Infinite Jest (20 page)

Marathe shrugged hard. ‘And abruptly M. DuPlessis has now passed away from life. Under
circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion.’ Again with the false-sounding laugh.
‘An inept burglary and grippe indeed.’

Both men were silent. Steeply’s left arm had on it a nasty mesquite scratch, Marathe
could observe.

Marathe finally glanced at his watch, its dial illuminated in his body’s shadow. Both
men’s shadows were now climbing the steep incline, returning up to them. ‘Me, I think
that we go about our affairs in a more simple manner than your B.S.S. office. If M.
Tine’s betrayal were incomplete, we of Québec would be aware.’

‘Because of Luria.’

Marathe pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it. ‘But yes. The caution.
Luria would be aware.’

Steeply stepped gingerly up to the edge and tossed out his cigarette’s stub. The wind
caught the stub and it soared slightly upward from his hand, moving east. Both men
were silent until the butt fell and hit the dark mountainside off below them, a tiny
bloom of orange. Their silence then became contemplative. Something tight in the air
between them loosened. Marathe no longer felt the sun on his skull. Dusk settled about
them. Steeply had found his triceps’ scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine
it, his rouged lips rounded with concern.

Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy:
A.M.
drills, shower, eat, class, lab, class, class, eat, prescriptive-grammar exam, lab/class,
conditioning run,
P.M.
drills, play challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight
room, sauna, shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players.

‘… to even realize what they’re sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel
it in the first place?’

1640h.: the Comm.-Ad. Bldg.’s males’ locker room is full of clean upperclassmen in
towels after
P.M.
matches, the players’ hair wet-combed and shining with Barbicide. Pemulis uses the
comb’s big-toothed end to get that wide-furrowed look that kids from Allston favor.
Hal’s own hair tends to look wet-combed even when it’s dry.

‘So,’ Jim Troeltsch says, looking around. ‘So what do you think?’

Pemulis lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, leaning up against the cabinet where
they keep all the disinfectants. He has this way of looking warily to either side
of him before he says anything. ‘Was there like a central point to all that, Troeltsch?’

‘The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy’s sentence, not about real unhappy
families,’ Hal says quietly.

John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart, like the fart was
some kind of task, standing at his locker, waiting for his feet to get dry enough
to put on socks.

There is a silence. Showerheads dribble on tile. Steam hangs. Distant ghastly sounds
from T. Schacht over in one of the stalls off the showers. Everyone stares into the
middle distance, stunned with fatigue. Michael Pemulis, who can stand about ten seconds
of communal silence tops, clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into
the sink behind him. The plate mirrors caught part of its quivering flight, Hal sees.
Hal closes his eyes.

‘Tired,’ someone exhales.

Ortho Stice and John (‘N.R.’) Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the
really top player’s way of shutting the whole neural net down for brief periods, staring
at the space they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the connectedness
of all events.

‘Right then,’ Troeltsch says. ‘Pop quiz. Pop test-question. Most crucial difference,
for Leith tomorrow, between your historical broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable
TP.’

Disney R. Leith teaches E.T.A.’s History of Entertainment I and II as well as certain
high-level esoteric Optics things you needed Permission of Inst. to get into.

‘The Cathodeluminescent Panel. No cathode gun. No phosphenic screen. Two to the screen’s
diagonal width in cm. lines of resolution, total.’

‘You mean a high-def. viewer in general, or a specifically TP-component viewer?’

‘No analogs,’ Struck says.

‘No snow, no faint weird like ghostly double next to UHF images, no vertical roll
when planes fly over.’

‘Analogs v. digitals.’

‘You referring to broadcast as in network versus a TP, or network-plus-cable versus
a TP?’

‘Did cable TV use analogs? What, like pre-fiber phones?’

‘It’s the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals.
That word he uses about eleven times an hour.’

‘What did pre-fiber phones use, exactly?’

‘The old tin-can-and-string principle.’

‘ “Seminal.” He keeps saying it. “Seminal, seminal.” ’

‘The biggest advance in home communications since the phone he says.’

‘In home entertainment since the TV itself.’

‘Leith might say the Write-Capable CD, for entertainment.’

‘He’s hard to pin down if you get him on entertainment qua entertainment.’

