Infinite Jest (109 page)

‘Over linoleum?’

‘My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance
an analytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always
pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects’ cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example
small children’s dolls and Action-Figurines.’

‘I don’t play with no goddamn Action-Figurines.’

‘GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father,
the “military” man, with “GI” representing at once the “General Issue” of a “weapon”
the Oedipal child both covets and fears
and
a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant
anal anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase’s desire to control the
bowels in order to impress or quote “win” the mother, of whom the Barbie might be
seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to
an archetype of sexual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal
mother
as image
.’

‘So you’re saying I’m
over
estimating objects?’

‘I’m saying there’s a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues
who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging
in fantasies of omnipotence.’

‘I ain’t omnipotent and I don’t want to X no Goddamn Barbiedoll.’ Then Dark’s voice
went way up and cracked as he said something about his bed.

Dr. Rusk’s office door had a nonconducting rubberized sheath on the knob, and Dr.
Rusk’s name and degrees and title, and a needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside
a big heart and a cursive exhortation to
Champion An Inner Child Today,
which the little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by
habit first at the silent locked infirmary door and then Rusk’s bottom-crack-lit door
on his way across the Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could
throw together. He wore maroon paratrooper’s pants with green stovepipe stripes down
the sides. The pants’ cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks above ancient and radically
uncool Clark’s Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk
turtleneck under an English-cut sportcoat in a purple-and-tan windowpane check. He
wore naval shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He wore his yachting cap, but with
the bill bent up at a bumpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely
poorly dressed, really. Dr. Rusk’s door was cool against his ear. Jim Troeltsch had
been coming down B’s hall just as Pemulis was leaving and said Pemulis looked like
a hangover. Through the door, Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was
proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man’s late pointer that had got into
some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice
brood, back in Kansas. The old Wallabies were from Pemulis’s older brother’s incomplete
public-school career and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the
soles’ perimeter. The socks belonged to Jennie Bash and she made it explicit she wanted
them back laundered. The sportcoat’s checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed
ribbed cuffs of shiny orange acetate esters.

The Community & Administration Bldg.’s downstairs was real quiet. It was like 2100h.,
supposedly mandatory Study Period, and Harde’s crew had gone home but the custodial
graveyard shift hadn’t come on yet. Pemulis moved noiselessly NE-SW across the lobby’s
shag. Except for lines of lamplight from under a couple doors the E.T.A. lobby was
pitch-black, and the outer Academy doors locked. There was an odd vehicular shape
near the north wall’s trophy case that Pemulis didn’t pause to investigate. He lifted
up slightly to keep the little SW hall’s door from squeaking as he opened it and entered
the administrative reception area, snapping his fingers softly to himself. A loose
music played in his head. Tavis’s reception area was empty and dim, the wallpaper’s
clouds now stormy-dark. It wasn’t totally quiet. Light came from Mrs. Inc’s doorway
and from the crack under Tavis’s inner door. Lateral Alice Moore had gone home. Pemulis
activated her Third Rail and played with her chair as he made a very quick survey
of the material on her desk. Activating the P.A. mike was out of all question. Two
of her five drawers were still locked. Pemulis scanned behind him and popped another
breath mint and sat quietly for a moment as Moore’s chair slid back and forth along
the rail, his fingers in a steeple under his nose, considering.

Light shone from the crack of Tavis’s inner door because the outer door stood open.
Pemulis didn’t even have to put any kind of ear to the wood of the inside door. He
could hear the hiss and high-speed grind of Tavis’s StairBlaster, and Tavis’s breathless
recessive voice. You could tell there was nobody else in there. You could tell Tavis
had no shirt on and an E.T.A. towel around his neck and his hair a sweaty curtain
down one side of his little head as he ran to keep up with what reminded everybody
of a Satanishly-possessed Filene’s escalator. He was exhorting himself in a kind of
fast rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis like either ‘Total worry total worry’
or ‘No don’t worry no don’t worry’ and c. Pemulis could envision Tavis’s round belly
and little titties of fat bouncing with the action of the StairBlaster. You could
hear the sudden muffling when he probably brought the towel up to dab at his slanted
mustache. Tavis’s doorknob had no insulating rubber sheath, Pemulis noticed.

