Infinite Jest (98 page)

My parents’ bed’s box spring, though also King-Size and heavy, had just below its
synthetic covering a wooden frame that gave the box spring structural integrity, and
it didn’t flop or alter its shape, and after another bit of difficulty for my father—who
was too thick through the middle, even with the professional girdle beneath his Glad
costume—after another bit of difficulty for my father squeezing with his end of the
box spring through the bedroom doorway, we were able to get it into the hall and lean
it vertically at something just over 70° against the wall, where it stayed upright
with no problem.

‘That’s the way she wants doing, Jim,’ my father said, clapping me on the back in
exactly the ebullient way that had prompted me to have my mother buy an elastic athletic
cranial strap for my glasses. I had told my mother I needed the strap for tennis purposes,
and she had not asked any questions.

My father’s hand was still on my back as we returned to the master bedroom. ‘Right,
then!’ my father said. His mood was now elevated. There was a brief second of confusion
at the doorway as each of us tried to step back to let the other through first.

There was now nothing but the suspect frame left where the bed had been. There was
something exoskeletal and frail-looking about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle
of black steel. At each corner of the rectangle was a caster. The casters’ wheels
had sunk into the pile carpet under the weight of the bed and my parents and were
almost completely submerged in the carpet’s fibers. Each of the frame’s sides had
a narrow steel shelf welded at 90° to its interior’s base, so that a single rectangular
narrow shelf perpendicular to the frame’s rectangle ran all around the frame’s interior.
This shelf was obviously there to support the bed’s occupants and King-Size box spring
and mattress.

My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. There
seemed to be a long silent interval of my father looking closely at the exposed frame.
The interval had the silence and stillness of dusty rooms immersed in sunlight. I
briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the bedroom covered with sheets and the
room unoccupied for years as the sun rose and crossed and fell outside the window,
the room’s daylight becoming staler and staler. I could hear two power lawnmowers
of slightly different pitch from somewhere down our subdivision’s street. The direct
light through the master bedroom’s window swam with rotating columns of raised dust.
I remember it seemed the ideal moment for a sneeze.

Dust lay thick on the frame and even hung from the frame’s interior support-shelf
in little gray beards. It was impossible to see any bolts anywhere on the frame.

My father blotted sweat and wet makeup from his forehead with the back of his sleeve,
which was now dark orange with makeup. ‘Jesus will you look at that mess,’ he said.
He looked at my mother. ‘Jesus.’

The carpeting in my parents’ bedroom was deep-pile and a darker blue than the pale
blue of the rest of the bedroom’s color scheme. I remember the carpet as more a royal
blue, with a saturation level somewhere between moderate and strong. The rectangular
expanse of royal blue carpet that had been hidden under the bed was itself carpeted
with a thick layer of clotted dust. The rectangle of dust was gray-white and thick
and unevenly layered, and the only evidence of the room’s carpet below was a faint
sick bluish cast to the dust-layer. It looked as if dust had not drifted under the
bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather had somehow taken root and
grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse
of spoiled food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like spoiled food, bad cottage
cheese. It was nauseous. Some of the dust-layer’s uneven topography was caused by
certain lost- and litter-type objects that had found their way under the bed—a flyswatter,
a roughly
Variety-
sized magazine, some bottletops, three wadded Kleenex, and what was probably a sock—and
gotten covered and textured in dust.

There was also a faint odor, sour and fungal, like the smell of an overused bathmat.

‘Jesus, there’s even a smell,’ my father said. He made a show of inhaling through
his nose and screwing up his face. ‘There’s even a fucking
smell.
’ He blotted his forehead and felt his jaw and looked hard at my mother. His mood
was no longer elevated. My father’s mood surrounded him like a field and affected
any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.

‘When was the last time this got cleaned under here?’ my father asked my mother.

My mother didn’t say anything. She looked at my father as he moved the steel frame
around a little with his boot, which raised even more dust into the window’s sunlight.
The bed frame seemed very lightweight, moving back and forth noiselessly on its casters’
submerged wheels. My father often moved lightweight objects absently around with his
foot, rather the way other men doodle or examine their cuticles. Rugs, magazines,
telephone and electrical cords, his own removed shoe. It was one of my father’s ways
of musing or gathering his thoughts or trying to control his mood.

‘Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I’m standing
here prompted to fucking muse out loud,’ my father said.

I looked at my mother to see whether she was going to say anything in reply.

I said to my father, ‘You know, since we’re discussing squeaking beds, my bed squeaks,
too.’

My father was trying to squat down to see whether he could locate any bolts on the
frame, saying something to himself under his breath. He put his hands on the frame
for balance and almost fell forward when the frame rolled under his weight.

‘But I don’t think I even really noticed it until we began to discuss it,’ I said.
I looked at my mother. ‘I don’t think it bothers me,’ I said. ‘Actually, I think I
kind of like it. I think I’ve gradually gotten so used to it that it’s become almost
comforting. At this juncture,’ I said.

My mother looked at me.

‘I’m not complaining about it,’ I said. ‘The discussion just made me think of it.’

‘Oh, we hear your bed, don’t you worry,’ my father said. He was still trying to squat,
which drew his corset and the hem of his tunic up and allowed the top of his bottom’s
crack to appear above the the waist of his white pants. He shifted slightly to point
up at the master bedroom’s ceiling. ‘You so much as turn over in bed up there? We
hear it down here.’ He took one steel side of the rectangle and shook the frame vigorously,
sending up a shroud of dust. The bed frame seemed to weigh next to nothing under his
hands. My mother made a mustache of her finger to hold back a sneeze.

He shook the frame again. ‘But it doesn’t aggravate us the way this rodential son
of a whore right here does.’

