Infinite Jest (108 page)

The Browning X444, combined with blocks of Don Gately’s highly portable cornflake-garnish
meatloaf, were for canines, which your urban canines tended to be nonferal and could
be found within the confinement of their pet-owners’ fenced yards on a regularer basis
than the urban-cat species, and who are less suspicious of food and, though more of
a personal-injury risk to approach, do not scratch the hand that feeds them.

For when the dense square of meatloaf is taken out and unwrapped from the Zip-loc
and proffered from the edgelet of yard out past the fence by the sidewalk, the dog
at issue invariably stops with the barking and/or lunging and its nose flares and
it becomes totally uncynical and friendly and comes to the end of its chain or the
fence Lenz stands behind and makes interested noises and if Lenz holds the meat-item
just up out of reach the dog if its rope or chain will permit it it’ll go up on the
hind legs and sort of play the fence with its front paws, jumping eagerly, as Lenz
dangles the meat.

Day had had some Recovery-Issue paperback he was reading that Lenz had a look at one
P.M.
in their room when Day was downstairs with Ewell and Erdedy telling each other their
windbagathon stories, lying on Day’s mattress with his shoes on and trying to fart
into the mattress as much as possible: some line in the book had arrested Lenz’s attention:
something about the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the likelihood
for the propensity for violent acting-out—and Lenz found the observation to be sound.

The only serious challenge to using the Browning X444 is that Lenz has to make sure
to get around behind the dog before he cuts the dog’s throat, because the bleeding
is far-reaching in its intensity, and Lenz is now on his second R. Lauren topcoat
and third pair of dark wool slacks.

Then once near Halloween in an alley behind Blanchard’s Liquors off Allston’s Union
Square Lenz comes across a street drunk in a chewed-looking old topcoat in the deserted
alley taking a public leak against the side of a dumpster, and Lenz envisualizes the
old guy both cut and on fire and dancing jaggedly around hitting at himself while
Lenz goes ‘
There,
’ but that’s as close as Lenz comes to that kind of level of resolution; and it’s
maybe to his credit that he’s a little off his psychic feed for a few days after that
close call, and inactive with pets circa 2216h.

Lenz has nothing much against his newer fellow resident Bruce Green, and when one
Sunday night after the White Flag Green asks can he walk along with Lenz on the walk
back after the Our Father Lenz says Whatever and lets Green walk with him, and is
inactive during this night’s 2216 interval as well. Except after a couple nights of
Green strolling home along with him, first from the White Flag and then from St. Columbkill’s
on Tuesday and a double 1900–2200 shot of St. E.’s Sharing and Caring NA and then
BYP on Wed., Green following him around like a terrier from mtg. to mtg. and then
home, it begins to like emerge on Lenz that Bruce G. is starting to treat this walking-through-the-urban-
P.M.
-with-Randy-Lenz thing as like a regular fucking thing, and Lenz starts to jones about
it, the unresolved Powerless Rage issues that the thing is now he’s gotten so he’s
used to resolving them on a more or less nightly basis, so that being unable to be
freely alone to be active with the Browning X444 or even a SteelSak during the 2216–
2226h. interval causes this pressure to build up like almost a Withdrawal-grade pressure.
But on the other side of the hand, walking with Green has its positive aspects as
well. Like that Green doesn’t complain about lengthy detours to keep a mainly north/northeastern
orientation to the walks when possible. And Lenz enjoys a sympathetic and listening
ear to have around; he has numerous aspects and experiences to mull over and issues
to organize and mull, and (like many people hardwired for organic stimulants) talking
is sort of Lenz’s way of thinking. And but most of the ears of the other residents
at Ennet House are not only unsympathetic but are attached to great gaping flapping
oral mouths which keep horning into the conversation with the mouths’ own opinions
and issues and aspects—most of the residents are the worst listeners Lenz has ever
seen. Bruce Green, on the hand’s positive side, hardly says anything. Bruce Green
is quiet the way certain stand-up type guys you want to have there with you beside
you if a beef starts going down are quiet, like self-contained. Yet Green is not so
quiet and unresponding that it’s like with some silent people where you start to wonder
if he’s listening with a sympathizing ear or if he’s really drifting around in his
own self-oriented thoughts and not even listening to Lenz, etc., treating Lenz like
a radio you can tune in or out. Lenz has a keen antenna for people like this and their
stock is low on his personal exchange. Bruce Green inserts low affirmatives and ‘No
shit’s and ‘Fucking-A’s, etc., at just the right places to communicate his attentions
to Lenz. Which Lenz admires.

So it’s not like Lenz just wants to blow Green off and tell him to go peddle his papers
and let him the fuck alone after Meetings so he can solo. It would have to be handled
in a more diplomatic fashion. Plus Lenz finds himself nervous at the prospect of offending
Green. It’s not like he’s scared of Green in terms of physically. And it’s not like
he’s concerned Green would be the Ewell- or Day-type you have to stressfully worry
about maybe going and ratting out on Lenz’s place of whereabouts to the Finest and
everything like that. Green has a strong air of non-rat about him which Lenz admires.
So it’s not like he’s frightened to blow Green off; it’s more like very tense and
tightly wound.

Plus it agitates Lenz that he has the feeling that it really wouldn’t be any big deal
to Green that much one way or the other, and that Lenz feels like he’s spending all
this stress tensely worrying about his side of something that Green would barely think
about for more than a couple seconds, and it enrages Lenz that he can know in his
head that the tense worry about how to diplomatize Green into leaving him alone is
unnecessary and a waste of time and tension and yet still not be able to stop worrying
about it, which all only increases the sense of Powerlessness that Lenz is impotent
to resolve with his Browning and meatloaf as long as Green continues to walk home
with him.

