Infinite Jest (131 page)

This is why a fair number of the smaller E.T.A. males don’t see Stice take a set off
Hal Incandenza and nearly beat him, is that they were remanded down here by Neil Hartigan
right after post-conditioning showers.

As noted already, they don’t much mind it, being down here, now in one of the child-size-diametered
off-tunnels between the prorectors’ hallway and the Lung-Storage Room. The Eschatonites
are down here quite a lot anyway. In fact the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind
of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel Club’s unifying raison d’être
is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating informally in
the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies about
their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton
(usually only about five a term); and the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around
with a yellowed copy of
Robert’s Rules
endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club.
A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club’s least vague raison d’être has to do with exclusion.
The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only ironclad part of the Tunnel Club’s charter.
²⁷²
With the exception of Kent Blott, every boy down here on this detail is an Eschatonite
and a member of the Tunnel Club. Kent Blott, ineligible for Eschaton because he’s
a humanities-type kid and hasn’t even taken quadrivial Algebra yet, and excluded from
the Club under every incarnation of the eligibility requirements thus far, is down
here solely because he was heard to maintain at lunch that he was in the north part
of the main tunnel between the Comm.-Ad. locker rooms and the subterranean laundry
room this
A.M.
, short-cutting back to his room in West House after drills and a sauna, and claimed
to have espied—scuttling out of his mercuric light toward one of the secondary tunnels
to Subdorms C and D and the East Courts and this same general tunnel-area they’re
now in—to have sighted what was either a rat or, he said, what looked even more like
a Concavitated feral hamster. So the Eschatonites are also enthusiastic to be down
here for potential rodent-recon, checking out Blott’s claim, and they’ve brought what’s
either a very nervous or very excited Blott down with them, so they can trace the
possible routes Blott said he saw the rodent maybe take, filling their Glad Handle-Ties
and noting heavy items along the way, and also so they can immediately encircle and
discipline Kent Blott if it turns out he was yanking people’s chains.

Plus they make Blott be the one to take full trashbags and tie their plastic handles
together and drag them back to where the expedition started—the entrance to the large
smooth main tunnel by the boys’ sauna—since none of them enjoys dragging full trashbags
solo through dark tunnels with the rodential squeaking of match play and spectation
far above. Chu holds a penlight in his teeth and writes heavy stuff down. They’ve
filled several bags and gotten the lighter shit stacked off back enough to create
a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump Room, around which Room hangs a strange
sweet stale burny smell that none of them can place. The applause as Hal Incandenza
barely takes the first set above sounds down here like faraway rain. The off-tunnel’s
dark as a pocket, but warm and dry, and there’s surprisingly little dust. Ducts and
coaxials running along the low ceiling make Whale and Tallat-Kelpsa have to crouch
as they walk Point, clearing boxes and trying unsuccessfully to move fridgelettes
back out of the way. There are several pockets of small but heavy dorm-size Maytag
fridgelettes, the kind of thing no graduate takes with him, panelled in dark wood-grain
plastic, some of them old models with three-prong plugs instead of chargers. Some
of the empty fridgelettes have been indifferently scrubbed out and have their doors
partway open and smell stale. Most of Chu’s inventory for beefy-adult removal are
either fridgelettes or locked trunks full of what sound like magazines and eight-year
accumulations of pennies. The muffled rodential squeak of sneakers far overhead excites
the Tunnel Club boys and puts them on edge. Philip Traub keeps making little squeaky
noises and secretly tickling the back of people’s necks, causing enormous excitement
and much stopping and starting and tightly-enclosed whirling around, until Kieran
McKenna captures Traub tickling Josh Gopnik in the bright beam of his P.B. light and
Gopnik punches Traub in the radial nerve, and Traub clutches his arm and weeps and
says he’s quitting and going topside—Traub’s the youngest kid here except for Blott
and is a probationary second-string launcher in most Eschatons—and they have to stop
and let Chu note and mark two discarded fridgelettes while Peterson and Gopnik try
to distract and amuse Traub into staying and not retreating back up to Nwangi and
making a high-pitched stink.

Discarded fridgelettes, empty boxes, immovable and complexly-address-labelled trunks,
used athletic tape and Ace bandages, the occasional empty Visine bottle (which Blott
stashes in his sweatshirt-pouch, for Mike Pemulis’s next contest), Optics I & II lab
reports, broken ball machines and stray tennis balls too dead even for the repressurization
machine, broken or discarded TP cartridges of stroke-analysis filmings or worn-out
entertainments, an anomalous set of parfait glasses, fruit peels and AminoPal energy-bar-wrappers
that the Club itself had left down here after meetings, discarded curls of grip and
tensile string, several incongruous barrettes, several old broadcast televisions some
older kids used to like to keep around to watch the static, and, along the seam of
wall and floor, brittle limb-shaped husks of exfoliated Pledge, expanses of arm and
leg already half-decayed into fragrant dust—this comprising the bulk of the crud down
here, and the kids don’t much mind scanning and inventorying and bagging it, because
their minds are diverted by something else very exciting, a kind of possible raison
d’être for the Club itself, unless Blott had been tweaking their Units, in which case
look out Blott, is the consensus.

Gopnik to a sniffling Traub, while Peterson shines his flashlight on the clipboard
for Chu: ‘Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere that Mary
went, the lights became erratic.’

Carl Whale pretends to be immensely fat and moves along the wall with a blimpish splay-legged
waddle.

Peterson to Traub, while Gopnik holds the light: ‘Eighteen-year-old top-ranked John
Wayne / Had sex with Herr Schtitt on a train / They had sex again / And again and
again / And again and again and again,’ which the slightly older kids find more entertaining
than Traub does.

Kent Blott asks why a wispy-dicked blubberer like Phil gets to be in the Tunnel Club
while his own applications get turned down, and Tallat-Kelpsa cuts him short by doing
something to him in the dark that makes Blott shriek.

It’s utterly dark except for the dime-sized discs of their low-diffusion B.P.s, because
they’ve left the tunnels’ strings of bare overhead bulbs off, because Gopnik, who’s
originally from Brooklyn and knows from rodents, says only a complete booger-eating
moron would do rat-reconnaissance in the light, and it seems reasonable to assume
that feral hamsters, also, have a basically ratty attitude toward light.

Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that’s lying
on its side up next to one wall, and Blott tries and barely lifts it, and pules, and
Chu marks the oven down for the adults to lift and tells Blott to drop it, which invitation
Blott takes literally, and the crash and tinkle infuriate Gopnik and McKenna, who
say that scanning for rodents with Blott is like fly-fishing with an epileptic, which
cheers Traub up quite a bit.

Feral hamsters—bogey-wise right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths,
carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas that melts your face off and leaves you with exposed
gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life, in terms
of late-night hair-raising Concavity narratives—are rarely sighted south of the Lucite
walls and ATHSCME’d checkpoints that delimit the Great Concavity, and only once in
a blue moon anywhere south of like the new-border burg of Methuen MA, whose Chamber
of Commerce calls it ‘The City That Interdependence Rebuilt,’ and anyway
pace
Blott are hardly ever seen solo, being the sort of rapacious locust-like mass-movement
creature that Canadian agronomists call ‘Piranha of the Plains.’ An infestation of
feral hamsters in the waste-rich terrain of metro Boston, to say nothing of the clutter-tunnelled
E.T.A. grounds, would be an almost grand-scale public-health disaster, would cause
simply no end of adult running-in-circles and knuckle-biting, and would consume megacalories
of displaced pre-adolescent stress for the E.T.A. players. Every ear-cocked eye-peeled
bag-toting kid in the off-tunnel this afternoon is hoping hamster in a big way, except
for Kent Blott, who’s hoping simply and fervently for some sort of rodential sighting
or scat-sample that’ll keep him from being disciplinarily hung upside-down in a lavatory
stall to shriek until a staff-member finds him. He reminds the Tunnel Clubbers that
it’s not like he’d claimed he espied the thing actually
heading
in this direction, he’d only seen the thing scuttling in a way that seemed to suggest
a
tendency
or like
probability
of heading in this direction.

One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of
a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor
in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases’ sharp
edges put holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges
and fruit rinds, each only about half full, back to the lit vestibule outside the
Comm.-Ad. tunnel’s start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly
up.

Plus a confirmed feral-hamster sighting, Chu and Gopnik and ‘S.T.P.’ Peterson have
agreed, could well distract the Headmaster’s office from post-Eschaton reprisals against
Big Buddies Pemulis, Incandenza and Axford, whom the Club’s Eschatonite faction doesn’t
want to see reprised against, particularly, though the consensus is nobody would much
mind seeing the malefic Ann Kittenplan hung out to dry in a serious way. Plus hamster-incursions
could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A.
objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice
balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged
pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and
has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit—feral hamsters being notorious
draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can’t eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway,
somehow—and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal
blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike. Which would make the Tunnel Club guys something
like heroes, foreseeably.

They move along the tunnel, their mercuric lights Xing and separating and forming
jagged angles, colored faintly pink.

But even a confirmed rat would be a coup. Dean of Academic Affairs Mrs. Inc has a
violent phobic thing about vermin and waste and insects and overall facility hygiene,
and Orkin men with beer-bellies and playing cards with naked girls in high-heeled
shoes on the backs (McKenna’s claim) spray the bejeesus out of the E.T.A. grounds
twice a semester. None of the younger E.T.A. boys—who have the same post-latency fetish
for vermin they have about subterranean access and exclusive Clubs—none of them has
ever once gotten to see or trap a rat or roach or even so much as a lousy silverfish
anyplace around here. So the unspoken consensus is that a hamster’d be optimal but
they’d settle for a rat. Just one lousy rat could give the whole Club a legit
raison,
an explicable reason for congregating underground—all of them are a bit uneasy about
liking to congregate underground for no good or clear reason.

‘Sleeps, you think you could lift that and carry it?’

‘Chu man I wouldn’t even get up next to whatever that is much less touch it.’

Blott’s footfalls and tuneless whistling can be heard from far away, returning, and
the distant squeak of overhead sneakers.

Gopnik stops and his light pans, playing on faces. ‘OK. Somebody farted.’

‘What’s this up next to it, Sleeps?’ Chu backing up to widen his light’s beam on something
broad and squat and dark.

‘Could I get some lights over here on this you guys?’

‘Because did somebody go ahead and
cut one
in this little unventilated space?’

‘Chu, it’s a room fridge, that’s all.’

‘But it’s bigger than the room fridges.’

‘But it’s not as big as a real fridge.’

‘It’s in-between.’

‘I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.’

‘There
is
a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.’

‘Otherwise it’s a
smell.’

‘
Don’t try to describe it.’

‘Sleeps, that’s no human fart I’ve ever smelled.’

‘It’s too powerful for a fart.’

‘Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attack and staggered down here just to cut one.’

Peterson trains his light on the midsized brown fridge. ‘You don’t possibly think…’

Chu says ‘No way. No way.’

‘
What?
’ Blott says.

‘Don’t even think it,’ Chu says.

‘I don’t even think any kind of
mammal
could fart that bad, Chu.’

Peterson’s looking at Chu, both of their faces pale in the mercuric light. ‘No
way
somebody’d graduate and leave and put their fridge down here without taking the food
out.’

Blott goes ‘Is that the smell?’

‘Was this Pearson’s fridge last year?’