Infinite Jest (144 page)

The girl’s nod caused the particular eye to wheel queasily in the socket of it. ‘I’ll
buy that, Day.’

‘If we’re jot-and-tittling with all possible precision regarding
portable,
that is.’

The other man continually rubbed at his shine of the shoes with a facial tissue, causing
his necktie to touch the floor.

These conversers formed this triad on an unevenly sloped divan of leather-colored
plastic across the room, which was now more airless yet from the roiling steam from
the kitchen, infiltrating. Directly facing Marathe in a yellow chair against the wall
by these conversers’ divan most directly across the living room from Marathe was an
addicted man waiting for seeking treatment by admission. This one, he appeared to
have several cigarettes burning at one time. He held a metal ashtray in his lap and
jiggled the boot of his crossed leg with vigor. For Marathe, it was not difficult
to ignore the fact that the addicted man was glaring at him. He noted it, and did
not understand because of what the man glared, but he was unconcerned. Marathe was
prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions.
U.S.A.’s B.S.S.’s M. Steeply had verified that U.S.A.s did not comprehend this or
appreciate it; it was foreign to them. The veil allowed Marathe the liberty of staring
calmly back at the addicted man without the man’s knowledge, which Marathe found he
enjoyed. Marathe felt sick to his body, from the smoky room’s smoke. Marathe had once,
as a child, with legs, bent himself over and overturned a decaying log in the forests
of the Lac de Deux Montaignes region of his four-limbed childhood, before
Le Culte du Prochain Train.
³⁰⁴
The pallor of the things which had writhed and scuttled beneath the wet log was the
pallor of this addicted man, who wore a square of the facial hair between lower lip
and chin and had also a needle run through the flesh of the top of an ear, which the
needle, it glistened and did not glisten rapidly in succession as it vibrated with
the jiggle of the jiggling boot. Marathe gazed at him calmly through the veil while
rehearsing his prepared lines within his head. The more idiomatic would be that the
needle jiggled sympathetically with the jiggle of the boot, which was dull black and
square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore
the boots of those who did.

The addicted man rose slowly and carried the burning ashtray with him nearer to Marathe,
trying to kneel. His Blue Jeans of Levi #501 were strangely torn in spots with tattered
white strings which showed the pallor of the knees; the torn holes had the size and
perimeter-damage of holes that Marathe recognized had been made by shotgun-blasts
of the high gauge. Marathe was mentally memorizing every detail of all things, for
both his reports. The addicted man kneeling before him, he leaned in closer, trying
to remove something he believed was on his lip. Close in, the expression that through
the veil had appeared as glaring corrected itself: the expression was more truly that
the man’s eyes had the vacant intensity of those who have violently died.

The man whispered: ‘You real?’ Marathe looked through the veil at his facial square.
‘Are you real?’ again the man whispered. All the time leaning more and more in, slowly.

‘You’re real I can tell ain’t you,’ the man whispered. Quickly he looked behind him
at the uproaring room before leaning once more in. ‘Listen then.’

Marathe kept his hands calmly in his lap, his machine pistol holstered securely to
his right stump beneath the blanket. The whispering man’s searching fingers were leaving
small bits of filth on the lip.

‘ ’s these poor fuckers’—the man gestured slightly with indicating the room—‘most
of them ain’t real. So watch your six. Most of these fuckers are—: metal people.’

‘I am Swiss,” Marathe experimentally said. It was the second of his lines of introduction.

‘Walking around, make you think they’re alive.’ The addicted man had the way with
subtleness of looking all around himself which Marathe associated with intelligence
professionals. One of his eyes had an exploded vein within it. ‘But that’s just the
layer,’ he said. He leaned in so far Marathe could see pores through the veil. ‘There’s
a micro-thin layer of skin. But underneath, it’s metal. Heads full of parts. Under
a organic layer that’s micro-thin.’ The eyes of men violently dead were also the eye
of a fish in a vendor’s crushed ice, studying nothing. The man’s smell suggested livestock
on a hot day, a goatish, even through the smoke of the room. Trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic
acid was a material, M. Broullîme had lectured to pass times in long surveillances,
a chemical material in the sweat of grave mental illness. Marathe, he had no trouble
timing his breath so his exhalation matched the addicted man’s, who leaned more in.

