Infinite Jest (86 page)

'What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.' Steeply looked back over his shoulder at Marathe. 'I mean we're talking about intense pleasure, Rémy. I'm remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable pleasure-tissue p-terminals.’

' "P" wishing to mean "the pleasure."

'And that their location seemed maddeningly inexact and unpredictable, even within brains of the same species — a p-terminal'd turn out to be right up next to some other neuron whose stimulation would cause pain, or hunger, or God knows what.’

'The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.’

'The whole point is they weren't doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically experimental. They used animals and animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string neuro-team stuck with the epileptic animals. Older — or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name — headed the team to map these what he called quote "Rivers of Reward," the p-terminals in the lobes.’

Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker's cotton pockets, pleasantly nodding. 'An experimental program of Canada, you stated.’

'I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.’

Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. 'This is a mental hospital. The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.’

'Because they were theorizing that these quote "rivers" or terminals were also the brain's receptors for things like beta-endorphins, L-dopa, Q-dopa, serotonin, all the various neurotransmitters of pleasure.’

'The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.’

There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light.

'But not humans yet,' Steeply said. 'Older's earliest subject were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu— the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his />-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever's stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’

Marathe said 'Not of the pleasure itself, however.’

'I think dehydration. I'm fuzzy on just what the rat died of.’

Marathe shrugged. 'But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.’

'Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates, even a dolphin.’

'Up the evolving scale, p-terminals for each. Each died?’

'Eventually,' Steeply said, 'or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember even if the pleasure-electrode was removed, the stimulation-lever removed, the subject'd run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get one more jolt.’

'The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.’

'You seem amused by this, Rémy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little neuroelectric adventure.’

'I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.’

'Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects, to see whether the human lobe had p-terminals and so on; and because of the sobering consequences for the subject-animals in the program they couldn't legally use prisoners or patients, they had to try to secure volunteers.’

'Because of a risk,' Marathe said.

'The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.’

Marathe pursed the lips: 'I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked your then CIA for, what is the term, "Persons of Expendability" from Southeast Asia or Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring U.S.A.'s MK-Ultra.'
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Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. 'But what apparently happened was that somehow word of the p-terminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up in Manitoba — some low-level worker at Brandon had broken security and leaked word.’

'Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.’

'... And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.’

'In full knowledge of the rat's and dolphin's death, from pressing the lever.’

Marathe's father had always assigned it to Rémy, his youngest, to go first inside some public restaurant or shop to check for the presence of a microwave or GC-type of transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a shoplifter, the shrieking instruments at doors.

Steeply said 'And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing spin on the study of human pleasure and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation —’

'To become some crazed rats.’

'— All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon's and Approception tests on all these hordes of prospective volunteers — the hordes were told it was part of the screening — the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal.’

'In other words not any deviants.’

'Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people — Canadian young people.’

'Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.’

'But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.’

Marathe gave him a bland look.

Steeply examined a cuticle. 'By free choice, of course.’

Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard's hard thought. 'Thus, but how long before these leaks and rumors of p-terminals reach the Ottawa of government and public weal, for Canada's government reacts with horror at the prospect of this.’

'Oh, and not just Ottawa,' Steeply said. 'You can see the implications if a technology like Elder's really became available. I know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey, whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley bit their knuckle in horror.’

'The CIA chewed a hand?’

'Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, high-discretionary-spending society.’

'But it would be illegalized,' Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines of movements Steeply made for keeping warm.

'Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,' Steeply said. 'There was still the prospect of an underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes'd be no more exotic than syringes.’

'But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.’

'Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures. Abortions. Electric penile implants.’

'The MK-Ultra surgeries.’

Steeply laughed without mirth. 'Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?’

Marathe blew just one nostril of his nose. This was the Québecois way: one of the nostrils at a time. Marathe's father's generation, they had used to bend and blow the one nostril out into the gutter in the street.

Steeply said 'Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.’

'Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’

'Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life. Finally pitching forward from sheer —’

Marathe said 'Giving away their souls and lives for p-terminal stimulation, you are saying.’

'You can maybe see the analogy,' Steeply said, over the shoulders to smile in a wry way. 'In Canada, my friend, this was.’

