Infinite Jest (209 page)

‘
Q
.’

‘The criteria I was analogizing to The Stork is does the Moms function. And the Moms
functions and then some. The Moms careers through the day turboed and in fifth gear.
You’ve got the assorted Deaning at E.T.A. You’ve got the full teaching load there.
You’ve got accreditation reports and structuring both quadrivium and trivium three
years ahead of time at the start of every year. You’ve got writing prescriptive linguistics
books that come out every thirty-six months so you could set your watch by them. You’ve
got grammatical conferences and conventions, which she doesn’t leave the grounds ever
anymore but she’s there videophonically rain or shine for them all. You’ve got the
Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, which she co-founded with a couple quote cherished
academic friends, also bats, where the M.G.M.s for instance go around to Mass. supermarkets
and dun the manager if the Express Checkout sign says 10 ITEMS OR LESS instead of
OR FEWER
and so on. The year before The Mad Stork’s death the Orange Crush people had an ad
on billboards and little magazine-fall-out cards that said
CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THAT’S ALL IT’S OWN
, with like a possessive
IT’S,
and I swear the M.G.M. squad lost their minds; the Moms spent five weeks going back
and forth to NNY City, organized two different rallies on Madison Avenue that got
very ugly, acted as her own attorney in the suit the Crush people brought, never slept,
never once slept, lived on cigarettes and salad, huge salads always consumed very
late at night, the Moms has a thing about never eating until it’s late.’

‘Q.’

‘Apparently it’s the noise, she can’t take urban noise, she says, is why Hallie says
she hasn’t set glass-slipper-one off the Grounds in—you’d have to ask Hallie. The
Volvo was already up on blocks when I was at college downtown. But I know she went
to The Stork’s funeral, which was off the grounds. Now she’s got a tri-modem and videophony
out the bazoo, though she’d never use a Tableau, I know.’

‘Q.’

‘Well it’s been pretty obvious since early on out in Weston the Moms has O.C.D. Obsessive-Compulsive
Disorder. The only reason she’s never been diagnosed or treated for it is that in
her the Disorder doesn’t prevent her from functioning. It all seems to come back to
functioning. Traversion is character, according to Schtitt. One guy I was close to
at E.T.A. for years developed the kind of impairing O.C.D. where you need treatment—Bain
wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of washing, cleaning, checking
things, walking, had to have a T-square on the court to make sure all the strings
on his stick were intersecting at 90°, could only go through a doorway if he’d felt
all around the frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame for God knows what,
and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to recheck the doorway
he’d just checked. We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker room, before
tournaments. Actually we’ve been close all our lives, notwithstanding that Marlon
Bain is the single sweatiest human being you’d ever want to get within a click of.
I think the O.C.D. might have started as a result of the compulsive sweat, which the
sweat itself started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident,
Bain’s. Unless the strain of the constant rituals and fussing itself exaculates the
perspiring. The Stork used Marlon in
Death in Scarsdale,
if you want to see way more than you want to know about perspiration. But the E.T.A.
staff indulged Bain’s pathology about doorways because Schtitt’s own mentor had been
pathologically devoted to this idea that you are what you walk between. It’s so nice
to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it’s easier. Jesus I’m thinking
usage again. This is why I avoid the topic of the Moms. The whole topic starts to
infect me. It takes me days to clean myself out of it. Traversion being character
according to Schtitt. It takes a certain type of woman to look that good in a pantsuit,
I think. I’ve always—’

‘Q.’