‘The Diz’ll say use your own judgment,’ Pemulis says. ‘Axford took it last year. He
wants an argument made. He’ll skewer you if you treat it like there’s an obvious answer.’

‘Plus there’s the InterLace de-digitizer instead of an antenna, with a TP,’ Jim Struck
says, squeezing at something behind his ear. Graham (‘Yard-guard’) Rader is checking
his underarm for more hair. Freer and Shaw might be asleep.

Stice has pulled his towel down slightly and is fingering the deep red abdominal stripe
a jock’s waistband leaves. ‘Boys, I ever become president, the first thing to go’s
elastic.’

Troeltsch pretends to shuffle cards. ‘Next item. Next like flash-card. Define
acutance.
Anybody?’

‘A measure of resolution directly proportional to the resolved ratio of a given pulse’s
digital code,’ Hal says.

‘The Incster has the last word once again,’ says Struck. Which invites a chorus:

‘The Halster.’

‘Halorama.’

‘Halation.’

‘Halation,’ Rader says. ‘A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen
on chemical film at low speed.’

‘That most angelic of distortions.’

Struck says ‘We’ll be like
vying
for the seats all around Inc tomorrow.’ Hal shuts his eyes: he can see the page of
text right there, all highlighted, all yellowed up.

‘He can scan the page, rotate it, fold the corner down and clean under his nails with
it, all mentally.’

‘Leave him alone,’ Pemulis says.

Freer opens his eyes. ‘Do a dictionary-page for us, man, Inc.’

Stice says ‘Leave him be.’

It’s all only half-nasty. Hal is placid about getting his balls smacked around; they
all are. He does his share of chops-busting. Some of the littler kids who take their
showers after the upperclassmen are hanging around listening. Hal sits on the floor,
quiescent, chin on his chest, just thinking it’s nice finally to breathe and get enough
air.

The temperature had fallen with the sun. Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind
roll across the incline and desert floor. Marathe could sense or feel many million
floral pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew. The American Steeply produced small
exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm. Only one or two
remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun found crevices
between the Tortolitas’ peaks and probed at the roof of the sky. There were the slight
and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night,
emerging. The sky was violet.

Everyone in the locker room’s got a towel around his waist like a kilt. Everyone except
Stice has a white E.T.A. towel; Stice uses his own sort of trademark towels, black
ones. After a silence Stice shoots some air out through his nose. Jim Struck picks
liberally at his face and neck. There are one or two sighs. Peter Beak and Evan Ingersoll
and Kent Blott, twelve, eleven, ten, are up sitting on the blond-wood benches that
run in front of the lockers’ rows, sitting there in towels, elbows on knees, not taking
part. So is Zoltan Csikzentmihalyi, who’s sixteen but speaks very little English.
Idris Arslanian, new this year, ethnically vague, fourteen, all feet and teeth, is
a shadowy lurking presence just outside the locker-room door, poking the non-Caucasoid
snout in occasionally and then withdrawing, terribly shy.

