Infinite Jest (193 page)

‘I’m pretty much straight already, C-man, after that nut-shot,’ Gately said, ‘if you
don’t want to waste the Narcan.’

‘Oh this isn’t no Narcan,’ C said softly, holding Gately’s arm.

‘Hadly,’ said the assistant, uncapping the syringe.

C said ‘Hold on to your hat.’ He poked the assistant’s shoulder. ‘Tell him.’

‘It’s pharm-grade Sunshine,’
³⁸⁷
the assistant said, tapping for a good vein.

‘Hold on to your heart,’ C said, watching the needle go in. The pharmacist slid it
in expertly, horizontal and flush to the skin. Gately had never done Sunshine. Next
to ungettable outside a Canadian hospital. He watched his own blood ruddle the serum
as the pharmacist extended his thumb to ease the plunger back. The pharmacist’s assistant
could really boot. C’s tongue was in the corner of his mouth as he watched. The corporate
guy had Fackelmann’s arms held tight and a transvestal who’d gotten in behind the
chair held his head by the chin and hair as the gray lady knelt before him with her
threaded needle. Gately couldn’t keep himself from watching the stuff go in him. There
was no pain. He wondered for a second if it was a hot shot: it seemed like a whole
lot of trouble to go to just to get him off. The pharmacist’s thumbnail was ingrown.
There were a couple eczema-flakes on Gately’s arm where the guy was inclined over
it. You get to like the sight of your own blood after a while. The pharmacist had
him half booted when Fackelmann started screaming. The scream’s pitch got higher as
it drew out. When Gately could look away from the stuff going in, he saw the librarian-type
lady was sewing Fackelmann’s eyelids open to the skin above his eyebrows. As in they
were sewing poor old Count Faxula’s eyes open. A kid on the playground had used to
turn his lids inside out at girls like they were doing now to the poor old Faxter.
Gately gave a reflexive jerk toward him, and C hugged him tight with one arm.

‘
Ea
sy,’ C said very softly.

The taste of the hydrochloride in the Sunshine was the same, delicious, the taste
of the smell of every Dr.’s office everywhere. He’d never done Talwin-PX. Impossible
to get scrips for, the PX, a Canadian blend; U.S. Talwin’s
³⁸⁸
got .5 mg. of naloxone mixed in, to cut the buzz, is why Gately only did NX on top
of Bam-Bams. He understood they’d given Fackelmann the anti-narc so he’d feel the
needle as they sewed his eyes open.
Cruel
is spelled with a
u,
he remembered. The two Orientals left the room at C’s direction. Linda McC. sounded
borderline-psychotic. The little gray lady worked fast. The eye that was already sewed
open bulged obscenely. Everybody in the room except C and the corporate guy and grim
lady started shooting dope. Two of the fags had their eyes shut and their faces at
the ceiling as if they couldn’t take watching what they were doing to their arm. The
pharmacist was tying off the passed-out Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, which seemed like insult
+ injury. There was every different kind of style and skill-level of injection and
boot going on. Fackelmann’s face was still a scream-face. The corporate-tool type
was dropping fluid from a pipette into Fackelmann’s sewed-open eye while the lady
rethreaded the needle. It was just seeming to Gately he’d seen the fluid-in-eye thing
in a cartridge or movie the M.P.’d liked when he was a Bim playing ball on the chintz
in the sea when the Sunshine crossed the barrier and came on.

You could see why the U.S. made them cut the buzz. The air in the room got overclear,
a glycerine shine, colors brightening terribly. If colors themselves could catch fire.
The word on the C-II Talwin-PX was it was intense but short-acting, and pricey. No
word on its interaction with massive residual amounts of I.V.-Dilaudid. Gately tried
to figure while he still could. If they were going to eliminate his map with an O.D.
they’d have used something cheap. And if the librarian was going to sew his eyes open.
Gately was trying to think. Too they wouldn’t have got him. Him. Got him off.