Marathe made a very slight version of his rotary motion of impatience: 'From the A.D. 1970s of time. This never has come to be. There would have been no development of the Happy Patch ...’

'We both went in. Both our nations.’

Tn secret.’

'Ottawa first cutting the Brandon program's funding, which Turner or Casey or whoever howled at — our old CIA wanted the procedure developed and perfected, then Classified — military use or something.’

Marathe said 'But the civilian guardians of the weal of the public felt differently.’

T think I'm remembering Carter was President. Both our combined nations made it a Security priority, shutting it down. Our old N.S.A., your old C7 with the R.C.M.P.s.’

'Bright red jackets and hats with wide brims. In the 1970s still on horses.’

Steeply held his mouth of the purse half up to the faint lights of Tucson, peering for something. T recall they went in directly. As in guns drawn. Boomed the doors. Dismantled the labs. Mercy-killed dolphins and goats. Olders disappeared somewhere.’

Marathe's slow circular gesture. 'Your point finally is Canadians also, we would choose dying for this, the total pleasure of a passive goat.’

Steeply turned, fiddling with an emery board. 'But you don't see a more specific analogy with the Entertainment?’

Marathe tongued the inside of his cheek. 'You are saying the Entertainment, a somehow optical stimulation of the p-terminals? A way to bypass Briggs electrodes for orgasm-and-massage pleasures?’

The dry rasp of the emerying a nail. 'All I'm saying is analogy. A precedent in your own nation.’

'Us, our nation is the Quebec nation. Manitoba is —’

'I'm saying that if he could get past the blind desire for harm against the U.S., your M. Fortier might be induced to see just what it is he's proposing to let out of the cage.' His training was such that he could emery without watching the procedure. For Steeply's most effective interviewing tactic was chis long looking down into the face without emotion of any kind. For Mar-athe felt more uncomfortable not knowing whether Steeply believed a thing than if Steeply's emotion of face showed he did not believe.

Then tonight, at the prospect of boiled hot dogs, the two newest residents had pulled the typically standard new-resident princess-and-pea special-food-issue thing: the new-today girl Amy J. that just sits there on the vinyl couch shaking like an aspen and having people bring her coffee and light her gaspers and with just short of a like HELPLESS VICTIM: PLEASE CODDLE sign hung around her neck now claiming Red Dye #4 gives her 'cluster migraines' (Gately gives this girl like a week tops before she's a vapor trail back to the Xanax
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; she has that look), and the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle van D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face announcing she was a vegetarian and would 'rather eat a bug' than even get downwind of a boiled frank. And but in an incredible move Pat M. has asked Gately, at like !8OOh., to blast down to the Purity Supreme down in Allston and pick up some eggs and peppers so the two new delicate-tummied newcomers can make themselves quiche or whatever. To Gately's way of thinking, this looks like catering to just the sort of classic addict's claim of special uniqueness that it's supposed to be Pat's job to help break down. The Joelle v.D. girl seems to have like inordinate immediate weight and pet-status with Pat, who's already making noises about exempting the girl from the menial-job requirement, and wants Gately to look for some kind of weird Big Red Soda Water tonic for the girl, who's apparently still dehydrated. It's sure a long way from making somebody chew feldspar. Gately has long since quit trying to figure Pat Monte-sian out.

It's a weird-weather evening, both thundering and spitting snow. Gately had finally become able to distinguish genuine thunder from the Enfield sounds of ATHSCME fans and E.W.D. catapults, this after nine months of wearing a Goodwill rain-slicker every morning on the 0430 Green Line.

