Infinite Jest (174 page)

M
R.
T
INE
J
R.
: So let’s have a look at the bastard.

M
R.
T
INE
S
R.
: Kid, your job here from here on out is to pipe down, now do you—?

M
R.
Y
EE
: I’ve been asked to say for transcription how pleased the Glad Flaccid Receptacle
Corporation is, during this potentially grave interval, to be a proud—

M
R.
V
EALS
: [At the Infernatron 210 Viewer.] Hit those lights over behind you, kid.

M
R.
T
INE
J
R.
: This’ll make it difficult for the transcriber to transcribe, can I say.

M
R.
Y
EE
: This spot doesn’t happen to in any way optically pulse or strobe, does it?

M
R.
V
EALS
: Are we all set?

M
R.
T
INE
S
R.
: So lights already.

Gately’s memories of ‘Cheers!’ ’s Nom now are clearer and vivider than any memory
of the wraith-dream or the whirling wraith who said death was just everything outside
you getting really slow. The implication that there might at any given time in any
room be whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn’t
affect anybody living, all way too fast to see and dropping by to watch Gately’s chest
rise and fall at the rate of the sun, none of this has sunk in enough to give him
the howlers, not in the wake of Joelle’s visit and the fantasies of romance and rescue,
and the consequent shame. There’s now a sandy sound of gritty sleetish stuff wind-driven
against the room’s window, the hiss of the heater, sounds of gunfire and brass bands
from cartridge viewers on in other rooms. The room’s other bed’s still empty and tightly
made. The intercom gives that triple ding every few minutes; he wonders if they just
do it to bug people. The fact that he couldn’t even finish
Ethan From
in 10th-grade English and hasn’t got clue one about where ghostwords like
SINISTRAL
or
LIEBESTOD
mean or come from, much less
OMMATOPHORIC,
is just starting to percolate up to awareness when there’s a cold hand on his good
shoulder and he opens his eyes. Not to mention
ghostwords,
which is a real and esoteric word. He’s been floating just under sleep’s lid again.
Joelle van D.’s gone. The hand is the nurse that had changed the catheter-bag. She
looks hassled and unserene, and one cheekbone sticks out farther than the other, and
her little slot of a mouth’s got little vertical wrinkles all around it from being
held tight all the time, not unlike the basically-late Mrs. G.’s tight little mouth.

‘The visitor said you’d requested this, because of the tube.’ It’s a little stenographic
notebook and Bic. ‘Are you left-handed?’ The nurse means
sinistral
. She’s penguin-shaped and smells of cheap soap. The notebook is
STENOGRAPHIC
because its pages turn over at the top instead of to the side. Gately shakes his
head gingerly and opens his left hand for the stuff. It makes him feel good all over
again that Joelle had understood what he’d meant. She hadn’t just come to tell her
troubles to somebody that couldn’t make human judgment-noises. Shaking his head slowly
lets him see past the nurse’s white hip. Ferocious Francis is sitting in the chair
that the wraith and Ewell and Calvin Thrust had all sat in, his skinny legs uncrossed,
gnarled and crew-cutted and clear-eyed behind his glasses and totally relaxed, holding
his portable O
₂
-tank, his chest rising and falling at about the rate a phone rings, watching the
nurse waddle tensely out. Gately can see a clean white T- under the open buttons of
Ferocious Francis’s flannel shirt. Coughing is F.F.’s way of saying hello.

‘Still sucking air I see,’ Ferocious Francis says when the fit’s passed, making sure
the little blue tubes are still taped under his nose.

Gately struggles with one hand to flip the notebook open and write ‘YO!’ in block
caps. Except there’s nothing to really hold the notebook up against and write; he
has to sort of balance it flat on one thigh, so he can’t see what he’s writing, and
writing with his left hand makes him feel like a stroke-victim must feel, and what
he holds up at his sponsor looks more like
.

‘Figured God needed a little help the other night did you?’ Francis says, leaning
way out to the side to get a red bandanna hankie out of a back pocket. ‘What I heard.’

Gately tries to shrug, can’t, smiles weakly. His right shoulder is so thickly bandaged
it looks like a turbanned head. The old man probes a nostril and then examines the
hankie with interest, just like the dream-wraith did. His fingers are swollen and
misshapen and his nails are long and square and the color of old turtleshell.

‘Poor sick bastard going around cutting up people’s pets, cut up the wrong people’s
pets. This is the way I heard it.’

Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he’s discovered how no one second of even
unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must.
He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that somebody
he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how
bad the pain of it is, how he doesn’t think he can stand it one more second.

‘You saw yourself as in charge. Thought you’d step in. Protect your fellowman from
his consequences. Which poor sick green Ennet House fuck was it?’

Gately struggles to try and get his knee up so he can see to write ‘LENZ. WHITE WIG.
ALWAYS NORTH. ALWAYS ON PHONE.’ Again it looks cuneiform though, illegible. Ferocious
Francis blows out a nostril and replaces the little tube. The tank in his lap makes
no sound. It has a little valve but no dial or needles.

‘You stepped in against six armed Hawaiians, I hear. Marshall Plan. Captain Courageous.
God’s personal Shane.’ F.F. likes to send air through his nose’s tubes in a mirthless
burst, a kind of anti-laugh. His nose is large and cucumber-shaped and wide-pored,
and pretty much its whole circulatory system is visible. ‘Glenny Kubitz calls me and
describes the thing blow by blowjob. Says I should see the other guys. Says about
breaking a Hawaiian’s nose, shoving the bits up into the brain. The old chop-and-stiff-arm
he says. Big Don G.’s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment. Said
the way he heard it you could fight like you was born in a barfight. I tell Glenny
I say I’m sure you’ll be proud to hear him say it.’

Gately was trying with maddening sinistral care to write out ‘HURT? DEAD ANY? FINIST?
WHO HAT IN HALL?,’ more like drawing than writing, when without warning one of the
day-shift Trauma M.D.s sweeps in, radiating brisk health and painless cheer. Gately
remembers dealing with this one M.D. some days ago in a kind of gray post-surgical
fog. This M.D. is Indian or Pakistani and is glossily dark but with a sort of weirdly
classically white-type face you could easily imagine profiling on a coin, plus teeth
you could read by the gleam of. Gately hates him.

‘So I am here with you again in this room!’ The M.D. sings, kind of, when he talks.
The name in gold piping on his white coat has a
D
and a
K
and a shitload of vowels. Gately almost had to reach up and swat this M.D. after
surgery to keep him from hooking up a Demerol drip. That was between let’s say four
and eight days ago. It’s probably But for the Grace that his Crocodilian sponsor Ferocious
Francis G.’s sitting here watching blandly when the Pakistani M.D. sweeps in this
time.

Plus they all have this flourishy M.D. way of sweeping Gately’s chart up off their
hip and holding it up to read it. The Pakistani purses his lips and puffs them out
absently and sucks off his pen a little.

‘Grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation. The pain of the trauma is very much worse
today, yes?’ the M.D. says to the chart. He looks up, the teeth emerge. ‘Synovial
inflammation: nasty nasty. The pain of synovial inflammation is compared in the medical
literature to renal calculus and ectopic labor.’ Partly it’s the darkness of the classic
face around them that makes the teeth seem so high-watt. The smile widens steadily
without seeming to run out of new teeth to expose. ‘And so you are now ready to let
us provide the level of analgesia the trauma warrants instead of Toradol, simple headache
ibuprofen, which these medications are boys doing a large man’s duty here, yes? There
has been reconsidering in light of the level? Yes?’

Gately is inscribing an enormous vowel in the notebook with incredible care.

‘I make you aware of synthetic anipyretic analgesics which are no higher than Category
C-III
³⁵⁴
for dependence.’ Gately imagines the M.D. smiling incandescently as he wields a shepherd’s
crook. The guy has that odd clipped singsong way of talking of skinny guys in loincloths
on mountains in films. Gately superimposes a big skull and crossbones over the glossy
face, mentally. He holds up a palsied page-high A and brandishes it at the M.D. and
then brings the notebook back down and swiftly up again, spells it out, figuring Ferocious
Francis will step in and set this ad-man for the Disease straight once and for all,
so Gately’ll never have to face this kind of Pakistani temptation again with maybe
nobody supportive here next time. C-III his ass. Fucking
Talwin
’s C-III, too.

