Infinite Jest (200 page)

20 June Y.W.-Q.M.D.

Dear Filbert,
^a

It’s been a quiet week here on Mount Gawdforsaken
^b
—today is perishing hot, windless, quiet as a tomb, lush and pretty. Every floral
unit on the grounds has its pistil aprick and petals atremble in a truly shameless
fashion, for the bees are about. The whole hill hums drowsily. Yesterday, your Uncle
Charles was accosted on the north path by a bumblebee that he alleges was so enormous
it sounded like a tuba, and he dispatched Mr. Harde and the grounds crew with skeet
rifles and orders to ‘… bring the Sikorski-sized bugger down.’ I shall spare you details
of the subsequent misadventures of the grounds crew, two of whom are now recovering
satisfactorily.

The paucity of decibels here is due in part to all six A-teams’ departure yesterday
for Milan, with Gerhardt, Aubrey, Carolyn, and Urquhart at the pedagogical tiller.
It seems not so many moons ago that we were seeing you, Marlon, Ross, and the rest
off on the European clay junket. I recall pressing the maternal beak to the terminal
window’s glass, trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane’s impossible
little bullet-hole windows. I cried like a fool every time, as of course I did all
over again yesterday, embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.

As for me, I’ve swotted and wakked all morning, cranking up your Uncle Charles’s videophone
and trying to cajole the editors of various supermarket trade publications to run
M.G.M.’s
^c
latest plea for amending
Less
to
Fewer
in those !*#!*# Express Check-Out lanes. One old editorial codger said that he’d
dearly love to help me out but that his newsletter was devoted exclusively to issues
of promotional display. When I suggested that a little comic relief in the form of
the
L
——>
F
bulletin might not be amiss, he chortled. Chortling is good. We like chortling. However,
I did manage to twist the arms (harder to do telephonically than one might think)
of
Produce Weekly,
Star Market’s
Quarterly Register,
and PriceChopper’s
Shelf and Cart,
so the wheels of adjectival justice continue, albeit creakily, to turn.

The very last gobbet of Academy news is that your Uncle Charles had his blood cholesterol
tested late last week. Though the verdict rendered was no worse than a rather unperspicuous
“Normal to Upper-normal” (
sic
), the penultimate modifier has caused, as you might anticipate, much pacing and high-decibel
whingeing, as well as vows of eternal xerophagy from here on out. Your Uncle Charles
has already, for some months now, made a practice of swallowing three teaspoons of
fish-liver oil just before he hurls the administrative skeleton bedward for the night.
Your brothers have taken to trekking over on slow nights to watch him swallow his
oil, purely out of enthusiasm for the faces Charles makes as the stuff goes gulletward.
I e-ordered the poor man a low-lipid, artery-friendly cookbook as a sort of Whatthehell
present the day the results came in, and your Uncle Charles has already pored over
the thing and marked several yummers. We’re to have a swot at cabbage patties tonight,
fast-laners that we are. I do suppose the poor man will find a way to ladle rice bran
^d
into his toothpaste before this spasm of angst subsides. Bless his heart—as it were!

My, this machine does let one maunder on. I’d best get back to harrying grocers. One
of this fall’s matriculates
^e
is the son of a man who’s apparently become an immensely wealthy Telegrocer
^f
in the Upper Midwest, so perhaps the Express Lane-Solecism issue will simply disappear
in these here parts as well.

It goes without saying that you are of course wearing your halo and mouth-guard at
all appropriate times and eating at least one green, leafy vegetable per day.

Oh—’twas
won
derful to hear about the arbitration and contract. Mr. deLint read a detailed account
and told us all about it. Proud, as ever, to know you.

Miss You and Love You Lots,

and c.

