Infinite Jest (22 page)

Marathe grunted, shifting slightly in the chair.

Steeply said ‘The sort that gets sung about, the kind people die for and then get
immortalized in song. You got your ballads, your operas. Tristan and Isolde. Lancelot
and what’s-her-name. Agamemnon and Helen, Dante and Beatrice.’

Marathe’s drowsy smile continued upward to become a wince. ‘Narcissus and Echo. Kierkegaard
and Regina. Kafka and that poor girl afraid to go to the postbox for the mail.’

‘Interesting choice of example here, the mailbox.’ Steeply pretended to chuckle.

Marathe came alert. ‘Take off your wig and be shitting inside it, Hugh Steeply B.S.S.
And the ignorance of you appalls me. Agamemnon had no relation with this queen. Menelaus
was husband, him of Sparta. And you mean
Paris
. Helen and Paris. He of Troy.’

Steeply seemed amused in the idiotic way: ‘Paris and Helen, the face that launched
vessels. The horse: the gift which was not a gift. The anonymous gift brought to the
door. The sack of Troy from inside.’

Marathe rose slightly on his stumps in the chair, showing some emotions at this Steeply.
‘I am seated here appalled at the naïveté of history of your nation. Paris and Helen
were the
excuse
of the war. All the Greek states in addition to the Sparta of Menelaus attacked Troy
because Troy controlled the Dardanelles and charged the ruinous tolls for passage
through, which the Greeks, who would like very dearly the easy sea passage for trade
with the Oriental East, resented with fury. It was for commerce, this war. The one-quotes
“love” one-does-not-quote of Paris for Helen merely was the excuse.’

Steeply, genius of interviewing, sometimes affected more than usual idiocy with Marathe,
which he knew baited Marathe. ‘Everything reduces itself to politics for you guys.
Wasn’t that whole war just a song? Did that war even really take place, that anybody
knows of?’

‘The point is that what launches vessels of war is the state and community and its
interests,’ Marathe said without heat, tiredly. ‘You only wish to enjoy to pretend
for yourself that the love of one woman could do this, launch so many vessels of alliance.’

Steeply was stroking the perimeters of the mesquite-scratch, which made his shrug
appear awkward. ‘I don’t think I’d be so sure. Those around Rod the God say the man
would die twice for her. Say he wouldn’t have to even think about it. Not just that
he’d let the whole of O.N.A.N. come down, if it came to that. But’d die.’

Marathe sniffed. ‘Twice.’

‘Without even having to pause and think,’ Steeply said, stroking at his lip’s electrolysistic
rash in a ruminative fashion. ‘It’s the reason most of us think he’s still there,
why he’s still got President Gentle’s ear. Divided loyalties are one thing. But if
he does it for
love
—well then you’ve got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political, wouldn’t
you say?’ Steeply smiled broadly down at Marathe.

Marathe’s own betrayal of A.F.R.: for medical care for the conditions of his wife;
for (Steeply might imagine to think) love of a person, a woman. ‘
Tragic
saying as if Rodney Tine of Nonspecificity were not responsible for choosing it,
as the insane are not responsible,’ said Marathe quietly.

Steeply now was smiling even more broadly. ‘It has a kind of tragic quality, timeless,
musical, that how could Gentle resist?’

Marathe’s tone now became derisive despite his legendary sangfroid in matters of technical
interviews: ‘These sentiments from a person who allows them to place him in the field
as an enormous girl with tits at the cock-eyed angle, now discoursing on tragic love.’

Steeply, impassive and slackly ruminative, picked at the lipstick of the corner of
his mouth with a littlest finger, removing some grain of grit, gazing out from their
shelf of stone. ‘But sure. The fanatically patriotic Wheelchair Assassins of southern
Québec scorn this type of interpersonal sentiment between people.’ Looking now down
at Marathe. ‘No? Even though it’s just this that has brought you Tine, yours for Luria
to command, should it ever come to that?’

Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. ‘Your U.S.A. word for fanatic,
“fanatic,” do they teach you it comes from the Latin for “temple”? It is meaning,
literally, “worshipper at the temple.” ’

‘Oh Jesus now here we go again,’ Steeply said.

‘As, if you will give the permission, does this
love
you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the
attachment
. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship,
no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. ‘Herrrrrre we go.’

Marathe ignored this. ‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A.
only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments
carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing
of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This
is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have
sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’

‘How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’

‘You U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of
a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy.
Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart.
Something bigger than the self.’

Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: ‘Ohh… Cana
da
….’

Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. ‘Make amusement all you wish. But choose
with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would
die for without, as you say, the
thinking twice.
You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?’

The A.F.R.’s extensive file on Steeply included mention of his recent divorce. Marathe
already had informed Steeply of the existence of this file. He wondered how badly
Steeply doubted what he reported, Marathe, or whether he assumed its truth simply.
Though the persona of him changed, Steeply’s car for all field assignments was this
green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for aspirin upon its side—the file knew this
stupidity—Marathe was sure the sedan with its aspirin advertisement was somewhere
below them, unseen. The fanatically beloved car of M. Hugh Steeply. Steeply was watching
or gazing at the darkness of the desert floor. He did not respond. His expression
of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these.

Marathe said, ‘This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches
your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think
two times?’

‘This from a man who—’

Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. ‘For this choice determines all else.
No? All other of our you say
free
choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.’s?
What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Québecers
conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?’

Steeply’s face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well
Québecers found repellent on Americans. ‘But you assume it’s always choice, conscious,
decision. This isn’t just a little naïve, Rémy? You sit down with your little accountant’s
ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?’

‘The alternatives are—’

‘What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes
to Mohammed? What if you just
love?
without deciding? You just
do:
you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose
but to love?’

Marathe’s sniff held disdain. ‘Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment.
Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective
narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You
are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.’

A silence ensued this.

Marathe shifted in his chair. ‘In a case such as this you become the slave who believes
he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would
die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.’

Another silence ensued. Steeply, who had made his early career with Unspecified Services
conducting technical interviews,
⁴⁴
used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface. Here it defused
Marathe. Marathe felt the ironies of his position. One strap of Steeply’s prostheses’
brassiere had slipped into view below his shoulder, where it cut deeply into his flesh
of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of creosote, but much less strongly smelling
than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe had smelled at close range. Steeply’s
back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said:

‘You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock
beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: “tragically,
unvoluntarily, lost.” ’

Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field
Operative Steeply may not have been truly sneering. The city Tucson’s lume appeared
a bleached and ghostly white in the unhumid air. Crepuscular animals rustled and perhaps
scuttled. Dense and unbeautiful spider webs of the poisonous U.S.A. species of spider
Black Widow were beneath the shelf and the incline’s other outcroppings. And when
the wind hit certain angles in the mountainside it moaned. Marathe thought of his
victory over the train that had taken his legs.
⁴⁵
He attempted in English to sing:

‘ “
Oh Say, Land of the Free.
” ’

And they both could feel this queer dry night-desert chill descend with the moon’s
gibbous rise—a powdery wind down below making dust to shift and cactus needles whistle,
the sky’s stars adjusting to the color of low flame—but were themselves not yet chilled,
even Steeply’s sleeveless dress: he and Marathe stood and sat in the form-fitting
astral spacesuit of warmth their own radiant heat produced. This is what happens in
dry night climes, Marathe was learning. His dying wife had never once left southwestern
Québec. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulents’ remote embryonic disseminatory Ops base
down here in Southwest U.S.A. seemed to him like the surface of the moon: four corrugated
Quonsets and kiln-baked earth and air that swam and shimmered like the area behind
jet engines. Empty and dirty-windowed rooms, doorknobs hot to touch and hell-stench
inside the empty rooms.

Steeply was continuing saying nothing while he tamped down another of his long Belgian
cigarettes. Marathe continued to hum the U.S.A. song, all over the map in terms of
key.

