Infinite Jest (176 page)

It must have been his twenty-third summer Out There, because he remembers being shirtless
and driving down 93 when he ran out of everything else and pulled off into the JFK
Library lot to take them, so small and tasteless he had to check his open mouth in
the rearview to make sure he’d gotten them down. And he remembers not wearing a shirt
because he’d gotten to study his big bare hairless chest for a long time. And from
that somnolent
P.M.
in the JFK lot on he’d been a faithful attendant at the goddess Demerol’s temple,
right to the very finish.

Gately remembers crewing—for good bits of both the Percocet and Demerol eras—with
two other North Shore narcotics addicts, who Gately’d grown up with one and had broke
digits for Whitey Sorkin the migrainous bookie with the other. They weren’t burglars,
either of them, these guys: Fackelmann and Kite. Fackelmann had a background in creative-type
checks, plus access to equipment for manufacturing I.D., and Kite’s background was
he’d been a computer-wienie at Salem State before he got the Shoe for hacking the
phone bills of certain guys deep in trouble over 900 sex-lines into the S.S. Administration’s
WATS account, and they became naturals at crewing together, F. and K., and had their
own unambitious but elegant scam going that Gately was ever only marginally in on.
What Fackelmann and Kite’d do, they’d rig up an identity and credit record sufficient
to rent them a luxury furnished apt., then they’d rent a lot of upscale-type appliances
from like Rent-A-Center or Rent 2 Own down in Boston, then they’d sell the luxury
appliances and furnishings off to one of a couple dependable fences, then they’d bring
in their own air mattresses and sleeping bags and canvas chairs and little legit-bought
TP and viewer and speakers and camp out in the empty luxury apartment, getting very
high on the rented goods’ net proceeds, until they got their second Overdue Notice
on the rent; then they’d rig up another identity and move on and do it all over. Gately
took his turn being the one to bathe and shave and answer a luxury-apt.-rental ad
in borrowed Yuppiewear and meet the property management people and sweep them off
their Banfis with his I.D. and credit rating, and forge some name on the lease; and
he usually crashed and got high in the apts. with Fackelmann and Kite, though he,
Gately, had had his own digit-breaking and then later burglary career, and his own
fences, and tended more and more to cop his own scrips and his own Percocets and then
later Demerol.

Lying there, working on Abiding and not-Entertaining, Gately remembers how good old
doomed Gene Fackelmann—that for a narcotics addict had had a truly raging libido—used
to like to bring different girls home to whatever apt. they were scamming at the time,
and how Fax’d open the door and look around in pretend-astonishment at the empty and
carpetless luxury apt. and shout ‘We been fuckin robbed!’

For Fackelmann and Kite, the rap on Gately was that he was a great and (for a narcotics
addict, which places limits on rational trusting) stand-up guy, and a ferociously
good friend and crewmate, but they just didn’t for their lives see why Gately chose
to be a narcotics man, why these were his Substances of his choice, because he was
a great and cheerful stand-up jolly-type guy off the nod, but when he was Pebbled
or narculated in any way he’d become this totally taciturn withdrawn dead-like person,
they always said, like a totally different Gately, sitting for hours real low in his
canvas chair, practically lying in this chair whose canvas bulged and legs bowed out,
speaking barely at all, and then only the necessariest word or two, and then without
ever seeming to open his mouth. He made whoever he got high with feel lonely. He got
real, like, interior. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s term was ‘Other-Directed.’ And it was
worse when he shot anything up. You’d have to almost
pry
his chin off his chest. Kite used to say it was like Gately shot cement instead of
narcotics.

McDade and Diehl come in around 1100h. from visiting Doony Glynn down somewheres in
the Gastroenterology Dept. and try to give Gately’s left hand archaic old unhip high
fives as a goof and say the Bowel guys’ve got Glynn on a megadrip of a Levsin
³⁶¹
-codeine diverticulitis compound, and the Doon seemed to have undergone a kind of
spiritual experience vis-à-vis this compound, and was giving them ebubblient high
fives and saying the Bowel M.D.s were saying that there was a chance the condition
might be inoperable and chronic and that D.G.’d have to be on the compound for life,
with a rubber bulb for Self-Administration, and the formerly fetal Doon was sitting
up in a lotus position and seemed to be a very happy camper indeed. Gately makes pathetic
sounds around his oral tube as McDade and Diehl start to interrupt each other apologizing
for how it’s looking like they might not be able to stand up and legally depose for
Gately like they’d be ready to do in a fucking
hatbeat
if it weren’t for various legal issues they’re still under the clouds of that their
P.D. and P.O. respectively say that walking voluntarily into Norfolk District Court
in Enfield would be tittymount to like judicio-penal suicide, they’re told.

