Infinite Jest (175 page)

The M.D. studies the palsied drawing, nodding the exact way Gately used to nod at
Alfonso Parias-Carbo the totally ununderstandable Cuban. ‘Oxycodone-nalaxone compound,
³⁵⁸
with a short half-life but only a C-III grading of abuse.’ There’s no way the guy
could be like intentionally making his voice this wheedly-sounding; it’s got to be
Gately’s own Disease. The Spider. Gately envisions his brain struggling in a silk
cocoon. He keeps summoning to mind the little detox-story Ferocious Francis tells
from the Commitment podium, how they gave him Librium
³⁵⁹
to help with the discomfort of Withdrawal, and how Francis says he just threw the
Librium hard over his left shoulder, for luck, and has had very good luck ever since.

‘Likewise as well the time-tested pentazocine lactate, which I can offer with assurances
as a Moslem trauma-professional standing here in this room in person with you at your
bed’s side.’

Pentazocine lactate is Talwin, Gately’s #2 trusted standard when he was Out There,
which 120 mg. on an empty gut was like floating in oil the exact same temperature
as your body, just like Percocet
³⁶⁰
except without the maddening back-of-the-eyeball itch that always wrecked a Percocet
high for him.

‘Surrender your courageous fear of dependence and let us do our profession, young
sir,’ the Pakistani sums up, standing right up next to the bed, the left side, his
professional lab-coat hiding F.F., hands behind his back, the dull glint of the metal
corner of Gately’s chart just visible between his legs, immaculate of posture, smiling
cheerily down, the whites of his eyes as ungodly white as his teeth. The memory of
Talwin makes parts of his body Gately didn’t know could drool drool. He knows what’s
coming next, Gately does. And if the Pakistani goes ahead and offers Demerol again
Gately won’t resist. And who the fuck’ll be able to blame him, after all. Why should
he have to resist? He’d received a bona fide Grade-Whatever dextral synovial trauma.
Shot with a professionally modified .44 Item. He’s post-trauma, in terrible pain,
and everyone heard the guy say it: it was going to get worse, the pain. This was a
trauma-pro in a white coat here making reassurances of legitimate fucking use. Gehaney
heard him; what the fuck did the Flaggers want from him? This wasn’t hardly like slipping
over to Unit #7 with a syringe and a bottle of Visine. This was a stop-term measure,
a short-gap-type measure, the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God.
A quick Rx-squirt of Demerol—probably at the outside two, three days of a Demerol
drip, maybe even one where they’d hook the drip to a rubber bulb he could hold and
self-administer the Demerol only As Needed. Maybe it was the Disease itself telling
him to be scared a medically necessary squirt would pull all his old triggers again,
put him back in the cage. Gately pictures himself trying to shunt through a magnetic-contact
burglar alarm with a hand and a hook. But surely if Ferocious Francis thought a medically
advised short-term squirt suspect, at all, the old reptilian bastard would
say
something, do his fucking job as a Crocodile and sponsor, instead of just sitting
there playing with his nostril’s little noninvasive tube.

‘Look kid, I’m gonna screw and let you settle this bullshit and come back up later,’
comes Francis’s voice, subdued and neutral, signifying nothing, and then the rasp
of the chair’s legs and the system of grunts that always accompanies F.F.’s getting
up from a chair. His white crew cut rises like a slow moon over the Pakistani’s shoulder,
which the M.D.’s only sign of acknowledgment of Francis is to sort of tuck his chin
down into his shoulder like a violinist, addressing Gately’s sponsor for the first
time:

‘Then perhaps you would please, Mr. Gately Senior, if you please help us help your
concerned and brave boy here but a boy I believe whose cavalier attitude underestimates
the level of coming discomfort which is sadly unnecessary altogether if he will let
us help him, sir,’ the Pakistani sings over his shoulder to Ferocious Francis, as
if they were the room’s only adults. He’s assuming Ferocious Francis is Gately’s organic
Dad.

