Infinite Jest (143 page)

And then naturally also a wider range of field-test Subjects would then be required,
to verify that this Subject’s responses were not merely subjective and typical only
of a certain sensibility of entertainment-consumer. The bus window yielded a faint
and ghostly reflection of Fortier, and, through that faint view, the lights of urban
life outside the bus. Somerville Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Phoenix House administrative
person had listened to Fortier’s delivery with shows of great compassion, then explained
with patience that they were unable to admit addicted persons for whom English was
the secondary language.
D’accord,
though he was pretending disappointment. Fortier had been able to see the admitted
addicts of Phoenix House holding a gathering in the room of living outside the office
door: no person among them wore a veil of facial concealment, and so
c’est ça.
Four small teams were at this moment rolling through the streets and small streets
and alleys of the unpleasant district of the Antitoi establishment, for the purpose
of acquiring additional Subjects for M. Broullîme for the time when the Subject’s
digits were expended. The Subjects for suitability had to be passively undefended
enough to be acquired publicly with quiet, yet not damaged in the brains or under
the influence of the many of the district’s intoxicant compounds. The A.F.R. were
highly trained in patience and to be disciplined.

The southbound bus, empty and (which he detested) fluorescently lit, climbs a thin
hill off Winter Park, north Cambridge, heading for the Squares Inman and Central.
Fortier looks out at the lights passing. He can smell snow coming; it soon will snow.
He sees in his imagination two-thirds of NNE’s largest urban city inert, sybaritically
entranced, staring, without bodily movement, home-bounded, fouling their divans and
the chairs which may recline. He sees the district of business’s towers of buildings
and luxury apartments striated as two of every three floors is darkened to lightless
black. With here and there the vaguely blue flicker of expensive digital entertainment
equipment flickering through darkened windows. He imagines M. Tine holding the hand
holding the pen of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring
War. He imagines teacups clinking thinly beneath trembling hands in the interior sanctums
of Ottawa’s sanctum of power. He adjusts his sportcoat’s lapel over his sweater and
smooths the wiry hair that tends to bulge unsmoothly around the bare spot. He watches
the back of the bus driver’s neck as the driver stares straight ahead.

