Infinite Jest (46 page)

Joelle makes a get-out-of-here gesture. ‘The really really good kind?’

‘The kind that looks
muddy
it’s so fresh.’

‘Where’d you get it this late this far east?’

‘The kind you just about have to
strain
it’s so fresh.’

The living room is full and hot, campy mambo playing, walls still the same off-white
but all the trim now a confectioner’s rich brown. Or plus there’s wine, Joelle sees,
a whole assortment on the old sideboard it took three men with cigars in gray jumpsuits
to get up the stairs when they got it, an assortment of bottles of different shapes
and dim colors and different levels of what’s inside. Molly Notkin has one dirty-nailed
hand on Joelle’s arm and one on the head of a chair of Maya Deren brooding avant-gardedly
in vivid spun-glass polymers, and is telling Joelle about her Orals in a party’s near-shout
that will leave her hoarse well before this big one’s sad end.

A good muddy juice fills Joelle’s mouth with spit that’s as good as the juice, and
her linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her
breath, and, perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don’t know they
know her voice, she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine
some of her purse’s untouched Material, raise the veil and set free the encaged rapacious
thing inside to breathe the only uncloth’d gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and
sad; she looks like death, her mascara’s all over the place; no one can tell. The
plastic Pepsi bottle and glass cigar tube and lighter and packet of glycine bags are
a shape in the corner of the rain-darkened cloth purse that rests on the floor just
below her dangling clogs. Molly Notkin is standing with Rutherford Keck and Crosby
Baum and a radically bad-postured man before the school-supplied Infernatron viewer.
Baum’s wide back and pompadour obscure whatever’s on the screen. Academics’ voices
sound nasal, with a cultivated stutter at sentences’ start. A good many of James O.
Incandenza’s films were silent. He was a self-acknowledged visual filmmaker. His damaged
grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried
the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light. That
insufferable child actor Smothergill used to contort his face at the boy and he’d
just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums that Miriam Prickett would resolve
in the bathroom somehow. An old Latin-revival CD issues at acceptable volume from
the speakers screwed into planters and hung with thin chains from each corner of the
cream ceiling. Another large loose group is dancing in the cleared space between the
cluster of directorial chairs and the bedroom door, most favoring Y.D.A.U.’s Minimal
Mambo, this autumn’s East Coast anticraze, the dancers appearing to be just this side
of standing still, the subtlest possible hints of fingers snapping under right-angled
elbows. Orin Incandenza, she has not forgotten, had a poor mottled swollen elbow above
a forearm the size of a leg of lamb. He had switched neatly from arm to leg. Joelle
was Orin Incandenza’s only lover for twenty-six months and his father’s optical beloved
for twenty-one. A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling
limp of someone with a prosthesis—hired by M.I.T. after her time. The better dancers’
movements are so tiny they are evocative and compel watching, their near-static mass
curdled and bent somehow subtly around one beautiful young woman, quite beautiful,
her back undulating minimally in a thin tight blue-and-white-striped sailorish top
as she alludes to a cha-cha with maracas empty of anything to rattle, watching herself
almost dance in the full-length mirror of quality plate that after Orin left Joelle
had forbidden Jim to hang and had slid beneath her bed face-down; now it’s the west
wall’s framed mirror, hung between two empty ornate gilt frames Notkin thinks she’s
been retroironic by having the frames themselves framed, in rather less ornate frames,
in wry allusion to the early-Experialist fashion of making art out of the accessories
of artistic presentation, the framed frames hanging not quite evenly on either side
of the mirror he’d cut for the scenes of that last ghastly thing he’d made her stand
before, reciting in the openly empty tones she’d gone on to use on-air; the girl stands
transfixed in alternating horizontal blue and white, then vertically sliced by bar-cut
sunlight, diced, drunk, so wrecked on good vintage her lips hang slack and the reflected
cheeks’ muscles have lost all integrity and the cheeks jiggle like the outstanding
paps in her little sailor’s top. Apocalyptic rouge and a nose-ring that’s either electrified
or is catching bits of light from the window. She is watching herself with unselfconscious
fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom. This absence
of shame at the self-obsession. Is she Canadian? Mirror-cult? Not possibly a U.H.I.D.:
the bearing’s all wrong. But now, whispered to by a near-motionless man in an equestrian
helmet, she turns abruptly falling away from her own reflection to explain, not to
the man so much as no one in particular, the whole dancing mass: I was just looking
at my
tits
she says looking down at herself aren’t they
beautiful,
and it’s moving, there’s something so heartbreakingly sincere in what she says Joelle
wants to go to her, tell her it is and will be completely all right, she’s pronounced
beautiful
like the earlier
interested
in four syllables, splitting the diphthong, betraying her class and origin with the
heartbreaking openness Joelle’s always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly
brave, the girl raising her striped arms in triumph or artless thanks for being constructed
this way, these ‘tits,’ built by whom and for whom never occurring, artlessly ecstatic,
she is not drunk Joelle now sees but has taken Ecstasy, Joelle can see, from the febrile
flush and eyes jacked so wide you can make out brain-meat behind the balls’ poles,
a.k.a. X or MDMA, a beta-something, an early synthetic, emotional acid, the Love Drug
so-called, big among the artistic young under say Bush and successors, since fallen
into relative disuse because its pulverizing hangover has been linked to the impulsive
use of automatic weapons in public venues, a hangover that makes a freebase hangover
look like a day at the emotional beach, the difference between suicide and homicide
consisting perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage’s door: Would she
kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining
and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start
of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent?
There was nothing coherent in the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she’d repeated
over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided
pram. He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety
days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must a person want out, to put his head
in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put her cat
in a microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the
cat ended up all over the woman’s kitchen’s walls. How would you rig the thing so
it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light
button you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt? She cannot remember
thinking of it once in four years. Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless
over that lens? The woman in love with her own breasts is being congratulated with
the subtlest possible allusions to clapping hands from barely animate dancers with
their glass tulips held between their teeth, and Vogelsong of Emerson College tries
suddenly to stand on his head and is immediately ill in a spreading plum-colored ectoplasm
the dancers do not even try to evade the spread of, and Joelle applauds the Xtatic
woman as well, because they are, Joelle admits freely, the paps, they are
attractive,
which in the Union is designated Compelling Within Compatible Relative Limits; Joelle
has no problem seeing beauty approved, within compatible relative limits; she feels
not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow every last drop
of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes
of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless
cages; and she lets herself slide forward from Méliès’ lap, a tiny fall, leading with
her lumpy purse and glass of matte apple juice toward the door beyond the lines of
a becalmed conga and doorway’d huddles of a warm and well-felt theoretical party.
And then, again, delays, dithers, and the easement to the bathroom is blocked. She
is the only veiled woman here, and an academic generation ahead of most of these candidates,
and rather feared, even though not many know she is an Aural Personality, feared for
quitting instead of failing, and because of the connection of the memory of Jim, and
she is given a certain wide social berth, allowed to delay and orbit and stand unengaged
at the fringes of shifting groups, obliquely glanced at, veil going concave at each
inbreath, waiting with hip-shot nonchalance for the bathroom off the bedroom to clear,
Iaccarino the Chaplin-archivist and a jaundice-yellow older man have gone into Molly’s
bedroom and left the door ajar, waiting nonchalantly, ignoring the foreign academic
who wishes to know where she works with that veil, turning from him, rudely, brain
heaving in its bone-box, memorizing every detail like collecting empty shells, sipping
cloudy juice under neatly lifted corners of veil, now looking at instead of through
the translucent cloth, the Improbably Deformed’s equivalent of closing the eyes in
concentration on sound, letting the Very Last Party wash over her, passed gracefully
by different mingling guests and once or twice almost touched, seeing only inrushing
and then billowing white, listening to different mingling voices the way the unveiled
young taste wine.

