Infinite Jest (85 page)

Marathe sniffed again and said:

‘But of these types of your persons—the different types, the mature who see down the
road, the puerile type that eats the candy and soup in the moment only.
Entre nous,
here on this shelf, Hugh Steeply: which do you think describes the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N.
and the Great Convexity, this U.S.A. you feel pain that others might wish to harm?’
Hands which shake out matches act always as if they are burned, this motion of snapping.
Marathe sniffed. ‘Are you understanding? I am asking between only us. How could it
be that A.F.R. malice could hurt all of the U.S.A. culture by making available something
as momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment? You know
there can be no forcing to watch a thing. If we disseminate the
samizdat,
the choice will be free, no? Free from force, no? Yes? Freely chosen?’

M. Hugh Steeply of B.S.S. was standing then with his weight on one hip and looked
his most female when he smoked, with his elbow in his arm and the hand to his mouth
and the back of this hand to Marathe, a type of fussy ennui that reminded Marathe
of women in hats and padded shoulders in black-and-white films, smoking. Marathe said:

‘You believe we are underestimating to see all you as selfish, decadent. But the question
has been raised: are we cells of Canada alone in this view? Aren’t you afraid, you
of your government and gendarmes? If not, your B.S.S., why work so hard to prevent
dissemination? Why make a simple Entertainment, no matter how seducing its pleasures,
a
samizdat
and forbidden in the first place, if you do not fear so many U.S.A.s cannot make
the enlightened choices?’

This now was the closest large Steeply had come, to stand over Marathe to look down,
looming. The rising astral body Venus lit his left side of the face to the color of
pallid cheese. ‘Get real. The Entertainment isn’t candy or beer. Look at Boston just
now. You can’t compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases
of sugar and soup.’

Marathe smiled bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of this round and hairless U.S.A.
face. ‘Perhaps the facts are true, after the first watching: that then there seems
to be no choice. But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place.
This is still a choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?’

During that last pre-Subsidized year, after each tournament’s perfunctory final, at
the little post-final award-presentations and dance, Eric Clipperton would attend
unarmed and eat maybe a little shaved turkey from the buffet and mutter out of the
side of his slot-like mouth to Mario Incandenza, and would stand there expressionless
and receive his outsized first-place trophy amid witheringly slight and scattered
applause, and would melt into the crowd soon after and dematerialize back to wherever
he lived and trained and target-practiced. Clipperton by this time must have had a
whole mantel plus bookcase’s worth of tall U.S.T.A. trophies, each U.S.T.A. trophy
a marbled plastic base with a tall metal boy on top arched in mid-serve, looking rather
like a wedding-cake groom with a very good outside slider. Clipperton must have been
just broke out in brass and plastic, but he had no official ranking whatsoever: since
his Glock 9 mm. and public intentions were instantly legendary, he was regarded by
the U.S.T.A. as never having had a legitimate victory, or even a legit match, in sanctioned
play. People on the jr. tour sometimes asked tiny Mario if that’s why Eric Clipperton
always seemed so terrifically glum and withdrawn and made such a big deal out of materializing
and dematerializing at tournaments, that the very tactic that let him win in the first
place kept the wins, and in a way Clipperton himself, from being treated as real.

All this until the erection of O.N.A.N. and the inception, in Clipperton’s eighteenth
summer, of Subsidized Time, the adverted Year of the Whopper, when the U.S.T.A. became
the O.N.A.N.T.A, and some Mexican systems analyst—who barely spoke English and had
never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw
results-data—this guy stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and ranking
center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn’t know enough not to treat Clipperton’s string
of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanctioned and real. And
when the first biweekly issue of the trilingual
North American Junior Tennis
that’s replaced
American Junior Tennis
comes out, there’s one E. R. Clipperton, Home Town ‘Ind.,’ ranked #1 in Boys’ Continental
18-and-Unders; and competitive eyebrows ascend at all latitudes; and but everyone
at E.T.A., from Schtitt on down, is highly amused, and some of them wonder whether
maybe now Eric Clipperton will put down his psychic cuirass and take his unarmed competitive
chances with the rest of them, now that he’s got what he’s surely been burning over
and holding himself hostage for all along, a real and sanctioned #1; and the Continental
Jr. Clay-Courts are coming up the following week, in Indianapolis IN, and little Michael
Pemulis of Allston takes his PowerBook and odds-software and makes a killing on vig
in the frenzy of locker-room wagering over whether Clipperton’ll even bother to materialize
at Indy now that he’s extorted himself to the sanctioned top he must have craved so
terribly, or whether he’ll retire from the tour now and lie around masturbating over
the Glock in one hand and the latest issue of
NAJT
in the other.
¹⁷⁵
And so everyone’s taken aback when Eric Clipperton of all people suddenly appears
at the E.T.A. front gate’s portcullis on a rainy warm late
A.M.
two days before the Clays, wearing a flap-frayed trench-type coat and toe-abraded
sneakers and a five-day growth of armpitty adolescent beard, but without any sticks
or anything in the way of competitive gear, not even his Glock 17’s custom-made wooden
case, and he makes the cold-eyed part-time portcullis attendant from the halfway place
down the hill just about lean on the intercom-buzzer, pleading for entry and counsel—he’s
in a terrible way, is the portcullis attendant’s intercom diagnosis—and rules about
nonenrolled jr. players being on academies’ grounds are strict and complex, and but
little Mario Incandenza sways down the steep path to the portcullis in the warm rain
and interfaces with Clipperton through the bars and has the attendant hold the intercom-button
down for him and personally requests that Clipperton be admitted under a special nonplay
codicil to the regulations, saying the kid is truly in desperate psychic straits,
Mario speaking first to Lateral Alice Moore and then to this prorector Cantrell and
then to the Headmaster himself as Clipperton stares wordlessly up at the little wrought-iron
racquet-heads that serve as spikes at the top of the portcullis and fencing around
E.T.A., his expression so blackly haunted that even the hard-boiled attendant told
some of the people back at the halfway place later that the spectral trench-coated
figure had given him sobriety’s worst fantods, so far; and J. O. Incandenza finally
lets Clipperton in over Cantrell’s and then Schtitt’s vehement objections when it’s
established that Clipperton wants only a few private minutes to obtain the counsel
of Incandenza Sr. himself—of whom I think we can presume Mario’s spoken glowingly
to Clipperton—and Incandenza, while not quite strictly sober, is lucid, and has a
very low melting-point of compassion for traumas connected with early success; and
so up goes the portcullis, and the Clipperton and the two Incandenzas go at high noon
up to an unused top-floor room in Subdorm C of East House, the structure nearest the
front gate, for some sort of psycho-existential CPR-session or something—Mario has
never spoken of what he got to sit in on, not even at night to Hal when Hal’s trying
to go to sleep. But it’s a matter of record that at some point first E.T.A. counselor
Dolores Rusk was beeped by Himself at her Winchester home and then her beep was canceled
and Lateral Alice Moore was beeped and asked with due speed to get Lyle up from the
weight room/sauna and over to East House ASAP, and that at some point while Lyle was
delotusing from the dispenser and making his way with sideways Lateral Alice to this
emergency-type huddle, at some point in this interval—in front of Dr. James O. Incandenza
and a Mario whose tiny borrowed head-clamped Bolex H128 Incandenza required Clipperton
to consent to having digitally record the whole crisis-conversation, to protect E.T.A.
from the O.N.A.N.T.A.’s Kafkaesque rules on unregistered recipients of any sort of
counsel at U.S. academies—at some point, w/ Lyle in transit, Clipperton pulls out
of various pockets in his wet complicated coat an elaborately altered copy of
NAJT
’s biweekly ranking report, a sepia’d snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern couple’s
wedding, and the hideous blunt-barreled Glock 17 9 mm. semiautomatic, which even as
both Incandenzas reach for the sky Clipperton places to his right—not left—temple,
as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and
blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then
some; and there’s just an ungodly subsequent mess in there, and the Incandenzas respectively
stagger and totter from the room all green-gilled and red-mist-stained, and—because
reports of Lyle’s appearance outside the weight room upright and walking across the
grounds have spread and caused enormous excitement and student-snapshots—it’s because
it was just as Lyle and L. A. Moore hit the upstairs hallway that they reeled out
of the room in a miasma of cordite and ghastly mist that they’re preserved in various
snapshots as resembling miners of some sort of really grisly coal.

