Infinite Jest (218 page)

The speaker out up by the clock in the cement hall by the sauna crackled to life for
the start of weekly WETA, with its glass-shattering Joan Sutherland theme. Pemulis
put his street-sneakers on his street-shoe shelf. ‘Buck up, T.P. It’s just an angst-spasm.
You’re just reeling from a temporary paternal kertwang. Philosophical truth’s jutting
out all over the place. Disney World or no. Nose or no. Eschaton lives on, believe
me. Underground or no. You have a calling, a talent. A missileman of your caliber.
Reach down and rally, me little button.’

Possalthwaite had taken his face from his hands and was staring stonily up somewhere
past Pemulis, lips moving in the habitual sucking reflex for which he took so much
guff. His face had the pink scrubbed look of a crying child all right. His hands had
left brown spiders of tincture of benzoin on his cheeks. He had two little smudges
of bruise under the eyes. He sniffed meatily through a nose still covered in horizontal
strips of surgical tape. ‘I ab dot a little button.’

‘That’s what all the little buttons say, kid,’ the Viking said levelly, removing something
from a nostril with tweezers. Pemulis’s sinuses felt like four-laners and his sense
of smell was a lot keener than a man in a locker room might wish. Freer’s locker next
to Gloeckner’s next to good old Inc’s was agape, the bolted colposcope gleaming in
the overhead lights and his Fox large-head sticks a nauseous West-Coast fluorescent
orange with the trademark fox-glyph painted on the strings.

Possalthwaite scratched at one foot with the nails of the other foot. ‘If you can’t
trust your folks…’

‘Let me both validate and remind you that the kertwang you’re reeling under is emotion-based
and not fact-based.’

Possalthwaite opened his mouth.

‘You’re getting ready to say if you can’t trust the ostensively loving patriarchal
bosom you can’t trust anyone at all, and if you can’t trust people what can you trust,
in terms of unvarying dependability, Postal Weight, am I right?’

‘Oh Jesus H. Christmastree here it comes,’ the Viking said to his forehead’s reflection.

Pemulis was putting on a sock and a shoe, his mouth right down by Postal Weight’s
ear. ‘This is not a bullshit problem. This is a like serious emotiono-philosophical
deal you’re confronting. I think it’s a good sign you’re coming to me instead of holding
it all impactedly inside.’

‘Who’s coming to you?’ Freer turned the big face this way and that. ‘He was already
in here having his little wa-wa-dinkle.’

Pemulis tried envisioning Keith Freer being bent over the net by Bedouins in purple
turbans and roundly buggered, making the sort of sounds Leith’s historical b/w J.
Gleason made when in pain. To Possalthwaite he was saying ‘Cause I can remember staring
down the exact same-type thing, though from a more like philosophicalized kertwang
than emotions.’

Freer said ‘Do not ask him what he means, kid.’

Then a couple of 16s came in, G. (‘Yardguard’) Rader and a marginal Slavic kid whose
first name was Zoltan and whose last name nobody could pronounce, and ignored Freer’s
advice to run for their lives because the good Dr. Pemulis had been prescribing for
himself again and was going to begin to rant, and threw down their gear and proceeded
immediately to get fresh towels from the dispenser over by the showers and to snap
them at each other.

‘What do you mean?’ said Possalthwaite.

‘The snare closes, the trap closes, here it comes.’

Rader rolled his wrists and spiraled the towel for what he called maximum painage.
The Viking turned and said if he felt so much as a terrycloth breeze on this personal
ass right here they were toast, the two. Pemulis was taking racquets out. E.T.A.’s
male 16s were as a group inbent, conspiratorial, glandular, cliqueish. They excluded
anyone not in their set. They had techniques and strategems of exclusion way more
advanced than the 18s or 14s. (They tended to exclude Stice, mostly because he roomed
with Coyle and drilled a lot of the time up with the 18s, and mixed with them, and
more recently Kornspan, excluded, basically because he was cretinous and cruel and
now consensually suspected of having tortured and killed the two collarless cats whose
burnt corpses had been found on the hillside during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks
back.) They had their own dialect and codes, in-jokes inside in-jokes.
^f
And at E.T.A. only 16s snapped towels, and only for a year or two, but they went
at it with a vengeance, towel-snapping, a brief flared genuflection to jock-stereotype,
a stage where there’s this primate-like passion for red-assed bonding in steamy rooms.
They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true,
of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange.

