Infinite Jest (126 page)

Even among the small circle who know Hal gets secretly high, it doesn’t make much
sense that Hal’s misery’d be Tavis- or urine-related, since Pemulis has never seemed
blither than today; and if anyone were going to get the boot, chemically or otherwise,
it was not going to be the E.T.A. administration’s relative and second-best boy.

Hal and his brother Mario both know that the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed
powdered milk since Charles Tavis assumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. Clarke
he wanted the kids’ animal-fat intake halved in a month by any and all means. The
kitchen’s graveyard shift power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls and then strains
out the foam and pours the milk into real-milk milk-dispenser bags for a kind of placebo
effect; it’s mostly just the
concept
of powdered milk that gags people.

Struck has traded his shiny clean plate for the absent Incandenza’s fortification-structured
plate of uneaten fillets, low-gluten bread, cornbread, baby boileds, a pea-chickpea-based
olla, half a fresh squash, mashed potatoes packed in a stelliform gelatin mold, and
a shallow bowl of dessert-tsimmes featuring mostly it seemed like plums. Hal is still
down on one knee by Ingersoll’s chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across Ingersoll
and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nwangi. Keith Freer remarks blandly on how
Hal seems like he’s feeling sort of punk this evening, checking Stice for a reaction.
Struck utters truisms about wasting food and global hunger through a full mouth. Struck
is wearing a Sox cap to the side so the bill shadows half his face. The bread is unkind
to his braces. Freer is wearing the leather vest with no shirt under, which is what
he favors after weights have pumped his torso full of air. Stice had had a traumatic
psychic experience at fourteen when he’d set the weight on the pull-down station too
high, and Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very basic weights,
pending resolution of his fear of weights. The joke around E.T.A. is that Stice, who’s
surely Show-bound after graduation, has no fear of heights, but does fear weights.
Keith Freer, though kind of a second-rank junior player, does look beautiful in his
calfskin vest—his face and body match. Troeltsch wants a sportscasting career, but
Freer is the E.T.A. with looks InterLace would favor. Freer’s from inland Maryland,
originally, his family’s riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in
the B.S. ’90s with his now-deceased father’s invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that
was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases—the so-called Phoneless
Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously
packaged, on Ortho’s first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking
an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody now much even
gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer’s
old man had invested his windfall shrewdly.

‘My own father,’ Steeply said. Steeply again faced outward, one hip out and a hand
on that hip. The scratch on his triceps was now ugly and puffed. Also, an area of
Steeply’s left finger was whiter than the skin around it. The removal of a university
ring, or more probably a wedding band. It seemed curious to Marathe that Steeply would
undergo electrolysis but not take trouble to fix his finger’s annular pallor.

Steeply said ‘My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed
with a sort of entertainment. It wasn’t pretty. I was never sure how it started or
what it was about.’

‘You are now imparting a personal anecdote of you,’ Marathe stated.

Steeply did not shrug. He was pretending to study something particular out on the
floor of the desert. ‘But nothing like this sort of Entertainment—a plain old television
program.’

‘Television of broadcasting and—how did one express it?—the passivity.’

‘Yes. Broadcast television. The program in question was called “M*A*S*H.” The title
was an acronym, not a command. As a boy I can recall some confusion on this point.’

‘I am knowing of the U.S.A. historical broadcast television comedy program “M*A*S*H,”
’ Marathe stated.

‘The fucking thing ran forever, it seemed. The program that would not die. B.S. ’70s
and ’80s before it finally died, mercifully. Set in a military hospital during the
U.N.’s action on Korea.’

Marathe remained without expression. ‘Police Action.’

Many small birds of the mountain of the outcropping had begun to whistle and twitter
somewhere off above and behind them. Also maybe the tentative rattle of some serpent.
Marathe pretended to search for the watch in his pocket.

Steeply said ‘Now, nothing prima facie exceptional about getting attached to a show.
God knows I was attached to my share of shows. That’s all it started as. An attachment
or habit. Thursday nights at 2100h. “Nine O’Clock Eastern, Eight O’Clock Central and
Mountain.” They used to broadcast this, to alert you to when to watch, or if you were
going to tape it.’ Marathe watched the big man shrug from behind. ‘So the show was
important to him. So, fine. OK. So he took pleasure in the program. God knows the
guy was entitled—he’d worked like a dog his whole life. So OK, so at the start he
scheduled his Thursday around the show, to an extent. It was hard to pinpoint anything
wrong or consumptive. He was, yes, always home from work by 2050 on Thursdays. And
he always had his supper watching the program. It seemed almost cute. Mummykins used
to tease him, think it was adorable.’

‘Cuteness in fathers, this is rare.’ There was no way Marathe was going to touch the
evident U.S.A. childhood expression
Mummykins
.

‘My old man worked for a heating-oil distributorship. Home heating-oil. Have your
files got this? A tidbit for M. Fortier: U.S.O.U.S.’s Steeply, H.H.: late father a
heating-oil-delivery dispatcher, Cheery Oil, Troy, New York.’

‘State of New York, U.S.A., prior to Reconfiguration.’

Hugh Steeply turned around but not all the way, scratching absently at his wens. ‘But
then: syndication. “M*A*S*H.” The show was incredibly popular, and after a few years
of Thursday nights it started also to run daily, during the day, or late at night,
sometimes, in what I remember all too well was called
syndication,
where local stations bought old episodes and chopped them up and loaded them with
ads, and ran them. And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still
appearing on Thursdays at 2100. I think this was the start.’

‘The cuteness, it was over.’

‘My old man started to find the syndicated reruns extremely important to him, too.
As in like not to be missed.’

‘Even though he had viewed and enjoyed them before, these reruns.’

‘The fucking show ran on two different local stations in the Capital District. Albany
and environs. For a while, this one station even had a “M*A*S*H” hour, two of them,
back to back, every night, from 2300. Plus another half an hour in the early
P.M
., for the unemployed or something.’

Marathe said ‘Virtually a bombardment of this U.S.A. broadcast comedy program.’

After a brief pause of attention to some wens of the face, Steeply said ‘He started
to keep a small television down at work. Down at the distributorship.’

‘For the broadcast of afternoon.’

Steeply appeared to Marathe uncalculating in his statements. ‘Broadcast TVs, toward
the end they made some of them really small. Kind of a pathetic try at keeping cable
down. Some as small as like wrist-size. You’d be too young to remember.’

‘I remember well a pre-digital television.’ Marathe, if Steeply’s anecdote of himself
had a political point or communiqué, Marathe could not yet determine this.

Steeply moved his foul Belgian cigarette into his right hand to flick it out into
the space below. ‘It progressed very slowly. The gradual immersion. The withdrawal
from life. I remember guys from his bowling league calling, that he’d quit. Our Mummykins
found out he’d dropped out of Knights of Columbus. Thursdays the jokes and cuteness
stopped—him all hunched in front of the set, barely even eating from his tray. And
every night late at night, for the nightly hour, the old man too wide awake, and hunched
over weirdly, head out, as if pulled toward the screen.’

‘I too have seen this posture of viewing,’ Marathe grimly said, recalling his second-oldest
of brothers and the Canadiens of the N.L. of H.

‘And he got anxious, ugly, if something made him miss even one. Even one episode.
And he’d get ugly if you pointed out he’d already seen most of them about seven times
before. Mummykins began to have to lie to get them out of engagements that would have
infringed. Neither of them talked about it. I don’t remember any of us trying to name
the thing out loud—this dark shift in his attachment to the program “M*A*S*H.” ’

‘The organism of family simply shifted to accommodate.’

‘Which it wasn’t even all that consuming an entertainment,’ Steeply said. He sounded
to Marathe uncalculated and somewhat younger. ‘I mean it was OK. But it was broadcast
TV. Broad comedy and canned laughter.’

‘I am remembering well this rerunning program, do not worry about me,’ said Marathe.

‘It was at some point during this gradual shift the notebook first appeared. He began
writing notes in a notebook as he viewed. But only when viewing “M*A*S*H.” And he
never left the notebook lying around where you could get any kind of look at it. He
wasn’t openly secretive about it; you couldn’t even point to that and say something
was wrong. The “M*A*S*H” notebook just never seemed to be lying around.’

With the hand that was not below the blanket still gripping the Sterling UL35, Marathe
was holding his thumb and forefinger up against the smear of red which was just over
the Mountains of Rincon and craning his neck to see his shadow behind them on the
hillside.

Steeply changed the hip which was out, in his standing, to his other hip. ‘As a child,
this is when it became impossible to ignore the odor of obsession about the whole
thing. The secrecy about the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy. The scrupulous
recording of tiny details, in careful order, for purposes you could just tell were
both urgent and furtive.’

‘This is unbalance,’ Marathe concurred. ‘This attaching of excessive importance.’

‘Jesus, you don’t know the half of it.’

‘And for you also,’ Marathe said, ‘excessive unbalance. For your father progresses
downhill in this obsessing, but always so slowly that always you could question yourself,
whether you were maybe yourself the one out of balance, attaching too much importance
to any one thing—a notebook, a posture. Crazy making.’

‘And the toll on Mummykins.’

Marathe had turned the chair to a slight angle to be able to see his shadow, which
appeared blunt and deformed by the topography of the steep hillside above the outcropping,
and in general pathetic and small. There would be no titanic or menacing
Bröckengespenstphänom
with the sunrise of dawn. Marathe said ‘The whole organism of family becomes out
of balance, questioning its perceptions.’

‘The old man—then he started developing this habit of quoting little lines and scenes
from “M*A*S*H,” to illustrate some idea, make some point in conversation. At the beginning
of the habit he seemed casual about it, as if the little bits and scenes simply occurred
to him. But this changed, but slowly. Plus I remember he started seeking out feature
films that also featured the television program’s actors.’

Marathe pretended to sniff.

‘Then at some point it was as if he was no longer able to converse or communicate
on any topic without bringing it back to the program. The topic. Without some system
of references to the program.’ Steeply gave small indications of paying attention
to the small squeaks as Marathe turned his chair slightly this way and that way, achieving
different angles of sight on his small shadow. Steeply exhaled air through the nostrils
with a forceful sound. ‘Though it wasn’t as though he was wholly uncritical of it.’

It sometimes from somewhere blue occurred to Marathe that he did not dislike this
Steeply, though
like
or
respect
would be too far in going, to say.

‘It was not that type of obsession with it, it, you are saying.’

‘It was gradual and slow. He started at some point I remember to refer to the kitchen
as the Mess Tent and his den as the Marsh or Swamp. These were fictional locations
on the show. He began renting films with even crowd-extra or cameo appearances by
the program’s actors. He bought what was then called a Betamixer,
²⁶³
a kind of early magnetic-video recorder. He began a practice of magnetically recording
each week’s 29 broadcasts and reruns. He stored the tapes, organizing them in baroque
systems of cross-reference that had nothing discernible to do with dates of recording.
I remember Mummykins didn’t say anything when he moved his bedding and began to sleep
at night in the easy chair in his den, the Swamp. Or pretend to. Sleep.’

‘But you had your suspicions of not real sleeping.’

‘It was gradually obvious he was viewing his magnetic recordings of the program “M*A*S*H”
throughout the night, probably over and over again, using a crude white plastic earplug
to hide the noise, scribbling feverishly in his notebook.’

In contrast with the violence and
transperçant
puncturing of the sunset, the dawn sun seemed slowly exhaled from the more rounded
salience of the Mountains of Rincon, its heat a moister heat and the light the vague
red of a type of fond sentiment; and U.S.O.U.S.’s Steeply’s standing shadow was cast
back over the outcropping toward Marathe behind him, close enough that Marathe might
reach his arm out and touch the shadow.