Infinite Jest (60 page)

Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the T. It happened on a Gray Line train from Watertown
to Inman Square, Cambridge. He’d been drinking codeine cough syrup in the men’s room
of the Armenian Foundation Library in horrid central Watertown MA for over a week,
darting out from cover only to beg a scrip from hideous Equus Reese and then dash
in at Brooks Pharmacy, wearing a simply vile ensemble of synthetic-fiber slacks and
suspenders and tweed Donegal cap he’d had to cadge from a longshoremen’s union hall.
Poor Tony couldn’t dare wear anything comely, not even the Antitoi brothers’ red leather
coat, not since that poor woman’s bag had turned out to have a heart inside. He had
simply never felt so beset and overcome on all sides as the black July day when it
fell to his lot to boost a heart. Who wouldn’t wonder Why Me? He didn’t dare dress
expressive or ever go back to the Square. And Emil still had him marked for de-mapping
as a consequence of that horrid thing with Wo and Bobby C last winter. Poor Tony hadn’t
dared show one feather east of Tremont St. or at the Brighton Projects or even Delphina’s
in backwater Enfield since last Xmas, even after Emil simply dematerialized from the
street-scene; and now since 29 July he was
non grata
at Harvard Square and environs; and even the sight of an Oriental now gave him palpitations—say
nothing of an Aigner accessory.

Thus Poor Tony had no way to cop for himself. He could trust no one enough to inject
their wares. S. T. Cheese and Lolasister were no more trustworthy than he himself;
he didn’t even want them to know where he slept. He began drinking cough syrup. He
managed to get Bridget Tenderhole and the strictly rough-trade Stokely Dark Star to
cop for him on the wink for a few weeks, until Stokely died in a Fenway hospice and
then Bridget Tenderhole was shipped by her pimp to Brockton under maddeningly vague
circumstances. Then Poor Tony had read the dark portents and swallowed the first of
his pride and hid himself even more deeply in a dumpster-complex behind the I.B.P.W.D.W.
¹⁰²
Local #4 Hall in Fort Point downtown and resolved to stay hidden there for as long
as he could swallow the pride to send Lolasister out to acquire heroin, accepting
w/o pride or complaint the shameless rip-offs the miserable bitch perpetrated upon
him, until a period in October when Lolasister went down with hepatitis-G and the
supply of heroin dried horribly up and the only people even copping enough to chip
were people in a position to dash here and there to great beastly lengths under an
open public-access sky and no friend, no matter how dear or indebted, could afford
to cop for another. Then, wholly friend- and connectionless, Poor Tony, in hiding,
began to Withdraw From Heroin. Not just get strung out or sick. Withdraw. The words
echoed in his neuralgiac and wigless head with the simply most awful sinister-footsteps-echoing-in-deserted-corridor
quality. Withdrawal. The Wingless Fowl. Turkeyfication. Kicking. The Old Cold Bird.
Poor Tony had never once had to Withdraw, not all the way down the deserted corridor
of Withdrawal, not since he first got strung at seventeen. At the very worst, someone
kind had always found him charming, if things got dire enough to have to rent out
his charms. Alas thus about the fact that his charms were now at low ebb. He weighed
fifty kilos and his skin was the color of summer squash. He had terrible shivering-attacks
and also perspired. He had a sty that had scraped one eyeball as pink as a bunny’s.
His nose ran like twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he didn’t think
looked promising at
all.
There was an uncomely dry-rot smell about him that even he could smell. In Watertown
he tried to pawn his fine auburn wig w/ removable chignon and was cursed at in Armenian
because the wig had infestations from his own hair below. Let’s not even mention the
Armenian pawnbroker’s critique of his red leather coat.