Then 18’s-B/C fence-sitter Duncan van Slack, the kid who carried a guitar around with
himself everyplace but never played it, and refused all late-night-sitting-around-someone’s-room
requests to play, and who was suspected of not being able to play the thing at all,
and whose own Da was supposedly a redoubted gene-sequencer in Savannah, poked his
head and guitar’s neck in the door and said to
come quick
and then withdrew his head before anybody could ask what was up.

‘If you didn’t have such a way with a launch-vector I wouldn’t be sure you’re ready
to hear this, Postalscale.’

‘It occurs to me this is your boring man’s true talent: the talent for ensnaring,’
says the Viking. ‘Flee while you can, kid.’

Possalthwaite blew his nose in the crook of his elbow and left it there.

Pemulis, who still used genuine catgut strings, zipped the two sticks he’d chosen
into their Dunlop covers. He put an arch-support shoe up on the bench by Postalweight’s
bottom, looking quickly right and left:

‘Todder, you can trust math.’

Freer said ‘You heard it here first.’

Pemulis compulsively zipped and unzipped one of the covers. ‘Take a breather, Keith.
Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you.
Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent.
When all else fails. When the boulder’s slid all the way back to the bottom. When
the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and
regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality.
The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven’s theme song. The
nightlight on life’s dark wall, late at night. Heaven’s recipe book. The hydrogen
spiral. The methane, ammonia, H
₂
O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math
is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it’s true.’

‘This from a man on academic probation for who knows the length.’

Something involving Freer and a saline-moistened cattle-prod refused to quite mentally
gel. There was still none of Tenuate’s stomachless verve or well-being, just a glittered
hum in his head and sinuses that felt like wind-tunnels. Pemulis tended to be a mouth-breather.
The Viking raised one leg to fart toward Pemulis in a vaudevillian way, getting a
laugh from Csikszentmihalyi and Rader, who’d mostly undressed and taken seats on the
bench opposite Pemulis and Postal Weight, towels hung unwinding in their hands, watching,
and were only every once in a while and in a halfhearted way pretending to look like
they were getting ready to snap each other.

‘I’m not a math person, Dad says,’ said Postal Weight. Again the nose made the words
come out
dot
and
bath
and
persod
. Csikszentmihalyi feinted a lunge and then really lunged and there was brief flurry
of terrycloth.

Pemulis unzipped the cover. ‘The axiom. The lemma. Listen: “If two different sets
of parametric equations represent the same curve J, but the curve is traced in opposite
directions in the two cases, then the two sets of equations produce values for a line
integral over J that are negatives of each other.” Not “
If
thus-and-such.” Not “
unless
a gladhanding commercial realtor from Boardman MN in $400 Banfi loafers changes his
mind.” Always and ever. As in puts the
a
in
a priori
. An honest lamp in the inkiest black, Toddleposter.’

There were voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus. McKenna stuck his head
in and looked wildly around and withdrew without saying anything. Csikszentmihalyi
went out after him. Freer and Rader both said What the fuck. Pemulis had only one
button of his fly buttoned and was pointing at the ceiling with a finger:

‘… Only that at times like this, when you’re directionless in a dark wood, trust to
the abstract deductive. When driven to your knees, kneel and revere the double S.
Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hilbert, L’Hôpital. You
will be lifted up. Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey. Borne up. Never let fall. Wiener,
Reimann, Frege, Green.’

Csikszentmihalyi came back in with Ortho Stice, their color high.

Pemulis compulsively zips and unzips zippers, is the reason why he wears only button-fly
pants and tennis shorts.

Cs/yi said ‘There is expression. You must immediately come.’

Freer turned from the mirror, both hands on a comb. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears.’

‘Never trust the father you can see,’ Pemulis told Possalthwaite.

