Infinite Jest (158 page)

Sure enough, the round man, whose hand’s left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor
old Kevin Bain to honor and name his I.I.’s wounded wish anyway, to say ‘Please, Mommy
and Daddy, come love and hold me,’ out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain goes
ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good
old adult mortified embarrassment to it, along with the racking sobs. A couple of
the other men in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the
arms of their teddy bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt
County hydroponic marijuana that Pemulis occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile
counterpart at the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so big and plump with
high-Delta-9 resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The
moist sounds right behind him turn out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt
out of a plastic cup. Hal keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O.
booklet the girl had given him. He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumb-prints
on several of the pages, and that two pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal
fears is an ancient dried booger, and now that the booklet’s cover is dated January
in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past,
and that it’s not impossible that the blandly hostile toothless girl at The Ennet
facility had kertwanged him by giving him a dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide.

Kevin Bain keeps repeating ‘Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me’ in
a kind of monotone of pathos. The gradually intensifying lisp in
Please
is apparently a performative invocation of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other
fluids flow and roll. The warm round leader Harv’s own eyes are a moist glassy blue.
The CD scanner’s cello is now into some sort of semi-jazzy pizzicato stuff that seems
oxymoronic against the room’s mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet
civety smell that signifies somebody nearby has some athlete’s-foot issues to confront,
under his socks. Plus it’s mystifying that 32A has no windows, given all the smoky-brown
fenestration Hal’d seen from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt’s beard
is one of those small rectangular ones that’s easy to keep clear of the cup’s rim.
The back and side of Kevin Bain’s hair has separated into spiky sweat-soaked strands,
from the room’s heat and the Infant’s emotions.

All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and dandled
and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told K.
Bain’s Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn’t automatically
seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather
envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to
blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn’t exactly
sounded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn’t consider
himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.

The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks
Kevin Bain if it feels to his Inner Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to
appear cribside to meet his needs.

‘No,’ Kevin says very quietly. ‘No, it doesn’t, Harv.’

The leader is idly arranging his bear’s splayed arms in different positions, so it
looks like the bear’s either waving or surrendering. ‘Do you suppose you would be
able to ask someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?’

The back of Kevin Bain’s head doesn’t move. Hal’s whole digestive tract spasms at
the prospect of watching two bearded adult males in sweaters and socks engage in surrogate
Infant-hugging. He begins asking himself why he doesn’t just fake a hideous coughing
fit and flee Q.R.S.-32A with his fist over his face.

Harv’s now waggling the bear’s arms back and forth and making his voice high and cartoon-characterish
and pretending to have his bear ask Kevin Bain’s bear if it would maybe point to the
man in the group Kevin Bain would most like to have hold and nurture and love him
in loco parentis
. Hal’s spitting quietly down the side of his glass and brooding wretchedly at the
fact that he’s driven fifty supperless clicks to listen to a globular man in plaid
socks pretend his teddy bear’s speaking Latin when he looks up from the glass and
is chilled to see that Kevin Bain has wiggled his Indian-style way around in his chair
and is holding his bear way up by its underarms, just the way a father holds a toddler
up for a public spect-op or parade, turning the throttled-looking bear this way and
that, scanning the room—as Hal covers part of his face with a hand, pretending to
scratch an eyebrow, praying not to be recognized—and finally manipulating the bear’s
arm so the plump brown fuzzy fingerless hand of the bear’s pointing right in Hal’s
direction. Hal doubles over in a coughing spasm only half-faked, running decision-trees
on various ruses for flight.

Just like his younger brother Marlon Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with
a dark swart face. He looks sort of like an overdeveloped troll. And he has the same
capacity for constant incredible sweating that always made Marlon Bain look to Hal,
both on-court and off-, like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade. Except
Kevin Bain’s little glittery Bain eyes are also red and swollen with public weeping,
and he’s balding back from the temples in a way that gives him a widow’s peak like
nobody’s business, and doesn’t seem to recognize a post-pubescent Hal, and is pointing
his bear’s blunt hand Hal realizes finally after almost swallowing his plug of Kodiak
not at Hal but at the mild-faced square-bearded older guy behind him, who’s holding
a spoon of vividly pink yogurt in front of his bear’s open mouth, just touching its
protruding tongue’s red corduroy, pretending to be feeding the bear. Hal very casually
puts the NASA glass between his legs and gets both hands under his chair-seat and
hops the chair bit by bit over and out of the lines of sight and transit between Kevin
Bain and the yogurt man. Harv, up front, is making a complex hand-signal to the yogurt
man not to speak or move from his back-row orange chair no matter what; and then,
as Kevin Bain wriggles cross-legged back around to face front again, Harv smoothly
turns the hand-signal into a motion like he’s smoothing his hair. The motion then
becomes sincere and ruminative as the leader breathes deeply a couple of times. The
music’s settled back into its original nodding narcosis.

‘Kevin,’ Harv says, ‘since this is a group exercise in passivity and Inner-Infant
needs, and since you’ve selected Jim as the member of the group you need something
from, we need you to ask Jim out loud to meet your needs. Ask him to come up and hold
you and love you, since your parents aren’t ever coming. Not ever, Kevin.’

Kevin Bain makes a mortified sound and reclamps a hand over his big swart face.

‘Go for it, Kev,’ somebody over near the Bly poster calls out.

‘We affirm and support you,’ says the guy by the filing cabinet.