AND AN EXAMPLE OF THE INVARIANT RESPONSE THESE PIECES OF MAIL ELICIT

Dear
    Ms. Incandenza
,

Due to the large number of mail the New Orleans Saints
^®
are so fortunate enough to receive from all across the 2nd InterLace Grid
^g
, we regrettably say
ORIN INCANDENZA #71
can not answer your letter in person, however, on behalf of the New Orleans Saints
^®
“ORIN”
has asked me to say Thank-You for your message of support, and best wishes.

Inclosed, please accept a special, color 20 × 25 centimeter personally autographed
action photo of
ORIN INCANDENZA #71
, as our way of saying Thank-You and how important you’re letter has been to us.

Cordjally,

Jethro Bodine

Assistant Mailroom Technician

And c.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’

‘Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’

‘A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’

‘And not every Dickinson poem is singable to ‘Yellow Rose,’ O. Sorry to disappoint
you. For instance like “
Am
ple
make
this
bed
—
Make
this
bed
with
awe
” isn’t even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’

‘Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine’s consideration.’

‘A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory’s unfortunately a dink. Plus
I don’t think you quite meant
proviso
.’

‘Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a
wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.’

‘You know I hate these Strategy calls.’

‘Also of course works if you really
do
happen to be married. In which case you’ve got a ring already.’

‘I’m sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’

‘The object being to present yourself to the Subject as married, as in happily married,
and you engage her in a conversation in which you make a big deal of how head-over-heels
in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean
the pilot-light of passion still burns in the central heating system of your love
for her, your wife, even after all these several years you’ve been hitched.’

‘I’m sitting here looking through an old box of letters to kill just a very few minutes
before a bunch of us climb in the tow truck for Pemulis’s annual I.-Day-Eve town-painting.’

‘But as you’re saying all this to the Subject, your manner is nevertheless indicating
that you’re attracted to her.’

‘It’s poignant somehow that you always use the word
Subject
when you mean the exact obverse.’

‘But it’s not like flirtatious or salivious, your manner. More like just strongly
involuntarily attracted. Almost as if hypnotized against your will. Your manner can
indicate this just by following the Subject’s conversational movements and changes
of posture or facial expression in that sort of vacant intense way a hungry person
watches somebody eating. Following the movements of the fork as if memerized. With,
of course now, the occasional flicker of pain and conflict in your eyes, at the fact
that here you are involuntarily memerized by somebody other than your serapic wife,
which the point—’

‘Time. Yo. I think you mean
seraphic
. I also think you meant
lascivious
and
mesmerized
.’

‘You know what your problem is, Hallie?’

‘I have just one problem?’

‘But hang on until you see that 7’s worth not making me digress away from, though.
Because the point being to get across how it’s an incredible tribute to the Subject’s
overwhelming female charms that you can even really even
see
her, the Subject, since you’re so in love with your wife you barely even see most
women as even female anymore, much less be involuntarily attracted to the Subject,
much less have maybe the thought of infidelity skitter no matter how involuntarily
across your devoted mind. And it’s not like you’ll have to volunteer any of this directly.
The Subject’ll draw the observations on her own. That’s the point of the conflicted
flickers in your memerized eyes, or at the most an involuntary tortured groan, a quick
bite of the knuckle of the forefinger.’

‘A heel of the hand to the forehead or something like that.’

‘Get your manner down just conflicted-looking enough and the Subject herself’ll actually
start drawing you out on this fact, the involuntary attraction that’s so painful to
you and so flattering and tributary to her.’

‘So wait. This is like a conversation where you’re affecting all this flickering and
groaning? Like you mean a cocktail-party-small-talk conversation? Or do you just brandish
your fake ring at some girl at a bus stop and start a tortured tribute to your seraphic
wife?’

‘It takes place anywhere. Venue-adjustable. 7’s portable and never-miss. The point
is to maneuver the issue of your devoted attracted conflicted pain to the point where
you can appear to almost sort of break down and can ask the Subject in all tortured
sincerity if she thinks your involuntarily finding her so visibly female and attractive
makes you a bad husband. Display vulnerability and ask her to evaluate the like integrity
of your heart. Seem desperate. Your whole married self-concept shaken. Practically
beg the Subject to reassure you you’re not a bad-hearted man. Plead with the Subject
to say what she thinks it might be about her charms that could drive your serapic
wife even momentarily from your heart. You present the attraction you feel for the
Subject as this involuntary identity-threatening soul-searing-type crisis you just
desperately need her help with, the Subject’s, person to person.’

‘Sounds very moving.’

‘And if it so happens you really are married, the additional advantage to 7’s pitch
is that you and the Subject both, however briefly, get to believe it. The pitch. The
involuntary passionate doomed knight-errant-type pitch.’

‘And of course, O., the Subject just happens to be married herself, often with small
children, putting her directly in your crosshairs.’

‘A matter of what’s the word personal preference and taste that doesn’t impact 7’s
surefire no-miss quality one way or the other. It’s the doomed involuntary conflicted
good-man’s-downfall-type quality that no Subject can seemingly resist.’

‘…’

‘Ainsi, then.’

‘Well O. the thing’s sick. It’s even sicker than 4. Was it 4? The one you said that
Loach inspired, where you’d supposedly just that very day dropped out of Jesuit seminary
after umpteen years of disciplined celibacy because of carno-spiritual yearnings you
hadn’t even been quite in touch with as carno-spiritual in nature until you just now
this very moment laid eyes on the Subject? With the breviary and rented collar?’

‘That was 4, yes. 4’s pretty much of a gynecopia also, but within a kind of narrower
demographic psychological range of potential Subjects. Notice I never said 4 was no-miss.’

‘Well you must be a very proud young man. This is even sicker. The fake ring and fictional
spouse. It’s like you’re inventing somebody you love just to seduce somebody else
into helping you betray her. What’s it like. It’s like suborning somebody into helping
you desecrate a tomb they don’t know is empty.’

‘This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody
who still thinks it’s exciting to shave.’

‘I ought to go. I have a blackhead I have to see to.’

‘You haven’t asked why I called right back. Why I’m calling during high-toll hours.’

‘Plus I feel some kind of toothache starting, and it’s the weekend, and I want to
see Schacht before Mrs. Clarke’s confectionery day in the sun tomorrow. Plus I’m naked.’

‘I’m surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice
and asking you to call back ASAP on this. What is it out there, 1600? Why aren’t you
outside hard at play? Don’t tell me Schtitt started cancelling
P.M.
’s for I.-Day Eve.’

‘I tagged this kid Pemberton in the eye up at net. It was inadvertent. We were only
four games in. He hit a big soft fluffy goose of an approach and I was trying to handcuff
him. I hit it at him only to handcuff him. He never even got his stick up. Right in
the left socket. It made a sound like a champagne cork. A prorector named Corbett
Thorp said he thought Pemberton might have detached a retina. Something sure seemed
detached. He was walking around in diminishing circles like he’d been hit with a mallet.’

‘You sound really, like, remorse-riddled.’

‘Kitchens and heat, O. I’ve taken my share of balls in various spots. And whence bizarre
metric theories about Emily Dickinson all of a sudden, by the way? And what’s up with
the lurking figures with wheelchairs?’

‘You’re a Top-Ten junior stickman suddenly now this year, Hallie, what’s Schtitt doing
giving you a cloth mouse like Hugh Pemberton to bat around anyway?’

‘You remember him?’

‘Who could forget a kid that looks like he’s curtsying when he serves? With the white
visor and the little amber glasses? That kid’s been hanging from the bottom of the
ladder by his nails since he was nine.’

‘It’s been carnage all week. Schtitt’s playing the C teams against the A’s. It’s for
the C’s’ development, Donni said. Also because today word’s down from the tower some
of the staff thought some of the A’s looked tentative against Port Wash.’

‘They despise tentativity.’

‘I think they want us just short of cocky for the Fundraiser and then the WhataBurger,
where Wayne’s got a chance to knock this Veach kid off the pole.’