Infinite Jest (9 page)

When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP’s viewer’s digital display
reads 1927h.

Wardine say her momma aint treat her right. Reginald he come round to my blacktop
at my building where me and Delores Epps jump double dutch and he say, Clenette, Wardine
be down at my crib cry say her momma aint treat her right, and I go on with Reginald
to his building where he live at, and Wardine be sit deep far back in a closet in
Reginald crib, and she be cry. Reginald gone lift Wardine out the closet and me with
him crying and I be rub on the wet all over Wardine face and Reginald be so careful
when he take off all her shirts she got on, tell Wardine to let me see. Wardine back
all beat up and cut up. Big stripes of cut all up and down Wardine back, pink stripes
and around the stripes the skin like the skin on folks lips be like. Sick down in
my insides to look at it. Wardine be cry. Reginald say Wardine say her momma aint
treat her right. Say her momma beat Wardine with a hanger. Say Wardine momma man Roy
Tony be want to lie down with Wardine. Be give Wardine candy and 5s. Be stand in her
way in Wardine face and he aint let her pass without he all the time touching her.
Reginald say Wardine say Roy Tony at night when Wardine momma at work he come in to
the mattresses where Wardine and William and Shantell and Roy the baby sleep at, and
he stand there in the dark, high, and say quiet things at her, and breathe. Wardine
momma say Wardine tempt Roy Tony into Sin. Wardine say she say Wardine try to take
away Roy Tony into Evil and Sin with her young tight self. She beat Wardine back with
hangers out the closet. My momma say Wardine momma not right in her head. My momma
scared of Roy Tony. Wardine be cry. Reginald he down and beg for Wardine tell Reginald
momma how Wardine momma treat Wardine. Reginald say he Love his Wardine. Say he Love
but aint never before this time could understand why Wardine wont lie down with him
like girls do their man. Say Wardine aint never let Reginald take off her shirts until
tonight she come to Reginald crib in his building and be cry, she let Reginald take
off her shirts to see how Wardine momma beat Wardine because Roy Tony. Reginald Love
his Wardine. Wardine be like to die of scared. She say no to Reginald beg. She say,
if she go to Reginald momma, then Reginald momma go to Wardine momma, then Wardine
momma think Wardine be lie down with Reginald. Wardine say her momma say Wardine let
a man lie down before she sixteen and she beat Wardine to death. Reginald say he aint
no way going to let that happen to Wardine.

Roy Tony kill Dolores Epps brother Columbus Epps at the Brighton Projects four years
gone. Roy Tony on Parole. Wardine say he show Wardine he got some thing on his ankle
send radio signals to Parole that he still here in Brighton. Roy Tony cant be leave
Brighton. Roy Tony brother be Wardine father. He gone. Reginald try to hush Wardine
but he can not stop Wardine cry. Wardine look like crazy she so scared. She say she
kill herself if me or Reginald tell our mommas. She say, Clenette, you my half Sister,
I am beg that you do not tell you momma on my momma and Roy Tony. Reginald tell Wardine
to hush herself and lie down quiet. He put Shedd Spread out the kitchen on Wardine
cuts on her back. He run his finger with grease so careful down pink lines of her
getting beat with a hanger. Wardine say she do not feel nothing in her back ever since
spring. She lie stomach on Reginald floor and say she aint got no feeling in her skin
of her back. When Reginald gone to get the water she asks me the truth, how bad is
her back look when Reginald look at it. Is she still pretty, she cry.

I aint tell my momma on Wardine and Reginald and Wardine momma and Roy Tony. My momma
scared of Roy Tony. My momma be the lady Roy Tony kill Columbus Epps over, four years
gone, in the Brighton Projects, for Love.

But I know Reginald tell. Reginald say he gone die before Wardine momma beat Wardine
again. He say he take his self up to Roy Tony and say him to not mess with Wardine
or breathe by her mattress at night. He say he take his self on down to the playground
at the Brighton Projects where Roy Tony do business and he go to Roy Tony man to man
and he make Roy Tony make it all right.

But I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald if Reginald go. I think Roy Tony gone kill
Reginald, and then Wardine momma beat Wardine to death with a hanger. And then nobody
know except me. And I am gone have a child.

In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with
a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because
if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone
or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and
nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every
nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an overwrought
teacher as ‘flaxen’; a body which the fickle angel of puberty—the same angel who didn’t
even seem to know Bruce Green’s zip code—had visited, kissed, and already left, back
in sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could
make unserious. Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted, given
to diffident movements of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of dear creamy forehead,
movements which drove Bruce Green up a private tree. A vision in a sundress and silly
shoes. Mildred L. Bonk.