Sure enough the Chinkette women had been strengthless and lightweight, flew aside
like dolls, and their bags were indeed treasure-heavy, hard to heft; but as Lenz cut
left down the north-south alley he could hold the bags by their twine handles out
slightly before him, so their weight’s momentum kind of pulled him along. The cruciform
alleys through the blocks between Central and Inman in Little Lisbon were a kind of
second city. Lenz ran. His breath came easy and he could feel himself from scalp to
sole. Green and green-with-red dumpsters lined both walls and made the going narrow.
He vaulted two sitting figures in khaki sharing a can of Sterno on the alley floor.
He glided through the foul air above them, untouched by it. The sounds behind him
were his footfalls’ echo off dumpsters and fire-escapes’ iron. His left hand ached
nicely from holding both a bag’s handle and his large-print volume. A dumpster up
ahead had been hitched to an E.W.D. truck and just left to sit: probably quitting
time. The Empire guys had an incredible union. In the recess of the hitch’s bar a
small blue light flickered and died. This was a dozen dumpsters up ahead. Lenz slowed
to a brisk walk. His topcoat had slipped slightly off one of his shoulders but he
had no free hand to fix it and wasn’t going to take time to put a bag down. His left
hand felt cramped. It was somewhere vague between 2224 and 2226h. The alley was dark
as a pocket. A tiny crash off somewhere south down the network of alleys was actually
Poor Tony Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that tripped up Ruth van Cleve. The
tiny blue flame came on, hung still, flickered, moved, hung there, went back out.
Its glow was dark blue against the back of the huge E.W.D. truck. Empire trucks were
unstrippable, hitches were valuable but locked down with a Kryptonite device thing
you needed welding stuff to cut through. From the recess of the hitch there were small
sounds. When the lighter lit again Lenz was almost on them, two boys on the hitch
and two squatting down by the hitch facing them, four of them, a fire-escape’s pull-ladder
distended like a tongue and hanging just above them. None of the boys was over like
twelve. They used a M. Fizzy bottle instead of a pipe, and the smell of burnt plastic
hung mixed with the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock. The boys were all small
and slight and either black or spic, greedily hunching over the flame; they looked
ratty. Lenz kept them in peripheral view as he strode briskly by, carrying his bags,
spine straight and extruding dignified purpose. The lighter went out. The boys on
the hitch eyed Lenz’s bags. The squatting boys turned their heads to look. Lenz kept
them in peripheral view. None of them wore watches. One of them wore a knit cap and
watched steadily. He locked eyes with Lenz’s left eye, made a gun of his thin hand,
pretended to draw a slow bead. Like performing for the others. Lenz walked by with
urban dignity, like he both saw them and didn’t. The smell was intense but real local,
of the rock and bottle. He had to veer out to miss the Empire truck’s side mirror
on its steel strut. He heard them say things as the truck’s grille fell behind, and
unkind laughter, and then something called out in a minority agnate he didn’t know.
He heard the lighter’s flint. He thought to himself Assholes. He was looking for someplace
empty and a bit more lit, to go through the bags. And cleaner than this one north-south
alley here, which smelled of ripe waste and rotting skin. He would separate the bags’
valuables from the nonvaluables and transfer the valuables to a single bag. He would
fence the nonnegotiable valuables in Little Lisbon and refill the receptacle in his
medical dictionary, and buy some attractiver shoes. The alley was devroid of cats
and rodents both; he did not stop to reflect why. A rock or bit of brick courtesy
of the junior crack-jockeys back there landed behind him and skittered past and rang
out against something, and someone cried out aloud, a sexless figure lying back against
a maybe duffel bag or pack against a dumpster, its hand moving furiously in its groin
and its feet pointed out into the alley and turned out like a dead body’s, its shoes
two different shoes, its hair a clotted mass around its face, looking up over at Lenz
going past in the faint start of light from a broader alley’s intersection ahead,
chanting softly what Lenz could hear as he stepped gingerly over the rot-smelling
legs as ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty.’ Lenz whispered to himself ‘Jesus what a lot of fucked-up
ass-eating fucking
losers
.’

‘Our cult burned money for fuel.’

‘As in like currency.’

‘We used Ones. The Semi Divine One advocated thrift. We’d bring them to Him at the
stove. There was one stove. We had to bring them to Him on our knees with no part
of our feet could touch the floor. He sat by the stove in our blankets and fed it
Ones. We got an extra slap if the currency was new.’

‘As in like crisp and new.’

‘It was a cleansing. Somebody always played a drum.’

‘Our cult’s Divinely Chosen Leader drove a Rolls. In neutral. We pushed him wherever
he was Called to like be at. He never turned it on. The Rolls. I got all muscled up.’

‘In summer then they made us slither on our bellies. We had to embrace our snake-nature.
It was a cleansing.’

‘As in like slithering.’

‘Serious slithering. They took wire and bound our arms and legs.’

‘At least your wire wasn’t barbed.’

‘I finally felt too cleansed to stay.’

‘Meaning over-pure, I can I.D. totally.’

‘It was too much love somehow to take.’

‘I’m like feeling the Identification all over, this is—’

‘Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end.’

‘And then our Divinely Chosen’s Love Squads made us chop wood with our teeth when
it got cold. As in like subzero wintertime.’

‘Yours let you keep your teeth?’

‘Only the ones for gnawing. See?’

‘Sheesh.’

‘Just the ones for gnawing.’

