Infinite Jest (170 page)

The walls of the subdorms’ hallways are dinner-mint blue. The walls of the rooms themselves
are cream. All the woodwork is dark and varnished, as is the guilloche that runs below
all E.T.A. ceilings; and the dominant odor in the hallways is always a mixture of
varnish and tincture of benzoin.

Someone had left a window open by the sinks in the boys’ room, and a hump of snow
lay on the sill, and on the floor beneath the window by the sink on the end, whose
hot-water pipe shrieks, was a parabolic dusting of snow, already melting at the apex.
I turned on the lights and the exhaust fan kicked on with them; for some reason I
could barely stand its sound. When I put my head out the window the wind came from
nowhere and everywhere, the snow swirling in funnels and eddies, and there were little
grains of ice in the snow. It was brutally cold. Across the East Courts, the paths
were obscured, and the pine’s branches were near horizontal under their snow’s weight.
Schtitt’s transom and observation tower looked menacing; it was still dark and snow-free
on the lee side facing Comm.-Ad. The sight of distant ATHSCME fans displacing great
volumes of snowy air northward is one of the better winter views from our hilltop,
but visibility was now too poor to make out the fans, and the liquid hiss of the snow
was too total to make out whether the fans were even on. The Headmaster’s House wasn’t
much more than a humped shape off by the north tree-line, but I could picture poor
C.T. at the living room window in leather slippers and Scotch-plaid robe, seeming
to pace even when standing still, raising and lowering the antenna of the phone in
his hand, with several calls out already to Logan, M.I.A.-Dorval, WeatherNet-9000’s
recorded update, heavy-browed figures in Québec’s O.N.A.N.T.A. office, C.T.’s forehead
a washboard and lips moving soundless as he brainstormed his way toward a state of
Total Worry.

I brought my head back in when I could no longer feel my face. I made my little ablutions.
I hadn’t had to go to the bathroom in a serious way in three days.

The digital display up next to the ceiling’s intercom read
11–18-EST0456.

When the whap-whap of the bathroom door subsided I heard a quiet voice with an odd
tone farther up around the curve of the hallway. It turned out that good old Ortho
Stice was sitting in a bedroom-chair in front of a hall window. He was facing the
window. The window was closed, and he had his forehead up against the glass, either
talking or chanting to himself very quietly. The whole lower part of the window was
fogged with his breath. I came up behind him, listening. The back of his head was
that shark-belly gray-white of crew cuts so short the scalp shows through. I was more
or less right behind his chair. I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to himself
or chanting something. He didn’t turn around even when I rattled my toothbrush in
the NASA glass. He had on his classic Darknesswear: black sweatshirt, black sweatpants
on which he’d had a red and gray
E.T.A.
silkscreened down both legs. His feet were bare on the cold floor. I was standing
right beside the chair, and he still didn’t look up.

‘Who’s that now?’ he said, staring straight ahead through the window.

‘Hi Orth.’

‘Hal. You’re up kind of early.’

I rattled my toothbrush a little to indicate a shrug. ‘You know. Up and about.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Your voice. Shoot, are you crying? What’s the matter?’

My voice had been neutral and a bit puzzled. ‘I’m not crying, Orth.’

‘Well then.’ Stice breathed onto the window. He reached up without moving his head
and scratched the back of his crew cut. ‘Up and around. We going to play some furriners
out there today or what?’

For the past ten days I’d always felt worst in the early
A.M.
, before dawn. There’s something elementally horrific about waking before dawn. The
window was unobscured above The Darkness’s breath-line. The snow wasn’t swirling or
pummelling the window as much on the building’s east side, but the lee side’s absence
of wind showed just how hard new snow was coming down. It was like a white curtain
endlessly descending. The sky was lightening here on the east side, a paler gray-white,
not unlike Stice’s crew-cut. I realized that from his position he could see only condensed
breath on the window, no reflections. I made a few grotesque, distended, pop-eyed
faces at him behind his back. They made me feel worse.

I rattled the brush. ‘Well, if we do, it’s not going to be out there. It’s drifting
about up to the tape on the west nets. They’ll have to try to get us indoors somewhere.’

