Infinite Jest (58 page)

Steeply's wig had slipped hard to starboard. 'Rémy, no. Drug-dealers don't want you dead, necessarily; they just want your money. There's a difference. You people seem to want us dead. Not just the Concavity re-demised. Not just secession for Quebec. The F.L.Q., maybe they're like the Bolivians. But Fortier wants us dead.’

'Again you pass over what is important. Why B.S.S. cannot understand us. You cannot kill what is already dead.’

'Just you wait and see if we're dead, paisano.’

Marathe made a gesture as if striking his own head. 'Again passing over the important. This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose — this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. What you call the death, the collapsing: this will be the formality only. Do you not see? This was the genius of Guillaume DuPlessis, what M. DuPlessis taught the cells, even if F.L.Q. and les Fils did not understand. Much less the Albertans, all crazy inside their head. We of the A.F.R., we understand. This is why this cell of Québecers, that danger of Entertainment so fine it will kill the viewer, if so — the exact way does not matter. The exact time of death and way of death, this no longer matters. Not for your peoples. You wish to protect them? But you can only delay. Not save. The Entertainment exists. The attache and gendarmes of the razzle incident — more proof. It is there, existing. The choice for death of the head by pleasure now exists, and your authorities know, or you would not be now trying to stop the pleasure. Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: "Someone is to blame."

'That had nothing to do with the Reconfiguration. The Reconfiguration was self-preservation.’

'That: forget it. There is the villain he saw you needed, all of you, to delay this splitting apart. To keep you together, the hating some other. Gentle is crazy in his head, but in this "fault of someone" he was correct in saying it. Un ennemi commun. But not someone outside you, this enemy. Someone or some people among your own history sometime killed your U.S.A. nation already, Hugh. Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say choose to you you make expressions with your face such as "Herrrrrre we are going," Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible. How is it you say: "Anything is going"'?’

'And this is why we shudder at what a separate Quebec would be like. Choose what we tell you, neglect your own wish and desires, sacrifice. For Quebec. For the State.’

Marathe shrugged. 'L'état protecteur.’

Steeply said 'Does this sound a little familiar, Rémy? The National Socialist Neofascist State of Separate Quebec? You guys are worse than the worst Albertans. Totalitarity. Cuba with snow. Ski immediately to your nearest reeducation camp, for instructions on choosing. Moral eugenics. China. Cambodia. Chad. Unfree.’

'Unhappy.’

'There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us — these are just the hazards of being free.’

'But what does this U.S.A. expression want to mean, this Buckeroo?’

Steeply turned to face away into the space they were above. 'And now here we go. Now you will say how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation. And we say "human" to you. We say that one cannot be human without freedom.’

Marathe's chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. 'Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout "Freedom! Freedom!" as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress.' Marathe over Steeply's shoulder suddenly could realize why the skies above the coruscating city were themselves erased of stars: it was the fumes from the exhaust's wastes of the moving autos' pretty lights that rose and hid stars from the city and made the city Tucson's lume nacreous in the dome's blankness of it. 'But what of the freedom-tor
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Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?’

Steeply threw away a cigarette and faced partly Marathe, from the edge: 'Now the story of the rich man.’

Marathe said 'The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his children: but if he cries out "Freedom!" and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick: is the rich man who cries "Freedom!" the good father?’

Steeply made four small noises. Excitement of some belief made the American's electrolysis's little pimples of rash redden even in the milky dilute light of lume and low stars. The moon over the Mountains of Rincon was on its side, its color the color of a fat man's face. Marathe could believe he could hear some young U.S.A. voices shouting and laughing in a young gathering somewhere out on the desert floor below, but saw no headlights or young persons. Steeply stamped a high heel in frustration. Steeply said:

'But U.S. citizens aren't presumed by us to be children, to pater-nalistically do their thinking and choosing for them. Human beings are not children.’

Marathe pretended again to sniff.

'Ah, yes, but then you say: No?' Steeply said. 'No? you say, not children? You say: What is the difference, please, if you make a recorded pleasure so entertaining and diverting it is lethal to persons, you find a Copy-Capable copy and copy it and disseminate it for us to choose to see or turn off, and if we cannot choose to resist it, the pleasure, and cannot choose instead to live? You say what your Fortier believes, that we are children, not human adults like the noble Québecers, we are children, bullies but still children inside, and will kill ourselves for you if you put the candy within the arms' reach.’

Marathe tried to make his face expressive of anger, which was difficult for him. 'This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to.’

Unmentioned by either man was how in heaven's name either man expected to get up or down from the mountainside's shelf in the dark of the U.S. desert's night.

8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

Every year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids between maybe like twelve and fifteen — children in the very earliest stages of puberty and really abstract-capable thought, when one's allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting to emerge as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew
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— maybe a dozen of these kids, mostly male, get fanatically devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton. Eschaton is the most complicated children's game anybody around E.T.A.'d ever heard of. No one's entirely sure who brought it to Enfield from where. But you can pretty easily date its conception from the mechanics of the game itself. Its basic structure had already pretty much coalesced when Allston's Michael Pemulis hit age twelve and helped make it way more compelling. Its elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it's almost addictively compelling, and shocks the tall.

