Infinite Jest (113 page)

‘Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and -utilization.
See? And when are we going to get you out on the old Eschaton map for a little geopolitical
sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob? Incidentally, the arrhythmic
meaty whacking sound is Booger hitting himself in the thigh and chest in there, which
self-abuse is a textbook symptom of an anxiously depressed episode.’

‘With this I can create sympathy. For, confusingly to me, fusion produces no waste.
This we are taught in the science of my home nation. This is the very essence of the
promise of the attraction of fusion for a densely populous and waste-impacted nation
such as mine, we are taught fusion to be self-sufficient and wasteless perpetuation.
Alas, my need to visit the lavatory is becoming distended.’

‘But except no, although this was the very roadblock that’d stymified annulation,
and what had to be overcome, and was overcome, though in a way so unintuitive and
abstracto-conceptual that this is where your Third World educational system’s real
sadly in need of like a massive up-to-date-textbook airlift or something. It’s also
at just this point in the fusion-wastelessness problem where our own glorious optical
Founder, Inc’s ex-Da, Mrs. Inc’s poor cuc—’

‘I know who you refer.’

‘The man himself, at just this point, makes his final lasting contribution to state
science after he quit designing neutron-diffusion reflectors for Defense. You’ve seen
the coprolite plaque in Tavis’s office. This is from the A.E.C., for the Incster’s
Da’s, like, lasting contribution to the energy of waste.’

‘The purpose for which I was upon the stairs and became disoriented was to visit a
lavatory. This was long ago.’

‘Hold your water one second is all this’ll take. You wouldn’t even fucking
be
here without Inc’s Da, you know. What the guy did was he helped design these special
holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the behavior
of subatomics in highly poisonous environments. Without getting poisoned themselves.’

‘They thus are studying holographic conversions of the poisons instead of the poisons.’

‘Men’s Sanity in Corporate Sterno, Ars. Like an optical glove-box. The ultimate prophylactic.’

‘Please conduct me.’

‘Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a
type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel
for the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?’

‘This means what? A bottle of medicine?’

‘The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted
now, but the whole idea of treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer
was anathematic just a couple decades back.’

‘Anathematic?’

‘As in like radical, fringe. Wacko. Laughed out of town on a rail by quote mainstream
established science. Whose idea of treatment was to like poison the whole body and
see what was left. Though annular chemotherapy did start out kind of wacko. You can
see these early microphotos Schacht’s got that poster of that he won’t take down even
after you’re sick of it, the early microphotos of cancer cells getting force-fed micromassive
quantities of overdone beef and diet soda, forced to chain-smoke microsized Marlboros
near tiny little cellular phones—’
²³⁸

‘I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot.’

‘—except and corollarying out of the micromedical model was this equally radical idea
that maybe you could achieve a high-waste annulating fusion by bombarding highly toxic
radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the radioactive
particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and produces relatively stable plutonium
fluoride and uranium tetrafluoride. All you turn out to need is access to mind-staggering
volumes of toxic material.’

‘Therefore placing the natural fusion site in the Great Concavity.’

‘Roger and
Jawohl.
Here things get abstractly furry and I’ll just skim through the fact that the only
kertwang in the whole process environmentally is that the resultant fusion turns out
so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of the surrounding
ecosystem, all inhibitors to organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in every
direction.’

‘Hence the eastern Concavity of anxiety and myth.’

‘You end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable.’

‘A rain forest on sterebolic anoids.’

‘Close enough.’

‘Therefore rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism
and the unmacheteable regions of forests of the mythic eastern Concavity.’

‘Yes Ars and you find you need to keep steadily dumping in toxins to keep the uninhibited
ecosystem from spreading and overrunning more ecologically stable areas, exhausting
the atmosphere’s poisons so that everything hyperventilates. And thus and such. So
this is why E.W.D.’s major catapulting is from the metro area due north.’

‘Into the eastern Concavity, keeping it at bay.’

‘See how it all comes together?’

‘Mr. Thorp will evince keen disappointment if I resort to remove my blindfold to locate
a lavatory.’

‘Ars, I hear you. I hear fine. You don’t need to go on and on. The thing to keep in
mind for if you have to take Watson is the cyclic effects of the waste-delivery and
fusion. Major catapulting is on what days?’

‘The dates which are in each month prime numbers, until midnight.’

‘Which eradicates the overgrowth until the toxins are fused and utilized. The satellite
scenario is that the eastern part of Grid 3 goes from overgrown to wasteland to overgrown
several times a month. With the first week of the month being especially barren and
the last week being like nothing on earth.’

