Infinite Jest (155 page)

—That Madame Psychosis had been present neither at the Auteur’s suicide nor at his
funeral. That she’d missed the funeral because her passport had expired. That nor
had Madame Psychosis been present at the reading of the late Auteur’s will, despite
the fact that she was one of the beneficiaries. That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned
the fate or present disposition of the unreleased cartridge entitled either
Infinite Jest
(
V
) or
Infinite Jest
(
VI
), and had described it only from the perspective of the experience of performing
in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even entertaining,
let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented little more
than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether—the
Auteur having apparently been extremely close to his own mother, in childhood—and
had no doubt been recognized as such by the Auteur—who though not exactly the psychic
sea’s steadiest keel had been in many respects an acute reader and critic of film,
and would have been able to distinguish the real filmic McCoy from pathetic cries
veiled as film no matter how wildly his nautical compass was spinning around, on its
tether, and would in all probability have destroyed the Master Print of the failed
piece of art, the same way he’d reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed
attempts at the same piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser
mystique and allure.

—That the Auteur’s funeral had purportedly taken place in the L’Islet Province of
Nouveau Québec, the birth-province of the Auteur’s widow, featuring an interment and
not a cremation.

—That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business,
but why not simply go to J.O.I.’s widow and verify directly the existence and location
of the purported cartridge?

—…

—That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur’s widow had
any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the
files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin’s
heard the woman didn’t have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually
neurotic agendas, even though she came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and solicitous.
That Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow struck her as very
possibly Death incarnate—her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic
figure—and that it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame
Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine instantiations of Death
when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot,
the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty even in her late
forties.

—That the Auteur had stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psychosis’s personal
condition for consenting to appear in what she knew to be her but did not know to
be the J.O.I.’s final film-cartridge, and that the Auteur had, apparently, incredibly,
³³⁰
kept his side of the bargain—possibly because he’d been so deeply moved at M.P.’s
consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation
and the little rotter of a son’s despicable abandonment of the relationship under
the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being sexually enmeshed with their—here
Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say
his
—father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for
the whole next three-and-a-half months, from Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated
Pad to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the date of his suicide.

—That the completely secret and hidden substance-abuse problem, the one that had now
landed Madame Psychosis in an elite private dependency-treatment facility so elite
that not even M.P.’s closest friends knew where it was beyond knowing only that it
was someplace far, very far away, that the abuse-problem could have been nothing but
a consequence of the terrible guilt Madame Psychosis felt over the Auteur’s suicide,
and constituted a clear unconscious compulsion to punish herself with the same sort
of substance-abuse activity she had coerced the Auteur into stopping, merely substituting
narcotics for Wild Turkey, which Molly Notkin could attest was some very gnarly-tasting
liquor indeed.

—No, that Madame Psychosis’s guilt over the Auteur’s
felo de self
had nothing to do with the purportedly lethal
Infinite Jest
(
V
) or (
VI
), which as far as Madame Psychosis had determined from the filming itself was little
more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship
and perspectival novelty. That, no, rather the consuming guilt had been over the condition
that the Auteur suspend the ingestion of spirits, which it turned out, M.P. had claimed
in deluded hindsight, had been all that was keeping the man’s tether ravelled, the
ingestion, such that without it he was unable to withstand the psychic pressures that
pushed him over the edge into what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes
referred to as quote ‘self-erasure.’

—That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition
turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with
the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles
on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur’s body had
been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse’s widow-to-be—who
may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willing to give
up spirits quote ‘for her’ but had apparently been willing to give them up quote ‘for’
Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus.

—That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an
irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed
herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her (Madame Psychosis) hideously and improbably
deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed’s
13-Step self-help organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse.

—That the intolerable stresses leading to the Auteur’s self-erasure had probably way
less to do with film or digital art—this Auteur’s anti-confluential approach to the
medium having always struck Molly Notkin as being rather aloof and cerebrally technical,
to say nothing of naïvely post-Marxist in its self-congratulatory combination of anamorphic
fragmentation and anti-Picaresque
³³¹
narrative stasis—or with having allegedly spawned some angelic monster of audience-gratification—anyone
with a nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment
was pretty low on the late filmmaker’s list of priorities—but rather much more likely
to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just
about everything with a Y-chromosome, and had been for what sounded like many years,
including possibly with the Auteur’s son and Madame’s craven lover, as a child, seeing
as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother
to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time.

