Infinite Jest (181 page)

Given the Faxter’s historical proclavity for fraudulent scams, it was amazing to Gately
that he didn’t ever know how Fackelmann had been fraudulently getting over on Whitey
Sorkin in all kinds of little ways almost from the start, and didn’t even find it
out until the not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob, which took
place during the three months Gately was out on bail Sorkin had generously put up.
By this time Gately had fallen in with two lesbian pharmaceutical-cocaine addicts
he’d met at the gym doing upside-down sit-ups from the chin-up bar (the lesbians,
not Gately, who was strictly from bench, curl, and squat). These vigorous girls ran
a rather intriguing house-cleaning-and-key-copying-and-burglary operation in Peabody
and Wakefield, and Gately had begun working heavy-merchandise-lifting and 4×4-vehicle-promotion
for them, serious full-time burglary, as his taste for even the threat of violence
diminished on account of remorse at the bouncer-damage he’d inflicted in that Danvers
bar after just seven Hefenreffers and an innocent comment about the B.-S.H.S.’s Minutemen’s
inferiority to the Danvers H.S. Roughriders; and Gately left more and more of Sorkin’s
transfer-and-collection work to Fackelmann, who by this time had gotten back into
oral narcotics out of Virus-fears and stopped resisting the sugar-cravings he associated
with oral narcs and gotten so fat and soft his shirtfront looked like an accordion
when he sat down to eat Peanut M&M’s and nod, and now also to a bad-news new guy Sorkin
had lately befriended and put to work, a fuchsia-haired Harvard Square punk-type kid
with a build like a stump and round black unblinking eyes, an old-fashioned street-junk
needle-jockey that went by the moniker Bobby C or just ‘C,’ and liked to hurt people,
the only I.V.-heroin addict Gately’d come across that actually preferred violence,
with no lips at all and purple hair in three great towering spikes and little bare
patches in the hair on his forearms—from constantly testing the edge on his boot-knife—and
a leather jacket with way more zippers than anybody could ever need, and a pre-electric
earring that hung way down and was a roaring skull in gold-plate flames.

Gene Fackelmann had, it turns out, for years been getting fraudulently over on Whitey
Sorkin’s bookmaking operation in all sorts of little ways that Gately and Kite (according
to Kite) hadn’t known about. Usually it was something like Fax taking long-shot action
from marginal bettors not well known to Sorkin and not phoning the action in to Sorkin’s
secretary, and then, when the long-shot lost, collecting the skeet plus vig
³⁷²
from the bettor and rat-holing it all for himself. It had seemed to Gately after
he found out about it a suicidal-type risk, since if any of these long-shots ever
actually
won
Fackelmann would be responsible for giving the bettor his winnings from ‘Whitey’—meaning
it would be Sorkin that would hear the complaint if Fackelmann didn’t come up with
the $ on his own and get it to the bettor—and the whole crew’s pharmacological expenses
meant they always existed on the absolutest margins of liquidity, at least that’s
what Gately and Kite (according to Kite) had always thought. It wasn’t until Fackelmann’s
map had been presumably eliminated for keeps and Kite had returned from his long highatus
and Gately and Kite were getting the late Fackelmann’s stuff together to divvy up
valuables and dump the rest and Gately found, taped to the underside of Fackelmann’s
porn-cartridge storage case, over $22,000 in mint-crisp O.N.A.N. currency, not until
then that Gately realized that Fackelmann had through iron will kept unspent an emergency
reserve skeet-payment stake for just such a worst-case possibility. Gately split this
found Fackelmann-$ with Trent Kite, then but went and turned his half of it in to
Sorkin, claiming it was all they’d found. It wasn’t that he forked his half over to
Sorkin out of any kind of fear—Sorkin would have regretfully had the C kid and his
Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too, along with Fackelmann, if he’d thought Gately
had been part of Fax’s scam—but out of guilt over having been clueless about his own
fellow Twin Tower screwing Sorkin after Sorkin had been so neurasthenically over-generous
to them both, and because Fackelmann’s betrayal had ended up so hurting Sorkin and
causing him so much psychosomatic grief that he’d spent a whole week in bed in Saugus
in the dark with Lone Ranger–type sleep shades on, drinking VO and Cafergot and clutching
his traumatized cranium and face, feeling betrayed and abandoned, he’d said, his whole
faith in the human creature shaken, he’d wept to Gately over the cellular phone, after
it all came out. Ultimately, Gately gave Sorkin his half of Fackelmann’s secret $
mostly to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know somebody cared. He also did it for
Fackelmann’s memory, which he was mourning Fax’s gruesome death even at the same time
he cursed him for a liar and rat-punk. It was a time of moral confusion for Don G.,
and his half of the post-mortem $ seemed like the best he could do in terms of like
a gesture. He didn’t rat out that Kite had a whole other half, which Kite spent his
half of the $ on Grateful Dead bootlegs and a portable semiconductor-refrigeration
unit for his D.E.C. 2100’s motherboard that upped his processing capacity to 32 mb2
of RAM, roughly the same as an InterLace Disseminator-substation or an NNE Bell cellular
SWITCHnet; though it wasn’t two months before he’d pawned the D.E.C. and put it in
his arm, and had become such a steeply-downhill-type Dilaudid-addict that when he
signed on as Gately’s new trusted associate for B&Es after Gately got out of Billerica
the once-mighty Kite wasn’t even able to dicky an alarm or shunt a meter, and Gately
found himself the brains of the team, which it was a mark of his own high-angle decline
that this fact didn’t make him more nervous.

