Infinite Jest (34 page)

if,
and later could never even hope to audition for those swim-trunk and Brylcreem beach
movies that snake Avalon is making his mint on. I do not insist that the judgment
and punishing fall are… were connected, Jim. Any man can slip out there. All it takes
is a second of misplaced respect. Son, it was more than a father’s voice, carrying.
My mother cried out. It was a religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body,
Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling
and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open. I
may have to burp, belch, son, son, telling you what I learned, son, my… my love, too
late, as I left my knees’ meat behind me, slid, ended in a posture of supplication
on my knees’ disclosed bones with my fingers racquetless hooked through the mesh of
the net, across which, the net, the sopped dandy had dropped his pricey gut-strung
Davis racquet and was running toward me with his visor askew and his hands to his
cheeks. My father and the client he was there to perform for dragged me upright to
the palm’s infected shade where she knelt on the plaid beach-blanket with her knuckles
between her teeth, Jim, and I felt the religion of the physical that day, at not much
more than your age, Jim, shoes filling with blood, held under the arms by two bodies
big as yours and dragged off a public court with two extra lines. It’s a pivotal,
it’s a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the
same moment, Jim. I got to notice what I’m sure you’ve noticed long ago, I know, I
know you’ve seen me brought home on occasions, dragged in the door, under what’s called
the Influence, son, helped in by cabbies at night, I’ve seen your long shadow grotesquely
backlit at the top of the house’s stairs I helped pay for, boy: how the drunk and
the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man
under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.

From Cambridge’s Latinate Inman Square, Michael Pemulis, nobody’s fool at all, rides
one necessary bus to Central Square and then an unnecessary bus to Davis Square and
a train back to Central. This is to throw off the slightest possible chance of pursuit.
At Central he catches the Red Line to Park St. Station, where he’s parked the tow
truck in an underground lot he can more than afford. The day is autumnal and mild,
the east breeze smelling of urban commerce and the vague suede smell of new-fallen
leaves. The sky is pilot-light blue; sunlight reflects complexly off the smoked-glass
sides of tall centers of commerce all around Park St. downtown. Pemulis wears button-fly
chinos and an E.T.A. shirt beneath a snazzy blue Brioni sport-coat, plus the bright-white
yachting cap that Mario Incandenza calls his Mr. Howell hat. The hat looks rakish
even when turned around, and it has a detachable lining. Inside the lining can be
kept portable quantities of just about anything. Having indulged in 150 mg. of very
mild ’drines, post-transaction. Wearing also gray-and-blue saddle oxfords w/o socks,
it’s such a mild autumn day. The streets literally
bustle.
Vendors with carts instead of tubs sell hot pretzels and tonics and those underboiled
franks Pemulis likes to have them put the works on. You can see the State House and
Common and Courthouse and Public Gardens, and beyond all that the cool smooth facades
of Back Bay brownstones. The echoes in the underground Park Pl. garage—PARK—are pleasantly
complex. Traffic westward on Commonwealth Avenue is light (meaning things can move)
all the way through Kenmore Square and past Boston U. and up the long slow hill into
Allston and Enfield. When Tavis and Schtitt and the players and ground crew and Testar
and ATHSCME teams inflate the all-weather Lung for the winter over Courts 16–32, the
domed Lung’s nacelle is visible against the horizon all the way down by the Brighton
Ave.–Comm. Ave. split in lower Allston.

