Infinite Jest (210 page)

‘Be there with me, Helen. Feel the sort of Wagnerish clouds gather. Hallie always
said there was always this sense as a kid with the Moms that the whole cosmos was
just this side of fulminating into boiling clouds of elemental gas and was being held
materially together only through heroic exercise of will and ingenuity on the part
of the Moms.

‘Everything slows waaay down. She’s coming around with the machine at the end of a
row and sees Hallie wearing his happy-slippers outside in the cold, which just in
itself is enough to gut-shot the cosmos as far as she’s concerned, usually. Now we’re
seeing the Rototiller get shut down as she bends way down to where I’d showed her
the choke. The machine diesels a little and farts some blue smoke. The machine sucks
the nub of its starter-rope into itself. I can feel the voltage like I’m still there.
Post-racket tingling quiet descends. There’s the tentative chirp of a bird. The Moms
comes toward Hal standing there in his little red coat. She’s tucking a wisp of hair
back under the special plastic cap’s elastic. Her hair at that time was dark brown,
she’s addressing him, she has an unbelievably humiliating little family pet name for
the kid that I’ll show him the mercy of never telling anybody.

‘But so she’s coming over. Hal is standing there. Holds the horrific patch of fungus
out. The Moms sees at first only her child holding something out, and like all moms
hardwired for motherhood she reaches to take whatever her baby holds out. The one
sort of case where she wouldn’t check before reaching out toward something held out.’

‘Q.’

‘The Moms though now stops just inside the border of string and she squints, her glasses
have dust, she starts to see and process just what it is the kid’s holding out to
her. Her hand’s outstretched in the air over the garden’s string and she stops.

‘Hallie takes one step forward, arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes
“I ate this.”

‘The Moms says she begs his pardon.

‘Helen, you decide. But consider the fragility of the obsesso-compulsive’s control.
The terrible life-ruling phobias. Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision,
and untidiness, which you can’t get much untidier than basement-mold.’

‘Q.’

‘The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the
unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time.

‘ “I ate this” Hal goes, he’s still holding the thing out, not crying, a kind of clinical
grimness to him about it, like the mold’s some audit it’s his job to show her. And
do you want to know if she touched it?’

‘Q.’

‘It suddenly occurs to me that if you want stuff on the Moms and The Mad Stork you
could contact Bain. He practically lived with us in Weston. As like a secondary source.
I’m sure he’d discuss the Moms’s foibles all you want. The man still practically holds
up a crucifix at any mention. His little greeting-card company has just been bought
up by a huge novelty concern, so I’m sure he’s in his big room lying there having
palm-fronds waved and his forehead wiped, feeling flush and voluble. I guess I’d rather
you didn’t ask him about my foibles, but he’s inexhaustible on the subject of the
Moms and O.C.D. He never leaves home, which home is one room, the converted Children’s
Reading Room of what used to be the Waltham Public Library, which is the whole third
floor. He learned from the Moms how to minimize doorways to traverse. I’m afraid he’s
not InterNetted and has an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail. His snail-mail address
is Marlon K. Bain, Saprogenic Greetings Inc., BPL-Waltham Bldg., 1214 Totten Pond
Road, Waltham MA 021549872/4. It’d also be good if you could avoid mentioning the
number 2 to him. He has problems with the number 2. I don’t know if his not leaving
home is similar to the Moms’s not leaving home. This is the most I’ve thought about
the Moms in a dog’s age, to be honest with you. You have this way of getting stuff
out of me. It’s like you do nothing but sit there with that cigarette and you’re all
I can see and all I want is to please you. It’s like I can’t help it. Is this just
good journalism, Helen?’

‘…’

‘Or is there something more going on here, some kind of strange bond I feel between
us that sort of like tears down all my normal personal-life boundaries and makes me
open totally to you? I guess I have to hope you won’t take advantage. Does this all
sound like some kind of line? Maybe if it was a line it’d sound less lame. I guess
I do wish I could come off more suave. I don’t know what else to do except just tell
what’s going on inside me, even if it sounds lame. I never have any clue what you’re
thinking about it.’

