Infinite Jest (18 page)

There is no jolly irony in Tiny Ewell’s name. He is tiny, an elf-sized U.S. male.
His feet barely reach the floor of the taxi. He is seated, being driven east into
the grim three-decker districts of East Watertown, west of Boston proper. A rehabilitative
staffer wearing custodial whites under a bombardier’s jacket sits beside Tiny Ewell,
big arms crossed and staring placid as a cow at the intricately creased back of the
cabbie’s neck. The window Tiny is next to has a sticker that thanks him in advance
for not smoking. Tiny Ewell wears no winter gear over a jacket and tie that don’t
quite go together and stares out his window with unplacid intensity at the same district
he grew up in. He normally takes involved routes to avoid Watertown. His jacket a
26S, his slacks a 26/24, his shirt one of the shirts his wife had so considerately
packed for him to bring into the hospital detox and hang on hangers that won’t leave
the rod. As with all Tiny Ewell’s business shirts, only the front and cuffs are ironed.
He wears size 6 Florsheim wingtips that gleam nicely except for one big incongruous
scuff-mark of white from where he’d kicked at his front door when he’d returned home
just before dawn from an extremely important get-together with potential clients to
find that his wife had had the locks changed and filed a restraining order and would
communicate with him only by notes passed through the mail-slot below the white door’s
black brass (the brass had been painted black) knocker. When Tiny leans down and wipes
at the scuff-mark with a slim thumb it only pales and smears. It is Tiny’s first time
out of Happy Slippers since his second day at the detox. They took away his Florsheims
after 24 abstinent hours had passed and he started to perhaps D.T. a little. He’d
kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when
he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began running
around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as
they continued to ooze through the room’s electrical outlets and scurry repulsively
about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men in custodial whites negotiated
a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what
really needed to be fumigated. They gave him slippers of green foam-rubber with smiley-faces
embossed on the tops. The detox’s in-patients are encouraged to call these Happy Slippers.
The staff refer to the footwear in private as ‘pisscatchers.’ It is Tiny Ewell’s first
day out of rubber slippers and ass-exposing detox pajamas and striped cotton robe
in two weeks. The early-November day is foggy and colorless. The sky and the street
are the same color. The trees look skeletal. There is bright wet wadded litter all
along the seams of street and curb. The houses are skinny three-deckers, mashed together,
wharf-gray w/ salt-white trim, madonnas in the yards, bowlegged dogs hurling themselves
against the fencing. Some schoolboys in knee-pads and skallycaps are playing street
hockey on a passing school’s cement playground. Except none of the boys seems to be
moving. The trees’ bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pass.
East Watertown is the obvious straight-line easement between St. Mel’s detox and the
halfway house’s Enfield, and Ewell’s insurance is paying for the cab. With his small
round shape and bit of white goatee and a violent flush that could pass for health
of some jolly sort, Tiny Ewell looks like a radically downscaled Burl Ives, the late
Burl Ives as an impossible bearded child. Tiny looks out the window at the rose window
of the church next to the school playground where the boys are playing/not playing.
The rose window is not illuminated from either side.

The man who for the last three days has been Tiny Ewell’s roommate at St. Mel’s Hospital’s
detoxification unit sits in a blue plastic straight-back chair in front of his and
Ewell’s room’s window’s air conditioner, watching it. The air conditioner hums and
gushes, and the man gazes with rapt intensity into its screen of horizontal vents.
The air conditioner’s cord is thick and white and leads into a three-prong outlet
with black heel-marks on the wall all around it. The November room is around 12° C.
The man turns the air conditioner’s dial from setting #4 to setting #5. The curtains
above it shake and billow around the window. The man’s face falls into and out of
amused expressions as he watches the air conditioner. He sits in the blue chair with
a trembling Styrofoam cup of coffee and a paper plate of brownies into which he taps
ashes from the cigarettes whose smoke the air conditioner blows straight back over
his head. The cigarette smoke is starting to pile up against the wall behind him,
and to ooze and run chilled down the wall and form a sort of cloud-bank near the floor.
The man’s raptly amused profile appears in the mirror on the wall beside the dresser
the two in-patients share. The man, like Tiny Ewell, has the rouged-corpse look that
attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. The man is in addition a burnt-yellow beneath
his flush, from chronic hepatitis. The mirror he appears in is treated with shatterproof
Lucite polymers. The man leans carefully forward with the plate of brownies in his
lap and changes the setting on the air conditioner from 5 to 3 and then to 7, then
8, scanning the screen of gushing vents. He finally turns the selector’s dial all
the way around to 9. The air conditioner roars and blows his long hair straight back,
and his beard blows back over his shoulder, ashes fly and swirl around from his plate
of brownies, plus crumbs, and his rodney’s tip glows cherry and gives sparks. He is
deeply engaged by whatever he sees on 9. He gives Tiny Ewell the screaming meemies,
Ewell has complained. He wears pisscatchers, a striped cotton St. Mel’s robe, and
a pair of glasses missing one lens. He has been watching the air conditioner all day.
His face produces the little smiles and grimaces of a person who’s being thoroughly
entertained.