I remarked that I didn’t think I’d ever once heard their bed squeak before, from upstairs.
My father twisted his head around to try to look up at me as I stood there behind
him. But I said I’d definitely heard and could confirm the presence of a squeak when
he’d pressed on the mattress, and could verify that the squeak was no one’s imagination.

My father held a hand up to signal me to please stop talking. He remained in a squat,
rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, using the rolling frame to keep his balance.
The flesh of the top of his bottom and crack-area protruded over the waist of his
pants. There were also deep red folds in the back of his neck, below the blunt cut
of the wig, because he was looking up and over at my mother, who was resting her tailbone
on the sill of the window, still holding her shallow ashtray.

‘Maybe you’d like to go get the vacuum,’ he said. My mother put the ashtray down on
the sill and exited the master bedroom, passing between me and the dresser piled with
bedding. ‘If you can… if you can remember where it is!’ my father called after her.

I could hear my mother trying to get past the King-Size mattress sagging diagonally
across the hall.

My father was rocking more violently on the balls of his feet, and now the rocking
had the sort of rolling, side-to-side quality of a ship in high seas. He came very
close to losing his balance as he leaned to his right to get a handkerchief from his
hip pocket and began using it to reach out and flick dust off something at one corner
of the bed frame. After a moment he pointed down next to a caster.

‘Bolt,’ he said, pointing at the side of a caster. ‘Right there’s a bolt.’ I leaned
in over him. Drops of my father’s perspiration made small dark coins in the dust of
the frame. There was nothing but smooth lightweight black steel surface where he was
pointing, but just to the left of where he was pointing I could see what might have
been a bolt, a little stalactite of clotted dust hanging from some slight protrusion.
My father’s hands were broad and his fingers blunt. Another possible bolt lay several
inches to the right of where he pointed. His finger trembled badly, and I believe
the trembling might have been from the muscular strain on his bad knees, trying to
hold so much new weight in a squat for an extended period. I heard the telephone ring
twice. There had been an extended silence, with my father pointing at neither protrusion
and me trying to lean in over him.

Then, still squatting on the balls of his feet, my father placed both hands on the
side of the frame and leaned out over the side into the rectangle of dust inside the
frame and had what at first sounded like a bad coughing fit. His hunched back and
rising bottom kept me from watching him. I remember deciding that the reason the frame
was not rolling under his hands’ pressure was that my father had so much of his weight
on it, and that maybe my father’s nervous system’s response to heavy dust was a cough-signal
instead of a sneeze-signal. It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside
the rectangle, plus the rising odor, that signified to me that, rather than coughing,
my father had been taken ill. The spasms involved made his back rise and fall and
his bottom tremble under his white commercial slacks. It was not too uncommon for
my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he
seemed to have been taken really ill. To give him some privacy, I went around the
frame to the side of the frame closest to the window where there was direct light
and less odor and examined another of the frame’s casters. My father was whispering
to himself in brief expletive phrases between the spasms of his illness. I squatted
easily and rubbed dust from a small area of the frame and wiped the dust on the carpet
by my feet. There was a small carriage-head bolt on either side of the plating that
attached the caster to the bed frame. I knelt and felt one of the bolts. Its round
smooth head made it impossible either to tighten or loosen. Putting my cheek to the
carpet and examining the bottom of the little horizontal shelf welded to the frame’s
side, I observed that the bolt seemed threaded tightly and completely through its
hole, and I decided it was doubtful that any of the casters’ platings’ bolts were
producing the sounds that reminded my father of rodents.

Just at this time, I remember, there was a loud cracking sound and my area of the
frame jumped violently as my father’s illness caused him to faint and he lost his
balance and pitched forward and lay prone and asleep over his side of the bed frame,
which as I rolled away from the frame and rose to my knees I saw was either broken
or very badly bent. My father lay face-down in the mixture of the rectangle’s thick
dust and the material he’d brought up from his upset stomach. The dust his collapse
raised was very thick, and as the new dust rose and spread it attenuated the master
bedroom’s daylight as decisively as if a cloud had moved over the sun in the window.
My father’s professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust
and stomach material. The stomach material appeared to be mostly gastric blood until
I recalled the tomato juice my father had been drinking. He lay face-down, with his
bottom high in the air, over the side of the bed frame, which his weight had broken
in half. This was how I accounted for the loud cracking sound.

I stood out of the way of the dust and the window’s dusty light, feeling along the
line of my jaw and examining my prone father from a distance. I remember that his
breathing was regular and wet, and that the dust mixture bubbled somewhat. It was
then that it occurred to me that when I’d been supporting the bed’s raised mattress
with my chest and face preparatory to its removal from the room, the dihedral triangle
I’d imagined the mattress forming with the box spring and my body had not in fact
even been a closed figure: the box spring and the floor I had stood on did not constitute
a continuous plane.

Then I could hear my mother trying to get the heavy canister vacuum cleaner past the
angled Simmons Beauty Rest in the hall, and I went to help her. My father’s legs were
stretched out across the clean blue carpet between his side of the frame and my mother’s
white dresser. His feet’s boots were at a pigeon-toed angle, and his bottom’s crack
all the way down to the anus itself was now visible because the force of his fall
had pulled his white slacks down even farther. I stepped carefully between his legs.

‘Excuse me,’ I said.

I was able to help my mother by telling her to detach the vacuum cleaner’s attachments
and hand them one at a time to me over the width of the slumped mattress, where I
held them. The vacuum cleaner was manufactured by Regina, and its canister, which
contained the engine, bag, and evacuating fan, was very heavy. I reassembled the vacuum
and held it while my mother made her way back across the mattress, then handed the
vacuum cleaner back to her, flattening myself against the wall to let her pass by
on her way into the master bedroom.

‘Thanks,’ my mother said as she passed.