Infinite Jest (134 page)

The southbound bus, empty and (which he detested) fluorescently lit, climbs a thin hill off Winter Park, north Cambridge, heading for the Squares Inman and Central. Fortier looks out at the lights passing. He can smell snow coming; it soon will snow. He sees in his imagination two-thirds of NNE's largest urban city inert, sybaritically entranced, staring, without bodily movement, home-bounded, fouling their divans and the chairs which may recline. He sees the district of business's towers of buildings and luxury apartments striated as two of every three floors is darkened to lightless black. With here and there the vaguely blue flicker of expensive digital entertainment equipment flickering through darkened windows. He imagines M. Tine holding the hand holding the pen of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring War. He imagines teacups clinking thinly beneath trembling hands in the interior sanctums of Ottawa's sanctum of power. He adjusts his sportcoat's lapel over his sweater and smooths the wiry hair that tends to bulge unsmoothly around the bare spot. He watches the back of the bus driver's neck as the driver stares straight ahead.

Sure enough the Chinkette women had been strengthless and lightweight, flew aside like dolls, and their bags were indeed treasure-heavy, hard to heft; but as Lenz cut left down the north-south alley he could hold the bags by their twine handles out slightly before him, so their weight's momentum kind of pulled him along. The cruciform alleys through the blocks between Central and Inman in Little Lisbon were a kind of second city. Lenz ran. His breath came easy and he could feel himself from scalp to sole. Green and green-with-red dumpsters lined both walls and made the going narrow. He vaulted two sitting figures in khaki sharing a can of Sterno on the alley floor. He glided through the foul air above them, untouched by it. The sounds behind him were his footfalls' echo off dumpsters and fire-escapes' iron. His left hand ached nicely from holding both a bag's handle and his large-print volume. A dumpster up ahead had been hitched to an E.W.D. truck and just left to sit: probably quitting time. The Empire guys had an incredible union. In the recess of the hitch's bar a small blue light flickered and died. This was a dozen dumpsters up ahead. Lenz slowed to a brisk walk. His topcoat had slipped slightly off one of his shoulders but he had no free hand to fix it and wasn't going to take time to put a bag down. His left hand felt cramped. It was somewhere vague between 2224 and 2226h. The alley was dark as a pocket. A tiny crash off somewhere south down the network of alleys was actually Poor Tony Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that tripped up Ruth van Cleve. The tiny blue flame came on, hung still, flickered, moved, hung there, went back out. Its glow was dark blue against the back of the huge E.W.D. truck. Empire trucks were unstoppable, hitches were valuable but locked down with a Kryptonite device thing you needed welding stuff to cut through. From the recess of the hitch there were small sounds. When the lighter lit again Lenz was almost on them, two boys on the hitch and two squatting down by the hitch facing them, four of them, a fire-escape's pull-ladder distended like a tongue and hanging just above them. None of the boys was over like twelve. They used a M. Fizzy bottle instead of a pipe, and the smell of burnt plastic hung mixed with the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock. The boys were all small and slight and either black or spic, greedily hunching over the flame; they looked ratty. Lenz kept them in peripheral view as he strode briskly by, carrying his bags, spine straight and extruding dignified purpose. The lighter went out. The boys on the hitch eyed Lenz's bags. The squatting boys turned their heads to look. Lenz kept them in peripheral view. None of them wore watches. One of them wore a knit cap and watched steadily. He locked eyes with Lenz's left eye, made a gun of his thin hand, pretended to draw a slow bead. Like performing for the others. Lenz walked by with urban dignity, like he both saw them and didn't. The smell was intense but real local, of the rock and bottle. He had to veer out to miss the Empire truck's side mirror on its steel strut. He heard them say things as the truck's grille fell behind, and unkind laughter, and then something called out in a minority agnate he didn't know. He heard the lighter's flint. He thought to himself Assholes. He was looking for someplace empty and a bit more lit, to go through the bags. And cleaner than this one north-south alley here, which smelled of ripe waste and rotting skin. He would separate the bags' valuables from the nonvaluables and transfer the valuables to a single bag. He would fence the nonnegotiable valuables in Little Lisbon and refill the receptacle in his medical dictionary, and buy some attractiver shoes. The alley was devroid of cats and rodents both; he did not stop to reflect why. A rock or bit of brick courtesy of the junior crack-jockeys back there landed behind him and skittered past and rang out against something, and someone cried out aloud, a sexless figure lying back against a maybe duffel bag or pack against a dump-ster, its hand moving furiously in its groin and its feet pointed out into the alley and turned out like a dead body's, its shoes two different shoes, its hair a clotted mass around its face, looking up over at Lenz going past in the faint start of light from a broader alley's intersection ahead, chanting softly what Lenz could hear as he stepped gingerly over the rot-smelling legs as 'Pretty, pretty, pretty.' Lenz whispered to himself 'Jesus what a lot of fucked-up ass-eating fucking losers.’

