Infinite Jest (63 page)

This is probably also the place to mention Hal’s older brother Mario’s khaki-colored
skin, an odd dead gray-green that in its corticate texture and together with his atrophic
in-curled arms and arachnodactylism gave him, particularly from a middle-distance,
an almost uncannily reptilian/dinosaurian look. The fingers being not only mucronate
and talonesque but nonprehensile, which is what made Mario’s knifework untenable at
table. Plus the thin lank slack hair, at once tattered and somehow too smooth, that
looked at 18+ like the hair of a short plump 48-year-old stress engineer and athletic
director and Academy Headmaster who grows one side to girlish length and carefully
combs it so it rides thinly up and over the gleaming yarmulke of bare gray-green-complected
scalp on top and down over the other side where it hangs lank and fools no one and
tends to flap back up over in any wind Charles Tavis forgets to carefully keep his
left side to. Or that he’s slow, Hal’s brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise,
slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found—but
not,
verifiably
not,
retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever
so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off
and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.

Or that his status at the Enfield Tennis Academy—erected, along with Dr. and Mrs.
I’s marriage’s third and final home at the northern rear of the grounds, when Mario
was nine and Hallie eight and Orin seventeen and in his one E.T.A. year B-4 Singles
and in the U.S.T.A.’s top 75—that Mario’s life there is by all appearances kind of
a sad and left-out-type existence, the only physically challenged minor in residence,
unable even to grip a regulation stick or stand unaided behind a boundaried space.
That he and his late father had been, no pun intended, inseparable. That Mario’d been
like an honorary assistant production-assistant and carried the late Incandenza’s
film and lenses and filters in a complex backpack the size of a joint of beef for
most of the last three years of the late-blooming filmmaker’s life, attending him
on shoots and sleeping with multiple pillows in small soft available spaces in the
same motel room as Himself and occasionally tottering out for a bright-red plastic
bottle of something called Big Red Soda Water and taking it to the apparently mute
veiled graduate-intern down the motel’s hall, fetching coffee and joe and various
pancreatitis-remedies and odds and ends for props and helping D. Leith out with Continuity
when Incandenza wanted to preserve Continuity, basically being the way any son would
be whose dad let him into his heart’s final and best-loved love, lurching gamely but
not pathetically to keep up with the tall stooped increasingly bats man’s slow patient
two-meter stride through airports, train stations, carrying the lenses, inclined ever
forward but in no way resembling any kind of leashed pet.

When required to stand upright and still, like when videotaping an E.T.A.’s service
motion or manning the light meters on the set of a high-contrast chiaroscuro art film,
Mario in his forward list is supported by a NNYC-apartment-door-style police lock,
a .7-meter steel pole that extends from a special Velcroed vest and angles about 40°
down and out to a slotted piece of lead blocking (a bitch to carry, in that complicated
pack) placed by someone understanding and prehensile on the ground before him. He
stood thus buttressed on sets Himself had him help erect and furnish and light, the
lighting usually unbelievably complex and for some parts of the crew sometimes almost
blinding, sunbursts of angled mirrors and Marino lamps and key-light kliegs, Mario
getting a thorough technical grounding in a cinematic craft he never even imagined
being able to pursue on his own until Xmas of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar,
when a gaily wrapped package forwarded from the offices of Incandenza’s attorney revealed
that Himself had designed and built and legally willed (in a codicil) to be gaily
wrapped and forwarded for Mario’s thirteenth Xmas a trusty old Bolex H64 Rex 5
¹¹⁶
tri-lensed camera bolted to an oversized old leather aviator’s helmet and supported
by struts whose ends were the inverted tops of training-room crutches and curved nicely
over Mario’s shoulders, so the Bolex H64 required no digital prehensility because
it fit over Mario’s oversized face
¹¹⁷
like a tri-plated scuba mask and was controlled by a sewing-machine-adapted foot
treadle, and but even then it took some serious getting used to, and Mario’s earliest
pieces of digital juvenilia are marred/enhanced by this palsied, pointing-every-which-way
quality of like home movies shot at a dead run.

