Infinite Jest (163 page)

Sometime later, at night, backlit by the light of the hall, is the figure of resident
Geoffrey Day, sitting where Thrust had sat but with the chair turned around the right
way and with his legs primly crossed, eating a cream-cheese brownie he reports they’re
passing out free to people down at the nurses’ station. Day says Johnette F. is certainly
no Don Gately in the culinary arena. She seems to enjoy some sort of collusive kickback-type
relationship with the manufacturers of Spam, Day says, is his theory. It might be
a whole different night. The nighttime ceiling no longer bulges convexly with Gately’s
own shallow breaths, and the improved sounds he can now make have evolved from feline
to more like bovine. But his right side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It’s gone
from a fiery pain to cold dead deep tight pain with a queer flavor of emotional loss
to it. From deep inside he can hear the pain laughing at the 90 mg. of Toradol-IM
they’ve got in the I.V. drip. As with Ewell, when Gately comes up out of sleep there’s
no way to tell how long Day’s been there, or quite why. Day is plowing through a long
story it seems about his relationship growing up with his younger brother. Gately
has a hard time imagining Day being blood-related to anybody. Day says his brother
was developmentally challenged in some way. He had enormous red wet loose lips and
wore eyeglasses so thick his eyes had looked like an ant’s eyes, growing up. Part
of his challenge was that Day’s brother had had a crippling phobic fear of leaves,
apparently. As in ordinary leaves, from trees. Day’s been sucker-punched by an emergent
sober memory of how he used to emotionally abuse his little brother simply by threatening
to touch him with a leaf. Day has this way of holding his cheek and jaw when he talks
like cutout photos of the late J. Benny. It’s not at all evident why Day’s choosing
to share this stuff with a mute and feverishly semiconscious Gately. It seems like
Don G.’s gotten way more popular as somebody to talk to since he’s become effectively
paralyzed and mute. The ceiling’s behaving itself, but in the room’s gray Gately could
still make out a tallly insubstantial ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in
the mist of his vision’s periphery. There was some creepy relationship between the
figure’s postures and the passing nurses’ noiseless glide. This figure pretty definitely
seemed to prefer night to day, though by this point Gately could well have been asleep
again, as Day began to describe different species of hand-held leaves.

A recurring bad dream Gately’s had ever since he gave up and Came In and got straight
consists simply of a tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman looking down at him. Nothing
else happens; she’s just looking down at Gately. Her acne scars aren’t even all that
bad. The thing is that she’s tiny. She’s one of those tiny little anonymous Oriental
women you see all over metro Boston, always seeming to be carrying multiple shopping
bags. But in the recurring dream she’s looking
down
at him, from his perspective he’s looking up and she’s looking down, which means
Gately in the dream is either (a) lying down on his back looking vulnerably up at
her or (b) is himself even more incredibly tiny than the woman. Involved in the dream
also in a menacing way somehow is a dog standing rigidly in the distance past the
Oriental woman, motionless and rigid, in profile, standing there still and straight
as a toy. The Oriental woman has no particular expression and never says anything,
though her face’s scars have a certain elusive pattern to them that seems like it
wants to mean something. When Gately opens his eyes again Geoffrey Day’s gone, and
his hospital bed with its railings and I.V. bottles on stands has been moved way over
so that it’s right up next to the bed of whoever the person in the room’s other bed
is, so it’s like Gately and this unknown patient are a sexless old couple sleeping
together but in separate beds, and Gately’s mouth goes oval and his eyes bug out with
horror, and his effort at yelling hurts enough to wake him up, and his eyelids shoot
up and rattle like old windowshades, and his hospital bed’s back where it’s always
been, and a nurse is giving the anonymous guy in the other bed some sort of late-night-type
shot you could tell was narcotic, and the patient, who has a very deep voice, is crying.
