Infinite Jest (203 page)

‘Although people aren’t exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either.
And the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over Fundy, and supposedly the
lobsters out there are like monsters in old Japanese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia
glows, at night, in satellite photos.’

‘Still and all, O., tell her proportionally speaking it’s Québec that’s borne the
brunt of what Canada had to take. The brunt
again,
to their way of thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently
anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There’s got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the whole
thing.’

The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael Pemulis
has pretended to kick it in. ‘Good Lard preserve us he’s nekkid,’ he says, coming
in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a
second.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered
patch of Hal’s half of the floor and makes a show of looking at his wrist as if there
were a watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin is saying. ‘The issue she raises is is there really
any sort of realistic hope of Québec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the
Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge
the waste as fundamentally American waste.’

‘Well probably of course not.’ Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into
a claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is compulsively going around
zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes.
‘But now she’s got you falling back into demanding realistic and consistent logic
from fringe mentalities again.’

‘But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn’t oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn’t. Ottawa’s
so far in now they wouldn’t say shit if they had three times the mouthful they already
have. Of shit I mean.’

Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow
truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry VIII–like rending and chewing motions.
His eyes, under the waning influence of
P.M.
stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed. They just get tiny and lightless and even
closer together in his narrow face, like a second set of nostrils. The right eye’s
little wobble is out of sync with the pulse of his earring.

There’s the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. ‘So then I’ll ask you what she seemed
like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists’ and fringe cells’ pathetic little
anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?’

‘Does fish-shit drift slowly bottomward, O.? How could she see it as anything but,
if she’s as savvy as you say?’ Hal removes his pruned white foot from the janitor-bucket
and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis’s
Docksider. Pemulis picks the briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them
to Hal with a pretend-shudder.

‘So simply largely symbolic at best, then?’

Hal’s lying back trying to get his legs into the briefs with one hand. ‘Tell her after
much chin-stroking simply
yes,
O. O., Pemulis is standing here already in his hat pretending to clang a dinner bell.
He’s got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.’ Pemulis is actually
making a complex system of motions indicating both the procedures for rolling a duBois
and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and Pemulis and Struck and
Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping out to the little
hidden clearing behind West House’s parking lot’s dumpsters and sharing an obscene
cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, while Schacht
and sometimes Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the green glow
of the truck’s instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling go-on-ahead-on-down
motion to Pemulis.

‘But you have the… Mr.
Hope,
’ Pemulis stage-whispers.

‘One moment please.’ Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and hand
with two pillows and some bedding, and stage-whispers ‘Where’s your part of the Mr.
H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of
my
part of the Hope I bought retail from
you
not three days ago?’

The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. ‘Extenuations. We can get it all sorted
out right later. Nobody’s going to like
exploit
you.’

And then it’s hard to extract the hand and phone. ‘O., I’m going to have to book out
of here in just about one second.’

‘Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you
can call me back. This was the Subject’s crux-type proposal. You can call collect
if you want.’

‘I don’t have to respond,’ Hal says.

‘Correct.’

‘I just listen and then break the connection.’

‘Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day’s full-toll.’

‘I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation’s over and we can go.’ Hal’s
directing all this more at Pemulis, who’s pacing and holding the Constantine bust
in his hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head.

‘All set? This is it. Are you set?’

‘So go already.’

‘Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists’ big object has always been
to independently secede, and if they’ve got about a snowball’s chance of ever really
getting O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle
and the transfer of the Concavity and the whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially
the Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity
in theirs, that the maps now say it’s Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant
that all this is obviously right; then why don’t the Separatists in Québec use the
fact of the odiousness of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and
go to Ottawa to parliament and say to the rest of Canada like: Look, let us secede,
and we’ll take the Concavity
with
us when we secede, it’ll be our problem not yours, it’ll go on the maps as Québecois
and not Canadian, it’ll be
our
blot and
our
bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada’s
pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated
because of the ingenious way Ottawa’s parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.’s
map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don’t they go to Ottawa
and say Cuibono all around and say This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai
Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject
posited why the Nucks don’t see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best
thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada’s persuadability into letting
Québec go. She hit me with Why wouldn’t your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity
as a bargaining chip for independence, why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the
one thing odious enough to be a chip?’

‘Who’s this you’re talking to you can’t call back?’ Pemulis says loudly, pacing back
and forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering like mad.

Hal lowers the phone but doesn’t cover it. ‘It’s Orin, wanting to know why Québec
and the F.L.Q. and so on haven’t tried bargaining with the Canadian administration,
offering Québec’s cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation.’
Hal cocks his head slightly. ‘This could be Poutrincourt’s so-called Separation and
return’s real meaning, it occurs to me.’

‘Orin as in your brother, with the leg?’

‘He’s all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.’

Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. ‘Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart!
Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a dozen D-bases off of the
Net! Tell him you’re pretty sure he can afford it!’ Pemulis’s hands are slender and
red-knuckled and his fingers long and sort of falcate. ‘Tell him you can hear the
truck getting impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we
ever get our friends get ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat
on schedule up here or we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly access
D-bases and run our asses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don’t just
stand there and swing one leg up and down over and over for seven-plus figures.’

