Infinite Jest (91 page)

Looks around.

‘So put a lid on it about the fucking cold,’ says deLint, with his clipboard under
his arm and his strangler-sized hands in his pockets, hopping a little in place.

Schtitt is looking around. Like most Germans outside popular entertainment, he gets
quieter when he wants to impress or menace. (There are very few shrill Germans, actually.)
‘If it is hard,’ he says softly, hard to hear because of the rising wind, ‘difficult,
for you to move between the two worlds, from cold hot wind and sun to this inside
place inside the lines where is always the same,’ he says, seeming now to study the
weatherman’s pointer he holds down and out with both hands, ‘it can be arranged for
you gentlemen not to leave, ever here, this world inside the lines of court. You know.
Can stay here until there is citizenship. Right here.’ The pointer is pointed at the
spots they’re standing at breathing and blotting their faces and blowing their noses.
‘Can today put up Testar Lung, for world’s shelter. Sleep bags. Meals brought to you.
Never across the lines. Never leave the court. Study here. A bucket for hygienic needs.
At Gymnasium Kaiserslautern where I am privileged boy who whining about cold wind,
we live inside tennis court for months, to learn to live inside. Very lucky days when
they bring us meals. Not possible to cross a line for months of living.’

Left-hander Brian van Vleck picks a bad moment to break wind.

Schtitt shrugs, half-turning away from them to look off somewhere. ‘Or else leave
here into large external world where is cold and pain without purpose or tool, eyelash
in eye and pretty girl—not worry anymore about how to
occur
.’ Looks around. ‘No one is a prisoner here. Who would like to escape into large world?
Master Sweeny?’

Little eyes down.

‘Mr. Coyle, with always too co-wold to give total?’

Coyle studies the vasculature on the inside of his elbow with deep interest as he
shakes his head. John Wayne is joggling his head around like a Raggedy-Andy-head,
stretching out the neck hardware. John Wayne is notoriously tight and can’t touch
anything below the knee with straight legs during stretches.

‘Mr. Peter Beak with always the weeping to home on the telephone?’

The twelve-year-old says Not Me Sir several times.

Hal very subtly shoots in a small plug of Kodiak. Aubrey deLint has his arms crossed
over the clipboard and is looking around beadily like a crow. Hal Incandenza has an
almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite
believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a
true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection. The kids of the next shift are
walking downhill and sprinting back up and walking down, warrior-whooping without
conviction. The other male prorectors are drinking cones of Gatorade, clustered in
the little pavilion, feet up on patio-chairs, Dunkel’s and Watson’s eyes closed. Neil
Hartigan, in his traditional Tahitian shirt and Gauguin-motif sweater, has to stay
sitting down to fit under the Gatorade awning.

‘Simple,’ Schtitt shrugs, so that the upraised pointer seems to stab at the sky. ‘Hit,’
he suggests. ‘Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be
here
. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be
here
in total. Is nothing else. Learn. Try. Drink your green juice. Perform the Butterfly
exercises on all eight of these courts, please, to warm down. Mr. deLint, please to
bring them back down, make sure of stretching the groins. Gentlemen: hit tennis balls.
Fire at your will. Use a head. You are not arms. Arm in the real tennis is like wheels
of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either. Where is where you apply for citizenship
in second world Mr. consciousness of ankle Incandenza, our revenant?’

Hal can lean out and spit in a way that isn’t insolent. ‘Head, sir.’

‘Excuse?’

‘The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I’m going to occur as a player.
The game’s two heads’ one world. One world, sir.’

Schtitt sweeps the pointer in an ironic morendo arc and laughs aloud:

‘Play.’

