Infinite Jest (12 page)

When the courts’ Lung is down and stored, Hal will descend and walk and then hunch
his way in to make sure nobody’s in the Physical Plant quarters, then he’ll hunch
and crawl to the P.R., gear bag in his teeth, and activate just one of the big exhaust
fans and get secretly high and exhale palely through its blades into the vent, so
that any possible odor is blown through an outtake duct and expelled through a grille’d
hole on the west side of the West Courts, a threaded hole, with a flange, where brisk
white-suited ATHSCME guys will attach some of the Lung’s arterial pneumatic tubing
at some point soon when Schtitt et al. on Staff decide the real weather has moved
past enduring for outdoor tennis.

During winter months, when any expelled odor would get ducted up into the Lung and
hang there conspicuous, Hal mostly goes into a remote subdormitory lavatory and climbs
onto a toilet in a stall and exhales into the grille of one of the little exhaust
fans in the ceiling; but this routine lacks a certain intricate subterranean covert
drama. It’s another reason why Hal dreads Interdependence Day and the approach of
the WhataBurger classic and Thanksgiving and unendurable weather, and the erection
of the Lung.

Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe
because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and impending
adulthood, etc. To help manage the intra-psychic storms, etc. Since the place’s inception,
there’s always been a certain percentage of the high-caliber adolescent players at
E.T.A. who manage their internal weathers chemically. Much of this is good clean temporary
fun; but a traditionally smaller and harder-core set tends to rely on personal chemistry
to manage E.T.A.’s special demands—dexedrine or low-volt methedrine
⁵
before matches and benzodiazapenes
⁶
to come back down after matches, with Mudslides or Blue Flames at some understanding
Comm. Ave. nightspot
⁷
or beers and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the
up-and-down cycle, mushrooms or X or something from the Mild Designer class
⁸
—or maybe occasionally a little Black Star,
⁹
whenever there’s a match- and demand-free weekend, to basically short out the whole
motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly recover and be almost neurologically
reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again… this circular routine, if your
basic wiring’s OK to begin with, can work surprisingly well throughout adolescence
and sometimes into one’s like early twenties, before it starts to creep up on you.

But so some E.T.A.s—not just Hal Incandenza by any means—are involved with recreational
substances, is the point. Like who isn’t, at some life-stage, in the U.S.A. and Interdependent
regions, in these troubled times, for the most part. Though a decent percentage of
E.T.A. students aren’t at all. I.e. involved. Some persons can give themselves away
to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something
they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit
more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually
unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer
to do it in secret.

An enrolled student-athlete’s use of alcohol or illicit chemicals is cause for immediate
expulsion, according to E.T.A.’s admissions catalogue. But the E.T.A. staff tends
to have a lot more important stuff on its plate than policing kids who’ve already
given themselves away to an ambitious competitive pursuit. The administrative attitude
under first James Incandenza and then Charles Tavis is, like, why would anybody who
wanted to compromise his faculties chemically even come here, to E.T.A., where the
whole point is to stress and stretch your faculties along multiple vectors.
¹⁰
And since it’s the alumni prorectors who have the most direct supervisory contact
with the kids, and since most of the prorectors themselves are depressed or traumatized
about not making it into the Show and having to come back to E.T.A. and live in decent
but subterranean rooms off the tunnels and work as assistant coaches and teach laughable
elective classes—which is what the eight E.T.A. prorectors do, when they’re not off
playing Satellite tournaments or trying to make it through the qualifying rounds of
some serious-money event—and so they’re morose and low on morale, and feel bad about
themselves, often, as a rule, and so also not all that surprisingly tend to get high
now and then themselves, though in a less covert or exuberant fashion than the hard-core
students’ chemical cadre, but so given all this it’s not hard to see why internal
drug-enforcement at E.T.A. tends to be flaccid.

The other nice thing about the Pump Room is the way it’s connected by tunnel to the
prorectors’ rows of housing units, which means men’s rooms, which means Hal can crawl,
hunch, and tiptoe into an unoccupied men’s room and brush his teeth with his portable
Oral-B and wash his face and apply eyedrops and Old Spice and a plug of wintergreen
Kodiak and then saunter back to the sauna area and ascend to ground level looking
and smelling right as rain, because when he gets high he develops a powerful obsession
with having nobody—not even the neurochemical cadre—know he’s high. This obsession
is almost irresistible in its force. The amount of organization and toiletry-lugging
he has to do to get secretly high in front of a subterranean outtake vent in the pre-supper
gap would make a lesser man quail. Hal has no idea why this is, or whence, this obsession
with the secrecy of it. He broods on it abstractly sometimes, when high: this No-One-Must-Know
thing. It’s not fear per se, fear of discovery. Beyond that it all gets too abstract
and twined up to lead to anything, Hal’s brooding. Like most North Americans of his
generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects
and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.
It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

