Infinite Jest (10 page)

Hal Incandenza’s brother Orin wakes up alone at 0730h. amid a damp scent of Ambush
and on the other side’s dented pillow a note with phone # and vital data in a loopy
schoolgirlish hand. There’s also Ambush on the note. His side of the bed is soaked.

Orin makes honey-toast, standing barefoot at the kitchen counter, wearing briefs and
an old Academy sweatshirt with the arms cut off, squeezing honey from the head of
a plastic bear. The floor’s so cold it hurts his feet, but the double-pane window
over the sink is hot to the touch: the beastly metro Phoenix October
A.M.
heat just outside.

Home with the team, no matter how high the AC or how thin the sheet, Orin wakes with
his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day
to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week’s other faint dried outlines,
so his fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like
a deck of cards, just overlapping, like an acid trail or timed exposure.

The heat just past the glass doors tightens his scalp. He takes breakfast out to a
white iron table by the condo complex’s central pool and tries to eat it there, in
the heat, the coffee not steaming or cooling. He sits there in dumb animal pain. He
has a mustache of sweat. A bright beach ball floats and bumps against one side of
the pool. The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell. No one else out here. The complex
is a ring with the pool and deck and Jacuzzi in the center. Heat shimmers off the
deck like fumes from fuel. There’s that mirage thing where the extreme heat makes
the dry deck look wet with fuel. Orin can hear cartridge-viewers going from behind
closed windows, that aerobics show every morning, and also someone playing an organ,
and the older woman who won’t ever smile back at him in the apartment next to his
doing operatic scales, muffled by drapes and sun-curtains and double panes. The Jacuzzi
chugs and foams.

The note from last night’s Subject is on violet bond once folded and with a circle
of darker violet dead-center where the subject’s perfume-spritzer had hit it. The
only interesting thing about the script, but also depressing, is that every single
circle—o’s, d’s, p’s, the #s 6 and 8—is darkened in, while the i’s are dotted not
with circles but with tiny little Valentine hearts, which are not darkened in. Orin
reads the note while he eats toast that’s mainly an excuse for the honey. He uses
his smaller right arm to eat and drink. His oversized left arm and big left leg remain
at rest at all times in the morning.

A breeze sends the beach ball skating all the way across the blue pool to the other
side, and Orin watches its noiseless glide. The white iron tables have no umbrellas,
and you can tell where the sun is without looking; you can feel right where it is
on your body and project from there. The ball moves tentatively back out toward the
middle of the pool and then stays there, not even bobbing. The same small breezes
make the rotted palms along the condominium complex’s stone walls rustle and click,
and a couple of fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the
plants out here are malevolent, heavy and sharp. The parts of the palms above the
fronds are tufted in sick stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in
the trees. Rats, maybe. Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants
either spiny or meaty. Cacti in queer tortured shapes. The tops of the palms like
Rod Stewart’s hair, from days gone by.

Orin returned with the team from the Chicago game two nights ago, redeye. He knows
that he and the place-kicker are the only two starters who are not still in terrible
pain, physically, from the beating.

The day before they left—so like five days ago—Orin was out by himself in the Jacuzzi
by the pool late in the day, caring for the leg, sitting in the radiant heat and bloody
late-day light with the leg in the Jacuzzi, absently squeezing the tennis ball he
still absently squeezes out of habit. Watching the Jacuzzi funnel and bubble and foam
around the leg. And out of nowhere a bird had all of a sudden fallen into the Jacuzzi.
With a flat matter-of-fact
plop
. Out of nowhere. Out of the wide empty sky. Nothing overhung the Jacuzzi but sky.
The bird seemed to have just had a coronary or something in flight and died and fallen
out of the empty sky and landed dead in the Jacuzzi, right by the leg. He brought
his sunglasses down onto the bridge of his nose with a finger and looked at it. It
was an undistinguished kind of bird. Not a predator. Like a wren, maybe. It seems
like no way could it have been a good sign. The dead bird bobbed and barrel-rolled
in the foam, sucked under one second and reappearing the next, creating an illusion
of continued flight. Orin had inherited none of the Moms’s phobias about disorder,
hygiene. (Not crazy about bugs though—roaches.) But he’d just sat there squeezing
the ball, looking at the bird, without a conscious thought in his head. By the next
morning, waking up, curled and entombed, it seemed like it had to have been a bad
sign, though.

Orin now always gets the shower so hot it’s to where he can just barely stand it.
The condo’s whole bathroom is done in this kind of minty yellow tile he didn’t choose,
maybe chosen by the free safety who lived here before the Cardinals sent New Orleans
the free safety, two reserve guards and cash for Orin Incandenza, punter.

And no matter how many times he has the Terminex people out, there are still the enormous
roaches that come out of the bathroom drains. Sewer roaches, according to Terminex.
Blattaria implacablus
or something. Really huge roaches. Armored-vehicle-type bugs. Totally black, with
Kevlar-type cases, the works. And fearless, raised in the Hobbesian sewers down there.
Boston’s and New Orleans’s little brown roaches were bad enough, but you could at
least come in and turn on a light and they’d run for their lives. These Southwest
sewer roaches you turn on the light and they just look up at you from the tile like:
‘You got a problem?’ Orin stomped on one of them, only once, that had come hellishly
up out of the drain in the shower when he was in there, showering, going out naked
and putting shoes on and coming in and trying to conventionally squash it, and the
result was explosive. There’s still material from that one time in the tile-grouting.
It seems unremovable. Roach-innards. Sickening. Throwing the shoes away was preferable
to looking at the sole to clean it. Now he keeps big glass tumblers in the bathroom
and when he turns on the light and sees a roach he puts a glass down over it, trapping
it. After a couple days the glass is all steamed up and the roach has asphyxiated
messlessly and Orin discards both the roach and the tumbler in separate sealed Ziplocs
in the dumpster complex by the golf course up the street.