‘There’s one way to tell,’ he said. ‘Get right up close. Like right up flush next
to: you can hear a whir. Micro-faint. This whirring. It’s the processors’ gears. It’s
their flaw. Machines always whir. They’re good. They can quiet down the whir.’

‘I have no six.’

‘But they can’t—can
not
—eliminate it.’

‘I am Swiss, seeking residential treatment with desperation.’

‘Not under no micro-thin tissue-layer they can’t.’ If the gaze were not vacant the
gaze would be grim, frightened. Marathe distantly remembered the emotion fear.

‘Did you hear what she said?’ the ironic man on the divan laughed. ‘
Potable
means drinkable. It’s not even the same
root
. Did you hear what she said?’

The man’s breath, it smelled of trans-3-methyl acid as well. ‘I’m clueing y’in,’ he
whispered. ‘They’re there to fool you. The real ones of us’re getting
fooled
. Nine-nine-plus per cent of the time.’ The flesh of the knees through the holes in
the Blue Jeans was the white of long death. ‘But you, I could tell you were real.’
He indicated the veil. ‘No micro-thin layer. The metal ones—have faces.’ The smoke
of his cigarette in the ashtray rose in a motion of corkscrewing. ‘Which this is why’—feeling
the lip—‘why the ones on the T or in the street—they won’t let you right up close.
Try it. They’ll never let you right up close. It’s programming. They know to look
scared and—like—offended and back away and move to another seat. The real advanced
ones, they’ll give you change, even, to let ’em back off. Try it. Get right—up—like
this—close.’ Marathe sat calmly behind the veil, feeling the veil move with the man’s
breath, waiting patiently to inhale. The women with experiences in cults had smelled
the odor of the man’s trans-3 odor and relocated farther away upon the divan. The
man’s face smiled with one knowing side only of his mouth, acknowledging their movement
away. He was so close that the nose of him touched the veil when Marathe finally inhaled.
Marathe was prepared for death in all forms. The smells were trans-3-methyl-2 and
of digested cheese and the under of an arm, from the facial skin. Marathe ignored
impulses to impale the eyesockets with one two-finger motion. The man had his hand
to his ear in a mime of to listen closely. His smile disclosed what might have once
been teeth. ‘Nothing,’ he smiled. ‘I knew. Not a sound.’

‘The Swiss, we are a quiet people, and reserved. In addition, I am deformed.’

The man waved his cigarette with impatience. ‘Listen up. This is why. You’re how come
I was here. I only thought it was the habit. They can
fool
you.’ He scrubbed at the lip of his mouth. ‘I’m here to tell you. Listen. You ain’t
here.’

‘I have emigrated from my native Swiss.’

Still whispering: ‘You ain’t
here
. These fuckers are
metal
. Us—us that are real—there’s not many—they’re
fooling
us. We’re all in one room. The real ones. One room all the time. Everything’s pro—jected.
They can do it with machines. They pro—ject. To fool us. The pictures on the walls
change so’s we think we’re going places. Here and there, this and that. That’s just
they change the pro—jections. It’s all the same place all the time. They fool your
mind with machines to think you’re moving, eating, cooking up, doing this and that.’

‘I have come desperately here.’

‘The real world’s one room. These so-called people, so-called’—with again the flourish—‘they’re
everybody you know. You’ve met ’em before, hunnerts times, with different faces. There’s
only 26 total. They play different characters, that you think you know. They wear
different faces with different pictures they pro—ject on the wall. You get me?’

‘This Recovery House was recommended highly.’

‘You follow? Count. Coincidence? There’s 26 here, counting the one without feet on
the stairs. Coincidence? Chance? This here’s every machine that’s played everbody
you ever met. Are you hearin’ me? They fool us. They take the machines in the back
room and they—like—’

The visible door of the locked Office opened and an addicted patient emerged with
a person in authority holding a clipboard. The addicted patient limped and leaned
far to a side, though was attractive in the blond stereotype of the U.S.A. image-culture.

‘—
change them
. The thin organic layers. All the different people you know. So-called. They’re the
same machines
.’

