Infinite Jest (129 page)

All the E.T.A. players loved the Show Courts 6–9 because they loved to be watched,
and also hated the Show Courts because the transom’s crow’s-nested shadow covered
the north halves of the courts around noon and all through the
P.M.
wheeled around gradually east like some giant hooded shadowed moving presence, brooding.
Sometimes just the sight of Schtitt’s little head’s shadow could make a younger kid
on the Show Courts clutch and freeze. By Hal and Stice’s seventh game, the sky was
cloudless, and the transom’s monolithic shadow, black as ink, gave everyone watching
the fantods as it elongated along the nets, completely obscuring Stice when he followed
a serve in. Another advantage of the Lung was that it afforded no overhead view, which
was one more reason why staff waited as long as possible before its erection. There
was no indication Hal even saw it, the shadow, hunched and waiting for Stice.

The Darkness splayed out stiff on the deuce side of the center line, ratcheting slowly
into his service motion. He overhit the first serve long and Hal angled it softly
off-court, moving two steps in for the second ball. Stice hit his second serve as
hard as he could again and netted it, and pursed his thick lips a little as he walked
into the net’s shadow to retrieve the ball, and Hal jogged over to the fence behind
the next court to get the ball he’d angled over. DeLint was putting a pejorative hieroglyphic
in a box on his chart marked
STICE
.

At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet
House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask,
his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room’s ceiling.

Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library,
right near the onion-domed Watertown Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in
a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his
face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages
and personae of time.

M. M. Pemulis and J. G. Struck, wet-haired after their
P.M.
runs, had blarneyed their way past the library-attendant at the B.U. School of Pharmacy
2.8 clicks down Commonwealth on Comm. and Cook St. and were seated at a table in Reference,
Pemulis’s yachting cap pushed way back to accommodate his rising eyebrows, licking
his finger to turn pages.

H. Steeply’s green sedan with its neuralgiac full-front Nunhagen ad on the side sat
in an Authorized Guest parking spot in the E.T.A. lot.

Between appointments,
²⁶⁶
in an office whose west windows yielded no view of the match, Charles Tavis had his
head mashed up against the upholstered seat-rail of his sofa, his arm under the gray-and-red
ruffle and sweeping back and forth for the bathroom scale he keeps under there.

Avril Incandenza’s whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown.

At just this moment M.S.T., Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain ‘Swiss’
hand-model before a wall-width window in a rented suite halfway up a different tall
hotel (from before) in Phoenix AZ. The windowlight was fiery with heat. Way below,
tiny cars’ roofs glared so bright with reflected light their colors were obscured.
Pedestrians hunched and sprinted between different areas of shade and refrigeration.
The cityscape’s glass and metal twinkled but seemed to sag—the whole vista looked
somehow stunned. The cool air through the room’s vent whispered. They’d put down their
glasses of ice and come together upright and embraced. The embrace was not like a
hug. There was no talking—the only sound was the vent and their breath. Orin’s linen
knee probed the deltoid fork of the hand-model’s parted legs. He let the ‘Swiss’ woman
grind against the muscular knee of his good leg. They got so close no light shone
between them, and ground together. Her lids fluttered; his closed; their breath became
somehow coded. Again the concentrated tactile languor of the sexual mode. Again they
stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they
didn’t have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same
way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported
her like that, the left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back,
and bore her.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the sun’s the same sun over all different parts of
the planet. The NNE sun was at this same moment the color of hollandaise and gave
off no heat. Between points, both Hal and Stice switched their sticks to their right
hands and clamped their left hands tight under their arms to keep from losing sensation
in the chill. Stice was double-faulting more than his average because he was trying
to get enough on his second serve to follow it credibly to net. DeLint estimated he
was charting Stice at one double-fault per 1.3 games, and his a./d.f. ratio
²⁶⁷
was an undistinguished .6, but he, deLint, told Helen Steeply of
Moment,
spread way out next to him on the third row from the top and using Gregg shorthand,
deLint told this Ms. Steeply that Stice was nevertheless wise to crank the second
serve and eat the occasional double-fault. Stice wound up to serve so stiff, his motion
so sprocketed and serial, that the journalist told deLint Stice looked to her as if
he’d learned to serve by studying still photos of the motion’s different stages, no
offense intended. There was none of real high-speed motion’s liquid flow until the
very end, when Stice pivoted toward the net and seemed to sort of fall out into the
court, his tennis racquet whirling behind his back and snapping upward to impact the
yellow ball hanging at just the height of his maximum reach, and there was a solid
pock
as this Stice cracked it flat into Orin’s brother’s body, handcuffing Hal at such
speeds the ball’s movement presented only as afterimage, the creamy retinal trail
of something too fast to track. Hal’s awkward return had too much slice, and floated,
and Stice hurtled forward to volley it chest-high, blocking it acute into open court
for a clean winner. There was mild applause. DeLint invited Helen Steeply to note
that The Darkness really won that point on the serve itself. Hal Incandenza walked
to the fence to retrieve the ball, impassive, wiping his nose against his sweatshirt’s
sleeve; ad-in. Hal was up 5–4 in the first and had saved three ads off Stice’s fifth
service game, two off double-faults; but deLint still maintained Stice was wise.

‘Hal’s got to the point in the last year here where a kid’s only real chance is to
totally press, attack at all times, whale the serve, haul ass to the net, assume the
aggressor role.’

‘Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?’ Helen Steeply asked him. ‘I was noticing.’