Part of Don Gately’s live-in Staff job is that he hurtles here and there on selected
Ennet House errands. He cooks the communal supper on weekdays,
¹⁸⁸
which means he does the House’s weekly shopping, which means that at least a couple
times a week he gets to take Pat Montesian’s black 1964 Ford Aventura and drive to
the Purity Supreme Market. The Aventura is an antique variant of the Mustang, the
sort of car you usually only see waxed and static in car shows with somebody in a
bikini pointing at it. Pat’s is functional and mint-reconditioned—her shadowy husband
with something like ten years sober being big into cars—with such a wicked nice multilayer
paint job that its black has the bottomless quality of water at night. It has two
different alarm systems and a red metal bar you’re supposed to lock across the steering
wheel when you get out. The engine sounds more like a jet engine than a piston engine,
plus there’s a scoop poking periscopically from the hood, and for Gately the vehicle’s
so terrifically tight and sleek it’s like being strapped into a missile and launched
at the site of a domestic errand. He can barely fit in the driver’s seat. The steering
wheel is about the size of an old video-arcade game’s steering wheel, and the thin
canted six-speed shift is encased in a red leather baglet that smells strongly of
leather. The height of the car’s roof compromises Gately’s driving-posture, and his
right ham like exceeds the seat and squeezes against the gearshift so that shifting
pinches his hip. He does not care. Some of the profoundest spiritual feelings of his
sobriety so far are for this car. He’d drive this car if the driver’s seat was just
a sharp pointy spike, he told Johnette Foltz. Johnette Foltz is the other live-in
Staffer, though between ultra-rabid Commitment-activity in NA and a somehow damaged
NA fiancé she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker wheelchair, she’s
around Ennet House less and less now, and there are rumblings about a possible replacement,
which Gately and the heterosexual male residents pray daily will be the leggy alumna
and part-time counselor Danielle Steenbok, who’s rumored also to attend Sex and Love
Addicts Anonymous, which engages everyone’s imagination to the max.

It’s a mark of serious regard and questionable judgment that Director Pat M. lets
Don Gately drive her priceless Aventura, even just to like the Metro Food Bank or
Purity Supreme, because Gately lost his license more or less permanently back in the
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster for getting pinched on a DUI in Peabody
on a license that had already been suspended for a previous DUI in Lowell. This was
not the only Loss Don Gately incurred as his chemical careers moved toward their life-reversing
climax. Once every couple months now, still, he has to put on his brown dress slacks
and slightly irregular green sportcoat from Brighton Budget Large ’N Tall Menswear
and take the commuter rail up to selected District Court venues on the North Shore
and meet with his various P.D.s and P.O.s and caseworkers and sometimes appear briefly
up in front of Judges and Review Boards to review the progress of his sobriety and
reparations. When he first came to Ennet House last year, Gately had Bad-Check and
Forgery issues, he had a Malicious Destruction of Property issue, plus two D&Ds and
a bullshit Public Urination out of Tewksbury. He had a Break-and-Enter from a silent-alarmed
Peabody mansion where he and a colleague got pinched before anything could get promoted.
He had a Possession With Intent from 38 50-mg. tablets of Demerol
¹⁸⁹
in a Pez container which he’d shoved down into the crack of the Peabody Finest’s
cruiser’s back seat, but which got found anyway on the routine post-transport cruiser-search
all cops perform when the arrestee’s pupils are unresponsive both to light and to
head-slaps.

There was, too, of course, a certain darker issue, vis-à-vis a certain up-scale Brookline
home whose late owner had been eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in
both the
Globe
and
Herald
. After eight months of indescribable psychic cringing, waiting for the legal footwear
to drop on the Nuck-VIP issue—toward the end of his drug-use Gately’d gotten sloppy
and crazy and stuck idiotically with a method of straight meter-shunting that he’d
learned up at MCI-Billerica and was pretty sure now constituted a signature Gately
M.O., since the older guy that’d taught it to him in the Billerica metal-shop had
subsequently got out and gone to Utah and died of a morphine overdose (and like who
on earth hopes to get reliable morphine in fucking
Utah?
) over two years ago—after eight months of cringing and nail-biting, the last couple
months of the torment in Ennet House—even though the House’s D.S.A.S.-license put
it legally off-limits to all constabulary without Pat Montesian’s physical presence
and notarized permission—after he was down to the cuticles on all ten digits, Gately
had very discreetly approached a certain Percodan-devoted court stenographer an old
girlfriend had once dealt to, and had the guy make equally discreet inquiries, and
found that the potential Murder–2 investigation of the botched burglary
¹⁹⁰
had been taken over—
pace
the loud howls of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A.—by something federal the addled
stenographer called ‘Non-Specific Services Bureau,’ whereupon the case vanished from
any sort of investigative scene the stenographer could make inquiries about, though
quiet rumor had it that current suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy
Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec, far north of the Enfield MA where
Gately had been cringing his way to nightly AA meetings with his fingers in his mouth.