‘Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!’ the authority called
with the clipboard.

‘I am being indicated,’ Marathe said, bending to release the clamps on his
fauteuil
’s wheels.

‘—why I’m in this pro—jection, to clue you. So that now you know.’ Marathe manipulated
the
fauteuil
to the right with its trusty left wheel. ‘I must be excused to plead for treatment.’

‘Get right up close.’

‘Good night,’ over his left shoulder. The
inutile
woman seemed to twitch slightly in her heavy
fauteuil
as he passed.

‘You only think you’re goin’ someplace!’ the addicted man called, still one-half kneeling.

Marathe rolled up to the person in authority as slowly as possible, hunched deep into
the sportcoat and pathetically tacking. With significance, the large and clipboarded
woman seemed without faze at the veil of U.H.I.D. Marathe extended a large hand in
greeting which he made tremble. ‘Good night.’

The insane-smelling man on the carpet called out after: ‘Make sure and pet the dogs!’

Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just
liked to clean. She dusted the top of the fiberboard dresser she and Nell Gunther
shared. She dusted the oval top of the dresser’s mirror’s frame and cleaned off the
mirror as best she could. She was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate
Gompert’s bed. She felt oddly averse to putting on socks and clogs and going down
to the kitchen for real cleaning supplies. She could hear the noise of all the post-meeting
nighttime residents and visitors and applicants down there. She could feel their voices
in the floor. When the dental nightmare tore her upright awake her mouth was open
to scream out, but the scream was Nell G. down in the living room, whose laugh always
sounds like she’s being eviscerated. Nell preempted Joelle’s own scream. Then Joelle
cleaned. Cleaning is maybe a form of meditation for addicts too new in recovery to
sit still. The 5-Woman’s scarred wood floor had so much grit all over she could sweep
a pile of grit together with just an unappliquéd bumper sticker she’d won at B.Y.P.
Then she could use damp Kleenex to get up most of the pile. She had only Kate G.’s
little bedside lamp on, and she wasn’t listening to any YYY tapes, out of consideration
for Charlotte Treat, who was unwell and missed her Saturday Night Lively Mtng. on
Pat’s OK and was now asleep, wearing a sleep mask but not her foam earplugs. Expandable
foam earplugs were issued to every new Ennet resident, for reasons the Staff said
would clarify for them real quick, but Joelle hated to wear them—they shut out exterior
noise, but they made your head’s pulse audible, and your breath sounded like someone
in a space suit—and Charlotte Treat, Kate Gompert, April Cortelyu, and the former
Amy Johnson had all felt the same way. April said the foam plugs made her brain itch.

It had started with Orin Incandenza, the cleaning. When relations were strained, or
she was seized with anxiety at the seriousness and possible impermanence of the thing
in the Back Bay’s co-op, the getting high and cleaning became an important exercise,
like creative visualization, a preview of the discipline and order with which she
could survive alone if it came to that. She would get high and visualize herself solo
in a dazzlingly clean space, every surface twinkling, every possession in place. She
saw herself being able to pick, say, dropped popcorn up off the rug and ingest it
with total confidence. An aura of steely independence surrounded her when she cleaned
the co-op, even with the little whimpers and anxious moans that exited her writhing
mouth when she cleaned high. The place had been provided nearly gratis by Jim, who
said so little to Joelle on their first several meetings that Orin kept having to
reassure her that it wasn’t disapproval—Himself was missing the part of the human
brain that allowed for being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them, Orin
had said—or dislike. It was just how The Mad Stork was. Orin had referred to Jim as
‘Himself’ or ‘The Mad Stork’—family nicknames, both of which gave Joelle the creeps
even then.

It’d been Orin who introduced her to his father’s films. The Work was then so obscure
not even local students of serious film knew the name. The reason Jim kept forming
his own distribution companies was to ensure distribution. He didn’t become notorious
until after Joelle’d met him. By then she was closer to Jim than Orin had ever been,
part of which caused part of the strains that kept the brownstone co-op so terribly
clean.