Stice breathed. ‘There’s no indoor place’s got thirty-six courts, Inc. Winchester
Club’s got twelve is maybe the most. Fucking Mount Auburn’s only got eight.’

‘They’ll have to move us around to different sites. It’s a pain in the ass, but Schtitt’s
done it before. I think the real variable’ll be whether the Québec kids got into Logan
last night before whenever it was this hit.’

‘Logan’ll be shut down you’re saying.’

‘But I think we’d have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping
tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper, Mario said.’

‘Boys are looking to get X’d by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or
what
?’

‘My guess is they’re stuck up at Dorval. I’ll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get
some sort of announcement at breakfast, probably.’

This was a clear opening for The Darkness to do a quick C.T. impression, wondering
aloud over the phone to the Québecois coach whether he, C.T., should press for them
to charter ground transport from Montreal or else rather urge them not to risk travel
through the Concavity in a storm in such a generous but disappointed gesture the Québecois
would think busing the 400 clicks to Boston in a blizzard was his own generous idea,
C.T. wholly open, opening all different psych-strategies to the coach’s inspection,
with the frantic ruffling sound of the coach’s French-English dictionary loud in the
phone’s background. But Stice just sat there with his forehead against the glass.
His bare feet were tapping some sort of rhythm on the floor. The hallway was freezing,
and his toes had a faint blue tinge. He blew air out of his lips in a tight sigh,
making his fat cheeks flap a little; we called this his horse-sound.

‘Were you talking to yourself out here, or chanting, or what?’

A silence ensued.

‘Heard this one joke,’ Stice said finally.

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘You want to hear it?’

‘I could use a quality laugh right now, Dark,’ I said.

‘You too?’

Another silence ensued. Two different people were weeping at different pitches behind
closed doors. A toilet flushed on the second floor. One of the weepers was nearly
skirling, an inhuman keening sound. There was no way to tell which E.T.A. male it
was, which door back down past the walls’ curve.

The Darkness scratched the back of his head again without moving his head. His hands
looked almost luminous against the black sleeves.

‘There’s these three statisticians gone duck hunting,’ he said. He paused. ‘They’re
like statisticians by trade.’

‘I’m with you so far.’

‘And they gone off hunting duck, and they’re hunkered down in the muck of a duck blind,
for hunting, in waders and hats and all, your top-of-the-line Winchester double-aughts,
so on. And they’re quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always quack into.’

‘Duck-calls,’ I said.

‘There you go.’ Stice tried to nod against the window. ‘Well and here comes this one
duck come flying on by overhead.’

‘Their quarry. The object of their being out there.’

‘Damn straight, their
raisin-debt
and what have you, and they’re getting set to blast the son of a whore into feathers
and goo,’ Stice said. ‘And the first statistician, he brings up his Winnie and lets
go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass kersplat in the muck, and but
he’s missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second statistician he up and
fires then, and back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies got a fucker of a recoil
on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from firing, and they see his shot
goes just high.’

‘Misses the duck as well.’

‘Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping
and jumping up and down to beat the band, hollering “We got him, boys, we done got
him!” ’

Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I wasn’t
even pretending to laugh. Stice didn’t seem to expect me to. He shrugged without moving
his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass.

I stood next to him in silence and held my NASA glass with the toothbrush and looked
out over the top of Stice’s head through the window’s upper half. The snowfall was
intense and looked silky. The East Courts’ pavilion’s green canvas roof bowed ominously
down, its white GATORADE logo obscured. A figure was out there, not under the shelter
of the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning
back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below,
not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting
buried by snow, just sitting there. It was impossible to tell the person’s age or
sex. Church spires off in Brookline were darkening as the sky lightened behind them.
The beginning of dawn looked like moonlight through the snow. Several people were
at their vehicles’ windshields with scrapers down along Commonwealth Avenue. Their
images were tiny and dark and fluttered; the Avenue’s line of buried parked cars looked
like igloo after igloo, some sort of Eskimo tract-housing thing. It had never before
snowed like this in mid-November. A snow-covered B train labored uphill like a white
slug. It seemed clear that the T would be suspending routes before long. The snow
and cold sunrise gave everything a confected quality. The portcullis between the driveway
and the parking lot was half up, probably to keep it from being frozen closed. I couldn’t
see who was in the portcullis’s security booth. The attendants always came and went,
most of them from the Ennet House place, trying to ‘recover.’ The flagpole’s two flags
were frozen and stuck right out straight, turning stiffly from side to side in the
wind, like someone in a neck-brace, instead of flapping. The E.T.A. physical-post
mailbox just inside the portcullis had a mo-hawk of snow. The whole scene had an indescribable
pathos to it. Stice’s fogged breath kept me from seeing anything closer than the mailbox
and East Courts. The light was starting to diffract into colors at the perimeter of
Stice’s breath-fog on the window.

