Infinite Jest (48 page)

The improbable thing of the whole thing is that, when the soda and water and cocaine
are mixed right and heated right and stirred just right as the mix cools down, then
when the stuff’s too stiff to stir and is finally ready to come on out it comes out
slick as shit from a goat, just an inverted-ketchup-bottle thump and out the son of
a fucking whore slides, one molded cylinder hardened onto the black wire, its snout
round from the glass tube’s bottom. The average pre-chopped freebase rock looks like
a .38 round. What Joelle now slides with three fillips from the cigar tube is a monstrous
white wiener, a county-fair corn dog, its sides a bit rough, like mâché, a couple
clots left on the inside of the tube that are what you forage and smoke before the
Chore Boys and panties.

She is now a little under two deliberate minutes from Too Much Fun for anyone mortal
to hope to endure. Her unveiled face in the dirty lit mirror is shocking in the intensity
of its absorption. Out in the bedroom doorway she can hear Reeves Mainwaring telling
some helium-voiced girl that life is essentially one long search for an ashtray. Too
Much Fun. She uses the razor blade to cross-section chunks out of the freebase wiener.
You can’t whittle thin deli-shaved flakes off because they’ll crumble back to powder
right away and they anyway don’t smoke as well as you’d think. Blunt chunks are S.O.P.
Joelle chops out enough chunks for maybe twenty good-sized hits. They form a little
quarry on the soft cloth of her folded veil on the counter. Her Brazilian skirt is
no longer damp. Reeves Mainwaring’s blond imperial often had little bits of food residue
in it. ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ is on perpetual display at the Vittoria in Rome
and she never got to see it. She will never again say
And Lo
and invite people to watch darkness dance on the face of the deep. ‘The Face of the
Deep’ had been the title she’d suggested for Jim’s unseen last cartridge, which he’d
said would be too pretentious and then used that skull-fragment out of the
Hamlet
graveyard scene instead, which talk about pretentious she’d laughed. His frightened
look when she’d laughed is for the life of her the last facial-expression memory she
can remember of the man. Orin had referred to his father sometimes as Himself and
sometimes as The Mad Stork and once in a slip as The Sad Stork. She lights one wooden
match and blows it right out and touches the hot black head to the side of the plastic
pop bottle. It melts right through and makes a little hole. The helicopter was probably
a traffic helicopter. Somebody at their Academy had had some connection to some traffic
helicopter that had had an accident. She can’t for the life of her. No one out there
knows she is in here getting ready to have Too Much. She can hear Molly Notkin calling
through rooms about has anyone seen Keck. In her first theory seminar Reeves Mainwaring
had called one film ‘wretchedly ill-conceived’ and another ‘desperately acquiescent’
and Molly Notkin had pretended to have a coughing fit and had had a Tennessee accent
and that was how they met. The Reynolds Wrap is to make a screen that will rest in
the bottle’s open top. A regular dope screen is the size of a thimble, its sides spread
like an opening bud. Joelle uses the point of some curved nail scissors on the back
of the toilet to poke tiny holes in the rectangle of aluminum foil and shapes it into
a shallow funnel large enough to siphon gasoline, narrowing its tip to fit in the
bottle’s mouth. She now owns a pipe with a monster-sized bowl and screen, now, and
puts in enough chunklets to make five or six hits at once. The little rocks lie there
piled and yellow-white. She puts her lips experimentally to the melted hole in the
side of the bottle and draws, then, very deliberately, lights another match and extinguishes
it and makes the hole bigger. The idea that she’ll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral
Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud
on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is
sentimental and banal. The idea of what she’s about in here contains all other ideas
and makes them banal. Her glass of juice is on the back of the toilet, half-empty.
The back of the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation of unknown origin. These
are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and
ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her
heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but
now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract
it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts.
Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?
Molly Notkin’s middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches together and
prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a
long descent.

‘I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New Formalist from Pittsburgh
who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant
knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed
of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares
in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside
corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s
wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar
and very crowded scene and pubic spiral of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored
rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket
blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack,
blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter
tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in
yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest
Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant
chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in
blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the last
generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height
and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand
in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun
way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel
exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked
prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out
for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white-party-noise reaches,
for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the
speakers blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly
old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed
to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic, both clogs
simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the
unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s
corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through
the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading
up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world’s best filter: this
is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver—

‘Look here then who’s that in there? Is someone in there? Do open up. I’m on one foot
then the other out here. I say Notkin someone’s been in here locked in and, well,
sounding unwell, amid rather a queer scent.’

