Infinite Jest (138 page)

Boone withdraws the clean spoon just as slowly. ‘No matter how sullen and pouty that
person is over that person’s play or near-loss in full view of a whole crowd that
day, I hear.’

‘Bridget, I forgot to tell you I saw that Rite Aid’s having an enormous clearance
on emetics. If I were you I’d scoot right over.’

‘You are vile.’

Bernadette Longley sticks her long boxy head in the door and sees Bridget Boone and
says ‘I
thought
I heard you in here’ and comes in uninvited with Jennie Bash in tow.

Hal whimpers.

Jennie Bash looks at the large screen. The cartridge’s theme-music is female-choral
and very heavy and ironic on the descants. Bernadette Longley looks at Hal. ‘You know
there’s a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and
a very determined expression.’

Boone banks the spoon back and forth absently. ‘He’s isolating. He won’t respond and
is spitting extra repulsively to get across the point.’

Jennie Bash says ‘Haven’t you got a huge paper due for Thierry tomorrow? There was
moaning coming from Struck and Shaw’s room.’

Hal packs chew down with his tongue. ‘Done.’

‘Figures,’ Bridget Boone says.

‘Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled.’

‘Proofed to within its life,’ Boone says, barrel-rolling the spoon. Hal can tell she’s
done a couple one-hitters. He’s looking straight at the wall’s screen, squeezing the
ball so hard his forearm keeps swelling to twice its size.

‘Plus I hear your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today,’
Longley says.

‘She means Pemulis,’ Fran Unwin tells Hal.

Bridget Boone makes dive-bomber sounds and swoops the spoon around. ‘Sounds like too
good a story not to save and let my craving for it build and build until finally it’s
like I have to hear it or die right on the spot.’

‘What is up his butt?’ Jennie Bash asks Fran Unwin. Fran Unwin’s a sort of hanuman-faced
girl with a torso and trunk about twice as long as her legs, and a scuttly, vaguely
simian style of play. Bernadette Longley wears knee-length candy-cane trousers and
a sweatshirt with the fleecy inside out. All the girls are now in socks. Hal notes
that girls always seem to slip out of their shoes when they assume any kind of spectatorial
posture. Eight empty white sneakers now sit mute and weird at various points, slightly
sunk in carpet pile. No two of the shoes face quite the same exact direction. Male
players, on the other hand, tend to leave the footwear on when they come in and sit
down somewhere. Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home. Males,
when they come in somewhere and sit down, project an air of transience. Remain suited
up and mobile. It’s the same whenever Hal comes in and sits down someplace where people
are already gathered. He’s aware that they sense he’s somehow there only in a very
technical sense, that he’s got an air of moment’s-notice readiness to leave about
him. Boone extends her carton of TCBY
²⁸⁸
toward Longley in an inviting way, even tilting it invitingly back and forth. Longley
puffs her cheeks and blows air out with a fatigued sound. At least three different
smells of cologne and skin-cream struggle for primacy in here. Bridget Boone’s free
LA Gear shoes are both on their sides from the force of having been almost kicked
off her feet. Hal’s spit makes a sound against the bottom of the wastebasket. Jennie
Bash has bigger arms than Hal. The Viewing Room is redly dim. Bash asks Unwin what
they’re watching.

Blood Sister: One Tough Nun,
one of Himself’s few commercial successes, wouldn’t have made near the money it made
if it hadn’t come out just as InterLace was starting to purchase first-run features
for its rental menus and hyping the cartridges with one-time Spontaneous Disseminations.
It was the sort of sleazy-looking shocksploitation film that would have had a two-week
run in multiplex theaters 8 and above and then gone right to the featureless brown
boxes of magnetic-video limbo. Hal’s critical take on the film is that Himself, at
certain dark points when abstract theory-issues seemed to provide an escape from the
far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges,
had made films in certain commercial-type genre modes that so grotesquely exaggerated
the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies
on the genres: ‘sub/inversions of the genres,’ cognoscenti taken in were wont to call
them. The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof and over-clever, to Hal’s way
of thinking, and he’s not comfortable with the way Himself always seemed to get seduced
by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert, especially the seductive
formulae of violent payback, i.e. the cathartic bloodbath, i.e. the hero trying with
every will-fiber to eschew the generic world of the stick and fist and but driven
by unjust circumstance back to the violence again, to the cathartic final bloodbath
the audience is brought to applaud instead of mourn. Himself’s best in this vein was
The Night Wears a Sombrero,
a Langesque metaWestern but also a really good Western, with chintzy homemade interior
sets but breathtaking exteriors shot outside Tucson AZ, an ambivalent-but-finally-avenging-son
story played out against dust-colored skies and big angles of flesh-colored mountain,
plus with minimal splatter, shot men clutching their chests and falling deliciously
sideways, all hats staying on at all times.
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun
was a supposedly ironic lampoon of the avenging-cleric splatter-films of the late
B.S. ’90s. Nor did Himself make any friends on either side of the Concavity, trying
to shoot the thing in Canada.

Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at
an osteoporotic angle over digital editing equipment for hours on end, deleting and
inserting code, arranging
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun
into subversive/inversion, and can’t summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might
have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing’s
metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on.
²⁸⁹

Jennie Bash has left V.R. 6’s door agape, and Idris Arslanian and Todd (‘Postal Weight’)
Possalthwaite and Kent Blott all drift in and sit Indian-style in a loose hemisphere
on the thick carpet between the girls’ recumbency and Hal’s recumbency, and are more
or less considerately quiet. They all keep their sneakers on. Postal Weight’s nose
is a massive proboscoid bandaged thing. Kent Blott wears a sportfisherman’s cap with
an extremely long bill. That queer faint smell of hot dogs that seems to follow Idris
Arslanian around begins to insinuate itself into the room’s colognes. He isn’t wearing
the rayon handkerchief as a blindfold but does have it tied around his neck; no one
asks him about it. All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked immediately
into
Blood Sister
’s unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic cue
from the little boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal’s the only
person in the room who isn’t 100% absorbed.

The entertainment’s uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets
of Toronto is found O.D.’d, beaten up, molested, and robbed of her leather jacket
outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended, spiritually
guided, and converted—‘
saved
’ is the weak entendre made much of in the first act’s dialogue—by a tough-looking
older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the tough older nun), had herself been hauled
up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing and -addiction by an even tougher even
older nun, a nun who had
herself
been saved by a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The latest saved biker-chick becomes
a tough and street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets
as Blood Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and
still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets.

The motivational crux here being that almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by
nuns who’d been saved from Toronto’s mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher
saved nuns. So, endless novenas later, Blood Sister eventually feels this transitive
spiritual urge to go out and find a troubled adolescent female of her own, to ‘save’
and bring into the order, thereby discharging her soul’s debt to the old tough nun
who’d saved
her
. Through processes obscure (a Toronto troubled-but-savable-adolescent-girl-directory
of some sort? Bridget Boone cuts wise), Blood Sister eventually takes on a burn-scarred,
deeply troubled adolescent punker-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, yes, reasonably
tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl’s pink shiny burn-scarred
face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister’s not looking) by
the terrible depredations she’s endured as a result of her rapacious and unshakable
addiction to crank cocaine, the kind you have to convert and cook up yourself, and
with ether, which is highly combustible, and which people used before somebody found
out baking soda and temperature-flux would do the same thing, which dates the film’s
B.S. time-period even more clearly than the tough tortured punk girl’s violet stelliform
coiffure.
²⁹⁰

But so Blood Sister eventually gets the girl clean, by nurturing her through Withdrawal
in a locked sacristy; and the girl becomes less sullen by degrees that almost have
audible clicks to them—the girl stops trying to dicky the lock of the sacramental-wine
cabinet, stops farting on purpose during matins and vespers, stops going up to the
Trappists who hang around the convent and asking them for the time and other sly little
things to try to make them slip up and speak aloud, etc. A couple times the girl’s
face writhes in emotional torment and vulnerability even
when
Blood Sister’s looking. The girl gets a severe and somewhat lesbianic haircut, and
her roots establish themselves as softly brown. Blood Sister, revealing biceps like
nobody’s business, beats the girl at arm-wrestling; they both laugh; they compare
tattoos: this marks the start of a brutally drawn-out Getting-to-Know-and-Trust-You
montage, a genre-convention, this montage involving Harley-rides at such speeds that
the girl has to keep her hand on Blood Sister’s head to keep B.S.’s wimple from flying
off, and long conversational walks filmed at wide-angle, and protracted and basically
unwinnable games of charades with the Trappists, plus some quick scenes of Blood Sister
finding the girl’s Marlboros and dildo-facsimile lighter in the wastebasket, of the
girl doing chores unsullenly under B.S.’s grudgingly approving eye, of candle-lit
scripture-study sessions with the girl’s finger under each word she reads, of the
girl carefully snipping the last bits of split violet ends from her soft brown hair,
of the more senior tough nuns punching Blood Sister’s shoulder approvingly as the
girl’s eyes start to get that impending-conversion gleam in them, then, finally, of
Blood Sister and the girl habit-shopping, the girl’s burned lantern jaw and hairless
Promethean brow frozen in a sunlit montage-climax shot under a novitiate wimple’s
gull-wings—all accompanied by—no kidding—‘Getting to Know You,’ which Hal imagines
the Stork justified to himself as subversively saccharine. This all takes about half
an hour. Bridget Boone, of the Indianapolis archdiocese, begins to declaim briefly
on
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun
’s ironic anti-Catholic subthesis—that the deformed addicted girl’s ‘salvation’ here
seemed simply the exchange of one will-obliterating ‘habit’ for another, substituting
one sort of outlandish head-decoration for another—and gets pinched by Jennie Bash
and shushed by just about everyone in the room but Hal, who could pass for asleep
except for the brief lists to port over the wastebasket, to spit, and in fact is experiencing
some of the radical loss of concentration that attends THC-Withdrawal and is thinking
about another, even more familiar J. O. Incandenza cartridge even while he watches
this one with the other E.T.A.s. This other attention-object is the late Himself’s
so-called ‘inversion’ of the corporate-politics genre,
Low-Temperature Civics,
an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position-jockeyings, timid
adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in elegant tight-fitting
dress-for-successwear who eat their paunched and muddled male counterparts for political
lunch. Hal knows that
L-TC
wasn’t an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ’80s
period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entrepreneurism,
when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and
existentially unmoored, and Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and
watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar’s
Dynasty
et al. in a remote spa off Canada’s Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and
bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.

What’s intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone’s take on Himself’s
take on the substitution-of-one-crutch-for-another interpretation of substituting
Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many not-yet-desperate-enough
newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on
the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic
piety, an ‘Attitude of Platitude,’ and use this idea that it’s still slavish dependence
as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA, and to go back to the original slavish Substance-dependence,
until that dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation
that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to
be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins.