Infinite Jest (96 page)

The happy-masked A.F.R. leader, politely ignoring the fact that Lucien’s sphincter
has failed them all in the small room, after complimenting them both on the craftsmanship
of some of the front’s blown-glass notions, pulls his velvet gloves tighter and tells
Lucien that it has fallen to him, Lucien, to direct their attention without delay
to an entertainment item they have come here to acquire. And require, this Copy-Capable
item. They are here on business,
ne pas plaisanter
, this is not the social call. They will acquire this thing and then
iront paître
. They have no wish to disturb anyone’s repast, but the A.F.R. fears that it is fearfully
urgent and key, this Master item they now require without delay or dissembly from
Lucien—
entend-il?

The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader’s meaningless sounds can’t
help but be misinterpreted, probably.

Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running Masters?

Same vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension.

Can a mask’s drawn smile widen?

From the front of the shop come whole symphonies of squeaks and low trilled
r
’s and the sounds of a densely packed area being swiftly dismantled and searched.
A few legless thick-armed men climb the shelves by hand and hang up near the drop-ceiling
by special climbing equipment and suction-cups fitted to their stumps, brown arms
busy in the upper shelving, dismantling and searching upside-down like obscene industrious
bugs. The outline of Lucien’s quivering mouth is being traced by a mammoth-torso’d
A.F.R. in a Jesuitical collar who holds Lucien’s own trusty broom inverted and leans
in his chair to caress Lucien’s full Gaspé-provincial lips (the lips are quivering)
with the handle’s wicked tip, which is sharply white, whittled free of the sienna
glaze of broomstick-varnish that patinas the rest of the big stick’s length. Lucien’s
lips are quivering not so much from fear—although there is certainly fear—but not
from fear so much as in an attempt to form words.
²⁰⁷
Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what
he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos
to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.F.R. leader can sense, perhaps that
is why his sigh is sincere, his complaint sincere when he complains that what will
follow will be
inutile,
Lucien’s failure to assist will be
inutile,
there will be no point serviced, there are several dozen highly trained and motivated
wheelchaired personnel here who will find whatever they seek and more, anyhow, perhaps
it is sincere, the Gallic shrug and fatigue of the voice through the leader’s mask-hole,
as Lucien’s leonine head is tilted back by a hand in his hair and his mouth opened
wide by callused fingers that appear overhead and around the sides of his head from
behind and jack his writhing mouth open so wide that the tendons in his jaws tear
audibly and Lucien’s first sounds are reduced from howls to a natal gargle as the
pale wicked tip of the broom he loves is inserted, the wood piney-tasting then white
tasteless pain as the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared
A.F.R., thrust farther in rhythmically in strokes that accompany each syllable in
the wearily repeated ‘
In
-
U
-
Tile
’ of the technical interviewer, down into Lucien’s wide throat and lower, small natal
cries escaping around the brown-glazed shaft, the strangled impeded sounds of absolute
aphonia, the landed-fish gasps that accompany speechlessness in a dream, the cleric-collared
A.F.R. driving the broom home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward
leverage as the fibers that protect the esophagal terminus resist and then give with
a crunching pop and splat of red that bathes Lucien’s teeth and tongue and makes of
itself in the air a spout, and his gargled sounds now sound drowned; and behind fluttering
lids the aphrasiac half-cellular insurgent who loves only to sweep and dance in a
clean pane sees snow on the round hills of his native Gaspé, pretty curls of smoke
from chimneys, his mother’s linen apron, her kind red face above his crib, homemade
skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes seen stretching away from the Cap-Chat hillside
they skied down to Mass, the red face’s noises he knows from the tone are tender,
beyond crib and rimed window Gaspésie lake after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic
sun and stretching out in the southeastern distance like chips of broken glass thrown
to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a
ribbon of light, unspeakably pure; and as the culcate handle navigates the inguinal
canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and with a grunt and shove completes
its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the back of his red sopped johns,
bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock’s canted
angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely skewered, and as the attentions
of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to the shelves and trunks of
the Antitois’ sad insurgents’ lives, and Lucien finally dies, rather a while after
he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally
sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean
and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades
at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed
call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.

M. Hugh Steeply spoke quietly, after a prolonged silence of both operatives alone
with their thoughts, upon this mountain. Steeply faced still out, standing on the
outcropping’s lip, bare arms around him for some warmth, his dress’s soiled back to
Marathe. Around the bonfire, far out below upon the desert floor, rotated a ring of
smaller and palsied fires, persons carrying torches or fires.

‘Do you ever think of viewing it?’

Marathe did not reply. It was not impossible that the young persons carrying the torches
were dancing.

‘Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis
burglary,’ Steeply said quietly; ‘still, you guys have a Read-Only copy, at least
one, you’ve told us, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody has this mysterious Master, but we’ve all got Read-Only’s—all the anti-O.N.A.N.
cells have at least one Read-Only, we’re pretty sure.’

