Infinite Jest (56 page)

A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch.
Animals here come and go. Alumni adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend
to remain. Gately’s intestines moan. Boston’s dawn coming back on the Green Line this
morning was chemically pink, trails of industrial exhaust blowing due north. The nail-parings
in the ashtray on the floor are, he realizes now, too big to be from fingernails.
These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. He swallows hard.
He’d tell Geoffrey Day how, even if they are just clichés, clichés are (a) soothing,
and (b) remind you of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns
out silence; and (4) silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you’ve got the Disease.
Gene M. says you can spell the Disease
DIS-EASE,
which sums the basic situation up nicely. Pat has a meeting at the Division of Substance
Abuse Services in Government Center at noon she needs to be reminded about. She can’t
read her own handwriting, which the stroke affected her handwriting. Gately envisions
going around having to find out who’s biting their fucking toenails in the living
room and putting the disgusting toenail-bits in the ashtray at like 0500. Plus House
regs prohibit bare feet anyplace downstairs. There’s a pale-brown water stain on the
ceiling over Day and Treat the almost exact shape of Florida. Randy Lenz has issues
with Geoffrey Day because Day is glib and a teacher at a Scholarly Journal’s helm.
This threatens the self-concept of a Randy Lenz that thinks of himself as a kind of
hiply sexy artist-intellectual. Small-time dealers never conceptualize themselves
as just small-time dealers, kind of like whores never do. For
Occupation
on his Intake form Lenz had put
free lance script writer.
And he makes a show of that he reads. For the first week here in July he’d held the
books upside-down in the northeast corner of whatever room. He had a gigantic Medical
Dictionary he’d haul down and smoke and read until Annie Parrot the Asst. Manager
had to tell him not to bring it down anymore because it was fucking with Morris Hanley’s
mind. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic
for when he just sat there and read. Geoffrey D. has issues with Randy L., also, you
can tell: there’s a certain way they don’t quite look at each other. And so now of
course they’re mashed together in the 3-Man together, since three guys in one night
missed curfew and came in without one normal-sized pupil between them and refused
Urines and got bounced on the spot, and so Day gets moved up in his first week from
the 5-Man room to the 3-Man. Seniority comes quick around here. Past Minty, down at
the dining-room table’s end, Burt F.S.’s still coughing, still hunched over, his face
a dusky purple, and Nell G. is behind him pounding him on the back so that it keeps
sending him forward over his ashtray, and he’s waving one stump vaguely over his shoulder
to try and signal her to quit. Lenz and Day: a beef may be brewing: Day’ll try to
goad Lenz into a beef that’ll be public enough so he doesn’t get hurt but does get
bounced, and then he can leave treatment and go back to Chianti and ’Ludes and getting
assaulted by sidewalks and make out like the relapse is Ennet House’s fault and never
have to confront himself or his Disease. To Gately, Day is like a wide-open interactive
textbook on the Disease. One of Gately’s jobs is to keep an eye on what’s possibly
brewing among residents and let Pat or the Manager know and try to smooth things down
in advance if possible. The ceiling’s color could be called dun, if forced. Someone
has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where
everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen; here everybody has to make their little
comment.

Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety,
hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here. Gately changes
the angle of one sneaker, puts the other arm behind his head. His head has real weight
and pressure. Randy Lenz’s obsessive compulsions include the need to be north, a fear
of disks, a tendency to constantly take his own pulse, a fear of all forms of timepieces,
and a need to always know the time with great precision.

‘Day man you got the time maybe real quick?’ Lenz. For the third time in half an hour.
Patience, tolerance, compassion, self-discipline, restraint. Gately remembers his
first six months here straight: he’d felt the sharp edge of every second that went
by. And the freakshow dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s you’d ever heard about.
A reason for a night-shift Staffer in the front office is so somebody’s there for
the residents to talk at when—not if, when—when the freakshow dreams ratchet them
out of bed at like 0300. Nightmares about relapsing and getting high, not getting
high but having everybody think you’re high, getting high with your alcoholic mom
and then killing her with a baseball bat. Whipping the old Unit out for a spot-Urine
and starting up and flames coming shooting out. Getting high and bursting into flames.
Having a waterspout shaped like an enormous Talwin suck you up inside. A vehicle explodes
in an enhanced bloom of sooty flame on the D.E.C. viewer, its hood up like an old
pop-tab.

Day’s making a broad gesture out of checking his watch. ‘Right around 0830, fella.’

Randy L.’s fine nostrils flare and whiten. He stares straight ahead, eyes narrowed,
fingers on his wrist. Day purses his lips, leg joggling. Gately hangs his head over
the arm of the sofa and regards Lenz upside-down.

‘That look on your map there mean something there, Randy? Are you like communicating
something with that look?’

‘Does anybody maybe know the time a little more
exactly
is what I’m wondering, Don, since Day doesn’t.’

Gately checks his own cheap digital, head still hung over the sofa’s arm. ‘I got 0832:14,
15, 16, Randy.’

‘ ’ks a lot, D.G. man.’

So and now Day has that same flared narrow look for Lenz. ‘We’ve been over this, friend.
Amigo. Sport. You do this all the time with me. Again I’ll say it—I don’t have a digital
watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of far better days.
It’s not a digital watch. It’s not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands.
See, Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest. It’s not a sodding
stopwatch for life. Lenz, get a watch. Am I right? Why don’t you just get a watch,
Lenz. Three people I happen to know of for a fact have offered to get you a watch
and you can pay them back whenever you feel comfortable about poking your nose out
and investigating the work-a-world. Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital,
incredibly
wide
watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer,
and it treats time like pi.’

‘Easy does it,’ Charlotte Treat half-sings, not looking up from her needle and frame.

