Infinite Jest (142 page)

Then the cartridge of the street-display turned out to be blank, void. Then another
from this box, also wet: also blank. Two blanks.
Donc. D’accord.
Fortier, philosophical, counselled against disappointment or damage from a frustration—he
and Marathe had counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment
and the wheelchaired man were probably the hoax, instilling of terror only. The fact
of the displays which featured wheelchairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R.—this
was ignored. A.F.R. wanted only to repossess this copy of the Entertainment. As well,
chiefly, now to determine: could this copy of DuPlessis itself be copied? This was
the real objective: a Master cartridge.
³⁰¹
Unlike the F.L.Q.,
les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
had no interest in blackmail or cartographic extortings for the Convexity’s return.
Not in re-Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. or even its charter’s dissolution. The A.F.R.
were interested only in dealing the sort of testicular
frappe
to the underbelly of U.S.A. self-interests that would render Canada itself unwilling
to face the U.S.A. retaliation for this—if A.F.R. could secure, copy, and disseminate
the Entertainment, Québec would be not so much allowed as required by Ottawa to secede,
to face on its own the wrath of a neighbor struck down by its own inability to say
‘
Non
’ to fatal pleasures.
³⁰²

Fortier bid the A.F.R. methodically to continue the search. Younger volunteers were
rolled into the room of storage on a rotating basis to sample each set of cartridges.
Aside from some bickering over the Portuguese pornography, the rotation proceeded
with valor and care. The plastic-wrapped cadavers began to swell, but the plastic
maintained hygienic conditions adequately for viewing samples of the many cartridges
in the room of storage. The search and inventory proceeded in a painstaking and slow
fashion.

M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search’s middle, to
help facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration of that relative of the
auteur
felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable
copy. There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from
this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne
responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans’
field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a
bad odor.

The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak substitute
for respect. As if he were a sickly child, Fortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps flanked
steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those standing
upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose interior
circuitry was responsive to large-bundle neural stimuli from his stumps, which with
metal crutches whose bracelets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling parody
of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never
for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional
‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ of the ‘equal access’; it honed the edge of his senses
of purpose. Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice.

After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily
into obsessive worry, in sobriety. A few days before the debacle in which Don Gately
got hurt, Joelle had begun to worry obsessively about her teeth. Smoking ’base cocaine
eats teeth, corrodes teeth, attacks the enamel directly. Chandler Foss had explained
all this to her at supper, showing her his corroded stumps. In her Latin cloth purse
now she carried a traveller’s brush and expensive toothpaste with alleged enamel-revitalizers
and anti-corrosives. Several of the Ennet House residents who’d hit bottom with the
glass pipe had no teeth or blackened and disintegrating teeth; the sight of Wade McDade’s
or Chandler Foss’s teeth gave Joelle the fantods like nothing at meetings could. The
toothpaste was only recently available over the counter and was a whole level of power
and expense above standard smoker’s polish.

