Infinite Jest (20 page)

Hal's put on an undemanding visualization-type cartridge, as he usually does for a Big Buddy group-interface when they're all tired. He's killed the volume, so you can't hear the reinforcing mantra, but the picture is bright and bell-clear. It's like the picture almost leaps out at you. A graying and somewhat ravaged-looking Stan Smith in anachronistic white is at a court's baseline hitting textbook forehands, over and over again, the same stroke, his back sort of osteoporotically hunched but his form immaculate, his footwork textbook and effortless — the frictionless pivot and back-set of weight, the anachronistic Wilson wood stick back and pointing straight to the fence behind him, the fluid transfer of weight to the front foot as the ball comes in, the contact at waist-level and just out front, the front leg's muscles bunching up as the back leg's settle, eyes glued to the yellow ball in the center of his strings' stencilled W — E.T.A. kids are conditioned to watch not just the ball but the ball's rotating seams, to read the spin coming in — the front knee dipping slightly down under bulging quads as the weight flows more forward, the back foot up almost en-pointe on the gleaming sneaker's unscuffed toe, the no-nonsense flourishless follow-through so the stick ends up just in front of his gaunt face — Smith's cheeks have hollowed as he's aged, his face has collapsed at the sides, his eyes seem to bulge from the cheekbones that protrude as he inhales after impact, he looks desiccated, aged in hot light, performing the same motions over and over, for decades, his other hand floating up gently to grasp the stick's throat out in front of the face so he's flowed back into the Ready Stance all over again. No wasted motion, egoless strokes, no flourishes or tics or excesses of wrist. Over and over, each forehand melting into the next, a loop, it's hypnotizing, it's supposed to be. The soundtrack says 'Don't Think Just See Don't Know Just Flow' over and over, if you turn it up. You're supposed to pretend it's you on the bell-clear screen with the fluid and egoless strokes. You're supposed to disappear into the loop and then carry that disappearance out with you, to play. The kids're lying there limp and splayed, supine, jaws slack, eyes wide and dim, a relaxed exhausted warmth — the flooring beneath the shag is gently heated. Peter Beak is asleep with his eyes open, a queer talent E.T.A. seems to instill in the younger ones. Orin had been able to sleep with his eyes open at the dinner table, too, at home.

Hal's fingers, long and light brown and still slightly sticky from tincture of benzoin,
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are laced behind his upraised head on the pillow, cupping his own skull, watching Stan Smith, eyes heavy too. 'You feel as though you'll be going through the exact same sort of suffering at seventeen you suffer now, here, Kent?’

Kent Blott has colored shoelaces on his sneakers with 'Mr.-Bouncety-Bounce-Program'-brand bow-biters, which Hal finds extraordinarily artless and young.

Peter Beak snores softly, a small spit-bubble protruding and receding.

'But Blott surely you've considered this: Why are they all still here, then, if it's so awful every day?’

'Not every day,' Blott says. 'But pretty often it's awful.’

'They're here because they want the Show when they get out,' Ingersoll sniffs and says. The Show meaning the A.T.P. Tour, travel and cash prizes and endorsements and appearance fees, match-highlights in video mags, action photos in glossy print-mags.

'But they know and we know one very top junior in twenty even gets all the way to the Show. Much less survives there long. The rest slog around on the satellite tours or regional tours or get soft as club pros. Or become lawyers or academics like everyone else,' Hal says softly.

'Then they stay and suffer to get a scholarship. A college ride. A white cardigan with a letter. Girl coeds keen on lettermen.’

'Kent, except for Wayne and Pemulis not one guy in there needs any kind of scholarship. Pemulis'll get a full ride anywhere he wants, just on test-scores. Slice's aunts'll send him anywhere even if he doesn't want to play. And Wayne's headed for the Show, he'll never do more than a year in the O.N.A.N.C.A.A.'s.' Blott's father, a cutting-edge E.N.T. oncologist, flew all over the world removing tumors from wealthy mucous membranes; Blott has a trust fund. 'None of that's the point and you guys know it.’

'They love the game, you're going to say.’

Stan Smith has switched to backhands.

'They sure must love something, Ingersoll, but how about for a second I say that's not Kent's point either. Kent's point's the misery in that room just now. K.B., I've taken part in essentially that same bitter bitchy kind of session hundreds of times with those same guys after bad P.M.s. In the showers, in the sauna, at dinner.’

'Very much bitching also in the lavatories,' Arslanian says.

Hal unsticks his hair from his fingers. Arslanian always has a queer faint hot-doggish smell about him. 'The point is it's ritualistic. The bitching and moaning. Even assuming they feel the way they say when they get together, the point is notice we were all sitting there all feeling the same way together.’

'The point is togetherness?’

'Shouldn't there be violas for this part, Hal, if this is the point?’

'Ingersoll, I —’

Beak's cold-weather adenoids wake him periodically, and he gurgles and his eyes roll up briefly before they level out and he settles back, seeming to stare.

Hal creatively visualizes that Smith's velvety backhand is him slo-mo slapping Evan Ingersoll into the opposite wall. Ingersoll's parents founded the Rhode Island version of the service where you order groceries by TP and teenagers in fleets of station wagons bring them out to you, instead of supermarkets. 'What the point is is that we'd all just spent three hours playing challenges against each other in scrotum-tightening cold, assailing each other, trying to take away each other's spots on the squads. Trying to defend them against each other's assaults. The system's got inequality as an axiom. We know where we stand entirely in relation to one another. John Wayne's over me, and I'm over Struck and Shaw, who two years back were both over me but under Troeltsch and Schacht, and now are over Troeltsch who as of today is over Freer who's substantially over Schacht, who can't beat anyone in the room except Pemulis since his knee and Crohn's Disease got so much worse, and is barely hanging on in terms of ranking, and is showing incredible balls just hanging on. Freer beat me 4 and 2 in the quarters of the U.S. Clays two summers ago, and now he's on the B-squad and five slots below me, six slots if Troeltsch can still beat him when they play again after that illness-default.’