Then somewhere later in the couple of hours before midnight’s parking-switch symphony
on Washington St. outside is an unpleasantly detailed dream where the ghostish figure
that’s been flickering in and out of sight around the room finally stays in one spot
long enough for Gately to really check him out. In the dream it’s the figure of a
very tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses and a sweatshirt with old stained
chinos, leaning back sort of casually or else morosely slumped, resting its tailbone
against the window sill’s ventilator’s whispering grille, with its long arms hanging
at its sides and its ankles casually crossed so that Gately can even see the detail
that the ghostly chinos aren’t long enough for its height, they’re the kind kids used
to call ‘Highwaters’ in Gately’s childhood—a couple of Bimmy Gately’s savager pals
would corner some pencil-necked kid in those-type too-short trousers on the playground
and go like ‘Yo little brother where’s the fucking
flood?
’ and then lay the kid out with a head-slap or chest-shove so the inevitable violin
went skittering ass-over-teakettle across the blacktop, in its case. The creepy ghostish
figure’s arm sometimes, like, vanishes and then reappears at the bridge of its nose,
pushing the glasses up in a weary unconscious morose gesture, just like those kids
in the Highwater pants on the playground always did in a weak morose way that always
somehow made Gately himself want to shove them savagely in the chest. Gately in the
dream experienced a painful adrenal flash of remorse and entertained the possibility
that the figure represented one of the North Shore violin-playing kids he’d never
kept his savage pals from abusing, now come in an adult state when Gately was vulnerable
and mute, to exact some kind of payback. The ghostly figure shrugged its thin shoulders
and said But no, it was nothing of the sort, it was just a plain old wraith, one without
any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith. Gately sarcastically
in the dream thought that Oh well then if it was just a garden-variety
wraith,
is all, geez what a fucking
relief
. The wraith-figure smiled apologetically and shrugged, shifting its tailbone on the
whispering grille a bit. There was an odd quality to its movements in the dream: they
were of regulation speed, the movements, but they seemed oddly segmented and deliberate,
as if more effort than necessary were going into them somehow. Then Gately considered
that who knew what was necessary or normal for a self-proclaimed generic wraith in
a pain-and-fever dream. Then he considered that this was the only dream he could recall
where even in the dream he knew that it was a dream, much less lay there considering
the fact that he was considering the up-front dream quality of the dream he was dreaming.
It quickly got so multilevelled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head.
The wraith made a weary morose gesture as if not wanting to bother to get into any
sort of confusing dream-v.-real controversies. The wraith said Gately might as well
stop trying to figure it out and just capitalize on its presence, the wraith’s presence
in the room or dream, whatever, because Gately, if he’d bothered to notice and appreciate
it, at least didn’t have to speak out loud to be able to interface with the wraith-figure;
and also the wraith-figure said it was by the way requiring incredible patience and
fortitude for him (the wraith) to stay in one position long enough for Gately to really
see him and interface with him, and the wraith was making no promises about how many
more months he (the wraith) could keep it up, since fortitude had never seemed to
have been his long suit. The city’s aggregate nighttime lights lightened the sky through
the room’s window to the same dark rose shade you see when you close your eyes, adding
to the dream-of-dream-type ambiguity. Gately in the dream tried the test of pretending
to lose consciousness so the wraith would go away, and then somewhere during the pretense
lost consciousness and really did sleep, for a bit, in the dream, because the tiny
pocked Oriental woman was back and looking wordlessly down at him, plus the creepy
rigid dog. And then the sedated patient in the next bed woke Gately back up, in the
original dream, with some kind of narcotized gurgle or snore, and the so-called wraith-figure
was still there and visible, only now it was standing on top of the railing at the
side of Gately’s bed, looking down at him now from a towering railing-plus-original-tallness
height, having to exaggerate his shoulders’ natural slump in order to clear the ceiling.