At 0015h., 2 April, the medical attaché’s wife is just leaving the Mount Auburn Total
Fitness Center, having played five six-game pro-sets in her little Mideast-diplomatic-wife-tennis-circle’s
weekly round-robin, then hung around the special Silver-Key-Members’ Lounge with the
other ladies, unwrapping her face and hair and playing Narjees
¹¹
and all smoking kif and making extremely delicate and oblique fun of their husbands’
sexual idiosyncrasies, laughing softly with their hands over their mouths. The medical
attaché, at their apartment, is still viewing the unlabelled cartridge, which he has
rewound to the beginning several times and then configured for a recursive loop. He
sits there, attached to a congealed supper, watching, at 0020h., having now wet both
his pants and the special recliner.

Eighteen in May, Mario Incandenza’s designated function around Enfield Tennis Academy
is filmic: sometimes during
A.M.
drills or
P.M.
matches he’ll be assigned by Coach Schtitt et al. to set up an old camcorder or whatever
video stuff’s to hand on a tripod and record a certain area of court, videotaping
different kids’ strokes, footwork, certain tics and hitches in serves or running volleys,
so the staff can show the tapes to the kids instructionally, letting the kids see
on the screen exactly what a coach or prorector’s talking about. The reason being
it’s a lot easier to fix something if you can see it.

Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined
toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug
addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their
professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore. One
reason why the home of someone whose home has been burglarized feels violated and
unclean is that there have probably been drug addicts in there. Don Gately was a twenty-seven-year-old
oral narcotics addict (favoring Demerol and Talwin
¹²
), and a more or less professional burglar; and he was, himself, unclean and violated.
But he was a gifted burglar, when he burgled—though the size of a young dinosaur,
with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when
drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on, he was, at his professional
zenith, smart, sneaky, quiet, quick, possessed of good taste and reliable transportation—with
a kind of ferocious jolliness in his attitude toward his livelihood.

As an active drug addict, Gately was distinguished by his ferocious and jolly élan.
He kept his big square chin up and his smile wide, but he bowed neither toward nor
away from any man. He took zero in the way of shit and was a cheery but implacable
exponent of the Don’t-Get-Mad-Get-Even school. Like for instance once, after he’d
done a really unpleasant three-month bit in Revere Holding on nothing more than a
remorseless North Shore Assistant District Attorney’s circumstantial suspicion, finally
getting out after 92 days when his P.D. got the charges dismissed on a right-to-speedy
brief, Gately and a trusted associate
¹³
paid a semiprofessional visit to the private home of this Assistant D.A. whose zeal
and warrant had cost Gately a nasty impromptu detox on the floor of his little holding-cell.
Also a believer in the Revenge-Is-Tastier-Chilled dictum, Gately had waited patiently
until the ‘Eye On People’ section of the
Globe
mentioned the A.D.A. and his wife’s presence at some celebrity charity sailing thing
out in Marblehead. Gately and the associate went that night to the A.D.A.’s private
home in the upscale Wonderland Valley section of Revere, killed the power to the home
with a straight shunt in the meter’s inflow, then clipped just the ground wire on
the home’s pricey HBT alarm, so that the alarm’d sound after ten or so minutes and
create the impression that the perps had somehow bungled the alarm and been scared
off in the middle of the act. Later that night, when Revere’s and Marblehead’s Finest
summoned them home, the A.D.A. and his wife found themselves minus a coin collection
and two antique shotguns and nothing more. Quite a few other valuables were stacked
on the floor of the living room off the foyer like the perps hadn’t had time to get
them out of the house. Everything else in the burglarized home looked undisturbed.
The A.D.A. was a jaded pro: he walked around touching the brim of his hat
¹⁴
and reconstructed probable events: the perps looked like they’d bungled disabling
the alarm all the way and had got scared off by the thing’s siren when the alarm’s
pricey HBT alternate ground kicked in at 300 v. The A.D.A. soothed his wife’s sense
of violation and uncleanliness. He calmly insisted on sleeping there in their home
that very night; no hotel: it was like crucial to get right back on the emotional
horse, in cases like this, he insisted. And then the next day the A.D.A. worked out
the insurance and reported the shotguns to a buddy at A.T.F.
¹⁵
and his wife calmed down and life went on.

About a month later, an envelope arrived in the A.D.A.’s home’s exquisite wrought-iron
mailbox. In the envelope were a standard American Dental Association glossy brochure
on the importance of daily oral hygiene—available at like any dentist’s office anywhere—and
two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots, one of big Don Gately and one of his associate,
each in a Halloween mask denoting a clown’s great good professional cheer, each with
his pants down and bent over and each with the enhanced-focus handle of one of the
couple’s toothbrushes protruding from his bottom.

