Infinite Jest (17 page)

Schtitt has the sort of creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously.
He has surprised blue eyes and a vivid white crewcut of the sort that looks virile
and good on men who have lost a lot of hair anyway. And skin so clean-sheet-white
it almost glows; an evident immunity to the sun’s UV; in pine-shaded twilight he is
almost glowingly white, as if cut from the stuff of moons. He has a way of focusing
his whole self’s concentration very narrowly, adjusting his legs’ spread for the varicoceles
and curling one arm over the other and sort of drawing himself in around the pipe
he attends to. Mario can sit motionless for really long periods. When Schtitt exhales
pipe-smoke in different geometric shapes they both seem to study intently, when Schtitt
exhales he makes little sounds variant in plosivity between P and B.

‘Am realizing whole myth of efficiency and no waste that is making this continent
of countries we are in.’ He exhales. ‘You know myths?’

‘Is that like a story?’

‘Ach. A made-up story. For some children. An efficiency of Euclid only: flat. For
flat children. Straight ahead! Plow ahead! Go! This is myth.’

‘There aren’t any flat children, really.’

‘This myth of the competition and bestness we fight for you players here: this myth:
they assume here always the efficient way is to plow in straight, go! The story that
the shortest way between two places is the straight line, yes?’

‘Yes?’

Schtitt can use the stem of the pipe to point, for emphasis: ‘But what then when something
is in the
way
when you go between places, no? Plow ahead: go: collide:
kabong
.’

‘Willikers!’

‘Where is their straight shortest then, yes? Where is the efficiently quickly straight
of Euclid then, yes? And how many two places are there without there is something
in the way between them, if you go?’

It can be entertaining to watch the evening pines’ mosquitoes light and feed deeply
on luminous Schtitt, who is oblivious. The smoke doesn’t keep them away.

‘When I am boyish, training to compete for best, our training facilities on a sign,
very largely painted, stated WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN.’

‘Gosh.’

It’s a tradition, one stemming maybe from Wimbledon’s All-England locker rooms’ tympana,
that every big-time tennis academy has its own special traditional motto on the wall
in the locker rooms, some special aphoristic nugget that’s supposed to describe and
inform what the academy’s philosophy’s all about. After Mario’s father Dr. Incandenza
passed away, the new Headmaster, Dr. Charles Tavis, a Canadian citizen, either Mrs.
Incandenza’s half-brother or adoptive brother, depending on the version, C.T. had
taken down Incandenza’s founding motto—
TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST
³²
—and had replaced it with the rather more upbeat THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS
HAS NONE.

Mario is an enormous fan of Gerhardt Schtitt, whom most of the other E.T.A. kids regard
as probably bats, and as w/o doubt mind-looseningly discursive, and show the old pundit
even token respect mostly because Schtitt still personally oversees the daily drill-assignments
and can, if aggrieved, have Thode and deLint make them extremely uncomfortable more
or less at will, out there in
A.M.
practice.

One of the reasons the late James Incandenza had been so terribly high on bringing
Schtitt to E.T.A. was that Schtitt, like the founder himself (who’d come back to tennis,
and later film, from a background in hard-core-math-based optical science), was that
Schtitt approached competitive tennis more like a pure mathematician than a technician.
Most jr.-tennis coaches are basically technicians, hands-on practical straight-ahead
problem-solving statistical-data wonks, with maybe added knacks for short-haul psychology
and motivational speaking. The point about not crunching serious stats is that Schtitt
had clued Incandenza in, all the way back at a B.S. 1989
³³
U.S.T.A. convention on photoelectric line-judging, that he, Schtitt, knew real tennis
was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the
game’s technicians revered, but in fact the opposite—
not
-order,
limit,
the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty. That real tennis was
no more reducible to delimited factors or probability curves than chess or boxing,
the two games of which it’s a hybrid. In short, Schtitt and the tall A.E.C.-optics
man (i.e. Incandenza), whose fierce flat serve-and-haul-ass-to-the-net approach to
the game had carried him through M.I.T. on a full ride w/ stipend, and whose consulting
report on high-speed photoelectric tracking the U.S.T.A. mucky-mucks found dense past
all comprehending, found themselves totally simpatico on tennis’s exemption from stats-tracking
regression. Were he now still among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe
tennis in the paradoxical terms of what’s now called ‘Extra-Linear Dynamics.’
³⁴
And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that
of a Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der
Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and
improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is
not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that
it was a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory
flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible
responses, n
²
possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate
to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian
³⁵
continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because
in
foliating,
contained,
this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled
but humanly
contained,
bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by
the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally
down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries
of self.

