Infinite Jest (95 page)

The front door squeaks loudly of the hinge and Lucien recloses it and drives the bolt
home:
squeak
. The upper hinge squeaks no matter the oil, as the shop drives Lucien crazy by becoming
again dusty each time the door is opened to the street’s grit, and from the dust of
the alley with so many dumpsters behind the back room which Bertraund refuses not
to open the iron service door of, to spit. The squeak functions in the place of a
customer-bell, however. The front knock of the closed door clearly is once again big-bottomed
Brazilian children playing at unamusing pranks. He does not pull the window shade,
but he does grab the stout trusty homemade broom he sweeps the shop all day with and
stands there, chewing anxiously the nail of a thumb, looking out. Lucien Antitoi enjoys
standing at the door’s glass pane and looking blankly out at the light snow of dust
bright against the blue-shadowed twilight eating the American street outside. The
door continues to squeak faintly even after he’s driven home the bolt. He can stand
here happily for hours, leaning on the sturdy broom he’d carved from a snow-snapped
limb as a boy during the Gaspé’s terrible blizzards of Québec of A.D. 1993 and bound
broom-corn onto and sharpened the tip of, as a sort of domestic weapon, even then,
before O.N.A.N.ite experialist impost made any sort of struggle or sacrifice remotely
necessary, as a silent boy, keenly interested in weapons and ammunitions of all the
different sorts. Which along with the size thing helped with the teasing. He could
and does stand here for hours, complexly backlit, transparently reflected, looking
at alien traffic and commerce. He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in
the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what
they see. ‘Squeak.’ The visual bulk of the shoproom of Antitoi Entertainent is devoted
to glass: they have set curved and planar mirrors at studied angles whereby each part
of the room is reflected in every other part, which flusters and disorients customers
and keeps haggling to a minimum. In a sort of narrow fashioned corridor behind one
gauntlet of angled glass is their stock of gags, notions, ironic postcards, and unironic
sentimental greeting cards as well.
²⁰⁴
Flanking another are shelf after shelf of used and bootleg InterLace and independent
and even homemade digital entertainment cartridges, in no discernible order, since
Bertraund handles acquisition and Lucien’s in charge of inventory and order. Nevertheless,
once he’s viewed it even once, he can identify any used cartridge in stock and will
point it out to the rare customer with the sharpened whitewood tip of his homemade
broom. Some of the cartridges do not even have labels, they’re so obscure or illicit.
To keep up with Bertraund, Lucien must watch new acquisitions on the small cheap viewer
beside the manual cash register as he sweeps the shop with the imposing broom he has
loved and kept sharpened and polished and floor-fuzz-free since adolescence, and which
he sometimes imagines he is conversing with, very quietly, telling it to
va chier putain
in tones surprisingly gentle and kind for such a large terrorist. The viewer’s screen
has something wrong with its Definition and there is a wobble that makes all cartridge
performers on the left section of it appear to have Tourette’s syndrome. The pornographical
cartridges he finds nonsensical and views them in Fast Forward to get them over with
as quickly as possible. So but he knows all but the most recent acquisitions’ colors
and visual plots, but some still have no labels. He still has not gotten to see and
shelve many of the massive assortment Bertraund lugged home and out of the all-terrain
vehicle in Saturday’s chilling rain, several old exercise and film cartridges a small
Back Bay TelEntertainment outlet was discarding as outdated. Also there were one or
two Bertraund claimed he had picked up literally on the street downtown from the site
of the flag-draped Shaw statue from untended commercial displays that stupidly contained
detachable cartridges anyone could detach and lug home in the rain. The displays’
cartridges he had immediately viewed, for though they were unlabelled save for a commercialed
slogan in tiny raised letters of
IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR
—which to Lucien Antitoi signified zilch—each was stamped also with a circle and arc
that resembled a disembodied smile, which made Lucien himself smile and pop them in
right away, to find to his disappointment and impatience with Bertraund that they
were blank, without even HD static, just as the old rude person’s bartered tapes he
had removed from the waste bag of their storage for viewing had proved, blank beyond
static, to the satisfaction of Lucien’s disgust.