Day looks around at her. ‘I don’t believe I was speaking to you in any way shape or
form.’

Lenz stares at him. ‘If you’re trying to fuck with me, brother.’ He shakes his fine
shiny head. ‘Big mistake.’

‘Oo I’m all atremble. I can barely hold my arm steady to read my watch.’

‘Big big big
real
big mistake.’

‘Peace on earth good will toward men,’ says Gately, back on his back, smiling at the
dun cracked ceiling. He’s the one who’d farted.

They returned from Long Island bearing their shields rather than upon them, as they
say. John Wayne and Hal Incandenza lost only five total games between them in singles.
The A doubles had resembled a spatterpainting. And the B teams, especially the distaffs,
had surpassed themselves. The whole P.W.T.A. staff and squad had had to sing a really
silly song. Coyle and Troeltsch didn’t win, and Teddy Schacht had, incredibly, lost
to his squat spin-doctory opponent in three sets, despite the kid’s debilitating nerves
at crucial junctures. The fact that Schacht wasn’t all that upset got remarked on
by staff. Schacht and a conspicuously energized Jim Troeltsch rallied for the big
win in 18-A #2 dubs, though. Troeltsch’s disconnected microphone mysteriously disappeared
from his gear bag during post-doubles showers, to the rejoicing of all. Pemulis’s
storky intense two-hands-off-both-sides opponent had gotten weirdly lethargic and
then disoriented in the second set after Pemulis had lost the first in a tie-break.
After the kid had delayed play for several minutes claiming the tennis balls were
too pretty to hit, P.W.T.A. trainers had conducted him gently from the court, and
the Peemster got ‘V.D.,’ which is jr.-circuit argot for a Victory by Default. The
fact that Pemulis hadn’t walked around with his chest out recounting the win for any
E.T.A. females got remarked on only by Hal and T. Axford. Schacht was in too much
knee-pain to remark on much of anything, and Schtitt had E.T.A.’s Barry Loach inject
the big purple knee with something that made Schacht’s eyes roll up in his head.

Then during the post-meet mixer and dance Pemulis’s defaulted opponent ate from the
hors d’oeuvres table without using utensils or at one point even hands, did a disco
number when there wasn’t any music going, and was finally heard telling the Port Washington
Headmaster’s wife that he’d always wanted to do her from behind. Pemulis spent a lot
of time whistling and staring innocently up at the pre-fab ceiling.

The bus for all the 18’s squads was warm and there were little nozzles of light over
your seat that you could either have on to do homework or shut off and sleep. Troeltsch,
left eye ominously nystagmic, pretended to recap the day’s match highlights for a
subscription audience, speaking earnestly into his fist. The C team’s Stockhausen
was pretending to sing opera. Hal and Tall Paul Shaw were each reading an SAT prep-guide.
A good quarter of the bus was yellow-highlighting copies of E. A. Abbott’s inescapable-at-E.T.A.
book
Flatland
for either Flottman or Chawaf or Thorp. An elongated darkness with assorted shapes
melted by, plus long gauntlets, near exits, of tall Interstatish lamps laying down
cones of dirty-looking sodium light. The ghastly sodium lamplight made Mario Incandenza
happy to be in his little cone of white inside light. Mario sat next to K. D. Coyle—who
was kind of mentally slow, especially after a hard loss—and they played rock-paper-scissors
for two hundred clicks or more, not saying anything, engrossed in trying to locate
patterns in each other’s rhythms of choices of shapes, which they both decided there
weren’t any. Two or three upperclassmen in Levy-Richardson-O’Byrne-Chawaf’s Disciplinary
Lit. were slumped over Goncharov’s
Oblomov,
looking very unhappy indeed. Charles Tavis sat way in the back with John Wayne and
beamed and spoke nonstop in hushed tones to Wayne as the Canadian stared out the window.
DeLint was with the 16’s one bus back; he’d been ragging Stice’s and Kornspan’s asses
since their doubles, which it looked like they practically gave away. The bus was
Schtittless: Schtitt always found a private mysterious way back, then appeared at
dawn drills with deLint and elaborate work-ups of everything that had gone wrong the
day before. He was particularly shrill and insistent and negative after they’d won
something. Schacht sat listing to port and didn’t respond when hands were waved in
front of his face, and Axford and Struck started kibitzing Barry Loach about their
knees were feeling punk as well. The luggage rack over everyone’s heads bristled with
grips and coverless strings, and liniment and tincture of benzoin had been handed
out and liberally applied, so the warm air became complexly spiced. Everybody was
tired in a good way.

The homeward ride’s camaraderie was marred only by the fact that someone near the
back of the bus started the passing around of a Gothic-fonted leaflet offering the
kingdom of prehistoric England to the man who could pull Keith Freer out of Bernadette
Longley. Freer had been discovered by prorector Mary Esther Thode more or less Xing
poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket in the very back seat on the bus trip
to the East Coast Clays in Providence in September, and it had been a nasty scene,
because there were some basic Academy-license rules that it was just unacceptable
to flout under the nose of staff. Keith Freer was deeply asleep when the leaflet was
getting passed around, but Bernadette Longley wasn’t, and when the leaflet hit the
front half where all the females now had to sit since September she’d buried her face
in her hands and flushed even on the back of her pretty neck, and her doubles partner
⁹²
came all the way back to where Jim Struck and Michael Pemulis were sitting and told
them in no uncertain terms that somebody on this bus was so immature it was really
sad.

Charles Tavis was irrepressible. He did a Pierre Trudeau impersonation no one except
the driver was old enough to laugh at. And the whole mammoth travelling squad, three
buses’ worth, got to stop and have the Mega-breakfast at Denny’s, over next to Empire
Waste, at like 0030, when they got in.