‘I think the point being that with actual clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I
had to watch much of my ex-doubles partner’s life grind to a halt because it’d take
him three hours to shower and then another two to get out through the shower door.
He was in this sort of paralysis of compulsive motions that didn’t serve any kind
of function. The Moms, on the other hand, can function with the compulsions because
she’s also compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions. Whether this
makes her more insane than Marlon Bain or less insane than Marlon Bain, who can like
say. As an instance the Moms solved a lot of her threshold-problems by having no real
doors or doorways built on the first floor of HmH so the rooms are all split off by
angles and partitions and plants. The Moms kept to a Prussian bathroom-schedule so
she couldn’t spend hours in there washing her hands until the skin fell off the way
Bain’s did, he had to wear cotton gloves the whole summer right before he left E.T.A.
The Moms for a while had video cameras installed so she could obsessively check whether
Mrs. Clarke’d left the oven on or check her plants’ arrangement or whether all the
bathroom towels are lined up with their fringes flush without physically checking;
she had a little wall of monitors in her study at HmH; The Stork put up with the cameras
but the sense I get is that Tavis isn’t going to be keen on being photorecorded in
the bathroom or anyplace else, so maybe she’s had to have other recourse.
^a
You can check that yourself out there. What I’m trying to say is she’s compulsively
efficient even about her obsessions and compulsions. Of course there are doors upstairs,
lockable doors, but that’s in service of other compulsions. The Moms’s. You can go
ahead and ask her what I mean. She’s so compulsive she’s got the compulsions themselves
arranged so efficiently that she can get everything done and still have plenty of
time left over for her children. These are a constant drain on her batteries. She’s
got to keep Hal’s skull lashed tight to hers without being so overt about it that
Hallie has any idea what’s going on, to keep him from trying to pull his skull away.
The kid’s still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two
hands. He’s still performing for her, syntax- and vocabulary-wise, at seventeen, the
same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him is like throwing
a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something’s wrong. Plus the Moms
has to obsess over Mario and Mario’s various challenges and tribulations and little
patheticnesses and worship Mario and think Mario’s some kind of secular martyr to
the mess she’d made of her adult life, all the while having to keep up a front of
laissez-faire laid-back management where she pretends to let Mario go his own way
and do his own thing.’

‘Q.’

‘I’m not going to talk about it.’

‘Q.’

‘No and don’t insult my intelligence, I’m not going to talk about why I don’t want
to talk about it. If this is going to be a
Moment
article, Hallie’s going to read it, and then he’ll read it to Booboo, and I’m not
talking about The Stork’s death or the Moms’s stability in a thing where they’ll read
about it and have to read some authoritative report on my take on it instead of coming
to their own terms about it. With it, rather. Terms with, terms about. No, terms with
it.’

‘…’

‘They both might have to wait until they get away from there before they can even
realize what’s going on, that the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats. All these terms
that became clichés—
denial, schizogenic, pathogenic family like systems
and so on and so forth. A former acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say
clichés earned their status as clichés because they were so obviously true.’

‘…’

‘I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy
years, is all I’ll say.’

‘Q.’

‘The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in
my opinion, is all I’ll say.’

‘…’

‘All right, I’ll relate one antidote
^b
that might be more revealing of the Moms’s emotional weather than any adjective.
Jesus, see, I start explicitly referring to parts of speech just thinking about the
whole thing. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real
genius is for making the people around them think they
themselves
are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.’

‘
Q
.’

‘I’m sorry? Right then, one illustrative thing. Which thing to pick. Embarrassment
of riches. I’ll pick one at random. I think I was maybe twelve. I was in 12’s, I know,
on that summer’s tour. Though I was playing 12’s when I was still ten. It was ten
to thirteen that I was regarded as gifted, with a tennis future. I began to decline
around what should have been puberty. Call me let’s say twelve. People were talking
about NAFTA and something called the quote Information Turnpike and there was still
broadcast TV, though we had a satellite dish. The Academy wasn’t even a twinkle in
anybody’s eye. The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think
he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me age ten. We still lived in Weston,
known also as Volvoland. The Moms gardened like a fiend out there. This was something
else she
had
to do. Had a thing about. Hadn’t gone to indoor plants yet. Called the garden’s crops
her Green Babies. Wouldn’t let us eat the zucchini. Never picked it, it got monstrous
and dry and fell off and rotted. Big fun. But her real thing was preparing the garden
every spring. She started making lists and pricing supplies and drafting outlines
in January. Did I mention her own father had been a potato farmer, at one time a millionaire
potato-baron-type farmer, in Québec?