—That thus—with the Promethean-guilt angle on the Auteur’s suicide cast into serious
doubt—there was little question in A.B.D.-Dr. Notkin’s mind that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-
Liebestod
myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic
illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist
mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal,
as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze’s posthumous
Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment,
which she’d be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp’s white
fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly against the lamp’s conic metal shade,
if they’d promise to return it and not mark it up.

—That—in response to respectful but pointed requests to keep the responses on some
sort of factual track and spare them all the eggheaded abstractions—Madame Psychosis’s
deforming trauma, in its combination of coincidence and malefic intention, had been
like something right out of the Auteur’s most ghastly and unresolvable proto-incestuous
disaster films, e.g.
The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence,
and
The Unfortunate Case of Me
. That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been extremely and heart-warmingly close
to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit, who’d apparently had
an extremely close only-child and watching-movies-together-based relationship with
his own mother and seemed to reenact the closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her
to movies on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid-South
for various junior baton-twirling competitions while his wife, Madame Psychosis’s
mother, a devoutly religious but wounded and neurasthenic woman with a fear of public
spaces, stayed home on the family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the administration
of the farm, etc. But that things had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame
Psychosis entered puberty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy,
seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking
her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge
issues of menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues
were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost
freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where
poor nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely
rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis’s
toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis’s father
interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame
Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her childhood diminutive
like
Pookie
or
Putti
as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University
whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full
of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this
signified.

—That—to cut to a chase which the interviewers’ hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement
of the lamp’s bulb with a much higher wattage signified they’d very much like to see
cut to—as is often the case, it wasn’t until Madame Psychosis got to college and gradually
acquired some psychic distance and matter for emotional comparison that she even began
to see how creepy her reagent-Daddy’s regression had been, and not until a certain
major-sport-star son’s autograph on a punctured football inspired more e-mailed suspicion
and sarcasm than gratitude from home in KY that she began even to suspect that her
lack of social life throughout puberty might have had as much to do with her Daddy’s
intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing pubescent charms. That—pausing briefly
to spell
actaeonizing
—the shit had hit the intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis brought
the Auteur’s little rotter of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for
Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy’s infantilizing
conduct of her and her mother’s wordless compulsive canning and cooking, not to mention
the terrific tension that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of
the stuffed animals out of her room to make room for the Auteur’s son, in short experiencing
her home and Daddy through the comparative filter of enmeshment with the Auteur’s
son brought Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable;
and that it had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when
the low-pH Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis’s plate’s turkey for her
but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative
eyebrows of the Auteur’s son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question
of why, with her now of legal age and living with a male and retired from childhood’s
twirling and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the film-camera,
did her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin’s secondhand
take on the emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels she can
state w/ confidence that it’s plausibly a case of any kind of system that’s been under
enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted
pressure’s such that it’s almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH Daddy’s
enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his grown daughter’s
white meat between his tines, in the confession that he’d been secretly, silently
in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real
thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her,
wouldn’t, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who
touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he’d
escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and disguisability
of his pure love hadn’t been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had been juvenile
and sexless, but that at the onset of puberty and nubility the pressure’d become so
great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an age of
incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his denial
of her maturation must have seemed—even though neither the daughter nor mother, even
now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial and creepiness,
although the man’s beloved pointers were given to whimper and scratch at the door
when the denial had gotten especially creepy (animals being way more sensitive than
humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin’s experience)—had raised his internal
limbic system’s pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and that he’d been
hanging on for dear life for the past nigh on now a decade, but that now that he’d
had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. from her
ballerina-wallpapered room to make space for a nonrelated mature male whose physical
vigor through the peephole the Daddy’d exerted every gram of trembling will he’d possessed
trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above the mirror over the sink
whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame Psychosis’s room’s bed sing
and clunk, and through which, late at night—claiming to Mother a case of skitters
from all the holiday nibbles—hunched atop the sink, every night since Madame Psychosis
and the Auteur’s son had first arrived to sleep together in the unstuffed-animaled
bed of a childhood through which he’d been all but tortured by the purity of his impossible
love for the—