Five years hence, Mario’s facility with the head-mount Bolex attenuates the sadness
of his status here, allowing him to contribute via making the annual E.T.A. fundraising
documentary cartridge, videotaping students’ strokes and occasionally from over the
railing of Schtitt’s supervisory transom the occasional challenge-match—the taping’s
become part of the pro-instruction package detailed in the E.T.A. catalogue—plus producing
more ambitious, arty-type things that occasionally find a bit of an à-clef-type following
in the E.T.A. community.

After Orin Incandenza left the nest to first hit and then kick collegiate balls, there
was almost nobody at E.T.A. or its Enfield-Brighton environs who did not treat Mario
M. Incandenza with the casual gentility of somebody who doesn’t pity you or admire
you so much as just vaguely prefer it when you’re around. And Mario—despite rectilinear
feet and cumbersome police lock the most prodigious walker-and-recorder in three districts—hit
the unsheltered area streets daily at a very slow pace, a halting constitutional,
sometimes w/ head-mounted Bolex and sometimes not, and took citizens’ kindness and
cruelty the same way, with a kind of extra-inclined half-bow that mocked his own canted
posture without pity or cringe. Mario’s an especial favorite among the low-rent shopkeepers
up and down E.T.A.’s stretch of Commonwealth Ave., and photographic stills from some
of his better efforts adorn the walls behind certain Comm. Ave. deli counters and
steam presses and Korean-keyed cash registers. The object of a strange and maybe kind
of cliquey affection from Lyle the Spandexed sweat-guru, to whom he sometimes brings
Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes to cut the diet’s salt, Mario sometimes finds younger E.T.A.s
referred to him by Lyle on really ticklish matters of injury and incapacity and character
and rallying-what-remains, and never much knows what to say. Trainer Barry Loach all
but kisses the kid’s ring, since it’s Mario who through coincidence saved him from
the rank panhandling underbelly of Boston Common’s netherworld and more or less got
him his job.
¹¹⁸
Plus of course there’s the fact that Schtitt himself constitutionalizes with him,
of certain warm evenings, and lets him ride in his surplus sidecar. An object of some
weird attracto-repulsive gestalt for Charles Tavis, Mario treats C.T. with the quiet
deference he can feel his possible half-uncle wanting, and stays out of his way as
much as possible, for Tavis’s sake. Players at Denny’s, when they all get to go to
Denny’s, almost vie to see who gets to cut up the cutupable parts of Mario’s under-12-size
Kilobreakfast.

And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes Mario,
secretly. God-type issues aside, Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes.
People who’re somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like
what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise. Withered
saurian homodontic
¹¹⁹
Mario floats, for Hal. He calls him Booboo but fears his opinion more than probably
anybody except their Moms’s. Hal remembers the unending hours of blocks and balls
on the hardwood floors of early childhood’s 36 Belle Ave., Weston MA, tangrams and
See ’N Spell, huge-headed Mario hanging in there for games he could not play, for
make-believe in which he had no interest other than proximity to his brother. Avril
remembers Mario still wanting Hal to help him with bathing and dressing at thirteen—an
age when most un-challenged kids are ashamed of the very space their sound pink bodies
take up—and wanting the help for Hal’s sake, not his own. Despite himself (and showing
a striking lack of insight into his Moms’s psyche), Hal fears that Avril sees Mario
as the family’s real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type,
a very rare and shining thing, even if his intuition—slow and silent—scares her, his
academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each
A.M.
without fail since the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry. This
is why she tries so terribly hard to leave Mario alone, not to hover or wring, to
treat him so less specially than she wants: it is for him. It is kind of noble, pitiable.
Her love for the son who was born a surprise transcends all other experiences and
informs her life. Hal suspects. It was Mario, not Avril, who obtained Hal his first
copies of the unabridged
O.E.D.
at a time when Hal was still being shunted around for the assessment of possible
damage, Booboo pulling them home in a wagon by his bicuspids over the fake-rural blacktop
roads of upscale Weston, months before Hal tested out at Whatever’s Beyond Eidetic
on the Mnemonic Verbal Inventory designed by a dear and trusted colleague of the Moms
at Brandeis. It was Avril, not Hal, who insisted that Mario live not in HmH with her
and Charles Tavis but with Hal in an E.T.A. subdorm. But in the Year of Dairy Products
From the American Heartland it was Hal, not she, who, when the veiled legate from
the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed showed up at the E.T.A. driveway’s
portcullis to discuss with Mario issues of blind inclusion v. visual estrangement,
of the openness of concealment the veil might afford him, it was Hal, even as Mario
laughed and half-bowed, it was Hal, brandishing his Dunlop stick, who told the guy
to go peddle his linen someplace else.

