Infinite Jest (44 page)

Pemulis appears to have left out of his calculations the fact that he’ll get that
Saturday
P.M.
off classes only if he makes the travelling list for the Tucson-WhataBurger the following
week, and that unlike Hal and Axford he’s not a lock: Pemulis’s U.S.T.A. rank, excepting
his halcyon thirteenth year in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, has never gotten
higher than 128, and the WhataBurger draws kids from all over O.N.A.N. and even Europe;
the draw will have to be weak indeed for him to get even one of the 64 Qualifying-Round
invitations. Axford’s on the fringes of the top 50, but he got to go last year at
seventeen, so he’s almost got to get to go. And Hal is looking at getting a Third
or maybe Fourth Seed in 18’s Singles; he’s definitely going, barring some sort of
cataclysmic ankle-relapse against either Port Wash. or Québec. Axford postulates that
Pemulis isn’t miscalculating so much as simply showing a slitty-eyed confidence, which
as far as his match-play outlook is concerned would be unusual and rather a fine thing—prorector
Aubrey deLint says (publicly) that seeing M. Pemulis in practice v. seeing M. Pemulis
in a real match that means anything is like getting to know some girl through e-mail
as like e-mail-keyboard-type penpals and really falling for her and then finally meeting
her in person and finding out she’s got like just one enormous tit in the exact middle
of her chest or something like that.
⁷⁷

Mario will get to come along if Avril can convince C.T. to bring him along to get
WhataBurger footage for this year’s E.T.A. promotional Xmas-giveaway-to-private-and-incorporated-patrons
cartridge.

Schacht and the glossy Syrian are laughing together about something up at the net-post,
where they’ve walked to gather gear and various spare rotator-cuff- and knee-appliances
after the Syrian kind of cornily jumped the net and pumped Schacht’s hand, breath
and sweat-steam rising up off and moving off through the fence’s mesh toward the manicured
western hills as Mario’s laugh rings out at some broad mock-supplicant’s gesture Schacht’s
just now made.

You can be at certain parties and not really be there. You can hear how certain parties
have their own implied ends embedded in the choreography of the party itself. One
of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where
a party ends—even a bad party—that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts
collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from
the plastic rind’s five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a
way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves,
usually shutting the door. When everybody’s voices recede down the hall. When the
hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white
V of utter silence in the party’s wake.

Joelle, at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it, listening, is supported
by a polished hardwood floor above both river and Bay’s edge, perched uncomfortably
in striated light in one of Molly Notkin’s chairs molded in the likeness of great
filmmakers from the celluloid canon, seated between empty Cukor and frightening Murnau
in Méliès’s fiberglass lap, his trousers’ crease uncomfortable and his cummerbund
M.I.T.-crested. The lurid chairs’ directors are larger than life: Joelle’s feet dangle
well off the floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn under a damp thick cotton
Brazilian skirt which is vivid, curled pale purples and fresh red against a Latin
black that seems to glow above pale knees and white rayon kneesocks and feet in clogs
that are hanging half off, legs swinging like a child’s, always feeling like a child
in Molly’s chairs, conspicuously perched in the eye of a bad party’s somewhat forced-feeling
storm of wit and good cheer, sitting by herself under what used to be her window,
the daughter of a low-pH chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky, a lot of fun
to be with, normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil.

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous
and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth
is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and
self-involvement.

There are decorative bars, slender and of black iron that pigeon droppings have made
piebald, over the west windows to this third-floor cooperative apartment on the East
Cambridge fringes of the Back Bay, where near-Professor Notkin is holding a party
to celebrate passing her Orals in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory, the doctoral program
where Joelle—before her retreat into broadcast sound—had met her.

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented
love of Notkin’s life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at
New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite
number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence
means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World
sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he’ll suffer the same order
of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the
idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur. Molly still takes the high-speed rail down to
visit him every couple weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance
he happens to harden, prompting in him black waves of self-disgust and an extreme
neediness for understanding and nonjudgmental love. She and poor Molly Notkin are
just the same, Joelle reflects, seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine—sisters,
sororal twins. With her fear of direct light, Notkin. And the disguises and whiskers
are simply veiled veils. How many sub-rosa twins are there, out there, really? What
if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it’s not arousal that’s so finitely
circumscribed? What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual
people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from
this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed
and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly
open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down
in a convex lens.