Hal now starts scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places he’d rather
be right now. He’s not even up to Addis Ababa when Kevin Bain acquiesces and begins
very softly and hesitantly asking the mild-faced Jim, who’s put aside his yogurt but
not the bear, to please come up and love him and hold him. By the time Hal’s envisioned
himself tumbling over American Falls at the Concavity’s southwest rim in a rusty old
noxious-waste-displacement drum, Kevin Bain has asked Jim eleven progressively louder
times to come nurture and hold him, to no avail. The older guy just sits there, clutching
his yogurt-tongued bear, his expression somewhere between mild and blank.

Hal has never actually seen projectile-weeping before. Bain’s tears are actually exiting
his eyes and projecting outward several cm. before starting to fall. His facial expression
is the scrunched spread one of a small child’s total woe, his neck-cords standing
out and face darkening so that it looks like some sort of huge catcher’s mitt. A bright
cape of mucus hangs from his upper lip, and his lower lip seems to be having some
kind of epileptic fit. Hal finds the tantrum’s expression on an adult face sort of
compelling. At a certain point hysterical grief becomes facially indistinguishable
from hysterical mirth, it appears. Hal imagines watching Bain weep on a white beach
through binoculars from the balcony of a cool dim Aruban hotel room.

‘He’s not
coming!
’ Kevin Bain finally keens to the leader.

Harv the leader nods, scratching an eyebrow, and confirms that that seems to be the
case. He pretends to stroke his imperial in puzzlement and asks rhetorically what
might be the problem, why mild-faced Jim isn’t automatically coming when called.

Kevin Bain’s just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration. He
seems deeply into his Infant persona now, and Hal rather hopes these guys have procedures
for getting Bain at least back to sixteen before he has to try to drive home. At some
point a timpani has gotten involved in the CD’s music, and a rather saucy cornet,
and the music’s finally started moving a little, toward what’s either a climax or
the end of the disk.

By now various men in the group have started crying out to Kevin Bain that his Inner
Infant wasn’t getting its needs met, that sitting there passively asking for nurture
to get up and come to him wasn’t getting the needs met, that Kevin owed it to his
Inner Infant to come up with some sort of active way to meet the Infant’s needs. Somebody
shouted out ‘Honor that Infant!’ Somebody else called ‘Meet those needs!’ Hal is mentally
strolling down the Appian Way in bright Eurosunlight, eating a cannoli, twirling his
Dunlop racquets by the throats like six-shooters, enjoying the sunshine and cranial
silence and a normal salivary flow.

Pretty soon the men’s supportive exhortations have distilled into everybody in the
room except Harv, Jim and Hal chanting ‘Meet Those Needs! Meet Those Needs!’ in the
same male-crowd-exhortative meter as ‘Hold That Line!’ or ‘Block That Kick!’

Kevin Bain wipes his nose on his sleeve and asks humongous Harv the leader what he’s
supposed to do to get his Infant’s needs met if the person he’s chosen to meet those
needs won’t come.

The leader has folded his hands over his belly and sat back, by this time, smiling,
cross-legged, holding his tongue. His bear sits atop the protrusion of belly with
its little blunt legs straight out, the way you’ll see a bear sitting on a shelf.
It seems to Hal that the O
₂
in 32A is now getting used up at a ferocious clip. Not at all like the cool, sheep-scented
breezes of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The men in the room are still chanting
‘Meet Those Needs!’

‘What you’re saying is I need to actively go over to Jim myself and ask him to hold
me,’ Kevin Bain says, grinding at his eyes with his knuckles.

The leader smiles blandly.

‘Instead of you’re saying passively trying to get Jim to come to me,’ says Kevin Bain,
whose tears have largely stopped, and whose sweat has taken on the clammy shine of
true fear-sweat.

Harv emerges as one of these people who can heft one eyebrow and not the other. ‘It
would take real courage and love and commitment to your Inner Infant to take the risk
and go actively over to somebody that might give you what your Infant needs,’ he says
quietly. The CD player has at some point shifted into an all-cello instrumental of
‘I Don’t Know (How to Love Him)’ from an old opera Lyle sometimes borrowed people’s
players and listened to at night in the weight room. Lyle and Marlon Bain had been
particularly tight, Hal recalls.

The trimeter of the men’s chant has reduced to a one-foot low-volume ‘
Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs
’ as Kevin Bain slowly and hesitantly uncrosses his legs and rises from his orange
chair, turning to face Hal and the motionless guy behind him, this Jim. Bain begins
to move slowly toward them with the tortured steps of a mime miming walking against
a tornadic gale. Hal’s picturing himself doing a lazy backstroke in the Azores, spouting
glassy water up out of his mouth in a cytological plume. He’s leaning almost out of
his chair, as far as possible out of Kevin Bain’s line of transit, studying the brown
suspension in the bottom of his glass. His prayer not to be recognized by a regressive
Kevin Bain is the first really desperate and sincere prayer Hal can remember offering
since he’d stopped wearing pajamas with feet in them.

‘Kevin?’ Harv calls softly from the front of the room. ‘Is it you moving actively
toward Jim, or should it be the Infant inside you, the one with the needs?’

‘
Needs, Needs, Needs,
’ the bearded men are chanting, some rhythmically raising their manicured fists in
the air.

Bain’s looking back and forth between Harv and Jim, chewing his finger indecisively.

‘Is this how an Infant moves towards its needs, Kevin?’ Harv says.

‘Go for it, Kevin!’ a full-bearded man calls out.

‘Let the Infant
out!
’

‘Let your Infant do the walking, Kev.’

So Hal’s most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty
oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother’s doubles
partner’s older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because
one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled
on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain’s knees leaving twin
pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past
Hal, his face unspeakable.