And the schizoid cats with clotted fur that lurk around Ennet House cringing and neurotic
and afraid of their own shadow are too risky, for the female residents are always
formulating attachments to them. And Pat M.’s Golden Retrievers would be tattlemount
to legal suicide. On a Saturday c. 2221h., Lenz found a miniature bird that had fallen
out of some nest and was sitting bald and pencil-necked on the lawn of Unit #3 flapping
ineffectually, and went in with Green and ducked Green and went back outside to #3’s
lawn and put the thing in a pocket and went in and put it down the garbage disposal
in the kitchen sink of the kitchen, but still felt largely impotent and unresolved.

Except for Pat Montesian’s bay-windowed front office and the House Manager’s phone-booth-sized
back office and the two live-in Staff bedrooms down in the basement, none of the doors
inside Ennet House have locks, for predictable reasons.

The only bona fide blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine, Chief, U.S. Office of Unspecified
Services: his special metric ruler. In a locked drawer of his bathroom cabinets at
home on Connecticut Ave. NW in the District is kept a special metric ruler, and Tine
measures his penis every
A.M.
, like clockwork; has since twelve; still does. Plus a special telescoping travelling
model of the ruler he travels with, for on-the-road-
A.M.
-penis-measurement. President Gentle has no N.S.A.
²²⁸
as such. Tine’s in metro Boston because of the N.S. implications of what they’d first
come to Unspecified Services about two summers past, both the head of D.E.A. and the
Chair of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, now both here standing on one foot
and then the other and twidgelling the brims of their hats. This unwatchable underground
Entertainment-cartridge that at first seemed to be just popping haphazardly up in
random locales: a film with certain he’s given to understand from briefings quote
‘qualities’ such that whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it
again, and then again, and so on. It had popped up in Berkeley NCA, in the home of
a film-scholar and his male companion, neither of whom had appeared for appointments
for days; and now lost to meaningful human activity henceforward, by all appearances,
were the scholar and companion, the two cops dispatched to the Berkeley home, the
six cops dispatched after the two cops never followed up their Code-Five, the watch
sergeant and partner dispatched after them—seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians
in all, until the lethality of whatever they’d caught sight of presented itself with
enough clarity for somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home’s
power. The Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds
of the attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.’s Entertainment
Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building’s whole grid.
J. Gentle had been apprised about the thing only after it had popped up and taken
out a diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attaché and a dozen incidentals here
in Boston MA late last spring. These persons now all in wards. Docile and continent
but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed. Tine had toured a ward.
The persons’ lives’ meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity
or connection could hold their attention. Possessed of roughly the mental/spiritual
energies of a moth, now, according to a diagnostician out of C.D.C. The Berkeley cartridge
had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of which had
revealed flannel fibers. The D.E.A. had lost four field researchers and a consultant
before they’d bowed to the intractable problems involved in trying to have somebody
view the confiscated Tempe cartridge and articulate the thing’s lethal charms. The
strongest possible language had been necessary to restrain a certain Famous Crooner
from attempting a personal review of the thing’s qualities. Neither C.D.C. nor the
entertainment pros wanted any part of any controlled-viewing tests. Three members
of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in the mail, and the one who’d
actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his chin at all times.
Reports of the thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain unsubstantiated.
Tine’s been dispatched here in part to coordinate substantiation. There’s also the
special pocket-Franklin-Planner-sized chart he charts the daily
A.M.
penis-measurement in, daily, though to the uninitiated the little leather notebook
could look like almost anything statistical at all. By now several U.S.O. test-subjects,
volunteers from the federal and military penal systems, have been lost in attempts
to produce a description of the cartridge’s contents. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges
are in custody, vaulted. A sociopathic and mentally retarded Lance Corporal at Leavenworth,
strapped down with electrode appliqués and headset-recorder, was able to report that
the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled
woman going through a large building’s revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone
else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before
the subject’s mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even
near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn’t divert his attention from the
Entertainment. Tine’s staff had sifted through dozens of entries before deciding that
the intelligence community’s terse little name for the allegedly enslaving Entertainment
would be ‘the
samizdat
.’ P.E.T.s on sacrificed subjects revealed unexceptional wave-activity, with not near
enough alpha to indicate hypnosis or induced dopamine-surges. Attempts to trace the
matrix of the
samizdat
without viewing it—from induction on postal codes, e-microscopies on the brown padded
mailers, immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive
and maddening interviews of those civilians exposed—place the likely dissemination-point
someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford
and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest. The U.S.’s Canadian Problem is U.S.O.U.S.
Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N. Activities’ Agency’s
²²⁹
special province. So to speak. The possibility of Canadian involvement in the lethally
compelling Entertainment’s dissemination is what has brought to metro Boston Rodney
Tine, his retinue, and his ruler.

For reasons that Pemulis couldn’t for the life of him, Ortho Stice seemed to be in
there in Dr. Dolores Rusk’s office, interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours.
Pemulis paused at the door on his way by.

‘—nical assessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that
your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you’re
suffering from counterphobia.’

‘Fear of linoleum?’ It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there through
the door’s wood.

‘On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience
magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects’ relation to your
narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency
or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with
absence of control.’