Joelle is thinking about what she has in her purse. She sits alone in her linen veil
and pretty skirt, obliquely looked at, listening to bits of conversation she reels
in out of the overall voices’ noise but seeing no one really else, the absolute end
of her life and beauty running in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm before her
eyes, projected against the white screen on her side, for once, from Uncle Bud and
twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY, all the way up to today’s wet walk here from the
Red Line’s Downtown stop, walking the whole way from East Charles St., employing a
self-conscious and kind of formal stride, but undeniably pretty, the overall walk
toward her last hour was, on this last day before the great O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence
revel. East Charles to the Back Bay today is a route full of rained-on sienna-glazed
streets and upscale businesses with awnings and wooden signs hung with cute Colonial
script, and people looking at her like you look at the blind, naked gazes, not knowing
she could see everything at all times. She likes the wet walk for this, everything
milky and halated through her veil’s damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St.
unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine,
holding the collar of her overcoat closed at her poncho’s neckline in a way that lets
her hold the veil secure against her face with a finger on her chin, thinking always
about what she has in her purse, stopping in at a discount tobacconist and buying
a quality cigar in a glass tube and then a block later placing the cigar inside carefully
in among the overflowing waste atop a corner receptacle of pine-green mesh, but keeps
the tube, puts the glass tube in her purse, can hear the rain’s
thup
on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and can see droplets broken and
regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound
of cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis’ shining windshields. In every
alley are green I.W.D. dumpsters and the smaller red I.W.D. dumpsters to take the
over-flow from the green dumpsters. And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against the
receding staccato of brittle women’s high heels on brick westward as Charles St. now
approaches Boston Common and becomes less quaint and upscale: sodden litter—flat the
way only wet litter can be flat—appears on the sidewalk and in the curb’s seam, and
now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, squatting
to lift and sift through litter; and the rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters being
sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and other
people’s blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in
each block’s three alleys, and the little cataract of rainwater off the edge of each
dumpster’s red annex’s downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes’ tops with
a rhythmless thappathappappathap; somebody going
Pssssst
from an alley’s lip, and ghastly-white or blotched faces declaiming to thin air from
recessed doorways curtained by rain, and for an other-directed second Joelle wishes
she’d hung on to the cigar, to give away, and moving westward into the territory of
the Endless Stem near the end of Charles she starts to dispense change she is asked
for from doorways and inverted up-tilted boxes; and she gets asked about the deal
with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers. A sooty wheelchaired man
with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins—a
puffed red cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing.
It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that
he says nothing.

She buys a .473-liter Pepsi Cola in a blunt plastic bottle at a Store 24 whose Jordanian
clerk just looks at her blankly when she asks if they carry Big Red Soda Water, and
settles for the Pepsi and comes out and pours the pop out down a storm-drain and watches
it pool there foaming brownly and stay put because the drain’s grate is clogged solid
with leaves and sodden litter. She walks on toward the Common with the empty bottle
and glass tube in her purse. There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the Store
24.

Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director’s lap can
call up everything from all times. What will be that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling,
to lock oneself in Molly Notkin’s bedroom or bath and get so high that she’s going
to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more
back and forth. Boston Common is like a lush hole Boston’s built itself around, a
two-k. square of shiny trees and dripping limbs and green benches over wet grass.
Pigeons all over, the same sooty cream as the willows’ rinds. Three young black men
perched like tough crows along a bench’s back approve her body and call her
bitch
with harmless affection and ask where’s the wedding at. No more deciding to stop
at 2300h. and then barely getting through the hour’s show and hurtling back home at
0130h. and smoking the Chore Boy’s resins and not stopping after all. No more throwing
the Material away and then half an hour later rooting through the trash, no more all-fours
scrutiny of the carpet in hopes of a piece of lint that looks enough like the Material
to try to smoke. No more singeing the selvage of veils. The Common’s south edge is
Boylston Street with its 24/7 commerce, upscale, cashmere scarves and cellular holsters,
doormen with gold braid, jewelers with three names, women with valence-curtain bangs,
stores disgorging shoppers with their wide white monogrammed twine-handle bags. The
rain’s wet veil blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur things
in imitation of a neonatal retina, everything recognizable and yet without outline.
A blur that’s more deforming than fuzzy. No more clutching her heart on a nightly
basis. What looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon’s
meshes. The entrance says
EXIT
. There isn’t an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage.
Jim’s own
Cage III: Free Show.
It is the cage that has entered
her,
somehow. The ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. The Fun has long since dropped
off the Too Much. She’s lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit,
or even about enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no
longer delimits the hole. There’s a certain smell to a rain-wet veil. Something about
that caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not.
She had hurtled on back home on the night’s final T and gone home and at least finally
not turned her face away from the situation, the predicament that she didn’t love
it anymore she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn’t stop or imagine stopping
or living without it. She had in a way done as they’d made Jim do near the end and
admitted powerlessness over this cage, this unfree show, weeping, literally clutching
her heart, smoking first the Chore Boy-scrap she’d used to trap the vapors and form
a smokable resin, then bits of the carpet and the acetate panties she’d filtered the
solution through hours earlier, weeping and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque
clown, in all four mirrors of her little room’s walls.