Infinite Jest (140 page)

This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near-Kabuki volume
during an appalling free-for-all in the office of the Mother Superior who hadn’t saved
the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns—who’d been tough
and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted
bike-chicks—teaming up and kicking Blood Sister’s ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling
habitements and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of the wall’s huge
decorative mahogany crucifix, with Blood Sister giving a good account of herself but
still getting her wimple beat in and finally, after several whirling kicks to the
forehead, starting to bid adieu to her corporeal map and commend herself to the arms
of God; until the unsaved recidivist Vice-Mother Superior nun who’d saved Blood Sister,
wiping blood from her eyes after a head-butt and seeing the Mother Superior about
to decapitate Blood Sister with the souvenir Champlain-era tomahawk the Huron nun
who’d been saved by the original founder of the Toronto tough-girl-saving order had
used to decapitate Jesuit missionaries before she (the tough Huron nun) had been saved,
seeing the tomahawk raised with both arms before the normally pious-eyed old Mother
Superior’s face—a face now rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of humility
and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil—seeing now
the upraised hatchet and demonized face of the M.S., the unsaved Vice-nun has a moment
of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister’s demapping
by leaping across the office and cold-cocking the Mother Superior with a large decorative
mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn’t even be named, the object’s
symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. Now Blood Sister has
the Champlain-era hatchet, and the unsaved nun who’d saved her has an unnamed object
whose mahogany’s no match for a hatchet, and they stand facing each other over the
prone Mother Superior’s puddle of skirts, chests heaving, and the Vice-M.S. has a
writhing expression under her askew wimple like
Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had
saved you but ultimately couldn’t even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian
circuit
or whatever. They stare at each other for countless frames, the office wall behind
them cruciformly pale where the unnamed object’d hung. Then Blood Sister shrugs in
resignation and drops the tomahawk, and turns and with an ironic little obeisance
walks out the Mother Superior’s office door and through the little sacristy and over
the altar and down the little convent nave (bike boots echoing on the tile, emphasizing
the silence) and out the big doors whose tympanum overhead is carved with a sword
and a ploughshare and a syringe and a soup-ladle and the motto
CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA,
the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it’s Boone who has to supply
the translation Kent Blott asks for.
²⁹⁸
On-screen, we’re still following the tough nun (or ex-nun). The fact that the hatchet
she resignedly dropped fetched the prone Mother Superior a pretty healthy knock is
presented as clearly accidental… because she (Blood Sister) is still walking away
from the convent, moving emphatically and in a gradually deepening focus. Limping
toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn. The cartridge’s closing sequence
shows her astride her Hawg on Toronto’s meanest street. About to lapse? Backslide
back into her tough pre-saved ways? It’s unclear in a way that’s supposed to be rich:
her expression is agnostic at best, but the huge sign of a discount Harley-muffler
outlet juts just at the horizon she’s roaring toward. The closing credits are the
odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield.

It’s hard to tell whether Boone and Bash’s applause is sarcastic. There’s that post-entertainment
flurry of changed positions and stretched limbs and critical sallies. Out of nowhere
Hal remembers: Smothergill. Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man brought Blott in
to speak to Hal about something disturbing they encountered during their disciplinary
shit-detail in the tunnels that
P.M.
Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, flipping through cartridge cases to
see whether
Low-Temperature Civics
is up here. All the cases are clearly labelled.

The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging view of
Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters and looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on
its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint
than swallowed. Kate Gompert held her hurt head and heard it roar. Ruth van Cleve’s
pursuit was slowed by her arms, which were waving around as she screamed; and the
apparition was swinging their purses to clear a path on the sidewalk before it. Kate
Gompert could see pedestrians leaping out into the street way up ahead to avoid getting
clocked. The whole visual scene seemed tinged in violet.

A voice under a storefront awning right nearby somewhere said: ‘Seen it!’

Kate Gompert leaned over again and held the part of her head that surrounded her eye.
The eye was palpably swelling shut, and her whole vision was queerly violet. A sound
in her head like a drawbridge being drawn up, implacable trundle and squeaks. Hot
watery spit was flooding her mouth, and she kept swallowing against nausea.