Gately knows a Crocodile never bothers to correct anybody’s misimpression. He’s halfway
to the door, moving with maddening slow care like always, as if walking on ice, twisted
and seeming to limp off both legs and heartbreakingly assless in the baggy seat-shiny
wide-waled old man’s corduroys he always wears, the back of his red neck complexly
creased as he moves off away, lifting one hand in a gesture of acknowledgment and
dismissal of the M.D.’s request:

‘Not my business to say one way or the other. Kid’s gonna do what he decides he needs
to do for himself. He’s the one that’s feeling it. He’s the only one can decide.’
He either pauses or slows down even further at the open door, looking back at Gately
but not meeting his wide eyes. ‘You keep your pecker up, kid, and I’ll bring some
of the son of a bitches by to look in again later.’ He slips in ‘Might want to Ask
For Some Help, deciding.’ The last of this comes from the white hall as the Pakistani’s
glossy head comes back in close with now a tight strained-patience smile, and Gately
can hear him inhaling to get ready to say that of course in Grade-II traumas of this
severe type the treatment of preferred indication is the admittedly C-II and highly
abusable but unsurpassed for effectiveness and tightly controlled administration of
one 50-mg. tab in a diluting saline drip q. 3–4 hours of mep—

Gately’s good left hand skins a knuckle shooting out between the bars of the bedside
crib-railing and plunging under the M.D.’s lab-coat and fastening onto the guy’s balls
and bearing down. The Pakistani pharmacologist screams like a woman. It isn’t rage
or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering
something Gately knows that he’s powerless at this moment to refuse. The sudden exertion
sends a blue-green sheet of pain over Gately that makes his eyes roll up as he bears
down on the balls, but not enough to crush. The Pakistani curtsies deeply and bends
forward, crumpling around Gately’s hand, showing all 112 teeth as he screams higher
and higher until he hits a jagged high note like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet
so shattering it makes the crib-railings and windowglass shiver and woke Don Gately
up with a start, his left arm through the railing and twisted with the force of his
attempt to sit up so that the pain now made him hit almost the same high note as the
dream’s foreign M.D. The sky outside the window was gorgeous, Dilaudid-colored; the
room was full of serious
A.M.
light; no sleet on the window. The ceiling throbbed a little but did not breathe.
The one visitor-chair was back over by the wall. He looked down. Either the stenographer’s
notebook and pen had got knocked off his bed or the dream had made up that part, too.
The next bed was still empty and made up tight. It came to him all of a sudden why
they called them hospital corners. But the railing Joelle van D. had folded down to
sit on the bunk in the fucking Erdedy kid’s sweats was still folded down, and the
other railing was still up. So there was some like evidence of the one part, that
she’d been really there, showing him the pictures. Gately brought his skinned hand
gingerly back inside the railing and felt to make sure there really was a big invasive
tube going into his mouth, and there was. He could roll his eyes way up and see his
heart monitor going silently nuts. Sweat was coming off every part of him, and for
the first time in the Trauma Wing he felt like he needed to take a shit, and he had
no idea what arrangements there were for taking a shit but suspected they weren’t
going to be appetizing at all. Second. Second. He tried to Abide. No single second
was past enduring. The intercom was giving triple dings. There really were sounds
of other rooms’ TPs, and of a meal cart being rolled down the hall, and the metally
smell of food for the edible patients. He couldn’t see anything like a hat-shadow
in the hall, but it could have been all the sunlight.