Don Gately had sense enough never to work the North Shore again after that. But he
ended up in hideous trouble anyway, A.D.A.-wise. It was either bad luck or kismet
or so forth. It was because of a cold, a plain old human rhinovirus. And not even
Don Gately’s cold, is what made him finally stop and question his kismet.

The thing started out looking like tit on a tray, burglary-wise. A beautiful neo-Georgian
home in a wildly upscale part of Brookline was set nicely back from an unlit pseudo-rural
road, had a chintzy SentryCo alarm system that fed, idiotically enough, on a whole
separate 330 v AC 90 Hz cable with its own meter, didn’t seem to be on anything like
a regular
P.M.
-patrol route, and had, at its rear, flimsily tasteful French doors surrounded by
dense and thorn-free deciduous shrubbery and blocked off from the garage’s halogen
floods by a private E.W.D.-issue upscale dumpster. It was in short a real cock-tease
of a home, burglary-wise, for a drug addict. And Don Gately straight-shunted the alarm’s
meter and, with an associate,
¹⁶
broke and entered and crept around on huge cat feet.

Except unfortunately the owner of the house turned out to be still home, even though
both of his cars and the rest of his family were gone. The little guy was asleep sick
in bed upstairs in acetate pajamas with a hot water bottle on his chest and half a
glass of OJ and a bottle of NyQuil
¹⁷
and a foreign book and copies of
International Affairs
and
Interdependent Affairs
and a pair of thick specs and an industrial-size box of Kleenex on the bedside table
and an empty vaporizer barely humming at the foot of the bed, and the guy was to say
the least nonplussed to wake up and see high-filter flashlights crisscrossing over
the unlit bedroom walls and bureau and teak chiffonnier as Gately and associate scanned
for a wall-safe, which surprisingly like 90% of people with wall-safes conceal in
their master bedroom behind some sort of land- or seascape painting. People turned
out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel strange
sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no
man should be entitled. Gately had a way stickier conscience about the possession
of some of these large particular facts than he did about making off with other people’s
personal merchandise. But then all of a sudden in mid-silent-search for a safe here’s
this upscale homeowner turning out to be home with a nasty head-cold while his family’s
out on a two-car foliage-tour in what’s left of the Berkshires, writhing groggily
and Ny-Quilized around on the bed and making honking adenoidal sounds and asking what
in bloody
hell
is the meaning of this, except he’s saying it in Québecois French, which means to
these thuggish U.S. drug addicts in Halloween-clowns’ masks exactly nothing, he’s
sitting up in bed, a little and older-type homeowner with a football-shaped head and
gray van Dyke and eyes you can tell are used to corrective lenses as he switches on
the bright bedside lamp. Gately could easily have screwed out of there and never looked
back; but here indeed, in the lamplight, is a seascape over next to the chiffonnier,
and the associate has a quick peek and reports that the safe behind it is to laugh
at, it can be opened with harsh language, almost; and oral narcotics addicts tend
to operate on an extremely rigid physical schedule of need and satisfaction, and Gately
is at this moment firmly in the need part of the schedule; and so D. W. Gately disastrously
decides to go ahead and allow a nonviolent burglary to become in effect a robbery—which
the operative legal difference involves either violence or the coercive threat of
same—and Gately draws himself up to his full menacing height and shines his flashlight
in the little homeowner’s rheumy eyes and addresses him the way menacing criminals
speak in popular entertainment—
d
’s for
th
’s, various apocopes, and so on—and takes hold of the guy’s ear and conducts him down
to a kitchen chair and binds his arms and legs to the chair with electrical cords
neatly clipped from refrigerator and can-opener and M. Café-brand Automatic Café-au-Lait-Maker,
binds him just short of gangrenously tight, because he’s hoping the Berkshire foliage
is prime and the guy’s going to be soloing in this chair for a good stretch of time,
and Gately starts looking through the kitchen’s drawers for the silverware—not the
good-silver-for-company silverware; that was in a calfskin case underneath some neatly
folded old spare Christmas wrapping in a stunning hardwood-with-ivory-inlay chest
of drawers in the living room, where over 90% of upscale people’s good silver is always
hidden, and has already been promoted and is piled
¹⁸
just off the foyer—but just the regular old everyday flatware silverware, because
the vast bulk of homeowners keep their dish towels two drawers below their everyday-silverware
drawer, and God’s made no better call-for-help-stifling gag in the world than a good
old oily-smelling fake-linen dish towel; and the bound guy in the cords on the chair
suddenly snaps to the implications of what Gately’s looking for and is struggling
and saying: Do not gag me, I have a terrible cold, my nose she is a brick of the snot,
I have not the power to breathe through the nose, for the love of God please do not