Rémy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room evening
of this Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, the last
demi-maison
on his portion of the list for this day. The hills of upper Enfield, they were
de l’infere
of difficulty, but the
demi-maison
itself had a ramp. A person with authority was conducting interviews to fill some
vacancies of recent time in the place’s Office, of which its locked door was visible
from this sitting. Marathe and others were invited to sit in the living room with
a cup of unpleasant coffee. Urged to smoke if he liked. Everyone else was smoking.
The living room smelled like an ashtray, and its ceiling was yellow like the fingers
of long smokers. Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been
stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud. There
were
demi-maison
patients viewing a cartridge of martial arts conflict, former patients and persons
of the upper Enfield area cohabiting on the furniture, conversing. A damaged woman,
also in a
fauteuil de rollent
like Marathe, slumped
inutile
next to the cartridge’s viewer, while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the
kicks and thrusts of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the woman
to twitch or cry out. Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway.
Other persons, presumably addicted, waiting in the room to seek admittance to the
Recovery House. The room was loud and hot. Marathe could hear a person who will seek
admittance vomiting in the shrubberies just outside the window. Marathe’s chair was
locked down next to a divan’s arm and directly before a window. The window, one could
wish it was open more than a crack, he felt. Upon the dull-colored carpet a tormented-appearing
man scuttling like the crab while two hooligans in leather played a cruel game of
jumping over him. Persons reading cartoon books and painting the nails of their extremities.
A tall-haired woman brought her foot to her mouth to blow upon her toes. Another young
girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. No other in
the room wore the veil of the Entertainment’s performer’s organization U.H.I.D. The
smell of the U.S.A. cigarettes permeated his veil and made Marathe’s eyes water, and
he thought of vomiting also. Two additional windows were open, but the room lacked
all air.

During the time of his sitting, several persons approached Marathe, but they would
say to him only the whispers ‘Pet the dogs’ or ‘Make sure and pet the dogs.’ This
idiomatic expression was not in Marathe’s knowledge of U.S.A. idiom.

Also one person approached of a face whose skin seemed that it was rotting away from
him in some way and asked him if he, Marathe, was
court-ordered
.

Marathe was one of few persons not smoking. He noted that none of the room’s persons
appeared to regard the cheesecloth veil he wore over his face as unusual or curious
or to be questioned. The old sportcoat he wore over a turtleneck sweater of Desjardin’s
made Marathe more formally dressed than other of the applicants for treatment. Two
of the Ennet House
demi-maison
current patients wore neckties, however. Marathe kept pretending to sniff; he did
not know why. He sat up next to a divan of false velour at whose end beside him two
women who had sought previous treatment of addiction in religious cults were meeting
and speaking together of their unenjoyable existences when in cults.

To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M.
Fortier quickly had developed: ‘Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential
treatment for addiction, desperately.’ Persons’ responses to his introductory lines
were difficult to interpret. One of the older two men in neckties who had approached,
he had clapped a hand to his soft face’s cheek and responded ‘How extraordinarily
nice for you,’ in which Marathe could detect sarcasm. The two women of cult experience
were inclined closely toward each other upon the divan. They touched each other’s
arms several times in a kind of excitement as they conversed. When they laughed in
delight they seemed to chew at the air. One’s laughter involved also a snorting noise.
A clatter and two shrieks: these came from one end of the dining room, in the
demi-maison
’s floor plans a large kitchen. The sounds were then followed by a roiling cloud of
steam, with repeated obscenities from unseen persons. A bald large black man in a
white cotton undershirt’s laughing became coughing that would not cease. The two patients
in neckties and the girl whose eye could be removed spoke together intensively and
also audibly at the end of one other divan.

‘But consider this quality of portability with respect to, say, a car. Is a car portable?
With respect to a car it’s more as though
I’m
portable.’

‘They’re portable when they’re on one of them semis where they got new cars stacked
on with prices in the windows like a good couple dozen on them semis that swing all
to fuck all over I-93 and make you think the cars are going to start falling out all
over the road when you’re wanting to try and pass.’

The plump one who had been ironic toward Marathe, he was nodding: ‘Or, say, too, with
respect to a tow truck or wrecker, if you suffer a breakdown. One might be in a position
to say that a deactivated car can be quote portable, but that with respect to a functional
car it is I who am portable.’