Infinite Jest (47 page)

‘I don’t think anyone here would dispute that they’re absolutely fetching tits, Melinda.’

‘We had blinis with caviar. There were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom cream
sauce. He said it was all on him. He said he was treating. There was roast artichoke
topped with a sort of sly aioli. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum
cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glacé and brandy in snifters you needed two hands
to swirl.’

‘That coke-addled fag in his Morris Mini.’

The prosthetic film-scholar: ‘Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity.
It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses
to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent
all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back.
Me, I can remember when your Charles was café with cream. Look now at it. It is the
blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin-egg’s blue.’

‘I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain.’

‘I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant.’

‘And then it turned out he’d put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing
you’ve ever seen. Everyone, all over, spouting like whales. I’d heard the term
projectile vomiting
but I never thought that I—you could
aim,
the pressure was such that you could
aim.
And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth’s like overhang, and
he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole horrible staggering
spouting groaning—’

‘This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor’s been going around like a lazy toilet
since Dishmaster, for Christ’s sake. Simply make inquiries, mention some obscure foundation
grant, obtain the thing through whatever shade of market the thing’s alleged to be
out in. Have a look. See that it’s doubtless just high-concept erotica or an hour
of rotating whorls. Or something like late Makavajev, something that’s only entertaining
after it’s over, on reflection.’

The striated parallelogram of
P.M.
sunlight is elongating in transit across the coop’s eastern wall, over bottle-laden
sideboard and glass cabinet of antique editing equipment and louvered vent and shelves
of art-cartridges in their dull black and dun cases. The mole-studded man in the equestrian
helmet is either winking at her or has a tic. There’s the pre-suicide’s classic longing:
Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything. My name is Joelle van Dyne, Dutch-Irish,
and I was reared on family land east of Shiny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a
low-pH chemist and his second wife. I now have no accent except under stress. I am
1.7 meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in
and breathe out. Joelle has never before today been conscious of the sustained volition
required to just breathe in and breathe out, her veil recessing into nose and rounded
mouth and then bowing out slightly like curtains over an opened pane.

‘Convexity.’

‘Con
cav
ity
!
’

‘Con
vexity!
’

‘
Concavity
damn your eyes!’

The bathroom has a hook and a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink and is off the
bedroom. Molly Notkin’s bedroom looks like the bedroom of someone who stays in bed
for serious lengths of time. A pair of pantyhose has been tossed onto a lamp. There
are not crumbs but whole portions of crackers protruding from the gray surf of wopsed-up
bedding. A photo of the phalloneurotic New Yorker with the same fold-out triangular
support as the blank cartridge’s anti-ad. A Ziploc of pot and EZ-Widers and seeds
in the ashtray. Books with German and Cyrillic titles lie open in spine-cracking attitudes
on the colorless rug. Joelle’s never liked the fact that Notkin’s father’s photograph
is nailed at iconic height to the wall above the headboard, a systems planner out
of Knoxville TN, his smile the smile of a man who wears white loafers and a squirting
carnation. And why are bathrooms always way brighter lit than whatever room they’re
off? On the private side of the bathroom door she’s had to take two damp towels off
the top of to close all the way, the same rotten old hook for a lock never quite ever
seeming to want to fit its receptacle in the jamb, the party’s music now some horrible
collection of mollified rock classics with all soft rock’s grim dental associations,
the business side of the door is hung with a Selective Automation of Knoxville calendar
from before Subsidized Time and cut-out photos of Kinski as Paganini and Léaud as
Doinel and a borderless still of the crowd scene in what looks like Peterson’s
The Lead Shoes
and rather curiously the offprinted page of J. van Dyne, M.A.’s one and only published
film-theory monograph.
⁸¹
Joelle can smell, through her veil and own stale exhalations, the little room’s complicated
spice of sandalwood rubble in a little violet-ribboned pomander and deodorant soap
and the sharp decayed-lemon odor of stress-diarrhea. Low-budget celluloid horror films
created ambiguity and possible elision by putting
?
after
THE END,
is what pops into her head:
THE END?
amid the odors of mildew and dicky academic digestion? Joelle’s mother’s family had
no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She represses all bathetic this-will-be-the-last-thing-I-smell
thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here. It was beyond all
else so much
fun,
at the start. Orin had neither disapproved nor partaken; his urine was an open book
because of football. Jim hadn’t disapproved so much as been vacant with disinterest.
His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to the fullest, and then gone
in for detoxification, again and again. This had been simply too much fun, at the
start. So much better even than nasaling the Material up through rolled currency and
waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and cleaning the newly
spacious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth twitches and writhes
unbidden beneath the veil. The ’base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience
to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm
of the heart that makes her feel, truly,
attractive,
sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female,
full, as if watched for an instant by God. She always sees, after inhaling, right
at the apex, at the graph’s spike’s tip, Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa,’ behind
glass, at the Vittoria, for some reason, the saint recumbent, half-supine, her flowing
stone robe lifted by the angel in whose other hand a bare arrow is raised for that
best descent, the saint’s legs frozen in opening, the angel’s expression not charity
but the perfect vice of barb-headed love. The stuff had been not just her encaging
god but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of rock. The toilet seat is up. She can
hear a helicopter’s chop somewhere overhead east, a traffic helicopter over Storrow,
and Molly Notkin’s shriek as an enormous glass crash sounds off in the living room,
imagines her beard hanging aslant and her mouth ellipsed with champagne’s foam as
she waves off the breakage that signals good Party, can hear through the door the
ecstatic Melinda’s apologies and Molly’s laugh, which sounds like a shriek:

‘Oh everything falls off the wall sooner or later.’

