Infinite Jest (110 page)

So then like strategically, at the Brookline Young People’s Mtg. over on Beacon near
the Newton line on a Wednesday, at the raffle-break, at 2109h., Lenz moistens his
half-gasper and puts it carefully back in the pack and yawns and stretches and does
a quick pulse-check and gets up and saunters casually into the Handicapped head with
the lockable door and the big sort of crib built around the shitter itself for crippled
lowering onto the toilet and does like maybe two, maybe three generous lines of Bing
off the top of the toilet-tank and wipes the tank-top off both before and after with
wet paper towels, ironically rolling up the same crisp buck he’d brought for the meeting’s
collection and utilizing it and cleaning it thoroughly with his finger and rubbing
his gums with the finger and then putting his head way back in the mirror to check
the kidney-shaped nostrils of his fine aqua-line nose for clinging evidence in the
trim hair up there and tasting the bitter drip in the back of his frozen throat and
taking the clean rolled buck and back-rolling it and smoothing it out and hammering
it with his fist on the lip of the sink and folding it neatly into half of half its
original Treasury Dept. size so that all evidence anybody ever even had a passing
thought of rolling the buck into a hard tight tube is, like,
anileated
. Then sauntered back out like butter wouldn’t soften anywhere on his body, knowing
just where to look at all times and casually hefting his balls before he sat back
down.

And then aside from the every so often hemispasm of the mouth and right eye he hides
via the old sunglasses and pretend-cough tactic the second half of the mtg.’s endless
oratory goes fine, he supposes, even though he did smoke almost a whole expensive
pack of gaspers in 34 minutes, and the holier-than-you Young-People AAs over in what
were supposed to be the Nonsmoking rows of chairs against the east wall to his right
shot him over some negative-type looks when perchance he happened to find he had one
going in the little tin ashtray and two at once going in his mouth, but Lenz was able
to play the whole thing off with insousistent aplomb, sitting there in his aviator
sunglasses with his legs crossed and his topcoated arms resting out along the backs
of the empty chairs on either side.

The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush
and sheen of overpass traffic, TPs’ laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved
cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor. Receding sirens. Confused inland gulls’
cries. Broken glass from far away. Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages,
more broken glass, running shoes, a woman’s either laugh or scream from who can tell
how far, coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pass by, the
sounds of chains and risen hackles. The podiatric click and thud, the visible breath,
gravel’s crunch, creak of Green’s leather, the
snick
of a million urban lighters, the gauzy far-off humming ATHSCMEs pointing out true
plumb north, the clunk and tinkle of stuff going into dumpsters and rustle of stuff
in dumpsters settling and skirl of wind on the sharp edges of dumpsters and unmistakable
clanks and tinkles of dumpster-divers and can-miners going after dumpsters’ cans and
bottles, the district Redemption Center down in West Brighton and actually even boldly
sharing a storefront with Liquor World liquor store, so the can-miners can do like
one-stop redeeming and shopping. Which Lenz finds repellent to the maximus, and shares
the feelings with Green. Lenz observes to Green how myriadly ironic are the devices
by which the Famous Crooner’s promise to Clean Up Our Urban Cities has come to be
kept. The noises parallaxing in from out over the city’s winking grid, at night. The
wooly haze of monoxides. You got your faint cuntstink of the wind off the Bay. Planes’
little crucifi of landing lights well ahead of their own noise. Crows in trees. You
got your standard crepuscular rustles. Ground floors’ lit windows laying little rugs
of light out into their lawns. Porch lights that go on automatically when you stroll
by. A threnody of sirens somewhere north of the Charles. Bare trees creaking in the
wind. The State Bird of Massachusetts, he shares to Green, is the police siren. To
Project and to Swerve. The cries and screams from out across who knows how many blocks,
who knows the screams’ intent. Sometimes the end of the scream is at the sound of
the start of the scream, he opines. The visible breath and the rainbowed rings of
streetlights and headlights through that breath. Unless the screams are really laughing.
Lenz’s own mother’s laugh had sounded like she was being eaten alive.