The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned. Fackelmann’s screams about lies rose
and fell, hard to hear against the arterial roar of the Sun. McC. was trying to muffle
a cough. Gately couldn’t feel his legs. He could feel C’s arm around him taking more
and more of his weight. C’s arms’s muscles rising and hardening: he could feel this.
His legs were, like: opting out. Attack of floors and sidewalks. Kite used to sing
a ditty called ‘32 Uses For Sterno Me Lad.’ C was starting to let him down easy. Strong
squat hard kid. Most heroin-men you can knock down with a Boo. C: there was a gentleness
about C, for a kid with the eyes of a lizard. He was letting him down real easy. C
was going to protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor’s assault. The supported swoon spun
Gately around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary
view of the whole room in almost untakable focus. Pointgravè was vomiting chunkily.
Two of the fags were sliding down the wall they had their backs to. Their red coats
were aflame. The passing window exploded with light. Or else it was DesMontes that
was vomiting and Pointgravè was taking the TP’s viewer off the wall and stretching
its fibroid wire over toward Fackelmann against the wall. One of Fax’s eyes was as
open as his mouth, disclosing way more eye than you ever want to see on somebody.
He was no longer struggling. He stared piratically straight ahead. The librarian was
starting on his other eye. The bland man had a rose in his lapel and he’d put on glasses
with metal lenses and was blind-high and missing Fax’s eye with the dropper half the
time, saying something to Pointgravè. A transvestal had P.H.-J.’s torn hem hiked up
and a spiderish hand on her flesh-colored thigh. P.H.-J.’s face was gray and blue.
The floor came up slowly. Bobby C’s squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half
lit by the window, tucked up under Gately’s spinning shoulder. Gately felt less high
than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant. His head left his shoulders. Gene and
Linda were both screaming. The cartridge with the held-open eyes and dropper had been
the one about ultra-violence and sadism. A favorite of Kite. Gately thinks
sadism
is pronounced ‘saddism.’ The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through
the door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C’s grip
finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held
square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square
pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back
to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining
out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

1.
Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth.

2.
Orin’s never once darkened the door of any sort of therapy-professional, by the way,
so his takes on his dreams are always generally pretty surface-level.

3.
E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly
rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid’s curve, with the tennis courts
and pavilions at the center and the staff and students’ parking lots in back of Comm.-Ad.
forming the little bashed-in dent that from the air gives the whole facility the Valentine-heart
aspect that still wouldn’t have been truly cardioid if the buildings themselves didn’t
have their convex bulges all derived from arcs of the same
r,
a staggering feat given the uneven ground and wildly different electrical-and-plumbing-conduit
wallspace required by dormitories, administrative offices, and polyresinous Lung,
pull-offable probably by on the whole East Coast one guy, E.T.A.’s original architect,
Avril’s old and very dear friend, the topology world’s closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch
A.Y. (‘Vector-Field’) Rickey of Brandeis U., now deceased, who used to wow Hal and
Mario in Weston by taking off his vest without removing his suit jacket, which M.
Pemulis years later exposed as a cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic
features of continuous functions, which revelation Hal mourned in a Santa’s-not-real
type of secret way, and which Mario simply ignored, preferring to see the vest thing
as plain magic.

4.
Those younger staffers who double as academic and athletic instructors are, by convention
at North American tennis academies, known as ‘prorectors.’

5.
Known usually as ’drines—i.e. lightweight speed: Cylert, Tenuate,
^a
Fastin, Preludin, even sometimes Ritalin. It’s worth an N.B. that, unlike Jim Troeltsch
or the Preludin-happy Bridget Boone, Michael Pemulis (out of maybe some queer sort
of blue-collar street-type honor) rarely ingests any ’drines before a match, reserving
them for recreation—some people are wired to find heart-pounding eye-wobbling ’drine-stimulation
recreational.