Most of the cases Gately had had pending his P.D. had gotten Closed Without Finding,
¹⁹¹
contingent on Gately’s entering long-term treatment and maintaining chemical abstinence
and submitting to random urinalyses and making biweekly reparation payments out of
the pathetic paychecks he earned cleaning shit and sperm under Stavros Lobokulas and
now also cooking and live-in-Staffing at Ennet House. The only issue not resolved
on a Blue-File deferral was the business of driving with a DUI-suspended license.
In the Commonwealth of MA, this issue carries a mandatory 90-day bit, as in like the
penalty’s written right into the statute; and the case’s P.D. has been up-front with
Gately about it’s only a matter of the time of the wheels’ slow judicial grind before
some judge Red-Files the issue and the case and Gately has to do the bit at someplace
MCI-Minimum like Concord or Deer Island. Gately isn’t too hinked about 90 inside.
At twenty-four he’d done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a nightclub—it
was more like he’d beaten the second bouncer bloody with the unconscious body of the
first—and he knew quite well he could get by in a Commonwealth lockdown. He was too
big to fuck or fuck with and not interested in fucking with anyone else: he did his
time stand-up and gave nobody any provoking cause; and when the first couple hard
guys had come after him for his canteen cigarettes he’d laughed it off with ferocious
jolliness, and when they came back a second time Gately beat them half to death in
the corridor behind the weight room where he could be sure plenty of other guys could
hear it, and after that one incident was out of the way he could simply get by and
not get fucked with. Gately now was hinked only about the prospect of getting just
one or two AA meetings a week in jail—the only meetings sober inmates get are when
an area Group comes in on an Institutional Commitment, which Gately’s been on—when
Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost easier to get in jail than in the
outside world. Gately cringed now only at the thought of the Sergeant at Arms, the
distinguished-looking shepherd guy. Going back to ingesting Substances had become
his biggest fear. Even Gately can tell this is a major psychic turn-around. He tells
the newer residents right up front that AA’s somehow gotten him by the mental curlies:
he’ll now go to literally Any Lengths to stay clean.

He’ll tell them right out that he’d first come to Ennet House only to keep out of
jail, and hadn’t had much interest or hope about actually staying clean for any length
of time; and he’d been up-front with Pat Montesian about this during his application
interview. The grim honesty about his disinterest and hopelessness was one reason
Pat even let such a clearly bad-news specimen into the House on nothing but a lukewarm
referral from a P.O. up at the 5th District office in Peabody. Pat told Gately that
grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from
Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek.
Desperation helped also, she said. Gately scratched at her dog’s stomach and said
he wasn’t sure if he was desperate about anything except wanting to somehow stop getting
in trouble for things he usually afterward couldn’t even remember he did them. The
dog trembled and shuddered and its eyes rolled up as Gately, who hadn’t been told
about Pat’s thing about wanting her dogs petted, rubbed its scabby stomach. Pat had
said like well that was enough, that desire for the shitstorm to end.
¹⁹²
Gately said her dog sure did like having its stomach rubbed, and Pat explained that
the dog was epileptic, and said that just a desire to stop blacking out was more than
enough to start with. She pulled some Commonwealth Substance-Abuse study in a black
plastic binder off a long black plastic bookshelf filled with black plastic binders.
It turned out Pat Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed—really kind
of overdressed, for a halfway house—in black leather pants and a black shirt of silk
or something silky. Outside the bay window a Green Line train was laboring up the
first Enfield hill in the late-summer rain. The downhill view from the bay window
over Pat’s black lacquer or enamelish desk was like the only spectacular thing about
Ennet House, which was otherwise a wicked awful dump. Pat made a sound against the
binder with a Svelte nail-extension and said that in this state study right here,
conducted in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, over 60% of the inmates serving
Life sentences in hellish MCI-Walpole and not disputing that they’d done what they’d
done to get in there nevertheless had no memory of having done it, whatever got them
in there. For Life. None. Gately had to have her run it by him a couple times before
he isolated her point. They’d been in blackouts. Pat said a blackout was where you
continued to function—sometimes disastrously—but weren’t aware later of what you did.
It’s like your mind wasn’t in possession of your body, and it was usually brought
on by alcohol but could also be brought on by chronic use of other Substances, synthetic
narcotics among them. Gately said he couldn’t recall ever having a real blackout,
and Pat M. got it but didn’t laugh. The dog was heaving and quivering with its legs
spronged out to all points of the compass and kind of spasming, and Gately didn’t
know whether to quit rubbing on it. To be honest he didn’t know what epilepsy was
but suspected Pat was not referring to the woman’s leg-shaver thing his totally alcoholic
past girlfriend Pamela Hoffman-Jeep used to scream in the bathroom when she used.
Everything mental for Gately was kind of befogged and prone to misprision for well
into his first year clean.