Infinite Jest (135 page)

The lights’ slight flicker and subtle change in the pressure of the room is from the
E.T.A. furnaces kicking on way down in the tunnels below Comm.-Ad. Hal shifts uneasily
on the couch, spitting into the wastecan. The very faint smell of burnt dust is also
from the furnace.

A minor short didactic one Hal likes and runs twice in a row is
Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat
. A bureaucrat in some kind of sterile fluorescent-lit office complex is a fantastically
efficient worker when awake, but he has this terrible problem waking up in the
A.M.
, and is consistently late to work, which in a bureaucracy is idiosyncratic and disorderly
and wholly unacceptable, and we see this bureaucrat getting called in to his supervisor’s
pebbled-glass cubicle, and the supervisor, who wears a severely dated leisure suit
with his shirt-collar flaring out on either side of its rust-colored lapels, tells
the bureaucrat that he’s a good worker and a fine man, but that this chronic tardiness
in the
A.M.
is simply not going to fly, and if it happens one more time the bureaucrat is going
to have to find another fluorescent-lit office complex to work in. It’s no accident
that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called ‘termination,’ as in ontological erasure,
and the bureaucrat leaves his supervisor’s cubicle duly shaken. That night he and
his wife go through their Bauhaus condominium collecting every alarm clock they own,
each one of which is electric and digital and extremely precise, and they festoon
their bedroom with them, so there are like a dozen timepieces with their digital alarms
all set for 0615h. But that night there’s a power failure, and all the clocks lose
an hour or just sit there blinking 0000h. over and over, and the bureaucrat still
oversleeps the next
A.M.
He wakes late, lies there for a moment staring at a blinking 0000. He shrieks, clutches
his head, throws on wrinkled clothes, ties his shoes in the elevator, shaves in the
car, blasting through red lights on the way to the commuter rail. The 0816 train to
the City pulls in to the station’s lower level just as the crazed bureaucrat’s car
screeches into the station’s parking lot, and the bureaucrat can see the top of the
train sitting there idling from across the open lot. This is the very last temporally
feasible train: if the bureaucrat misses this train he’ll be late again, and terminated.
He hauls into a Handicapped spot and leaves the car there at a crazy angle, vaults
the turnstile, and takes the stairs down to the platform seven at a time, sweaty and
bug-eyed. People scream and dive out of his way. As he careers down the long stairway
he keeps his crazed eyes on the open doors of the 0816 train, willing them to stay
open just a little longer. Finally, filmed in a glacial slo-mo, the bureaucrat leaps
from the seventh-to-the-bottom step and lunges toward the train’s open doors, and
right in mid-lunge smashes headlong into an earnest-faced little kid with thick glasses
and a bow-tie and those nerdy little schoolboy-shorts who’s tottering along the platform
under a tall armful of carefully wrapped packages. Kerwham, they collide. Bureaucrat
and kid both stagger back from the impact. The kid’s packages go flying all over the
place. The kid recovers his balance and stands there stunned, glasses and bow-tie
askew.
²⁷⁹
The bureaucrat looks frantically from the kid to the litter of packages to the kid
to the train’s doors, which are still open. The train thrums. Its interior is fluorescent-lit
and filled with employed, ontologically secure bureaucrats. You can hear the station’s
PA announcer saying something tinny and garbled about departure. The stream of platform
foot-traffic opens around the bureaucrat and the stunned boy and the litter of packages.
Ogilvie’d once lectured for a whole period on this kid’s character as an instance
of the difference between an antagonist and a deuteragonist in moral drama; he’d mentioned
the child-actor’s name over and over. Hal tries whacking himself just over the right
eye several times, to dislodge the name. The film’s bureaucrat’s buggy eyes keep going
back and forth between the train’s open doors and the little kid, who’s looking steadily
up at him, almost studious, his eyes big and liquid behind the lenses. Hal doesn’t
remember who played the bureaucrat, either, but it’s the kid’s name that’s driving
him bats. The bureaucrat’s leaning away, inclined way over toward the train doors,
as if his very cells were being pulled that way. But he keeps looking at the kid,
the gifts, struggling with himself. It’s a clear internal-conflict moment, one of
Himself’s films’ very few. The bureaucrat’s eyes suddenly recede back into their normal
places in his sockets. He turns from the fluorescent doors and bends to the kid and
asks if he’s OK and says it’ll all be OK. He cleans the kid’s spectacles with his
pocket handkerchief, picks the kid’s packages up. About halfway through the packages
the PA issues something final and the train’s doors close with a pressurized hiss.
The bureaucrat gently loads the kid back up with packages, neatens them. The train
pulls out. The bureaucrat watches the train pull out, expressionless. It’s anybody’s
guess what he’s thinking. He straightens the kid’s bow-tie, kneeling down the way
adults do when they’re ministering to a child, and tells him he’s sorry about the
impact and that it’s OK. He turns to go. The platform’s mostly empty now. Now the
strange moment. The kid cranes his neck around the packages and looks up at the guy
as he starts to walk away:

‘Mister?’ the kid says. ‘Are you Jesus?’