gag my mouth; and as a gesture of goodwill the homeowner tells Gately, who’s rummaging,
the combination of the bedroom’s seascape safe, except in French numbers, which together
with the honking adenoidal inflection the guy’s grippe gives his speech doesn’t even
sound like human speech to Gately, and but also the guy tells Gately there are some
antique pre-British-takeover Québecois gold coins in a calfskin purse taped to the
back of an undistinguished Impressionist landscape in the living room. But everything
the Canadian homeowner says means no more to poor old Don Gately, whistling a jolly
tune and trying to look menacing in his clown’s mask, than the cries of, say, North
Shore gulls or inland grackles; and sure enough the towels are two drawers under the
spoons, and here comes Gately across the kitchen looking like a sort of Bozo from
hell, and the Québecer guy’s mouth goes oval with horror, and into that mouth goes
a balled-up, faintly greasy-smelling kitchen towel, and across the guy’s cheeks and
over the dome of protruding linen goes some fine-quality fibrous strapping tape from
the drawer under the decommissioned phone—why does everybody keep the serious mailing
supplies in the drawer nearest the kitchen phone?—and Don Gately and associate finish
their swift and with-the-best-of-intentions nonviolent business of stripping the Brookline
home as bare as a post-feral-hamster meadow, and they relock the front door and hit
the unlit road in Gately’s reliable and double-mufflered 4×4. And the bound, wheezing,
acetate-clad Canadian—the right-hand man to probably the most infamous anti-O.N.A.N.
organizer north of the Great Concavity, the lieutenant and trouble-shooting trusted
adviser who selflessly volunteered to move with his family to the savagely American
area of metro Boston to act as liaison between and general leash-holder for the half-dozen
or so malevolent and mutually antagonistic groups of Québecer Separatists and Albertan
ultra-rightists united only in their fanatical conviction that the U.S.A.’s Experialistic
‘gift’ or ‘return’ of the so-calledly ‘Reconfigured’ Great Convexity to its northern
neighbor and O.N.A.N. ally constituted an intolerable blow to Canadian sovereignty,
honor, and hygiene—this homeowner, unquestionably a V.I.P., although admittedly rather
a covert V.I.P., or probably more accurately a ‘
P.I.T.,
’
¹⁹
in French, this meek-looking Canadian-terrorism-coordinator—bound to his chair, thoroughly
gagged, sitting there, alone, under cold fluorescent kitchen lights,
²⁰
the rhinovirally afflicted man, gagged with skill and quality materials—the guy,
having worked so hard to partially clear one clotted nasal passage that he tore intercostal
ligaments in his ribs, soon found even that pinprick of air blocked off by mucus’s
implacable lava-like flow once again, and so has to tear more ligaments trying to
breach the other nostril, and so on; and after an hour of struggle and flames in his
chest and blood on his lips and the white kitchen towel from trying frantically to
tongue the towel out past the tape, which is quality tape, and after hopes skyrocketing
when the doorbell rings and then hopes blackly dashed when the person at the door,
a young woman with a clipboard and chewing gum who’s offering promotional coupons
good for Happy Holidays discounts on memberships of six months or more at a string
of Boston non-UV tanning salons, shrugs in her parka and makes a mark on the clipboard
and blithely retreats down the long driveway to the pseudo-rural road, an hour of
this or more, finally the Québecois
P.I.T.,
after unspeakable agony—slow suffocation, mucoidal or no, being no day at the Montreal
Tulip-Fest—at the height of which agony, hearing his head’s pulse as receding thunder
and watching his vision’s circle shrink as a red aperture around his sight rotates
steadily in from the edges, at the height of which he could think only, despite the
pain and panic, of what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all this time,
to die, a thought which the towel and tape denied expression via the rueful grin with
which the best men meet the dumbest ends—this Guillaume DuPlessis passed bluely from
this life, and sat there, in the kitchen chair, 250 clicks due east of some really
spectacular autumn foliage, for almost two nights and days, his posture getting more
and more military as rigor mortis set in, with his bare feet looking like purple loaves
of bread, from the lividity; and when Brookline’s Finest were finally summoned and
got him unbound from the coldly lit chair, they had to carry him out as if he were
still seated, so militarily comme-il-faut had his limbs and spine hardened. And poor
old Don Gately, whose professional habit of killing power with straight shunts to
a meter’s inflow was pretty much a signature M.O., and who had, of course, a special
place in the heart of a remorseless Revere A.D.A. with judicial clout throughout Boston’s
three counties and beyond, an of course particularly remorseless A.D.A., as of late,
whose wife now needed Valium even just to floss, and was patiently awaiting his chance,
the A.D.A. was, coldly biding his time, being a patient Get-Even and Cold-Dish man
just like Don Gately, who was, through no will to energy-consuming violence on his
part, in the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man’s life right around.