Infinite Jest (165 page)

This gets Gately’s attention. Here at last could be some sort of point to the unpleasantness
and confusion of the dream. ‘You tried to get sober?’ he thinks, rolling his eyes
over to the wraith. ‘More than once, you tried? Was it White-Knuckle?
³⁴³
Did you ever Surrender and Come In?’

The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety
days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and
the muted son could simply
converse
. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a
new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and
come
out
—even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done
it, impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment.
Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall
into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy
to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and
toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they
say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have
it
heard
. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that
his most serious wish was:
to entertain
.

Gately’s not too agonized and feverish not to recognize gross self-pity when he hears
it, wraith or no. As in the slogan ‘Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink.’ With all due
respect, pretty hard to believe this wraith could stay sober, if he needed to get
sober, with the combination of abstraction and tragically-misunderstood-me attitude
he’s betraying, in the dream.

He’d been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life,
the wraith avers, now back up on the silent heart monitor, though Boston AA had a
humorless evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty.
And he never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction. Not to mention
the cigarette smoke. The atmosphere of the meeting rooms had been like a poker game
in hell, had been his impression. The wraith stops and says he bets Gately’s struggling
to hide his curiosity about whether the wraith succeeded in coming up with a figurantless
entertainment so thoroughly engaging it’d make even an in-bent figurant of a boy laugh
and cry out for more.

Father-figure-wise, Gately’s tried his best these last few sober months to fend off
uninvited memories of his own grim conversations and interchanges with the M.P.

The wraith on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his
face is upside-down only cm. from Gately’s face—the wraith’s face is only about half
the size of Gately’s face, and has no odor—and responds vehemently that No!
No! Any
conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that
the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal
or hiddenness on either side. The wraith apparently can’t tell the difference between
Gately just thinking to himself and Gately using his brain-voice to sort of think
at
the wraith. His shoulder suddenly sends up a flare of pain so sickening Gately’s
afraid he might shit the bed. The wraith gasps and almost falls off the monitor as
if he can totally empathize with the dextral flare. Gately wonders if the wraith has
to endure the same pain as Gately in order to hear his brain-voice and have a conversation
with him. Even in a dream, that’d be a higher price than anybody’s ever paid to interface
with D. W. Gately. Maybe the pain’s supposed to lend credibility to some Diseased
argument for Demerol the wraith’s going to make. Gately feels somehow too self-conscious
or stupid to ask the wraith if it’s here on behalf of the Higher Power or maybe the
Disease, so instead of thinking at the wraith he simply concentrates on pretending
to wonder to himself why the wraith is spending probably months of aggregate wraith-time
flitting around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with crooner-photos
and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn’t know from a rock
instead of just quantuming over to wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding
very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking
son
. Though maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would
drive the youngest son bats, though, might be the thing. The son didn’t exactly sound
like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith’s
shared. Of course this was assuming the mute figurant son even existed, this was assuming
this wasn’t all some roundabout way of the Disease starting to talk Gately into succumbing
to a shot of Demerol. He tries to concentrate on all this instead of remembering what
Demerol’s warm rush of utter well-being felt like, remembering the comfortable sound
of the clunk of his chin against his chest. Or instead of remembering any of his own
interchanges with his mother’s live-in retired M.P. One of the highest prices of sobriety
was not being able to keep from remembering things you didn’t want to remember, see
for instance Ewell and the fraudulent-grandiosity thing from his wienieish childhood.
The ex-M.P. had referred to small children and toddlers as ‘rug-rats.’ It was not
a term of gruff affection. The M.P. had made the toddler Don Gately return empty Heineken
bottles to the neighborhood packy and then haul-ass on back with the bottle-deposits,
timing him with a U.S.N.-issue chronometer. He never laid a hand on Gately personally,
that Don could recall. But he’d still been afraid of the M.P. The M.P.’d beaten his
mother up on an almost daily basis. The most hazardous time for Gately’s mother was
between eight Heinekens and ten Heinekens. When the M.P. threw her on the floor and
knelt down very intently over her, picking his spots and hitting her very intently,
he’d looked like a lobsterman pulling at his outboard’s rope. The M.P. was slightly
shorter than Mrs. Gately but was broad and very muscular, and proud of his muscles,
going shirtless whenever possible. Or in like sleeveless khaki military T’s. He had
bars and weights and benches, and had taught the child Don Gately the fundamentals
of free-weight training, with special emphasis on control and form as opposed to just
sloppily lifting as much weight as possible. The weights were old and greasy and their
poundage pre-metric. The M.P. was very precise and controlled in his approach to things,
in a way Gately has somehow come to associate with all blond-haired men. When Gately,
at age ten, began to be able to bench-press more weight than the M.P., the M.P. had
not taken it in a good spirit and began refusing to spot him on his sets. The M.P.
entered his own weights and repetitions carefully in a little notebook, pausing to
do this after each set. He always licked the point of the pencil before he wrote,
a habit Gately still finds repellent. In a different little notebook, the M.P. noted
the date and time of each Heineken he consumed. He was the sort of person who equated
incredibly careful record-keeping with control. In other words he was by nature a
turd-counter. Gately had realized this at a very young age, and that it was bullshit
and maybe crazy. The M.P. was very possibly crazy. The circumstances of his leaving
the Navy were like: shadowy. When Gately involuntarily remembers the M.P. now he also
remembers—and wonders why, and feels bad—that he never once asked his mother about
the M.P. and why the fuck was he even there and did she actually love him, and why
did she love him when he flang her down and beat her up on a more or less daily basis
for fucking years on end. The intensifying rose-colors behind Gately’s closed lids
are from the hospital room lightening as the light outside the window gets licoricey
and pre-dawn. Gately lies below the unoccupied heart-monitor snoring so hard the railings
on either side of his bed shiver and rattle. When the M.P. was sleeping or out of
the house, Don Gately and Mrs. Gately never once talked about him. His memory is clear
on this. It wasn’t just that they never discussed him, or the notebooks or weights
or chronometer or his beating up Mrs. Gately. The M.P.’s name was never even mentioned.
The M.P. worked nights a lot—driving a cheese-and-egg delivery truck for Cheese King
Inc. until he was terminated for embezzling wheels of Stilton and fencing them, then
for a time on a mostly automated canning line, pulling a lever that sent New England
chowder out of hundreds of spigots into hundreds of lidless cans with an indescribable
plopping sound—and the Gately home was like a different world when the M.P. was working
or out: it was like the very idea of the M.P. walked out the door with him, leaving
Don and his mother not just behind but alone, together, at night, she on the couch
and he on the floor, both gradually losing consciousness in front of broadcast TV’s
final seasons. Gately tries especially hard now not to explore why it never occurred
to him to step in and pull the M.P. off his mother, even after he could bench-press
more than the M.P. The precise daily beatings had always seemed in some strangely
emphatic way not his business. He rarely even felt anything, he remembers, watching
him hit her. The M.P. was totally unshy about hitting her in front of Gately. It was
like everybody unspokenly agreed the whole thing was none of Bimmy’s beeswax. When
he was a toddler he’d flee the room and cry about it, he seems to recall. By a certain
age, though, all he’d do is raise the volume on the television, not even bothering
to look over at the beating, watching ‘Cheers!’ Sometimes he’d leave the room and
go into the garage and lift weights, but when he left the room it was never like he
was fleeing the room. When he’d been small he’d sometimes hear the springs and sounds
from their bedroom sometimes in the
A.M.
and worry that the M.P. was beating her up on their bed, but at a certain point without
anybody taking him aside and explaining anything to him he realized that the sounds
then didn’t mean she was getting hurt. The similarity of her hurt sounds in the kitchen
and living room and her sex-sounds through the asbestos fiberboard bedroom wall troubles
Gately, though, when he remembers now, and is one reason why he fends off remembering,
when awake.