'Our cult burned money for fuel.’

'As in like currency.’

'We used Ones. The Semi Divine One advocated thrift. We'd bring them to Him at the stove. There was one stove. We had to bring them to Him on our knees with no part of our feet could touch the floor. He sat by the stove in our blankets and fed it Ones. We got an extra slap if the currency was new.’

'As in like crisp and new.’

'It was a cleansing. Somebody always played a drum.’

'Our cult's Divinely Chosen Leader drove a Rolls. In neutral. We pushed him wherever he was Called to like be at. He never turned it on. The Rolls. I got all muscled up.’

'In summer then they made us slither on our bellies. We had to embrace our snake-nature. It was a cleansing.’

'As in like slithering.’

'Serious slithering. They took wire and bound our arms and legs.’

'At least your wire wasn't barbed.’

'I finally felt too cleansed to stay.’

'Meaning over-pure, I can I.D. totally.’

'It was too much love somehow to take.’

'I'm like feeling the Identification all over, this is —’

'Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end.’

'And then our Divinely Chosen's Love Squads made us chop wood with our teeth when it got cold. As in like subzero wintertime.’

'Yours let you keep your teeth?’

'Only the ones for gnawing. See?’

'Sheesh.’

'Just the ones for gnawing.’

Rémy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room evening of this Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, the last demi-maison on his portion of the list for this day. The hills of upper Enfield, they were de I'infere of difficulty, but the demi-maison itself had a ramp. A person with authority was conducting interviews to fill some vacancies of recent time in the place's Office, of which its locked door was visible from this sitting. Marathe and others were invited to sit in the living room with a cup of unpleasant coffee. Urged to smoke if he liked. Everyone else was smoking. The living room smelled like an ashtray, and its ceiling was yellow like the fingers of long smokers. Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud. There were demi-maison patients viewing a cartridge of martial arts conflict, former patients and persons of the upper Enfield area cohabiting on the furniture, conversing. A damaged woman, also in a fauteuil de rollent like Marathe, slumped inutile next to the cartridge's viewer, while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the kicks and thrusts of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the woman to twitch or cry out. Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway. Other persons, presumably addicted, waiting in the room to seek admittance to the Recovery House. The room was loud and hot. Marathe could hear a person who will seek admittance vomiting in the shrubberies just outside the window. Marathe's chair was locked down next to a divan's arm and directly before a window. The window, one could wish it was open more than a crack, he felt. Upon the dull-colored carpet a tormented-appearing man scuttling like the crab while two hooligans in leather played a cruel game of jumping over him. Persons reading cartoon books and painting the nails of their extremities. A tall-haired woman brought her foot to her mouth to blow upon her toes. Another young girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. No other in the room wore the veil of the Entertainment's performer's organization U.H.I.D. The smell of the U.S.A. cigarettes permeated his veil and made Marathe's eyes water, and he thought of vomiting also. Two additional windows were open, but the room lacked all air.

During the time of his sitting, several persons approached Marathe, but they would say to him only the whispers 'Pet the dogs' or 'Make sure and pet the dogs.' This idiomatic expression was not in Marathe's knowledge of U.S.A. idiom.

