Infinite Jest (156 page)

—That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis’s mother’s fork and then whole
plate had clattered to the floor, and that amid the sounds of the pointers under the
table fighting over that plate the mother’s own denial-system’s pressure blew, and
she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once
known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that
she’d known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated
her suspicions and placed them under great pressure in the bell-jar of her own denial,
because, she admits—
admits
is probably less accurate than something like
keens
or
shrieks
or
jabbers
—that her own father—an itinerant camp-meeting preacher—had molested her and her sister
all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she’d
married at just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she’d married
the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his
daughter.

—That she’d said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if
so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before God and man.

—That whereupon she’d reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down
to the Daddy’s acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid.

—That the Daddy’d kept a world-class collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks
on wooden shelves down in the cellar.

—That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis
had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother
had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on
the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside
signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid.

—That Madame Psychosis’s name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy’s name
either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.

—That, despite the little rotter’s professions of self-recrimination for allowing
the deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror
and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis
increasingly untenable, it didn’t take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses
to figure out why the fellow’d given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the
traumatic deformity, now did it.

—That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to
externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively
ducked; and that the rotter, one
Orin,
right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively
ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis—dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting
of so many high-pressure repressive family systems—open for a direct facial hit, resulting
in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone’s failure to press any charges
that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once
again to her home’s kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by
putting her extremities down the garbage disposal—first one arm and then, kind of
miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.
³³²

The most distant and obscure Tuesday
P.M.
Meeting listed in the little white Metro-Boston Recovery Options
³³³
booklet the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him
looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, almost in Framingham, at
something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as ‘Q.R.S.–32A.’
Hal, who had no last class period, rushed through
P.M.
’s, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular
P.M.
’s were even warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was
also forgoing tonight’s lemon chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick
in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn’t sure
why, since it didn’t seem to be any kind of slobbering inability to abstain that was
the problem—he hadn’t had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day
urological condonation of last week. The issue’s the horrific way his head’s felt,
increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope.
³³⁴
It wasn’t just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost
all night now and in the terribly early
A.M.
when Hal’s eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You’re UP I’ve Been Wanting To
TALK To You and then didn’t let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw
all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched
to await more bad dreams. 24/7’s of feeling wretched and bereft.

Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill
and took the tow truck up Comm. Ave. to the C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond,
the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit Boylston
St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St.
became shunpike Rte. 9, the major west-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal
I–90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27.

Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By
the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the sky’s combustionish orange had deepened to
the hellish crimson of a fire’s last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after,
and Hal’s spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics
Anonymous Meeting thing out.

Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps
were set so senselessly high on the truck’s grille.

The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and
not returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only
corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then cancelled
a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown. NPR
had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects—George Will’s laryngectomy-prosthesis
sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He ate two of three $4.00
bran muffins he’d whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet bakery, grimacing as
he swallowed because he’d forgotten a tonic to wash them down, then put in a mammoth
plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA glass, which fit neatly
in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and passed the last fifteen minutes of
the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word
Anonymous,
all the way he supposed from the Æolic
through Thynne’s B.S. 1580s reference to ‘anonymall Chronicals’; and whether it was
joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English
on-áne,
which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf’s eventual standard
inversion to the classic
anon,
maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S.
’35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there’d been such a lengthy entry
in the
Discursive O.E.D.
that Hal hadn’t had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually
prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over.
Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he’d ever read and basically read
it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn’t (so far) compromised,
the withdrawal’s effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.

The rock faces on either side of the truck when 27 goes through blasted hills of rock,
the very fringes of the Berkshires’ penumbra, are either granite or gneiss.

Hal for a while also practices saying ‘My name’s Mike.’ ‘Mike. Hi.’ ‘Hey there, name’s
Mike,’ etc., into the truck’s rearview.

By 15 minutes east of Natick it becomes obvious that the little booklet’s terse
Q.R.S.
designates a facility called Quabbin Recovery Systems, which is easy to find, roadside
ad-signs starting to announce the place several clicks away, each sign a little different
and designed to form a little like narrative of which actual arrival at Q.R.S. would
be the climax. Even Hal’s late father was too young really to remember Burma-Shave
signs.