Gately got a clear view of an impressive thatch of nostril-hair, looking up into the
wraith’s nostrils, and also a clear lateral look at the wraith’s skinny ankles’ like
ankle-bones bulging in brown socks below the cuffs of the Highwater chinos. As much
as his shoulder, calf, toe, and whole right side were hurting, it occurred to Gately
that you don’t normally think of wraiths or ghostish phantasms as being tall or short,
or having bad posture, or wearing certain-colored socks. Much less having anything
as specific as extrusive nostril-hair. There was a degree of, what,
specificness
about this figure in this dream that Gately found troubling. Much less having the
unpleasant old-Oriental-woman dream
inside
this dream right here. He began to wish again that he could call out for assistance
or to wake himself up. But now not even moos or mews would come, all he could seem
to do was
pant
real hard, as if the air was like totally missing his vocal box, or like his vocal
box was totally demapped from nerve-damage in his shoulder and now just sort of hung
there all withered and dry like an old hornet nest while air rushed out Gately’s throat
all around it. His throat still didn’t feel right. It was exactly the suffocated speechlessness
in dreams, nightmares, Gately realized. This was both terrifying and reassuring, somehow.
Evidence for the dream-element and so on and so forth. The wraith was looking down
at him and nodding sympathetically. The wraith could empathize totally, it said. The
wraith said Even a garden-variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be
anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men, but it couldn’t
ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to anybody,
a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody’s like internal
brain-voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and
insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts,
from inside your own head, if a wraith’s trying to interface with you. The wraith
says By way of illustration consider phenomena like intuition or inspiration or hunches,
or when someone for instance says ‘a little voice inside’ was telling them such-and-such
on an intuitive basis. Gately can now take no more than a third of a normal breath
without wanting to throw up from the pain. The wraith was pushing his glasses up and
saying Besides, it took incredible discipline and fortitude and patient effort to
stay stock-still in one place for long enough for an animate man actually to see and
be in any way affected by a wraith, and very few wraiths had anything important enough
to interface about to be willing to stand still for this kind of time, preferring
ordinarily to whiz around at the invisible speed of quanta. The wraith says It doesn’t
really matter whether Gately knows what the term
quanta
means. He says Wraiths by and large exist (putting his arms out slowly and making
little quotation-mark finger-wiggles as he said
exist
) in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage.
As an example, he goes on, normal animate men’s actions and motions look, to a wraith,
to be occurring at about the rate a clock’s hour-hand moves, and are just about as
interesting to look at. Gately was thinking for fuck’s sake what was this, now even
in unpleasant fever-dreams now somebody else is going to tell him their troubles now
that Gately can’t get away or dialogue back with anything about his own experience.
He normally couldn’t ever get Ewell or Day to sit down for any kind of real or honest
mutual sharing, and now that he’s totally mute and inert and passive all of a sudden
everybody seems to view him as a sympathetic ear, or not even a sympathetic
real
ear, more like a wooden carving or statue of an ear. An empty confessional booth.
Don G. as huge empty confessional booth. The wraith disappears and instantly reappears
in a far corner of the room, waving Hi at him. It was slightly reminiscent of ‘Bewitched’
reruns from Gately’s toddlerhood. The wraith disappears again and again just as instantly
reappears, now holding one of Gately’s Ennet House basement flea-baggy Staff bedroom’s
cut-out-and-Scotch-taped celebrity photos, this one an old one of U.S. Head of State
Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, on stage, wearing velour, twirling a mike, from back
in the days before he went to a copper-colored toupee, when he used a strigil instead
of a UV flash-booth and was just a Vegas crooner. Again the wraith disappears and
instantly reappears holding a can of Coke, with good old Coke’s distinctive interwoven
red and white French curls on it but alien unfamiliar Oriental-type writing on it
instead of the good old words
Coca-Cola
and
Coke
. The unfamiliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream’s worst moment. The
wraith walks jerkily and overdeliberately across the floor and then up a wall, occasionally
disappearing and then reappearing, sort of fluttering mistily, and ends up standing
upside-down on the hospital room’s drop ceiling, directly over Gately, and holds one
knee to its sunken chest and starts doing what Gately would know were pirouettes if
he’d ever once been exposed to ballet, pirouetting faster and faster and then so fast
the wraith’s nothing but a long stalk of sweatshirt-and-Coke-can-colored light that
seems to extrude from the ceiling; and then, in a moment that rivals the Coke-can
moment for unpleasantness, into Gately’s personal mind, in Gately’s own brain-voice
but with roaring and unwilled force, comes the term
PIROUETTE,
in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn’t have any idea what it means
and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy
but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape. Gately begins to consider this hopefully
nonrecurring dream even more unpleasant than the tiny-pocked-Oriental-woman dream,
overall. Other terms and words Gately knows he doesn’t know from a divot in the sod
now come crashing through his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g.
