myths can't resist, according to the myths.’

'And are rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,' Marathe said. When now he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a St. Remi-d'Amherst outdoor rink, M. Mar-athe's breath visible and his pacemaker a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan.

'Killed outright, usually. The pleasure's too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills them. M-o-r-t-s.’

Marathe sniffed.

'The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, they go ahead anyway.’

Marathe coughed.

Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bio-luminescent. They seemed very intent, flying past the outcropping and darting jaggedly off on a course, on their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe think of playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men were silent. This is the time of false dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The softest light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan vistas around them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of the lap was covered in burrs and small spiked seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began to rustle with life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars fluttering like banked flames above a low-resolution seepage of glow. But none of the pinkening of genuine dawn.

Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and les Assassins des Fau-teuils Rollents looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with Marathe's betrayal, despite language.
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The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. According to Steeply, Steeply's B.S.S. superiors did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this fact back from his superiors. It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one's superiors, Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Quebec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney 'the God' Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both.

The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. 'A false dawn.’

'No,' Steeply said, 'but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.’

'L'Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse.' Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe.

Steeply said 'The multicultural myth being that the Odalisk's so beautiful that mortal Québecois eyes can't take it. Whoever looks at her turns into a diamond or gem.’

'In most versions an opal.’

'A Medusa in reverse, one might say.’

Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed.
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Marathe said 'The Greeks, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I think beauty and pleasure, these were not fatal temptations for the Greek type.’

'Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk' said Steeply. He was smoking either his last or one of his purse's pack's last cigarettes — the American's habit to throw the butts off the outcropping had prevented Marathe from counting the consumed butts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not biodegrade for the environment. The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other.

A hidden bird twittered.

'The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.’

'And haven't we come a long way,' Steeply said ironically.

'This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type's temptation, I think.’

'Whereas your type's a man of only actions, ends,' Steeply said, with Marathe could not tell whether irony or maybe not.

The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of the night's bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The distant construction site's payloaders were urine-colored and appeared frozen in the middle of various actions. It was still chill. Marathe's teeth had a palpable film on them, of perhaps a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun's top arc was appearing, and Marathe could cast no shadow yet on the shale behind them.

Rémy Marathe's resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left. All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed. Steeply manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his right arm to cradle the left elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed. The little wens of his field-persona's electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor of Steeply's face, which appeared both puffy and drawn.

The cloudless sky above the east's Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn. The whole imperceptibly lightening scene of the vistas had a stillness about it that suggested photography. Marathe had long ago placed his watch in his windbreaker's pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining that his interface dictated its own period and time; Marathe had chosen to indulge this.

Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence. 'You could seat yourself briefly, if you have fatigue. The shoes' straps ..." He gestured slightly.

Steeply made a show of looking down and prodding at the tan stone's dust with the toes of his shoe. 'It looks like there might be things.’

'I must soon leave.' Marathe's hand was imprinted with the texture of the Sterling's pebbled grip. Tt has been good to be in the air for a night. Soon I must leave,’

'Crawling around. The skirt, it makes one sensitive about simply plopping down wherever you wish. Possibility of things . . . crawling up.' He looked up at Marathe. He appeared sad. 'I'd never realized.’

0450H., 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA

'Didn't know whether to shit or shout Dixie after it went off. And the look on his face.’

'One of the times for me was I'm in some bar in Lowell with some guys I'm crewing around with and we were there with some other guys, just fucking Lowell knuckleheads, your young drunks that are just getting to be your young working-type drunks that stop off after work for just a couple and don't make it home til closing. Just putting away boilermakers and playing darts and this and that. And this one guy on the crew starts making moves on this one guy's girl, this real ordinary-looking guy's in there with his girl and one of our guys starts saying this and that to her, trying to pick her up, and her date got pissed off, you know, who can blame him, and there was words exchanged and so on and so forth, and we was all there with this first guy, in our like group, he was the one talking the shit to this guy's girl but he was our boy, we're all in the crew, so we all crew up on this girl's date and push him around somewhat, you know how it is, say he's talking shit to our boy, he gets a little bit of a beating, dope-slaps, nothing like extreme or blood, and we kick his ass around a little bit and toss him out of this bar and get this girl to drink boilermakers with us and the one guy that was making the moves on her in the first place gets her to start playing strip-darts, like taking off bits of clothes for points in darts, which the keep isn't too like thrilled but these boys are his customers, it's like family. We're all real drunk and playing strip-darts.’

T get the picture. Sounds like a real nice picture.’

'Except when I got a little smarter later I learned you never in a neighborhood bar fu— you don't ever mess with a local guy with a girl and make him look small in front of the girl and then stay there where it happened if he leaves, because it's this kind of guy always comes back.’

'You learned to leave.’

'Because this guy like a half-hour later on he comes back packing. Packing means there's a Item involved, now, see.’

'Item?’

'A gun. This wasn't a big one, I'm remembering a .25 somewhat, in that range, but in he comes and comes straight over to the dart game and the girl that's down to her slip and pulls it out and without saying nothing up and comes right over and shoots our boy, that'd taken his girl and made him look small, shoots him right in the head, right in the back of the head.’

'Boy was crazy as a shithouse rat.’

'Well Joelle he'd got made small in front of his girl, and we stayed, and he came back and plugged him in the back of the head.’

'And killed him dead.’

'Not right away he didn't die. The negativest part for me is what we do. All us guys with the guy that was shot. We are all very fucked up by this point in time. I remember it not seeming real. The keep's busy calling the Finest, the guy drops the Item and the keep grabbed him and covered him with the bar piece and called the Finest and kept the guy back behind the bar, I think mostly now to keep us from eliminating his map right there, out of payback. We're all blotto-zombie drunk by this juncture. The girl, there was blood all down the side of her slip. And here our boy's shot in the head, the guy'd shot him right through the back of the head from the side, and blood's all over. You always maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one way, like steady. But your serious bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn't know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out.’