Infinite Jest (161 page)

What made the whole interface with Pat M. possibly unreal was that right at the end
for no reason Pat M. burst into tears, and for no reason Gately got so embarrassed
he pretended to pass out, and slept again, and probably dreamed.

Almost certainly dreamed and unreal was the interval when Gately came up with a start
and saw Mrs. Lopate, the objay dart from the Shed that they come and install next
to the Ennet House viewer some days, sitting there in a gunmetal wheelchair, face
contorted, head cocked, hair stringy, looking not at him but more like seemingly at
whatever array of I.V. bottles and signifying monitors hung above and behind his big
crib, so not speaking or even looking at him but still in some sense being there
with
him, somehow. Even though there was no way she could have really been there, it was
the first time Gately realized that the catatonic Mrs. L. had been the same lady he’d
seen touching the tree in #5’s front lawn late at night, some nights, when he’d first
come on Staff. That they were the same person. And that this realization was real
even though the lady’s presence in the room was not, the complexities of which made
his eyes roll up in his head again as he passed back out again.

Then at some later point Joelle van Dyne was sitting in a chair just outside the railing
of the bed, veiled, wearing sweatpants and a sweater that was starting to unravel,
in a pink-bordered veil, not saying anything, probably looking at him, probably thinking
he was unconscious with his eyes open, or delirious with Noxzema. The whole right
side of himself hurt so bad each breath was like a hard decision. He wanted to cry
like a small child. The girl’s silence and the blankness of her veil frightened him
after a while, and he wished he could ask her to come back later.

Nobody’d offered him anything to eat, but he wasn’t hungry. There were I.V. tubes
going into the backs of both hands and the crook of his left elbow. Other tubing exited
him lower down. He didn’t want to know. He kept trying to ask his heart if just codeine
would be a relapse, according to the heart, but his heart was declining to comment.