Diehl looks at McDade and then says there’s also disparaging news about the .44 Item,
that by everybody’s reconstruction of events it’s more than likely Lenz might have
promoted the Item up off the lawn when he legged it off the E.M.P.H.H. complex just
ahead of the Finest. Because it’s fucking vanished, and nobody’d have rat-holed it
and not given it up knowing what’s at stake for the good old G-Man in the deal. Gately
makes a whole new kind of noise.

McDade says the more upbeat news is that Lenz has been possibly spotted, that Ken
E. and Burt F. Smith had seen what looked like either R. Lenz or C. Romero after a
wasting illness on their way back from wheeling Burt F.S. to a meeting in Kenmore
Square, mostly from the side of the back they’d seen him, wearing a back-split tux
and sombrero w/ balls, and apparently officially relapsed, back Out There, drunk as
a maroon, so totally legless when they saw him he was doing a drunk’s old hurricane-walk,
fighting his way from parking meter to parking meter and clinging to each parking
meter. Wade McDade here thinks to insert that the confirmed scuttlebutt is that E.M.P.H.H.
is getting ready to rent out Unit #3 to a long-term mental-health agency caring for
people with incapacitating agoraphobia, and that everybody at the House is speculating
on what a constantly crowded and cabin-feverish place
that’s
going to be, what with the terribleness of the predicted winter coming up. Diehl
says his nasal sinus can always tell when it’s going to snow, and his sinus is starting
to predict at least flurries for maybe as early as tonight. They never think to tell
Gately what day it is. That Gately can’t communicate even this most basic of requests
makes him want to scream. McDade, in what’s either an intimate aside or a knife-twist
at a Staffer who’s in no position to enforce anything, confides that he and Emil Minty
are arranging with Parias-Carbo—who works for an Ennet House alum at All-Bright Printing
down near the Jackson-Mann School—for engraved-looking formal invitations for the
agoraphobic folks in Unit #3 to all just come on out and over to Ennet House for a
crowded noisy outdoor Welcome-to-the-E.M.P.H.H.-Neighborhood bash. And now Gately
knows for sure it was McDade and Minty that put the HELP WANTED sign up under the
window of the lady in Unit #4 that shouts for Help. The general level of tension in
the room increases. Gavin Diehl clears his throat and says everybody says to say Gately’s
like wicked missed back at the House and everybody said to say ‘ ’s up?’ and that
they hope the G-Man’s up and back kicking residential ass very soon; and McDade produces
an unsigned Get Well card from his pocket and puts it carefully through the railing’s
bars, where it lies next to Gately’s arm and begins to open up from being folded and
shoved in a pocket. It’s clear the thing was shoplifted.

It’s probably the pathetic unsigned folded hot card, but Gately’s suddenly stricken
by the heat of the waves of self-pity and resentment he feels about not only the card
but about the prospect of these booger-chewing clowns not standing up to eyewitness
for his
se offendendo
after he just tried to do his sober job on one of their behalf and is now lying here
in a level of increasing dextral discomfort these limp punks couldn’t imagine if they
tried, getting ready to have to say no to grinning Pakistanis about his Disease’s
drug of choice with an invasive tube down his mouth and no notebook after he asked
for one, and needing to shit and to know the day and no big black nurse in view, and
unable to move—it suddenly seems awful starry-eyed to be willing to look on the course
of events as evidence of the protection and care of a Higher Power—it’s a bit hard
to see why a quote
Loving God
would have him go through the sausage-grinder of getting straight just to lie here
in total discomfort and have to say no to medically advised Substances and get ready
to go to jail just because Pat M. doesn’t have the brass to make these selfish bottom-feeding
dipshits stand up and do the right thing for once. The resentment and fear make cords
stand out on Gately’s purple neck, and he looks ferocious but not at all jolly.—Because
what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down
He isn’t, and He gets you straight just so you can feel all the more keenly every
bevel and edge of the special punishments He’s got lined up for you?—Because why the
fuck say no to a whole rubber bulbful of Demerol’s somnolent hum, if these are the
quote
rewards
of sobriety and rabidly-active work in AA? The resentment, fear and self-pity are
almost narcotizing. Way beyond anything he’d felt when hapless Canadians punched or
shot him. This was a sudden total bitter impotent Job-type rage that always sends
any sober addict falling back and up inside himself, like vapor up a chimney. Diehl
and McDade were backing away from him. As well they fucking might. Gately’s big head
felt hot and cold, and his pulse-line on the overhead monitor started to look like
the Rockies.