The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses
with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually
steaming up with roach-dioxide. The whole thing makes Orin sick. Now he figures the
hotter the shower’s water, the less chance any small armored vehicle is going to feel
like coming out of the drain while he’s in there.

Sometimes they’re in the bowl of the toilet first thing in the
A.M.
, dog-paddling, trying to get to the side and climb up. He’s also not crazy about
spiders, though more like unconsciously; he’s never come anyplace close to the conscious
horror Himself had somehow developed about the Southwest’s black widows and their
chaotic webs—the widows are all over the place, both here and Tucson, spottable on
all but the coldest nights, their dusty webs without any kind of pattern, clotting
just about any right-angled place that’s dim or out of the way. Terminex’s toxins
are more effective on the widows. Orin has them out monthly; he’s on like a subscription
plan over at Terminex.

Orin’s special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches.
There’d been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he’d refused to go to, as a child.
Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate
or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical
flying
roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking
fly,
and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs,
especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus
in the babies’ eyes, some special sort of optical mucus—the stuff of fucking nightmares,
mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant—and were reportedly
blinding them; parents’d come in in the ghastly
A.M.
-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last
summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that
sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue
down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette,
shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside’s mud and one even one morning
coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for
the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. And so to
the glass canyons and merciless light of metro Phoenix, in a kind of desiccated circle,
near the Tucson of his own father’s desiccated youth.

It’s the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that
it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the
grip on his soul’s throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes
unalone, if the previous night’s Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or to
cuddle and, like, spoon, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy inverted
tumblers on the bathroom floor, commenting on his night-sweats, clattering around
in the kitchen, making kippers or bacon or something even more hideous and unhoneyed
he’s supposed to eat with postcoital male gusto, the ones who have this thing about
they call it Feeding My Man, wanting a man who can barely keep down
A.M.
honey-toast to eat with male gusto, elbows out and shovelling, making little noises.
Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and
go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself
for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst mornings with
cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day
will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going
to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and
sheer.

So now his own eye-mucus is secure, in the Desert Southwest; but the bad dreams have
gotten worse since the trade to this blasted area Himself himself had fled, long ago,
as an unhappy youngster.

As a nod to Orin’s own unhappy youth, all the dreams seem to open briefly with some
sort of competitive-tennis situation. Last night’s had started with a wide-angle shot
of Orin on a Har-Tru court, waiting to receive serve from someone vague, some Academy
person—Ross Reat maybe, or good old M. Bain, or gray-toothed Walt Flechette, now a
teaching pro in the Carolinas—when the dream’s screen tightens on him and abruptly
dissolves to the blank dark rose color of eyes closed against bright light, and there’s
the ghastly feeling of being submerged and not knowing which way to head for the surface
and air, and after some interval the dream’s Orin struggles up from this kind of visual
suffocation to find his mother’s head, Mrs. Avril M. T. Incandenza’s, the Moms’s disconnected
head attached face-to-face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face somehow
by a wrap-around system of VS HiPro top-shelf lamb-gut string from his Academy racquet’s
own face. So that no matter how frantically Orin tries to move his head or shake it
side to side or twist up his face or roll his eyes he’s still staring at, into, and
somehow through his mother’s face. As if the Moms’s head was some sort of overtight
helmet Orin can’t wrestle his way out of.
²
In the dream, it’s understandably vital to Orin that he disengage his head from the
phylacteryish bind of his mother’s disembodied head, and he cannot. Last night’s Subject’s
note indicates that at some point last night Orin had clutched her head with both
hands and tried to sort of stiff-arm her, though not in an ungentle or complaining
way (the note, not the stiff-arm). The apparent amputation of the Moms’s head from
the rest of the Moms appears in the dream to be clean and surgically neat: there is
no evidence of a stump or any kind of nubbin of neck, even, and it is as if the base
of the round pretty head had been sealed, and also sort of rounded off, so that her
head is a large living ball, a globe with a face, attached to his own head’s face.

The Subject after Bain’s sister but before the one just before this one, with the
Ambush scent and the hearts over i’s, the previous Subject had been a sallowly pretty
Arizona State developmental psychology grad student with two kids and outrageous alimony
and penchants for sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate, InterLace educational cartridges,
and professional athletes who thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright—she thought
the figure he’d trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral
8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he’d mailed her
child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he’d awakened from a
night of horror-show dreams—woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm, unrefreshed and benighted
of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coroner’s
chalk outline—he woke to find the Subject up and sitting up against the reading pillow,
wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and sipping hazelnut espresso and watching,
on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the bedroom’s south wall, something
horrific called ‘INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL
PROGRAMMING MATRIX PRESENTS
SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?
’ and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his own sweat-shadow,
and watch on the viewer a pale young guy about Hal’s age, with copper stubble and
a red cowlick and flat blank affectless black doll’s eyes, stare into space stage-left
while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here was a dyed-in-the-wool
paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids were invading his skull
and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and programmed
to pursue him without cease until they caught him and made brutal sport of him and
buried him alive. It was an old late-millennial CBC public-interest Canadian news
documentary, digitally sharpened and redisseminated under the InterLace imprimatur—InterLace
could get kind of seedy and low-rent during early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous
Disseminations.