When the big black rehabilitative staffer placed Tiny Ewell in the taxi and then squeezed
in and told the cabbie they wanted Unit #6 in the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex
just off Commonwealth Ave. in Enfield, the cabbie, whose photo was on the Mass. Livery
License taped to the glove compartment, the cabbie, looking back and down at little
Tiny Ewell’s neat white beard and ruddy complexion and sharp threads, had scratched
under his skallycap and asked if he was sick or something.

Tiny Ewell had said, ‘So it would seem.’

By mid-afternoon on 2 April Y.D.A.U.: the Near Eastern medical attaché; his devout
wife; the Saudi Prince Q———’s personal physician’s personal assistant, who’d been
sent over to see why the medical attaché hadn’t appeared at the Back Bay Hilton in
the
A.M.
and then hadn’t answered his beeper’s page; the personal physician himself, who’d
come to see why his personal assistant hadn’t come back; two Embassy security guards
w/ sidearms, who’d been dispatched by a candidiatic, heartily pissed-off Prince Q———;
and two neatly groomed Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers who’d seen human heads through
the living room window and found the front door unlocked and come in with all good
spiritual intentions—all were watching the recursive loop the medical attaché had
rigged on the TP’s viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still
and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though
the room smelled very bad indeed.

He sat alone above the desert, redly backlit and framed in shale, watching very yellow
payloaders crawl over the beaten dirt of some U.S.A. construction site several km.
to the southeast. The outcropping’s height allowed him, Marathe, to look out over
most of U.S.A. area code 6026. His shadow did not yet reach the downtown regions of
the city Tucson; not yet quite. Of sounds in the arid hush were only a faint and occasional
hot wind, the blurred sound of the wings of sometimes an insect, some tentative trickling
of loosened grit and small stones moving farther down the upslope behind.

And as well the sunset over the foothills and mountains behind him: such a difference
from the watery and somehow sad spring sunsets of southwestern Québec’s Papineau regions,
where his wife had need of care. This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It
took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the
sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when
he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall. It hung
just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly was
sinking.

Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized
fauteuil de rollent
³⁷
on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with
his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute,
Goethe’s well-known ‘
Bröckengespenst
’ phenomenon
³⁸
enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of
his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows,
whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the
wheels’ rubber rims; and his head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson
a premature dusk.

He appeared to remain concentrated on his huge shadow-play as gravel and then also
breath sounded from the steep hillside back above him, grit and dirty stones cascading
onto the outcropping and gushing past his chair and off the front lip, and then the
unmistakable yelp of an individual’s impact with a cactus somewhere up behind. But
Marathe, he had all the time without turning watched the other man’s clumsy sliding
descent’s own mammoth shadow, cast as far east as the Rincon range just past the city
Tucson, and could see the shadow rush in west toward his own as Unspecified Services’
M. Hugh Steeply descended, falling twice and cursing in U.S.A. English, until the
shadow collapsed nearly into Marathe’s monstrous own. Another yelp took place as the
Unspecified Services field-operative’s fall and slide the last several meters carried
him upon his bottom down onto the outcropping and then nearly all the way out and
off it, Marathe having to release the machine pistol under his blanket to grab Steeply’s
bare arm and halt this sliding. Steeply’s skirt was pulled obscenely up and his hosiery
full of runs and stubs of thorns. The operative sat at Marathe’s feet, glowing redly
in the backlight, legs hanging over the shelf’s edge, breathing with difficulty.

Marathe smiled and released the operative’s arm. ‘Stealth becomes you,’ he said.

‘Go shit in your chapeau,’ Steeply wheezed, bringing up his legs to survey the hosiery’s
damage.

They spoke for the most part U.S.A. English when they met like this, covertly, in
the field. M. Fortier
³⁹
had wished Marathe to require that they interface always in Québecois French, as
for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of the Office of Unspecified
Services, which the Québecois Sepératiste Left referred to always as B.S.S., the ‘
Bureau des Services sans Spécificité
.’

Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert’s floor as
Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on
heels. The two men sent together a strange
Bröckengespenst
-shadow out toward the city Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged
at the top, from Steeply’s wig becoming un-combed in his descent. Steeply’s gigantic
prosthetic breasts pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty
sky. The matte curtain of sunset’s true dusk-shadow was moving itself very slowly
in across the Rincons and Sonora desert east of the city Tucson, still many km. from
obscuring their own large shadow.

But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his
Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to
in truth do this—betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R.
superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S.
⁴⁰
—once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of
the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the
U.S.A. English of Steeply’s preference.

In fact, Steeply’s Québecois was better than Marathe’s English, but c’était la guerre,
as one says.

Marathe sniffed slightly. ‘Thus, so, we now are both here.’ He wore a windbreaker
and did not perspire.

Steeply’s eyes were luridly made up. The rear area of his dress was dirty. Some of
his makeup had started to run. He was forming a type of salute to shade his eyes and
looking upward behind them at what remained of the explosive and trembling sun. ‘How
in God’s name did you get up here?’