‘Seen it? Bet your ever-living goddamn
life
I seen it!’ A kind of gargoyle seemed to detach itself from a storefront hardware
display and moved in, its motions oddly jerky, as in a film missing frames. ‘Seen
the whole thing!’ it said, then repeated it. ‘I’m a witness!’ it said.

Kate Gompert put her other arm out against the lightpost and hauled herself mostly
upright, looking at it.

‘Witnessed the whole
god
damn thing,’ it said. In the eye that wasn’t swelling shut the thing resolved violetly
into a bearded man in an army coat and a sleeveless army coat over that coat, spittle
in his beard. One eye had a system of exploded arteries in it. He shook like an old
machine. There was a smell involved. The old man got right up close, looming in, so
that pedestrians had to curve out around both of them together. Kate Gompert could
feel her pulse in her eye.

‘Witness!
Eye
witness! The whole thing!’ But he was looking someplace else, like more around at
people passing. ‘Seen it?
I’m
him!’ Not clear who he was shouting at. It wasn’t her, and the passersby were paying
that studious, urban kind of no-attention as they broke and melted around them at
the lightpost and then reformed. Kate Gompert had the idea that supporting herself
against the lightpost would keep her from throwing up.
Concussion
is really another word for a bruised brain. She tried not to think about it, that
the impact had maybe sent one part of her brain slamming against her skull, and now
that part was purply swelling, mashed up against the inside of her skull. The lightpost
she held herself up with was what had hit her.

‘Fellow?
I’m
your fellow. Witness? Saw it all!’ And the old fellow was holding a trembling palm
up just under Kate Gompert’s face, as if he wanted it thrown up into. The palm was
violet, with splotches of some sort of possible fungal decay, and with dark branching
lines where the pink palm-lines of people who don’t live in dumpsters usually are,
and Kate Gompert studied the palm abstractly, and the weather-bleached
GIGABUCKS
²⁹⁹
ticket on the pavement below it. The ticket seemed to recede into a violet mist and
then move back up. Pedestrians barely glanced at them and then looked studiously elsewhere:
a drunk-looking pale girl and a street bum showing her something in his hand. ‘Witnessed
the whole thing being committed,’ the man remarked to a passerby with a cellular on
his belt. Kate Gompert couldn’t summon the juice to tell him to go screw. That’s the
way it was said down here in the real city, Go Screw, with a deft little thumb-gesture.
She couldn’t even say Go Away, though the smell involved in the man made it worse,
the nausea. It seemed terribly important not to vomit. She could feel her pulse in
the eye the pole had hit. As if the strain of vomiting could aggravate the spongy
purpling of the part of her brain the pole had bruised. The thought made her want
to vomit in this horrid palm that wouldn’t stay still. She tried to reason. If the
man had witnessed the whole thing then how could he think she’d have change to put
in his hand. Ruth van Cleve had been listing some of her baby’s jailed father’s wittier
aliases when Kate Gompert had felt a hand strike her back and close around the strap
of her purse. Ruth van Cleve had cried out as the apparition of just about the most
unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen crashed forward between them, knocking
them apart. Ruth van Cleve’s vinyl purse’s strap gave right away, but Kate Gompert’s
thin but densely macramé’d strap held around her shoulder and she was pulled wrenchingly
forward by the womanly apparition’s momentum as it tried to sprint up Prospect St.,
and the red hag-like figure was yanked wrenchingly back as the quality Filene’s all-cotton
French-braidedly macramé’d purse-strap held, and Kate Gompert had got a whiff of something
danker than the dankest municipal sewage and a glimpse of what looked like a five-day
facial growth on the hag’s face as street-tough Ruth van Cleve got a grip on her/his/its
red leather coat, proclaiming the thief a son of a mafun ho. Kate Gompert was staggering
forward, trying to get her arm out of the strap’s loop. They all three moved forward
together this way. The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off
Ruth van Cleve, and her/its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert
(who didn’t weigh very much) out around in a wide circle (she’d had a flashback of
reminiscence back to Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club’s rink’s ‘Wee
Blades’ Toddler Skating Hour, as a child), gaining speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside
lightpost rotated toward her, also gaining speed, and the sound was somewhere between
a
bonk
and a
clang,
and the sky and the sidewalk switched places, and a violet sun exploded outward,
and the whole street turned violet and swung like a clanging bell; and then she was
alone and purseless and watching the two recede, both seeming to be shrieking for
help.