²⁰⁵
Through the door’s window, passing headlights illumine a disabled person in a wheelchair
laboring along the rutted walk outside the Portuguese grocery opposite Antitoi Entertainent’s
storefront. Lucien forgets he was eating bread with upscale molasses and
soupe aux pois;
he forgets he is eating the moment the food’s taste leaves his mouth. His mind is
usually as clean and transparent as anything in the shop. He sweeps a little, absently,
in front of the pane, watching his face’s reflection bob against the blackening night
outside. Light snowfall almost is bouncing back and forth between sides of Prospect’s
canyon. The broom’s bristles say ‘Hush, hush.’ The tin-and-static sound of CQBC has
been silenced, he can hear Bertraund moving about rattling some pans and dropping
one, and Lucien works his sharp-pointed broom against the chipped Portuguese tile
of the nonwood floor. He is a gifted domestic, the best 125-kilo domestic ever to
wear a beard and suspenders of small-arms ordnance. The shop, crammed to the acoustic-tile
ceiling and dustless, resembles a junkyard for anal retentives. He bobs and sweeps,
and bobbing shafts of mirror-light gleam and dance, backed by night, in the locked
door’s pane. The figure in the wheelchair still labors at his wheels, but appears,
queerly, still to be where he was before, in front of the Portuguese grocery. Moving
closer to the pane, so that his face’s transparent image fills the glass and he can
now see clearly beyond it, Lucien sees that what it is is it’s a different figure
in a different wheelchair from the one before, this new figure’s face also downcasted
and queerly masked, laboring around the sidewalk’s jagged holes; and that not too
far behind this seated figure is yet another figure in a wheelchair, coming this way;
and as Lucien Antitoi twists his head and presses his hairy cheek to the glass of
the squeaking door—except but now how can a door’s upper hinge loudly squeak when
the door is tightly closed and the bolt driven home with the solid
snick
of a .44 bullet slipping home in a revolver’s chamber?—looking due southeast up Prospect,
Lucien can see the variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole
long single-file column of polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by
swarthy hands in fingerless wheelchair-gloves. ‘Squeak.’ ‘
Squeak
.’ Lucien has been hearing squeaks for several minutes from what he had naïvely like
the babe assumed was the door’s upper hinge. This hinge does truly squeak.
²⁰⁶
But Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow and soft but not stealthy squeaks,
the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, implacable, calm and businesslike
and yet menacing, moving with the indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain;
and, now, turning, heart loud in his head, can now see, in the carefully placed display
mirrors’ angles, spikes of light off rotary metal rotating at a height about waist-level
to a huge standing man w/ broom clutched to barrel chest, there are great quiet numbers
of persons in wheelchairs moving in the room with him, in the shoproom, moving calmly
into position behind waist-high glass counters full of wacky notions. The street outside
is flanked on both sidewalks by defiles of wheelchaired, blanket-lapped persons whose
faces are obscured by what look like large and snow-dotted leaves, and the shades
of the Portuguese grocery have been drawn and a
ROPAS
sign hung by a circumflex of twine in the pane of the front door. Wheelchair Assassins.
Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an enormous bone-crossed
skull below. It is the worst possible scenario; it is worse than O.N.A.N.ite gendarmes
by far: A.F.R. Whimpering to his broom, Lucien disengages the mammoth Colt from his
pants and finds that a length of black thread from the denim panel that surrounds
his zipper has gotten looped around the barrel’s sight-blade and comes ripping out
with a long high squeak from the pants with the convulsive force of his drawing the
weapon, so that his pants split open alongside the zipper and the force of his mammoth
Canadian gut extends the tear all up and down the front so that the snap unsnaps and
the jeans burst open and fall immediately to his ankles, puddling around his hobnail
boots, revealing red union-suit underwear beneath and forcing Lucien to take tiny
undignified shuffling steps frantically toward the back room as he tries with the
thread-snagged Colt to cover every piece of fragmented waist-high motion the mirror’s
shards of light reveal in the shoproom while scuttling as fast as the fallen jeans
allow toward the back room to alert, nonverbally, using the sort of demon-eyed tongue-protruded
neck-corded tortured rigid bug-eyed face a small child makes when he is playing
Le Monstre,
to alert Bertraund that
They
have come, not Bostonian gendarmes or white-suited O.N.A.N.ite chiens but
They, Them, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents,
A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the twilight, implacably squeaking, and cannot
be reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or fear (except a rumored
fear of steep hills), and now they’re all in here all over the shoproom like faceless
rats, the devil’s own hamsters, moving with placid squeaks just beyond view of the
shop’s mirrored peripheries, regally serene; and Lucien, with the big broom in one
hand and the thread-webbed Colt in the other, tries to cover his little-stepped flight
