Infinite Jest (184 page)

His fever is way worse, and his little snatches of dreams have a dismantled cubist
aspect he associates in memory with childhood flu. He dreams he looks in a mirror
and sees nothing and keeps trying to clean the mirror with his sleeve. One dream consists
only of the color blue, too vivid, like the blue of a pool. An unpleasant smell keeps
coming up his throat. He’s both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out,
but never Ferocious Francis or Joelle van D. He dreams there’s people in his room
but he’s not one of them. He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard
digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency
important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly
hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate
snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying
to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert
the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late,
but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with
wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and
Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because
he’s got no idea who they’re talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible
up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic:
Too Late
.

She’d come out of the St. E.’s doors and turned right for the quick walk back up to
Ennet and a grotesquely huge woman whose hose bulged with stubble and whose face and
head were four times larger than the largest woman Joelle had ever seen had grabbed
her arm at the elbow and said she was sorry to be the one to tell her but that unbeknownst
to her she was in almost mind-boggling danger.

It took rather a while for Joelle to look her up and down. ‘This is supposed to be
news?’

So and but that night’s next
A.M.
’d found Gately and Fackelmann still there in Fackelmann’s little corner, belts around
their arms, arms and noses red from scratching, still at it, the ingestion, on a hell
of a tear, cooking up and getting off and eating M&M’s when they could find their
mouths with their hands, moving like men deep under water, heads wobbling on strengthless
necks, the empty room’s ceiling sky-blue and bulging and under it hanging on the wall
overhead to their right the apartment’s upscale TP’s viewer on a recursive slo-mo
loop of some creepy thing Fackelmann liked that was just serial shots of flames from
brass lighters, kitchen-matches, pilot lights, birthday candles, votive candles, pillar
candles, birch shavings, Bunsen burners, etc., that Fackelmann had got from Kite,
who just before dawn had come out dressed and declined to get high with them and coughed
nervously and announced he had to leave for a few days or more for a ‘totally key’
and unmissable software trade-show in a different area code, not knowing Gately now
knew he knew Fackelmann already to be dead, w/ Kite then trying to leave discreetly
with every piece of hardware he owned in his arms, including the nonportable D.E.C.,
trailing cables. Then a bit later, as the
A.M.
light intensified yellowly and made both Gately and Fackelmann curse the fact that
the curtains had been stripped and pawned, as they continued to hunch and cook and
shoot, at maybe 0830h. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was up and vomiting briskly and applying
mousse against the workaday day, calling Gately Honey and her Night Errand and asking
if she’d done anything last night she’d have to explain to anybody today—kind of an
A.M.
routine in their relationship—applying blush and drinking her standard anti-hangover
breakfast
³⁷⁷
and watching Gately and Fackelmann’s chins fall and rise at slightly different underwater
rates. The smell of her perfume and high-retsin mints hung in the bare room long after
she’d bid them both Ciao Bello. As the
A.M.
sun got higher and intolerable, instead of taking action and nailing a blanket or
something over the window they opted instead to obliterate the reality of the eye-scalding
light and began truly bingeing on Blues, flirting with an O. D. They scaled Fackelmann’s
Mt. Dilaudid at a terrible clip. Fackelmann was by nature a binger. Gately was typically
more like a maintenance user. He rarely went on a classic-type binge, which meant
plunking down in one place with an enormous stash and getting loaded over and over
again for long periods without moving. But when he did start a binge he might as well
have been strapped to the snout of a missile for all the control he had over length
or momentum. Fackelmann was having at the mountain of 10-mg. Blues like there was
no tomorrow. Every time Gately even started to bring up the issue of how Faxter had
come by such a huge blue haul of the Substance—trying maybe to invite Fackelmann to
confront the reality of his trouble by describing it, like—Fackelmann would cut him
off with a soft ‘That’s a goddamn lie.’ This was pretty much all Fackelmann would
ever say, when loaded, even in response to things like questions. You have to picture
all the binge’s verbal exchanges as occurring like very slowly, oddly distended, as
if the time were honey:

‘Serious fucking stash you managed to come by somehow right here, Fa—’

‘That’s a goddamn lie.’