Poor Tony got more and more ill as he further Withdrew. His symptoms themselves developed
symptoms, troughs and nodes he charted with morbid attention in the dumpster, in his
suspenders and horrid tweed cap, clutching a shopping bag with his wig and coat and
comely habilements he could neither wear nor pawn. The empty Empire Displacement Co.
dumpster he was hiding in was new and apple-green and the inside was bare dimpled
iron, and it remained new and unutilized because persons declined to come near enough
to utilize it. It took some time for Poor Tony to realize why this was so; for a brief
interval it had seemed like a break, fortune’s one wan smile. An E.W.D. land-barge
crew set him straight in language that left quite a bit of tact to be wished for,
he felt. The dumpster’s green iron cover also leaked when it rained, and it contained
already a colony of ants along one wall, which insects Poor Tony had ever since a
neurasthenic childhood feared and detested in particular, ants; and in direct sunlight
the quarters became a hellish living environment from which even the ants seemed to
vanish.

With each step further into the black corridor of actual Withdrawal, Poor Tony Krause
stamped his foot and simply refused to believe things could feel any worse. Then he
stopped being able to anticipate when he needed to as it were visit the powder room.
A fastidious gender-dysphoric’s horror of incontinence cannot properly be described.
Fluids of varying consistency began to pour w/o advance notice from several openings.
Then of course they stayed there, the fluids, on the summer dumpster’s iron floor.
There they were, not going anywhere. He had no way to clean up and no way to cop.
His entire set of interpersonal associations consisted of persons who did not care
about him plus persons who wished him harm. His own late obstetrician father had rended
his own clothing in symbolic shiva in the Year of the Whopper in the kitchen of the
Krause home, 412 Mount Auburn Street, horrid central Watertown. It was the incontinence
plus the prospect of 11/4’s monthly Social Assistance checks that drove Poor Tony
out for a mad scampering relocation to an obscure Armenian Foundation Library men’s
room in Watertown Center, wherein he tried to arrange a stall as comfortingly as he
could with shiny magazine photos and cherished knickknacks and toilet paper laid down
around the seat, and flushed repeatedly, and tried to keep true Withdrawal at some
sort of bay with bottles of Codinex Plus. A tiny percentage of codeine gets metabolized
into good old C
₁₇
-morphine, affording an agonizing hint of what real relief from The Bird might feel
like. I.e. the cough syrup did little more than draw the process out, extend the corridor—it
slowed up time.

Poor Tony Krause sat on the insulated toilet in the domesticated stall all day and
night, alternately swilling and gushing. He held his high heels up at 1900h. when
the library staff checked the stalls and turned off all the lights and left Poor Tony
in a darkness within darkness so utter he had no idea where his own limbs were or
went. He left that stall maybe once every two days, scampering madly to Brooks in
cast-off shades and a kind of hood or shawl made pathetically of brown men’s-room
paper towels.

Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed. Time began
to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dim-lit stall was like time was
being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic
red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming
ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony’s flesh in compensation as it helped
bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal. By the second week
in the stall time itself seemed the corridor, lightless at either end. After more
time time then ceased to move or be moved or be move-throughable and assumed a shape
above and apart, a huge, musty-feathered, orange-eyed wingless fowl hunched incontinent
atop the stall, with a kind of watchful but deeply uncaring personality that didn’t
seem keen on Poor Tony Krause as a person at all, or to wish him well. Not one little
bit. It spoke to him from atop the stall, the same things, over and over. They were
unrepeatable. Nothing in even Poor Tony’s grim life-experience prepared him for the
experience of time with a shape and an odor, squatting; and the worsening physical
symptoms were a spree at Bonwit’s compared to time’s black assurances that the symptoms
were merely hints, signposts pointing up at a larger, far more dire set of Withdrawal
phenomena that hung just overhead by a string that unravelled steadily with the passage
of time. It would not keep still and would not end; it changed shape and smell. It
moved in and out of him like the very most feared prison-shower assailant. Poor Tony
had once had the hubris to fancy he’d had occasion really to shiver, ever, before.
But he had never truly really shivered until time’s cadences—jagged and cold and smelling
oddly of deodorant—entered his body via several openings—cold the way only damp cold
is cold—the phrase he’d had the gall to have imagined he understood was the phrase
chilled to the bone
—shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and
he could hear his joints’ glassy crunch with every slightest shift of hunched position,
time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, coldly; and the pain
of his breath against his teeth. Time came to him in the falcon-black of the library
night in an orange mohawk and Merry Widow w/ tacky Amalfo pumps and nothing else.
Time spread him and entered him roughly and had its way and left him again in the
form of endless gushing liquid shit that he could not flush enough to keep up with.
He spent the longest morbid time trying to fathom whence all the shit came from when
he was ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus. Then at some point he realized:
time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through
him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow. He now weighed more
like 45 kg. His legs were the size his comely arms had been, before Withdrawal. He
was haunted by the word
Zuckung,
a foreign and possibly Yiddish word he did not recall ever before hearing. The word
kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head without meaning anything. He’d
naïvely assumed that going mad meant you were not aware of going mad; he’d naïvely
pictured madmen as forever laughing. He kept seeing his sonless father again—removing
the training wheels, looking at his pager, wearing a green gown and mask, pouring
iced tea in a pebbled glass, tearing his sportshirt in filial woe, grabbing his shoulder,
sinking to his knees. Stiffening in a bronze casket. Being lowered under the snow
at Mount Auburn Cemetery, through dark glasses from a distance. ‘Chilled to the
Zuckung.
’ When, then, even the funds for the codeine syrup were exhausted, he still sat on
the toilet of the rear stall of the A.F.L. loo, surrounded by previously comforting
hung habilements and fashion-magazine photographs he’d fastened to the wall with tape
cadged on the way in from the Reference desk, sat for almost a whole nother night
and day, because he had no faith that he could stem the flow of diarrhea long enough
to make it anywhere—if anywhere to go presented itself—in his only pair of gender-appropriate
slacks. During hours of lit operation, the men’s room was full of old men who wore
identical brown loafers and spoke Slavic and whose rapid-fire flatulence smelled of
cabbage.

