Infinite Jest (11 page)

And so but since the old CBC documentary’s thesis was turning out pretty clearly to
be
SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY,
the voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained that well, yes, poor
old Fenton here was more or less hopeless as an extra-institutional functioning unit,
but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some sort of meaning
by studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in
the human body’s brain… that, in other words, with the aid of cutting-edge Positron-Emission
Topography or ‘P.E.T.’ technology (since supplanted wholly by Invasive Digitals, Orin
hears the developmental psychology graduate student mutter to herself, watching rapt
over her cup, unaware that Orin’s paralytically awake), they could scan and study
how different parts of poor old Fenton’s dysfunctional brain emitted positrons in
a whole different topography than your average hale and hearty nondelusional God-fearing
Albertan’s brain, advancing science by injecting test-subject Fenton here with a special
blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive dye and then sticking him in the rotating
body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner—on the viewer, it’s an enormous gray-metal
machine that looks like something co-designed by James Cameron and Fritz Lang, and
now have a look at this Fenton fellow’s eyes as he starts to get the gist of what
the voiceover’s saying—and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now showed subject Fenton
in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head from side to side
as guys in mint-green surgical masks and caps inject him with radioactive fluids through
a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton’s eyes bugging out in total foreseen
horror as he’s rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device and slid like an unrisen
loaf into the thing’s open maw until only his decay-colored sneakers are in view,
and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise, with brutal
speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right
and then up, faster and faster, the machine’s blurps and tweets not even coming close
to covering Fenton’s entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came true in digital
stereo and you could hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated
mind being screamed out of him for all time as the viewer digitally superimposed an
image of Fenton’s ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the lower-right corner, where
InterLace’s Time/Temp functions usually appear, and the brisk voiceover gave capsule
histories of first paranoid schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With Orin lying there slit-eyed,
wet and neuralgic with
A.M.
dread, wishing the Subject would put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take
the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the bathroom
and get yesterday’s asphyxiated roaches into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters
all filled for the day, and decide what kind of expensive present to mail the Subject’s
kid.

And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.

And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with some
sort of insipid-type personality-profile series of interviews with some profiler from
Moment
magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some blandly sincere
team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again,
reopen that whole Pandora’s box of worms.

Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving
upward, with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught.

Here’s Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly
high in the Enfield Tennis Academy’s underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into
an industrial exhaust fan. It’s the sad little interval after afternoon matches and
conditioning but before the Academy’s communal supper. Hal is by himself down here
and nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing.

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the
secrecy as he is to getting high.

A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with
a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth—the brass ones especially—but
one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets inhaled;
there’s none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl’s big load,
and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even
his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.

Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.

The Academy’s tennis courts’ Lung’s Pump Room is underground and accessible only by
tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design.

Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let’s face it, anything you use
to smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going
to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bongwater to deal with. Pipes
are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party
bowl that disperses nonutilized smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly
employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and
sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the
lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and
it’s highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.

As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C. Boone, Jim
Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford, and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw,
and remotely possibly Frannie Unwin, all know Hal gets regularly covertly high. It’s
also not impossible that Bernadette Longley knows, actually; and of course the unpleasant
K. Freer always has suspicions of all kinds. And Hal’s brother Mario knows a thing
or two. But that’s it, in terms of public knowledge. And but even though Pemulis and
Struck and Boone and Troeltsch and Axford and occasionally (in a sort of medicinal
or touristic way) Stice and Schacht all are known to get high also, Hal has actually
gotten actively high only with Pemulis, on the rare occasions he’s gotten high with
anybody else, as in in person, which he avoids. He’d forgot: Ortho (‘The Darkness’)
Stice, of Partridge KS, knows; and Hal’s oldest brother, Orin, mysteriously, even
long-distance, seems to know more than he’s coming right out and saying, unless Hal’s
reading more into some of the phone-comments than are there.

Hal’s mother, Mrs. Avril Incandenza, and her adoptive brother Dr. Charles Tavis, the
current E.T.A. Headmaster, both know Hal drinks alcohol sometimes, like on weekend
nights with Troeltsch or maybe Axford down the hill at clubs on Commonwealth Ave.;
The Unexamined Life has its notorious Blind Bouncer night every Friday where they
card you on the Honor System. Mrs. Avril Incandenza isn’t crazy about the idea of
Hal drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly
his father’s own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal’s academic precocity, and
especially his late competitive success on the junior circuit, make it clear that
he’s able to handle whatever modest amounts she’s pretty sure he consumes—there’s
no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic
levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic
part—and Avril feels it’s important that a concerned but un-smothering single parent
know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make
their own possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how
much the secret worry about mistakes tears her gizzard out, the mother’s. And Charles
supports whatever personal decisions she makes in conscience about her children. And
God knows she’d rather have Hal having a few glasses of beer every so often than absorbing
God alone knows what sort of esoteric designer compounds with reptilian Michael Pemulis
and trail-of-slime-leaving James Struck, both of whom give Avril a howling case of
the maternal fantods. And ultimately, she’s told Drs. Rusk and Tavis, she’d rather
have Hal abide in the security of the knowledge that his mother trusts him, that she’s
trusting and supportive and doesn’t judge or gizzard-tear or wring her fine hands
over his having for instance a glass of Canadian ale with friends every now and again,
and so works tremendously hard to hide her maternal dread of his possibly ever drinking
like James himself or James’s father, all so that Hal might enjoy the security of
feeling that he can be up-front with her about issues like drinking and not feel he
has to hide anything from her under any circumstances.