‘You stay back against this Hal kid, you try to out-think him and move him around,
he’ll yank you back and forth and chew you up and spit you out and step on the remains.
We’ve spent years getting him to this point. Nobody stays back and out-controls Incandenza
anymore.’

Pretending to flip to a fresh page, Helen Steeply dropped her pen, which fell into
the bleachers’ struts and supports and clattered as only something dropped into a
system of metal bleachers can clatter. The prolonged noise made Stice take some extra
bounces before he served. He bounced the ball several times, leaning forward, lined
up splayed and violently sideways. He went into his odd segmented windup; Helen Steeply
produced another pen from the pocket of her fiberfill parka; Stice cracked it flat
down the center, aiming for an ace on the service lines’ T. It went by Hal unplayable
and literally too close to call. There are no linesmen for internal E.T.A. matches.
Hal looked down the line at where the thing hit and skidded, pausing before indicating
his call, the hand to his cheek indicating deliberation. He shrugged and shook his
head and laid a hand out flat in the air before him to signify to Stice he was calling
the serve good. This meant game Stice. The Darkness was walking toward the net, kneading
his neck, looking at where Hal was still standing.

‘We can go on and play two,’ Stice said. ‘Didn’t see it neither.’

Hal was coming in closer to Stice because he was going to the net-post for his towel.
‘Not your job to see it.’ He looked unhappy and tried to smile. ‘You hit it too hard
to see, you deserve the point.’

Stice shrugged and nodded, chewing. ‘You take the next gimme then.’ He sliced two
balls soft so they ended their roll down near the opposite baseline, where Hal could
use them to serve. The Darkness still made huge mandibular chewing faces on-court
even though he hadn’t been allowed to chew gum in play since he accidentally inhaled
gum and had to be Heimliched by his opponent in the semis of last spring’s Easter
Bowl.

‘Ortho’s saying how the next debatable call goes immediately to Hal; they don’t take
two,’ deLint said, darkening in half-squares on the two charts.

‘Take two?’

‘Play a let, babe. Do it over. Two serves: one point.’ Aubrey deLint was a lightly
pockmarked man with thick yellow hair in an anchorman’s helmety style and a hypertensive
flush, and eyes, oval and close-set and lightless, that seemed like a second set of
nostrils in his face. ‘Do a whole lot of sports at
Moment
do you?’

‘So they’re being sporting,’ Steeply said. ‘Generous, fair.’

‘We inculcate that as a priority here,’ deLint said, gesturing vaguely at the space
around them, head bent to his charts.

‘They seem like friends.’

‘The angle here for
Moment
might be the good-friends-off-the-court-and-remorseless-pitiless-foes-on-court angle.’

‘I mean they seem like friends even playing,’ Helen Steeply said, watching Hal dry
off his leather grip with a white towel as Stice jumped up and down in place back
at his deuce corner, one hand in his armpit.

DeLint’s laugh sounded to Steeply’s keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less
fit man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair
on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer
to know who he was. ‘Don’t kid yourself, babe,’ deLint got out. The Vaught twins on
the bleacher below looked up and around and pretended to shush him, the left mouth
grinning, deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal Incandenza
bounced the ball three times and went into his own service motion.

Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel
twenty-six meters below the Show Courts.

Steeply’s face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for
a motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal Incandenza’s serve. At the start a violinist
maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand
with the ball at the racket’s throat like a bow. The down-together-up-together of
the downswing and toss could be a child making angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and
eyes at the sky. But Hal’s face was pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow
extending only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The
service motion’s middle might be a man at a precipice, falling forward, giving in
sweetly to his own weight, and the serve’s terminus and impact a hammering man, the
driven nail just within range at the top of his tiptoed reach. But all these were
only parts, and made the motion seem segmented, when the smaller crew-cutted jowly
boy was the one with the stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis
only a couple times, with his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The
punter’s discourses on the game had been lengthy but not much use. It was unlikely
that any one game figured much in the Entertainment.

Hal Incandenza’s first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately
identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put
the ball away on the next shot, up at net. Hal’s serve seemed to set in motion a much
more involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive.
His first serve hadn’t Stice’s pace, but it had depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved
with an arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made
the serve curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box
and hop up high, so that Stice couldn’t do more than send back a deep backhand chip
from shoulder-height, and then couldn’t come in behind a return that’d been robbed
of all pace. Stice moved to the baseline’s center as the chip floated back to Hal.
Hal’s pivot moved him right so he could take it on the forehand,
²⁶⁸
another looper dripping with top, right back in the same corner he’d served to, so
that Stice had to stop and sprint back the same way he’d come. Stice drove this backhand
hard down the line to Hal’s forehand, a blazing thing that made the audience inhale,
but as the
samizdat
’s director’s other son glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had
a whole open court to hit cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he’d backpedalled
a bit off the shot and was now scrambling to get back out of the deuce corner, and
Hal hit the flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly
so, and the diagonal of the ball kept it travelling out wide after it hit Stice’s
ad sideline, carrying it away from the boy in black’s outstretched racquet, and for
a second it looked as if Stice at a dead run might get his strings on the ball, but
the ball stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-court
diagonal, and it passed Stice’s racquet half a meter past its rim, and Stice’s momentum
carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice slowed to a jog to go retrieve
the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot on the ad side, waiting for Stice to get back
and let him serve again. DeLint, whose peripheral vision’s acuity and disguise was
an E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second and then put
down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for
pretty,
shaking her fuchsia cap.