Infinite Jest (93 page)

‘Do you remember hearing,’ U.S.O.U.S.’s Hugh Steeply said, ‘in your own country, in
the late I think B.S. ’70s, of an experimental program, a biomedical experiment, involving
the idea of electro-implantations in the human brain?’ Steeply, at the shelf’s lip,
turned to look. Marathe merely looked back at him. Steeply said: ‘No? Some sort of
radical advance. Stereotaxy. Epilepsy-treatment. They proposed to implant tiny little
hair-thin electrodes in the brain. Some leading Canadian neurologist—Elder, Elders,
something—at the time had hit on evidence that certain tiny little stimulations in
certain brain-areas could prevent a seizure. As in an epileptic seizure. They implant
electrodes—hair-thin, just a few millivolts or—’

‘Briggs electrodes.’

‘Beg pardon?’

Marathe coughed slightly. ‘Also the type used in pacemakers of the heart.’

Steeply felt his lip. ‘I’m thinking I’m recalling a tentative Bio-entry saying your
father had had a pacemaker.’

Marathe touched his own face absently. ‘The plutonium-239 pack of power. The Briggs
electrode. The Kenbeck DC circuit. I am recalling terms and instructions. Avoid all
microwaving ovens and many transmitters. Cremation for burial forbidden—this is because
of plutonium-239.’

‘So but you know of this old program with epileptics? Experiments they thought could
avoid ablative surgery for severe epilepsy?’

Marathe said nothing and made what might be seen as slightly shaking the head.

Steeply turned back to face the east with his hands clasped before his back, wishing
to speak of it one way or another way, Marathe could tell.

‘I can’t remember if I read about it or heard a lecture or what. The implantation
was a pretty inexact science. It was all experimental. A whole lot of electrodes had
to be implanted in an incredibly small area in the temporal lobe to hope to find the
nerve-terminals that involved epileptic seizures, and it was trial and error, stimulating
each electrode and checking the reaction.’

‘Temporal lobes of the brain,’ Marathe said.

‘What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find,
during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of
the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.’ Steeply looked back over his
shoulder at Marathe. ‘I mean we’re talking about
intense
pleasure, Rémy. I’m remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable
pleasure-tissue
p
-terminals.’

‘ “
P
” wishing to mean “the pleasure.” ’

‘And that their location seemed maddeningly inexact and unpredictable, even within
brains of the same species—a
p
-terminal’d turn out to be right up next to some other neuron whose stimulation would
cause pain, or hunger, or God knows what.’

‘The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.’

‘The whole point is they weren’t doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically
experimental. They used animals and animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation
phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string neuro-team
stuck with the epileptic animals. Older—or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name—headed
the team to map these what he called quote “Rivers of Reward,” the
p
-terminals in the lobes.’

Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker’s cotton pockets,
pleasantly nodding. ‘An experimental program of Canada, you stated.’

‘I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.’

Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. ‘This is a mental hospital.
The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.’

‘Because they were theorizing that these quote “rivers” or terminals were also the
brain’s receptors for things like beta-endorphins, L-dopa, Q-dopa, serotonin, all
the various neurotransmitters of pleasure.’

‘The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.’

There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light.

‘But not humans yet,’ Steeply said. ‘Older’s earliest subject were rats, and the results
were apparently sobering. The Nu—the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation
lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his
p
-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food
and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night,
stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’

Marathe said ‘Not of the pleasure itself, however.’

‘I think dehydration. I’m fuzzy on just what the rat died of.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.’

‘Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates,
even a dolphin.’

‘Up the evolving scale,
p
-terminals for each. Each died?’

‘Eventually,’ Steeply said, ‘or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember
even if the pleasure-electrode was removed, the stimulation-lever removed, the subject’d
run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get one more
jolt.’

‘The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.’

‘You seem amused by this, Rémy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little neuroelectric
adventure.’

‘I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.’

‘Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects,
to see whether the human lobe had
p
-terminals and so on; and because of the sobering consequences for the subject-animals
in the program they couldn’t legally use prisoners or patients, they had to try to
secure volunteers.’

‘Because of a risk,’ Marathe said.

‘The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.’

Marathe pursed the lips: ‘I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked
your then CIA for, what is the term, “Persons of Expendability” from Southeast Asia
or Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring U.S.A.’s MK-Ultra.’
¹⁹⁸

Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. ‘But what apparently happened
was that somehow word of the
p
-terminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up in Manitoba—some low-level worker
at Brandon had broken security and leaked word.’

‘Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.’

‘… And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers
lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember
to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in
their desire to sign up as volunteers for
p
-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.’

‘In full knowledge of the rat’s and dolphin’s death, from pressing the lever.’

Marathe’s father had always assigned it to Rémy, his youngest, to go first inside
some public restaurant or shop to check for the presence of a microwave or GC-type
of transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a shoplifter,
the shrieking instruments at doors.

Steeply said ‘And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing
spin on the study of human pleasure and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital
team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing
to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation—’

‘To become some crazed rats.’

‘—All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon’s
and Approception tests on all these hordes of prospective volunteers—the hordes were
told it was part of the screening—the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly average,
normal.’

‘In other words not any
deviants
.’

‘Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people—Canadian young
people.’

‘Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.’

‘But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate
of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire
on a winter night—the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and
deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.’

Marathe gave him a bland look.

Steeply examined a cuticle. ‘By free choice, of course.’

Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard’s hard thought. ‘Thus, but
how long before these leaks and rumors of
p
-terminals reach the Ottawa of government and public weal, for Canada’s government
reacts with horror at the prospect of this.’

‘Oh, and not just Ottawa,’ Steeply said. ‘You can see the implications if a technology
like Elder’s really became available. I know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey,
whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley bit their knuckle in horror.’

‘The CIA chewed a hand?’

‘Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven,
high-discretionary-spending society.’

‘But it would be illegalized,’ Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines
of movements Steeply made for keeping warm.

‘Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,’ Steeply said. ‘There was still the prospect
of an underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The
electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee
enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes’d be no more exotic
than syringes.’

‘But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.’

‘Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures. Abortions.
Electric penile implants.’

‘The MK-Ultra surgeries.’

Steeply laughed without mirth. ‘Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists,
no?’

Marathe blew just one nostril of his nose. This was the Québecois way: one of the
nostrils at a time. Marathe’s father’s generation, they had used to bend and blow
the one nostril out into the gutter in the street.

Steeply said ‘Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted
with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal
p
-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and
over.’

‘Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without
earning reward.’

‘Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not
consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life. Finally pitching forward
from sheer—’

Marathe said ‘Giving away their souls and lives for
p
-terminal stimulation, you are saying.’

‘You can maybe see the analogy,’ Steeply said, over the shoulders to smile in a wry
way. ‘In Canada, my friend, this was.’

Marathe made a very slight version of his rotary motion of impatience: ‘From the A.D.
1970s of time. This never has come to be. There would have been no development of
the Happy Patch…’

‘We both went in. Both our nations.’

‘In secret.’

‘Ottawa first cutting the Brandon program’s funding, which Turner or Casey or whoever
howled at—our old CIA wanted the procedure developed and perfected, then Classified—military
use or something.’

Marathe said ‘But the civilian guardians of the weal of the public felt differently.’

‘I think I’m remembering Carter was President. Both our combined nations made it a
Security priority, shutting it down. Our old N.S.A., your old C7 with the R.C.M.P.s.’

‘Bright red jackets and hats with wide brims. In the 1970s still on horses.’

Steeply held his mouth of the purse half up to the faint lights of Tucson, peering
for something. ‘I recall they went in directly. As in guns drawn. Boomed the doors.
Dismantled the labs. Mercy-killed dolphins and goats. Olders disappeared somewhere.’

Marathe’s slow circular gesture. ‘Your point finally is Canadians also, we would choose
dying for this, the total pleasure of a passive goat.’

Steeply turned, fiddling with an emery board. ‘But you don’t see a more specific analogy
with the Entertainment?’

Marathe tongued the inside of his cheek. ‘You are saying the Entertainment, a somehow
optical stimulation of the
p
-terminals? A way to bypass Briggs electrodes for orgasm-and-massage pleasures?’

The dry rasp of the emerying a nail. ‘All I’m saying is analogy. A precedent in your
own nation.’

‘Us, our nation is the Québec nation. Manitoba is—’

‘I’m saying that if he could get past the blind desire for harm against the U.S.,
your M. Fortier might be induced to see just what it is he’s proposing to let out
of the cage.’ His training was such that he could emery without watching the procedure.
For Steeply’s most effective interviewing tactic was this long looking down into the
face without emotion of any kind. For Marathe felt more uncomfortable not knowing
whether Steeply believed a thing than if Steeply’s emotion of face showed he did not
believe.

Then tonight, at the prospect of boiled hot dogs, the two newest residents had pulled
the typically standard new-resident princess-and-pea special-food-issue thing: the
new-today girl Amy J. that just sits there on the vinyl couch shaking like an aspen
and having people bring her coffee and light her gaspers and with just short of a
like
HELPLESS VICTIM: PLEASE CODDLE
sign hung around her neck now claiming Red Dye #4 gives her ‘cluster migraines’ (Gately
gives this girl like a week tops before she’s a vapor trail back to the Xanax
¹⁹⁹
; she has that look), and the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle
van D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face announcing she was a vegetarian
and would ‘rather eat a bug’ than even get downwind of a boiled frank. And but in
an incredible move Pat M. has asked Gately, at like 1800h., to blast down to the Purity
Supreme down in Allston and pick up some eggs and peppers so the two new delicate-tummied
newcomers can make themselves quiche or whatever. To Gately’s way of thinking, this
looks like catering to just the sort of classic addict’s claim of special uniqueness
that it’s supposed to be Pat’s job to help break down. The Joelle v.D. girl seems
to have like inordinate immediate weight and pet-status with Pat, who’s already making
noises about exempting the girl from the menial-job requirement, and wants Gately
to look for some kind of weird Big Red Soda Water tonic for the girl, who’s apparently
still dehydrated. It’s sure a long way from making somebody chew feldspar. Gately
has long since quit trying to figure Pat Montesian out.