Then at some point Ennet House alum and senior counselor Calvin Thrust came roaring
in and pulled up a chair and straddled it backwards like a slow-tease stripper, slumping
and draping his arms over the back of the chair, gesturing with an unlit rodney as
he spoke. He told Gately that man he looked like shit something heavy had fell on.
But he told Gately he should get a gander of the other guys, the Nucks in Polynesian-wear.
Thrust and the House Manager had got there before E.M.P.H.H. Security could drag the
Finest away from issuing midnight street-side citations down on Comm. Ave., he told
Gately. Lenz and Green and Alfonso Parias-Carbo had dragged/carried the passed-out
Gately inside and laid him on the black vinyl couch in Pat’s office, where Gately
had come to and told them ixnay on the ambulanceay and to please wake him up in five
more minutes, and then passed out for serious real. Parias-Carbo seemed like he’d
suffered a mild intestinal hernia from dragging/carrying Gately, but he was being
a man about it and had refused codeine downstairs at the E.R. and was expressing gratitude
for the growth experience, and the thoraxic lump was receding nicely. Calvin Thrust’s
breath smelled of smoke and old scrambled eggs. Gately had once seen a cheap bootleg
cartridge of a young Calvin Thrust having sex with a lady with only one arm on what
looked like a crude homemade trapeze. The cartridge’s lighting and production values
had been real low-quality, and Gately had been in and out of a Demerol-nod, but he
was 98% sure it had been the young Calvin Thrust. Calvin Thrust said how right there
over Gately’s unconscious form in the office Randy Lenz had begun womaning right off
how of course he, Randy Lenz, was going to somehow get blamed for Gately and the Nucks
getting fucked up and why didn’t they just get it over with and give him the administrative
Shoe right now without going through the sham motions of deliberating. Bruce Green
had rammed Lenz up against Pat’s cabinets and shaken him like a margarita, but refused
to rat out Lenz or say why irate Canadians might think a specimen as dickless as Lenz
might have demapped their friend. The matter was under investigation, but Thrust confessed
to a certain admiration for Green’s refusal to eat cheese. Brucie G. had suffered
a broken nose in the beef and now had a terrific set of twin shiners. Calvin Thrust
said both he, Calvin Thrust, and the House Manager had immediately on arrival pegged
Lenz as either coked up or ’drined to the gills on some ’drine, and Thrust said he
summoned every Oreida of self-control sobriety’d blessed him with and had quietly
taken Lenz out of the office into the special Disabled Bedroom next door and over
the sound of Burt F. Smith coughing up little pieces of lung in his sleep he said
he’d real controlledly given Lenz the choice of voluntarily resigning his Ennet residency
on the spot or submitting to a spot-urine and a room-search and everything like that,
plus to questioning by the Finest, who were pretty doubtless even now on route with
the fleet of ambulances for the Nucks. Meanwhile, Thrust said—gesturing with the gasper
and occasionally leaning forward to see whether Gately was still conscious and to
tell him he looked like shit, meanwhile—Gately had been lying there passed out, wedged
with two full filing cabinets to keep him from rolling off the couch he was wider
than, and was bleeding in a very big way, and nobody knew how to, like,
affix
a turnipcut to a shoulder, and the good-bodied new girl with the cloth mask was bending
over the arm of the couch applying pressure to towels on Gately’s bleeding, and her
partly-open robe was yielding a view that even brought Alfonso P.-C. around from his
herniated fetal posture on the floor, and Thrust and the House Manager were taking
turns Asking for Help to intuitively know what they ought to do with Gately, because
it was well known that he was on Probie against a real serious bit, and with all due
trust and respect to Don it wasn’t clear at that point from the scattered damaged
Canadian forms still in different prone positions out in the street who’d done what
to who in defense of whatever or not, and the Finest tend to take a keen interest
in huge guys who come into E.R.’s with spectacular gunshot wounds, and but then when
Pat M. pulled up in the Aventura laying rubber a couple minutes later she’d screamed
rather unserenely at Thrust for not having already rikky-ticked Don Gately over to
St. E.’s on his own already. Thrust said he’d let go of Pat’s screaming like water
off a duck, revealing that Pat M. had been under felony-weight domestic stress at
home, he knew. He said and but so Gately was too heavy to carry unconscious for more
than a few meters, even with the masked girl filling in for Parias-Carbo, and they’d
just barely got Gately outside still in his wet bowling shirt and laid him briefly
on the sidewalk and covered him with Pat’s black suede car-coat while Thrust maneuvered
his beloved Corvette up as close to Gately as possible. The sounds of sirens on the
way up Comm. Ave. mixed with the sounds of severely fucked-up Canadians returning
to whatever passed with Nucks for consciousness and calling for what they called
medecins,
and with the crazed-squirrel sound of Lenz trying to start his rusted-out brown Duster,
which had a bad solenoid. They’d heaved Gately’s dead weight in the ’Vette and Pat
M. drove interference like a madwoman in her turbocharged Aventura. Pat let the masked
girl ride shotgun with her because the masked girl wouldn’t quit asking her to let
her come too. The House Manager stayed behind to represent Ennet House to E.M.P.H.H.
Security and the somewhat less bullshittable BPD-Finest. The sirens got steadily closer,
which added to the confusion because senile and mobile-vegetable residents of both
Unit #4 and the Shed had been drawn out on the frozen lawns by the freakas, and the
mix of several kinds of sirens didn’t do them a bit of good, and they started flapping
and shrieking and running around and adding to the medical confusion of the whole
scene, which by the time him and Pat pulled out of there was a fucking millhouse and
