Infinite Jest (61 page)

When it descended, the seizure felt less like a separate distinct health-crisis than
simply the next exhibit in the corridor of horrors that was the Old Cold Bird. In
actual fact the seizure—a kind of synaptic firefight in Poor Tony’s desiccated temporal
lobes—was caused entirely by Withdrawal not From Heroin but from plain old grain alcohol,
which was Codinex Plus cough syrup’s primary ingredient and balm. He’d consumed upwards
of sixteen little Eighty-Proof bottles of Codinex per day for eight days, and so was
cruising for a real neurochemical bruising when he just up and stopped. The first
thing that didn’t augur very well was a shower of spark-sized phosphenes from the
ceiling of the swaying train, this plus the fiery violet aura around the heads of
the respectables who’d quietly retreated as far as possible from the various puddles
in which he sat. Their clean pink faces looked somehow stricken, each inside a hood
of violet flame. Poor Tony didn’t know that his silent whimpers had ceased to be silent,
was why everyone in the car had gotten so terribly interested in the floor-tiles between
their feet. He knew only that the sudden and incongruous smell of Old Spice Stick
Deodorant, Classic Original Scent—unbidden and unexplainable, his late obstetric Poppa’s
brand, not smelled for years—and the tiny panicked twitters with which Withdrawal’s
ants skittered glossily up into his mouth and nose and disappeared (each of course
taking its tiny pincered farewell bite as it went) augured some new and vivider exhibit
on the corridor’s horizon. He’d become, at puberty, violently allergic to the smell
of Old Spice. As he soiled himself and the plastic seat and floor once again the Classic
Scent of times past intensified. Then Poor Tony’s body began to swell. He watched
his limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach
from him and float sluggishly up snout-first into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling
rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero
sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

Then he had a seizure.
¹⁰³
The floor of the subway car became the ceiling of the subway car and he was on his
arched back in a waterfall of light, gagging on Old Spice and watching his tumid limbs
tear-ass around the car’s interior like undone balloons. The booming
Zuckung Zuckung Zuckung
was his high heels’ heels drumming on the soiled floor’s tile. He heard a rushing
train-roar that was no train on earth and felt a vascular roaring rushing that until
the pain hit seemed like the gathering of a kind of orgasm of the head. His head inflated
hugely and creaked as it stretched, inflating. Then the pain (seizures
hurt,
is what few civilians have occasion to know) was the sharp end of a hammer. There
was a squeak and rush of release inside his skull and something shot from him into
the air. He saw Bobby (‘C’) C’s blood misting upward in the hot wind of the Copley
blower. His father knelt beside him on the ceiling in a well-rended sleeveless tee-,
extolling the Red Sox of Rice and Lynn. Tony wore summer taffeta. His body flopped
around without OK from HQ. He didn’t feel one bit like a puppet. He thought of gaffed
fish. The gown had ‘a thousand flounces and a saucy bodice of lace crochet.’ Then
he saw his father, green-gowned and rubber-gloved, leaning to read the headlines off
the skin of a fish a newspaper had wrapped. That had never happened. The largest-print
headline said PUSH. Poor Tony flopped and gasped and pushed down inside and the utter
red of the blood that feeds sight bloomed behind his fluttering lids. Time wasn’t
passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed
tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod. Poor Tony convulsed and
drummed and gasped and fluttered, a fountain of light all around him. He felt a piece
of nourishing and possibly even intoxicating meat in the back of his throat but elected
not to swallow it but swallowed it anyway, and was immediately sorry he did; and when
his father’s bloody-rubbered fingers folded his teeth back to retrieve the tongue
he’d swallowed he refused absolutely to bite down ungratefully on the hand that was
taking his food, then without authorization he pushed and bit down and took the gloved
fingers clean off, so there was rubber-wrapped meat in his mouth again and his father’s
head exploded into needled antennae of color like an exploding star between his gown’s
raised green arms and a call for
Zuckung
while Tony’s heels drummed and struggled against the widening stirrups of light they
were hoisted into while a curtain of red was drawn wetly up over the floor he stared
down at, Tony, and he heard someone yelling for someone to Give In, Err, with a hand
on his lace belly as he bore down to PUSH and he saw the legs in the stirrups they
held would keep spreading until they cracked him open and all the way inside-out on
the ceiling and his last worry was that red-handed Poppa could see up his dress, what
was hidden.