Each E.T.A. player in 18-and-Unders has like four to six 14-and-Unders kids he’s supposed
to keep his more experienced wing over, look out for. The more the E.T.A. administration
trusts you, the younger and more generally clueless the little kids in your charge.
Charles Tavis instituted the practice and calls it the Big Buddy System in the literature
he sends new kids’ parents. So the parents can feel their kid’s not getting lost in
the institutional shuffle. Beak, Blott, and Arslanian are all in Hal’s Big Buddy group
for Y.D.A.U. He also in effect has Ingersoll, having traded Todd (‘Postal-Weight’)
Possalthwaite to Axford off the books for Ingersoll, because Trevor Axford found he
so despised the Ingersoll kid for some unanalyzable reason that he was struggling
against a horrible compulsion to put Ingersoll’s little fingers into the gap by the
hinges of an open door and then very slowly close the door, and came to Hal almost
in tears, Axford had. Though technically Ingersoll is still Axford’s and Possalthwaite
Hal’s. Possalthwaite, the great lobber, has a weird young-old face and little wet
lips that lapse into a sucking reflex under stress. In theory, a Big Buddy’s somewhere
between an R.A. and a prorector. He’s there to answer questions, ease bumpy transitions,
show ropes, act as liaison with Tony Nwangi and Tex Watson and the other prorectors
specializing in little kids. Be somebody they can come to off the record. A shoulder
to climb up on a footstool and cry on. If a 16-and-Under gets made a Big Buddy it’s
kind of an honor; it means they think you’re going places. When there’s no tournament
or travel, etc., Big Buddies get together with their quar-to-sextet in small-group
private twice a week, in the interval between
P.M.
challenge matches and dinner, usually after saunas and showers and a few minutes
of sitting slumped around the locker room sucking air. Sometimes Hal sits with his
Little Buddies at dinner and eats with them. Not often, however. The savvier Big Buddies
don’t get too overly close with their L.B. ephebes, don’t let them forget about the
unbridgeable gaps of experience and ability and general status that separate ephebes
from upperclassmen who’ve hung in and stuck it out at E.T.A. for years and years.
Gives them more to look up to. The savvy Big Buddy doesn’t rush in or tread heavy;
he holds his own ground and lets the suppliants realize when they need his help and
come to him. You have to know when to tread in and take an active hand and when to
hang back and let the littler kids learn from the personal experience they’ll have
to learn from, inevitably, if they want to be able to hang. Every year, the biggest
source of attrition, besides graduating 18s, is 13–15s who’ve had enough and just
can’t hang. This happens; the administration accepts it; not everyone’s cut out for
what’s required of you here. Though C.T. makes his administrative assistant Lateral
Alice Moore drive the prorectors bats trying to ferret out data on littler kids’ psychic
states, so he can forecast probable burnouts and attritive defections, so he’ll know
how many slots he and Admissions’ll have to offer Incomings for the next term. Big
Buddies are in a tricky position, requested to keep the prorectors generally informed
about who among their charges seems shaky in terms of resolve, capacity for suffering
and stress, physical punishment, homesickness, deep fatigue, but at the same time
wanting to remain a trustworthy confidential shoulder and wing for their Little Buddies’
most private and delicate issues.

Though he, too, has to struggle with a strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, who
reminds him of someone he dislikes but can’t quite place, Hal on the whole rather
likes being a Big B. He likes being there to come to, and likes delivering little
unpretentious minilectures on tennis theory and E.T.A. pedagogy and tradition, and
getting to be kind in a way that costs him nothing. Sometimes he finds out he believes
something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front
of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces. The twice-weekly (more
like once-weekly, as things usually pan out) group interfaces with his quintet are
unpleasant only after a particularly bad
P.M.
session on the courts, when he’s tired and on edge and would far rather go off by
himself and do secret stuff in underground ventilated private.

Jim Troeltsch feels at his glands. John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe
school.

‘Tired,’ Ortho Stice again sighs. He pronounces it ‘tard.’ To a man, now, the upperclassmen
are down slumped on the locker room’s blue crush carpet, their legs straight out in
front of them, toes pointing out at that distinctive morgue-angle, their backs up
against the blue steel of the lockers, careful to avoid the six sharp little louvered
antimildew vents at each locker’s base. All of them look a bit silly naked because
of their tennis tans: legs and arms the deep sienna of a quality catcher’s mitt, from
the summer, the tan just now this late starting to fade, but feet and ankles of toadbelly-white,
the white of the grave, with chests and shoulders and upper arms more like off-white—the
players can sit shirtless in the stands at tournaments when they’re not playing and
get at least a bit of thoracic sun. The faces are the worst, maybe, most red and shiny,
some still deep-peeling from three straight weeks of outdoor tournaments in August-September.
Besides Hal, who’s atavistically dark-complected anyway, the ones here with the least
bad piebald coloring are the players who can tolerate spraying themselves down with
Lemon Pledge before outdoor play. It turns out Lemon Pledge, when it’s applied in
pre-play stasis and allowed to dry to a thin crust, is a phenomenal sunscreen, UV-rating
like 40+, and the only stuff anywhere that can survive a three-set sweat. No one knows
what jr. player at what academy found this out about Pledge, years back, or how: rather
bizarre discovery-circumstances are envisioned. The smell of sweat-wet Pledge out
on the court makes some of the more delicately constituted kids sick, though. Others
feel sunscreen of any kind to be unconscionably pussified, like white visors or on-court
sunglasses. So most of the E.T.A. upperclassmen have these vivid shoe-and-shirt tans
that give them the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from different bodies’
parts, especially when you throw in the heavily muscled legs and usually shallow chests
and the two arms of different sizes.