‘Schacht heard that joke down at the Cranial place from some B.U. fellow with just
terrible facial pain, he said,’ Stice said.

‘I’m going to go ahead and ask the question, D-man.’

‘It’s a statistics joke. You got to know your medials means and modes.’

‘I get the joke, Orth. The question is how come you’ve got your forehead all up against
the window like that when your breath’s keeping you from seeing anything. What are
you trying to look at? And isn’t your forehead getting kind of cold?’

Stice didn’t nod. He made his horse-sound again. He had always had the face of a fat
man on a fit man’s lean body. I hadn’t noticed before that he had an odd little teardrop
of extra flesh low down on his right jowl, like a bit of skin with mole-aspirations.
He said ‘The forehead stopped feeling cold a couple hours back, when I lost all my
feeling in it.’

‘You’ve been sitting here with bare feet and your forehead against the glass for a
couple
hours?
’

‘More like four, I think.’

I could hear a night-custodial crew laughing and clanking a bucket right below us.
Only one was laughing. It was Kenkle and Brandt.

‘My next question’s pretty obvious, then, Orth.’

He gave another awkward shrug that didn’t involve his head. ‘Well. It’s sort of embarrassing,
here, Inc,’ he said. He paused. ‘It’s stuck is what it is.’

‘Your forehead’s stuck to the window?’

‘Best as I can recollect I wake up, it’s just after 0100, fuckin Coyle’s having them
discharges again and there’s no sleeping through that, boy.’

‘I shudder to think, Orth.’

‘And Coyle ’course just doesn’t even hit the light just hauls out a fresh sheet from
the stack under his bunk and goes right back to sawing logs. And I’m wide awake by
this point in time, though, and then I couldn’t get back under.’

‘Couldn’t get back to sleep.’

‘Something’s real wrong, I can tell,’ The Darkness said.

‘Pre-Fundraiser nerves? The WhataBurger coming up? You feel yourself starting to climb
plateaux, starting to play the way you came here hoping one day to play, and part
of you doesn’t believe it, it feels wrong. I went through this. Believe me, I can
und—’

Stice automatically tried to shake his head and then gave a small cry of pain. ‘Not
that. None of that. Long fucking story. I’m not even sure I’d want anybody to believe
it. Forget that part. The point’s I’m up there—I’m lying there real sweaty and hot
and jittered. I jump on down and got a chair and brang it out here to set where it’s
cool.’

‘And where you don’t have to lie there and contemplate Coyle’s sheet slowly ripening
under his bunk,’ I said, shuddering a little.

‘And it’s just starting to snow, then, out. It’s about maybe like 0100. I thought
how I’d just set and watch the snow a little and settle on down and then go grab some
sack down in the V.R.’ He scratched at the reddening back of his scalp again.

‘And as you watched, you rested your head pensively against the glass for just a second.’

‘And that was all she wrote. Forgot the forehead was sweated up. Whammo. Kertwanged
my own self. Just like remember when Rader and them got Ingersoll to touch his tongue
on that net-post last New Year’s? Stuck here fucking tight as that tongue, Hal. Hell
of a lot more total stuck area, too, than Ingersoll. He only did lose that smidgeon
off the tip. Inc, I tried to pull her off her about 0230, and there was this fucking…
sound
. This sound and a feeling like the skin’ll give before the bind will, sure. Frozen
stuck. And this here’s more skin than I care to say goodbye to, buddy-ruff.’ He was
speaking just above a whisper.