'I am over Blott. I am over Ingersoll,' Idris Arslanian nods.

'Well Blott's just ten, Idris. And you're under Chu, who's on an odd year and is under Possalthwaite. And Blott's under Beak and Ingersoll simply by virtue of age-division.’

'I know just where I stand at all times,' muses Ingersoll.

SyberVision edits its visualization sequences with a melt-filter so Stan Smith's follow-through loops seamlessly into his backswing for the exact same next stroke; the transitions are gauzy and dreamlike. Hal struggles to hike himself up onto his elbows:

'We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.’

'E Unibus Pluram,'' Ingersoll muses.

Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll's face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. 'So how can we also be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris's singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot again?’

'I do not require his root, for I am ready.' Arslanian bares canines.

'Well that's the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?’

'You're talking about community. This is a community-spiel.’

'I think alienation,' Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he's talking to Ingersoll. 'Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism.' His upper lip goes up and down over his teeth.

Hal says, 'In a nutshell, what we're talking about here is loneliness.’

Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak's palsied eyes and little limb-spasms signify a troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose furiously with the heel of his hand.

'I miss my dog,' Ingersoll concedes.

'Ah.' Hal rolls onto one elbow to hike a finger into the air. 'Ah. But then so notice the instant group-cohesion that formed itself around all the pissing and moaning down there why don't you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering unites us. They want to let us sit around and bitch. Together. After a bad P.M. set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.’

'Mr. deLint.’

'Dr. Tavis. Schtitt.’

'DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt's henchmen and henchwo-men.’

'I hate them!' Blott cries out.

'And you've been here this long and you still think this hatred's an accident?’

'Purchase a clue Kent Blott!' Arslanian says.

'The large and economy-size clue, Blott,' Ingersoll chimes.

Beak sits up and says 'God no not with pliers!' and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble.

Hal is pretending incredulity. 'You guys haven't noticed yet the way Schtitt's whole staff gets progressively more foul-tempered and sadistic as an important competitive week comes up?’

Ingersoll up on one elbow at Blott. 'The Port Washington meet. I.D. Day. The Tucson WhataBurger the week after. They want us in absolute top shape, Blott.’

Hal lies back and lets Smith's ballet de se loosen his facial muscles again, staring. 'Shit, Ingersoll, we're all in top shape already. That's not it. That's the least of it. We're off the charts, shape-wise.’

Ingersoll: 'The average North American kid can't even do one pull-up, according to Nwangi.’

Arslanian points down at his own chest. 'Twenty-eight pull-ups.’

'The point,' Hal says softly, 'is that it's not about the physical anymore, men. The physical stuff's just pro forma. It's the heads they're working on here, boys. Day and year in and out. A whole program. It'll help your attitude to look for evidence of design. They always give us something to hate, really hate together, as big stuff looms. The dreaded May drills during finals before the summer tour. The post-Christmas crackdown before Australia. The November freezathon, the snot-fest, the delay in upping the Lung and getting us under cover. A common enemy. / may despise K. B. Freer, or' (can't quite resist) 'Evan Ingersoll, or Jennie Bash. But we despise Schtitt's men, the double matches on top of runs, the insensitivity to exams, the repetition, the stress. The loneliness. But we get together and bitch, all of a sudden we're giving something group expression. A community voice. Community, Evan. Oh they're cunning. They give themselves up to our dislike, calculate our breaking points and aim for just over them, then send us into the locker room with an unstructured forty-five before Big Buddy sessions. Accident? Random happenstance? You guys ever see evidence of the tiniest lack of coolly calculated structure around here?’

'The structure's what I hate the most of all,' Ingersoll says.

'They know what's going on,' Blott says, bouncing a little on his tailbone. 'They want us to get together and complain.’

'Oh they're cunning,' Ingersoll says.

Hal curls himself a bit on one elbow to put in a small plug of Kodíak. He can't tell whether Ingersoll's being insolent. He lies there very slack, visualizing Smith pounding overheads down onto Ingersoll's skull. Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle's diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll — this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama's boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself — that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself he can't or won't accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll's in the room. He wishes him ill.

Blott and Arslanian are looking at him. 'Are you OK?’

'He is tired,' Arslanian says.

Ingersoll drums idly on his own ribcage.

Hal usually gets secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he hasn't gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit — some rebound effect from B. Hope's desiccating action — and his eyes start to water as if he's just yawned. The smokeless tobacco started almost as an excuse to spit, sometimes. Hal's struck by the fact that he really for the most part believes what he's said about loneliness and the structured need for a we here; and this, together with the Ingersoll-repulsion and spit-flood, makes him uncomfortable again, brooding uncomfortably for a moment on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high in secret more than on the getting high itself, possibly. He always gets the feeling there's some clue to it on the tip of his tongue, some mute and inaccessible part of the cortex, and then he always feels vaguely sick, scanning for it. The other thing that happens if he doesn't do one-hitters sometime before dinner is he feels slightly sick to his stomach, and it's hard to eat enough at dinner, and then later when he does go off and get off he gets ravenous, and goes out to Father & Son Market for candy, or else floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the Headmaster's House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats like such a feral animal that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see him pack it away, but then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.

'So the suffering gets less lonely,' Blott prompts him.