Infinite Jest (104 page)

'Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?’

'I dunno.’

'Oh. Oh. My mother's dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy's still sucking air, though. That's how he puts it — still sucking air. In Kentucky.’

'...’

'My mother's a worm-farmer from way back, though.’

'But so what about this Half Measures guy hit you so hard?’

'Harrd. Harrrrrd. Sound it out.’

'Real funny.’

'Don well it started out as that he spoke about himself like he used to be somebody else. Like a whole different person. He said he used to wear a four-piece suit and the fourth piece was him.’

'An Allston Group guy says that all the time, that joke.’

'He had on a real nice white thick-weave cotton shirt opened at the throat and wheat-colored pants and loafers without socks, which I'm up here ten years Don and I still can't follow this thing up here about y'all all wearing nice shoes and then wrecking them by wearing them without socks.’

'Joelle, you're maybe about the last person to be taking somebody's inventory about weird ways they dress, under there, maybe.’

'Kiss my rosy red ass, maybe.’

'Remind me to Log how it's real positive to see you coming out of this shell of yours.’

'Well and I got reservations on this Don but Diehl and Ken are telling me to come in to you with this issue of what's like occurring out there which Erdedy says it's a Staff-type issue and duh-duh duh-duh.’

'Had a little coffee tonight have we Foss?’

'Well Don and like you know and duh-duh.’

'Take a second. Inhale and blow out. I'm not going anywheres.’

'Well Don I hate a cheese-nibbler much as the next man but Geoff D. and Nell G. are out in the living room going around to all the new people asking them to think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for him to lift. They're doing it to everybody that's new. And that skittery kid Dingley —’

'Tingley. The new kid.’

'Well Don he's sitting in the linen closet with his legs sticking out of the linen closet with his eyes bugging out with like smoke coming out his ears and duh-duh duh-duh going like He Can but He Can't but He Can, respecting the suitcase and duh-duh, and Diehl says it's a matter for Staff, it's a negative thing Day's doing and Erdedy says I'm Senior Res. and to go to Staff with it and eat cheese.’

'Shit.’

'Diehl said a case this negative and duh-duh, no way it's like ratting.’

'No, I appreciate. It ain't ratting.’

'Plus I brought in this really good like tollhouse-butterscotch cookie thing Hanley made a plate of, which Erdedy said it's not like kissing ass so much as commonplace decency.’

'Erdedy's a community pillar. I got to stay in here with the phone. Maybe you could tell Geoff and Nell to like waltz on in if they can take time out from torturing the new people.’

Til probably leave out the torturing part if it's OK with you, Don.’

'Which by the way here I am looking at this cookie still in your hand, notice.’

'Jesus, the cookie. Jesus.’

'Try and relax a little, kid.’

'I got to stay down with the phones till 2200. Try a plunger and let me know and I can call Services.’

'I'm thinking it'd be doing a favor if Staff clued in anybody new that comes in on the fact that the H-faucet in the shower that its H really stands for Holy Cow That's Cold.’

'Are you saying in a sideways way there's some trouble with the water-temp in the head, McDade?’

'Don, I'm saying just what I came in here to say. And can I say by the way nice shirt. My dad used to bowl, too, when he still had a thumb.’

'I don't care what the sick bastard told you, Yolanda. Getting on your knees in the A.M. to Ask For Help does not mean getting on your knees in the A.M. while this sick yutz stands in front of you and unzips his fly and you Ask For Help into his fly. I'm praying this is not a male resident said this. This is the sort of thing why same-sex sponsors only are a suggestion. Is that there's some sick bastards around the rooms, you get me? Any AA tells a new female in the Program to use his Unit for her Higher Power, I'd give that guy a wide detour. You get what I'm saying?’

'And I didn't even tell you yet how he suggested I should thank the Higher Power at night.’

'I'd cross a broad street to avoid an AA like this guy, Yolanda.’

'And how he said how I always have to be on the south of him, like stay on his south side, and I have to buy a digital watch.’

'Holy Christ this is Lenz. Is this Lenz you're telling me about?’

'I ain't use no names in here. All I say he seemed real friendly and fly at first, and helpful, when I first came, this dude I ain't say no name.’

'You have trouble with the part of the Second Step that's about insanity and you've been using Randy Lenz for a sponsor?’

'This is a nomonous Program, you know what I'm saying?’

'Jesus, kid.’