The R.N. that’d flushed his colon while Gately wept with shame is now back in the
room with an M.D. Gately hasn’t seen before. He lies there pinwheel-eyed from pain
and efforts to Abide via memory. One eye has some sort of blurry sleep-goop film in
it that won’t blink or rub away. The room is filled with mournful gunmetal winter-
P.M.
light. The M.D. and gorgeous R.N. are doing something to the room’s other bed, attaching
something metally complex from out of a big case not unlike a good-table-silverware
case, with molded purple velvet insides for metal rods and two half-circles of steel.
The intercom dings. The M.D.’s got a beeper at his belt, an object with still more
unhealthy associations. Gately hasn’t exactly been asleep. The heat of his post-op
fever makes his face feel tight, like standing too close to a fire. His right side’s
settled down to a sick ache like a kicked groin. Fackelmann’s favorite phrase had
been
‘That’s a goddamned lie!’
He’d used it in response to just about everything. His mustache always looked like
it was getting ready to crawl off his lip. Gately’s always despised facial hair. The
former naval M.P. had had a great big yellow-gray mustache he waxed into two sharp
protruding steer-horns. The M.P. was vain about his mustache and spent giant amounts
of time clipping and grooming and waxing it. When the M.P. passed out, Gately used
to come quietly up and gently push the stiff waxed sides of the mustache into crazy
canted angles. Sorkin’s new third field-operative C’d claimed to collect ears and
to have a collection of ears. Bobby C with his lightless eyes and flat lipless head,
like a reptile. The M.D. was one of those apprentice Residential M.D.s that looked
about twelve, scrubbed and groomed to a dull pink shine. He radiated the bustling
cheer they teach M.D.s how to radiate at you. He had a child’s haircut, complete with
spit-curl, and his thin neck swam in the collar of his white M.D.-coat, and his coat’s
pens’ pocket-protector and the owlish glasses he kept pushing up, together with the
little neck, gave Gately the sudden insight that most M.D.s and A.D.A.s and P.D./P.O.s
and shrinks, the fearsomest authority figures in a drug addict’s life, that these
guys came from the pencil-necked ranks of the same weak-chinned wienie kids that drug
addicts used to despise and revile and bully, as kids. The R.N. was so attractive
in the gray light and goop-blur it was almost grotesque. Her tits were such that she
had a little cleft of cleavage showing even over her R.N.’s uniform, which was not
like a low-neckline thing. The milky cleavage that suggests tits like two smooth scoops
of vanilla ice cream that your healthy-type girls all have probably got. Gately’s
forced to confront the fact that he’s never once been with a really healthy girl,
and not with even so much as a girl of any kind in sobriety. And then when she reaches
way up to unscrew a bolt in some kind of steelish plate on the wall over the empty
bed the like hemline of her uniform retreats up north so that the white stockings’
rich violinish curves at the top of the insides of her legs in the white
LISLE
are visible in backlit silhouette, and an
EMBRASURE
of sad windowlight shines through her legs. The raw healthy sexuality of the whole
thing just about makes Gately sick with longing and self-pity, and he wants to avert
his head. The young M.D. is also staring at the lissome stretch and retreating hem,
not even pretending to help with the bolt, missing as he goes to push up the glasses
so that he stabs himself in the forehead. The M.D. and R.N. exchange several pieces
of real technical medical language. The M.D. drops his clipboard twice. The R.N. either
doesn’t notice any of the sexual tension in the room because she’s spent her whole
life as the eye of a storm of sexual tension, or else she just pretends not to notice.
Gately’s almost positive the M.D.’s jacked off before to the thought of this R.N.,
and he feels sick that he totally empathizes with the M.D. It’d be
CIRCUMAMBIENT
sexual tension, would be the ghostword. Gately’d never even let an unhealthy strung-out-type
female go into the head for at least an hour after he’d taken a dump in there, out
of embarrassment, and now this sickening circumambient creature had with her own Fleet
syringe and soft hands summoned a loose pathetic dump from the anus of Bimmy Gately,
which anus she had thus seen close up, producing a dump.

