Infinite Jest (66 page)

(1 / total Toronto area in m.
²
)
2
π

of target center. Five megatons of heavy-hydrogen fusion yields at least 1,400,000
curies worth of strontium-90, meaning microcephalic kids in Montreal for roughly twenty-two
generations, and yes wiseacre McKenna of AMNAT the world will probably notice the
difference. Struck and Trevor Axford hoot loudly from under the green
GATORADE THIRST AID
awning of the open-air pavilion outside the fence along the south side of the East
Courts, where (the pavilion) they and Michael Pemulis and Jim Troeltsch and Hal Incandenza
are splayed on reticulate-mesh patio chairs in street clothes and with their street-sneakers
up on reticulate-mesh foot-stools, Struck and Axford with suspiciously bracing Gatorades
and what looks like a hand-rolled psychochemical cigarette of some sort being passed
between them. 11/8 is an E.T.A. day of mandatory total R&R, though the public intoxicants
are a bit much. Pemulis has a bag of red-skinned peanuts he hasn’t eaten much of.
Trevor Axford has overinhaled from the cigarette and is hunched coughing, his forehead
purple. Hal Incandenza is squeezing a tennis ball and leaning out far to starboard
to spit into a NASA glass on the ground and struggling with a strong desire to get
high again for the second time since breakfast v. a strong distaste about smoking
dope with/in front of all these others, especially out in the open in front of Little
Buddies, which seems to him to violate some sort of issue of taste that he struggles
to articulate satisfactorily to himself. A tooth way back on the upper left is twinging
electrically in the cold air. Pemulis, though from his twitchy right eye he’s clearly
had recent recourse to some Tenuate (which helps explain the uneaten nuts), is currently
abstaining and sitting on his hands for warmth, peanuts on the floor well away from
Hal’s NASA glass. The pavilion is open on all sides and compliments of Stokely-van
Camp Corp. and little more than like a big fancy tent with a green felt cover over
the expanse’s real grass and white-iron patio furniture with reticulate plastic mesh;
it’s mostly used for civilians’ spectation during exhibition matches on the East Show
Courts 7, 8, 9; sometimes E.T.A.s cluster under it during drill-breaks in the summer
in the heat of the day. The green awning gets taken down when they go into the Lung
for the winter. Eschaton traditionally commandeers Courts 6–9, the really nice East
Courts, unless there’s legit tennis going on. All the upperclass spectators except
Jim Struck are former Eschaton devotees, though Hal and Troeltsch were both marginal.
Troeltsch, who’s also pretty clearly had some Tenuate, is left-eye-nystagmic and is
calling the action into a disconnected broadcast-headset, but Eschaton’s tough to
enliven, verbally, even for the stimulated. Being generally too slow and cerebral.

Struck is telling Axford to put his hands over his head and Pemulis is telling Axford
to hold his breath. Now, in a stress-heightened voice, Otis P. Lord says he needs
Pemulis to real quick come zip inside through the Cyclone-fence gate south of Court
12 and walk across the theater’s four-court map to show Lord how to access the EndStat
calculation that every thousand Roentgens of straight X and gamma produces 6.36 deaths
per hundred POP and for the other 93.64 means reduced lifespans of

(Total R−100) (.0636(Total R−100)
²
)

years, meaning nobody’s exactly going to have to be pricing dentures in Minsk, so
to speak, in the future. And so on.

After about half the planet’s extant megatonnage has been expended, things are looking
pretty good for the AMNAT crew. Even though they and SOVWAR are SPASEXing back and
forth with chilling accuracy—SOVWAR’s designated launcher is the butch and suspiciously
muscular Ann Kittenplan (who at twelve-and-a-half looks like a Belorussian shot-putter
and has to buy urine more than quarter-annually and has a way more lush and impressive
mustache than for instance Hal himself could raise, and who gets these terrible rages)
but so Kittenplan’s landed nothing worse than an indirect hit all afternoon, while
AMNAT’s launchman is Todd (‘Postal Weight’) Possalthwaite, an endomorphic thirteen-year-old
from Edina MN whose whole infuriating tennis-game consists of nothing but kick serves
and topspin lobs, and who’s been the Eschaton MVL
¹²⁸
for the last two years, and accuracy-wise has to be seen to be believed—still, both
sides have artfully avoided the escalation to SACPOP that often takes both super-Combatants
right out of the game; and AMNAT’s president LaMont Chu has used the excuse of Gopnik’s
emotional strikes against the U.S. South, plus Penn’s arational lobbing at an Israel
that at the summit was explicitly placed under AMNAT’s mutual-defense umbrella, has
used these as golden tactical geese, racking up serious INDDIR-points against a SOUTHAF
and INDPAK whose hasty defensive alliance and shaky aim produce nothing more than
a lot of irradiated cod off Gloucester. Whenever there’s a direct hit, Troeltsch sits
up straight and gets to use the exclamation he’s hit on for a kind of announcerial
trademark: ‘Ho-
ly CROW!
’ But SOVWAR, beset from two vectors by AMNAT and IRLIBSYR (whose occasional lob Israel’s
way AMNAT, drawing a storm of diplomatic protest from SOUTHAF and INDPAK, keeps instructing
Lord to log as ‘regrettable mistargetings’), even with cutting-edge civil defense
and EMP-resistant communications, poor old SOVWAR is absorbing such serious collateral
SUFDDIR that it’s being inexorably impelled by game-theoretic logic to a position
where it’s going to pretty much have no choice but to go SACPOP against AMNAT.