A disadvantage of your nasally ingested cocaine being that at a certain point somewhere
past the euphoric crest—if you haven’t got the sense left to stop and just ride the
crest, and instead keep going, nasally—it takes you into regions of almost interstellar
cold and nasal numbness. Randy Lenz’s sinuses were frozen against his skull, numb
and hung with crystal frost. His legs felt like they ended at the knees. He was trailing
two very small-sized Chinese women as they lugged enormous paper shopping bags east
on Bishop Allen Dr. under Central. His heart sounded like a shoe in the Ennet House
basement’s dryer. His heart was beating that loud. The Chinese women scuttled at an
amazing rate, given their size and the bags’ size. It was c. 2212:30–40h., smack in
the middle of the former Interval of Issues-Resolution. The Chinese women didn’t walk
so much as scuttle with a kind of insectile rapidity, and Lenz was heart-pressed to
both keep up and seem to casually saunter, numb from the knee down and the nostril
back. They made the turn onto Prospect St. two or a few blocks below Central Square,
moving in the direction of Inman Square. Lenz followed ten or thirty paces behind,
eyes on the twine handles of the shopping bags. The Chinese women were about the size
of fire hydrants and moved like they had more than the normal amount of legs, conversing
in their anxious and high-pitched monkey-language. Evolution proved your Orientoid
tongues were closer to your primatal languages than not. At first, on the brick sidewalks
of the stretch of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central, Lenz had thought
they
might be following
him
—he’d been followed a great deal in his time, and like the well-read Geoffrey D. he
knew only too well thank you that the most fearsome surveillance got carried out by
unlikely-looking people that followed you by walking in front of you with small mirrors
in their glasses’ temples or elaborate systems of cellular communicators for reporting
to the Command Center—or else also by helicopters, also, that flew too high to see,
hovering, the tiny chop of their rotors disguised as your own drumming heart. But
after he’d had success at successfully shaking the Chinese women twice—the second
time so successfully he’d had to tear-ass around through alleys and vault wooden fences
to pick them up again a couple blocks north on Bishop Allen Dr., scuttling along,
jabbering—he’d settled down in his conviction about who was trailing who, here. As
in just who had the controlling discretion over the general situation right here.
The ejection from the House, which the ejection had at first seemed like the kiss
of a death sentence, had turned out to maybe be just the thing. He’d tried the Straight
On Narrow and for his pains had been threatened and dismissively sent off; he’d given
it his best, and for the most part impressively; and he had been sent Away, Alone,
and at least now could openly hide. R. Lenz lived by his wits out here, deeply disguised,
on the amonymous streets of N. Cambridge and Somerville, never sleeping, ever moving,
hiding in bright-lit and public plain sight, the last place They would think to find
him.

Lenz wore fluorescent-yellow snowpants, the slightly shiny coat to a long-tailed tux,
a sombrero with little wooden balls hanging off the brim, oversize tortoise-shell
glasses that darkened automatically in response to bright light, and a glossy black
mustache promoted from the upper lip of a mannequin at Lechmere’s in Cambridgeside—the
ensemble the result of bold snatch-and-sprints all up and down the nighttime Charles,
when he’d first gone Overground northeast from Enfield several-odd days back. The
absolute blackness of the mannequin’s mustache—very securely attached with promoted
Krazy Glue and made even glossier by the discharge from a nose Lenz can’t feel running—gives
his pallor an almost ghostly aspect in the sombrero’s portable shade—another both
advantage and disadvantage of nasal cocaine is that eating becomes otiose and optional,
and one forgets to for extended periods of time, to eat—in his gaudy pastiche of disguise
he passes easily for one of metro Boston’s homeless and wandering mad, the walking
dead and dying, and is given a wide berth by all comers. The trick, he’s found, is
to not sleep or eat, to stay up and moving at all times, alert in all six directions
at all times, heading for under the cover of T-station or enclosed mall whenever the
invisible rotors’ cardiac chop betrayed surveillance at altitude.