Orin ('O.') Incandenza stands embracing a putatively Swiss hand-model in a rented room. They embrace. Their faces become sexual faces. It seems clear evidence of a kind of benign fate or world-spirit that this incredible specimen had appeared at Sky Harbor Int. Airp. just as Orin stood with his fine forehead against the glass of the Gate overlooking the tarmac after actually volunteering to drive Helen Steeply all the nightmarish way down I-17/-10 to the ghastly glittering unnavigable airport and the Subject seemed, in the car, not only not especially grateful, and hadn't let him so much as place a friendly and supportive palm on her incredible quadricep during the ride, but had been irritatingly all-business and had continued to pursue lines of family-linen inquiry he'd all but begged her to quit subjecting him to the inappropriateness of
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— that, as he stood there after having received little other than a cool smile and a promise to try to say hello to Hallie, with his forehead against the glass of the Weston back door — or rather the Delta gate window — this incredible specimen had — unbidden, unStrategized — come up to him and started a lush foreign-accented conversation and revealed professionally lovely hands as she rooted in her tripolymer bag to ask him to autograph for her toddler-age son a Cardinal-souvenir football she had right there (!) in her bag, along with her Swiss passport — as if the universe were reaching out a hand to pluck him from the rim of the abyss of despair that any real sort of rejection or frustration of his need for some Subject he'd picked out always threatened him with, as if he'd been teetering with his arms windmilling at a great height without even idiotic red wings strapped to his back and the universe were sending this lovely steadying left hand to pull him gently back and embrace him and not so much console him as remind him of who and what he was about, standing there embracing a Subject with a sexual face for his sexual face, no longer speaking, the football and pen on the neatly made bed, the two of them embracing between the bed and the mirror with the woman facing the bed so that Orin can see past her head the large hanging mirror and the small framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed along the wood-grain dresser below the window,
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the tubby-faced man and Swiss-looking kids all smiling trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to their right.

They have shifted into a sexual mode. Her lids flutter; his close. There's a concentrated tactile languor. She is left-handed. It is not about consolation. They start the thing with each other's buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second's love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets — that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One.

(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never again.)

And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he disguises in the tender attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were part of her, and him. As if it could feel. They have stripped each other neatly. Her mouth is glued to his mouth; she is his breath, his eyes shut against the sight of hers. They are stripped in the mirror and she, in a kind of virtuoso jitterbug that is 100% New World, uses O.'s uneven shoulders as support to leap and circle his neck with her legs, and she arches her back and is supported, her weight, by just one hand at the small of her back as he bears her to bed as would a waiter a tray.

'Hoompf.’

'Herrmmp.’

'Well in excess of a thousand pardons for my collision.’

'Arslanian? Is that you?’

'It is I, Idris Arslanian. Who is this other?’

'It's Ted Schacht, Id. Why the blindfold?’

'Where have I come, please. I became disoriented upon a set of stairs. I became panicked. I nearly removed my blindfold. Where are we? I detect many odors.’

'You're just off the weight room, in the little hall off the tunnel that isn't the little hall that goes to the sauna. Why the blindfold, though?’

'And the origin of this sound of hysterical weeping and moans, this is —?’

'It's Anton Doucette in there. He's in there clinically depressed. Lyle's trying to buck him up. Some of the crueler guys are in there watching like it's entertainment. I got disgusted. Somebody in pain isn't entertainment. I did my sets, now I'm a vapor-trail.’

'You exude vapor?’

'Always nice running into you, Id.’

'Await. Please conduct me upstairs or into the locker for a lavatory visit. The blindfold I am wearing is experimental on the part of Thorp. You are told of the visually challenged player who will matriculate?’

The blind kid? From like Nowheresburg, Iowa? Dempster?’

'Dymphna.’

'He's not coming in til next term. He delayed, Inc said they said. Dural edema or something.’

'Though age only nine, he is in his Midwest region's ranking of Twelve and Belows highly ranked. Coach Thorp tells this.’

'Well, I'd say for a blind, soft-skulled kid he's real high-ranked, Id, yeah.’

'But Dymphna. I hear Thorp tell that the highness of the ranking may be due to the blindness itself. Thorp and Texas Watson were who scouted this player.’

'I wouldn't mention the name Watson near that weight room in there if I were you.’

'Thorp tells that his excellence of play is scouted by them to be his anticipation. As in the player Dymphna arrives at the necessary location well before the opponent player's ball, through anticipation.’

'I know what anticipation is, Id.’

'Thorp tells to me that this excellence in anticipation in the blind is because of hearing and sounds, because sounds are merely . . . here. Please read the comment I have carefully notated upon this folded piece of paper.’

' "Sound Merely 'Variations In Intensity' — Throp." Throp?’

'It was meaning Thorp, in excitement. He tells that one may, perforce, judge the opponent player's VAPS
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in more detail by the ear than the eye. This is experimental theory of Thorp. This is explaining why the highly ranked Dymphna appears to always have floated by magic to the necessary spot where a ball is soon to land. Thorp tells this in a convincing manner.’

'Perforce?’

That this blind person is able to judge the necessary spot of landing by the intensity of the sound of the ball against the opponent player's string.’

'Instead of watching the contact and then imaginatively extending the beginning of its flight, like those of us hobbled by sight.’

T, Idris Arslanian, am compelled with Thorp's telling.’

'Which helps explain the blindfold.’

'I therefore experiment with volunteer blindness. Training the ear in degrees of intensity in play. Today versus Whale I was wearing the blindfold to play.’

'How'd it go?’

'Not as well as hoped. I frequently faced the wrong direction for play. I frequently judged by the intensity of balls struck on adjacent courts and ran onto adjacent courts, intruding on play.’

'We sort of wondered what all the ruckus was down there at the 14's end.’

'Thorp tells that training the ear is a process of time, in encouragement.’

'Well, later, Id.’

'Stop. Wait before leaving. Please conduct me to a lavatory. Ted Schacht? Are you as yet there?’

'...’

'Are you as yet there? I very —’