Now SOVWAR premier Timmy (‘Sleepy T.P.’) Peterson petitions O. P. Lord for capacity/authorization
to place a scrambled call to Air Force One. ‘Scrambled call’ means they don’t yell
at each other publicly across the courts’ map; Lord has to ferry messages from one
side to the other, complete with inclined heads and hushed tones etc. Premier and
president exchange standard formalities. Premier apologizes for the Prince Albert
crack. Hal, who’s declining all public chemicals, he’s decided, has a gander at Pemulis’s
rough tallies of Combatants’ INDDIR/SUFDDIR ratios so far and agrees to bet Axford
a U.S. finski no way AMNAT accepts SOVWAR’s invitation to possible terms. During actionless
diplomatic intervals like this, Troeltsch is reduced to saying ‘What a beautiful day
for an Eschaton’ over and over and asking people for their thoughts on the game until
Pemulis tells him he’s cruising to get dope-slapped. There’s pretty much nobody around:
Tavis and Schtitt are off giving what are essentially recruiting-talks at indoor clubs
in the west suburbs; Pemulis’d let Tall Paul Shaw take the multi-emblazoned tow truck
to take Mario down to the Public Gardens to watch the public I.-Day festivities with
the Bolex H64; the local kids often go home for the day; a lot of the rest like to
lie in the Viewing Rooms barely moving all I. Day until the dinner gala. Lord tear-asses
back and forth between Courts 6 and 8, food cart clattering (the food cart, which
Pemulis and Axford picked up from a kind of a seedy-looking orderly at SJOG hospital
that Pemulis knew from Allston, has one of those crazy left front wheels that e.g.
seems always to afflict only
your
particular grocery cart in supermarkets, and makes a hell of a clattering racket
when rushed), ferrying messages which the 18-and-Under guys can tell AMNAT and SOVWAR
are making deliberately oblique and obtuse so Lord has to do that much more running:
God is never a particularly popular role to have to play, and Lord this fall has already
been the victim of several boarding-school-type pranks too puerile even to detail.
J. A. L. Struck Jr., who as usual has made a swine of himself with the suspiciously
bracing cups of Gatorade, is abruptly ill all over his own lap and then sort of slumps
to one side in his patio-chair with his face slack and white and doesn’t hear Pemulis’s
quick analysis that Hal might as well give Axhandle the $ right now, because LaMont
Chu can parse a Decision Tree with the best of them, and the D. Tree’s now indicating
peace terms in whatever a D. Tree’s version of neon letters is, because the biggest
priority for AMNAT right at 1515h. is to avoid having to SACPOP with SOVWAR, since
if the game stops right now AMNAT’s probably won, whereas if they SACPOP with SOVWAR,
trading massive infliction of INDDIR for massive body-shots of SUFDDIR, staying more
or less even with each other, AMNAT’ll still be the same number of points ahead of
SOVWAR overall, but it’ll have taken such heavy SUFDDIR debits that IRLIBSYR—never
forget IRLIBSYR, brilliantly if obnoxiously Imam’d today by eleven-year-old eyebrowless
Evan Ingersoll of Binghamton NNY—by staying out of the SACPOP-fest and lobbing sporadically
at SOVWAR just often enough to rack up serious INDDIR but not quite enough to piss
SOVWAR off enough to provoke the retaliatory SS10-wave that would mean significant
SUFDDIR, could well have a serious shot at overtaking AMNAT for the overall Eschaton,
especially when you factored in the
f
(x) advantages for bellicosity and nonexistent civil defense. At some point Axford
has passed the remainder of the cigarette back over toward Struck without looking
to see that Struck is no longer in his chair, and Hal finds himself taking the proffered
duBois and smoking dope in public without even thinking about it or having consciously
decided to go ahead. Sure enough, poor red-faced runny-nosed Lord is making way too
many clattering trips between Courts 6 and 8 for it to mean anything but peace terms.
Evan Ingersoll is positively strip-mining his right nostril. Finally Lord stops with
the running back and forth and positions himself in the ad service box of Court 7
and loads a new diskette into the Yushityu. Struck moans something in a possibly foreign
tongue. All the other upperclass spectators have scooted their chairs well away from
Struck. Troeltsch extends a blood-blistered palm and rubs the tips of the hand’s fingers
together at Hal, and Hal forks over the fin without handing the thin cigarette back
over to Axford, somehow. Pemulis has leaned forward intently with his pointy chin
in his hands; he seems completely absorbed.

