Infinite Jest (154 page)

‘Of tea and vinegar and total abstinence. Of no substances whatsoever. Of abrupt and
total withdrawal while I try to justify my seed at the WhataBurger and maybe get offered
up to Wayne at the Fundraiser. And then your birthday in two weeks.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Jesus and then the SAT’s in December, I’ll have to finish prepping for the Boards
and then take the Boards while still in abrupt withdrawal.’

‘You’ll get a perfect score. Everybody’s betting you get a perfect score. I’ve heard
them.’

‘Marvelous. That’s just exactly what I need to hear.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘And of course you’re hurt, Boo, that I’ve tried to hide all of it from you.’

‘I’m zero percent hurt, Hal.’

‘And of course you’re wondering why I didn’t just tell you when of course you knew
anyway, knew something, the times hanging upside-down in the weight room with a forehead
Lyle didn’t even want to get near. You sitting there letting me say I was just really
really tired and nightmare-ridden.’

‘I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it’s right to.’

‘Marvelous.’

‘I feel like you’re the only one who knows when it’s right to tell. I can’t know for
you, so why should I be hurt.’

‘Be a fucking human
being
for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt
that I was trying to hide it.’

‘I wasn’t hurt. I don’t want you to be sad.’

‘You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid.
It’s called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn’t mean they’ll
go away. You don’t have to put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One liar’s
enough.’

‘You’re scared your pee might still flunk after one calendar month.’

‘Jesus it’s like talking to a big poster of some smily-faced guy. Are you
in
there?’

‘And you can’t use a Visine bottle of pee because the man will be right there looking
at your penis, and Trevor and Pemulis’s penises.’

‘….’

‘The sun’s thinking about coming up in the window. You can see it.’

‘It’s been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I’m bats inside and I can’t
sleep without more of the horror-show dreams. I feel like I’m stuck halfway down a
chimney.’

‘You beat Ortho, and your toothache’s gone.’

‘Pemulis and Axhandle say a month’ll be tit. Pemulis’s only concern is is this DMZ
he got for the WhataBurger detectable. He goes to the library and pores. He’s fully
alert and functional.
³²¹
It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in
a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.’

‘So what do you think you should do?’

‘And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different
directions. I’ll fly apart in midair. I’ll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at
200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I’m different.
Whom I’ve lied to, and liked it. It’ll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘And it’ll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, Booboo, I’m afraid.’

‘Hey Hal? What are you going to do?’

‘…’

‘Hal?’

‘Booboo, I’m up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I should do.’

‘Me tell you?’

‘I’m just two big aprick ears right here, Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what
to do.’

‘Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a fucking?’

‘I trust you. You’re smart, Boo.’

‘Then Hal?’

‘Tell me what I should do.’

‘I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.’

‘…’

‘Do you see what I mean?’

In Don Gately’s medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts
on Dream Duty and was in the front office just after 0830 writing up the previous
night in the Log, trying to think of synonyms for
boredom
and periodically dipping a finger in her scalding coffee to stay awake, plus listening
to distant toilets flush and showers hiss and residents clunking sleepily around in
the kitchen and dining room and everything like that, when somebody all of a sudden
starts knocking at the House’s front door, which meant that the person was like a
newcomer or stranger, since people in the Ennet House recovery community know that
the front door’s unlocked at 0800 and always completely open to all but the Law as
of 0801.

The residents these days all know not to answer any knocks at the door themselves.

So Johnette F. at first thought it might be some more of those kind of police
³²²
that wore suits and ties, come to depose more residents as witnesses on the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian
fuck-up and everything like that; and Johnette got out the clipboard with the names
of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed to be put upstairs out
of sight before any police were let on the premises. A couple of the residents on
the list were in the dining room in full view, eating cereal and smoking. Johnette
carried the clipboard as a kind of emblem of authority as she went to the window by
the front door to check out the knocking party and everything like that.

