Infinite Jest (38 page)

Mario Incandenza has sat in on a back-row stool for every session of an E.T.A. Entertainment
Dept. offering ever since he was finally three years ago December asked to disenroll
from the Winter Hill Special School in Cambridgeport for cheerfully declining even
to try to learn to really read, explaining he’d way rather listen and watch. And he
is a fanatical listener/observer. He treats the lavish Tatsuoka fringe-FM-band tuner
in the living room of the Headmaster’s House like kids of three generations past,
listening the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close
to one of the speakers with his head cocked dog-like, listening, staring into that
special pocket of near-middle distance reserved for the serious listener. He really
does have to sit right up close to listen to ‘Sixty Minutes +/–…’ when he’s over at
the HmH
⁶⁵
with C.T. and sometimes Hal at his mother’s late suppers, because Avril has some
auditory thing about broadcast sound and gets the howling fantods from any voice that
does not exit a living corporeal head, and though Avril’s made it clear that Mario’s
free at any time to activate and align the Tatsuoka’s ghostly-green tuner to whatever
he wishes, he keeps the volume so low that he has to be lowered onto a low coffee
table and lean in and almost put his ear up against the woofer’s tremble and concentrate
closely to hear YYY’s signal over the conversation in the dining room, which tends
to get sort of manically high-pitched toward the end of supper. Avril never actually
asks Mario to keep it down; he does it out of unspoken consideration for her thing
about sound. Another of her unspoken but stressful things involves issues of enclosure,
and the HmH has no interior doors between rooms, and not even much in the way of walls,
and the living and dining rooms are separated only by a vast multileveled tangle of
house-plants in pots and on little stools of different heights and arrayed under hanging
UV lamps of an intensity that tends to give the diners strange little patterns of
tan that differ according to where someone usually sits at the table. Hal sometimes
complains privately to Mario that he gets more than enough UV during the day thank
you very much. The plants are incredibly lush and hale and sometimes threaten to block
off the whole easement from dining to living room, and the rope-handled Brazilian
machete C.T. had mounted on the wall by the tremulous china-case has stopped really
being a joke. The Moms calls the houseplants her Green Babies, and she has a rather
spectacular thumb, plant-wise, for a Canadian.

‘The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen. Those with distorted
orbits of all kinds. Get out from under the sun’s cove-lighting is what this says.
Come in from the spectral rain.’ Madame Psychosis’s broadcast accent is not Boston.
There are
r
’s, for one thing, and there is no cultured Cambridge stutter. It’s the accent of
someone who’s spent time either losing a southern lilt or cultivating one. It’s not
flat and twangy like Stice’s, and it’s not a drawl like the people at Gainesville’s
academy. Her voice itself is sparely modulated and strangely empty, as if she were
speaking from inside a small box. It’s not bored or laconic or ironic or tongue-in-cheek.
‘The basilisk-breathed and pyorrheic.’ It’s reflective but not judgmental, somehow.
Her voice seems low-depth familiar to Mario the way certain childhood smells will
strike you as familiar and oddly sad. ‘All ye peronic or teratoidal. The phrenologically
malformed. The suppuratively lesioned. The endocrinologically malodorous of whatever
ilk. Run don’t walk on down. The acervulus-nosed. The radically -ectomied. The morbidly
diaphoretic with a hankie in every pocket. The chronically granulomatous. The ones
it says here the ones the cruel call Two-Baggers—one bag for your head, one bag for
the observer’s head in case your bag falls off. The hated and dateless and shunned,
who keep to the shadows. Those who undress only in front of their pets. The quote
aesthetically challenged. Leave your lazarettes and oubliettes, I’m reading this right
here, your closets and cellars and TP Tableaux, find Nurturing and Support and the
Inner Resources to face your own unblinking sight, is what this goes on to say, a
bit overheatedly maybe. Is it our place to say. It says here Hugs Not Ughs. It says
Come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what’s hidden inside.
To hold and cherish. The almost unbelievably thick-ankled. The kyphotic and lordotic.
The irremediably cellulitic. It says Progress Not Perfection. It says Never Perfection.
The fatally pulchritudinous: Welcome. The Actaeonizing, side by side with the Medusoid.
The papuled, the macular, the albinic. Medusas and
odalisques
both: Come find common ground. All meeting rooms windowless. That’s in ital: all
meeting rooms windowless.’ Plus the music she’s cued for this inflectionless reading
is weirdly compelling. You can never predict what it will be, but over time some kind
of pattern emerges, a trend or rhythm. Tonight’s background fits, somehow, as she
reads. There’s not any real forwardness to it. You don’t sense it’s straining to get
anywhere. The thing it makes you see as she reads is something heavy swinging slowly
at the end of a long rope. It’s minor-key enough to be eerie against the empty lilt
of the voice and the clinks of tines and china as Mario’s relations eat turkey salad
and steamed crosiers and drink lager and milk and vin blanc from Hull over behind
the plants bathed in purple light. Mario can see the back of the Moms’s head high
above the table, and then over to the left Hal’s bigger right arm, and then Hal’s
profile when he lowers it to eat. There’s a ball by his plate. The E.T.A. players
seem to need to eat six or seven times a day. Hal and Mario had walked over for 2100
supper at HmH after Hal had read something for Mr. Leith’s class and then disappeared
for about half an hour while Mario stood supported by his police lock and waited for
him. Mario rubs his nose with the heel of his hand. Madame Psychosis has an unironic
but generally gloomy outlook on the universe in general. One of the reasons Mario’s
obsessed with her show is that he’s somehow sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense
the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow. He has visions
of interfacing with her and telling her she’d feel a lot better if she listened to
her own show, he bets. Madame Psychosis is one of only two people Mario would love
to talk to but would be scared to try. The word
periodic
pops into his head.