‘Because none of them really meant any of it,’ Hal tells Kent Blott. ‘The end-of-the-day
hatred of all the work is just part of the work. You think Schtitt and deLint don’t
know we’re going to sit in there together after showers and bitch? It’s all planned
out. The bitchers and moaners in there are just doing what’s expected.’

‘But I look at these guys that’ve been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering,
hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel tired and suffer, I feel this what, dread,
this dread, I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day
of tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance
at a like a pro career that I’m starting to get this dready feeling a career in the
Show means even
more
suffering, if I’m skeletally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I get
there.’

Blott’s on his back on the shag carpet—all five of them are—stretched out splay-limbed
with their heads up supported on double-width velourish throw-pillows on the floor
of V.R.6, one of the three little Viewing Rooms on the second floor of the Comm.-Ad.
Bldg., two flights up from the locker rooms and three from the main tunnel’s mouth.
The room’s new cartridge-viewer is huge and almost painfully high-definition; it hangs
flat on the north wall like a large painting; it runs off a refrigerated chip; the
room’s got no TP or phone-console; it’s very specialized, just a player and viewer,
and tapes; the cartridge-player sits on the second shelf of a small bookcase beneath
the viewer; the other shelves and several other cases are full of match-cartridges,
motivational and visualization cartridges—InterLace, Tatsuoka, Yushityu, SyberVision.
The 300-track wire from the cartridge-player up to the lower-right corner of the wall-hung
viewer is so thin it looks like a crack in the wall’s white paint. Viewing Rooms are
windowless and the air from the vent is stale. Though when the viewer’s on it looks
like the room has a window.

Hal’s put on an undemanding visualization-type cartridge, as he usually does for a
Big Buddy group-interface when they’re all tired. He’s killed the volume, so you can’t
hear the reinforcing mantra, but the picture is bright and bell-clear. It’s like the
picture almost leaps out at you. A graying and somewhat ravaged-looking Stan Smith
in anachronistic white is at a court’s baseline hitting textbook forehands, over and
over again, the same stroke, his back sort of osteoporotically hunched but his form
immaculate, his footwork textbook and effortless—the frictionless pivot and back-set
of weight, the anachronistic Wilson wood stick back and pointing straight to the fence
behind him, the fluid transfer of weight to the front foot as the ball comes in, the
contact at waist-level and just out front, the front leg’s muscles bunching up as
the back leg’s settle, eyes glued to the yellow ball in the center of his strings’
stencilled W—E.T.A. kids are conditioned to watch not just the ball but the ball’s
rotating seams, to read the spin coming in—the front knee dipping slightly down under
bulging quads as the weight flows more forward, the back foot up almost
en-pointe
on the gleaming sneaker’s unscuffed toe, the no-nonsense flourishless follow-through
so the stick ends up just in front of his gaunt face—Smith’s cheeks have hollowed
as he’s aged, his face has collapsed at the sides, his eyes seem to bulge from the
cheekbones that protrude as he inhales after impact, he looks desiccated, aged in
hot light, performing the same motions over and over, for decades, his other hand
floating up gently to grasp the stick’s throat out in front of the face so he’s flowed
back into the Ready Stance all over again. No wasted motion, egoless strokes, no flourishes
or tics or excesses of wrist. Over and over, each forehand melting into the next,
a loop, it’s hypnotizing, it’s supposed to be. The soundtrack says ‘Don’t Think Just
See Don’t Know Just Flow’ over and over, if you turn it up. You’re supposed to pretend
it’s you on the bell-clear screen with the fluid and egoless strokes. You’re supposed
to disappear into the loop and then carry that disappearance out with you, to play.
The kids’re lying there limp and splayed, supine, jaws slack, eyes wide and dim, a
relaxed exhausted warmth—the flooring beneath the shag is gently heated. Peter Beak
is asleep with his eyes open, a queer talent E.T.A. seems to instill in the younger
ones. Orin had been able to sleep with his eyes open at the dinner table, too, at
home.