Shirtless in the summer—and pale, with a blond man’s dislike for the sun—the M.P.
would sit in the little kitchen, at the kitchen table, feet flat on the wood-grain
tiling, with a patriotic-themed bandanna wrapped around his head, recording Heinekens
in his little notebook. A previous tenant had thrown something heavy through the kitchen
window once, and the window’s screen was fucked up and not quite flush, and houseflies
came and went more or less at will. Gately, when small, would be in there in the kitchen
with the M.P. sometimes; the tile was better for his little cars’ suspensions than
nubbly carpet. What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep,
is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the
kitchen. He used no swatter or rolled cone of
Herald
. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white and fast. He’d whack them as they lit
on the kitchen table. The flies. But in a controlled way. Not hard enough to kill
them. He was very controlled and intent about it. He’d whack them just hard enough
to disable them. Then he’d pick them up real precisely and remove either a wing or
like a leg, something important to the fly. He’d take the wing or leg over to the
beige kitchen wastebasket and very deliberately hike the lid with the foot-pedal and
deposit the tiny wing or leg in the wastebasket, bending at the waist. The memory
is unbidden and very clear. The M.P.’d wash his hands at the kitchen sink, using green
generic dishwashing liquid. The maimed fly itself he’d ignore and allow to scuttle
in crazed circles on the table until it got stuck in a sticky spot or fell off the
edge onto the kitchen floor. The conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences
in minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens, explaining that
maiming a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies. A fly was stuck
in a sticky spot of dried Heineken and agitating its wing as the M.P. explained that
a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear. Human beings
couldn’t hear a maimed fly’s screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass
other flies could, and the screams of their maimed colleagues helped keep them away.
By the time the M.P. would put his head on his big pale arms and grab a little shut-eye
among the Heineken bottles on the sun-heated table there’d often be several flies
trapped in goo or scuttling in circles on the table, sometimes giving odd little hops,
trying to fly with one wing or no wings. Possibly in Denial, these flies, as to their
like condition. The ones that fell to the floor Gately would hunch directly over on
hands and knees, getting one big red ear down just as close to the fly as possible,
listening, his big pink forehead wrinkled. What makes Gately most uncomfortable now
as he starts to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true hospital morning is that
he can’t remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery, ever, after the M.P.
passed out, can’t mentally see himself stepping on them or wrapping them in paper
towels and flushing them down the toilet or something, but he feels like he must have;
it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing something more than just
hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer-cars and trying to see if he could hear
tiny agonized screams, listening very intently. But he can’t for the life of him remember
doing more than trying to hear, and the sheer cerebral stress of trying to force a
more noble memory should have awakened him, on top of the dextral hurt; but he doesn’t
come all the way awake in the big crib until the memory’s realistic dream bleeds into
a nasty fictional dream where he’s wearing Lenz’s worsted topcoat and leaning very
precisely and carefully over the prone figure of the Hawaiian-dressed Nuck whose head
he’s whacked repeatedly against the hood’s windshield, he’s supporting his inclined
weight on his good left hand against the warm throbbing hood, bent in real close to
the maimed head, his ear to the bleeding face, listening very intently. The head opens
its red mouth.