Marathe said, ‘M. Brullîme, he tells Fortier he thinks the CPCP of Alberta do not
have any copy.’

‘Fuck the Albertans,’ Steeply said. ‘Who’s worried about the Albertans? The Albertans’
idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is they blow up rangeland in Montana. They’re wackos.’

‘I have not been tempted,’ Marathe said.

Steeply’s sound appeared as if he did not hear. ‘We have more than one. Copies. Sure
we can assume your boys know this.’

Marathe dryly laughed. ‘Confiscated from razzles of Berkeley, Boston. But who can
know what is on them? Who can study the Entertainment while detached?’

Steeply’s scratch on the arm had become overnight puffed, and there were cross-hatches
of his scratching. ‘But just between us two, though. Tête to tête. You’ve never been
even slightly tempted? I mean personally. You the person. Wife’s condition be damned.
Kids be damned. Just for a second, slip into wherever you guys keep it and load it
and have a quick look? To see what’s all the fuss, the irresistible pull of the thing?’
He pivoted on one heel and looked, and cocked his head in a way of cynicism that seemed
to Marathe consummately U.S.A.

Marathe coughed softly into his fist. His own dead father’s Kenbeck pacemaker, it
had been damaged accidentally by a videophonic pulse of waves. This from a telephone
call from the telephone company, a video call, advertising the videophony. M. Marathe
had picked up the ringing telephone; the videophonic pulse, it had come; M. Marathe
had fallen, still holding a telephone Rémy had never been instructed to answer first,
to check. The advertisement, which was recorded, played its audible portion out upon
the floor beside his father’s ear, audible between Marathe’s mother’s cries.

Steeply raised and lowered himself on his shoes’ toes. ‘Us, Rod the God Tine’s got
Tom Flatto’s I/O boys running tests around the clock. 24-dash-7.’

‘Flatto, Thomas M., B.S.S. director of Input/Output testing, resident of Falls Church’s
community, a widower with three children, one child with cystic fibrosis.’

‘Funny as an impacted follicle, Rémy. And no doubt the insurgent cells are all each
doing work of your own, you guys with your own Dr. Brullent or whomever, trying to
find out what the Entertainment’s appeal could be without sacrificing any of your
own.’ Steeply again turned; he did this for emphasis. ‘Or maybe you’re willingly sacrificing
your own. Yes? Willing volunteers in chairs. Sacrificing self for the Greater and
all that. By adult choice and all that. Just for the sake of causing us harm. Wouldn’t
even want to
think
about how the A.F.R.’s conducting tests of the thing.’

‘
C’est ça.
’

‘But not so much for content,’ Steeply said. ‘Input/Output’s exhaustive testing. Flatto’s
got them working on conditions and environments for possible nonlethal viewing. Certain
departments in Virginia, the developing theory is that it’s holography.’

‘The
samizdat
.’

‘The filmmaker’d been a cutting-edge optics man. Holography, diffraction. He’d used
holography a couple times before, and in the context of a kind of filmed assault on
the viewer. He was of the Hostile School or some such shit.’

‘Also a maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important
Annulateur,
also, and amasser of the capital from opticals, before hostility and film,’ Marathe
said.

Steeply embraced himself. ‘Tom Flatto’s personal theory is the appeal’s got something
to do with density. The visual compulsion. Theory’s that with a really sophisticated
piece of holography you’d get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing
the selective realism of the viewer-screen. That the density plus the realism might
be too much to take. Dick Desai in Data Production wants to go in with ALGOL and see
if there are Fourier Equations in the root code’s ALGOL, which would signify holo-grammatical
activity going on.’

‘M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant.’

Steeply cocked his head sometimes in a way that was both feminine and birdlike. He
did this most often during silences. Also he again removed something small from his
painted lip. Also he spoke with more feminine inflection. Marathe committed all this
to his memories.

I remember
²⁰⁸
I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the
kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished
he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning
at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white
parted hair, and hadn’t yet removed the television makeup that gave his real face
an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and finished and rinsed my dishes in the
sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were
both in there. The master bedroom’s valance curtains and the heavy lightproof curtain
behind them were all slid back and the venetian blinds up, and the daylight was very
bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder-blue.

My father was bent over my parents’ large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the
way down to the mattress protector. He was bent over, pushing down on the bed’s mattress
with the heels of his hands. The bed’s sheets and pillows and powder-blue coverlet
were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his tumbler
of tomato juice to hold for him and got all the way on top of the bed and knelt on
it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight
into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress, then let up and pivoted slightly
on his knees and bore down with equal vigor on a different area of the mattress. He
did this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on the mattress on his
knees to get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember
thinking the bearing-down action looked very much like emergency compression of a
heart patient’s chest. I remember my father’s tomato juice had grains of pepperish
material floating on the surface. My mother was standing at the bedroom window, smoking
a long cigarette and looking at the lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch.
The uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight.