Infinite Jest (127 page)

‘You can tell I don’t have a good recall of the exact progression of the thing,’ Steeply
said.

‘The gradual.’

‘I do know that Mummykins, I remember one day in the garbage can out behind the house
she found a number of letters addressed to a “M*A*S*H” character named—this I fucking-A
sure remember—Major Burns. She found them.’

Marathe did not allow himself the chuckle. ‘While searching inside the can of waste
in the back. For evidence of unbalance.’

Steeply waved Marathe off. He was incapable of amused. ‘She didn’t search through
the garbage. Mumkinsky had too much class. She probably forgot and threw away the
day’s
Troy Record
before she’d clipped her food-coupons. She was an inveterate coupon-clipper.’

‘This was prior to the days of North American laws of recircling
²⁶⁴
of newspapers.’

Steeply did not wave off or give a glare. He wore the look of concentrating. ‘This
character—this I remember, too well—was portrayed by I remember the actor Maury Linville,
a plain old employee of 20th Century Fox.’

‘Which later upstarted the fourth network of the Large Four.’

Steeply’s luridly run makeup from the heat of the day before had now over the night
hardened into a configuration of almost horror. ‘But the letters, the letters were
addressed to Major Burns. Not to Maury Linville. And not c/o Fox Studios or wherever,
but addressed to an involved military address, with a Seoul routing code.’

‘In the South Korea of history.’

‘The letters were hostile, savage, and lavishly descriptive. He’d come to think the
show’s character Major Burns embodied some type of cataclysmic, Armageddon-type theme
that was slowly assembling itself on the program and progressively being hinted at
and emerging in the gradual succession of seasons of this “M*A*S*H.” ’ Steeply felt
at his lip. ‘I remember Mummykins never mentioned the letters. From the garbage. She
just left them around where my kid sister and I would see them.’

‘You are not meaning your sister was a goat.’

Steeply was not provokable into some different emotion, however, Marathe observed.
‘Younger sister. But my old man, the progression of the program from fun to obsession—crucial
distinctions had collapsed, I think, now. Between the fictional Burns and this Linville
who portrayed Burns.’

Marathe raised a brow for concurring: ‘This is signifying a severe loss of balance.’

‘I remember something about he seemed to believe the name of the character Burns also
somehow hiddenly signified the English verb for the promise of the consuming fire
of apocalypse.’

Marathe looked puzzled or else squinted because of a rising sun. ‘But he threw the
letters into the waste receptacle, you stated, instead of the Snail’s Mail.’

‘He’d already started missing whole weeks at a time from work. He’d been at Cheery
for decades. He was only a few years from retirement.’

Marathe was looking at his lap’s blanket’s brightening colors of plaid.

‘Mo Cheery and the old man—they’d bowled together, they were in Knights of Columbus
together. Missing all the weeks of work made things awkward. Mo didn’t want to can
the old man. He wanted the old man to see somebody.’

‘A professional person.’

‘A lot of this I wasn’t even there for. The “M*A*S*H” thing. I was at college by the
time the really crucial distinctions had collapsed.’

‘Studying the multiple cultures.’

‘My kid sister had to keep me abreast of developments during the term. Good old Mo
Cheery’d come by the house, view magnetic tapes of the show with the old man a while,
listen to the old man’s theories and views, then on his way out he’d collar Mummykins
and take her out into the garage and talk to her very quietly about the fact that
the old man was in a high-angle psychic nose-dive and needed with all due regard in
his opinion to see somebody in the direst fucking way. My kid sister said the Mumkinsky
always acted like she had no idea what Mo Cheery was talking about.’

Marathe smoothed at his blanket.

‘
Mumkinsky
being a type of pet family name,’ Steeply said, looking a little bit of embarrassed.

Marathe nodded.

‘I’m trying to reconstruct this out of memory,’ Steeply said. ‘The old man is by this
time pretty much unable to converse about anything except the television program “M*A*S*H.”
The theory of the theme of this Burns-slash-
Burn
ing apocalypse now sort of spreads out to become huge and complex theories about wide-ranging
and deeply hidden themes having to do with death and time, on the show. Like evidence
of some sort of coded communication to certain viewers about an end to our familiar
type of world-time and the advent of a whole different order of world-time.’

‘Your mother continues to play-act at normalcy, however.’

‘I’m trying to reconstruct things that weren’t even clear at the time,’ Steeply said,
his wet and then dried makeup now grotesque in his concentration in the sunrise, like
a mask of a mentally ill clown. He said ‘One theory involved the fact, which the old
man found extremely significant, that the historical Korean Police Action of the U.N.
lasted only roughly two-odd years, but that “M*A*S*H” itself was by then into something
like its seventh year of new episodes. Some characters of the program were getting
gray hair, receding hair, face-lifts. The old man was convinced this signified intentional
themes. According to my kid sister, who bore the brunt of time spent with him, watching,’
Steeply said, ‘the old man’s theories were almost inconceivably complex and wide-ranging.
As the years of new seasons went on and some actors retired and characters were replaced
by other characters, the old man generated baroquoco theories about what it was that
had quote-underline “
really
” happened to the absent characters. Where they’d gone, where they were, what it all
augured. Then the next thing was one or two of the letters started to appear, canceled
and returned, stamped as undeliverable, or to addresses that were not just nonexistent
but absurd.’

‘Unbalanced letters were no longer being discarded as waste, but now mailed.’

‘And Mummykins was uncomplaining throughout. It was enough to break your heart. She
was a rock. She did, granted, begin taking prescription anti-anxiety medication.’

Land of the freely brave: Marathe did not say this aloud. He looked at his pocket’s
watch and was trying to remember a time when he had ever with Steeply had to consider
the tact of departing.

Steeply, at this time, gave the impression somehow of having several cigarettes going
at one time. ‘Somewhere along late in the progression the old man let it be known
he was working on a secret book that revised and explicated much of the world’s military,
medical, philosophical and religious history by analogies to certain subtle and complex
thematic codes in “M*A*S*H.” ’ Steeply would stand on one foot to raise the other
foot to look at a shoe’s inflicted damage, all the time smoking. ‘Even when he went
in to work, there were problems. Heating-oil customers who called for deliveries or
information or whatever began to complain that the old man kept trying to engage them
in bizarre theoretical discussions of the thematics of “M*A*S*H.” ’

‘Because it is necessary that I leave soon, a central point must be soon emerging,’
Marathe worked in as gracefully as possible.

Steeply seemed not to hear this other man. He seemed not only uncalculated and self-enmeshed;
his demeanor itself seemed more young, that of some young person. This unless this
was part of some performance beyond Marathe, Marathe knew he must consider.

‘Then the double blow,’ Steeply said. ‘In B.S. 1983. My memory’s clear on this. The
Mumkinsky opened an alarming letter from attorneys for CBS and 20th Century Fox. Certain
letters had been apparently rerouted by dogoodnik military postal clerks to Fox. The
old man’d been trying to correspond with different past and present “M*A*S*H” personas
in letters the family never saw get mailed but whose content, the attorneys said,
raised quote grave concern and could quote constitute grounds for strenuous legal
action.’ Steeply raised the foot to look, his face in pain. He said, ‘Then the program’s
final episode ran. Late autumn of B.S. 1983. I was on an ROTC marching-band trip to
Fort Ticonderoga. My kid sister, who’d by this time left home herself, and who could
blame the kid, she reported that the Mumkinsky was talking very casually and uncomplainingly
of the old man’s now refusing to leave his den.’

‘This, the final enclosing isolation of obsession.’

Steeply looked over his shoulder on one awkward foot to look slightly at Marathe.
‘As in even to go to the bathroom, now, the not leaving.’

‘Your mother’s prescriptions prevented some episodes of great anxiety, I think.’

‘He’d gotten a special A.C.D.C. cable hook-up that brought in extra syndication. When
reruns weren’t running, the video-magnetic tapes ran constantly. He was haggard and
spectral and his easy chair was all but unrecognizable. Cheery Oil was keeping him
on the books until he could get his thirty years in at age sixty. My kid sister and
I started reluctantly discussing intervening on Mummykins to intervene on the old
man and force him to see somebody.’

‘Yourselves, you could not reach him.’

‘He died just before his birthday. He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline,
watching an episode in which Alda’s Hawkeye can’t stop sleepwalking and fears he’s
going out of his fucking mind until a professional military therapist reassures him,
I remember.’

‘Me, I too have seen this episode rerunning, in my childhood.’

‘All I can recall of it is the army professional telling Alda not to worry, that if
he was truly crazy he’d sleep like a newborn, as did the notorious Burns-slash-Linville.’

‘The program’s character of Burns slept exceptionally well, I remember.’

‘His secret book’s manuscript filled scores of notebooks. This is what the notebooks
turned out to be. One closet in the den had to be forced open. All these notebooks
tumbled out. The whole thing was written in a kind of medical-slash-military-looking
code, though, indecipherable—Sis and her first husband and I spent some time trying
to decode them. After his death in the chair.’

‘His unbalance of temptation cost him life. An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast
television program took his life, because of the consuming obsession. This is your
anecdote.’

‘No. It was a transmural infarction. Blew out a whole ventricle. His whole family
had a history: the heart. The pathologist said it was amazing he’d lasted this long.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘The obsessed frequently endure.’

Steeply shook the head. ‘It must have been hell on the poor old Mumkinsky.’

‘She never complained, however.’

Already the sun was up and pulsing. Light ran over everything in a sickening yellow
way like gravy. All birds and living animals had been silenced, stunned already by
heat, and the site’s bright loaders had not yet been started in movement. All was
calm. All was bright. Steeply’s shadow on the shelf was squat and blunt, already shorter
than the living figure of Steeply himself, who was leaning outward to try to find
a spot far below to litter with a crumpled Belgian packing with one prayed no more
finally to smoke.

Marathe took his watch from out of the windbreaker’s pocket.

Steeply shrugged. ‘I think you’re right, that it’s part of both the horror and the
pull. When I’m east and thinking of Flatto’s lab and I sort of look up and find myself
tempted.’

‘About the Entertainment of now.’

‘And I kind of half-picture Hank Hoyne in the old man’s old recliner, hunched and
scribbling feverishly.’

‘In military coding.’

‘His eyes, they got like that, too, the old man’s, like Hoyne’s. Periodically.’

Heat began to shimmer, as well, off the lionhide floor of a desert. The mesquite and
cactus wobbled, and Tucson AZ resumed once more the appearance of the mirage, as it
had appeared when Marathe had first arrived and found his shadow so entrancing in
its size and reach. The sun of
A.M
. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to
look upon. Marathe allowed himself a few diverting seconds of watching the Mountains
of the Rincons’ widening shadows melt slowly backward into the base of the Mountains
of the Rincons. Steeply hawked and spat, still holding the last crumpled pack of Flanderfumes.

‘My time is sharply finite to remain.’ Marathe said this. Every change of his postures
brought small squeaks of leather and metal. ‘I would feel gratitude if you departed
first.’

Steeply figured Marathe wanted him to have no idea how he got up and down, in and
out. To no real purpose; a personal point of pride. Steeply squatted for adjusting
the straps of his high heels. His prostheses were still not quite aligned. He spoke
with the faintly breathless quality of large men trying to bend:

‘Well. Rémy, but I don’t think Dick Willis’s “empty of intent” quite does it. Captures
it. The eye-factor. Hoyne, the Arab internist. The old man. Not for eyes like that.’

‘You would say it does not capture these eyes’ expression.’

Looking up while squatting, this made Steeply’s neck appear thick. He stared past
Marathe, at the shale. He said ‘The expressions seem more like—fuck, how to say it.
Fuck,’ Steeply said in concentration.

‘Petrified,’ Marathe said. ‘Ossified. Inanimate.’

‘No. Not inanimate. More like the opposite. More as if…
stuck
in some way.’

Marathe’s neck itself was stiff from so much time looking out and down from a height.
‘What is it this wishes here to mean? Glued?’

Steeply was doing something to a toenail’s cracked polish. ‘Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped.
As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different
directions.’

Marathe’s eyes searched the sky, which this was already too light blue for his pleasure,
filmed with a sort of eggy plura of heat. ‘Meaning between different cravings of great
intensity, this.’