And then but by tenth grade, in one of those queer when-did-that-happen metamorphoses,
Mildred Bonk had become an imposing member of the frightening Winchester High School
set that smoked full-strength Marlboros in the alley between Senior and Junior halls
and that left school altogether at lunchtime, driving away in loud low-slung cars
to drink beer and smoke dope, driving around with sound-systems of illegal wattage,
using Visine and Clorets, etc. She was one of them. She chewed gum (or worse) in the
cafeteria, her dear diffident face now a bored mask of Attitude, her flaxen locks
now teased and gelled into what looked for all the world like the consequence of a
finger stuck into an electric socket. Bruce Green saved up for a low-slung old car
and practiced Attitude on the aunt who’d taken him in. He developed a will.

And, by the year of what would have been graduation, Bruce Green was way more bored,
imposing, and frightening than even Mildred Bonk, and he and Mildred Bonk and tiny
incontinent Harriet Bonk-Green lived just off the Allston Spur in a shiny housetrailer
with another frightening couple and with Tommy Doocey, the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries
dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled,
which Tommy Doocey didn’t notice because his upper lip completely covered his nostrils
and all he could smell was lip. Mildred Bonk got high in the afternoon and watched
serial-cartridges, and Bruce Green had a steady job at Leisure Time Ice, and for a
while life was more or less one big party.

‘Hal?’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Yes Mario?’

‘Are you asleep?’

‘Booboo, we’ve been over this. I can’t be asleep if we’re talking.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Happy to reassure you.’

‘Boy were you on today. Boy did you ever make that guy look sick. When he hit that
one down the line and you got it and fell down and hit that drop-volley Pemulis said
the guy looked like he was going to be sick all over the net, he said.’

‘Boo, I kicked a kid’s ass is all. End of story. I don’t think it’s good to rehash
it when I’ve kicked somebody’s ass. It’s like a dignity thing. I think we should just
let it sort of lie in state, quietly. Speaking of which.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘It’s late, Mario. It’s sleepy-time. Close your eyes and think fuzzy thoughts.’

‘That’s what the Moms always says, too.’

‘Always worked for me, Boo.’

‘You think I think fuzzy thoughts all the time. You let me room with you because you
feel sorry for me.’

‘Booboo I’m not even going to dignify that. I’ll regard it as like a warning sign.
You always get petulant when you don’t get enough sleep. And here we are seeing petulance
already on the western horizon, right here.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘When I asked if you were asleep I was going to ask if you felt like you believed
in God, today, out there, when you were so on, making that guy look sick.’

‘This again?’

‘…’

‘
Really
don’t think midnight in a totally dark room with me so tired my hair hurts and drills
in six short hours is the time and place to get into this, Mario.’

‘…’

‘You ask me this once a week.’

‘You never say, is why.’

‘So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with
God, Boo. I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not
crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death.
I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.’

‘You’re talking about since Himself passed away.’

‘…’

‘See? You never say.’

‘I do too say. I just did.’

‘…’

‘I just didn’t happen to say what you wanted to hear, Booboo, is all.’

‘…’

‘There’s a difference.’

‘I don’t get how you couldn’t feel like you believed, today, out there. It was so
right there
. You moved like you totally believed.’

‘…’

‘How do you feel inside, not?’

‘Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from either
side of some unbridgeable difference on this issue. Let’s lie very quietly and ponder
this.’

‘Hal?’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘I’m going to propose that I tell you a joke, Boo, on the condition that afterward
you shush and let me sleep.’

‘Is it a good one?’

‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a
dyslexic.’

‘I give.’

‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question
of whether or not there’s a dog.’

‘That’s a good one!’

‘Shush.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal? What’s an insomniac?’

‘Somebody who rooms with you, kid, that’s for sure.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘…’

‘How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even C.T.
cried. I saw him personally cry.’

‘…’

‘You listened to
Tosca
over and over and cried and said you were sad. We all were.’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?’

‘…’

‘It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling everywhere
all the time for this and that thing. The corporate-grammar thing. The library-protest
thing.’

‘Now she never goes anywhere, Boo. Now she’s got the Headmaster’s House and her office
and the tunnel in between, and never leaves the grounds. She’s a worse workaholic
than she ever was. And more obsessive-compulsive. When’s the last time you saw a dust-mote
in that house?’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Now she’s just an
agoraphobic
workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you as happification?’

‘Her eyes are better. They don’t seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at
C.T. way more than she laughed at Himself. She laughs from lower down inside. She
laughs more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even, now, a lot of the
time.’

‘…’

‘How come she never got sad?’

‘She did get sad, Booboo. She just got sad in her way instead of yours and mine. She
got sad, I’m pretty sure.’

‘Hal?’

‘You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by the portcullis
here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it goes to half-mast every year
at Convocation? Remember the flag, Boo?’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Don’t cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are
two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really
have to sleep here in a second. So listen—one way to lower the flag to half-mast is
just to lower the flag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole.
You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand
what I mean, Mario?’

‘Hal?’

‘She’s plenty sad, I bet.’

At 2010h. on 1 April Y.D.A.U., the medical attaché is still watching the unlabelled
entertainment cartridge.

For Orin Incandenza, #71, morning is the soul’s night. The day’s worst time, psychically.
He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked,
fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you’re dreading whatever
you think of.