Joelle has lifted her veil back to cover her skull like a bride. Since she threw away
her pipes and bowls and screens again this
A.M.
she is going to have to be resourceful. On the counter of an old sink the same not-quite
white as the floor and ceiling (the wallpaper is a maddening uncountable pattern of
roses twined in garlands on sticks) on the counter are an old splay-bristled toothbrush,
tube of Gleem rolled neatly up from the bottom, unsavory old NoCoat scraper, rubber
cement, NeGram, depilatory ointment, tube of Monostat not squeezed from the bottom,
phony-beard whiskerbits and curled green threads of used mint floss and Parapectolin
and a wholly unsqueezed tube of diaphragm-foam and no makeup but serious styling gel
in a big jar with no lid and hairs around the rim and an empty tampon box half-filled
with nickels and pennies and rubber bands, and Joelle sweeps an arm across the counter
and squunches everything over to the side under the small rod with a washcloth wrung
viciously out and dried in the tight spiral of a twisted cord, and if some items do
totter and fall to the floor it is all right because everything eventually has to
fall. On the cleared counter goes Joelle’s misshapen purse. The absence of veil dulls
the bathroom’s smells, somehow.

She’s been resourceful before, but this is the most deliberate Joelle has been able
to be about it in something like a year. From the purse she removes the plastic Pepsi
container, a box of wooden matches kept dry in a resealable baggie, two little thick
glycine bags each holding four grams of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, a single-edge
razor blade (increasingly tough to find), a little black Kodachrome canister whose
gray lid she pops and discards to reveal baking soda sifted fine as talc, the empty
glass cigar tube, a folded square of Reynolds Wrap foil the size of a playing card,
and an amputated length of the bottom of a quality wire coat hanger. The overhead
light casts shadows of her hands over what she needs, so she turns on the light over
the medicine cabinet’s mirror as well. The light stutters and hums and bathes the
counter with cold lithium-free fluorescence. She undoes the four pins and removes
the veil from her head and places it on the counter with the rest of the Material.
Lady Delphina’s little glycine baglets have clever seals that are green when sealed
and blue and yellow when not. She taps half a glycine’s worth into the cigar tube
and adds half again as much baking soda, spilling some of the soda in a parenthesis
of bright white on the counter. This is the most deliberate she’s been able to be
in at least a year. She turns the sink’s C knob and lets the water get really cold,
then cranks the volume back to a trickle and fills the rest of the tube to the top
with water. She holds the tube up straight and gently taps on its side with a blunt
unpainted nail, watching the water slowly darken the powders beneath it. She produces
a double rose of flame in the mirror that illuminates the right side of her face as
she holds the tube over the matches’ flame and waits for the stuff to begin to bubble.
She uses two matches, twice. When the tube gets too hot to hold she takes and folds
her veil and uses it as a kind of oven-mitt over the fingers of her left hand, careful
(from habit and experience) not to let the bottom corners get close enough to the
flame to brown. After it’s bubbled for just a second Joelle shakes out the matches
with a flourish and tosses them in the toilet to hear that briefest of hisses. She
takes up the black wire prod from the hanger and begins to stir and mash the just-bubbled
stuff in the tube, feeling it thicken quickly and its resistance to the wire’s tiny
circles increase. It was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the
cooking procedure that she’d first known she liked this more than anyone can like
anything and still live. She is not stupid. The Charles rolling away far below the
windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from the fresh rainwater
that had made purple rings appear and widen, a deeper Magic Marker–type blue below
the dilute layer, gulls stamped to the cleared sky, motionless as kites. A bulky thump
sounds from behind the large flat-top Enfield hill on the river’s south shore, a large
but relatively shapeless projectile of drums wrapped in brown postal paper and belted
with twine hurtling in a broad upward arc that bothers the gulls into dips and wheels,
the brown package quickly a pinpoint in the yet-hazy sky to the north, where a yellow-brown
cloud hangs just above the line between sky and terrain, its top slowly dispersing
and opening out so that the cloud looks like a not very pretty sort of wastebasket,
waiting. Inside, Joelle hears only a bit of the bulky thump, which could be anything.
The only other thing besides what she’s about to do too much of here right now she’d
ever come close to feeling this way about: In Joelle’s childhood, Paducah, not too
bad a drive from Shiny Prize, still had a few public movie theaters, six and eight
separate auditoria clustered in single honeycombs at the edges of interstate malls.
The theaters always ended in
-plex,
she reflected. The Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she
never saw even one film there, as a girl, that she didn’t just about die with love
for. It didn’t matter what they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front
row, they sat in the front rows of the narrow little overinsulated -plexes up in neck-crick
territory and let the screen fill their whole visual field, her hand in his lap and
their big box of Crackerjacks in her hand and sodapops secure in little rings cut
out of the plastic of their seats’ arms; and he, always with a wooden match in the
corner of his mouth, pointing up into the rectangular world at this one or that one,
performers, giant flawless 2D beauties iridescent on the screen, telling Joelle over
and over again how she was prettier than this one or that one right there. Standing
in the placid line as he bought the -plex’s paper tickets that looked like grocery
receipts, knowing that she was going to love the celluloid entertainment no matter
what it was, wonderfully innocent, still thinking
quality
referred to the living teddy bears in Qantas commercials, standing hand-held, eyes
even with his wallet’s back-pocket bulge, she’d never so much again as in that line
felt so
taken care of,
destined for big-screen entertainment’s unalloyed good fun, never once again until
starting in with this lover, cooking and smoking it, five years back, before Incandenza’s
death, at the start. The punter never made her feel quite so
taken care of,
never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn’t know she was there
and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.