It doesn’t even register on Gately that it’s spitting a little goopy sleet outside
until he’s made himself avert his head from the window and R.N. The ceiling’s throbbing
a little, like a dog when it’s hot. The R.N. had told him, from behind, her name was
Cathy or Kathy, but Gately wants to think of her as just the R.N. He can smell himself,
a smell like sandwich-meat left in the sun, and feel greasy sweat purling all over
his scalp, and his unshaved chin against his throat, and the tube taped into his mouth
is tacky with the scum of sleep. The thin pillow is hot and he has no way to flip
it over to the cool side of the pillow. It’s like his shoulder’s grown its own testicles
and every time his heart beats some very small guy kicked him in them, the testicles.
The M.D. sees Gately’s open eyes and tells the nurse the gunshot patient is semiconscious
again and is he Q’d for any kind of
P.M.
med. The sleetfall is slight; it sounds like somebody’s throwing little fistfuls
of sand at the window from real far away. The deadly R.N., helping the M.D. clamp
some kind of weird steel back-braceish thing with what looks like a metal halo they’d
put together from parts out of the big case, clamping the thing to the head of the
bed and to little steel plates under the bed’s heart monitor—it looks sort of like
the upper part of an electric chair, he thinks—the R.N. looks down in mid-stretch
and says Hi Mr. Gately and says Mr. Gately is allergic and doesn’t get any meds except
antipyretics and Toradol in a drip Dr. Pressburger do you Mr. Gately you poor brave
allergic thing. Her voice is like you can just imagine what she’d sound like getting
X’d and really liking it. Gately’s repelled at himself for having taken a dump in
front of this kind of R.N. The M.D.’s name had sounded just like ‘Pressburger’ or
‘Prissburger,’ and Gately’s now sure the poor yutz’d taken daily ass-kickings from
sinister future drug addicts, as a kid. The M.D.’s perspiring in the ambient sexuality
of the R.N. He says (the M.D. does) So what’s he intubated for if he’s conscious and
self-ventilating and on a drip. This is while the M.D.’s trying to screw the metal
halo itself to the top of the back-braceish thing with bolt-head screws, one knee
up on the bed and stretching so part of the red soft upper part of his ass is showing
over his belt, not being able to get the thing screwed on, shaking the metal halo
like it’s its stubborn fault, and even lying there Gately can tell the guy’s turning
the bolt-head screws the wrong way. The R.N. comes over and puts a cool soft hand
on Gately’s forehead in a way that makes the forehead want to die with shame. What
Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there’d been concern
that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded with in,
through, or near his lower-something Trachea, since there’d been trauma to his Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-
Sterno,
she said the radiology results were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called
Pendleton had wanted a 16 mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of 20% Mucomyst
³⁷³
q. 2 h. on the off-chance of hemorrhage or mucoidal flux, like just in case. The
parts of this Gately can follow he doesn’t care for one bit. He doesn’t want to know
his body even fucking
has
something with six syllables in it. The horrifying R.N. wipes Gately’s face off as
best she can with her hand and says she’ll try to fit him in for a sponge bath before
she goes off-shift at 1600h., at which Gately goes rigid with dread. The R.N.’s hand
smells of Kiss My Face–brand Organic Hand and Body Lotion, which Pat Montesian also
uses. She tells the poor M.D. to let her have a try at the cranial brace, those things
are always a bear to screw in. Her shoes are those subaudible nurses’ shoes that make
no sound, so it seems like she glides away from Gately’s bed instead of walks away.
Her legs aren’t visible until she gets a certain ways away. The M.D.’s own shoes have
a wet squeak to the left one. The M.D. looks like he hasn’t slept well in about a
year. There’s a faint vibe of prescription ’drines about the guy, on Gately’s view.
He paces squeakily at the foot of the bed watching the R.N. turn the screws the right
way and pushes his owlish glasses up and says that Clifford Pendleton, scratch golfer
or no, is a post-traumatic maroon, that nebulized Mucomyst is for (and here his voice
makes it clear he’s reciting from memory, like to show off) abnormal, viscid, or inspissated
post-traumatic mucus, not potential hemorrhaging or edema, and that 16 mm. siphuncular
intubation itself had been specifically discreditated as an intratracheal-edema prophylaxis
in the second-to-latest issue of
Morbid Trauma Quarterly
as so diametrically invasive that it was more apt to exacerbate than to alleviate
hemoptysis, according to somebody he calls ‘Laird’ or ‘Layered.’ Gately’s listening
in with the uncomprehending close attention of like a child whose parents are discussing
something adultly complex about child-care in its presence. The condescension with
which Prissburger inserts that
hemoptysis
means something called ‘pertussive hemorrhage,’ like Kathy the R.N. wasn’t enough
of a pro not to have to insert little technical explanations for, makes Gately sad
for the guy—it’s obvious the guy pathetically thinks this kind of limp condescending
shit will impress her. Gately’s got to admit he would have tried to impress her, too,
though, if she hadn’t met him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus.
The R.N.’s finishing packing up the parts of the brace thing the M.D. couldn’t seem
to attach, meanwhile. She was saying the M.D. seemed awful well-up on methodology
for something called a 2R, as they left, and Gately could tell the M.D. couldn’t tell
she was being a little sarcastic. The M.D. was struggling to try to carry the thing’s
case, which Gately judges weighs at most 30 kg. It occurs to him head-on for the first
time that the real reason Stavros L. hired shelter-cleaning guys out of halfway houses
was that he could get away with paying them like bupkis, and that he (Don G.) must
surely on some level have known this all along but been in some kind of Denial about
confronting it head-on that he was getting fucked over by Stavros the shoe-freak,
and that the word
embrasure
had been surely another invasive-wraith ghostword, and then now also that nobody
seems to exactly be falling all over themself to bring the paper and pen it had sure
seemed like Joelle van D. had understood Gately’s mimed request for, and that thus
maybe Joelle’s visit and show-and-tell with the snapshots had been just as much a
febrile hallucination as the figuranted wraith, and that it has stopped spitting sleet
but the clouds out there still look like they mean serious business out there over
Brighton-Allston, and that if Joelle v.D.’s intimate visit with the photo album was
a hallucination that at least meant it was also a hallucination she was wearing fucking
college-kid Ken Erdedy’s sweatpants, and that the low-angled sadness of the cloudy
P.M.
light meant it had to be pretty near 1600h. EST so that maybe There By The Grace
he could avoid maybe getting an uncontrolled woodie getting sponged naked by the horrifyingly
attractive K/Cathy and but still could get sponged by her linebacker of a replacement,
because the sour meaty smell of himself was grim, only maybe miss the woodie-hazard
and get sponged by the big hairy-moled 1600–2400h. nurse in support-hose to who Gately’s
anus was a stranger. Plus that 1600h. EST was Spontaneous-Dissemination time for Mr.
Bouncety-Bounce, the mentally ill kiddy-show host Gately’s always loved and used to
try his best with Kite and poor old Fackelmann to be home and largely alert for, and
that nobody’s once offered to click on the HD viewer that hangs next to a myopic fake-Turner
fog-and-boat print on the wall opposite Gately’s and the former kid’s beds, and that
he had no remote with which to either activate the TP at 1600 or ask somebody else
to activate it. That without some kind of notebook and pencil he couldn’t communicate
even the basicest question or like concept to anybody—it was like he was a vegetated
hemorrhagic-stroke-victim. Without a pencil and notebook he couldn’t even seem to
get across a request for a notebook and pencil; it was like he was trapped inside
his huge chattering head. Unless, his head then points out, Joelle van Dyne’s visit
had been real and her understanding of the pen-and-notebook gesture had been real,
and but somebody out there in the hallway with a hat or at the Hospital President’s
office or at the nurses’ station with his innerdicted M.-Hanley-brownies had also
innerdicted the request for writing supplies, at the Finest’s request, so he couldn’t
get his story straight with anybody before they came for him, that it was like a pre-interrogation
softening-up thing, they were leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and
unmoving and blank like the House’s catatonic lady slumped moist and pale in her chair
or the Advanced Basics Group’s adopted girl’s vegetable-kingdom sister, or the whole
catatonic gang over at E.M.P.H.H.’s #5 Shed, silent and dead-faced even when touching
a tree or propped up amid exploding front-lawn firecrackers. Or the wraith’s nonexistent
kid. It’s got to be past 1600h., light-wise, unless it’s the lowering clouds. There’s
roughly 0% or less visibility now outside the sleet-crusted window. The room’s windowlight
is darkening to that Kaopectate shade that has always marked the just-pre-sunset time
of day that Gately (like most drug addicts) has always most dreaded, and had always
either lowered his helmet and charged extra-murderous at somebody to block it out
(the late-day dread) or else dropped QuoVadis or oral narcotics or turned on Mr. Bouncety-Bounce
extra loud or busied himself in his silly chef’s hat in the Ennet House kitchen or
made sure he was at a Meeting sitting way up close in nose-pore range, to block it
out (the late-day dread), the gray-light late-afternoon dread, always worse in winter,
the dread, in winter’s watered-down light—just like the secret dread he’s always felt
whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left him alone in a room, a
terrible stomach-sinking dread that probably dates all the way back to being alone
in his XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed.