Infinite Jest (82 page)

But these consequences’ own consequence—with all the Yankee-ingenious irony that attends
true resurrections—comes when the now-combined Big Four, muted and unseen, now, but
with its remaining creditor-proof assets now supporting only those rapaciously clever
executive minds that can survive the cuts down to a skeleton of a skeleton staff,
rises from the dust-heap and has a collective last hurrah, ironically deploying V&V’s
old pro-choice/anti-passivity appeal to obliterate the A.C.D.C. that had just months
before obliterated the Big Four, bringing TCI’s Malone down on a golden bell-shaped
’chute and sending TBS’s Turner into self-imposed nautical exile:

Because enter one Noreen Lace-Forché, the USC-educated video-rental mogulette who
in the B.S. ’90s had taken Phoenix’s Intermission Video chain from the middle of the
Sun Belt pack to a national distribution second only to Blockbuster Entertainment
in gross receipts. The woman called by Microsoft’s Gates ‘The Killer-App Queen’ and
by Blockbuster’s Huizenga ‘The only woman I personally fear.’

Convincing the rapacious skeletal remains of the Big Four to consolidate its combined
production, distribution, and capital resources behind a front company she’d had incorporated
and idling ever since she’d first foreseen broadcast apocalypse in the Nunhagen ads’
psycho-fiscal fallout—the front an obscure-sounding concern called InterLace TelEntertainment—Lace-Forché
then went and persuaded ad-maestro P. Tom Veals—at that time mourning his remorse-tortured
partner’s half-gainer off the Tobin Bridge by drinking himself toward pancreatitis
in a Beacon Hill brownstone—to regather himself and orchestrate a profound national
dissatisfaction with the ‘passivity’ involved even in D.S.S.-based
cable-
watching:

What matter whether your ‘choices’ are 4 or 104, or 504? Veals’s campaign argued.
Because here you were—assuming of course you were even cable-ready or dish-equipped
and able to afford monthly fees that applied no matter what you ‘chose’ each month—here
you were, sitting here accepting only what was pumped by distant A.C.D.C. fiat into
your entertainment-ken. Here you were consoling yourself about your dependence and
passivity with rapid-fire zapping and surfing that were starting to be suspected to
cause certain rather nasty types of epilepsy over the longish term. The cable kabal’s
promise of ‘empowerment,’ the campaign argued, was still just the invitation to choose
which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you’d sit there and open wide for.
¹⁶⁴
And so but
what if,
their campaign’s appeal basically ran, what if, instead of sitting still for choosing
the least of 504 infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could choose to make
its home entertainment literally and essentially
adult?
I.e. what if—according to InterLace—what if a viewer could more or less
100% choose what’s on at any given time?
Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of
second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non–‘Happy Days’
programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested,
newly lean Big Four’s mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated
by InterLace TelEnt. in convenient fiber-optic pulses that fit directly on the new
palm-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes InterLace was marketing as ‘cartridges’? Viewable right
there on your trusty PC’s high-resolution monitor? Or, if you preferred and so chose,
jackable into a good old premillennial wide-screen TV with at most a coaxial or two?
Self-selected programming, chargeable on any major card or on a special low-finance-charge
InterLace account available to any of the 76% of U.S. households possessed of PC,
phone line, and verifiable credit? What if, Veals’s spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what
if the viewer could become her/his
own
programming director; what if s/he could
define
the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?

The rest, for Hal, is recent history.

By the time not only second-run Hollywood releases but a good many first-run films,
plus new sitcoms and crime-dramas and near-live sports, plus now also big-name-anchor
nightly newscasts, weather, art, health, and financial-analysis cartridges were available
and pulsing nicely onto cartridges everywhere, the ranks of A.C.D.C.’s own solvent
program-pumpers had been winnowed back to the old-movie-and-afternoon-baseball major-metro
regional systems of more like the B.S. ’80s. Passive pickings were slim now. American
mass-entertainment became inherently pro-active, consumer-driven. And because advertisements
were now out of the televisual question—any halfway-sensitive Power-PC’s CPU could
edit out anything shrill or ungratifying in the post-receipt Review Function of an
entertainment-diskette—cartridge production (meaning by now both the satellitic ‘spontaneous
dissemination’ of viewer-selected menu-programming and the factory-recording of programming
on packaged 9.6 mb diskettes available cheap and playable on any CD-ROM-equipped system)
yes cartridge production—though tentacularly controlled by an InterLace that had patented
the digital-transmission process for moving images and held more stock than any one
of the five Baby Bells involved in the InterNet fiber-optic transmission-grid bought
for .17 on the dollar from GTE after Sprint went belly-up trying to launch a primitively
naked early mask- and Tableauxless form of videophony—became almost Hobbesianly free-market.
No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials
would pale in comparison. The more pleasing a given cartridge was, the more orders
there were for it from viewers; and the more orders for a given cartridge, the more
InterLace kicked back to whatever production facility they’d acquired it from. Simple.
Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve,
at least as far as home entertainment went.