This year it's been Otis P. Lord, a thirteen-year-old baseliner and calculus phenom from Wilmington DE, who 'Wears the Beanie' as Eschaton's game-master and statistician of record, though Pemulis, since he's still around and is far and away the greatest Eschaton player in E.T.A. history, has a kind of unofficial emeritus power of correction over Lord's calculations and mandate.

Eschaton takes eight to twelve people to play, w/ 400 tennis balls so dead and bald they can't even be used for service drills anymore, plus an open expanse equal to the area of four contiguous tennis courts, plus a head for data-retrieval and coldly logical cognition, along with at least 40 megabytes of available RAM and wide array of tennis paraphernalia. The vade-mecumish rulebook that Pemulis in Y.P.W. got Hal Incandenza to write — with appendices and sample c:\Pink
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\Mathpak\EndStat-path Decision-Tree diagrams and an offset of the most accessible essay Pemulis could find on applied game theory — is about as long and interesting as J. Bunyan's stupefying Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to compress into anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such a fanatical depth that they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later). But if Hal had a Luger pointed at him and were under compulsion to try, he'd probably start by explaining that each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game's global arsenal represents a 5-mega-ton thermonuclear warhead. Of the total number of a given day's players,
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three compose a theoretical Anschluss designated AMNAT, another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI, another one or two the wacko but always pesky LIBSYR or more formidable IRLIBSYR, and that the day's remaining players, depending on involved random considerations, can form anything from SOUTHAF to INDPAK to like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas. Each team is called a Combatant. On the open expanse of contiguous courts, Combatants are arrayed in positions corresponding to their location on the planet earth as represented in The Rand McNally Slightly Rectangular Hanging Map of the World.
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Practical distribution of total megatonnage requires a working knowledge of the Mean-Value Theorem for Integrals,
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but for Hal's synoptic purposes here it's enough to say that megatonnage is distributed among Combatants according to an integrally regressed ratio of (a) Combatant's yearly military budget as percentage of Combatant's yearly GNP to (b) the inverse of stratego-tactical expenditures as percentage of Combatant's yearly military budget. In quainter days, Combatants' balls were simply doled out by throws of shiny red Yahtzee-dice. Quaint chance is no longer required, because Pemulis has downloaded Mathpak Unltd.'s elegant EndStat
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stats-cruncher software into the late James Incandenza's fearsome idle drop-clothed D.E.C. 2100, and has shown Otis P. Lord how to dicky the lock to Schtitt's office at night with a dining-hall meal card and plug the D.E.C. into a three-prong that's under the lower left corner of the enormous print of Dürer's 'The Magnificent Beast' on the wall by the relevant edge of Schtitt's big glass desk, so Schtitt or deLint won't even know it's on, when it's on, then link it by cellular modem to a slick Yushityu portable with color monitor out on the courts' nuclear theater. AMNAT and SOVWAR usually end up with about 400 total megatons each, with the rest inconsistently divided. It's possible to complicate Pemulis's Mean-Value equation for distribution by factoring in stuff like historical incidences of bellicosity and appeasement, unique characteristics of perceived national interests, etc., but Lord, the son of not one but two bankers, is a straight bang-for-buck type of apportíoner, a stance the equally bottom-line-minded Michael Pemulis endorses with both thumbs. Pieces of tennis gear are carefully placed within each Combatant's territories to mirror and map strategic targets. Folded gray-on-red E.T.A. T-shirts are MAMAs — Major Metro Areas. Towels stolen from selected motels on the junior tour stand for airfields, bridges, satellite-linked monitoring facilities, carrier groups, conventional power plants, important rail convergences. Red tennis shorts with gray trim are CONFORCONs — Conventional-Force Concentrations. The black cotton E.T.A. armbands — for when God forbid there's a death — designate the noncontemporary game-era's atomic power plants, uranium-/ plutonium-enrichment facilities, gaseous diffusion plants, breeder reactors, initiator factories, neutron-scattering-reflector labs, tritium-production reactor vessels, heavy-water plants, semiprivate shaped-charge concerns, linear accelerators, and the especially point-heavy Annular Fusion research laboratories in North Syracuse NNY and Presque Isle ME, Chyonskrg Kurgistan and Pliscu Romania, and possibly elsewhere. Red shorts with gray trim (few in number because strongly disliked by the travelling squads) are SSTRACs — equally low-number but point-intensive Sites of Strategic Command. Socks are either missile installations or antimissile installations or isolated silo-clusters or Cruise-capable B2 or SS5 squadrons — let's draw the curtain of charity across any more MILABBREVs — depending on whether they're boys' tennis socks or boys' street-shoe socks or girls' tennis socks with the little bunny-tail at the heel or girls' tennis socks w/o the bunny-tail. Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the subs they stand for.