‘But so it’s early March. Are those earrings electric, or is it you? How come I’ve
never seen those earrings up to now? I thought women who could bring off copper earrings
never wore anything but copper. You should see yourself in this light. Fluorescence
isn’t kind to most women. It must take an exceptional kind—’

‘Q.’

‘In the Moms’s family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there.
His will said only not anywhere near his own dad’s plot. Right near Maine. Heart of
the Concavity. The Moms’s home town’s wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country.
I’d have to try to recall the town. But so but then so the Moms is out in the cold
garden. It’s March and it’s co-
wold.
I’ve got this story down. I’ve related this incident to several family-type professionals,
and not one eyebrow stayed steady among them. This is the sort of antidote that makes
pathogenic-systems-pros’ eyebrows go all the way up and over their skull and disappear
down the back of their neck.’

‘…’

‘So then I’m let’s say thirteen, which means Hallie’s four. The Moms is in the backyard
garden, tilling the infamously flinty New England soil with a rented Rototiller. The
situation is ambiguous between whether it’s the Moms steering the Rototiller or vice
versa. The old machine, full of gas I’d slopped through a funnel—the Moms secretly
believes petroleum products give you leukemia, her solution is to pretend to herself
she doesn’t know what’s wrong when the thing won’t work and to stand there wringing
her hands and let some eager-to-please thirteen-year-old puff out his chest at being
able to diagnose the problem, and then I pour the gas. The Rototiller is loud and
hard to control. It roars and snorts and bucks and my mother’s stride behind it is
like the stride of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard, she’s leaving drunken
staggery footprints behind her in the tilled dirt, behind the thing. There’s something
about a very very tall woman trying to operate a Rototiller. The Moms is incredibly
tall, way taller than everybody except The Stork, who towered even over the Moms.
Of course she’d be horrified if she ever brought herself to recognize what she was
doing, orchestrating a little kid into handling the gas that she thinks might be cancerous;
she doesn’t even
know
she’s phobic about gas. She’s wearing two pairs of work-gloves and plastic surgery-type
bags over her espadrilles, which were the only footwear she could garden in. And a
Fukoama microfiltration pollution mask, which you might remember those from that period.
Her toes are blue in the dirty plastic bags. I’m a few meters ahead of the Moms, in
charge of preemptive rock- and clod-removal. That’s her term. Preemptive rock- and
clod-removal.

‘Now work with me, see this with me. In the middle of this tilling here comes my little
brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing some kind of fuzzy red pajamas
and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day yellow smile-faces
on both toes. We’ve been at it maybe an hour and half, and the garden’s dirt is just
about tilled when Hal comes out and down off the pressure-treated redwood deck and
comes walking very steadily and seriously toward the border of the garden the Moms
had surveyed out with little sticks and string. He has his little hand out, he’s holding
out something small and dark and he’s coming toward the garden as the Rototiller snorts
and rattles behind me, dragging the Moms. As he gets closer the thing in his hand
resolves into something that just doesn’t look pleasant at all. Hal and I look at
each other. His expression is very serious even despite that his lower lip is having
a sort of little epileptic fit, which means he’s getting ready to bawl. That’s with
a
w.
I remember the air was gray with dust and the Moms had her glasses on. He holds the
thing out toward the Moms’s figure. I squint. The thing covering his palm and hanging
over the sides of the palm is a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold.
Underline
big
and
old
. It must have come from some hot furnace-hidden corner of the basement, some corner
she must have missed with the flamethrower, after the flooding we had every January
thaw. I heft a clod or rock, I’m staring, every follicle I’ve got is bunched and straining.
You could feel the tension, it was like standing down at Sunstrand Plaza when they
fired the transformers, every follicle bunches and strains. It was a sort of nasal
green, black-speckled, hairy like a peach is hairy. Also some orange speckles. A patch
of very bad-news-type mold. Hal looks at me in the noise, his lower lip all over the
place. He looks to the Moms, the Moms is intent on a plumb-straight Rototilled line,
weaving. The pièce is that the mold looks, like, strangely incomplete. As in it dawns
on me right then
chewed on,
Helen. And yes as I squint some sickening hairy stuff is still there like impacted
in the kid’s front teeth and hairily smeared around the mouth.