‘Hey Hal?’ he calls across the plants.

Like for months in the spring semester of Y.D.P.A.H. she referred to her own program
as ‘Madame’s Downer-Lit Hour’ and read depressing book after depressing book—
Good Morning, Midnight
and
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
and
Giovanni’s Room
and
Under the Volcano,
plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent—in a monotone, really slowly,
night after night. Mario sits on the low little van der Rohe–knockoff coffee table
with bowed legs (the table) with his head cocked right up next the speaker and his
claws in his lap. His toes tend to point inward when he sits. The background music
is both predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it’s periodic. It
suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability
it denies. It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman.
Mario thinks of the word
haunting,
like in ‘a haunting echo of thus-and-such.’ Madame Psychosis’s cued music—which the
student engineer never chooses or even sees her bring in—is always terribly obscure
⁶⁶
but often just as queerly powerful and compelling as her voice and show itself, the
M.I.T. community feels. It tends to give you the feeling there’s an in-joke that you
and she alone are in on. Very few devoted WYYY listeners sleep well M-F. Mario has
horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that he sleeps like a babe.
Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L’Islet-region practice of taking just
tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat seriously until right before
bed. Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen. Some
of Orin and Mario and Hal’s earliest memories are of nodding off at the dining-room
table and being gently carried by a very tall man to bed. This was in a different
house. Madame Psychosis’s cued musics stir very early memories of Mario’s father.
Avril is more than willing to take some good-natured guff about her inability to eat
before like 2230h. Prandial music holds little charm or associations for Hal, who
like most of the kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats
like a wild dog.

‘Nor are excluded the utterly noseless, nor the hideously wall- and cross-eyed, nor
either the ergotic of St. Anthony, the leprous, the varicelliformally eruptive or
even the sarcoma’d of Kaposi.’