The sky of U.S.A.’s desert was clotted with blue stars. Now it was deep at night.
Only above the U.S.A. city was the sky blank of stars; its color was pearly and blank.
Marathe shrugged. ‘Perhaps in you is the sense that citizens of Canada are not involved
in the real root of the threat.’

Steeply shook the head in seeming annoyance. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.
The lurid wig of him slipped when he moved the head with any abrupt force.

The first way Marathe betrayed anything of emotion was to smooth rather too fussily
at the blanket on his lap. ‘It is meaning that it will not of finality be Québecers
making this kick to
l’aine des Etats Unis.
Look: the facts of the situation speak loudly. What is known. This is a U.S.A. production,
this Entertainment cartridge. Made by an American man in the U.S.A. The appetite for
the appeal of it: this also is U.S.A. The U.S.A. drive for spectation, which your
culture teaches. This I was saying: this is why choosing is everything. When I say
to you choose with great care in loving and you make ridicule it is why I look and
say: can I believe this man is saying this thing of ridicule?’ Marathe leaned slightly
forward on his stumps, leaving the machine pistol to use both his hands in saying.
Steeply could tell this was important to Marathe; he really believed it.

Marathe made small emphatic circles and cuts in the air while he spoke: ‘These facts
of situation, which speak so loudly of your
Bureau
’s fear of this
samizdat:
now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each
one. A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called
perfect Entertainment, this film. Who would die for this chance to be fed this death
of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving: Hugh Steeply, in complete
seriousness as a citizen of your neighbor I say to you: forget for a moment the Entertainment,
and think instead about a U.S.A. where such a thing could be possible enough for your
Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive
as a nation of peoples? To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other
peoples? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose? who will
die for something larger? who will sacrifice the warm home, the loved woman at home,
their legs, their life even, for something more than their own wishes of sentiment?
who would choose not to die for pleasure, alone?’

Steeply removed with cool deliberation another Belgian cigarette and lit it, this
time on the first match. Waving the match out with a circular flourish and snap. All
this took time of his silence. Marathe settled back. Marathe wondered why the presence
of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed.
An aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with Americans,
as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief.

Steeply rested his one elbow on the forearm of the other arm across his prostheses,
to smoke like a woman: ‘You’re saying that the administration wouldn’t even be concerned
about the Entertainment if we didn’t know we were fatally weak. As in as a nation.
You’re saying the fact that we’re worried speaks volumes about the nation itself.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes.
We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake
or choose not to.’ Smoothing slightly at his lap’s blanket. ‘How will U.S.A.s choose?
Who has taught them to choose with care? How will your Offices and Agencies protect
them, your people? By laws? By killing Québecois?’ Marathe rose, but very slightly.
‘As you were killing Colombians and Bolivians to protect U.S.A. citizens who desire
their narcotics? How well did this work for your Agencies and Offices, the killing?
How long was it before the Brazilians replaced the dead of Colombia?’