Toward the end of the day of the second syrupless afternoon (the day of the seizure)
Poor Tony Krause began to Withdraw from the cough syrup’s alcohol and codeine and
demethylated morphine, now, as well as from the original heroin, yielding a set of
sensations for which not even his recent experience had prepared him (the alcohol-Withdrawal
especially); and when the true D.T.-type big-budget visuals commenced, when the first
glossy and minutely hirsute army-ant crawled up his arm and refused ghost-like to
be brushed away or hammered dead, Poor Tony threw his hygienic pride into time’s porcelain
maw and pulled up his slacks—mortifyingly wrinkled from 10+ days puddled around his
ankles—made what slight cosmetic repairs he could, donned his tacky hat with Scotch-taped
scarf of paper towels, and lit out in last-ditch desperation for Cambridge’s Inman
Square, for the sinister and duplicitous Antitoi brothers, their Glass-Entertainment-’N-Notions-fronted
operations center he’d long ago vowed never again to darken the door of and but now
figured to be his place of very last resort, the Antitois, Canadians of the Québec
subgenus, sinister and duplicitous but when it came down to it rather hapless political
insurgents he’d twice availed of services through the offices of Lolasister, now the
only persons anywhere he could claim somehow owed him a kindness, since the affair
of the heart.

In his coat and skallycap-over-scarf on Watertown Center’s underground Gray Line platform,
when the first hot loose load fell out into the baggy slacks and down his leg and
out around his high heel—he still had only his red high heels with the crossing straps,
which the slacks were long enough to mostly hide—Poor Tony closed his eyes against
the ants formicating up and down his arms’ skinny length and screamed a soundless
interior scream of utter and soul-scalded woe. His beloved boa fit almost entirely
in one breast pocket, where it stayed in the name of discretion. On the crowded train
itself, then, he discovered that he’d gone in three weeks from being a colorful and
comely albeit freakishly comely person to being one of those loathsome urban specimens
that respectable persons on T-trains slide and drift quietly away from without even
seeming to notice they’re even there. His scarf of paper towels had come partly untaped.
He smelled of bilirubin and yellow sweat and wore week-old eyeliner that simply did
not fly if one needed a shave. There had been some negative urine-incidents as well,
in the slacks, to round matters out. He had simply never in his life felt so unattractive
or been so sick. He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of each brightly
lit public second’s edge, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed
little insectile mouths to catch the tears. He could feel his erratic pulse in his
sty. The Gray Line was of the Green- and Orange-Line trundling-behemoth-type train,
and he sat all alone at one end of the car, feeling each slow second take its cut.