Quabbin Recovery Systems is set far back from Rte. 27 on a winding groomed-gravel
road flanked all the way up by classy old-time standing lanterns whose glass shades
are pebbled and faceted like candy dishes and seem more for mood than illumination.
Then the actual building’s driveway’s an even more winding little road that’s barely
more than a tunnel through meditative pines and poor-postured Lombardy poplars. Once
off the highway the whole nighttime scene out here in exurbia—Boston’s true boonies—seems
ghostly and circumspect. Hal’s tires crunch cones in the road. Some sort of bird shits
on his windshield. The driveway broadens gradually into a like delta and then a parking
lot of mint-white gravel, and the physical Q.R.S. is right there, cubular and brooding.
The building’s one of these late-model undeformed cubes of rough panel-brick and granite
quoins. Illuminated moodily from below by more classy lanterns, it looks like a building-block
from some child-titan’s toy-chest. Its windows are the smoky brown kind that in daylight
become dark mirrors. Hal’s late father had publicly repudiated this kind of window-glass
in an interview in
Lens & Pane
when the stuff first came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort
of bloody, polluted aspect.

A good two-thirds of the lot’s parking places say RESERVED FOR STAFF, which strikes
Hal as odd. The tow truck tends to diesel and chuff after deignition, finally subsiding
with a shuddering fart. It’s dead quiet except for the hiss of light traffic down
on 27 past all the trees. Only TP-link workers and marathon-type commuters live in
exurban Natick. It’s either way colder out here or else a front’s been coming in while
Hal drove. The lot’s piney air has the ethyl sting of winter.

Q.R.S.’s big doors and lintel are more of that reflector-shade glass. There’s no obvious
bell, but the doors are unlocked. They open in that sort of pressurized way of institutional
doors. The savanna-colored lobby is broad and still and has a vague medical/dental
smell. Its carpet’s a dense low tan Dacronyl weave that evacuates sound. There’s a
circular high-countered nurse’s station or reception desk, but nobody’s there.

The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak of blood in his head.

The
32A
that follows
Q.R.S.
in the girl’s little white booklet is presumably a room number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A.
jacket and carries the NASA glass he spits in. He’d have to spit even if he didn’t
have chew in; the Kodiak’s almost like a cover or excuse.

There is no map or You-Are-Here-type directory on view in the lobby. The lobby’s heat
is intense and close but kind of porous; it’s in a sort of uneasy struggle with the
radiant chill of all the smoked glass of the entrance. The lamps out in the lot and
off along the driveway are blobs of sepia light through the glass. Inside, cove-lighting
at the seams of walls and ceiling produce an indirect light that’s shadowless and
seems to rise from the room’s objects themselves. It’s the same lighting and lion-colored
carpeting in the first long hall Hal tries. The room numbers go up to 17 and then
after Hal turns a sharp corner start at 34A. The room doors are false blond wood but
look thick and private, flush in their frames. There’s also the smell of stale coffee.
The walls’ color scheme is somewhere between puce and mature eggplant-skin, kind of
nauseous against the sandy tan of the carpet. All buildings with any kind of health-theme
to them have this thin sick sweet dental sub-odor to them. Q.R.S. also seems to have
some sort of balsamy air-freshener going in the ventilation system, too, but it doesn’t
quite cover the sweet medical stink or the bland sour smell of institutional food.

Hal hasn’t heard one human sound since he came in. The place’s silence has that glittery
sound of total silence. His footfalls make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels furtive
and burglarish and holds the NASA glass down at his side and the NA booklet higher
up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced landscapes
on the walls, little low tables with glossy pamphlets, a framed print of Picasso’s
‘Seated Harlequin,’ and nothing else that wasn’t just institutional bullshit, visual
Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it’s like the gauntlets of doors just glide
by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold
the tensed menace of a living thing that’s chosen to hold itself still. If you asked
Hal to describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would
be to say he wished he were somewhere else and feeling some way besides how he felt.
His mouth pours spit. The glass’s one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much
fun to look at. He’s missed the glass a couple of times and marred the tan carpet
with dark spit. After two 90° turns it’s clear the hallway’s run is a perfect square
around the cube’s ground level. He’s seen no stairs or entrances to stairways. He
empties the NASA glass rather gooily into a potted rubber tree’s dirt. Q.R.S.’s building
may be one of those infamous Rubikular cubes that looks topologically undeformed but
is actually impossible to negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third
corner start at 18, and now Hal can hear either very distant or very muffled voices.
He carries the NA booklet in front of him like a crucifix. He has about $50 U.S. and
another $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom-emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no
idea what sort of introductory costs might be involved. Q.R.S. didn’t purchase prime
Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a São-Paulo-School Geometric-Minimalist
architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was for sure.