Also one person approached of a face whose skin seemed that it was rotting away from him in some way and asked him if he, Marathe, was court-ordered.

Marathe was one of few persons not smoking. He noted that none of the room's persons appeared to regard the cheesecloth veil he wore over his face as unusual or curious or to be questioned. The old sportcoat he wore over a turtleneck sweater of Desjardin's made Marathe more formally dressed than other of the applicants for treatment. Two of the Ennet House demi-maison current patients wore neckties, however. Marathe kept pretending to sniff; he did not know why. He sat up next to a divan of false velour at whose end beside him two women who had sought previous treatment of addiction in religious cults were meeting and speaking together of their unenjoyable existences when in cults.

To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M. Fortier quickly had developed: 'Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately.' Persons' responses to his introductory lines were difficult to interpret. One of the older two men in neckties who had approached, he had clapped a hand to his soft face's cheek and responded 'How extraordinarily nice for you,' in which Marathe could detect sarcasm. The two women of cult experience were inclined closely toward each other upon the divan. They touched each other's arms several times in a kind of excitement as they conversed. When they laughed in delight they seemed to chew at the air. One's laughter involved also a snorting noise. A clatter and two shrieks: these came from one end of the dining room, in the demi-maison's floor plans a large kitchen.

The sounds were then followed by a roiling cloud of steam, with repeated obscenities from unseen persons. A bald large black man in a white cotton undershirt's laughing became coughing that would not cease. The two patients in neckties and the girl whose eye could be removed spoke together intensively and also audibly at the end of one other divan.

'But consider this quality of portability with respect to, say, a car. Is a car portable? With respect to a car it's more as though I'm portable.’

'They're portable when they're on one of them semis where they got new cars stacked on with prices in the windows like a good couple dozen on them semis that swing all to fuck all over 1-93 and make you think the cars are going to start falling out all over the road when you're wanting to try and pass.’

The plump one who had been ironic toward Marathe, he was nodding: 'Or, say, too, with respect to a tow truck or wrecker, if you suffer a breakdown. One might be in a position to say that a deactivated car can be quote portable, but that with respect to a functional car it is I who am portable.’

The girl's nod caused the particular eye to wheel queasily in the socket of it. Til buy that, Day.’

'If we're jot-and-titiling with all possible precision regarding portable, that is.’

The other man continually rubbed at his shine of the shoes with a facial tissue, causing his necktie to touch the floor.

These conversers formed this triad on an unevenly sloped divan of leather-colored plastic across the room, which was now more airless yet from the roiling steam from the kitchen, infiltrating. Directly facing Marathe in a yellow chair against the wall by these conversers' divan most directly across the living room from Marathe was an addicted man waiting for seeking treatment by admission. This one, he appeared to have several cigarettes burning at one time. He held a metal ashtray in his lap and jiggled the boot of his crossed leg with vigor. For Marathe, it was not difficult to ignore the fact that the addicted man was glaring at him. He noted it, and did not understand because of what the man glared, but he was unconcerned. Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions. U.S.A.'s B.S.S.'s M. Steeply had verified that U.S.A.s did not comprehend this or appreciate it; it was foreign to them. The veil allowed Marathe the liberty of staring calmly back at the addicted man without the man's knowledge, which Marathe found he enjoyed. Marathe felt sick to his body, from the smoky room's smoke. Marathe had once, as a child, with legs, bent himself over and overturned a decaying log in the forests of the Lac de Deux Montaignes region of his four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train.
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The pallor of the things which had writhed and scuttled beneath the wet log was the pallor of this addicted man, who wore a square of the facial hair between lower lip and chin and had also a needle run through the flesh of the top of an ear, which the needle, it glistened and did not glisten rapidly in succession as it vibrated with the jiggle of the jiggling boot. Marathe gazed at him calmly through the veil while rehearsing his prepared lines within his head. The more idiomatic would be that the needle jiggled sympathetically with the jiggle of the boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did.