Infinite Jest (164 page)

wraith
mean like a ghost, as in dead? Is this a message from a Higher Power about sobriety
and death? What would it be like to try and talk and have the person think it was
just their own mind talking? Gately could maybe Identify, to an extent, he decides.
This is the only time he’s ever been struck dumb except for a brief but nasty bout
of pleuritic laryngitis he’d had when he was twenty-four and sleeping on the cold
beach up in Gloucester, and he doesn’t like it a bit, the being struck dumb. It’s
like some combination of invisibility and being buried alive, in terms of the feeling.
It’s like being strangled somewhere deeper inside you than your neck. Gately imagines
himself with a piratical hook, unable to speak on Commitments because he can only
gurgle and pant, doomed to an AA life of ashtrays and urns. The wraith reaches down
and removes the can of un-American tonic from Gately’s forehead and assures Gately
he can more than Identify with an animate man’s feelings of communicative impotence
and mute strangulation. Gately’s thoughts become agitated as he tries to yell mentally
that he never said a fucking thing about im
potence
. He’s got a way clearer and more direct view of the wraith’s extreme nostril-hair
situation than he’d prefer to. The wraith hefts the can absently and says age twenty-eight
seems old enough for Gately to remember U.S. broadcast television’s old network situation
comedies of the B.S. ’80s and ’90s, probably. Gately has to smile at the wraith’s
cluelessness: Gately’s after all a fucking drug addict, and a drug addict’s second
most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit, TV/VCR
or HDTP. A drug addict’s maybe the only human species whose own personal vision has
a Vertical Hold, for Christ’s sake, he thinks. And Gately, even in recovery, can still
summon great verbatim chunks not only of drug-addicted adolescence’s ‘Seinfeld’ and
‘Ren and Stimpy’ and ‘Oo Is ’E When ’E’s at ’Ome’ and ‘Exposed Northerners’ but also
the syndicated ‘Bewitched’ and ‘Hazel’ and ubiquitous ‘M*A*S*H’ he grew to monstrous
childhood size in front of, and especially the hometown ensemble-casted ‘Cheers!,’
both the late-network version with the stacked brunette and the syndicated older ones
with the titless blond, which Gately even after the switch over to InterLace and HDTP
dissemination felt like he had a special personal relationship with ‘Cheers!,’ not
only because everybody on the show always had a cold foamer in hand, just like in
real life, but because Gately’s big childhood claim to recognition had been his eerie
resemblance to the huge neckless simian-browed accountant Nom who more or less seemed
to live at the bar, and was unkind but not cruel, and drank foamer after foamer without
once hitting anybody’s Mom or pitching over sideways and passing out in vomit somebody
else had to clean up, and who’d looked—right down to the massive square head and Neanderthal
brow and paddle-sized thumbs—eerily like the child D. W. (‘Bim’) Gately, hulking and
neckless and shy, riding his broom handle, Sir Osis of Thuliver. And the wraith on
the heart monitor looks pensively down at Gately from upside-down and asks does Gately
remember the myriad thespian extras on for example his beloved ‘Cheers!,’ not the
center-stage Sam and Carla and Nom, but the nameless patrons always at tables, filling
out the bar’s crowd, concessions to realism, always relegated to back- and foreground;
and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths
move realistically, but without sound; only the name-stars at the bar itself could
audibilize. The wraith says these fractional actors, human scenery, could be seen
(but not heard) in most pieces of filmed entertainment. And Gately remembers them,
the extras in all public scenes, especially like bar and restaurant scenes, or rather
remembers how he doesn’t quite remember them, how it never struck his addled mind
as in fact surreal that their mouths moved but nothing emerged, and what a miserable
fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture,
figurants
the wraith says they’re called, these surreally mute background presences whose presence
really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of
who’s important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen. A term from ballet, originally,
figurant,
the wraith explains. The wraith pushes his glasses up in the vaguely snivelling way
of a kid that’s just got slapped around on the playground and says he personally spent
the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture
at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it turned out, and that it’s one
heck of a crummy way to try to live. Gately, whose increasing self-pity leaves little
room or patience for anybody else’s self-pity, tries to lift his left hand and wiggle
his pinkie to indicate the world’s smallest viola playing the theme from
The Sorrow and the Pity,
but even moving his left arm makes him almost faint. And either the wraith is saying
or Gately is realizing that you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant
until you realize how completely
trapped
and
encaged
he is in his mute peripheral status, because like say for example if one of ‘Cheers!’