‘Don’t I wish,’ the ex-bureaucrat says over his shoulder, walking away, as the kid
shifts the packages and frees one little hand to wave Bye at the guy’s topcoat’s back
as the camera, revealed now as mounted on the 0816’s rear, recedes from the platform
and picks up speed.

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat
remains Mario’s favorite of all their late father’s entertainments, possibly because
of its unhip earnestness. Though to Mario he always maintains it’s basically goo,
Hal secretly likes it, too, the cartridge, and likes to project himself imaginatively
into the ex-bureaucrat’s character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological
erasure.

As a kind of weird self-punishment, Hal also plans to subject himself to the horrific
Fun with Teeth
and
Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators,
then finally to one of Himself’s posthumous hits, a cartridge called
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun
that he’d always found kind of gratuitously nasty and overwrought, but which Hal
has no idea that this piece of entertainment actually germinated out of James O. Incandenza’s
one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-’90s, when Himself
lasted two and a half months and then drifted gradually away, turned off by the simplistic
God-stuff and covert dogma. Bob-Hopeless, Hal spits way more than is his norm, now,
and also likes having the wastecan right nearby in case he might throw up. That afternoon
he’d had zilch in the way of a kinesthetic sense: he couldn’t feel the ball on his
stick. His nausea has nothing to do with watching his father’s cartridges. For the
last year his arm’s been an extension of his mind and the stick an extension of the
arm, acutely sensitive. Each of the cartridges is a carefully labelled black diskette;
they’re all signed neatly out on the clipboard by the egg-shaped glass bookshelf and
are loaded in the cueing slots and waiting to drop, in order, and be digitally decoded.

P. T. Krause: N. Cambridge: that infamous deceptive post-seizure feeling of well-being.
That broken-fever, reversal-of-fortune-type highhearted feeling after a neuroelectric
event. Poor Tony Krause awoke in the ambulance lizardless and continent and feeling
right as rain. Lay there and flirted with the blue-jawed paramedic leaning over him,
certain bawdy entendres on expressions like
vital signs
and
dilation
until the paramedic radioed ahead to Cambridge City’s E. Room to cancel the crash-cart.
Manipulated his skinny arms in a parodic Minimal Mambo, lying there. Fiddle-de-dee’d
the paramedic’s warning that post-seizure feelings of well-being were notoriously
deceptive and transient.

And then also the little-mentioned advantage to being destitute and in possession
of a Health Card that’s expired and not even in your name: hospitals show you a kind
of inverted respect; a place like Cambridge City Hospital bows to your will not to
stay; they all of a sudden defer to your subjective diagnostic knowledge of your own
condition, which post-seizure condition you feel has turned the corner toward improvement:
they bow to your quixotic will: it’s unfortunately not a free hospital but it is a
free country: they honor your wishes and compliment your mambo and say Go with God.

It’s a good thing you can’t see what you look like, though.

And the serendipity of Cambridge City Hospital being just an eight-block stroll east
on Cambridge St. and then south on Prospect, through mentholated autumn air, through
Inman Square and up to Antitoi Entertainment, maybe the one last place where a renewed,
post-seizure, on-the-diagnostic-upswing if still slightly shaky young gender-dysphoric
might yet expect a bit of kindness, pharmacological credit, since the affairs of Wo
and Copley Library and heart.

The big brick cake of the hospital behind Krause in purple twilight. The brisk click
of his heels on pavement, boa semi-formally loose on his shoulders and down beneath
each arm, hand holding red leather collar closed at the throat, head up and staying
that way on its own, steady eyes meeting with blasé dignity the eyes of whoever passes.
The dignity of a man risen by will from the ashes of Withdrawal and now on the upswing
and with places to go and potentially considerate Canadians to see. A charming and
potentially once again in the not-too-distant future gorgeous creature with the renewed
wherewithal to now meet the eyes of Inman Sq. pedestrians veering sharply away from
the residual smells of men’s room stall and subway vomit, the ashes from which he’s
been rescued and risen once again, feeling righter than rain. A rind of moon hanging
cocked above a four-spired church. And the emergent stars are yo-yos, you feel, after
a seizure: Poor Tony feels as if he could cast them out, draw them in again at will.