—and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip
revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy
juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can
hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels
aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light
from one sky, searching.

Enfield MA
is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because
it is a township composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities.
A kind of arm-shape extending north from Commonwealth Avenue and separating Brighton
into Upper and Lower, its elbow nudging East Newton’s ribs and its fist sunk into
Allston, Enfield’s broad municipal tax-base includes St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Franciscan
Children’s Hospital, The Universal Bleacher Co., the Provident Nursing Home, Shuco-Mist
Medical Pressure Systems Inc., the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex,
the Svelte Nail Co., half the metro Boston turbine and generating stations of Sunstrand
Power and Light (the part that gets taxed is in incorporated Allston), corporate headquarters
for ‘The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement Effectuators’ (meaning they make really
big fans), the Enfield Tennis Academy, St. John of God Hospital, Hanneman Orthopedic
Hospital, the Leisure Time Ice Company, a Discalced monastery, the combined St. John’s
Seminary and offices for the RCC’s Boston Archdiocese (partly in Upper Brighton; neither
half taxed), convent headquarters of The Sisters for Africa, the National Cranio-Facial
Pain Foundation, the Dr. George Roebling Runyon Memorial Institute for Podiatric Research,
regional shiny-truck, land-barge, and catapult facilities for the O.N.A.N.-subsidized
Empire Waste Displacement Co. (what the Québecois call
les trebuchets noirs,
spectacular block-long catapults that make a sound like a giant stamping foot as
they fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the subannular regions of the Great
Concavity at a parabolic altitude exceeding 5 km.; the devices’ slings are of alloy-belted
elastic and their huge cupped vehicle-receptacles like catcher’s mitts from hell,
a half dozen or so of the catapults in this like blimp-hangarish thing with a selectively
slide-backable roof, taking up a good six square blocks of Enfield’s brachiform incursion
into the Allston Spur, occasional school tours tolerated but not encouraged), and
so on. W/ the whole flexed Enfield limb sleeved in a perimeter layer of light residential
and mercantile properties. The Enfield Tennis Academy occupies probably now the nicest
site in Enfield, some ten years after balding and shaving flat the top of the big
abrupt hill that constitutes a kind of raised cyst on the township’s elbow, the better
part of 75 hectares of broad lawns and cloverleafing paths and topologically cutting-edge
erections, 32 asphalt tennis courts and sixteen Har-Tru composition tennis courts
and extensive underground maintenance and storage and athletic-training facilities
and briers and calliopsis and pines mixed artfully in on the inclines with deciduous
trees, the E.T.A. hilltop overlooking on one side, east, historic Commonwealth Avenue’s
acclivated migration out of the squalor of Lower Brighton—liquor stores and Laundromats
and bars and palisades of somber and guano-dappled tenement facades, the huge and
brooding Brighton Project high-rises with three-story-high orange I.D.-numerals on
the sides, plus liquor stores, and pale men in leather and whole gangs of pale children
in leather on the corners and Greek-owned pizza places with yellow walls and dirty
corner markets owned by Orientals who try like heck to keep their sidewalks clean
but can’t, even with hoses, plus the quarter-hourly trundle and ding of the Green
Line train’s labor up the Ave.’s long rise to Boston College—into the spiky elegance
of B.C. and the broad gentrification of Newton out to the west, where the haze-haloed
Boston sun drops behind the last node in the four-km. sine wave that is collectively
called the historic April Marathon’s ‘Heartbreak Hill,’ the sun always setting fifteen
minutes to the nanosecond after deLint turns on the courts’ high-tower lights. To
I think it must be the southwest, E.T.A. overlooks the steely gray tangle of Sunstrand’s
transformers and high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers strung with beads of ceramic
insulators, with not one Sunstrand smokestack anywhere in sight but a monstrous mega-ohm
insulator-cluster at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in from the northeast,
each sign talking with many
Ø
’s about how many annular-generated amps are waiting underground for anyone who digs
or in any way dicks around, with hair-raising nonverbal stick-figure symbols of somebody
with a shovel going up like a Kleenex in the fireplace. There are smokestacks in the
visual background slightly south of Sunstrand, though, from the E.W.D. hangars, each
stack with a monstrous ATHSCME 2100-Series A.D.E. (fan) bolted behind it and blowing
due north with an insistent high-pitched fury that is somehow soothing, aurally, at
E.T.A.’s distance and height. From both the north and northeast tree-lines E.T.A.
looks down its hill’s steepest, best-planted decline into the complexly decaying grounds
of Enfield Marine.