Interdependence Day Y.D.A.U.’s Eschaton enters probably its most crucial phase. Lord,
at his cart and portable TP, puts on the white beanie (n.b.: not the black or the
red beanie) that signals a temporary cessation of SPASEX between two Combatants but
allows all other Combatants to go on pursuing their strategic interests as they see
fit. SOVWAR and AMNAT are thus pretty vulnerable right now. SOVWAR’s Premier Peterson
and Air Marshal Kittenplan, carrying their white janitorial stockpile-bucket between
them, walk across Europe and the Atlantic to parley with AMNAT President Chu and Supreme
Commander Possalthwaite in what looks to be roughly Sierra Leone. Various territories
smolder quietly. The other players are mostly standing around beating their arms against
their chests to stay warm. A few hesitant white flakes appear and swirl around and
melt into dark stars the moment they hit court. A couple ostensible world leaders
run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths directed
at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall’s first snow. Yesterday it had been warmer
and rained. Axford speculates about whether snow will mean Schtitt might consent to
inflate the Lung even before the Fundraiser two weeks hence. Struck is threatening
to fall out of his chair. Pemulis, leaning forward intently, wearing his Mr. Howell
yachting cap, ignores everyone. He hates to type and keeps his tallies via pencil
and clipboard à la deLint. The idling Ford sedan is conspicuous for the excruciated
full-color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of its right rear door. Hal and Axford
are passing what looks to the Combatants like a suckerless Tootsie-Roll stick back
and forth between them, and occasionally to Troeltsch. Trevor (‘The Axhandle’) Axford
has a total of only three-and-a-half digits on his right hand. From West House you
can hear Mrs. Clarke and the time-and-a-half holiday kitchen staff preparing the Interdependence
Day gala dinner, which always includes dessert.

Now REDCHI, itself quietly trying to rack up some unanswered INDDIR, sends a towering
topspin lob into INDPAK’s quadrant, scoring what REDCHI claims is a direct hit on
Karachi and what warheadless INDPAK claims is only an indirect hit on Karachi. It’s
an uneasy moment: a dispute such as this would never occur in the real God’s real
world, since the truth would be manifest in the actual size of the actual wienie roast
in the actual Karachi. But God here is played by Otis P. Lord, and Lord is number-crunching
so fiendishly at the cart’s Yushityu, trying to confirm the verisimilitude of the
peace terms AMNAT and SOVWAR are hashing out, that he can’t even pretend to have seen
where REDCHI’s strike against INDPAK landed w/ respect to Karachi’s T-shirt—which
is admittedly kind of mashed and woppsed up, though this could be primarily from breezes
and feet—and in his lapse of omniscience cannot see how he’s supposed to allocate
the relevant INDDIR- and SUFDDIR-points. Troeltsch doesn’t know whether to say ‘Ho
ly CROW!
’ or not. Lord, vexed by a lapse it’s tough to see how any mortal could have avoided,
appeals over to Michael Pemulis for an independent ruling; and when Pemulis gravely
shakes his white-hatted head, pointing out that Lord is God and either sees or doesn’t,
in Eschaton, Lord has an intense little crying fit that’s made abruptly worse when
now J. J. Penn of INDPAK all of a sudden gets the idea to start claiming that now
that it’s snowing the snow totally affects blast area and fire area and pulse-intensity
and maybe also has fallout implications, and he says Lord has to now completely redo
everybody’s damage parameters before anybody can form realistic strategies from here
on out.

Pemulis’s chairlegs shriek and make red-skin peanuts spill out in a kind of cornucopic
cone-shape and he’s up in his capacity as sort of eminence grise of Eschaton and ranging
up and down just outside the theater’s chainlink fencing, giving J. J. Penn the very
roughest imaginable side of his tongue. Besides being real sensitive to any theater-boundary-puncturing
threats to the map’s integrity—threats that’ve come up before, and that as Pemulis
sees it threaten the game’s whole sense of animating realism (which realism depends
on buying the artifice of 1300 m.
²
of composition tennis court representing the whole rectangular projection of the
planet earth)—Pemulis is also a sworn foe of all Penns for all time: it had been J.
J. Penn’s much older brother Miles Penn, now twenty-one and flailing away on the grim
Third-World Satellite pro tour, playing for travel-expenses in bleak dysenteric locales,
who when Pemulis first arrived at E.T.A. at age eleven had christened him Michael
Penisless and had had Pemulis convinced for almost a year that if he pressed on his
belly-button his ass would fall off.
¹²⁹