She’d barely thought consciously of any Incandenzas for four years before Don Gately,
who for some reason kept bringing them bubbling up to mind. They were the second-saddest
family Joelle’d ever seen. Orin felt Jim disliked him to the precise extent that Jim
was even aware of him. Orin had spoken about his family at length, usually at night.
On how no amount of punting success could erase the psychic stain of basic fatherly
dislike, failure to be seen or acknowledged. Orin’d had no idea how banal and average
his same-sex-parent-issues were; he’d felt they were some hideous exceptional thing.
Joelle’d known her mother didn’t much like her from the first time her own personal
Daddy’d told her he’d rather take Pokie to the pictures alone. Much of the stuff Orin
said about his family was dull, gone stale from years of never daring to say it. He
credited Joelle with some strange generosity for not screaming and fleeing the room
when he revealed the banal stuff.
Pokie
had been Joelle’s family nickname, though her mother’d never called her anything
but Joelle. The Orin she knew first felt his mother was the family’s pulse and center,
a ray of light incarnate, with enough depth of love and open maternal concern to almost
make up for a father who barely existed, parentally. Jim’s internal life was to Orin
a black hole, Orin said, his father’s face any room’s fifth wall. Joelle had struggled
to stay awake and attentive, listening, letting Orin get the stale stuff out. Orin
had no idea what his father thought or felt about anything. He thought Jim wore the
opaque blank facial expression his mother in French sometimes jokingly called
Le Masque
. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said he’d come to see
him as like autistic, almost catatonic. Jim opened himself only to the mother. They
all did, he said. She was there for them all, psychically. She was the family’s light
and pulse and the center that held tight. Joelle could yawn in bed without looking
like she was yawning. The children’s name for their mother was ‘the Moms.’ As if there
were more than one of her. His younger brother was a hopeless retard, Orin had said.
Orin recalled the Moms used to tell him she loved him about a hundred times a day.
It nearly made up for Himself’s blank stare. Orin’s basic childhood memory of Jim
had been of an expressionless stare from a great height. His mother had been really
tall, too, for a girl. He’d said he’d found it secretly odd that none of the brothers
were taller. His retarded brother was stunted to about the size of a fire hydrant,
Orin reported. Joelle cleaned behind the filthy room’s radiator as far as she could
reach, being careful not to touch the radiator. Orin described his childhood’s mother
as his emotional sun. Joelle remembered her own personal Daddy’s Uncle T.S. talking
about how her own personal Daddy’d thought his own Momma ‘Hung the God Damn Moon,’
he’d said. The radiators on Ennet House’s female side stayed on at all times, 24/7/365.
At first Joelle had thought Mrs. Avril Incandenza’s high-watt maternal love had maybe
damaged Orin by bringing into sharper relief Jim’s remote self-absorption, which would
have looked, by comparison, like neglect or dislike. That it had maybe made Orin too
emotionally dependent on his mother—why else would he have been so traumatized when
a younger brother had suddenly appeared, specially challenged from birth and in need
of even more maternal attention than Orin? Orin, late one night on the co-op’s futon,
recalled to Joelle his skulking in and dragging a wastebasket over and inverting it
next to his infant brother’s special crib, holding a heavy box of Quaker Oats high
above his head, preparing to brain the needy infant. Joelle had gotten an A- in Developmental
Psych. the semester before. And also dependent psychologically, Orin, it seemed, or
even metaphysically—Orin said he’d grown up, first in a regular house in Weston and
then at the Academy in Enfield, grown up dividing the human world into those who were
open, readable, trustworthy, v. those so closed and hidden that you had no clue what
they thought of you but could pretty damn well imagine it couldn’t be anything all
that marvelous or else why hide it? Orin had recounted that he’d started to see himself
getting closed and blank and hidden like that, as a tennis player, toward the end
of his junior career, despite all the Moms’s frantic attempts to keep him from hiddenness.
Joelle had thought of B.U.’s Nickerson Field’s 30,000 voices’ openly roared endorsement,
the sound rising with the punt to a kind of amniotic pulse of pure positive noise.
Versus tennis’s staid and reserved applause. It had all been so easy to figure and
see, then, listening, loving Orin and feeling for him, poor little rich and prodigious
boy—all this was before she came to know Jim and the Work.