The way Poor Tony Krause, Lolasister, and Susan T. Cheese became mercenary adjuncts
to something dour Bertraund Antitoi had invited them to call the ‘
Front-Contre-O.N.A.N.isme
’ was that, for a heavily cut bundle to split six ways, Lolasister, Susan T. Cheese,
P. T. Krause, Bridget Tenderhole, Equus Reese, and the late Stokely (‘Dark Star’)
McNair had had to wear identical red leather coats and auburn wigs and spike heels
and go and hang around the lobby of Harvard Square’s Sheraton Commander Hotel with
six mannish-looking women in the same wigs and coats while an androgynous Québecer
insurgent who filled out h/his red leather coat in a way that made Bridget Tenderhole
dig his nails into his palms in sheer green envy came through the Commander’s revolving
Lucite doors and strode purposefully into the crowded Epaulet Ballroom and threw foul
semi-liquid violet waste from a souvenir miniature waste-displacement barrel in the
face of the Canadian Minister of Inter-O.N.A.N. Trade, who was addressing the U.S.
press from a leaf-shaped rostrum. The decoys were then required to mill hysterically
in the lobby, all twelve of them, and then hit the revolving doors and disperse in
a dozen different vectors as the androgynous waste-wielding Québecer legged it out
of the Epaulet Ballroom and lobby pursued by white-suited men with earplugs and Cobray
M–11 subautomatics, so the security guys’d see identical epicene figures high-heeling
it away in different directions and get fuddled about who to chase. Susan T. Cheese
and Poor Tony’d met the Antitoi Bros.—only one of whom could or would speak, and who’d
been in charge of the diversionary aspects of the Sheraton Commander operation, and
had clearly been subordinate to still other Québecers of way higher I.Q.—Krause and
S.T.C. had met them at Inman Square’s Ryle’s Tavern, which had Gender-Dysphoric Night
every second Wednesday, and attracted comely and unrough trade, and which Poor Tony
passed now (Ryle’s), just after the Man o’ War Grille, now only a block or so from
the Antitois’ glass-and-novelty-shop front, feeling not so much quite ill again as
just deeply tired, after only five or so blocks—that post-fever, sleep-for-a-week-type
cellular fatigue—and is debating with himself about whether to have a go at the purses
of the two young and unstriking women walking just a few steps ahead, both of their
purses hanging only by the flimsiest of evening-gown-width straps from slumped shoulders,
the duo interracial, rare and disquieting in metro Boston, the black girl talking
a click a minute and the white one not responding, her weary stolid plod and air of
inattention fairly begging for a purse-snatch, both of them with an air about them
of routine victimization, the sort of demoralized lassitude Poor Tony felt always
guaranteed a minimum of protest or pursuit—though the white girl wore formidable-looking
running shoes under her tartan skirt. So intent was Poor Tony Krause on the logistics
and implications of the possible purses dangled as if by God right before him—how
different to hit the Antitois’ doorstep with liquid assets, to request a transaction
rather than bare charity, more almost a social call than a contemptible Withdrawn
snivel for compassion—so intent as he sidestepped an impressive pile of dog-droppings
and passed across the broad windows of the Man o’ War that he never saw his old former
crewmate Mad Matty Pemulis, a sure source of compassion, looking up and out and down
and back up, aghast in recognition of what Poor Tony has come through the corridor
to resemble.

Geoffrey Day’s noted the way most of the male residents of Ennet House have special
little cognomens for their genitals. E.g. ‘Bruno,’ ‘Jake,’ ‘Fang’ (Minty), ‘The One-Eyed
Monk,’ ‘Fritzie,’ ‘Russell the Love Muscle.’ He speculates this could be a class thing:
neither he nor Ewell nor Ken Erdedy have named their Units. Like Ewell, Day enters
a certain amount of comparative-class data in his journal. Doony Glynn called his
penis ‘Poor Richard’; Chandler Foss confessed to the moniker ‘Bam-Bam.’ Lenz had referred
to his own Unit as ‘the Frightful Hog.’ Day would die before admitting he missed either
Lenz or his soliloquies about the Hog, which had been frequent. The penis in question
had been that curious two or three shades darker than the rest of Lenz that people’s
penises sometimes are. Lenz had brandished it at his roommates whenever he wished
to emphasize a point. It had been short and thick and blunt, and Lenz described the
Hog as a primo example of what he called the Polish Curse, viz. undistinguished length
but sobering circumference: ‘Easy on the bottom but tears hell out of the sides, brother.’
This had been his description of the Polish Curse. A surprising amount of Day’s Recovery
Journal is filled with quotations from R. Lenz. Lenz’s discharge had moved the tax-attorney
Tiny Ewell up into the 3-Man room with Day. Ewell was the one man here with whom a
conversation of anything remotely approaching depth could be held, so Day was nonplussed
when he found himself, after a couple long nights, almost missing Lenz, his obsession
with time, his patter, his way of leaning up against the wall upside-down in his briefs,
or brandishing the Hog.