And but the kid at the door there was no way he was police or court-personnel, and
Johnette opened the unlocked door and let him in, not bothering to explain that nobody
had to knock. It was an upscale kid about Johnette’s own age or slightly less, coughing
against the foyer’s pall of
A.M.
smoke, saying he wanted to speak in comparative private to someone in whatever passed
here for authority, he said. This kid he had the sort of cool aluminum sheen of an
upscale kid, a kid with either a weird tan or a weird windburn on top of a tan, and
just the whitest Nike hightops Johnette had ever seen, and ironed jeans, as in with
like a crease down the front, and a weird woolly-white jacket with
A.T.E.
in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other, and slicked-back dark hair that was
wet, as in showered and not oil, and had half frozen, the hair, in the early outside
cold and was standing up straight and frozen in front, making his dark face look small.
His ears looked inflamed from the cold. Johnette appraised him coolly, digging at
her ear with a pinkie. She watched the boy’s face as David Krone came scuttling over
like a crab and blinked at the boy upside-down a few times and scuttled around and
up the stairs, his forehead clunking against each stair. It was pretty obvious the
boy wasn’t any resident’s like homey or boyfriend come to give somebody a ride to
work or like that. The way the boy looked and stood and talked and everything like
that radiated high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody carried
weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from the planet of Johnette
Marie Foltz of South Chelsea and then the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility
for Demonstrably Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton; and in Pat’s office, with the
door only half shut, Johnette gave her face the blandly hostile expression she wore
around upscale boys with no tatts and all their teeth that outside of NA wouldn’t
have interest in her or might view her lack of front teeth and nose-pin as evidence
of they were like better than her and like that, somehow. It emerged this kid didn’t
seem like he had enough emotional juice to be interested in judging anybody or even
noticing them, however. His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew
all too wicked well, the quality of somebody who’d just lately put down the pipe and/or
bong. The kid’s hair was starting to melt in the heat of Pat’s office and drip and
settle on his head like a slashed tire, causing that his face got bigger. He looked
a little like what the fourth Mrs. Foltz had called green around the gills. The boy
stood there very straight with his hands behind his back and said he lived nearby
and had for some time been interested in sort of an idle, largely speculative way
in considering maybe dropping in on some sort of Substance Anonymous meeting and everything
like that, basically as just something to do, the exact same roundabout Denial shit
as persons without teeth, and said but he didn’t know where any were, any Meetings,
or when, and but knew The Ennet House
³²³
was nearby, that dealt directly with Anonymous organizations of this sort, and was
wondering whether he maybe could have—or borrow and Xerox and promptly return by either
e- or fax or First-Class mail, whichever they might prefer—some sort of relevant meeting
schedule. He apologized for intruding and said but he didn’t know whom else to call.
The sort of guy like Ewell and Day and snotty look-right-through-you-if-you-weren’t-a-fucking-covergirl
Ken E. that knew how to long-divide and say
whom
but didn’t even know how to look up shit in the Yellow Pages.

Much later, in subsequent events’ light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight
of the boy’s frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said
whom,
and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower
lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing.
³²⁴

Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. (‘the G.’) Tine
³²⁵
really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its
neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview’s subject, whose
homburg and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request.
And it was this, the harsh light on her fully exposed post-Marxist face, more than
any kind of tough
noir
-informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer, that prompted
M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in
the Sidney Peterson–shaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op’s darkened
and lock-dickied living room, to spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like
a canary, tell everything she believed she knew:
³²⁶

—Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde
Auteur J. O. Incandenza’s lethally entertaining
Infinite Jest
(
V
or
VI
) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the
archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant,
her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated
squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the
camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in
very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death
is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who
kills you is always your next life’s mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn’t
make too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of
the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue
to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding
a knife during this monologue, and the film’s big technical hook (the Auteur’s films
always involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very unusual kind of single
lens on the Bolex H32’s turret,
³²⁷
and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant, because the
real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had seen her naked,
³²⁸
and you can always tell if a woman’s ever carried anything past the first trimester
if you look at her naked.
³²⁹

—Molly Notkin tells them that Madame Psychosis’s own mother had killed herself in
a truly ghastly way with an ordinary kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of Thanksgiving
Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before the film’s Auteur
himself had killed himself, also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly, which she
says though any Lincoln-Kennedy-type connections between the two suicides will have
to be ferreted out by the interviewers on their own, since as far as Molly Notkin
knew the two different parents didn’t even know of each other’s existence.

—That the lethal cartridge’s digital Bolex H32 camera—already a Rube-Goldbergesque
amalgam of various improvements and digital adaptations to the already modification-heavy
classic Bolex H16 Rex 5—a Canadian line, by the way, favored throughout his whole
career by the Auteur because its turret could accept three different C-mount lenses
and adapters—that
Infinite Jest
(
V
) or (
VI
)’s had been fitted with an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens, and lay
during filming on either the floor or like a cot or bed, the camera, with Madame Psychosis
as the Death-Mother figure inclined over it, parturient and nude, talking
down
to it—in both senses of the word, which from a critical perspective would introduce
into the film a kind of synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual
perspectives of the subjective camera—explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche
that this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow
narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make
amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

—Molly Notkin tells them she could be far more helpful and forthcomingly detailed
if only they’d switch that beastly lamp off or train it someplace else, which is a
brass-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays
right on Molly Notkin’s glabrous unhappy face.

—That Madame Psychosis and the film’s Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, and for
reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur’s belief in a finite world-total of available
erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden. That in fact Madame
Psychosis had loved and been sexually enmeshed only with the Auteur’s son, who, though
Molly Notkin never encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis had taken care
never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little rotter as one would
find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, emotional
chicanery, and rot.