Infinite Jest (219 page)

‘I’m in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on
Possalthwaite who was in crisis and Zoltan and The Darkness come like spasming in
saying Troeltsch’d jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast.’

‘They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without awareness
it’s going out over WETA into all the rooms?’

Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody’d see that Wayne’d have
to have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little old-time gunmetal handheld
mike at Lateral Alice Moore’s curved desk. He’d already heard from Lateral Alice that
it was more like Wayne had come rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed
the mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on
aghastly; and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.’s deactivated
third rail, had been so aghasted he’d pitched forward narcoleptically and stayed like
that with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that
Lateral Alice’s own stress had brought on an aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to
the point where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis
had got to her.

‘This was more like a general sort of impression which I feel like I might have misbegotten
from the agitation of the guys. Plus how completely un-Wayneish Wayne sounded, like
how could anybody ever have said that shit if they thought it wasn’t just them and
Troeltsch alone, much less Wayne, who as we all know is pretty much reserve in motion.’

DeLint’s nostrils got that pale flare they got, Pemulis knew, when he smelled horseshit
and knew you knew it. Pemulis knows deLint’s been laying for him ever since the incident
with the P.W.T.A. guy who started to wobble and then rant down at P.W.T.A., which
was a totally different type of deal. The irony was that the Wayne-dosing had been
a total accident and in no way Pemulis’s deal, if anybody’s Troeltsch’s, but the cortex
couldn’t nail down any way to get this across without admitting to possession of a
’drine, which given the shaky pharmaceutical ground since the Eschaton and O.N.A.N.T.A.
urologist would be tantamount to Clippertonizing himself. Nwangi showed almost blinding
3rd-World teeth but was saying nothing. Watson’s eyes had almost this nictitater of
stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light of nobody
home at chez Tex Watson. Pemulis saw the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. and deviant
division in the papers deLint held.

‘Which is in your words your first knowledge of untowardness with Wayne.’

‘My first is I get out there still trying to counsel the Postheimer and here on the
speaker’s Wayne doing what Keith observed may have been a sort of imitation of Dr.
Tavis.’

It had been uncanny. It had made Stice look like a rank amateur. Wayne had told Troeltsch
to pretend he was some adolescent girl: this was adolescent Tavis asking her for a
date; Pemulis shuddered; he couldn’t exactly remember all the little mannerisms, which
Wayne’d clearly gotten locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the bus
back from victories going at him nonstop, but in outline it was Chuckie Tavis coming
up to some Canadian cheerleader or something and telling her he was going to be completely
open with her: he had a terrible fear of rejection; he was telling her up-front now
that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was
begging
her not openly to reject him if she didn’t want to go, to think up some plausible
excuse—though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that
excuse hard to believe, now that he’s openly asked her to make up an excuse.

‘Whereupon the whole Academy hears Mr. Troeltsch prompt Wayne into making public castigations
of his various peers and instructors.’

‘I’ve got to say it did seem like Troeltsch had kind of orchestrated things somehow,
sir, was my impression.’

‘Referring to Corbett Thorp as a—’ pretending to riffle through the papers so Pemulis’d
have to see the 17-into-56 leaflet several times as it came up in the riffle.

‘I believe the expression was “a palsied twit,” ’ Nwangi said to deLint.

‘Yes “palsied twit.” And Francis Unwin quote “has the on-court look of a cornered
rodent.” And Disney R. Leith: the quote “sort of man you always end up sitting next
to at civic functions.” Ms. Richardson-Levy-o’Byrne-Chawaf as chair of some sort of
committee dealing with the topic of the quote “Itty Bitty Titty.” On Coach Schtitt,
quote, seeming as if he’d been “denied some kind of vitally important moisture from
birth henceforward.” Our own Mr. Nwangi here being in rough quote if I’ve got it quote
“the sort of fellow who’ll be in a Chinese restaurant with you and won’t even share
food or trade food.” ’

‘Meaning mean-spirited.’ Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind.
What was chilling was that in Wayne’s scenario Tavis does succeed, Wayne projects,
in seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he’s totally open on the
date about the fact that he’d deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in
the first place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys,
more honest and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting
she’d basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except—chillingly—he
hadn’t shut up.

‘—including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the
act of sexual intercourse,’ deLint said, trying to find it in the sheaf. ‘On Bernadette
Longley: “Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other
way around.” On Mary Esther Thode: “a face like a pancake.” On the Academy’s own late
Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: “so full of himself he could have shit
limbs.” Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: “by all appearances addicted
to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth.”
’

‘I’m remembering the word as
insertable
.’ Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen
seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode’s face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered,
doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. Plus somehow even more chilling was that Pemulis
knew from Inc that Wayne’s pseudo-Tavis ‘I-live-in-fear-of-rejection’ ploy was actually
in the top five or ten of the troubling ‘Strategies’ that Inc’s brother Orin the punter
called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.

‘Donni Stott has we’re informed “skin like an attaché case and is a compelling advertisement
for sunscreen.” I myself am, here I quote, quote “a man who would not lend his own
mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch.” ’

‘Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger
trip?’

Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark hatchet.
Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by and brought
out Pemulis’s special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to
jump for. From someplace under Nwangi’s chair were brought out two pharmaceutical
scales, several jeweller’s loupes, the tow truck’s supply of empty sterile Visine
bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch’s bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch
had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.

Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. ‘I request to see
the Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.’

‘We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone’s mind very much today, now said to
be the sort of person who quote “cries at card tricks.” We have a Rik Dunkel who “could
not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting precision.”
We have a return engagement with Ms. Heath, described as “dwelling always at the edge
of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria.” We have our own beloved Tex, sitting
right here, described as having “a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the spine”
in lieu of higher cortex function.’

‘Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell
her it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations.’

Nwangi’s laugh was high and had the slight teakettle-wheeze to it of the laughs of
large black men the world over. ‘She sends you her
regards,
the Dean said to tell you.’ He slapped his knee three times.

DeLint looked a little less happy because he clearly didn’t know what any of it was
about and didn’t like playing coded messenger, but he still looked pretty happy: ‘Michael
Mathew Pemulis, the Academy’s Dean of Academic Affairs said to tell you the administration’s
too naturally concerned about the state of one of our two very finest current talents,
who it’s clear he’s been unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant prohibited by
federal statute, O.N.A.N.T.A. regulations, and the Enfield Tennis Academy Honor-Code
Specs on Artificial Substances, to permit itself the satisfaction of giving you the
Dean’s very best regards and her wish that quote “may the road rise up to meet you
whitherever your future travels lie.” ’ DeLint probed his ear. ‘I think that was it
in a nutshell.’

Pemulis got very cool and brass-mask-faced. He was breathing very clearly through
his nose, and the office air seemed mentholated. Everything got very cool and formal
inside and glycerine-clear. ‘Aubs, before anything gets nailed in stone that we’ll
all I promise you and Mrs. Inc we’ll all of us regret—’

DeLint said ‘I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit
or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like
a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they’ll take a senior
without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration
says fat chance on any kind of reference.’

Tex Watson said something about urine.

Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:

‘I believe the kid is speechless.’

‘I believe he has nothing to say.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘And something about you’re invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration
to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon won’t be this
one.’

Nwangi got out through laughter: ‘And that the administrative office doorknobs have
been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone’s
room’s mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’

The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately
envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da’s saggy frown. Pemulis scratched
very coolly next to his ear. ‘And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’

DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face
and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed
and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious.

333.
Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most
lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both
Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket.

334.
Hal’s Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started
as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes
abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn’t a very promising way
to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity.

335.
Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict,
which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships.

336.
(according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)

337.
Latin blunder for self-defense’s
se defendendo
is
sic,
either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip,
or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with
the graveyard scene from
Hamlet
—namely V.i. 9.

338.
Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition—
^®
Syntex Labs.

339.
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

340.
Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic—
^®
Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals.

341.
Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C-III narcotic oral analgesic—
^®
Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

342.
Or possibly
Babel
.

343.
Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any
kind of Recovery Program.

344.
E.T.S.’s
^a
Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza’s signed up to
take in English and (Parisian) French.

^a.
Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.

345.
The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast
of E.T.A.

346.
Montréal International Airport-D’Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted
to intra-Québec flights only.

347.
(Which in fact she doesn’t, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the
hulpil.)

348.
An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center.

349.
Sic
.

350.
Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.’s own armlessness and hook, maybe.

351.
As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: ‘My Life Is
Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share It With You.’