The residents, between Gately and the door, wide-eyed, now suddenly parted to let
someone pass. At first all Gately could see between them was the kidney-shaped plastic
bedpan and a cylindrical syringe-snouted ketchup-bottlish thing with
FLEET
down the side in cheery green. It took this equipment a second to signify. Then he
saw the nurse that came forward bearing the stuff, and his raging heart fell out of
him with a thud. Diehl and McDade made hearty-farewell noises and melted out the door
with the vague alacrity of seasoned drug-addicts. The nurse was no slot-mouthed penguin
or booming mammy. This nurse looked like something out of a racy-nursewear catalogue,
like somebody that had to detour blocks out of her way to avoid construction sites
at lunchtime. Gately’s projected image of his and this gorgeous nurse’s union unfolded
and became instantly grotesque: him prone and ass-up on the porch swing, she white-haired
and angelic and bearing something away in a kidney-shaped pan to the towering pile
behind the retirement-cottage. Everything angry in him evaporated as he got ready
to just fucking die of mortification. The nurse stood there and twirled the bedpan
on one finger and flexed the long Fleet cylinder a couple times and made an arc of
clear fluid come out the tip and hang in the windowlight, like a gunslinger twirling
his six-shooter around to casually show off, smiling in a way that simply snapped
Gately’s spine. He began to mentally recite the Serenity Prayer. When he moved he
could smell his own sour smell. Not to mention the time and pain involved in rolling
onto his left side and exposing his ass and pulling his knees to his chest with one
arm—‘Hug those knees like they were your Sweetie, is what we say,’ she said, putting
a terribly soft cool hand on Gately’s ass—without jostling the catheter or I.V.s,
or the thick taped tube that went down his mouth to God knows where.

I was going to go back up to see about Stice’s defenestration, to check on Mario and
change my socks and examine my expression in the mirror for unintentional hilarity,
to listen to Orin’s phone-messages and then the protracted-death aria from
Tosca
once or twice. There is no music for free-floating misery like
Tosca
.

I was moving down the damp hall when it hit. I don’t know where it came from. It was
some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating
during a match. I’d never felt quite this way off-court before. It wasn’t wholly unpleasant.
Unexplained panic sharpens the senses almost past enduring. Lyle had taught us this.
You perceive things very intensely. Lyle’s counsel had been to turn the perception
and attention on the fear itself, but he’d shown us how to do this only on-court,
in play. Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects.
But it wasn’t disorienting. The intensity wasn’t unmanageable. It was just intense
and vivid. It wasn’t like being high, but it was still very:
lucid
. The world seemed suddenly almost edible, there for the ingesting. The thin skin
of light over the baseboards’ varnish. The cream of the ceiling’s acoustic tile. The
deerskin-brown longitudinal grain in the rooms’ doors’ darker wood. The dull brass
gleam of the knobs. It was without the abstract, cognitive quality of Bob or Star.
The turn-signal red of the stairwell’s lit EXIT sign. Sleepy T. P. Peterson came out
of the bathroom in a dazzling plaid robe, his face and feet salmon-colored from the
showers’ heat, and vanished across the hall into his room without seeing me wobbling,
leaning against the cool mint wall of the hallway.

But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with an overcognitive, bad-trip-like
element that I didn’t recognize from the very visceral on-court attacks of fear. Something
like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. The concentration of
attention did something to it. What didn’t seem fresh and unfamiliar seemed suddenly
old as stone. It all happened in the space of a few seconds. The familiarity of Academy
routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect. The total number of times I’d schlepped
up the rough cement steps of the stairwell, seen my faint red reflection in the paint
of the fire door, walked the 56 steps down the hall to our room, opened the door and
eased it gently back flush in the jamb to keep from waking Mario. I reexperienced
the years’ total number of steps, movements, the breaths and pulses involved. Then
the number of times I would have to repeat the same processes, day after day, in all
kinds of light, until I graduated and moved away and then began the same exhausting
process of exit and return in some dormitory at some tennis-power university somewhere.
Maybe the worst part of the cognitions involved the incredible volume of food I was
going to have to consume over the rest of my life. Meal after meal, plus snacks. Day
after day after day. Experiencing this food in toto. Just the thought of the meat
alone. One megagram? Two megagrams? I experienced, vividly, the image of a broad cool
well-lit room piled floor to ceiling with nothing but the lightly breaded chicken
fillets I was going to consume over the next sixty years. The number of fowl vivisected
for a lifetime’s meat. The amount of hydrochloric acid and bilirubin and glucose and
glycogen and gloconol produced and absorbed and produced in my body. And another,
dimmer room, filled with the rising mass of the excrement I’d produce, the room’s
double-locked steel door gradually bowing outward with the mounting pressure…. I had
to put my hand out against the wall and stand there hunched until the worst of it
passed. I watched the floor dry. Its dull shine brightened behind me in the snowlight
from the east window. The wall’s baby blue was complexly filigreed with bumps and
clots of paint. An unmopped glob of Kenkle’s spit sat by the corner of V.R.5’s door’s
jamb, quivering slightly as the door rattled in its frame. There were scuffles and
thumps from upstairs. It was still snowing like hell.