Each of the eight to ten prorectors at the Enfield Tennis Academy teaches one academic
class per term, usually a once-a-week Saturday thing. This is mostly for certification
reasons,
¹⁰⁴
plus all but one of the prorectors are low-level touring professionals, with low-level
professional tennis players in general being not exactly the most candent stars in
the intellectual Orion. Because of all this, their classes tend to be not only electives
but Academy jokes, and the E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs regards prorector-taught
classes—e.g., in Fall Y.D.A.U., Corbett Thorp’s ‘Deviant Geometries,’ Aubrey deLint’s
‘Introduction to Athletic Spreadsheets,’ or the colon-mad Tex Watson’s ‘From Scarcity
to Plenty: From Putrid Stuff Out of the Ground to the Atom in the Mirror: A Lay Look
at Energy Resources from Anthracite to Annular Fusion,’ etc.—as not satisfying any
sort of quadrivial requirement. But the older E.T.A.s, with more latitude credit-
and elective-wise, still tend to clamor and jostle for spots in the prorectors’ seminars,
not just because the classes can be passed by pretty much anybody who shows up and
displays vital signs, but because most of the prorectors are (also like low-level
tennis pros as a genus) kind of bats, and their classes are usually fascinating the
way plane-crash footage is fascinating. E.g., although any closed room she’s in soon
develops a mysterious and overpowering vitamin-B stink he can just barely stand, E.T.A.
senior Ted Schacht has taken Mary Esther Thode’s perennially batsoid ‘The Personal
Is the Political Is the Psychopathological: the Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological
Double-Binds’ all three times it’s been offered. M. E. Thode is regarded by the upperclassmen
as probably insane, by like clinical standards, although her coaching proficiency
with the Girls’ 16’s is beyond dispute. A bit on the old side for an E.T.A. prorector,
Thode had been a pupil of Coach G. Schtitt back at Schtitt’s infamous old crop-and-epaulette
Harry Hopman program in Winter Park FL and then for a couple years at the new E.T.A.
as a top and Show-bound if kind of rabidly political and not too tightly wrapped female
junior. Later blacklisted off both the Virginia Slims and Family Circle professional
distaff circuits after trying to organize the circuits’ more politically rabid and
unwrapped players into a sort of radical post-feminist grange that would compete only
in pro tournaments organized, subsidized, refereed, overseen, and even attended and
cartridge-distributed exclusively to not only women or homosexual women, but only
by, for, and to registered members of the infamously unpopular early-Interdependence-era
Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx,
¹⁰⁵
given the shoe, she’d come, practically with a bandanna-tied stick over her shoulder,
back to Coach Schtitt, who for historico-national reasons has always had a soft place
inside for anyone who seems even marginally politically repressed. Last spring’s airless
and B-redolent section of Thode’s psycho-political offering, ‘The Toothless Predator:
Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault,’ had been one of the most disorientingly fascinating
experiences of Ted Schacht’s intellectual life so far, outside the dentist’s chair,
whereas this fall’s focus on pathologic double-bind-type quandaries was turning out
to be not quite as compelling but weirdly—almost intuitively—easy:

E.g., from today’s:

The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopathological: The Politics of Contemporary
Psychopathological Double-Binds

Midterm Examination

Ms. THODE

November 7, Yr. of D.A.U.

ITEM
1

(1a) You are an individual who, is pathologically kleptomaniacal. As a kleptomaniac,
you are pathologically driven to steal, steal, steal. You must steal.

(1b) But, you are also an individual who, is pathologically agoraphobic. As an agoraphobic,
you cannot so much as step off your front step of the porch of your home, without
undergoing palpitations, drenching sweats, and feelings of impending doom. As an agoraphobic,
you are driven to pathologically stay home and not leave. You cannot leave home.