Stice was already on his way back out and said over his shoulder, ‘Troeltsch’s got
Wayne on the air and Wayne’s lost his mind.’

^a.
Like dry loamy clay, highly absorbent, used by some for traction on their grips,
eschewed by others because it has a lot of aluminum silicates and the Y.T.M.P.’s ‘aluminum-causes-impotence’
panic still weighs hard on some pubescent players’ minds.

^b.
A good many seniors’ schedules have no last-period classes, or have Independent-Study
stuff slated for last period, and when two of these seniors—e.g. Pemulis & Freer—are
scheduled for a
P.M.
challenge-match, they get to start at 1430h. instead of 1515h., and usually then
finish up early, which is a great perk, given that they’ll get to hit both the weight
room and the locker room at slack and empty times.

^c.
An advantage of competitive mediocrity is you get to sit in the stands and get lots
of sun on your feet and chest, because you’re knocked out of competition by like the
second round. Hence grotesquely pale feet are sort of a perverse mark of competitive
status, maybe like toothlessness in hockey or something.

^d.
Specially engineered to react very fast with the hydrolytic enzyme esterase and thus
to be completely out of the tissues within 36 hrs.

^e.
Q.v. Note 22
supra
.

^f.
For example, during the first month of last summer’s Euroclay junket, at some prearranged
signal the male 16s would all hunch and hop around brachiatishly with their knuckles
just off the ground in a circle, hitting their chests and going ‘
Er ah ee oo ah,
’ over and over, until prorector N. Hartigan finally lost his patience as they did
it again in the line for Customs at L’Aéroport Orly and had hysterics so gruesome
in someone that tall that the practice stopped as mysteriously as it’d started.

325.
(whose theories of detection and interview are strongly informed by the b/w noir
films Tine so enjoyed as a boy late at night on local broadcast television, and misses)

326.
(and then some)

327.
Bolex H64, -32 and -16 models come with a turret that accepts three C-mount lenses,
which gives the models a kind of multi-eyed, alien-facial look.

328.
(though never unveiled)

329.
(which is actually complete horseshit, but goes unchallenged by the O.U.S. operatives,
who are pretty savvy at choosing their heuristic battles)

330.
(given the guy’s track record with ingestion)

331.
Picaresque
pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists
like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson’s
Potted Psalm
’s mother-and-Death stuff and
The Cage
’s cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are pretty obvious touchstones
in a lot of Himself’s more parodic-slapstick productions.

332.

17 NOV. Y.D.A.U.

‘Gracious me and mine,’ Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he’d crossed
to keep the foot from joggling.

‘Rusk and Charles and Mrs. Incandenza are with him now. Schtitt’s been up to see him.
Loach has done a thorough reflex-check. John Wayne’s going to be OK.’

‘Well thank heavens for that load off everyone’s mind,’ Pemulis said.

It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs’ Office.
Mrs. Inc’s ventilator hissed and something up in there whirred a little. DeLint was
behind the high desk, looking like a mean little boy. Nobody’d said if anybody higher
up than deLint was going to show. Pemulis didn’t know if this was good or bad.

‘Let’s make perfectly sure we got this in order and in your words.’ Nwangi and Watson
were window-dressing. This was A. deLint’s show. His face kind of came apart when
he smiled. ‘With no prior knowledge of anything untoward, you’re pulled from the locker
room and stand out in the hall with several other students, which is your first knowledge
anything’s untoward with Wayne.’

Pemulis figured none of the administrators had heard the thing; they always shut their
soundproof doors at 1435h.; Pemulis had no idea what Wayne’s said about anything,
or Jim Troeltsch, who very prudently hasn’t shown facial-feature one in their room
since the apocalyptic broadcast. It’d taken Pemulis about half the salivaless sprint
up to B-204 to figure out what had happened and to find his pilfered Tenuates in the
little pecker’s Sel-dane bottle. Pemulis sort of shuddered to imagine the impact of
the ’drine on Wayne’s cherry-red and virgin bloodstream. The slight whir of his cortex
working at full speed was masked by the hiss of the ventilator and the sound of whistles
and play and Schtitt’s megaphone outside.