Except—after the maybe five total lines hoovered in a totally purposive medicinal
nonrecreational spirit—except then instead of assuring Green he’s a blue-chip commodity
on Lenz’s Exchange but to please screw and let Lenz stroll home solo with his meatloaf
and agenda, it eventuates that Lenz has again miscalculated the effect the Bing’s
hydrolysis
²³²
will have, he always like previsions the effect as cool nonchalant verbal sangfroid,
but instead Lenz on the way home finds himself under huge hydrolystic compulsion to
have Green right there by his side—or basically anyone who can’t get away or won’t
go away—right there with him, and to share with Green or any compliant ear pretty
much every experience and thought he’s ever had, to give each datum of the case of
R. Lenz shape and visible breath as his whole life (and then some) tear-asses across
his mind’s arctic horizon, trailing phosphenes.

He tells Green that his phobic fear of timepieces stems from his stepfather, an Amtrak
train conductor with deeply unresolved issues which he used to make Lenz wind his
pocketwatch and polish his fob daily with a chamois cloth and nightly make sure his
watch’s displayed time was correct to the second or else he’d lay into the pint-sized
Randy with a rolled-up copy of
Track and Flange,
a slick and wicked-heavy coffee-table-sized trade periodical.

Lenz tells Green how spectacularly obese his own late mother had been, using his arms
to dramatically illustrate the dimensions involved.

He breathes between about every third or fourth fact, ergo about once a block.

Lenz tells Green the plots of several books he’s read, confabulating them.

Lenz doesn’t notice the way Green’s face sort of crumples blankly when Lenz mentions
the issue of late mothers.

Lenz euphorically tells Green how he once got the tip of his left finger cut off in
a minibike chain once and how but within days of intensive concentration the finger
had grown back and regenerated itself like a lizard’s tail, confounding doctoral authorities.
Lenz says that was the incident in youth after which he got in touch with his own
unusual life-force and
energois de vivre
and knew and accepted that he was somehow not like the run of common men, and began
to accept his uniqueness and all that it entailed.

Lenz clues Green in on it’s a myth the Nile crocodile is the most dreaded species
of crocodile, that the dreaded Estuarial crocodile of saltwater habits is a billion
times more dreaded by those in the know.

Lenz theorizes that his compulsive need to know the time with microspic precision
is also a function of his stepfather’s dysfunctional abuse regarding the pocketwatch
and
Track and Flange.
This segues into an analysis of the term
dysfunction
and its revelance to the distinctions between, say, psychology and natural religion.

Lenz tells how once in the Back Bay on Boylston outside Bonwit’s a pushy prosthesis-vendor
gave him a hard time about a glass-eye item of jewelry and got his issues’ juices
flowing and then down the prosthesis-vendor line another vendor simply would not take
No of any sort about a bottle of A.D.A.-Approved Xero-Lube Saliva Substitute with
a confabulated celeb-endorsement from J. Gentle F. Crooner on it and Lenz utilized
akido to break the man’s nose with one blow and then drive the bone’s shards and fragments
up into the vendor’s brain with the follow-up heel of his hand, a maneuver known by
a secret ancient Chinese term meaning The Old One-Two, eliminating the saliva guy’s
map on the spot, so that Lenz had learned about the lethality of his whatever-was-beyond-black
belt in akido and his hands’ deadliness as weapons when his issues were provoked and
tells Green how he’d taken a solemn vow right there, running like hell down Boylston
for the Auditorium T-Stop to evade prosecution, vowed never to use his lethally adept
akido skills except in the most compulsory situation of defending the innocent and/or
weak.

Lenz tells Green how once he was at a Halloween party where a hydrocephalic woman
wore a necklace made of dead gulls.

Lenz shares about this recurving dream where he’s seated under a tropical ceiling
fan in a cane chair wearing an L.L. Bean safari hat and holding a wickerware valise
in his lap, and that’s all, and that’s the recurving dream.

On the 400 block of W. Beacon, around 2202h., Lenz demonstrates for Bruce Green the
secret akido 1-2 with which he’d demapped the saliva-monger, breaking the move down
into slo-mo constituent movements so that Green’s untrained eye could follow. He says
there’s another recurving nightmare about a clock with hands frozen eternally at 1830
that’s so trouser-foulingly scary he won’t even burden Green’s fragile psychology
with the explicits of it.

Green, lighting both their smokes, says he either doesn’t remember his dreams or doesn’t
dream.

Lenz adjusts his white toupee and mustache in a darkened InterLace outlet’s window,
does the odd bit of t’ai-chi stretching, and blows his nose into W. Beacon’s cluttered
gutter Euro-style, one nostril at a time, arching to keep his coatfront well back
from what he expels.