One of the possible weak spots in Gately's AA recovery-program of rigorous personal honesty is that once he's jammed himself into a black-as-water Aventura and watched the spoiler throb as he turns over the carnivorous engine, etc., he often finds himself taking a little bit less of a direct route to a given Ennet-errand-site than he probably could. If he had to come right down to the heart of the issue he likes to cruise around town in Pat's car. He's able to minimize the suspicious time any particular bit of extra cruising adds to his errands by basically driving like a lunatic: ignoring lights, cutting people off, scoffing at One-Ways, veering wildly in and out, making pedestrians drop things and lunge curbward, leaning on a horn that sounds more like an air-raid siren. You'd think this would be judicially insane, in terms of not having a license and facing a no-license jail-bit anyway, but the fact is that this sort of on-the-way-to-the-E.R.-with-a-passenger-in-labor driving doesn't usually raise so much as an eyebrow among Boston's Finest, since they have more than enough other stuff to attend to, in these troubled times, and since everybody else in metro Boston drives exactly the same socio-pathic way, including the Finest themselves, so that the only real risk Gately's running is to his own sense of rigorous personal honesty. One cliche he's found especially serviceable w/r/t the Aventura issue is that Recovery is about Progress Not Perfection. He likes to make a stately left onto Commonwealth and wait to get out of view of the House's bay window and then produce what he imagines is a Rebel Yell and open her up down the serpentine tree-lined boulevard of the Ave. as it slithers through bleak parts of Brighton and Allston and past Boston U. and toward the big triangular CITGO neon sign and the Back Bay. He passes The Unexamined Life club, where he no longer goes, at !8OOh. already throbbing with voices and bass under its ceaseless neon bottle, and then the great gray numbered towers of the Brighton Projects, where he definitely no longer goes. Scenery starts to blur and distend at 70 kph. Comm. Ave. splits Enfield-Brighton-Allston from the downscale north edge of Brookline on the right. He passes the meat-colored facades of anonymous Brookline tenements, Father & Son Market, a dumpster-nest, Burger Kings, Blanchard's Liquors, an InterLace outlet, a land-barge alongside another dumpster-nest, corner bars and clubs — Play It Again Sam's, Harper's Ferry, Bunratty's, Rathskeller, Father's First I and II — a CVS, two InterLace outlets right next to each other, the ELLIS THE RIM MAN sign, the Marty's Liquors that they rebuilt like ants the week after it burned down. He passes the hideous Riley's Roast Beef where the Allston Group gathers to pound coffee before Commitments. The giant distant CITGO sign's like a triangular star to steer by. He's doing 75 k down a straightaway, keeping abreast of an Inbound Green Line train ramming downhill on the slightly raised track that splits Comm.'s lanes into two and two. He likes to match a Green train at 75 k all the way down Commonwealth's integral ç and see how close he can cut beating it across the tracks at the Brighton Ave. split. It's a vestige. He'd admit it's like a dark vestige of his old low-self-esteem suicidal-thrill behaviors. He doesn't have a license, it's not his car, it's a priceless art-object car, it's his boss's car, who he owes his life to and sort of maybe loves, he's on a vegetable-run for shattered husks of newcomers just out of detox whose eyes are rolling around in their heads. Has anybody mentioned Gately's head is square? It's almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously blunt: the head of somebody who looks like he likes to lower his head and charge. He used to let people open and close elevator doors on his head, break things across his head. The 'Indestructible' in his childhood cognomen referred to the head. His left ear looks a bit like a prizefighter's left ear. The head's nearly flat on top, so that his hair, long in back but with short Prince Valiant bangs in front, looks sort of like a carpet remnant someone's tossed on the head and let slide slightly back but stay.
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Nobody that lives in these guano-spotted old brown buildings along Comm. with bars on the low floors' windows
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ever goes inside, it seems like. Even in thunder and little asterisks of snow, all kinds of olive Spanish and puke-white Irish are on every corner, bullshitting and trying to look like they're just out there waiting for something important and drinking out of tallboys wrapped tight in brown bags. A strange nod to discretion, the bags, wrapped so tight the outline of the cans can't be missed. A Shore boy, Gately'd never used a paper bag around streetcorner cans: it's like a city thing. The Aventura can do 80 kph in third gear. The engine never strains or whines, just eventually starts to sound hostile, is how you to know to hurt your hip and shift. The Aventura's instrument panel looks more like the instrument panel of military aircraft. Something's always blinking and Indicating; one of the blinking lights is supposed to tell you when to shift; Pat has told him to ignore the panel. He loves to make the driver's-side window go down and rest his left elbow on the jamb like a cabbie.