^a.
Tenuate’s the trade name of diethylpropion hydrochloride, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals,
technically a prescription antiobesity agent, favored by some athletes for its mildly
euphoric and resources-rallying properties w/o the tooth-grinding and hideous post-blood-spike
crash that the hairier-chested ’drines like Fastin and Cylert inflict, though with
a discomfiting tendency to cause post-spike ocular nystagmus. Nystagmus or no nystagmus,
Tenuate’s a particular favorite of Michael Pemulis, who hoards for personal ingestion
every 75-mg. white Tenuate capsule he can lay hands on, and does not sell or trade
them, except sometimes to roommate Jim Troeltsch, who nags Pemulis for them and also
goes into Pemulis’s special entrepôt-yachting-cap and promotes still more of them
on the sly, a couple at a time, feeling that they help his sports-color-commentary
loquacity, which secret promotions Pemulis knows about all too well, and is biding
his time to retaliate, never you fear.

6.
Lightweight tranqs: Valium-III and Valrelease, good old dependable Xanax, Dalmane,
Buspar, Serax, even Halcion (legally available in Canada, unbelievably, still); with
those kids inclined toward a heavier slide—reds, Meprospan, ‘Happy Patch’ transdermals,
Miltown, Stelazine, the odd injury-’scrip Darvon) never lasting for more than a couple
seasons for the obvious reason that serious tranqs can make even breathing seem like
too much trouble to go to, the cause of a meaty percentage of tranq-related deaths
being attributed off the record by Emergency Room personnel to ‘P.S.’ or ‘Pulmonary
Sloth.’

7.
Top jr. players are for the most part pretty cautious with alcohol, mostly because
the physical consequences of heavy intake—like nausea and dehydration and poor hand-eye
interface—make high-level performance almost impossible. Very few other standard substances
have prohibitive short-term hangovers, actually, though an evening of even synthetic
cocaine will make the next day’s Dawn Drills very unpleasant indeed, which is why
so few of E.T.A.’s hard core do cocaine, though there’s also the issue of expense:
though many E.T.A.s are the children of upscale parents, the children themselves are
rarely flush with $ from home, since the gratification of pretty much every physical
need is either taken care of or prohibited by E.T.A. itself. It’s maybe worth noting
that the same people hardwired to enjoy recreational ’drines also tend to gravitate
toward cocaine and methedrine and other engine-revvers, while another broad class
of more naturally higher-strung types tend more toward the edge-bevelling substances:
tranqs, cannabis, barbiturates, and—yes—alcohol.

8.
I.e.: psylocibin; Happy Patches
^a
; MDMA/Xstasy (bad news, though, X); various low-tech manipulations of the benzene-ring
in methoxy-class psychedelics, usually homemakable; synthetic dickies like MMDA, DMA,
DMMM, 2CB, para-DOT I–VI, etc.—though note this class doesn’t and shouldn’t include
CNS-rattlers like STP, DOM, the long-infamous West-U.S.-Coast ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’
(gamma hydroxybutyric acid), LSD-25 or -32, or DMZ/M.P. Enthusiasm for this stuff
seems independent of neurologic type.

^a.
Homemade transdermals, usually MDMA or Muscimole, with DDMS or the over-counter-available
DMSO as the transdermal carrier.

9.
A.k.a. LSD-25, often with a slight ’drine kicker added, called ‘Black Star’ because
in metro Boston the available acid usually comes on chip-sized squares of thin cardboard
with a black stencilled star on them, all from a certain shadowy node of supply down
in New Bedford. All acid and Grievous Bodily Harm, like cocaine and heroin, come into
Boston mostly from New Bedford MA, which in turn gets most of its supply from Bridgeport
CT, which is the true lower intestine of North America, Bridgeport, be advised, if
you’ve never been through there.

10.
Like most sports academies, E.T.A. maintains the gentle fiction that 100% of its
students are enrolled at their own ambitious volition and not that of, say for instance,
their parents, some of whom (tennis-parents, like the stage-mothers of Hollywood legend)
are bad news indeed.