‘You mean like the baselines are boundaries?’ Mario tries to ask.

‘
Lieber Gott nein,
’ with a plosive disgusted sound. Schtitt likes best of all smoke-shapes to try to
blow rings, and is kind of lousy at it, blowing mostly wobbly lavender hot dogs, which
Mario finds delightful.

The thing with Schtitt: like most Europeans of his generation, anchored from infancy
to certain permanent values which—yes, OK, granted—may, admittedly, have a whiff of
proto-fascist potential about them, but which do, nevertheless (the values), anchor
nicely the soul and course of a life—Old World patriarchal stuff like honor and discipline
and fidelity to some larger unit—Gerhardt Schtitt does not so much dislike the modern
O.N.A.N.ite U.S. of A. as find it hilarious and frightening at the same time. Probably
mostly just
alien
. This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza has a
severely limited range of verbatim recall. Schtitt was educated in pre-Unification
Gymnasium
under the rather Kanto-Hegelian idea that jr. athletics was basically just training
for citizenship, that jr. athletics was about learning to sacrifice the hot narrow
imperatives of the Self—the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings
of the individual appetitive will—to the larger imperatives of a team (OK, the State)
and a set of delimiting rules (OK, the Law). It sounds almost frighteningly simple-minded,
though not to Mario, across the redwood table, listening. By learning, in
palestra,
the virtues that pay off directly in competitive games, the well-disciplined boy
begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being
a ‘team player’ in a larger arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of
full-service citizenship in a State. Except Schtitt says
Ach,
but who can imagine this training serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting
nation that’s forgotten privation and hardship and the discipline which hardship teaches
by requiring? A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort
of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy
must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat
and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:

‘The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?’

‘Except why do you let deLint tie Pemulis and Shaw’s shoes to the lines, if the lines
aren’t boundaries?’

‘Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely.
Verstiegenheit
.’
³⁶

‘Bless you.’

‘Any something. The
what:
this is more unimportant than that there is
something
.’

Schtitt one time was telling Mario, as they respectively walked and tottered down
Comm. Ave. eastward into Allston to see about getting a gourmet ice cream someplace
along there, that when he was Mario’s age—or maybe more like Hal’s age, whatever—he
(Schtitt) had once fallen in love with a tree, a willow that from a certain humid
twilit perspective had looked like a mysterious woman aswirl with gauze, this certain
tree in the public
Platz
of some West German town whose name sounded to Mario like the sound of somebody strangling.
Schtitt reported being seriously smitten with the tree:

‘I went daily to there, to be with the tree.’

They respectively walked and tottered, ice-cream-bound, Mario moving like the one
of them who was truly old, mind off his stride because he was trying to think hard
about what Schtitt believed. Mario’s thinking-hard expression resembles what for another
person would be the sort of comically distorted face made to amuse an infant. He was
trying to think how to articulate some reasonable form of a question like: But then
how does this surrender-the-personal-individual-wants-to-the-larger-State-or-beloved-tree-or-
something
stuff work in a deliberately
individual
sport like competitive junior tennis, where it’s just you v. one other guy?

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines,
that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess
on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense?

Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s
late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always
and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to
hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he
is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word
excuse
or
occasion
for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are
self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination
and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve:
win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow
as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited
self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad
and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the
animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder
on the green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt
darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they’re doing a dance-floor dip as
Schtitt says this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system
of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s brothers worked so brutishly hard to master:
junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the
self you cannot live without.

Schtitt then falls into the sort of silence of someone who’s enjoying mentally rewinding
and replaying what he just came up with. Mario thinks hard again. He’s trying to think
of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self
the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? Three passing
Allstonian street-kids mock and make fun of Mario’s appearance behind the pair’s backs.
Some of Mario’s thinking-faces are almost orgasmic: fluttery and slack. And then but
so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and
its own end?

It’s always Schtitt who ends up experimenting with some exotic ice-cream flavor, when
they arrive. Mario always chickens out and opts for good old basic chocolate when
the moment of decision at the counter comes. Thinking along the lines of like Better
the flavor you know for sure you already love.

‘And so. No different, maybe,’ Schtitt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated
aluminum chair with Mario beneath an askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table
it’s rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk’s breeze. ‘Maybe no different, so,’
biting hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where
there’s some sort of red welt, it looks like. ‘Not different’—looking out into the
Ave.’s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill—‘except the chance
to play.’ He brightens in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying
‘No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?’ And Mario loses a dollop of chocolate down his
chin, because he has this involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does,
and Schtitt is finding what he has just said very amusing indeed.