‘…’

‘ “Help! My son ate this!” She screamed the same thing over and over, holding the
mold-rhombus up like a torch, running around just inside the string border while I
and Hallie staggered back, literally like staggered back, gaping at our first taste
of apocalypse, a corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed
out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order.

‘ “Help! My son ate this! My son has eaten this! Help!” she kept screaming, running
in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string, and I’m seeing
The Mad Stork’s face at the glass door over the deck, palms out and thumbs together
to make a frame, and Mario my other brother next to him as usual down around his knee,
with Mario’s face all squished against the glass from supporting his weight, their
breath on the window spreading, Hal inside the string finally and trying to follow
her, crying, and not impossibly I also crying a little, just from the infectious stress,
and those two through the back door’s glass just watching, and fucking Booboo also
trying to make that frame with his hands, so finally it was Mr. Reehagen next door,
who was so-called “friends” with her, who had to come out and over and finally had
to hook up the hose.’

^a.
This may be a lie—no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having been
any cameras in HmH’s kitchen, bathroom, etc.

^b.
sic
.

235.
She’d arrayed the photos herself, from her purse, on the dresser; he hadn’t had to
ask her to; it added to the sense of synchronous mercy, a cosmic kindness balancing
out the jacuzzi’s dead bird and the frigidly invasive reporter.

236.
E.T.A. shorthand: Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin.

237.
The NW-to-NE angle at the former Monteplier VT isn’t quite 90°, but it is very close.
By the way, the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem triangle is one of those endless-based
25-130-25 triangles that looks so hideous when projected onto one of Corbett Thorp’s
distorting globes in the Trivium’s Cubular Trigonometry.

238.
Quod vide here Ch. 7, ‘It All Started with a Colorectal Neoplastis, an Openness to
Communicative Manifestations of Divine Grace, and a Seedy-Looking Fellow That Publicly
Lifted a Chair He Was Standing On, That Was Clearly Just Such a Manifestation,’ in
The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle
Lithiumized Annular Fusion,
ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut für Neutronenphysik und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum
Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, ©
Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY. (N.b. that while the annular meta-disease
treatment is highly effective on metastatic cancers, it proved a disappointment on
the HIV-spectrum viri, since AIDS is itself a meta-disease.)

239.
Because he’d been sworn to secrecy, Green doesn’t tell Lenz that Charlotte Treat
had shared with Green that her adoptive father had been one-time Chair of the Northeast
Regional Board of Dental Anesthesiologists, and had been pretty liberal with the use
of the old N
₂
O and thiopental sodium around the Treats’ Revere MA household, for personal and extremely
unsavory reasons.

240.
^®
The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hilo HI—‘A LOW SODIUM FOOD.’

241.
Popular corporate-hard-rock bands, though it shows where Bruce Green’s psychic decline
really started that, except for TBA
₅
, these bands were all truly big two or three years past, and are now slightly passé,
with Choosy Mothers having split up entirely by now to explore individual creative
directions.

242.
This is one reason why he consents to be hung way out into space from Schtitt’s transom
for filming all-court play, held only by some prorector with a firm grip on the back
of his lock’s vest, which the players looking up at Mario’s forward ski-jump posture
off the crow’s nest find incredibly terrifying and audacious and ballsy, and Avril
won’t even leave HmH during all-court filmings.

243.
This though Avril’s never come right out and articulated her worry about his
P.M.
safety to Mario, not wanting to seem as though she’s making a special issue of his
deficits and vulnerability or to seem inconsistent when she lets Hal go off nightly
wherever he likes or just basically in any way to inhibit Mario’s sense of autonomy
and freedom by causing him to worry about her worrying—which he does, rather a lot,
worry about Avril’s worrying about him. If that makes sense.