‘This is a technologically constituted space.’

‘—thing opens tight on Remington in a hideous grandfatherly flannel suit, b & w, straight
full-frontal shot in this grainy b & w stuff Bouvier taught him to manipulate the
f
-stop to mimic that horrid old Super 8, straight full-frontal, staring past the camera,
no attempt to disguise he’s reading off a prompter, monotone and all, saying “Few
foreigners realize that the German term
Berliner
is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy’s seminal
‘Ich bein ein Berliner’
was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political,” at
which point he aims his thumb and finger at his own temple at which point his TA doubles
the focal-length so there’s this giant—’

‘I would die to defend your constitutional right to error, friend, but in this one
case you—’

‘They used to be less beautiful but then Rutherford said to quit sleeping face-down.’

‘No no I’m saying that
this,
this whole thing, what you and I are discoursing
within,
is a technologically constituted space.’

‘À du nous avons foi au poison.’

‘It’s good cheese, but I’ve had better cheese.’

‘Mainwaring, this is Kirby, Kirby here’s in pain, he’s been telling me about it and
now he’d like to tell you about it.’

‘—complete mystery why Eve Plumb didn’t show, it’s known she’d reupped for the part,
the whole rest of them were there, even Henderson and that Davis woman as Alice who
had to be wheeled out under nurses’ care, my God and Peter, looking as if he’d eaten
nothing but pastry for the past forty years, Greg with that absurd hairpiece and snakeskin
boots, yes but all the kids recognizable, underneath, somehow, this pre-digital insistence
on continuity through time that was the project’s whole magic and
raison,
you know this, you’re current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And
then but now here’s this entirely incongruous
middle-aged black woman
playing Jan!’

‘
De gustibus non est disputandum
.’

‘Balls.’

‘An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible whiteness
that had been in ineluct—’

‘The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered.
Terribly altered.’

‘Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar.’

‘You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they’re
somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.’

‘—so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but
the right eye-socket. Then the old socket’s fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb
doubles me over. It won’t stay put.’

‘Fucks with the emulsion’s gradient so that all the tesseract’s angles
appear
to be right-angled, except in—’

‘So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn’t have room
to stalk or draw a bead, Keck had said they needed a good ten m., so I cocked the
hat just so, just ever so slightly, like so, just cocked it over to the side like
so and sat down practically on the man’s knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps
pedigreed carp, and of course you can imagine what—’

‘—more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is
a priori,
whether space as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept.’

‘It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like—’

‘Because they’re emotional more labile at that stage.’

‘ “So get dentures?” she said. “So get
dentures?
” ’

‘Who shot
The Incision?
Who did the cinematography on
The Incision?
’

‘—way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something
more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector.
Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue.
A recorded delusion. Duquette says he’s lost contact with three colleagues. He said
a good bit of Berkeley isn’t answering their phone.’