’s bar’s figurants suddenly decided he couldn’t take it any more and stood up and
started shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral
status on the show, Gately realizes, all that would happen is that one of the audibilizing
‘name’ stars of the show would bolt over from stage-center and apply restraints or
the Heineken Maneuver or CPR, figuring the silent gesturing figurant was choking on
a beer-nut or something, and that then the whole rest of that episode of ‘Cheers!’
would be about jokes about the name star’s life-saving heroics, or else his fuck-up
in applying the Heineken Maneuver to somebody who wasn’t choking on a nut. No way
for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant. Gately
speculates briefly about the suicide statistics for bottom-rung actors. The wraith
disappears and then reappears in the chair by the bed’s railing, leaning forward with
its chin on its hands on the railing in what Gately’s coming to regard as the classic
tell-your-troubles-to-the-trauma-patient-that-can’t-interrupt-or-get-away position.
The wraith says that he himself, the wraith, when animate, had dabbled in filmed entertainments,
as in making them, cartridges, for Gately’s info to either believe or not, and but
in the entertainments the wraith himself made, he says he goddamn bloody well made
sure that either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that
you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on
the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were; and that it wasn’t just the
self-conscious overlapping dialogue of a poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn’t
just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was real life’s real egalitarian babble
of figurantless crowds, of the animate world’s real agora, the babble
³⁴²
of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his
own entertainment. It occurs to Gately he’s never had any sort of dream where somebody
says anything like
vast bulk,
much less
agora,
which Gately interprets as a kind of expensive sweater. Which was why, the wraith
is continuing, the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line
entertainment-critics always complained that the wraith’s entertainments’ public-area
scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could
never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered
babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious
viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism. The wraith’s
grim smile almost disappears before it appears. Gately’s slight tight smile back is
the way you can always tell he’s not really listening. He’s remembering that he used
to pretend to himself that the unviolent and sarcastic accountant Nom on ‘Cheers!’
was Gately’s own organic father, straining to hold young Bimmy on his lap and letting
him draw finger-pictures in the condensation-rings on the bartop, and when he was
pissed off at Gately’s mother being sarcastic and witty instead of getting her down
and administering horribly careful U.S.-Navy-brig-type beatings that hurt like hell
but would never bruise or show. The can of foreign Coke has left a ring on his forehead
that’s colder than the feverish skin around it, and Gately tries to concentrate on
the cold of the ring instead of the dead cold total ache on his whole right side—
DEXTRAL
—or the sober memory of his mother Mrs. Gately’s ex-significant other, the little-eyed
former M.P. in khaki skivvies hunched drunk over his notebook’s record of his Heinekens
for the day, his tongue in the corner of his mouth and his eyes scrunched as he tries
to see a unitary enough notebook to write in, Gately’s mother on the floor trying
to crawl off toward the lockable bathroom quietly enough so the M.P. wouldn’t notice
her again.

The wraith says Just to give Gately an idea, he, the wraith, in order to appear as
visible and interface with him, Gately, he, the wraith, has been sitting, still as
a root, in the chair by Gately’s bedside for the wraith-equivalent of
three weeks,
which Gately can’t even imagine. It occurs to Gately that none of the people that’ve
dropped by to tell him their troubles has bothered to say how many days he’s even
been in the Trauma Wing now, or what day it’s going to be when the sun comes up, and
so Gately has no idea how long he’s gone now without an AA meeting. Gately wishes
his sponsor Ferocious Francis G. would hobble by instead of Ennet Staff that want
to talk about prosfeces and residents who come just to share remembered wreckage with
somebody they don’t even think can even hear them, sort of the way a little kid confides
to a dog. He doesn’t let himself even contemplate why no Finest or federally crew-cut
guys have visited yet, if he’s been in here a while, if they’ve been all over the
House like hamsters on wheat already, as Thrust had said. The seated shadow of somebody
in a hat is still there out there in the hall, though if the whole interlude was a
dream it isn’t and has never been there, Gately realizes, squinting a little to try
to make sure the shadow is the shadow of a hat and not a fire-extinguisher box on
the hall wall or something. The wraith excuses himself and disappears but then reappears
two slow blinks later, back in the same position. ‘That was worth an Excuse Me?’ Gately
thinks at the wraith dryly, almost laughing. The sheet of pain from the near-laugh
send his eyes way up back up in his head. The chassis of the heart monitor doesn’t
look broad enough to support even a wraith’s ass. The heart monitor’s the silent kind.
It’s got the moving white line with big speed bumps moving across it for Gately’s
pulse, but it doesn’t make the sterile beeping that old hospital-drama monitors did.
Patients in hospital-dramas were frequently unconscious figurants, Gately reflects.
The wraith says he’d just paid a small quantumish call to the old spotless Brighton
two-decker of one Ferocious Francis Gehaney, and from the way the old Crocodile’s
shaving and putting on a clean white T-shirt, the wraith says, he predicts F.F. will
be visiting the Trauma Wing soon to offer Gately unconditional empathy and fellowship
and acerbic Crocodilian counsel. Unless this was just Gately himself thinking this
up to keep a stiff upper attitude, Gately thinks. The wraith pushes his glasses up
sadly. You never think of a wraith looking sad or unsad, but this dream-wraith displays
the whole affective range. Gately can hear the horns and raised voices and U-turn
squeals way down below on Wash. that indicate it’s around 0000h., the switching hour.
He wonders what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that
has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not figurant, Gately meant, he
corrects himself. He’s lying here correcting his thoughts like he was talking. He
wonders if his brain-voice talks fast enough for the wraith not to have to like tap
its foot and look at its watch between words. Are they words if they’re only in your
head, though? The wraith blows its nose in a hankie that’s visibly seen better epochs
and says he, the wraith, when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own
personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous
and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end. His end, not the son’s
end, the wraith clarifies. Gately wonders if it offends the wraith when he sometimes
refers to it mentally as
it
. The wraith opens and examines the used hankie just like an alive person can never
help but do and says No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own
offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out. The wraith says it mars the memory
of the end of his animate life, this son’s retreat to the periphery of life’s frame.
The wraith confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy’s mother for his silence.
But what good does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might
have been shrugging. Gately remembers the former Navy M.P. telling Gately’s mother
why it was her fault he lost his job at the chowder plant. ‘Resentment Is The #1 Offender’
is another Boston AA cliché Gately’d started to believe. That blame’s a shell-game.
Not that he wouldn’t mind a private couple of minutes alone in a doorless room with
Randy Lenz, once he was up and capable again, though.

The wraith reappears slumped back in the chair with his weight on his tailbone and
his legs crossed in that Erdedyish upscale way. He says Just imagine the horror of
spending your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully
to convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard
and seen but not so well that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad’s) projections
of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen, gesturing wildly
through the distilled haze, so that in adulthood you still carried the moist flabby
weight of your failure ever to make him hear you really
speak,
carried it on through the animate years on your increasingly slumped shoulders—only
to find, near the end, that your very own child had himself become blank, inbent,
silent, frightening, mute. I.e. that his son had become what he (the wraith) had feared
as a child he (the wraith) was. Gately’s eyes roll up in his head. The boy, who did
everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked,
and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son)
know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more
hidden
boy, toward the wraith’s life’s end; and no one else in the wraith and boy’s nuclear
family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy
was disappearing right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.
And they listened but did not hear the wraith’s warning. Gately has that slight tight
absent smile again. The wraith says the nuclear family had believed he (the wraith)
was unstable and was confusing the boy with his own (the wraith’s) boyhood self, or
with the wraith’s father’s father, the blank wooden man who according to family mythology
had ‘driven’ the wraith’s father to ‘the bottle’ and unrealized potential and an early
cerebral hemorrhage. Toward the end, he’d begun privately to fear that his son was
experimenting with Substances. The wraith keeps having to push its glasses up. The
wraith says almost bitterly that when he’d stand up and wave his arms for them all
to attend to the fact that his youngest and most promising son was disappearing, they’d
thought all his agitation meant was that he had gone bats from Wild Turkey–intake
and needed to try to get sober, again, one more time.