Infinite Jest (191 page)

In outline, it eventually boiled down to this: a desperate Barry Loach—with Mrs. L.
now on 25 mg. of daily Ativan
³⁸⁴
and just about camped out in front of the candle-lighting apse of the Loach’s parish
church—Loach challenges his brother to let him prove somehow—risking his own time,
Barry’s, and maybe safety somehow—that the basic human character wasn’t as unempathetic
and necrotic as the brother’s present depressed condition was leading him to think.
After a few suggestions and rejections of bets too way-out even for Barry Loach’s
desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge. The spiritually
despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes
for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly
in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station
on the edge of the Boston Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community’s
lumpen dregs, who all usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and
for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply
ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth
and contact. And this Barry does. And does. Days go by. His own spiritually upbeat
constitution starts taking blows to the solar plexus. It’s not clear whether the verminousness
of his appearance had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there
outside the station doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him
ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to
do was touch him. It’s possible that the respectable citizenry with their bookbags
and cellulars and dogs with little red sweater-vests thought that sticking one’s hand
way out and crying ‘Touch me, just touch me,
please
’ was some kind of new stem-type argot for ‘Lay some change on me,’ because Barry
Loach found himself hauling in a rather impressive daily total of $—significantly
more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and sterilizing dental
prostheses for Boston College lacrosse players. Citizens found his pitch apparently
just touching enough to give him $; but B. Loach’s brother—who often stood there in
collarless mufti up against the plastic jamb of the T-station’s exit, slouched and
smirking and idly shuffling a deck of cards in his hands—was always quick to point
out the spastic delicacy with which the patrons dropped change or $ into Barry Loach’s
hand, these kind of bullwhip-motions or jagged in-and-outs like they were trying to
get something hot off a burner, never touching him, and they rarely broke stride or
even made eye-contact as they tossed alms B.L.’s way, much less ever getting their
hand anywhere close to contact with B.L.’s disreputable hand. The brother not unreasonably
nixed the accidental contact of one commuter who’d stumbled as he tried to toss a
quarter and then let Barry break his fall, not to mention the bipolarly ill bag-lady
who got Barry Loach in a headlock and tried to bite his ear off near the end of the
third week of the Challenge. Barry L. refused to concede defeat and misanthropy, and
the Challenge dragged on week after week, and the older brother got bored eventually
and stopped coming and went back to his room and waited for the St. John’s Seminary
administration to give him his walking papers, and Barry Loach had to take Incompletes
in the semester’s Training courses, and got canned from his work-study job for not
showing up, and he went through weeks and then months of personal spiritual crisis
as passerby after passerby interpreted his appeal for contact as a request for cash
and substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact; and some of the
T-station’s other disreputable stem-artists became intrigued by Barry’s pitch—to say
nothing of his net receipts—and started themselves to take up the cry of ‘Touch me,
please, please,
someone!,
’ which of course further compromised Barry Loach’s chances of getting some citizen
to interpret his request literally and lay hands on him in a compassionate and human
way; and Loach’s own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot, and
his upbeat view of the so-called normal and respectable human race began to undergo
dark revision; and when the other scuzzy and shunned stem-artists of the downtown
district treated him as a compadre and spoke to him in a collegial way and offered
him warming drinks from brown-bagged bottles he felt too disillusioned and coldly
alone to be able to refuse, and thus started to fall in with the absolute silt at
the very bottom of the metro Boston socioeconomic duck-pond. And then what happened
with the spiritually infirm older brother and whither he fared and what happened with
his vocation never gets resolved in the E.T.A. Loach-story, because now the focus
becomes all Loach and how he was close to forgetting—after all these months of revulsion
from citizens and his getting any kind of nurturing or empathic treatment only from
homeless and addicted stem-artists—what a shower or washing machine or a ligamental
manipulation even were, much less career-ambitions or a basically upbeat view of indwelling
human goodness, and in fact Barry Loach was dangerously close to disappearing forever
into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life and spending his whole adult
life homeless and louse-ridden and stemming in the Boston Common and drinking out
of brown paper bags, when along toward the end of the ninth month of the Challenge,
his appeal—and actually also the appeals of the other dozen or so cynical stem-artists
right alongside Loach, all begging for one touch of a human hand and holding their
hands out—when all these appeals were taken literally and responded to with a warm
handshake—which only the more severely intoxicated stemmers didn’t recoil from the
profferer of, plus Loach—by E.T.A.’s own Mario Incandenza, who’d been sent dashing
out from the Back Bay co-op where his father was filming something that involved actors
dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove
Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and Mario’d been sent dashing out to get another
roll of tokens from the nearest station, which because of a dumpster-fire near the
entrance to the Arlington St. station turned out to be Park Street, and Mario, being
alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies
outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain
to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High
Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike
hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand, which led through
a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances
to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer’s job at E.T.A.,
a job he was promoted from just months later when the then-Head Trainer suffered the
terrible accident that resulted in all locks being taken off E.T.A. saunas’ doors
and the saunas’ maximum temperature being hard-wired down to no more than 50°C.