‘Man. Man. I just hope Gwendine or C’s got the phone today out there, man. Instead
of Whitey. No business getting done out of here today I don’t thi—’

‘ ’s a goddamn lie.’

‘That’s for sure, Fax.’

‘ ’s a goddamn lie.’

‘Fax. The Faxter. Count Faxula.’

‘Goddamn
lie
.’

After a while in all the distension it got to be like a joke. Gately would haul his
big head upright and try to allege the roundness of the planet, the three-dimensionality
of the phenomenal world, the blackness of all black dogs—

‘ ’s a goddamn lie.’

They found it increasingly funny. After every exchange like this they laughed and
laughed. Each exhalation of laughter seemed to take several minutes. The ceiling and
the window’s light receded. Fackelmann wet his pants; this was even funnier. They
watched the pool of urine spread out against the hardwood floor, changing shape, growing
curved arms, exploring the fine oak floor. The rises and valleys and little seams.
It might of gotten later and then early
A.M.
again. The entertainment cartridge’s myriad small flames were reflected in the spreading
puddle, so that soon Gately could watch without taking his chin off his chest.

When the phone rang it was just a fact. The ringing was like an environment, not a
signal. The fact of its ringing got more and more abstract. Whatever a ringing phone
might signify was like totally overwhelmed by the overwhelming fact of its ringing.
Gately pointed this out to Fackelmann. Fackelmann vehemently denied it.

At some point Gately tried to stand and was rudely assaulted by the floor, and wet
his own pants.

The phone rang and rang.

At another point they got interested in rolling different colors of Peanut M&M’s into
the puddles of urine and watching the colored dye corrode and leave a vampire-white
football of M&M in a nimbus of bright dye.

The intercom’s buzzer to the luxury apartment complex’s glass doors downstairs sounded,
overwhelming both of them with the fact of its sound. It buzzed and buzzed. They discussed
wishing it would stop the way you discuss wishing it would stop raining.

It became the ICBM of binges. The Substance seemed inexhaustible; Mt. Dilaudid changed
shapes but never really much shrank that they could see. It was the first and only
time ever that Gately I.V.’d narcotics so many times in one arm that he ran out of
arm-vein and had to switch to the other arm. Fackelmann was no longer coordinated
enough to help him tie off and boot. Fackelmann kept making a string of chocolaty
drool appear and distend almost down to the floor. The acidity of their urine was
corroding the apt.’s hardwood floor’s finish in an observable way. The puddle had
grown many arms like a Hindu god. Gately couldn’t quite tell if the urine had explored
its way almost back to their feet or if they were already sitting in urine. Fackelmann
would see how close to the surface of the pond of their mixed piss he could get the
tip of the string of spit before he sucked it back up and in. The little game had
an intoxicating aura of danger to it. The insight that most people like play-danger
but don’t like real-life danger hit Gately like an epiphany. It took him gallons of
viscous time to try and articulate the insight to Fackelmann so that Fackelmann could
give it the imprimatur of a denial.

Eventually the buzzer stopped.

The phrase ‘More tattoos than teeth’ also kept going through Gately’s head as it bobbed
(the head), even though he had no idea where the phrase came from or who it was supposed
to refer to. He hadn’t been to Billerica Minimum yet; he was on bail that Whitey Sorkin
had bonded.

The taste of the M&M’s couldn’t cut the weirdly sweet medical taste of hydromorphone
in Gately’s mouth. He watched an old stovetop-burner’s crown of blue flame shimmer
in the shine of the urine.