As she lies on her side beside Kate Gompert’s empty bunk, her veil’s selvage tucked
secure between pillow and jaw, and Charlotte Treat also asleep across the lit room,
Joelle dreams that Don Gately, unhurt and mid-South-accented, is ministering to her
teeth. He is bibbed in dental white, humming softly to himself, his big hands deft
as he plucks instruments from the gleaming chair-side tray. Her chair is dental and
canted back, yielding her face up to him, her legs shut tight and stretching up and
out before her. Dr. Don’s eyes are abstractly kind, concerned for her teeth; and his
thick fingers, as he inserts things to hold her open, are gloveless and taste warm
and clean. Even the light seems sterilely clean. There is no assistant; the dentist
is solo, leaning in above her, humming absent chords as he probes. His head is massive
and vaguely square. In the dream she is concerned for her teeth and feels Gately shares
her concern. She feels good that he makes no chitchat and probably doesn’t know her
name. There’s very little eye-contact. He is completely intent on her teeth. He is
there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor’s message. His bib hangs by a necklace
of tiny steel balls and could not be whiter, his head haloed with a strap and a polished
metal disk attached to the strap just above his eyes, a tiny mirror of stainless steel,
clean as the instruments’ tray; and the dream’s yielding and trustful quality of calm
is undercut only by the view of her face in the halo’s mirror, the disk like a third
eye in Gately’s broad clean forehead: because she can see her face, convexly distorted
and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, her face all bug-eyes and sunken cheeks,
lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes; and as the dentist’s warm thick fingers gently
draw her lips back she looks up into his head’s mirror at long rows of all canine
teeth, tapered and sharp, with then more rows of canines behind them, in reserve.
The countless rows of the teeth are all sharp and strong and unblackened but tinged
at the tips with an odd kind of red, as of old blood, the teeth of a creature that
carelessly tears at meat. These are teeth that have been up to things she hasn’t known
about, she tries to say around the fingers. The dentist hums, probing. In the dream
Joelle looks up into Don Gately’s forehead’s dental mirror’s disk and is seized with
a fear of her teeth, a terror, and as her spread mouth spreads farther to cry out
in fear all she can see in the little round mirror are endless red-stained rows of
teeth leading back and away down a pitch-black pipe, and the image of all these rows
of teeth in the disk blots out the big dentist’s good face as he probes with a hook
and says he assures her that these can be saved.

Then, by the time Fortier was able to return to the dismantled shop, they had located
a third cartridge emblazed with the embossed smile and letters disclaiming need of
happy pursuit, and, after some regretful losses, they had secured and verified it,
the
samizdat
cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis.

Fortier was told the story. The cell’s young Desjardins had been taking his turn in
the viewing rotation, seated with young Tassigny in the room of storage during the
hours of early morning, sampling the dregs of unshelved entertainments found in kitchen-can
waste bags in the same closet the Antitois’ cadavers were swelling within. Desjardins
had just moments before complained of the wasted time of cartridges scheduled for
the coffre d’amas.

Tassigny, who had been in the room of storage with Desjardins, then was saved by the
need to leave this room to change the bag of his partial colostomy. But, Marathe reported,
they had lost Desjardins, and the older and valued Joubet also, who rolled against
orders into the room of storage to see why Desjardins had not been sending out the
tapes for more tapes to sample. Both were lost. They had not lost more only because
someone had thought to wake up Broullîme, whom Fortier had briefed with care on procedures
for if the actual Entertainment was found by this viewing. But two were lost—Joubet
the red-bearded workhorse, who loved to pop wheelies, and young Desjardins, so filled
with the idealism and so young as to be still feeling the phantom pains in his stumps.
Rémy Marathe reported that the two had been made comfortable since their loss, allowed
to remain in the locked room of storage and view the Entertainment again and again,
silent behind the door except when the watch-detail reported the hearing of cries
of impatience at the player’s rewinder, to rewind. Marathe reported they had declined
to come out for water or food, or Joubet—who was diabétique—for his insulin. M. Broullîme
estimated that it would be a matter of hours now for Joubet, perhaps maybe one day
or two days for Desjardins. Fortier had sadly said ‘Bôf’ and acceptingly shrugged:
all knew the sacrifices that might have been required: all viewing details had taken
their chances at random in the rotation of viewing.

On Fortier’s return, Marathe delivered also the expected bad news of the finding of
it: there was no need yet for high-rpm hardware of duplication: the found copy was
Read-Only.
³⁰³

Philosophical, Fortier reminded the A.F.R. that they did now encouragingly know the
Entertainment of such power did truly exist, for themselves, and could thus gird their
courage and fortitude for the more indirect task of forfeiting hopes of securing a
Master copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the
auteur
’s own cartridge, from which all Read-Only copies had presumably been copied.

Thus, he said, now the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview
known persons associated with the Entertainment and locating the original maker’s
duplicable Master copy. None of this would have been worthy of the risk had they not
now determined, through the heroic sacrifices of Joubet and Desjardins, that the device
for extending O.N.A.N.’s self-destructing logic to its final conclusion lay within
their arduous grasp.

Fortier gave numerous orders. The platoon of A.F.R. remained in the closed Antitoi
Entertainent shop, behind their lingual window shade. Surveillance on the hated F.L.Q.’s
bureau centrale,
in the poorly disciplined house on Allston’s Rue de Brainerd—this was suspended,
the A.F.R. personnel pulled in and relocated to this commandeered Inman Square shop,
where Fortier and Marathe and M. Broullîme coordinated phases of activity in this
next more arduous and indirect phase, and reviewed tactics also.

The deceased
auteur
’s colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. Their concentration
of place worked in the favor of this. An employee at the Academy of Tennis of Enfield
had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student already inside for
closer work of surveillance. In the Desert, the redoubtable Mlle. Luria P——was winning
necessary confidences with her usual alacrity. An expensive source in the Subject’s
former department of the M.I.T. University had reported the Entertainment’s probable
performer’s last known employment—the small Cambridge radio station which Marathe
and Beausoleil had pronounced
Weee
—where she had donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity.

Attentions were to be focused on the cartridge’s performer and on the Academy of Tennis
of the
auteur
’s estate. The fact that the players of the Academy were to play a provincially-selected
team from Québec would have been easier to exploit had the A.F.R. possessed a tennis
player of talent and lower extremities. Inquiries into the composition and travel
of the Québecois team were under way from sources at home in Papineau.

On the day of Fortier’s return also, the performer’s radio program’s technical engineer
of radio had been acquired in a public but low-risk operation whose success had raised
hopeful spirits for the acquisitions of more directly related persons to the Entertainment
in this next phase. This person of U.S.A. radio had divulged all he professed to know
under the mere descriptive threat of technical-interview procedures. Marathe, the
best lay judge of Americans’ veracity which the cell possessed, believed the veracity
of the engineer; but nevertheless a formal technical interview had proceeded, justified
in order to verify. The young and eruption-studded person’s report remained consistent
two levels past average U.S.A. endurance, the only variance involving several curious
claims that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was defensive in bed.

Today, Fortier himself, and Marathe, young Balbalis, R. Ossowiecke—all those with
the better English—were thus now therefore making the rounds of all Substance-Difficulty-Rehabilitation
facilities in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and
demi-maisons
within a 25-km. radius. Procedures for expanding the radius of inquiry by factors
of two and three had been pre-formulated, teams assembled, lines rehearsed. Joubet
and then Desjardins had succumbed and been transported north by van as well with the
remains of the Antitois’ remains. The U.S.A. student radio engineering person, the
veracity of whose limited statements of the Subject’s whereabouts Broullîme had verified
to within +/− (.35) of assurance well before debriefing-levels incompatible with physical
existence, had been allowed several hours to recover, then had become of service as
the A.F.R.’s first Subject in field-tests of the
samizdat
cartridge’s motivational range. The room of storage again was utilized for this.
His head immobilized with some straps, the test Subject had viewed the Entertainment
twice at gratis, without the application of any motivational inquiry. For inquiry
into the degree of motivation the cartridge will induce, M. Broullîme had rolled himself
blindfolded into the room of storage holding an orthopedic saw and informed the Subject
of the test that, as of beginning now, each subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment
now would have the price of one digit from the Subject’s extremities. And handed the
Subject the orthopedic saw in question, also. Broullîme’s explanation to Fortier was
that thus a matrix could be created to compute the statistical relation between (n)
the number of times the Subject replayed the Entertainment and (t) the amount of time
he took to decide and remove a digit for each subsequent (n + 1) viewing. The goal
was to confirm with statistical assurance the Subject’s desire for viewing and reviewing
as incapable of satiation. There could be no index of diminishing satisfaction as
in the econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. For the
samizdat
Entertainment’s allure to be macro-politically lethal, the ninth digit of extremities
had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second. Broullîme, personally he had
some skepticism about this. But this was Broullîme’s function in his role in the cell:
expertise in combination with skepticism
de coeur.