The inverted glass was the size of a cage or small jail cell, but it was still recognizably
a bathroom-type tumbler, as if for gargling or post-brushing swishing, only huge and
upside-down, on the floor, with him inside. The tumbler was like a prop or display;
it was the sort of thing that would have to be made special. Its glass was green and
its bottom over his head was pebbled and the light inside was the watery dancing green
of extreme ocean depths.

There was a kind of louvered screen or vent high on one side of the glass, but no
air was coming out. In. The air inside the huge glass was pretty clearly limited,
as well, because there was already CO
₂
steam on the sides. The glass was too thick to break or to kick his way out, and
it felt like he might have possibly broken the leg’s foot already trying.

There were some green and distorted faces through the glass’s side’s steam. The face
at eye-level belonged to the latest Subject, the dexterous and adoring Swiss hand-model.
She stood looking at him, her arms crossed, smoking, exhaling greenly through her
nose, then looked down to confer with another face, seeming to float at about waist-level,
that belonged to the shy and handicapped fan who O.’d realized had shared the Subject’s
Swiss accent.

The Subject behind the glass would meet Orin’s eye steadily but did not acknowledge
him or anything he shouted. When Orin had tried to kick his way out was when he’d
recognized that the Subject was looking
at
his eyes rather than
into
them as previously. There were now smeared footprints on the glass.

Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to
see what the faces were doing.

His foot really was hurt, and the remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so
hard really were making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty
clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not
being a dream. It was like the minute he’d come to and found himself inside a huge
inverted tumbler he’d opted to figure: dream. The stilted amplified voice that came
periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is
The Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make
him grateful: it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible
but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams. Plus the bizarre anxiety
of not being able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he said through
the glass. When the speaker’s screen slid back, Orin looked away from the glass’s
faces and up, figuring that they were going to do something even more surreal and
vehement that would really nail down the undeniable dream-status of the whole experience.

Mlle. Luria P———, who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had
lobbied simply to be given a pair of rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone
with the Subject’s testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately
what the Subject’s response would be when the speaker’s screen was withdrawn and the
sewer roaches began pouring blackly and shinily through, and as the Subject splayed
itself against the tumbler’s glass and pressed its face so flat against the absurd
glass’s side that the face changed from green to stark white, and, much muffled, shrieked
at them ‘Do it to her!
Do it to her!
,’ Luria P———inclined her head and rolled her eyes at the A.F.R. leader, whom she
had long regarded as something of a ham.

Human beings came and went. An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back with
a yelp. Somebody down the hall was jabbering and weeping. At one point Chandler F.,
the recently graduated nonstick-cookware salesman, seemed to be there in the classic
resident-confiteor position, his chin on his hands on the bedside crib-railing. The
room’s light was a glowing gray. The Ennet House House Manager was there, fingering
the place her missing eyebrow’d been, trying to explain something about how Pat M.
hadn’t come because she and Mr. M.’d had to kick Pat’s little girl out of the house
for using something synthetic again, and was in a too shaky place spiritually to even
leave home. Gately felt physically hotter than he’d ever felt. It felt like a sun
in his head. The crib-type railings got tapered on top and writhed a little, like
flames. He imagined himself on the House’s aluminum platter with an apple in his mouth,
his skin glazed and crispy. The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed
in mist and said Up it to 30 q 2 and Let’s Try Doris,
³⁸⁵
that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He wasn’t talking to Gately. The M.D.
was not addressing Don Gately. Gately’s only conscious concern was Asking For Help
to refuse Demerol. He kept trying to say
addict
. He remembered being young on the playground and telling Maura Duffy to look down
her shirt and spell
attic
. Somebody else said Ice Bath. Gately felt something rough and cool on his face. A
voice that sounded like his own brain-voice with an echo said to never try and pull
a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn’t calm and peaceful
like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you. He heard
the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of this. He was the object of much bedside
industry. A brisk clink of I.V. bottles overhead. Slosh of bags. None of the overhead
voices talking to him. His input unrequired. Part of him hoped they were putting Demerol
in his I.V without him knowing. He gurgled and mooed, saying
addict
. Which was the truth, that he was, he knew. The Crocodile that liked to wear Hanes,
Lenny, that at the podium liked to say ‘The truth will you set you free, but not until
it’s done with you.’ The voice down the hall was weeping like its heart would break.
He imagined the A.D.A. with his hat off earnestly praying Gately would live so he
could send him to M.D.C.-Walpole. The harsh sound he heard up close was the tape around
his unshaved mouth getting ripped off him so quick he hardly felt it. He tried to
avoid projecting how his shoulder would feel if they started pounding on his chest
like they pound on dying people’s chests. The intercom calmly dinged. He heard conversing
people in the hall passing the open door and stopping for a second to look in, but
still conversing. It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go
home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep. A conversing voice at the door laughed
and told somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the homosexuals from
the people who beat up homosexuals. It was impossible to imagine a world without himself
in it. He remembered two of his Beverly High teammates beating up a so-called homosexual
kid while Gately walked away, wanting no part of either side. Disgusted by both sides
of the conflict. He imagined having to become a homosexual in Walpole. He imagined
going to one meeting a week and having a shepherd’s crook and parrot and playing cribbage
for a cigarette a point and lying on his side in his bunk in his cell facing the wall,
jacking off to the memory of tits. He saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat
against his chest.