Infinite Jest (102 page)

Hal’s maternal half-uncle Charles Tavis is a little like the late Himself in that
Tavis’s C.V. is a back-and-forth but not indecisive mix of athletics and hard science.
A B.A. and doctorate in engineering, an M.B.A. in athletics administration—in his
professional youth Tavis had put them together as a civil engineer, his specialty
the accommodation of stress through patterned dispersal, i.e. distributing the weight
of gargantuan athletic-spectatorial crowds. I.e., he’d say, he’d handled large live
audiences; he’d been in his own small way a minor pioneer in polymer-reinforced cement
and mobile fulcra. He’d been on design teams for stadia and civic centers and grandstands
and micological-looking superdomes. He’d admit up-front that he’d been a far better
team-player engineer than out there up-front stage-center in the architectural limelight.
He’d apologize profusely when you had no idea what that sentence meant and say maybe
the obfuscation had been unconsciously deliberate, out of some kind of embarrassment
over his first and last limelighted architectural supervision, up in Ontario, before
the rise of O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence, when he’d designed the Toronto Blue Jays’
novel and much-ballyhooed SkyDome ballpark-and-hotel complex. Because Tavis had been
the one to take the lion’s share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays’ spectators
in the stands, many of them innocent children wearing caps and pounding their little
fists into the gloves they’d brought with hopes of nothing more exotic than a speared
foul ball, that spectators at a distressing number of different points all along both
foul-lines could see right into the windows of guests having various and sometimes
exotic sex in the hotel bedrooms over the center-field wall. The bulk of the call
for Tavis’s rolling head had come, he’d tell you, when the cameraman in charge of
the SkyDome’s Instant-Replay-Video Scoreboard, disgruntled or professionally suicidal
or both, started training his camera on the bedroom windows and routing the resultant
multi-limbed coital images up onto the 75-meter scoreboard screen, etc. Sometimes
in slow motion and with multiple replays, etc. Tavis will admit his reluctance to
talk about it, still, after all this time. He’ll confess that his usual former-career-summary
is to say just that he’d specialized in athletic venues that could safely and comfortably
seat enormous numbers of live spectators, and that the market for his services had
bottomed out as more and more events were designed for cartridge-dissemination and
private home-viewing, which he’ll point out is not technically untrue so much as just
not entirely open and forthcoming.

Lateral Alice Moore is printing out WhataBurger RSVPs. The Intel 972 is cutting-edge,
but she clings to a hideous old dot-matrix printer she refuses to replace as long
as Dave Harde can keep it going. It’s the same with the intercom system and its antiquated
iron stand-up mike that Troeltsch says is an affront to the whole broadcasting profession.
Lateral Alice has queer eccentric pockets of intransigence and Ludditism, due possibly
to her helicopter-crash and neurologic deficits. The printer’s needly sound fills
the waiting room. Hal finds he can be confident of his face’s symmetry and saliva
only when he sits there with his right hand over his left cheek. Each line of Alice’s
printed response sounds like some sort of supposedly unrippable fabric getting ripped,
over and over, a dental and life-denying sound.

For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around
people and tries to hide it by being very open and expansive and wordy and bluff,
and that it’s excruciating to be around. Mario’s way of looking at it is that Tavis
is very open and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind
of protective shield that it betrays a frightened vulnerability almost impossible
not to feel for. Either way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he’s
possibly the openest man of all time. Orin and Marlon Bain’s view was always that
C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person. Even the
Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she’d taken
the child C.T. or been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other
kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with
any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril
said she’d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily
on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in some lull in the group’s
conversation, something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious really to join
in here, so I’m just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that’s all
right, just so you know,’ and so on.