‘As if time itself were vastly sped up. As if nature itself had desperately to visit
the lavatory.’

‘Accelerated phenomena, which is actually equivalent to an incredible
slowing down
of time. The mnemonic rhyme Watson tried to get the Boog to remember here is “Wasteland
to lush: time’s in no rush.” ’

‘Decelerated time, I have got you.’

‘And this is what the Boog’s saying is eating him alive the worst, conceptually. He
says he’s toast if he can’t wrap his head around the concept of time in flux, conceptually.
It jacklights him for the whole annular model overall. Granted, it’s abstract. But
you should see him. One half of the face is like spasming around while the half with
the mole just like hangs there staring like a bunny you’re about to run over. Lyle’s
trying to walk him real slowly through the most basic kiddie-physical principles of
the relativity of time in extreme organic environments. In between Booger’s trips
back to the sauna. The irony for the Boogerman is you don’t really even have to know
that much about the temporal-flux stuff, since Watson’s forehead gets all mottled
and pruny-looking when he thinks about it himself.’

‘Do not please necessitate begging from me, Idris Arslanian.’

‘The eastern Concavity of course being a whole different kettle of colored horses
from what Inc calls the barren Eliotical wastes of the western Concavity, let me tell
you.’

‘I will let you tell me anything as long as it is told to me over the porcelain of
a lavatory.’

‘Interesting step you’re doing there, Id, I have to say.’

‘I beg without frequency. My home culture views begging as low-caste.’

‘Hmm. Ars, I’m standing here thinking we could work something out, maybe.’

‘I commit no illegal or degrading acts. But I will, if forced, beg.’

‘Forget that. I’m just thinking. You’re Muslimic, isn’t that right?’

‘Devoutly. I pray five times daily in the prescribed fashion. I eschew representational
art and carnality in all its four-thousand-four-hundred-and-four forms and guises.’

‘Body a temple and suchlike?”

‘I eschew. Neither stimulants nor depressing compounds pass my lips, as is prescribed
in the holy teachings of my faith.’

‘I’m wondering if you had any specific plans for this urine you’re so anxious to get
rid of, Ars, then.’

‘I am not following.’

‘What say we hash it all out over some porcelain, then, brother.’

‘Mike Pemulis, you are in motion a prince and in repose a sage.’

‘Brother, it’ll be a cold day in a warm climate when this kid right here’s in repose.’

It was strange upon strange; it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy
punting-groupies were somehow afraid of
Moment
’s Junoesque Ms. Steeply—Orin had seen his last wheelchair the day before she came
up, and now (he realized, driving) it was only hours after she’d left that they were
now back, with their shy ruses. The Excitement-Hope-Acquisition-Contempt cycle of
seduction always left Orin stunned and wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake.
It was only after he’d cleaned up and dressed and exchanged the standard compliments
and assurances, taken the elevator’s glass pod down the tall hotel’s round glass core
into the lobby, gone out through the pressurized revolving door into the scalp-crackling
gust of Phoenix heat, waited for the car’s directional AC to render the steering wheel
touchable, and then injected himself into the teeming arteries of Rt. 85 and Bell
Rd. west, back out toward Sun City, ruminating as he drove, that it kertwanged on
him that the handicapped man at the hotel room’s door had had a wheelchair, that it
was the first wheelchair he’d seen since Hal’d hit him with his theory, and that the
legless surveyer had had (stranger) the same Swiss accent as the hand-model.

En route, R. Lenz’s mouth writhes and he scratches at the little rhynophemic rash
and sniffs terribly and complains of terrible late-autumn leaf-mold allergies, forgetting
that Bruce Green knows all too well what coke-hydrolysis’s symptoms are from having
done so many lines himself, back when life with M. Bonk was one big party.

Lenz details how the vegetarian new Joel girl’s veil is because of this condition
people get where she’s got only one eye that’s right in the middle of her forehead,
from birth, like a seahorse, and asks Green not even to think of asking how he knows
this fact.