ACCIACCATURA
and
ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS
and
NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO
and
PROPRIOCEPTION
and
TESTUDO
and
ANNULATE
and
BRICOLAGE
and
CATALEPT
and
GERRYMANDER
and
SCOPOPHILIA
and
LAERTES
—and all of a sudden it occurs to Gately the aforethought
EXTRUDING, STRIGIL
and
LEXICAL
themselves—and
LORDOSIS
and
IMPOST
and
SINISTRAL
and
MENISCUS
and
CHRONAXY
and
POOR YORICK
and
LUCULUS
and
CERISE MONTCLAIR
and then
DE SICA NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY
and
CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE
and then more lexical terms and words speeding up to chipmunkish and then
HELIATED
and then all the way up to a sound like a mosquito on speed, and Gately tries to
clutch both his temples with one hand and scream, but nothing comes out. When the
wraith reappears, it’s seated way up behind him where Gately has to let his eyes roll
way back in his head to see him, and it turns out Gately’s heart is being medically
monitored and the wraith is seated up on the heart monitor in a strange cross-legged
posture with his pantcuffs pulled up so high Gately could see the actual skinny hairless
above-the-sock skin of the wraith’s ankles, glowing a bit in the spilled light of
the Trauma Wing hall. The Oriental can of Coke now rests on Gately’s broad flat forehead.
It’s cold and smells a little funny, like low tide, the can. Now footsteps and the
sound of bubblegum in the hall. An orderly shines a flashlight in and plays it over
Gately and the narcotized roommate and environs, and makes marks on a clipboard while
blowing a small orange bubble. It’s not like the light passes through the wraith or
anything dramatic—the wraith simply disappears the instant the light hits the heart
monitor and reappears the instant it moves away. Gately’s unpleasant dreams definitely
don’t normally include specific gum-color and intense physical discomfort and invasions
of lexical terms he doesn’t know from shinola. Gately begins to conclude it’s not
impossible that the garden-variety wraith on the heart monitor, though not conventionally
real, could be a sort of epiphanyish visitation from Gately’s personally confused
understanding of God, a Higher Power or something, maybe sort of like the legendary
Pulsing Blue Light that AA founder Bill W. historically saw during his last detox,
that turned out to be God telling him how to stay sober via starting AA and Carrying
The Message. The wraith smiles sadly and says something like Don’t we both wish, young
sir. Gately’s forehead wrinkling as his eyes keep rolling up makes the foreign can
wobble coldly: of course there’s also the possibility that the tall slumped extremely
fast wraith might represent the Sergeant at Arms, the Disease, exploiting the loose
security of Gately’s fever-addled mind, getting ready to fuck with his motives and
persuade him to accept Demerol just once, just one last time, for the totally legitimate
medical pain. Gately lets himself wonder what it would be like, able to quantum off
anyplace instantly and stand on ceilings and probably burgle like no burglar’d ever
dreamed of, but not able to really affect anything or interface with anybody, having
nobody know you’re there, having people’s normal rushed daily lives look like the
movements of planets and suns, having to sit patiently very still in one place for
a long time even to have some poor addled son of a bitch even be willing to entertain
your maybe being there. It’d be real free-seeming, but incredibly lonely, he imagines.
Gately knows a thing or two about loneliness, he feels. Does