with a thunderous shot that goes high and shatters an angled full-length planar door-mirror,
spraying anodized glass and replacing the reflection of a blanket-lapped A.F.R. wearing
a plastic fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem mask on his face with a jagged stelliform hole,
with glittered shards and glass-dust in the air all over the place and the unperturbable
squeaks—‘squeak
squeak
squeak squeak,’ it is awful—sounding right through clatter and tinkle and frantic
hobnailed bootfalls, and through the flying glass, aiming every which way behind him,
Lucien bursts almost falling through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed
in thread, to alert Bertraund facially that the shot had signified A.F.R.s and to
break out the sub-cot weaponry and prepare to bunker for encirclement, only to horrifically
see the shop’s rear service door standing agape in a gritty breeze and Bertraund still
at the card table they use for their supper—used—with pea soup and troubling meat-patty
still on his ration-tray, sitting, squinting piratically straight ahead, with a railroad
spike in his eye. The spike, its tip is both domed and squared, also rusty, and it
protrudes from the socket of his brother’s former blue right eye. There are maybe
about six or nine A.F.R. here in the drafty back room, silent as ever, seated with
motionless wheels, flannel blankets obscuring an absence of the legs, also of course
flannel-shirted, masked in synthetic-blend heraldic-flag irises with flaming transperçant
stems at the chin and slits for eyes and round utter holes for mouths—all except for
one particular of the A.F.R., in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst
mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smily-face in
thin black lines, who is speculatively dipping a baguette’s heel in Bertraund’s metal
soup-cup and popping the bread into his mask’s mouth’s cheery hole with an elegantly
cerise-gloved hand. Lucien, staring goggle-eyed at the only brother he’s ever had,
is standing very still, face still unwittingly teratoid, the broom at an angle in
his hand, the Colt dangling at his side, and the long black zipper-thread he’s pulled
from his zipper caught somehow now and wrapped around his thumb and hung trailing
on the spotless floor with slack between gun and thumb, his pants woppsed around his
red woolen ankles, when he hears a quick efficient
squeak
and feels from behind a tremendous wallop on the backs of his knees that drives him
down to his knees on the floor, the .44 bucking as it discharges by reflex into the
wood-pattern Portuguese tile, so that he’s down in a supplicant’s posture on his red
knees, encircled by
fauteuils des rollents,
still holding his broom but now down near the broom-corn’s wire binding; his face
is now of equal height to the yellow empty smiling chewing face of the A.F.R. as this
leader—everything about him radiates pitiless and remorseless command—rotates a right
wheel to bring himself about and with three squeakless rotations has his hideous blank
black smile within cm. of Lucien Antitoi’s face. The A.F.R. bids him ‘
’n soir, ’sieur,
’ which means nothing to Lucien Antitoi, whose chin has caved and lips are quivering,
though his eyes are not what you would call jacklighted or terrified eyes. Lucien’s
brother’s pierced and rigid profile is visible over the leader’s left shoulder. The
man still has some soup-sopped bread in his glove’s left hand.

‘
Malheureusement, ton collégue est décédé. Il faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.
’ He looks amused. ‘Non? Ou c’é
tait toi, faisait-elle?
’ The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing
wiry hair and a small and strangely banal bald-spot, and gently removes the hot revolver
from Lucien’s hand. He engages the safety without having to look at the revolver.
Spanish-language music is thinly audible from somewhere up above the alley. The A.F.R.
looks warmly into Lucien’s eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded
motion pegs the gun at Bertraund’s profiled head, striking Bertraund in the side of
the head; and Bertraund rocks away and then toward and forward and slides forward-left
off the rickety camping-chair and with a ghastly and moist thump comes to rest chairless
but upright, his left hip on the floor, the eye’s sturdy railroad spike’s thick tip
caught on the edge of the card table and tilted up as the table tilts downward and
cookery slides nautically off and onto the tile as the weight of Bertraund’s large
upper body is somehow held by the spike and tilted table. His brother’s face is now
turned away from Lucien, and his overall posture is of some person crumpled with hilarity
or regret, maybe beer—a man overcome. Lucien, who never has apprehended what the safety-switch
is or where, thinks it a small miracle that the Colt .44 with its tail of thread does
not discharge again as it wangs off Bertraund’s temple and hits the slick tile and
slides from sight under a cot. Somewhere in the tall house next door a toilet flushes,
and the back room’s pipes sing. The black thread has remained snagged on the Colt’s
sight-blade and in the middle caught somewhere on Bertraund’s ear; the other remains
also attached to Lucien by a persistent hangnail on his well-gnawed right thumb, so
that a black filament still connects the knelt Lucien to his hidden revolver, with
a surreal angled turn at the ear of his overcome
frère.