Infinite Jest (123 page)

U.S. Office of Unspecified Services Chief Rodney Tine stands at the unclean window
for much of the morning, ruminative, his posture a martial at-ease. A stenographer
and an aide and a Deputy Mayor and the Director of the Massachusetts Division for
Substance Abuse Services, and Unspecified Services Regional Operatives Rodney Tine
Jr.
²⁵⁷
and Hugh Steeply
²⁵⁸
all sit silently in the conference room behind him, the stenographer’s Gregg pen
poised in mid-dictation. The eighth-floor window’s purview goes all the way to the
ridge of the hillside at the Gardens’ other end. Two Frisbees and what looks like
a disembowelled ring of Frisbee float back and forth along this ridge, dreamily floating
back and forth, sometimes dipping below the ridge and lost, for a moment, to the specular
vision of Tine.

Trying at the same time to give his bad skin some quality UV and a good chill’s chap,
the grad-work-study engineer of M.I.T.’s WYYY-109 lies bare-chested on a silvery NASA-souvenir
space blanket, supine and cruciform at about the angle of a living-room recliner on
the Public Gardens’ far hillside. This is out by Arlington St., in the Gardens’ southwest
corner, hidden by its ridge from the pond’s basin and tourism booth and pavilion and
the hub of radial paths and the giant verdigrised statues of ducklings in a row commemorating
Robert McCloskey’s beloved and timeless
Make Way for Ducklings
. The Gardens’ only other slope is now the bowl of the former pond. The hillside’s
grassy decline, not too steep, runs at a wedge’s angle down toward Arlington St. and
is one broad greensward, free of dog droppings because dogs won’t go to the bathroom
on inclined terrain. Frisbees float on the ridge behind the engineer’s head, and four
lithe boys on the ridge play a game with a small beanbaggy ball and bare blue feet.
It is 5° C. The sun has the attenuated autumn quality of seeming to be behind several
panes of glass. The wind is bitter and keeps flopping unmoored sections of NASA blanket
over parts of the engineer’s body. Goose-pimples and real pimples jostle each other
for space on his exposed flesh. The student engineer’s is the hillside’s only metallic
space blanket and bare torso. He lies there splayed, wholly open to the weak sun.
The WYYY student engineer is one of roughly three dozen human forms scattered over
the steep slope, a human collection without pattern or cohesion or anything to bind
them, looking rather like firewood before it’s been gathered. Wind-bronzed sooty men
in zipperless parkas and mismatched shoes, some of the Gardens’ permanent residents,
sleeping or in stupors of various origin. Curled on their sides, knees drawn up, unopen
to anything. In other words huddled. From the great height of one of Arlington St.’s
office buildings, the forms look like things dumped onto the hillside from a great
height. An overhead veteran’d be apt to see a post-battle-battlefield aspect to the
array of forms. Except for the WYYY engineer, all the men are textured in urban scuz,
unshaven, yellow-fingered and exposure-bronzed. They have coats and bedrolls for blankets
and old twine-handle shopping bags and Glad bags for recyclable cans and bottles.
Also huge camper’s packs without any color to them. Their clothes and appurtenances
are the same color as the men, in other words. A few have steel supermarket-carts
filled with possessions and wedged by their owners’ bodies against a downhill roll.
One of the cart-owners has vomited in his sleep, and the vomit has assumed a lava-like
course toward the huddled form of another man curled just downhill. One of the shopping
carts, from upscale Bread & Circus, has an ingeniously convenient little calculator
on its handlebar, designed to let shoppers subtotal their groceries as they select
them. The men have sepia nails and all somehow look toothless whether they have teeth
or not. Every so often a Frisbee lands among them. The loose ball makes a beanbaggy
sound against players’ feet above and behind them. Two skinny and knit-capped boys
descend very close to the engineer, chanting very softly ‘Smoke,’ ignoring all the
other forms, which anyone could tell are undercapitalized for purchasing Smoke. When
his eyes are open he’s the only one on the hillside to see the round bellies of ascending
ducks pass low overhead, catching a thermal off the hillside and rising to wheel away
left, due south. His WYYY-109 T-shirt and inhaler and glasses and M. Fizzy and spine-split
copy of
Metallurgy of Annular Isotopes
are just off the edge of the reflecting blanket. His torso is pale and ribby, his
chest covered with tough little buttons of acne scar. The hillside’s grass is still
pretty viable. One or two of the scattered fetal forms have black cans of burnt-out
Sterno beside them. Bits of the hillside are reflected in Arlington’s storefronts
and office windows and the glass of passing cars. An unexceptional white Dodge or
Chevy-type van pulls out of Arlington’s traffic and does some pretty impressive parallel
parking along the curb at the hillside’s bottom. A man in an ancient NATO-surplus
wool greatcoat is up on his hands and knees to the engineer’s lower left, throwing
up. Bits of chyme hang from his mouth and refuse to detach. There’s little bloody
threads in it. His hunched form looks somehow canine on the uneven slope. The fetal
figure wedged unconscious under the front wheels of the shopping cart nearest the
engineer has only one shoe, and that shoe’s without laces. The exposed sock is ash-colored.
Besides the
HANDICAPPED
license plate, the only exceptional things about the van now idling at the curb far
below are the tinted windows and the fact that the van is spotless and twinkly with
wax to about halfway up its panelled side, but above that line dirty and rust-saucered
and shamefully neglected-looking. The engineer has been turning his head this way
and that, trying to tan evenly along his whole jawline. The curbside van idles at
a distant little point between his heels. Some of the hillside’s forms have curled
themselves around bottles and pipes. A smell comes off them, rich and agricultural.
The student engineer doesn’t usually try to sun and chap his skin at the same time,
but chapping-ops have lately been scarce: since Madame Psychosis of ‘60+/−’ took her
sudden leave of medical absence, the student engineer hasn’t once had the heart to
sit out on the Union’s convoluted roof and monitor the substitute shows.