The incredibly potent DMZ is apparently classed as a para-methoxylated amphetamine
but really it looks to Pemulis from his slow and tortured survey of the MED.COM’s
monographs more like more similar to the anticholinergic-deliriant class, way more
powerful than mescaline or MDA or DMA or TMA or MDMA or DOM or STP or the I.V.-ingestible
DMT (or Ololiuqui or datura’s scopolamine, or Fluothane, or Bufotenine (a.k.a. ‘Jackie-O.’),
or Ebene or psilocybin or Cylert
⁵⁶
; DMZ resembling chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid, but
significantly different from LSD-25 in that its effects are less visual and spatially-cerebral
and more like
temporally
-cerebral and almost ontological, with some sort of manipulated-phenylkylamine-like
speediness whereby the ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time
as radically (and euphorically, is where the muscimole-affective resemblance shows
its head) altered.
⁵⁷
The incredibly potent DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure
mold that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky chemist at Sandoz
Pharm. who’d first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic and clueless organic chemist,
while futzing around with ergotic fungi on rye. DMZ’s discovery was the tail-end of
the B.S. 1960s, just about the same time Dr. Alan Watts was considering T. Leary’s
invitation to become ‘Writer in Resonance’ at Leary’s utopian LSD-25 colony in Millbrook
NY on what is now Canadian soil. A substance even just the accidental-synthesis of
which sent the Sandoz chemist into early retirement and serious unblinking wall-watching,
the incredibly potent DMZ has a popular-lay-chemical-underground reputation as the
single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube. It is also now the hardest recreational
compound to acquire in North America after raw Vietnamese opium, which forget it.

DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as
Madame Psychosis,
after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.’s student-run
radio station WYYY-109, ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,’ which Mario Incandenza
and E.T.A. stats-wienie and Eschaton game-master Otis P. Lord listen to almost religiously.

The day-shift Ennet House kid at the booth who raises the portcullis to let him onto
the grounds had a couple times in October approached Pemulis about a potential transaction.
Pemulis has a rigid policy about not transacting with E.T.A. employees who come up
the hill from the halfway house, since he knows some of them are at the place on Court
Order, and knows for a fact they pull unscheduled Urines all over the place down there,
and types like the Ennet House types are just the sorts of people Pemulis’s talents
let him get away from in terms of like social milieu and mixing and transacting; and
his basic attitude with these low-rent employees is one of unfoolish discretion and
like why tempt fate.

The East Courts are empty and ball-strewn when Pemulis pulls in; most of them are
still at lunch. Pemulis, Troeltsch, and Schacht’s triple-room is in subdorm B in the
back north part of the second floor of West House and so superjacent to the Dining
Hall, from which through the floor Pemulis can hear voices and silverware and can
smell exactly what they’re having. The first thing he does is boot up the phone console
and try Inc and Mario’s room over in Comm.-Ad., where Hal is sitting in windowlight
with the Riverside
Hamlet
he told Mario he’d read and help with a conceptual film-type project based on part
of, his uncushioned captain’s chair partly under an old print of a detail from the
minor and soft-core Alexandrian mosaic
Consummation of the Levirates,
eating an AminoPal
^®
energy-bar and waiting very casually, the phone with its antenna already out lying
ready on the arm of the chair and two folio-size
Baron’s
SAT-prep guides and a spine-shot copy of the B.S. 1937
Tilden on Spin
and his keys on their neck-chain lying on the Lindistarne carpet by his shoe, waiting
in a very casual posture. Hal deliberately waits till the audio console’s third ring,
like a girl at home on Saturday night.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘The turd emergeth.’ Pemulis’s clear and digitally condensed voice on the line. ‘Repeat.
The turd emergeth.’

‘Please commit a crime,’ is Hal Incandenza’s immediate reply.

‘Gracious me,’ Pemulis says into the phone tucked under his jaw, carefully de-Velcroing
the lining of his Mr. Howell hat.

TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY
, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA, AN 11.5-MINUTE DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT CARTRIDGE DIRECTED,
RECORDED, EDITED, AND—ACCORDING TO THE ENTRY FORM—WRITTEN BY MARIO INCANDENZA, IN
RECEIPT OF NEW-NEW-ENGLAND REGIONAL HONORABLE MENTION IN INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT’S
ANNUAL ‘NEW EYES, NEW VOICES’ YOUNG FILMMAKERS’ CONTEST, APRIL IN THE YEAR OF THE
YUSHITYU 2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD-EASY-TO-INSTALL UPGRADE
FOR INFERNATRON/INTERLACE TP SYSTEMS FOR HOME, OFFICE OR MOBILE (
SIC
), ALMOST EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE

Here is how to put on a big red tent of a shirt that has
ETA
across the chest in gray.

Please ease carefully into your supporter and adjust the elastic straps so the straps
do not bite into your butt and make bulged ridges in your butt that everyone can see
once you’ve sweated through your shorts.

Here is how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your
left leg feels like a log.

Here is how to win, later.

This is a yellow iron-mesh Ball-Hopper full of dirty green dead old balls. Take them
to the East Courts while the dawn is still chalky and no one’s around except the mourning
doves that infest the pines at sunrise, and the air is so sopped you can see your
summer breath. Hit serves to no one. Make a mess of balls along the base of the opposite
fence as the sun hauls itself up over the Harbor and a thin sweat breaks and the serves
start to boom. Stop thinking and let it flow and go boom, boom. The shiver of the
ball against the opposite fence. Hit about a thousand serves to no one while Himself
sits and advises with his flask. Older men’s legs are white and hairless from decades
in pants. Here is the set of keys a stride’s length before you in the court as you
serve dead balls to no one. After each serve you must almost fall forward into the
court and in one smooth motion bend and scoop up the keys with your left hand. This
is how to train yourself to follow through into the court after the serve. You still,
years after the man’s death, cannot keep your keys anywhere but on the floor.

This is how to hold the stick.

Learn to call the racquet a stick. Everyone does, here. It’s a tradition: The Stick.
Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet.

Please look. You’ll be shown exactly once how to hold it. This is how to hold it.
Just like this. Forget all the near-Eastern-slice-backhand-grip bafflegab. Just say
Hello is all. Just shake hands with the calfskin grip of the stick. This is how to
hold it. The stick is your friend. You will become very close.

Grasp your friend firmly at all times. A firm grip is essential for both control and
power. Here is how to carry a tennis ball around in your stick-hand, squeezing it
over and over for long stretches of time—in class, on the phone, in lab, in front
of the TP, a wet ball for the shower, ideally squeezing it at all times except during
meals. See the Academy dining hall, where tennis balls sit beside every plate. Squeeze
the tennis ball rhythmically month after year until you feel it no more than your
heart squeezing blood and your right forearm is three times the size of your left
and your arm looks from across a court like a gorilla’s arm or a stevedore’s arm pasted
on the body of a child.

Here is how to do extra individual drills before the Academy’s
A.M.
drills, before breakfast, so that after the thousandth ball hit just out of reach
by Himself, with his mammoth wingspan and ghastly calves, urging you with nothing
but smiles on to great and greater demonstrations of effort, so that after you’ve
gotten your third and final wind and must vomit, there is little inside to vomit and
the spasms pass quickly and an east breeze blows cooler past you and you feel clean
and can breathe.

Here is how to don red and gray E.T.A. sweats and squad-jog a weekly 40 km. up and
down urban Commonwealth Avenue even though you would rather set your hair on fire
than jog in a pack. Jogging is painful and pointless, but you are not in charge. Your
brother gets to ride shotgun while a senile German blows BBs at your legs both of
them laughing and screaming
Schnell.
Enfield is due east of the Marathon’s Hills of Heartbreak, which are just up Commonwealth
past the Reservoir in Newton. Urban jogging in a sweaty pack is tedious. Have Himself
hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own
father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation:
it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to
his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations
of his promise in, and didn’t seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped
than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden
state with respect to talent.

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything
runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself,
a long waking dream of pure play.

The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having
a prodigious talent to live up to.

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy. Here is how to handle being seeded at
tournaments, signifying that seeding committees composed of old big-armed men publicly
expect you to reach a certain round. Reaching at least the round you’re supposed to
is known at tournaments as ‘justifying your seed.’ By repeating this term over and
over, perhaps in the same rhythm at which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce it to
an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed,
signifying zip.