Infinite Jest (105 page)

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. ‘It 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.’

‘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.’

‘I 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.’

‘Don’t have to tell me.’

‘Well I don’t know you, Joelle, am I right? I don’t know what you seen or know.’

‘I saw an old boy cut his hand off with a chainsaw cutting back brush back of the
Cumberland when I was fishing with my Daddy. Like to have bled to death right there.
My Daddy had to use his belt. Before he got it tied off the blood came like that,
with the pulse. My Daddy got him to the hospital in his car, like to saved his life.
He’d had some training. He could save lives like that.’

‘I tell you, what still gets me is we was so drunk we didn’t even somehow take it
seriously, because everything seemed like a movie when I got real drunk. I still wish
we’d thought to take him to the hospital right away. We could of piled him in. He
wasn’t dead yet even though he didn’t look good. We didn’t even lay him down, we got
this idea, one of the guys started walking him around. We all walked him around in
circles like some kind of O.D., thought if we could keep him walking til the wagon
came he’d be OK. By the end we was dragging him, I think then he was dead. Blood all
over everybody. The gun wasn’t more than an old .25. People was yelling at us to pile
him in and take him to the hospital, but we’d got this walking-him-around idea into
our heads, to hold him up and walk him in circles, the girl’s screaming and trying
to put her stockings on and we’re yelling to the guy that’d shot him how we were going
to off with his map and so on and so forth, till the keep called an ambulance and
they came and he was dead as a stick.’

‘Gately that’s really bad.’

‘Why are you even up, don’t have to work.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘I like it when it snows real early like this. This is the best window. But you learned
a lesson.’

‘His name was Chuck or Chick. The one that got shot that time.’

‘Did you hear that McDade person at supper? You know how some folks have one of their
legs shorter than the other?’

‘I don’t listen to those guys’ crap.’

‘It was down at the far end of the table at supper. He was telling Ken and me how
he had a counselor when he was in Juvenile in Jamaica Plain, he had this counselor
he said she had this condition where each leg was shorter than the other.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘I don’t think I follow you, Joelle.’

‘Each of the woman’s legs was shorter than the other.’

‘How can a leg that’s shorter than the other leg have the other leg shorter than it?’

‘He was having us on. He said the point was an AA point, that it defied sense and
explaining and you just had to accept it on faith. That creepy Randy guy with the
white wig was backing him up with a very straight face. McDade said she walked like
a metronome. He was making fun of us, but I still thought it was funny.’

‘Maybe tell me about this veil of yours, then, Joelle, if we’re talking about defied
sense.’

‘Waaaay out to one side. Then waaaay out to the other side.’

‘Really. Let’s really interface if you’re in here. How come with the veil?’

‘Bridal thing.’

‘…’

‘Aspiring Muslim.’

‘I didn’t mean to pry in. You can just tell me if you don’t want to talk about the
veil.’

‘I’m also in another fellowship, with almost four years in.’

‘U.H.I.D.’

‘It’s the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. The veil is a sort of fellowship
caparison.’

‘What’s it compared to?’

‘We all wear one. Almost all of us, with some time in.’

‘But if you don’t mind, how come you’re in it? U.H.I.D.? How’re you supposed to be
deformed? It’s nothing that sticks way out, if I can say it. Are you, like, missing
something?’

‘There’s a brief ceremony. It’s a bit like giving out chips over at the Better Late
Than Never meeting, for Varying Lengths. The new U.H.I.D.s stand and receive the veil
and don the veil and stand there and recite that the veil they’ve donned is a Type
and a Symbol, and that they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always—a day
at a time—both in light and darkness, both in solitude and before others’ gaze, and
as with strangers so with familiar friends, even Daddies. That no mortal eye will
see it withdrawn. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all
sight. Unquote.’

‘…’

‘I’ve also got a membership card that spells out everything you could ever want to
know, and more.’

‘Except I’ve asked Pat and Tommy S. and still the thing I don’t get is why join a
fellowship just to hide? I can see if somebody is like—you know, hideously—and they’ve
been hiding away in the dark all their life, and they want to Come In and join a fellowship
where everybody’s equal and everybody can Identify because they all spent their whole
life hiding also, and you join a fellowship so you can step out of the dark and into
the group and get support and finally show yourself minus eyes or with three ti—arms
or whatever and be accepted by people that know just what it’s like, and like in AA
they say they’ll love you till you can like love yourself and accept yourself, so
you don’t care what people see or think anymore, and you can finally step out of the
cage and quit hiding.’

‘That’s AA?’

‘Kind of, a little bit, I think.’

‘Well Mr. Gately what people don’t get about being hideously or improbably deformed
is that the urge to hide is offset by a gigantic sense of shame about your urge to
hide. You’re at a graduate wine-tasting party and improbably deformed and you’re the
object of stares that the people try to conceal because they’re ashamed of wanting
to stare, and you want nothing more than to hide from the covert stares, to erase
your difference, to crawl under the tablecloth or put your face under your arm, or
you pray for a power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness
to descend so you can be reduced to nothing but a voice among other voices, invisible,
equal, no different, hidden.’

‘Is this like this thing they talked about about people hating their faces on videophones?’

‘But Don you’re still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection
and society, you know intellectually that you’re no less worthy of connection and
society than anyone else simply because of how you appear, you know that hiding yourself
away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and
that will keep you from the kind of life you deserve as much as the next girl, you
know that you can’t help how you look but that you are supposed to be able to help
how much you
care
about how you look. You’re supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over
how much you want to hide, and you’re so desperate to feel some kind of control that
you settle for the
appearance
of control.’

‘Your voice gets different when you talk about this shit.’

‘What you do is you
hide
your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to
appear
to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you
appear
to others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd’s
visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra
gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial
struggles of people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that
they can see that you’re hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your
deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance.’

‘Use less words.’

‘In other words you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame, Don: you’re ashamed
of the fact that you want to hide from sight. You’re ashamed of your uncontrolled
craving for shadow. U.H.I.D.’s First Step is admission of powerlessness over the need
to hide. U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment.
In other words we don the veil. We don the veil and wear the veil proudly and stand
very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, and but now completely
up-front and unashamed about the fact that how we appear to others affects us deeply,
about the fact that we want to be shielded from all sight. U.H.I.D. supports us in
our decision to hide openly.’

‘You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it’s like
you don’t want me to follow.’

‘Well I’ve got a brand-new life, just out of the wrapper, which you all say’ll take
some time to fit.’

‘So they teach you how to accept your nonacceptance, the Union, you’re saying.’

‘You followed very well. You didn’t need fewer words at all. If you don’t mind my
saying so, my sense is that you think you’re not bright but you’re not.’

‘Not bright?’

‘I put that poorly. You’re not
not
bright. As in you’re incorrect in thinking you have nothing upstairs.’

‘It’s a self-esteem issue, then, you’re seeing in me after like three days here, then.
I feel low esteem about how I think I’m not bright enough for some people.’

‘Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently
more AA take. U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re
not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if
you begin to be
ashamed
of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you
feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and
acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others
perceived you as unbright or not.’

‘This makes the front of my head hurt, trying to follow this.’

‘Well you’ve been up all night.’

‘Then now I have to go to my other fucking job.’