People in the competitive jr. tennis community somehow regarded it as healthy that
Mario Incandenza’s perfectly even smile never faltered even through tears at Clipperton’s
funeral. The funeral was poorly attended. It turned out Eric Clipperton had hailed
from Crawfordsville, Indiana, where his Ma was a late-stage Valium addict and his
ex-soybean-farmer Pa, blinded in the infamous hailstorms of B.S. ’94, now spent all
day every day playing with one of those little wooden paddles with a red rubber ball
attached by elastic string, paddle-ball, with an understandable lack of success; and
the tranquilized and sightless Clippertons had had no clue about where Eric had even
disappeared off to most weekends, and bought his explanation that all the tall trophies
came from an after-school job as a freelance tennis-trophy designer, the parents apparently
being not exactly the two brightest bulbs in the great U.S. parental light-show. They
held the interment under a threat of rain in Veedersburg IN, where there’s a budget
cemetery, and Himself skipped Indianapolis and took Mario to the first of his life’s
two funerals so far; and it was probably moving that Incandenza acceded to Mario’s
request that nothing get filmed or documented, at the funeral, for Himself’s jr.-tennis
documentary. Mario probably told Lyle all about everything, back down in the weight
room, but he sure never told Hal or the Moms; and Himself was already in and out of
rehabs and hardly a credible source on much of anything by this point. But Incandenza
did let Mario insist that no one else get to clean up the scene in Subdorm C after
Enfield’s Finest had come and peered around and drawn a chalk ectoplasm around Clipperton’s
sprawled form and written things down in little spiral notebooks which they kept checking
against one another with maddening care, and then EMTs had zipped Clipperton up in
a huge rubber bag and taken him down and out on a wheeled stretcher with retractable
legs they had to retract on all the stairs. Lyle was long gone by this time. It took
the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room with
his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the 18’s girls in the rooms on either
side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and again;
and the finally spotless room in question had been locked ever since, with its tasteless
sign—except G. Schtitt holds a special key, and when an E.T.A. jr. whinges too loudly
about some tennis-connected vicissitude or hardship or something, he’s invited to
go chill for a bit in the Clipperton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other
ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily
slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with.

It was Ennet House’s Assistant Director Annie P. who coined the phrase that Don Gately
‘sunlights on the side.’ Five
A.M.
s a week, whether he’s just getting off all-night Staff duty or not, he has to be
on the Inbound Green Line by 0430h. to then catch two more trains to his other job
at the Shattuck Shelter For Homeless Males down in bombed-out Jamaica Plain. Gately
has become, in sobriety, a janitor. He mops down broad cot-strewn floors with anti-fungal
delousing solvents. Likewise the walls. He scrubs toilets. The relative cleanliness
of the Shattuck’s toilets might seem surprising until you head into the shower area,
with your equipment and face-mask. Half the guys in the Shattuck are always incontinent.
There’s human waste in the showers on a daily fucking basis. Stavros lets him attach
an industrial hose to a nozzle and spray the worst of the shit away from a distance
before Gately has to go in there with his mop and brushes and solvents, and his mask.

Cleaning the Shattuck only takes three hours, since he and his partner got the routine
down tight. Gately’s partner is also the guy that owns the company that contracts
with the Commonwealth for the Shattuck’s maintenance, a guy like forty or fifty, Stavros
Lobokulas, a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection
of women’s-shoes catalogues he keeps piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4×4.

So at like 0800 usually they’re done and by vendor’s contract still get to bill for
eight hours (Stavros L. only pays Gately for three, but it’s sub-table), and Gately
heads back to Government Center to take the westbound Greenie back up Commonwealth
to Ennet House to put on his black eye-patch mask thing and sleep till 1200h. and
the afternoon shift. Stavros L. himself gets a couple hours off to footwear-browse
(Gately very much needs to assume that’s all he does with the catalogues, is browse),
then has to head over to Pine Street Inn, the biggest and foulest homeless shelter
in all of Boston, where Stavros and two other broke and desperate yutzes from another
of the halfway houses Stavros cruises for cheap labor will spend four hours cleaning
and then bill the state for six.