During a ruddled sunset-light period Fackelmann had had a small convulsion and a bowel
movement in his pants and Gately hadn’t had the coordination to go to Fackelmann’s
side during the seizure, to help and just be there. He had the nightmarish feeling
that there was something crucial he had to do but had forgot what it was. 10-mg. injections
of the Blue Bayou kept the feeling at bay for shorter and shorter periods. He’d never
heard of somebody having a convulsion from an O.D., and Fackelmann had indeed seemed
to bounce to his version of back.

The sun outside the big windows seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo.

They ran out of the distilled water Fackelmann had in the mixing bowl, and Fackelmann
took a cotton and sopped up candy-dyed urine off the floor and cooked up with urine.
Gately appeared to himself to be repulsed by this. But there was no question of trying
to get to the stripped kitchen for the distilled-water bottle. Gately was tying off
his right arm with his teeth, now, his left was so useless.

Fackelmann smelled very bad.

Gately nodded out into a dream where he was on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides said
PARAGON BUS LINES: THE GRAY LINE. In his stuporous recall over four years later in
St. E.’s he realizes that this bus is the bus from the dream that wouldn’t end and
wouldn’t go anywhere, but has the sickening realization that the connection between
the two buses is itself a dream, or is in a dream, and it’s now that his fever returns
to new heights and his line on the heart monitor gets a funny little hitch like a
serration at the 1st and 3rd nodes, which makes an amber light flash at the nurse’s
station down the hall.

When the buzzer sounded again they were watching the flames-film late at night. Now
poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s voice came to them through the intercom. The intercom
and apt.-complex-front-doors-unlocker button were all the way across the living room
by the apartment door. The ceiling bulged and receded. Fackelmann had made his hand
into the shape of a claw and was studying the claw in the light of the TP’s flames.
Mt. Dilaudid was badly caved in on one side; a disastrous avalanche into Lake Urine
was a possibility. P.H.-J. sounded drunk as a Nuck. She said to let her in. She said
she knew they were in there. She used
party
as a verb several times. Fackelmann was whispering that it was a lie. Gately remembers
he actually had to prod himself in the bladder to feel if he had to go to the bathroom.
His Unit felt small and icy cold against his leg in the wet jeans. The ammoniac smell
of urine and the breathing ceiling and drunk distant female voice… Gately reached
in the dark for the bars of his playpen, grasped them with pudgy fists, hauled himself
to his feet. His rising was more like the floor lowering. He wobbled like a toddler.
The apt. floor below him feinted right, left, circling for an opening to attack. The
luxury windows hung with starlight. Fackelmann had made his claw come alive into a
spider and was letting the spider climb slowly down his chest-area. The starlight
was smeary; there were no distinct stars. Everything out of the line of fire of the
cartridge-viewer was dark as a pocket. The buzzer sounded angry and the voice pathetic.
Gately put his foot out in the direction of the buzzer. He heard Fackelmann telling
his hand’s claw’s spider it was witnessing the birth of an empire. Then when Gately
put his foot down there was nothing there. The floor dodged his foot and rushed up
at him. He caught a glimpse of bulged ceiling and then the floor caught him in the
temple. His ears belled. The impact of the floor against him shook the whole room.
A box of laminates teetered and fell and fanned clear laminates all over the wet floor.
The viewer fell off the wall and cast ruddled flames on the ceiling. The floor jammed
itself against Gately, pressing in tight, and he grayed out with his scrunched face
toward Fackelmann and the windows beyond, with Fackelmann holding the spider out in
mid-air at him for his inspection.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake then.

‘I was in two scenes. What else is in there I do not know. In the first scene I’m
going through a revolving door. You know, around in this glass revolving door, and
going around out as I go in is somebody I know but apparently haven’t seen for a long
time, because the recognition calls for a shocked look, and the person sees me and
gives an equally shocked look—we’re supposedly formerly very close and now haven’t
seen each other in the longest time, and the meeting is random chance. And instead
of going in I keep going around in the door to follow the person out, which person
is also still revolving in the door to follow me in, and we whirl in the door like
that for several whirls.’