Hal and Mario probably eat/listen late over at the HmH twice a week. Avril likes to
see them outside the awkward formality of her position at E.T.A. C.T.’s the same at
home and office. Both Avril and Tavis’s bedrooms are on the second floor, as a matter
of fact right next to each other. The only other room up there is Avril’s personal
study, with a big color Xerox of M. Hamilton as Oz’s West Witch on the door and custom
fiber-wiring for a tri-modem TP console. A stairway runs from her study down the backside
of HmH, north, down to a tributary-tunnel leading to the main tunnel to Comm.-Ad.,
so Avril can commute over to E.T.A. below ground. The HmH tunnel connects with the
main at a point between the Pump Room and Comm.-Ad., meaning Avril never like hunches
idly past the Pump Room, which fact Hal obviously endorses. Late suppers at HmH for
Hal are limited by deLint to twice a week tops because they get him excused from dawn
drills, which also means late-night mischief possibilities. Sometimes they bring Canada’s
John (‘No Relation’) Wayne over with them, whom Mrs. I. likes and speaks to animatedly
even though he rarely says anything the whole time he’s there and also eats like a
wild dog, sometimes neglecting utensils altogether. Avril also likes it when Axford
comes; Axford has a hard time eating, and she likes to exhort him to eat. Very rarely
anymore does Hal bring Pemulis or Jim Struck, to whom Avril is so faultlessly, brittlely
polite that the dining room’s tension raises hair.

Whenever Avril parts ficus leaves to check, Mario’s still hunched pigeon-toed and
cocked in the same RCA-Victorish posture, with the little horizontal forehead-crease
that means he’s either listening or thinking hard.

‘The multiple amputee. The prosthetically malmatched. The snaggletoothed, wattled,
weak-chinned, and walrus-cheeked. The palate-clefted. The really large-pored. The
excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute. The pin-headed. The convulsively
Tourettic. The Parkinsonianly tremulous. The stunted and gnarled. The teratoid of
overall visage. The twisted and hunched and humped and halitotic. The in any way asymmetrical.
The rodential- and saurian- and equine-looking.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘The tri-nostriled. The invaginate of mouth and eye. Those with those dark loose bags
under their eyes that hang halfway down their faces. Those with Cushing’s Disease.
Those who look like they have Down Syndrome even though they don’t have Down Syndrome.
You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity
is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain. Crow’s feet. Birthmark. Rhinoplasty
that didn’t take. Mole. Overbite. A bad-hair
year.
’

The WYYY student engineer in his sulcus contemplates the moon, which looks sort of
like a full moon that somebody’s bashed in a little bit with a hammer. Madame Psychosis
asks rhetorically whether the circular’s left anyone out. The engineer finishes his
Fizzy and makes ready to descend again for the hour’s close, his skin turned toward
the terrible cerebral chill off the Charles, which is windy and blue. Sometimes Madame
Psychosis takes one random call to start ‘60 +/–.’ Tonight the one caller she ends
by taking has a cultured stutter and invites M.P. and the YYY community to consider
the fact that the moon, which of course as any sot knows revolves around the earth,
does not itself revolve. Is this true? He says it is. That it just stays there, hidden
and disclosed by our round shadow’s rhythms, but never revolving. That it never turns
its face away.

The little Heathkit can’t receive signals inside the Cerebrum’s subdural stairwells,
during descent, but the student engineer can anticipate she’ll make no direct reply.
Her sign-off is more dead air. She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in
high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them
whether you adored them. It had sure made a difference to the engineer, though, who
hadn’t been invited to even one graduation party, with his inhaler and skin.

The dessert Avril serves when Hal’s over is Mrs. Clarke’s infamous high-protein-gelatin
squares, available in bright red or bright green, sort of like Jell-O on steroids.
Mario’s wild for them. C.T. clears the table and loads the dishwasher, since he didn’t
cook, and Hal gets into his coat at like 0101h. Mario’s still listening to the WYYY
nightly sign-off, which takes a while because they not only list the station’s kilowattage
specs but go through proofs for the formulae by which the specs are derived. C.T.
always drops at least one plate out in the kitchen and then bellows. Avril always
brings some hell-Jell-O squares in to Mario and adopts a mock-dry tone and tells Hal
it’s been reasonably nice to see him outside les bâtiments sanctifiés. The whole thing
to Hal sometimes gets ritualistic and almost hallucinatory, the post-prandial farewell
routine. Hal stands under the big framed poster of
Metropolis
and whumps his gloves together casually and tells Mario there’s no reason for him
to leave too; Hal’s going to blast down the hill for a bit. Avril and Mario always
smile and Avril asks casually what his plans are.