‘Oramorph SR for an instance. Very safe, very much relief. Fast relief.’

This is just morphine sulfate with a fancy corporate name, Gately knows. This raghead
doesn’t know who he’s dealing with, or what he’s.

‘Now I must tell tell, I would make the personal first choice of titrated hydromorphone
hydrochloride, in this case—’

Christ, this is Dilaudid. Blues. Fackelmann’s Mount Doom. Kite’s steep-angled decline,
as well. Death on a Ritz. The Blue Bayou. Gene Fackelmann’s killer, by and large.
And also Gately pictures good old Nooch, tall skinny Vinnie Nucci, from the beach
at Salem, who favored Dilaudid and spent over a year without ever taking the belt
off his wing, dropping through Osco skylights at night on a rope with the belt all
tight and ready just over his elbow already, Nucci never eating and getting skinnier
and skinnier until he seemed to be just two cheekbones raised to a great silent height,
even the whites of his eyes finally turning the blue of the bayou; and Fackelmann’s
eliminated map after the insane scam on Sorkin and a disastrous two nights of Dilaudid,
when Sorkin’d—

‘—though I say yes, this in truth is a C-II medication, and I wish to respect all
wishes and concerns,’ the M.D. half-sings, inclined at the waist now by Gately’s railings,
looking closely at the shoulder’s dressing but not seeming at all disposed to even
touch it, his hands behind his back. His ass is more or less right in Ferocious Francis’s
face, who’s just sitting there. The M.D. doesn’t even seem to be aware 34-year-sober
Ferocious Francis is there. And Francis isn’t making a peep.

It also occurs to Gately that
esoteric
is another ghostword he’s got no rights to throw around, mentally.

‘For I am Moslem, and abstain also, by religious law, from all abusive compounds as
well,’ the M.D. says. ‘Yet if I have suffered trauma, or the dentist of my teeth proposes
to perform a painful process, I submit as a Moslem to the imperative of my pain and
will accept relief, knowing no established religion’s God wills needless suffering
for His children.’

Gately has made two shaky smaller A’s together on the next sheet and is stabbing emphatically
at the sheet with his Bic. He wishes if the M.D. wouldn’t shut up he’d at least move,
so Gately could shoot a desperate Please-Jump-In-Here look at Ferocious Francis. The
drug-question has nothing to do with established Gods.

The M.D.’s bobbing a little as he leans, his face coming in and then receding. ‘This
is a Grade-II trauma we are looking at in this room. Allow me to explain that the
discomfort of right now will only intensify as the synovial nerves begin to reanimate.
The laws of trauma dictate that the pain will intensify as healing begins to commence.
I am a professional at my job, sir, as well as a Moslem. Hydrocodone bitartrate
³⁵⁵
—C-III. Levorphanol tartrate
³⁵⁶
—C-III. Oxymorphone hydrochloride
³⁵⁷
—admittedly, yes, C-II, but more than indicated in this degree of needless suffering.’

Gately can hear Ferocious Francis blowing his nose again behind the M.D. Gately’s
mouth floods with spittle at the memory of the sick-sweet antiseptic taste of hydrochloride
that rises to the tongue with an injection of Demerol, the taste Kite and the lesbian
burglars and even Equus (‘I’ll Stick Anything in Any Part of My Body’) Reese all gagged
at but that poor old Nooch and Gene Fackelmann and Gately himself had loved, came
to love like a mother’s warm hand. Gately’s eyes wobble and his tongue protrudes from
a shiny mouth-corner as he draws a crude syringe and arm and belt and then tries to
draw a skull-and-bones over the whole shaky ensemble, but the skull looks more like
a plain old smiley-face. He holds it out to the foreigner anyway. The dextral pain’s
so bad he wants to throw up, throat-tube or no.