Dr. Tavis and Dolores Rusk have privately discussed the fact that not least among
the phobic stressors Avril suffers so uncomplainingly with is a black phobic dread
of hiding or secrecy in all possible forms with respect to her sons.

Avril and C. T. know nothing about Hal’s penchants for high-resin Bob Hope and underground
absorption, which fact Hal obviously likes a lot, on some level, though he’s never
given much thought to why. To why he likes it so much.

E.T.A.’s hilltop grounds are traversable by tunnel. Avril I., for example, who never
leaves the grounds anymore, rarely travels above ground, willing to hunch to take
the off-tunnels between Headmaster’s House and her office next to Charles Tavis’s
in the Community and Administration Bldg., a pink-bricked white-pillared neo-Georgian
thing that Hal’s brother Mario says looks like a cube that has swallowed a ball too
big for its stomach.
³
Two sets of elevators and one of stairs run between the lobby, reception area, and
administrative offices on Comm.-Ad.’s first floor and the weight room, sauna, and
locker/shower areas on the sublevel below it. One large tunnel of elephant-colored
cement leads from just off the boys’ showers to the mammoth laundry room below the
West Courts, and two smaller tunnels radiate from the sauna area south and east to
the subbasements of the smaller, spherocubular, proto-Georgian buildings (housing
classrooms and subdormitories B and D); these two basements and smaller tunnels often
serve as student storage space and hallways between various prorectors’
⁴
private rooms. Then two even smaller tunnels, navigable by any adult willing to assume
a kind of knuckle-dragging simian posture, in turn connect each of the subbasements
to the former optical and film-development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the
late Dr. James O. Incandenza (now deceased) below and just west of the Headmaster’s
House (from which facilities there’s also a fair-diametered tunnel that goes straight
to the lowest level of the Community and Administration Bldg., but its functions have
gradually changed over four years, and it’s now too full of exposed wiring and hot-water
pipes and heating ducts to be really passable) and to the offices of the Physical
Plant, almost directly beneath the center row of E.T.A. outdoor tennis courts, which
offices and custodial lounge are in turn connected to E.T.A.’s Lung-Storage and -Pump
Rooms via a pargeted tunnel hastily constructed by the TesTar All-Weather Inflatable
Structures Corp., which together with the folks over at ATHSCME Industrial Air Displacement
Devices erects and services the inflatable dendriurethane dome, known as the Lung,
that covers the middle row of courts for the winter indoor season. The crude little
rough-sided tunnel between Plant and Pump is traversable only via all-fours-type crawling
and is essentially unknown to staff and Administration, popular only with the Academy’s
smaller kids’ Tunnel Club, as well as with certain adolescents with strong secret
incentive to crawl on all fours.

The Lung-Storage Room is basically impassable from March through November because
it’s full of intricately folded dendriurethane Lung-material and dismantled sections
of flexible ducting and fan-blades, etc. The Pump Room is right next to it, though
you have to crawl back out into the tunnel to get to it. On the engineering diagrams
the Pump Room’s maybe about twenty meters directly beneath the centermost courts in
the middle row of courts, and looks like a kind of spider hanging upside-down—an unfenestrated
oval chamber with six man-sized curved ducts radiating up and out to exit points on
the grounds above. And the Pump Room has six radial openings, one for each upcurving
duct: three two-meter vents with huge turbine-bladed exhaust fans bolted into their
grilles and three more 2M’s with reversed ATHSCME intake fans that allow air from
the ground above to be sucked down and around the room and up into the three exhaust
vents. The Pump Room is essentially like a pulmonary organ, or the epicenter of a
massive six-vectored wind tunnel, and when activated roars like a banshee that’s slammed
its hand in a door, though the P.R.’s in full legit operation only when the Lung is
up, usually November–March. The intake fans pull ground-level winter air down into
and around the room and through the three exhaust fans and up the outtake ducts into
networks of pneumatic tubing in the Lung’s sides and dome: it’s the pressure of the
moving air that keeps the fragile Lung inflated.