But so the point is that Tavis is an odd and delicate specimen, both ineffectual and
in certain ways fearsome as a Headmaster, and being a relative guarantees no special
predictive insight or quarter, unless certain maternal connections are exploited,
the thought of doing which literally does not occur to Hal. This odd blankness about
his family might be one way to manage a life where domestic and vocational authorities
sort of bleed into each other. Hal squeezes his tennis ball like a madman, sitting
there in the needly printout-noise, right palm against his left cheek and elbow hiding
his mouth, wanting very much to go first to the Pump Room and then to brush vigorously
with his portable collapsible Oral-B. A quick chew of Kodiak is out of the question
for several reasons.

The only other time this year that Hal was officially summoned to the Headmaster’s
waiting room had been in late August, right before Convocation and during Orientation
period, when Y.D.A.U.’s new kids were coming in and wandering around clueless and
terrified, etc., and Tavis had wanted Hal to take temporary charge of a nine-year-old
kid coming in from somewhere called Philo IL, who was allegedly blind, the kid, and
apparently had cranium-issues, from having originally been one of the infantile natives
of Ticonderoga NNY evacuated too late, and had several eyes in various stages of evolutionary
development in his head but was legally blind, but still an extremely solid player,
which is all kind of a long tale in itself, given that his skull was apparently the
consistency of a Chesapeake crabshell but the head itself so huge it made Booboo look
microcephalic, and the kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the
other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo-shaped
metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head; but anyway
Tex Watson and Thorp had broken C.T. down over the kid’s admission and tuition-waver,
and C.T. now figured the kid would need to say the least some extra help getting oriented
(literally), and he wanted Hal to be the one to take him in hand (again literally).
It turned out a couple days later that the kid had some kind of either family or cerebro-spinal-fluid
crisis at home in rural IL and wasn’t matriculating now till the Spring term. But
back in August Hal had sat in the very chair Trevor Axford is now nodding off in,
very late in the day, like dusk, having had an informal exhibition match with a visiting
Latvian Satellite pro go an encouraging three sets that
P.M.
so that he’d missed Mrs. C.’s stuffed peppers at supper, his stomach making those
where’s-the-food noises from around the transverse colon, alone in the blue room,
waiting, the chair bobbing reflexively, with Lateral Alice Moore gone home to her
long apartment with rooms only 2 m. wide in Newton and an opaque plastic dust-thing
wrapped tight over her Intel processor and intercom-console and the little red danger-light
on her
DANGER: THIRD RAIL
plaque unlit, and the only lights besides the weak dusk outside were the hot 105W
of his chairback’s creepy blue-shaded magazine-lamp, plus the multiple lamps on in
Charles Tavis’s office (Tavis has a phobic thing about overhead lighting) as Tavis
was doing a late-day Intake interview on impossibly tiny little Tina Echt, who just
matriculated this fall at age seven. His doors were open because it was a brutal August
and F. D. V. Harde had somehow rigged Lateral Alice’s air-conditioner vent in the
waiting room so it really put out. Tavis’s office’s outer door opened out while the
inner door opened in, which gave his little inter-door vestibule kind of a jaw-like
quality, when exposed.

August Y.D.A.U. had been when Hal’s chronic left ankle had been almost the worst it’s
ever been, after an erumpent but grueling summer tour of getting to at least the Quarters
of just about everything, mostly on hard asphalt,
²¹⁷
and he could feel his pulse in the vessels in the raw ligaments of the ankle as he
sat flipping the shiny pages of a new
World Tennis
and watching the little ad-cards fall out and flutter; but he also couldn’t help
exploiting the open-jawed view of a substantial section of Charles Tavis at his office
desk, looking as usual oddly foreshortened and small and with his hands together on
the massive desktop across from a partial-profile view of a girl who looked like she
couldn’t be much more than five or six, preparing to receive Intake papers as she
listened to Tavis. There’d been no Echt parents or guardians anywhere in view. Some
kids just get dropped off. Sometimes the parents’ cars barely even stop, just slow
down, throw gravel as they accelerate away. Tavis’s desk drawers have squeaky casters.
Jim Struck’s folks’ Lincoln hadn’t even much slowed. Struck had been helped to his
feet and taken immediately to the locker room to shower the gravel out of his hair.
Hal had been in charge of his Orientation, too, when Struck transferred, booted out
of Palmer Academy after his pet tarantula (named Simone—another long story) escaped
and wouldn’t even have
dreamed
of biting the Headmaster’s wife if she hadn’t screamed and passed out and fallen
right on it, Struck explained as Hal helped pick up suitcases tumbled all over the
drive.

Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal’s mother’s adoptive brother Charles Tavis is physically
small in a way that seems less endocrine than perspectival. His smallness resembles
the smallness of something that’s farther away from you than it wants to be, plus
is receding.
²¹⁸
This weird appearance of recessive drift, together with the compulsive hand-movements
that followed his quitting smoking some years back, helped contribute to the quality
of perpetual frenzy about the man, a kind of locational panic that it’s easy to see
explains not only Tavis’s compulsive energy—he and Avril, pretty much the Dynamic
Duo of compulsion, between them, sleep, in their second-floor rooms in the Headmaster’s
House—separate rooms—tend to sleep, between them, about as much as any one normal
insomniac—but maybe also contributes to the pathological openness of his manner, the
way he thinks out loud about thinking out loud, a manner Ortho Stice can imitate so
eerily that he’s been prohibited by the male 18’s from doing his Tavis-impression
in front of the younger players, for fear that the littler kids will find it impossible
to take the real Tavis seriously at the times he needs to be taken seriously.

As for the older kids, Stice can make them all double up now merely by shielding his
eyes with his hand and assuming a horizon-scan expression whenever Tavis heaves into
view, seeming to recede even as he bears down.

C.T. as Headmaster always has a number of introductory questions for matriculants,
and Hal, now, in November, can’t remember which one of these Tavis opened with with
Echt, but he remembers seeing the little girl’s sucker-stick sweep the air and a plastic
Mr. Bouncety-Bounce
²¹⁹
no-pierce earring swing wildly as she shook her head. Hal’d marvelled at her size.
How high could somebody this little be ranked, even regionally, in 12’s?

And then yes the sumptuous squeak of Tavis’s big seagrass chair coming back forward
as his elbows took his weight and he laced his fingers together out across meters
of polymer-reinforced shale desktop, custom-designed. The Headmaster’s smile as he
leaned back, though hidden from Hal because of the shadow of the office’s enormous
StairBlaster,
²²⁰
was nevertheless audible because of the thing with Charles Tavis’s teeth, about which
maybe the less said the better. Looking discreetly in, Hal had felt an involuntary
rush of affection for C.T. His maternal uncle’s hair was straight and very precisely
combed over, and his little mustache was never quite symmetrical. One eye was also
set at a slightly different angle than the other, so that besides holding his hand
up to scan Stice would also cock his head slightly to the side whenever C.T. came
near. Hal’s involuntary grin is lopsided and only half-felt, now, remembering. The
Axhandle’s sitting there slumped, with his fist to his chin, a posture that he thinks
makes him look meditative but that really makes him look
in utero,
and Kittenplan is chewing at her knuckles’ tattoos, which is what she does instead
of washing them off.

Then Ortho Stice had entered the hot waiting room, shirt wet and crew cut matted from
the courts and toting his Wilsons, and made right for the AC-vent’s downdraft outside
Tavis’s little vestibule. Stice’s clothes were comped by Fila and when he played any
sort of match he wore all black, and at E.T.A. and on the tour was known as The Darkness.
He had a crew cut and the beginnings of jowls. He and Hal exchanged the very slight
sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness. They
had similar games, although most of Stice’s touch was at the net. Stice raised one
hand to his eyes and cocked his head slightly in the direction of the office’s lamplight.

‘The little guy going to be a long time in there?’

‘You have to ask?’

Tavis was saying ‘What actually we do for you here is to break you down in very carefully
selected ways, take you apart as a little girl and put you back together again as
a tennis player who can take the court against any little girl in North America without
fear of limitation. With a perspective unmarred by the eyelashes of whatever pockets
you brought here. A little girl now who can regard the court as a mirror whose reflection
holds no illusions or fear for you.’