everything like that. Thrust asks rhetorically how much does Don fucking
weigh,
anyway, because moving the front buckets way up to where like dwarfs put them and
putting Gately’s carcass across the back seat of the ’Vette had required all available
hands and even Burt F.S.’s stumps, had been like trying to get something humongous
through a door that’s way smaller than the humongous thing was and everything like
that. Thrust occasionally tapped his gasper like he thought it was lit. The first
squad cars had come fishtailing around the Warren-Comm. corner just as they all came
out of the E.M. driveway onto Warren. Pat in her car up ahead had made an arm-motion
that could have been either waving coolly at the passing Finest or uncoolly clutching
her head. Thrust said had he mentioned Gately’s blood? Gately’d bled all over Pat
M.’s vinyl couch and filing cabinets and carpet, the little E.M. streetlet, the sidewalk,
Pat M.’s black suede car-coat, pretty much everybody’s winter coats, and the beloved
upholstery of Thrust’s beloved Corvette, which upholstery Thrust might add had been
new, and dear. But he said not to worry about it, Thrust said: the fucking blood was
the least of the problems. Gately didn’t like the sound of that at all, and started
trying to blink at him in a kind of crude code, to get his attention, but Thrust either
didn’t notice it or thought it was like a postoperative tic. Thrust’s hair was always
combed straight back like a mobster. Thrust said at the St. E.’s E.R. how the E.R.
crew had been quick and ingenious about getting Gately out of the ’Vette and onto
a double-width gurney, though they did have some trouble lifting the gurney so they
could get the legs with wheels set up under it so the guys in white could roll him
in with more guys in white walking briskly alongside of him and leaning over him and
applying pressure and barking little orders in terse code like they always do in E.R.s
and everything like that, in emergencies. Thrust says he couldn’t tell if they could
tell right away it was a spectacular gunshot wound, nobody used the G-word or anything
like that. Thrust had babbled something about a chain-saw while Pat nodded furiously.
The chief two things Gately kept blinking rhythmically to try to find out were: did
anybody end up getting killed, meaning the Nucks; and has this one certain A.D.A.-type
figure that always wore a hat come in from Essex County or given any sign of getting
wind of Gately’s whereabouts or involvement; and—so really three things—and will any
of the Ennet House residents that were right there on the scene from start to finish
look respectable enough on paper to have creditibility as like legal witnesses. Plus
he wouldn’t mind knowing what the fuck Thrust was thinking of, scaring Lenz off and
letting him screw off into the urban night leaving Gately maybe holding the statutory
bag. Most of Calvin Thrust’s legality-experience was filmic and petty-vice. Thrust
eventually describes that one of the House Manager’s key coups of quick thinking was
doing a quick TP-scan and finding out which of the residents out there milling around
with the catatonics on the street had up-in-the-air legal issues such that they needed
to be secloistered in the protected area of the House out of legal sight by the time
the BPD’s Finest hit the scene. He says in his view it was lucky for Gately that he
(Gately) was such a massive son of a bitch and had so much blood, because even so
Gately’d lost huge volumes of blood all over people’s upholstery and was in shock
and everything like that by the time they got him on the double-width gurney, his
face cheese-colored and his lips blue and muttering all this shock-type stuff, but
even so here he (Gately) was, not exactly ready for a
GQ
cover but still sucking air. Thrust said in the waiting room at the E.R., where they
wouldn’t let a working man smoke down there either, he said then the arrogant new
girl resident in the white veil had up and tried to take Thrust’s inventory for letting
Randy L. resign and decamp before his part in Gately’s legal embryoglio could be nailed
down, and Pat M. had been pretty unconditionally loving about it but it was obvious
she wasn’t thrilled with Thrust’s tactics either and everything like that. Gately
blinked furiously to signify his agreement with Joelle’s position. Calvin Thrust gestured
stoically with his cigarette and said he’d told Pat M. the truth: he always told the
truth, no matter how unpleasant for himself, today: he said he’d said he’d encouraged
Lenz to rikky-tick out of there because otherwise he was afraid that he (Thrust) was
going to eliminate Lenz’s map on the spot, out of rage. Lenz’s solenoid appeared to
have been on the permanent dicky, because the rusty Duster was seen by new resident
Amy J. real early the next
A.M.
getting towed from its wrong-side-of-the-street spot in front of #3 when Amy J. slunk
back to the House all jonesy and hungover to get her Hefty bag full of evicted personal
shit, Lenz apparently having abandoned his wheels and fleen off by foot during all
the Finest’s confusion and static with the ambulance drivers that who could blame
them didn’t want to take Canadians because of horrible paperwork for Health Card reimbursement
for Nucks. The House Manager had gone so far as planting herself out in front of the
House’s locked front door with her not-all-that-small arms and legs spread out, blocking
the door, assertively stating at whatever Finest tried to enter that Ennet House was
court-mandated Protected by the Commonwealth of MA and could only be entered with
a Court Order and three working days’ mandated time for the House to file an injunction
and wait for a ruling, and the Finest and even the booger-eating morons from E.M.P.H.H.
Security were successfully held in bay and kept out, therefore, by her, alone, and
Pat M. was considering rewarding the House Manager’s coolness under fire by promoting
her to Assistant Director next month when the present Assistant Director left to go
get certified in jet-engine maintenance at East Coast Aerotech on a Mass Rehab grant.