While Green acts as lookout while Lenz relieves himself against a Market St. dumpster,
Lenz swears Green to secrecy about how poor old scarred-up diseased Charlotte Treat
had sworn him to secrecy about her secret dream in sobriety was to someday get her
G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist specializing in educating youngsters pathologically
frightened of dental anesthesia, because her dream was to help youngsters, and but
how she feared her Virus has placed her secret dream forever out of reach.
²³⁹

All the way up the Spur’s Harvard St. toward Union Square, in a barely NW vector,
Lenz consumes several minutes and less than twenty breaths sharing with Green some
painful Family-Of-Origin Issues about how Lenz’s mother Mrs. Lenz, a thrice-divorcée
and Data Processor, was so unspeakably obese she had to make her own mumus out of
brocade drapes and cotton tablecloths and never once did come to Parents’ Day at Bishop
Anthony McDiardama Elementary School in Fall River MA because of the parents had to
sit in the youngsters’ little liftable-desktop desks during the Parents’ Day presentations
and skits, and the one time Mrs. L. hove her way down to B.A.M.E.S. for Parents’ Day
and tried to seat herself at little Randall L.’s desk between Mrs. Lamb and Mrs. Leroux
she broke the desk into kindling and needed four stocky cranberry-farmer dads and
a textbook-dolly to arise back up from the classroom floor, and never went back, fabricating
thin excuses of busyness with Data Processing and basic disinterest in Randy L.’s
schoolwork. Lenz shares how then in adolescence (his), his mother died because one
day she was riding a Greyhound bus from Fall River MA north to Quincy MA to visit
her son in a Commonwealth Youth Corrections facility Lenz was doing research for a
possible screenplay in, and during the voyage on the bus she had to go potty, and
she was in the bus’s tiny potty in the rear of the bus going about her private business
of going potty, as she later testified, and even though it was the height of winter
she had the little window of the potty wide open, for reasons Lenz predicts Green
doesn’t want to hear about, on the northbound bus, and how this was one of the last
years of Unsubsidized ordinational year-dating, and the final fiscal year that actual
maintenance-work had ever been done on the infernous six-lane commuter-ravaged Commonwealth
Route 24 from Fall River to Boston’s South Shore by the pre-O.N.A.N.ite Governor Claprood’s
Commonwealth Highway Authority, and the Greyhound bus encountered a poorly marked
UNDER CONSTRUCTION area where 24 was all stripped down to the dimpled-iron sheeting
below and was tooth-rattlingly striated and chuckholed and torn up and just in general
basically a mess, and the poorly marked and unflag-manned debris plus the excessive
speed of the northbound bus made it jounce godawfully, the bus, and swerve violently
to and forth, fighting to maintain control of what there was of the road, and passengers
were hurled violently from their seats while, meanwhile, back in the closet-sized
rear potty, Mrs. Lenz, right in the process of going potty, was hurled from the toilet
by the first swerve and proceeded to do some high-velocity and human-waste-flinging
pinballing back and forth against the potty’s plastic walls; and when the bus finally
regained total control and resumed course Mrs. Lenz had, freakishly enough, ended
up her human pinballing with her bare and unspeakably huge backside wedged tight in
the open window of the potty, so forcefully ensconced into the recesstacle that she
was unable to extricate, and the bus continued on its northward sojourn the rest of
the way up 24 with Mrs. Lenz’s bare backside protruding from the ensconcing window,
prompting car horns and derisive oratory from other vehicles; and Mrs. Lenz’s plaintiff
shouts for Help were unavailed by the passengers that were arising back up off the
floor and rubbing their sore noggins and hearing Mrs. Lenz’s mortified screams from
behind the potty’s locked reinforced plastic door, but were unable to excretate her
because the potty’s door locked from the interior by sliding across a deadbolt that
made the door’s outside say OCCUPIED/OCCUPADO/OCCUPÉ, and the door was locked, and
Mrs. Lenz was wedged beyond the reach of arm-length and couldn’t reach the deadbolt
no matter how plaintiffly she reached out her mammoth fatwattled arm; and, like fully
88% of all clinically obese Americans, Mrs. Lenz was diagnosed clinically claustrophobic
and took prescription medication for anxiety and ensconcement-phobias, and she ended
up successfully filing a Seven-Figure suit against Greyhound Lines and the almost-defunct
Commonwealth Highway Authority for psychiatric trauma, public mortification, and second-degree
frostbite, and received such a morbidly obese settlement from the Dukakis-appointed
18th-Circus Civil Court that when the check arrived, in an extra-long-size envelope
to accommodate all the zeroes, Mrs. L. lost all will to Data Process or cook or clean,
or nurture, or finally even move, simply reclining in a custom-designed 1.5-meter-wide
recliner watching InterLace Gothic Romances and consuming mammoth volumes of high-lipid
pastry brought on gold trays by a pastry chef she’d had put at her individual 24-hour
disposal and outfitted with a cellular beeper, until four months after the huge settlement
she ruptured and died, her mouth so crammed with peach cobbler the paramedics were
hapless to administer C.P.R., which Lenz says he knows, by the way—C.P.R.