(1c) But, from (1a) you are pathologically driven to go out and steal, steal, steal.
But, from (1b) you are pathologically driven to not ever leave home. You live alone.
Meaning, there is no one else in your home to steal from. Meaning, you must go out,
into the marketplace to satisfy your overwhelming compulsion to steal, steal, steal.
But, such is your fear of the marketplace that you cannot under any circumstances,
leave home. Whether your problem is true personal psychopathology, or merely marginalization
by a political definition of ‘psychopathology,’ nevertheless, it is a Double-Bind.

(1d) Thus, respond to the question of, what do you do?

Schacht was just looping the d in
mail fraud
when Jim Troeltsch’s pseudo-radio program, backed by its eustacian-crumpling operatic
sound-track, came over 112 West House’s E.T.A.-intercom speaker up over the classroom
clock. When no away-tournaments or meets were going on, WETA student-run ‘radio’ got
to ‘broadcast’ E.T.A.-related news, sports and community affairs for ten or so minutes
over the closed-circuit intercom every Tuesday and Saturday during the last
P.M.
class period, like 1435–1445h. Troeltsch, who’s dreamed of a tennis-broadcast career
ever since it became clear (very early) that he would be in no way Show-bound—the
Troeltsch who spends every last fin his folks send him on his staggering InterLace/SPN-pro-match-cartridge
library, and spends almost every free second calling pro action with his room’s TP’s
viewer’s volume down;
¹⁰⁶
the kind of pathetic Troeltsch who shamelessly kiss-asses the InterLace/SPN sportscasters
whenever he’s on the scene of an I/SPN-recorded jr. event,
¹⁰⁷
pestering the sportscasters and offering to get them doughnuts and joe, etc.; the
Troeltsch who already owns a whole rack of generic blue blazers and practices combing
his hair so that it has that glassy toupee-like look of a real sportscaster—Troeltsch’s
been doing the sports portion of WETA’s weekly broadcast ever since Schacht’s old
man died of ulcerative colitis and Ted came up to join his old childhood doubles partner
at the Academy in the fall of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, which had been
four months after the late E.T.A. Headmaster’s felo de se, when the flags were still
at half-mast and everybody’s bicep was banded in black cotton, which the mesomorphic
Schacht got excused from because of biceps-size; Troeltsch’d already been doing WETA
sports when he came, and he’s been undislodgeable from the post ever since.

The sports portion of WETA’s broadcast is mostly just reporting the outcomes and scores
of whatever competitive events the E.T.A. squads have been in since the last broadcast.
¹⁰⁸
Troeltsch, who approaches his twice-a-week duties with all possible verve, will say
he feels like the hardest thing about his intercom-broadcasts is keeping things from
getting repetitive as he goes through long lists of who beat whom and by how much.
His quest for synonyms for
beat
and
got beat by
is never-ending and serious and a continual source of irritation to his friends.
Mary Esther’s exams were notorious no-brainers and automatic A’s if you were careful
with your third-person pronouns, and even while he listened closely enough to Troeltsch
to be able to supply the audience-feedback that tonight’s dinner-table would be inescapable
without, Schacht was already on the test’s third item, which concerned exhibitionism
among the pathologically shy. 11/7’s broadcast results were from E.T.A.’s 71–37 rout
of Port Washington’s A and B teams at the Port Washington annual thing.

‘John Wayne at A-1 18’s beat Port Washington’s Bob Francis of Great Neck, New New
York, 6–0, 6–2,’ Troeltsch says, ‘while A-2 Singles’ Hal Incandenza defeated Craig
Burda of Vivian Park, Utah, 6–2, 6–1; and while A-3 K. D. Coyle went down in a hard-fought
loss to Port Wash’s Shelby van der Merwe of Hempstead, Long Island 6–3, 5–7, 7–5,
A-4 Trevor “The Axhandle” Axford crushed P.W.’s Tapio Martti out of Sonora, Mexico,
7–5, 6–2.’