‘Tell Penisless to go sit on something sharp,’ Orin says.

‘O., he’s right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You
said I could think and call you back. I’ll use your pager if you like.’

Pemulis has used one foot to clear a path through laundry and diskettes and books
and gear to the west window, where he’s making broad involved gestures with a person
or persons outside down on the grounds whom the window’s big sill keeps Hal from being
able to see. Hal’s underwear is at a diagonal across his pelvis. Orin on the phone
is saying:

‘Picture this and see what you think. Imagine this. The F.L.Q. and other various Separatist
cells all suddenly divert their terror’s energies away from Canada and suddenly start
mounting an insurgent campaign of U.S. and Mexican harassment. But the thing is they
make a big deal of terroristically insurging against O.N.A.N. on the behalf of
all
of Canada. They even find a way to bring the Albertan ultra-rightists in on it, plus
other provincial fringes, so it looks to O.N.A.N. like maybe all of Canada as a whole
is in on the insurging.’

‘I don’t have to picture it. It’s what’s going on. The C.P.C.P.
^l
makes incursions against Montana like clockwork. There was that horrific jamming
of InterLace pulses and substitution of porn-films for children’s programming around
Duluth in June traced to that psycho quintet in southwest Ontario. The Interstates
north of Saratoga are still supposed to be undrivable after sunset.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So some point for me to ponder needs to emerge really fast, here, Orin.’

‘The point is I was rhetorically invited by the Subject to entertain the picture of
it all really being the Nucks. The pan-Canadian thing being a dodge. The Separatists
all some-how united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question
becomes to imagine this and ask: Why would they do this?’

‘We’re wearing a groove in the same track again, O. It’s because the Concavity impacts
mainly Québec.’

‘No, I mean she meant why would they make such a noise about insurging on behalf of
all of
Canada
and go to such lengths to orchestrate the appearance of pan-
Canadian
anti-O.N.A.N.ism.’

‘And then judging by precedent the Subject gave a hypothetical answer to her own question.
Have you gotten to get a word in edgewise throughout this series of interviews, O.?’

‘What if it’s that the Nuck Separatists know totally well that if the O.N.A.N. administration
sees Canada as a big enough roach in the ointment, Gentle and Unspecified Services’
boys in white can get together with Mexico’s Vichified puppet-state and make things
like really unpleasant
indeed
for Ottawa. They could make Canada the sort of black scapegoat of all of O.N.A.N.
There’s little you can picture that might be worse than being the one country in a
three-country continental Anschluss that the other two countries are ganging up on
and making things unpleasant for.’

‘
Vichified? Anschluss?
This doesn’t sound like any Orin I know. These are rabidly political catchwords.
What kind of heartbreaking Rubensian
Moment
-type fluff-journalist is this you’re so determined to—?’

‘The unpleasantness is pretty easy to imagine a picture of. The E.W.D. vectors could
easily be recalibrated further north, Gentle could tell them. Our waste-resources
are extensive. At the mildest, he could say, good-sized chunks of Canada could be
Concavitized.’

‘I have to go. Pemulis is slumped back against the wall with his hands over his stomach
and is slumping all the way down the wall looking wobbly and pale.’

‘Ponder the picture of the parliament’s nails bitten all the way down to the ragged
pink pulpy stuff as the Nucks orchestrate the terrorism so it looks more and more
like Canada versus O.N.A.N.’

Hal’s in slacks and one street-sock and one athletic sock and picking different shirts
up off the floor, trying to smell a clean one. ‘But this is all—’

‘Kyaaaa!’ Pemulis vaults a corner of Hal’s bed and tries to claw at the transparent
phone’s antenna like he’s going to break it off. Hal turns to protect the phone with
a shoulder, whipping at Pemulis with a sweatshirt.

Orin is saying ‘What I’m asking is for you to ponder could it maybe end up that Québec,
after wreaking various mayhi down here and making it look like it’s all of Canada,
the P.Q.s or somebody respectable gets wigged up and go to Ottawa and offers this
deal: Parliament gets the
P.M.
and the government to get the other provinces to let Québec go, Separate,
aller, partir
—and in return Québec’ll step up the anti-O.N.A.N. harassment and insurgency while
dropping
the pretense of other provinces being involved and all of Canada insurging and make
it publicly clear that it’s Québec and Québec alone that’s O.N.A.N.’s real nemesis.
They tell Ottawa they’ll offer the contiguousness of the Concavity as their reason
and send absolutely everything they’ve got in terms of terrorism at O.N.A.N. and Gentle,
taking full credit each time. Offering themselves as the culprit and de-Reconfiguration
as the objective.’

‘So your multilevelled journalist’s hypothesizing a kind of meta-extortion.’ Hal can
hear Pemulis’s whistle-lipped breathing. ‘Separation is still the Québecer insurgents’
real goal, and their anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency is not what it appears.’ Hal’s in the
dark under the desk that the fold-out TP and drives and phone console and modem are
stacked on one corner of, surrounded by nests of wires, trying to find his other street-shoe.
‘It’s supposedly just been a ruse to arouse O.N.A.N.’s ire at Canada so the Québecers
can use the U.S. and Mexico as levers on Ottawa.’