Green’s one of these muscle-shirt types that carries his next gasper tucked up over
his ear, which the use of RIJID or other brands of quality hair-fixative makes impossible
for the reason that residues of spray on the cigarette cause it to burst unexpectedly
into flame at points along its length. Lenz regales how at that Halloween Party with
the necklace of birds there’d been allegedly a Concavity-refugee infant there, at
the party, at the home of a South Boston orthodontist that dealt Lidocaine to Bing-retailers
on the prescriptional dicky,
²³³
a normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying in a kind of
raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and deskulled head-region
supported and, like (shuddering),
contained
in a sort of lidless plastic box, and its eyes were sunk way down in its face, which
was the consistency of like quicksand, the face, and its nose concave and its mouth
hanging out over either side of the boneless face, and the total head had like
conformed
to the inside of the containing box it was contained in, the head, and appeared roughly
square in overall outline, the head, and the woman with the lei of gull-heads and
other persons in costumes had ingested hallucinogens and drank mescal and ate the
little worms in the mescal and had performed circled rituals around the box and platform
around 2355h., worshipping the infant, or as they termed it simply
The Infant,
as if there were only One.

Green lets Lenz know the time at roughly two-minute intervals, maybe once a block,
from his cheap but digital watch, when the critical B.B.S.B. liquid-crystal sign is
obscured by the urban night’s strolling skyline.

Lenz’s labial writhing occurs worst on diphthongs involving o-sounds.

Lenz clues Green in that AA/NA works all right but there’s no fucking question it’s
a cult, he and Green’ve apparently got themselves to the point where the only way
out of the addictive tailspin is to enlist in a fucking cult and let them try and
brainwash your ass, and that the first person tries to lay a saffron robe or tambourine
on Lenz is going to be one very sorry cableyarrow indeed, is all.

Lenz claims to remember some experiences which he says happened to him
in vitro
.

Lenz says the Ennet graduates who often come back and take up living-room space sitting
around comparing horror stories about former religious cults they’d tried joining
as part of their struggle to try to quit with the drugs and alcohol are not w/o a
certain naïve charm but are basically naïve. Lenz details that robes and mass weddings
and head-shaving and pamphleteering in airports and selling flowers on median strips
and signing away inheritances and never sleeping and marrying whoever they tell you
and then never seeing who you marry are small potatoes in terms of bizarre-cult criterion.
Lenz tells Green he knows individuals who’ve heard shit that would blow Green’s mind
out his ear-sockets.

At lunchtime, Hal Incandenza was lying on his bunk in bright sunlight through the
window with his hands laced over his chest, and Jim Troeltsch poked his head in and
asked Hal what he was doing, and Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn’t say
anything else until Troeltsch went away.

Then, 41 breaths later, Michael Pemulis stuck his head in where Troeltsch’s had been.

‘Did you eat yet?’

Hal made his stomach bulge up and patted it, still looking at the ceiling. ‘The beast
has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the Baobob tree.’

‘Gotcha.’

‘Surveying his loyal pride.’

‘
I
gotcha.’

Over 200 breaths later, John (‘N.R.’) Wayne opened up the ajar door a little more
and put his whole head in and stayed like that, with just his head in. He didn’t say
anything and Hal didn’t say anything, and they stayed like that for a while, and then
Wayne’s head smoothly withdrew.

Under a streetlamp on Faneuil St. off W. Beacon, Randy Lenz shares a vulnerable personal
thing and tilts his head back to show Bruce Green where his septum used to be.

Randy Lenz reguiles Bruce Green about certain real-estate cults in S. Cal. and the
West Coast. Of Delawareans that still believed Virtual-Reality pornography even though
it’d been found to cause bleeding from the eye-corners and real-world permanent impotence
was still the key to Shrangi-la and believed that some sort of perfect piece of digito-holographic
porn was circulating somewhere in the form of a bootleg Write-Protect-notched software
diskette and devoted their cultic lives to snuffling around trying to get hold of
the virtual kamasupra diskette and getting together in dim Wilmington-area venues
and talking very obliquely about rumors of where and just what the software was and
how their snufflings for it were going, and watching Virtual fuckfilms and mopping
the corner of their eyes, etc. Or of something called Stelliform Cultism that Bruce
Green isn’t even near ready to hear about, Lenz opines. Or like e.g. of a suicidal
Nuck cult of Nucks that worshipped a form of Russian Roulette that involved jumping
in front of trains and seeing which Nuck could come the closest to the train’s front
without getting demapped.