Infinite Jest (169 page)

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy
in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered
Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the
good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell
hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal.
The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere
Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it
a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one
second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for
60 more of these seconds—he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build
a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped
in his memory down into like one second—less: the space between two heartbeats. A
breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching
its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since
felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White
Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed
like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.

But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now—it had vanished in Revere Holding
along with the heaves and chills. He’d returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk’s
edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to.

His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird’s hurt was.
He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk
toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible
leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second,
the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis’s own sponsor,
the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time:
It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it
The Present
.

‘And yet it wasn’t til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled
me up there and I said it that I realized,’ Joelle said. ‘I don’t
have
to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they’ll help me stick to the
choice. I don’t think I’d realized before that I could—I can really
do
this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.’

The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes
yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right
at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over
from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one
single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it.
What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching
ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there
in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter,
of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering.
It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s
real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold
Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each
heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable
is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking
over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his
head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now,
how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything
unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the
wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
If Gately got out of this, he decided, he was going to take the Knievel picture off
his wall and mount it and give it to Joelle, and they’d laugh, and she’d call him
Don or The Bimster, etc.

Gately rolls his eyes way over to the right to see Joelle again, who she’s using both
pale hands to get the big book open on her sweatpants’ lap. Gray windowlight shines
on clear plastic sheets like little laminates inside the thing.

‘… idea to haul this out last night and was looking at it. I wanted to show you my
own personal Daddy,’ she says. She’s holding the photo album out at him, wide open,
like a kindergarten teacher at storytime. Gately makes a production of squinting.
Joelle comes over and rests the big album on the top of Gately’s crib-railing, peering
down over the top and pointing at a snapshot in its little square sleeve.

‘Right there’s my Daddy.’ In front of a low white porch-railing, a generic lean old
guy with lines around his nose from squinting into sunlight and the composed smile
of somebody that’s been told to smile. A skinny dog at his side, half in profile.
Gately’s more interested in how the shadow of whoever took the photo is canted into
the shot’s foreground, darkening half the dog.

‘And that’s one of the dogs, a pointer that got hit right after that by a UPS truck
out to 104,’ she says. ‘Where no animal with a lick of sense would think it had business
being. My Daddy never names dogs. That one’s just called the one that got hit by the
UPS truck.’ Her voice is different again.

Gately tries to Abide in seeing what she’s pointing at. Most of the rest of the page’s
pictures are of farm-type animals behind wooden fences, looking the way things look
that can’t smile, that don’t know a camera’s looking. Joelle said her personal Daddy
was a low-pH chemist, but her late mother’s own Daddy had left them a farm, and Joelle’s
Daddy moved them out there and jick-jacked around with farming, mostly as an excuse
to keep lots of pets and stick experimental low-pH stuff in the soil.

At some point in here an all-business nurse comes in and fucks with the I.V. bottles,
then hunkers down and changes the catheter-receptacle under the bed, and for a second
Gately likes to die of embarrassment. Joelle seems not even to be pretending not to
notice.

‘And this right here’s a bull we used to call Mr. Man.’ Her slim thumb moves from
shot to shot. The sunlight in Kentucky looks bright-yellower than NNE’s. The trees
are a meaner green and have got weird mossy shit hanging from them. ‘And this right
here’s a mule called Chet that could jump the fence and used to get at everybody’s
flowers out along Route 45 til Daddy had to put him down. This is a cow. This right
here’s Chet’s mama. It’s a mare. I don’t recollect any kind of name except “Chet’s
Mama.” Daddy’d let her out to neighbors that really did farm, to sort of make up for
folks’ flowers.’

Gately nods studiously at each photo, trying to Abide. He hasn’t thought about the
wraith or the wraith-dream once since he woke up from the dream where Joelle was Mrs.
Waite as a maternal Death-figure. Next life’s Chet’s Mama. He opens his eyes wide
to clear his head. Joelle’s head is down, looking down at the open album from overhead.
Her veil hangs loose and blank again, so close he could reach his left hand up and
lift it if he wanted. The open book she’s moving her hand around in gives Gately an
idea he can’t believe he’s only having now. Except he worries because he isn’t left-handed.
Which is to say
SINISTRAL
. Joelle’s got her thumb by a weird old sepia shot of the ass and hunched back of
some guy scrabbling up the slope of a roof. ‘Uncle Lum,’ she says, ‘Mr. Riney, Lum
Riney, my Daddy’s partner over to the shop, that breathed some kind of fume at the
shop when I was little, and got strange, and now he’ll always try and climb up on
top of shit, if you let him.’

He winces at the pain of moving his left arm to put a hand on her wrist to get her
attention. Her wrist is thin across the top but oddly deep, thick-seeming. Gately
gets her to look at him and takes the hand off her wrist and uses it to mime writing
awkwardly in the air, his eyes rolling a bit from the pain of it. This is his idea.
He points at her and then out the window and circles his hand back to her. He refuses
to grunt or moo to emphasize anything. His forefinger is twice the size of her thumb
as he again mimes holding an implement and writing on the air. He makes such a big
slow obvious show of it because he can’t see her eyes to be sure she gets what he’s
after.

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the
crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within
a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female,
all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint
knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively
wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he’s going, the drug addict
has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the
kids or is mentally happily still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting
together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing modified for Gately’s
mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having
to speak to converse, calling each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Papa,’ knowing they’ll kick
within weeks of each other because neither could possibly live without the other,
is how bonded they’ve got through the years.

The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle (‘M.P.’) van Dyne keeps foundering
on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil,
however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle’s veil in moonlight on their
honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her
forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something.
³⁵⁰
So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can’t help envisioning
the old X, with Joelle well-veiled and crying out
And Lo!
in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm—the closest Gately’d ever come
to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging
loft, who’d borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle
share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second’s
wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to
bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube
and catheter out of St. E.’s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD
Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat
might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress
and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles
under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery
and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a
Liebestod
-type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it’s so cowardly. And even contemplating a romantic
thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful. In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called
13th-Stepping
³⁵¹
and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It’s predation. Newcomers
come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside
of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior,
to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming
as their former friend the Substance. To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of
them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance’s betrayal, and grieving
it. Plus let’s not even mention the mirror-and-vulnerability issues of a newcomer
that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA’s stronger suggestions is that newcomers
avoid all romantic relationships for at least a year. So somebody with some sober
time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer is almost tantamount to rape, is the
Boston consensus. Not that it isn’t done. But the ones that do it never have the kind
of sobriety anybody else respects or wants for themselves. A 13th-Stepper is still
running from the mirror himself.

Not to mention that a Staffer seducing a new resident he’s supposed to be there to
help would be dicking over Pat Montesian and Ennet House on a grand scale.

Gately sees it’s probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident
with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head’s real fantasy
is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in like Kentucky
on a modified porch swing. He’s still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to
take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his various cages. It’s the
same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll
up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there.

I went down the hall to take out the tobacco and brush my teeth and rinse out the
Spiru-Tein can, which had gotten an unpleasant crust along the sides. The subdorm
halls were curved and had no corners as such, but you can see at most three doors
and the jamb of the fourth from any point in the hall before the curve extrudes into
your line of sight. I wondered briefly whether it was true that small children believed
their parents could see them even around corners and curves.

The high wind’s moan and doors’ rattle were worse in the uncarpeted hall. I could
hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms beyond my line of sight.
Lots of the top players start the
A.M.
with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale and well-wrapped for the rest
of the day.