244.
Mario, like his maternal uncle Charles Tavis, has a dislike of fluorescent lighting.

245.
Viz.: ‘You feeling better?’

‘Will be soon.’

‘Is that supposed to mean something? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. Literally nothing.’

246.
A depressing new Sober Club in Somerville’s Davis Square where AAs and NAs—mostly
new and young—get heartbreakingly dolled up and dance stiffly and tremble with sober
sexual anxiety and they stand around with Cokes and M.F.s telling each other how great
it is to be in an intensely social venue with all your self-conscious inhibitions
unmedicated and screaming in your head. The smiles alone in these places are excruciating
to see.

247.
A Restriction means just no Overnight that week and an extra Chore; a House Restriction
means you have to be back an hour after work and nightly meetings; Full House is no
leaving the House except for work and meetings, and 15 minutes to get back, and no
even leaving to buy smokes or a paper, or even to go out in the lawn for oxygen, and
one violation means a Discharge: F.H.R. is Ennet’s version of the Hole, and it’s dreaded.

248.
Ennet House takes its urines over to the methadone clinic, which has all manner of
clients who have to submit weekly urines to courts and programs, and the clinic lets
Ennet put its urines gratis in the weekly batch the clinic sends out to an E.M.I.T.-mill
clinic all the way out in Natick, and in return every once in a while Pat gets a call
from the trollish little social worker who runs #2 about some client down there who’s
decided he wants off the methadone, as well, and Pat will shoot the client way up
on the Interview list and give him an interview and usually let the client in—Calvin
T. and Danielle S. had both originally gotten into Ennet House this way, i.e. via
#2.

249.
It’s maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or
incontinence his mother’d just drunkenly left there or passed out in, no matter how
pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once.

250.
(who owns a Lincoln, Henderson does, origins unknown and suspicious)

251.
This is all for Insurance Reasons, the Staff sheet on which Gately doesn’t understand
all the language of, and fears.

252.
It’s against House rules to smoke upstairs in the bedrooms—more Insurance Reasons—and
a week’s Restriction is supposed to be mandatory, and Pat’s personally a fanatic about
the rule, but Gately, much as he fears the grim boilerplate on the Insurance Sheet,
always pretends he doesn’t see anything when he sees somebody smoking up here, since
when he was a resident he actually used to sometimes smoke
in his sleep
he was so tense, and every once in a while will wake up and find that he has again,
i.e. lit a gasper and apparently smoked it and put it out all in his sleep, down in
bed in his Staff oubliette in the basement.

253.
(the items from the House’s donated-clothes baskets that fit Gately being few and
far)

254.
Gately’s made it an iron point never again ever to run, once he got straight.

255.
NNE street argot for any kind of handgun.

256.
(Erdedy’s hands still up, w/ keys)

257.
(NNE Region, trying hard not to irritate Tine Sr. by fidgeting)

258.
(Desert-SW Region, understated in a massive peasant skirt and sensible flats)

259.
These,
^®
a number of fine companies, are like enormous versions of the little windshield-washer
implements at service stations—an industrial mop-handle w/ a canted rubber blade at
the end, used for spreading puddle-water out so it dries faster, at some academies
replaced with the EZ-DRI hinged-roller-of-dense-sponge-at-the-end court-dryer, which
E.T.A. eschews because of how fast the rolling sponge at the end mildews and smells
bad.

260.
Mrs. Incandenza always grades everything in blue ink.

261.
A phenomenon not unknown, viz. menial employees and shift-workers mining E.T.A.’s
collected waste for cast-off value, and permitted by the administration and Mr. Harde,
or rather just not actively discouraged, since ‘One man’s trash…’ and so on, with
the only requirement being a certain visual discretion when carrying off E.T.A.’s
offal, simply because the whole thing’s kind of embarrassing for everybody.

262.
I.e. the Women’s Tennis Association, the distaff equivalent of the A.T.P.

263.
Sic,
presumably for Betamax (
^®
Sony).