The dream’s vividness had been either fever or Disease, but either way it had fucking
seriously rattled his cage. He heard the singsong voice promising about increasing
discomfort. His shoulder beat like a big heart, and the pain was sickeninger than
ever. No single second was past standing. Memories of good old Demerol rose up, clamoring
to be Entertained. The thing in Boston AA is they try to teach you to accept occasional
cravings, the sudden thoughts of the Substance; they tell you that sudden Substance-cravings
will rise unbidden in a true addict’s mind like bubbles in a toddler’s bath. It’s
a lifelong Disease: you can’t keep the thoughts from popping in there. The thing they
try to teach you is just to Let Them Go, the thoughts. Let them come as they will,
but do not
Entertain
them. No need to invite a Substance-thought or -memory in, offer it a tonic and your
favorite chair, and chat with it about old times. The thing about Demerol wasn’t just
the womb-warm buzz of a serious narcotic. It was more like the, what, the aesthetics
of the buzz. Gately’d always found Demerol with a slight Talwin kicker such a smooth
and orderly buzz. A somehow deliciously
symmetrical
buzz: the mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in
a warm skull that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion of soft air some neckless
distance above the shoulders, and inside all is a somnolent hum. Chest rises and falls
on its own, far away. The easy squeak of your head’s blood is like bedsprings in the
friendly distance. The sun itself seems to be smiling. And when you nod off, you sleep
like a man of wax, and awaken in the same last position you remember falling asleep
in.

And pain of all sorts becomes a theory, a news-item in the distant colder climes way
below the warm air you hum on, and what you feel is mostly gratitude at your abstract
distance from anything that doesn’t sit inside concentric circles and love what’s
happening.

Gately takes advantage of the fact that he’s already facing ceilingward to seriously
Ask For Help with the obsession. He thinks hard about anything else at all. Heading
out w/ old Gary Carty in the pre-dawn reek of low tide off Beverly to bring up lobster
traps. The M.P. and the flies. His mother sleeping slack-mouthed on a chintz divan.
Cleaning the very grossest corner of the Shattuck Shelter. The billow of the veiled
girl’s veil. The traps’ little cages of cross-hatched bars, the lobsters’ eyes’ stalks
always poking through the squares so the eyes looked out at open sea. Or the bumper
stickers on the M.P.’s old Ford—SEEEEE YAAAAAAA!! and DON’T TAILGATE ME OR I’LL FLICK
A BOOGER ON YOUR WINDSHIELD! and MIA:
FORGOTTEN
and I HAVEN’T HAD SEX IN SO LONG I FORGET WHO GETS TIED UP! The fish asking about
what’s water. The sharp-nosed round-cheeked dead-eyed nurse with a weird Germanish
accent that would sell Gately little sampler bottles of Sanofi-Winthrop Demerol syrup,
80 mg./bottle, vilely banana-flavored, then would lie back slack and dead-eyed while
Gately X’d her, barely breathing, in an airless Ipswich apartment whose weird brown
windowshades filled the place with light the color of weak tea. Named Egede or Egette,
she eventually started telling Gately she couldn’t come close to coming unless he
burned her with a cigarette, which marked the first time Gately seriously tried to
quit smoking.

Now a black outside-linebacker of a St. E.’s nurse rumbles in and checks his drips
and writes on his chart and points the artillery of her tits down at him to ask how
he’s doing, and calls him ‘Baby,’ which nobody minds from enormous black nurses. Gately
points at his lower abdomen in the area of his colon and tries to make a broad explosive
gesture with just one arm, slightly less mortified than if it had been a human-size
white nurse, at least.

Gately happened onto Demerol at age twenty-three when intra-ocular itching finally
forced him to abandon Percocets and explore new vistas. Demerol was more expensive
mg. for mg. than most synthetic narcs, but it was also easier to get, being the treatment
of medical choice for mind-bending post-operative pain. Gately can’t for the life
of him remember who or just where in Salem he was first introduced to what the boys
on the North Shore called Pebbles and Bams-Bams, 50 and 100 mg. Demerol tablets, respectively
very tiny and tiny, chalky white scored discs with
on one side and Sanofi-Winthrop Co.’s very-soon-beloved trademark, a kind of
on the other, that rakish
just puncturing the square envelope of itchy-eyed North-Shore life. And remembering
even the
feels like Entertaining the obsession. He knows it was not long after Nooch’s funeral,
because he’d been alone and crewless at whatever moment whoever handed him two 50
mg. tablets way too tiny for his big-fingered hands, in lieu of whatever else it was
he’d wanted, laughing when Gately said What the fuck and They look like Bufferin for
ants or some shit, saying: Trust Me.