And as InterLace’s eventual outright purchase of the Networks’ production talent and
facilities, of two major home-computer conglomerates, of the cutting-edge Froxx 2100
CD-ROM licenses of Aapps Inc., of RCA’s D.S.S. orbiters and hardware-patents, and
of the digital-compatible patents to the still-needing-to-come-down-in-price-a-little
technology of HDTV’s visually enhanced color monitor with microprocessed circuitry
and
more lines of optical resolution—as these acquisitions allowed Noreen Lace-Forché’s
cartridge-dissemination network to achieve vertical integration and economies of scale,
viewers’ pulse-reception- and cartridge-fees went down markedly;
¹⁶⁵
and then the further increased revenues from consequent increases in order- and rental-volume
were plowed presciently back into more fiber-optic-InterGrid-cable-laying, into outright
purchase of three of the five Baby Bells InterNet’d started with, into extremely attractive
rebate-offers on special new InterLace-designed R.I.S.C.
¹⁶⁶
-grade High-Def-screen PCs with mimetic-resolution cartridge-view motherboards (recognizably
renamed by Veals’s boys in Recognition ‘Teleputers’ or ‘TPs’), into fiber-only modems,
and, of course, into extremely high-quality entertainments that viewers would freely
desire to choose even more.
¹⁶⁷

But there were—could be—no ads of any kind in the InterLace pulses or ROM cartridges,
was the point Hal’s presentation kept struggling to return to. And so then besides
e.g. a Turner who kept litigating bitterly via shortwave radio from his equatorial
yacht, the true loser in the shift from A.C.D.C. cable to InterLace Grid was an American
advertising industry already reeling from the death of broadcast’s Big Four. No significant
markets seemed in any hurry to open up and compensate for the capping of TV’s old
gusher. Agencies, reduced to skeletal cells of their best and most rapacious creative
minds, cast wildly about for new pulses to finger and niches to fill. Billboards sprouted
with near-mycological fury alongside even rural twolaners. No bus, train, trolley,
or hack went unfestooned with high-gloss ads. Commercial airliners began for a while
to trail those terse translucent ad-banners usually reserved for like Piper Cubs over
football games and July beaches. Magazines (already endangered by HD-video equivalents)
got so full of those infuriating little fall-out ad cards that Fourth-Class postal
rates ballooned, making the e-mail of their video-equivalents that much more attractive,
in another vicious spiral. Chicago’s once-vaunted Sickengen, Smith and Lundine went
so far as to get Ford to start painting little domestic-product come-ons on their
new lines’ side-panels, an idea that fizzled as U.S. customers in Nike T-shirts and
Marlboro caps perversely refused to invest in ‘cars that sold out.’ In contrast to
just about the whole rest of the industry, a certain partnerless metro-Boston ad agency
was doing so well that it was more out of ennui and a sense of unlikely challenge
that P. Tom Veals consented to manage PR for the fringe candidacy of a former crooner
and schmaltz-mogul who went around swinging a mike and ranting about literally clean
streets and creatively refocused blame and rocketing people’s waste into the forgiving
chill of infinite space.
¹⁶⁸

Marathe did not quite sleep. They had remained on the shelf for some hours. He thought
it a bit of much that Steeply refused even for a brief time to sit down upon the ground.
If his persona’s skirt rode up above his weapon, what was the difference? Were grotesque
and humiliating undergarments also involved? Marathe’s wife had been in an irreversible
coma for fourteen months. Marathe was able to refresh himself without quite sleeping.
It was not a state of fugue or neural relaxation, but a type of detachment. He had
learned this in the months after losing his legs to a U.S.A. train. Part of Marathe
floated off and hovered somewhere just above him, crossing its legs, nibbling at his
consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn.

At some times on the outcropping Steeply went farther than crossing his arms, almost
embracing himself, chilled but unwilling to comment on the chill. Marathe noted that
the gesture of self-embrace appeared convincingly feminine and unconscious. Steeply’s
preparations for his returning field-assignment had been disciplined and effective.
The feature of complete unswallowability about M. Steeply as a U.S.A. female journalist—even
a massive and unfortunate-looking U.S.A. female journalist—was his feet. These were
broad and yellow-nailed, hairy and trollesque, the ugliest feet Marathe had observed
anywhere south of 60° N, and the ugliest supposedly female feet of his experience.

Both men were strangely reluctant, somehow, to broach the subject of plans for getting
down off the shelf in the utter dark. Steeply didn’t even waste time wondering how
Marathe could have gotten up (or down) there in the first place, short of some sort
of helicopter drop, which capricious winds and the proximity of the mountainside made
unlikely. The dogma around Unspecified Services was that if
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
had one Achilles’ heel it was their penchant for showing off, making a spectacle
of denying any kind of physical limitation, etc. Steeply had field-interfaced with
Rémy Marathe once on a rickety-feeling Louisiana oil platform 50-plus clicks out of
Caillou Bay, covered the whole time by armed Cajun sympathizers. Marathe always disguised
the boggling size of his arms under a long-sleeved windbreaker. His eyelids were half-closed
whenever Steeply turned to look. If he (Marathe) were a cat he would be purring. One
hand stayed below the blanket at all times, Steeply noted. Steeply himself had a small
and unregistered Taurus PT9 taped to his shaved inner thigh, which was the main reason
he was reluctant to sit down on the outcropping’s stone; the weapon was unsafetied.

In the faint lume- and starlight Marathe found the four-limbed American’s high-heeled
feet compellingly grotesque, like loaves of soft processed U.S.A. bread being slowly
squeezed and mangled by the footwear’s straps. The meaty compression of the toes at
the shoes’ open tips, the leather faintly creaking as he bobbed up and down, hugging
himself chillily in the sleeveless summer dress, his fleshy bare arms webbed redly
with mottle in the chill, one arm luridly scratched. The received wisdom among Québecois
anti-O.N.A.N. cells was that there was something latent and sadistic in the
Bureau des Services sans Spécificité
’s assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives—casting men as women,
women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals, heterosexual men as homosexual men,
Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and Dominicans, healthy males as
degenerative-nerve-disease-sufferers, healthy women operatives as hydrocephalic boys
or epileptic public-relations executives, nondeformed U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not
only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual deformity, all for the realism
of their field-personae. Steeply, silent, rose and fell absently on the toes of these
feet. The feet were also visibly unused to high U.S.A. women’s heels, for they were
mangled-looking, deprived of flowing blood and abundantly blistered, and the smallest
toes’ nails were blackening and preparing, Marathe noted, in the future to fall off.