The engineer moves his upturned face back and forth. First, Madame was replaced by
a Mass Comm. graduate student who proved a crushing disappointment as a Miss Diagnosis;
then Madame was publicly deemed irreplaceable by management, and the engineer is now
paid simply to cue her background music and then sit monitoring a live mike for a
noiseless 60 minutes, which means he has to stay in his booth maintaining 0-levels
with a live mike and can’t ascend with his receiver and cigarettes even if he wanted
to. The station’s student manager’s given the engineer written instructions on just
what to say when people phone in during the hour to inquire and wish Psychosis a speedy
recovery from whatever might ail her. At once denying and encouraging rumors of suicide,
institutionalization, spiritual crisis, silent retreat, pilgrimage to the snow-capped
East. The disappearance of someone who’s been only a voice is somehow worse instead
of better. A terrible silence now, weeknights. A different silence altogether from
the radio-silence-type silence that used to take up over half her nightly show. Silence
of presence v. silence of absence, maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst.
Some listeners have actually come in and down through the deep cortex and into the
cold pink studio itself, to inquire. Some to allay this firm conviction that Madame
was still actually still showing up and sitting there by the mike but not saying anything.
Another of the men sleeping nearby keeps punching at the air in his sleep. Almost
all the personal wee-hour inquiries are from listeners somehow bent, misshapen, speech-defective,
vacantly grinning, damaged in some way. The type whose spectacles have been repaired
with electrician’s tape. Shyly inquiring. Apologies for bothering someone they can
clearly see is not even there. Before the student manager’s written instructions,
the student engineer’d wordlessly directed their attention to Madame’s triptych screen
with no silhouette behind it. Another white Dodge van, just as unevenly clean and
opaque-windowed, has appeared on the ridge above and behind the hillside’s littered
forms. It casts no visible shadow. A Frisbee-ring caroms off the clean grille of its
snout. It idles, its panel door facing the declivity and the other white van’s panel
door far below. One hideous little inquirer had had a hat with a lens on it and seemed
about to fall forward into the engineer’s lap. His attendant wanting some address
where they might send something supportive and floral. The NASA blanket’s micronized
aluminumoid coating is designed to refract every possible UV ray into the student
engineer’s bare skin. The engineer knows about the ambulance and the Brigham and Women’s
ICU and five-day rehab ward from the thick swart girl Notkin, the one with the disreputable
hat and Film-Dept. I.D. who came down via the Basilar elevator late at night to retrieve
some old tapes of the program for the Madame’s personal listening use, she said, and
was fortunate enough to know the Madame in private life, she said. The term is
Treatment
, Madame Psychosis is in long-term
Treatment
at something the bearded girl in the sooty hat obliquely described as only half a
house in some unbelievably unpleasant and low-rent part of the metro-area. This is
the precise total of what the WYYY engineer knows. He is shortly to have occasion
to wish he knew a great deal more. Q.v. the dimpled steel ramp now protruding from
the squeakily opened panel door of the van on the ridge above and behind him. Q.v.
the utter darkness inside the idling van down along the Arlington St. curb, whose
side panel’s also been slid open from within. The southwest hillside is copless: the
Gardens’ platoon of M.D.C. Finest are all in their souped-up golf carts over at the
drained pond, throwing curved sections of glazed doughnut into the ducks’ shrubbery
and telling a largely-dispersed-already crowd to please move along. The ridge’s Frisbees
and hackysackers have abruptly vanished; there’s now an eerie stillness like a reef
when a shark cruises through; the ridge’s van’s idling maw open and black, silver-tongued.

Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside’s van’s
ramp as a madly squeaking brass-colored blur, a snowplow-like scoop-type thing welded
to it and out front skimming the ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of grass
it’s mowing, moving terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on
burly stumps in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward
for a skier’s pure speed, the huddled fetal hillside figures the speeding chair slaloms,
the dim glittered movements of arrangement for reception deep within the curbside
van way at the bottom of the steep grade, the engineer arching his neck way out to
capture sun on the scarred hollows under his jaw, the shopping cart with the calculator
clipped by a squeaking rubberized wheel at an angle and sent clattering off down the
hillside, spraying possessions, the homeless shoe to which it had been roped skittering
empty behind it and the cart’s now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the air
in front of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and worldly goods,
the calculating cart whumping into the side of the hunched man vomiting and flipping
over and bouncing several times and the vomiting man rolling and yelping, vulgarities
echoing, the WYYY engineer now to be seen hiking himself up on a chill-reddened elbow
with a start and starting to turn and look above and behind him up at the ridge just
as the speeding wheelchair with the hunched figure reaches him and the chair’s shovel
scoops the engineer and his NASA blanket and shirt and book up and runs over the glasses
and bottle of M. Fizzy with one wheel and bears the engineer in the scoop up and away
and down the steep grade toward the idling van at the bottom, a van whose own angled
ramp now slides out like a tongue or Autoteller’s transaction-receipt, the NASA blanket
blowing away from the scooped engineer’s flailing form about halfway down and suddenly
aloft in a hillside thermal and blown far out over Arlington St. traffic by the keen
November wind, the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls and coming
back down and up again, the snatched engineer in the chair’s scoop appearing to the
hillside’s roused figures mostly as a hallucinatory waggle of bare limbs and strangely
wheezy shrieks for Help or at least to Look Out Below, all as the modified chair squeaks
frantically straight down the hillside’s most efficient downward line toward the van
with the ramp now idling in gear, its pipe’s exhaust beating the street in high-rpm
idle, the NASA blanket twisting coruscant in the air high above the street, and the
shriek-roused figures on the hillside lying there still bent in and barely moving,
stiff with cold and general woe, except for the hunched man, the unwell man who’d
been hit by the dislodged cart, who’s rolled to a stop and is thrashing, holding the
parts that were hit.

1810h., 133 kids and thirteen assorted staff sitting down at suppertime, the E.T.A.
dining hall taking most of the first floor of West House, a sort of airy atrium-like
commons, broad and knotty-pine-panelled, the east wall hugely fenestrated and columns
running the length of the room at center, with ceiling fans high overhead circulating
the rich and slightly sour smell of bulk-prepared food, the oceanic sound of 20 different
tables’ conversation, the flat clink of utensils on plates, much chewing, the clank
and tinkle of the dishwasher’s conveyor belt behind the tray-bus window with its sign
saying
YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY,
the muffled shouts of kitchen workers in steam. The top upperclassmen get the best
table, an unspoken tradition, the one nearest the gas fireplace in winter and the
AC venting in July, the one whose chairs’ legs are all pretty much even, both seats
and backs with thin corduroy cushions in E.T.A. red and gray. The prorectors have
their own permanent table near the carbs bar; the Syrian Satelliter and enormous peasant-skirted
Moment
soft-profiler are with them.