Pemulis’s ensemble’s belt was a plastic thing with chintzy fake-Navajo beading, purchased
by little Chip Sweeny at one of last fall’s WhataBurger’s souvenir stands and subsequently
transferred to Pemulis during a Big Buddy tennis-as-game-of-chance exercise. The beading-patterns
were in Gila-monster orange and black, the orange a different shade than Pemulis’s
turtleneck.

He could never resist biting down once a mint’d melted to a certain size and texture.

The doorless Dean of Academic Affairs’s office was a blazing rectangle of light. The
light didn’t spill very far into the reception area, however. At close-range, sounds
issued from the office, but not exactly words. Pemulis checked his fly and snapped
his fingers under his own nose and assumed a businesslike stride and rapped firmly
on the doorless jamb without breaking stride. The heavier blue shag of the office
itself slowed him down a bit. He stopped once he was all the way in. 18-A John Wayne
and Hal’s Mumsly-Wumsly were both in the front of the office. They were about maybe
two meters apart. The room was lit overhead and by four standing lamps. The seminar
table and chairs cast a complicated shadow. Two homemade pompoms of shredded paper
and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis racquets were on the seminar
table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulderpads
and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He was down
in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc’s incredibly tall and well-preserved
mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader’s outfit and
had one of deLint’s big brass whistles hanging around her neck. She was blowing on
the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling
sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits
on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced
the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show
of pushing the bumpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs.
Inc was the only one looking at him.

‘I probably won’t even waste everybody’s time asking if I’m interrupting,’ Pemulis
said.

Mrs. Inc seemed frozen in place. Her one hand was still up in the air, fine fingers
splayed. Wayne craned his neck to look over at Pemulis from under his helmet without
changing his three-point stance. The football-noises trailed off. Wayne’s got a narrow
nose and close-set witchy eyes. He wore a plastic mouthguard. The musculature of his
legs and buttocks was clearly outlined as he squatted forward with his weight on his
knuckles. There was way less time passing in the office than there seemed to be.

‘Hoping for a second of your time,’ Pemulis told Mrs. Inc. He was standing schoolboy-straight,
hands clasped demurely over his fly, which on Pemulis this posture did look insolent.

Wayne straightened up and moved toward his clothing with no little dignity. His sweats
were neatly folded on the Dean’s desk at the rear of the office. The mouthguard was
attached to the facemask and hung from it when removed. The chin strap had several
snaps Wayne had to undo.

‘Nice-looking helmet,’ Pemulis told him.

Wayne, pulling hard on his sweatpants’ cuffs to fit them over a shoe, didn’t reply.
He was so fit that his supporter’s straps didn’t even dent his buttocks.

Mrs. Incandenza removed the mute whistle. She was still split down on the floor. Pemulis
made rather a show of not looking south of her face. She pursed her lips to chuff
hair out of her eyes.

‘I predict this’ll take about two minutes at most,’ Pemulis said, smiling.

Lenz wears a worsted topcoat and dark slacks and Brazilian loafers with a high-wattage
shine and a disguise that makes him look like Andy Warhol with a tan. Bruce Green
wears a cheesy off-the-rack leather jacket of stiff cheap leather that makes the jacket
creak when he breathes.

‘This is when you man this is when you find out your like what like true character,
is when it’s pointed right at you and some bugeyed fucking spic’s not five mitts
²³⁰
away pointing it, and I strangely I get real calm see and said I said Pepito I said
I Pepito man you go on and do what you need to do man go on and shoot but man you
better
I mean fucking
better
kill me with the first shot man or you won’t get another one I said. Not even bullshitting
man I’m serious it’s like I found right then I meant it. You know what I’m saying?’
Green lights both their smokes. Lenz exhales with that hiss of people in a rush to
drive their point home. ‘You know what I’m saying?’

‘I don’t know.’

It’s an urban November
P.M.
: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees.
The rising moon looks like it doesn’t feel very well. The click of Lenz’s loafers
and the crunchy thud of Green’s old asphalt-spreader’s boots with the thick black
soles. Green’s little noises of attention and assent. He says he’s been broken by
life, is all he’ll personally say. Green. Life has kicked his ass, and he’s regrouping.
Lenz likes him, and there’s always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging, whenever
he likes somebody. It’s like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear
than a kind of tension in the region of stomach and ass, an all-body wince. Deciding
to go ahead and think somebody’s a stand-up guy: it’s like you drop something, you
give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it
to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like
somebody. There would be no way to say any of this out loud to Green. As it gets past
2200h. and the meatloaf in his pocket’s baggie’s gotten dark and hard from disuse
the pressure to exploit the c. 2216 interval for resolution builds to a terrible pitch,
but Lenz still can’t yet quite get it up to ask Green to walk back some other way
at least once in a while. How does he do it and still have Green know he thinks he’s
OK? But you don’t come right out there and let somebody hear you say you think they’re
OK. When it’s a girl you’re just trying to X it’s a different thing, straightforwarder;
but like for instance where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you
like them and mean what you say? You can’t look right at them, because then what if
their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and you lock eyes as you’re saying
it, and then there’d be some awful like voltage or energy there, hanging between you.
But you can’t look away like you’re nervous, like some nervous kid asking for a date
or something. You can’t go around giving that kind of thing of yourself away. Plus
the knowing that the whole fucking thing’s not worth this kind of wince and stress:
the whole thing’s enraging. The afternoon of tonight earlier at circa 1610h. Lenz’d
sprayed RIJID-brand male hairspray in the face of a one-eyed Ennet House stray cat
that had wandered by mischance into the men’s head upstairs, but the result: unsatisfying.
The cat had just run away downstairs, clunking into the bannister only once. Lenz
then got diarrhea, which always disgusts him, and he had to stay in the head and open
the little warped frosted-glass window and run the shower on C until the smell’s evidence
cleared, with fucking Glynn pounding on the door and attracting attention howling
about who’s flailing the whale in there all this time is it by any chance Lenz. But
then how would he be supposed to act henceforward toward Green if he blows him off
and says to let him walk solo home? How would he be supposed to act if it’d seemed
like he’d like spurned Green? What does he henceforward say if he and Green pass each
other in the aisle at Saturday Night Lively or both reach for the same sandwich at
the raffle-break at White Flag, or get caught standing there half-naked in towels
in the hall waiting for somebody to get out of the shower? What if he like spurns
Green and Green ends up in the 3-Man room while Lenz is still in there and they have
to room together and interface constantly? And if Lenz tries to temper the spurning
by telling Green he likes him, where the fuck is he supposed to look when he says
it? If trying to X a female species Lenz would have nullo problemo with where to look.
He’d have no problem with looking deep into some bitch’s eyes and looking so sincere
it’s like he’s dying inside him. Or if like assuring a bad-complected Brazilian he
hadn’t stepped on a half-kilo three separate times with Inositol.
²³¹
Or if high: zero problem. If he got high, he’d have no problem telling somebody he
liked him even if he really did. For it’d give his spirits a voltage that’d more than
overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might hang in the air between somebody. A few
lineskers and there’d be no stress-issues about telling Bruce G. with all due respects
to screw, go peddle his papers, go play in the freeway, go play with a chain saw,
go find a short pier, that no disrespect but Lenz needed to fly solo in the urban
night. So after the incident with the cat and diarrhea and some hard words with D.
R. Glynn, who was slumped holding his abdomen down against the south wall of the upstairs
hall, Lenz decides enough is enough and goes and gets a little square of foil off
the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink and goes and takes a half-gram,
maybe a gram at most out of the emergency stash out of the vault-thing he’s razored
out of the
Principles of Natural Lectures.
Far from your scenario of relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for assertively
sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get
resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth—Lenz will use cocaine in the
very interests of sobriety and growth itself.