Infinite Jest (94 page)

Avril had eschewed an office door even before the cleaning-lady kert-wang, for simple enclosure-reasons.

Recrossed legs and closer inspection reveal that Trevor Axford's left sock, though not his right sock, is blue.

Sinistral, his right hand missing digits from a fireworks accident three Interdependence Days past, Axhandle is several cm. shorter than Hal Incan-denza and is a true redheaded person, with copper-colored hair and that moist white freckle-chocked skin that even through two layers of summer Pledge only reddens and peels, plus there's the matter of the enormous and forever chapped lips; and as a tennis player he is like a less effective version of John Wayne — he does nothing but blast from the baseline, w/o discernible spin. He's a junior from Short Beach CT and under enormous family pressure to continue the male Axford tradition of attending Yale and is academically so marginal that he knows his only chance to go to Yale is to play tennis for Yale, which would effectively blow any chance at a Show-level future, and is high-ranked but has set his competitive sights on nothing past a Ride-offer to Yale. Though Ingersoll's informally in Hal's Big Buddy contingent, he's technically in Axhandle's, they're both aware; and Hal's a little uncomfortable about his relief that none of the real Eschaton casualties were technically his Buddies.
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The only real thing Axford and Hal have in common on the court is a curious habit of refusing to ask for help from other courts when their balls go astray.
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Pemulis has finally quit with the bobbing and folded the printout scroll of Pink
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into a big ragged square and has sidled over to Lateral Alice Moore's horseshoe-shaped desk and is bantering with her very casually, looking all around him as he banters, trying subtly to feel her out re whether maybe one of these WhataBurger Jr. Invitational invitations stacked cruciform, female athwart male, in Lateral Alice's IN box concerns anybody with the male initials M.M.P., by any chance. Pemulis and Moore would be less tight if she knew he dickied in at night and used her WATS and modem, though she's very laid-back and easygoing and not at all like the little framed thing by her name plaque with a scowling woman saying I'VE GOT ONE NERVE LEFT AND YOU'RE GETTING ON IT. The little cartoon is just a standard like office-worker gag. She'd summoned them out of Sixth Hour with the same ancient intercom-and-mike system Troeltsch et al. get to commandeer for Saturdays' WETA (Troeltsch has had to be prohibited from playing with her chair), and her transmitted voice had not been ungentle. Hal's face's left side feels queerly inflated, but then when he runs his right hand over it it's always regulation-size. Administrative assistants worth their health benefits are synaptically evolved to the point where they can banter, accept compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle ensemble, effortlessly deflect unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass-intensive on personal-stereo headphones, and word-process effortlessly to the headphones' backbeat, all simultaneously. Lateral Alice Moore's bluish fingertips make her painted nails ten little sunsets. Lateral Alice Moore's desk's chair's wheels fit on a track with an electrified third rail, so she can slide from one corner of the horseshoe's arc to the other — more or less laterally — at the touch of a cerise desktop button. For post-Delco-incident legal reasons, the name-plaque on her reception desk has DANGER: THIRD RAIL instead of the name Lateral Alice Moore.

Hal can hear Avril saying 'Now. If I speak to all of you very gently about being touched by a tall person in an uncomfortable way, will you know what I mean? Have any of you been kissed or nuzzled or hugged or rubbed or pinched or probed or fondled or in any way touched by a tall person in a way that's made you uncomfortable?' Hal can see one of his Moms's stockinged legs, terminating in a trim ankle and a very white Reebok, extruding from stage-right into the frame of the empty doorway, the Reebok tapping patiently, and one arm crossed over Avril's chest, and the other arm's elbow resting on that arm and fluttering in and out of view as Avril taps at her teeth with a blue pen.

'Gramma pinches my cheek,' one girl volunteers. She'd actually raised her hand to be called on, her wrist with its touching little (blue) terry wristband. Hal hasn't seen so many pigtails and button noses and small berry-shaped mouths convened in one indoor place in who knows how long. Very few of the sneakered feet reach all the way to the thick shag in there. Much leg-dangling and absent uncomfortable sneaker-swinging. A couple fingers in nostrils in absent contemplation. Ann Kittenplan, in her blue chair, is coolly appraising the little wash-offable tattoos she applies daily to the knuckles of her hands.

'Not quite what we're trying to speak of together right now, Erica,' from someplace above the tapping foot and in-and-out arm. Hal knows the register and inflections of his mother's voice so well it almost makes him uncomfortable. His left ankle gives a sick squeak when he flexes it. Cords in his left forearm stand out and subside as he squeezes his tennis ball. The left side of his face feels like something far away that means him harm and is coming gradually closer. He can make out just the whistly fricatives of Charles Tavis's distant voice from behind his double office doors; it sounds somehow like he's speaking to more than one person in there. Charles Tavis's office's inner door also has the I.D. DR. CHARLES TAVIS on it, and below that his E.T.A. motto about the man who knows his limitations having none.

'She does it really hard,' rebuts what must be Erica Siress.

'I've seen her do it,' what sounds like Jolene Criess confirms.

Another: 'I hate that.’

'I hate it when some adult pats my head like I'm a schnauzer.’

'The next adult that calls me adorable is in for a really unpleasant surprise let me tell you.’

'I hate it when my hair is tousled or smoothed in any way.’

'Kittenplan's tall. Kittenplan gives Indian rub-burns after lights-out.’

Avril gives them verbal space, tries gently to steer the topic closer to true Phielyism; she's subtle and very good with small children.

'. . . that my daddy gives me these small little shoves in the small of the back when he wants me to go into rooms. It's like he influences me into rooms from behind. This tiny little irritating push, that makes me want to let him have it in the shin.’

'Mmmmmm-hmm,' Avril muses.

It's impossible not to overhear, because things out in the waiting room right now are so comparatively silent except for the tinny hiss of Lateral Alice Moore's disengaged headphones and the conspiratorial murmur of Michael Pemulis trying to get her to drum on her chest and describe 1-93 South's Neponset exit-ramp as one very long thin parking lot. Things are so quiet because the anxiety level in Tavis's waiting room is high.

'You're all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction,' Ann Kittenplan had said to Pemulis as they all first answered the intercom's summons, which was also about the time that Pemulis started in with the rodential chair-squeaking that made one half of Kittenplan's face spasm.

One of the tricky and sinister things about corrective discipline at a tennis academy is that punishments can take the form of what might look like straight-out athletic conditioning. Q.v. the drill sergeant telling the recruit to drop and give him fifty, etc. So but this is why Gerhardt Schtitt and his prorectors are way more feared than Ogilvie or Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf or any of the regular academics. It's not just that Schtitt's corporal reputation preceded him here. It's that Schtitt and deLint make out the daily schedules for A.M. drills and P.M. matches and resistance-training and conditioning runs. But especially the A.M. drills. Certain drills are well known to be nothing more than attitude-adjusters, designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality for a few minutes. Too brutal to be assigned on the daily basis that would contribute to genuine aerobic conditioning, drills like the disciplinary version of Tap & Whack
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are known to the kids simply as Pukers. Puker-drills are really meant to do nothing but hurt you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to merit them; but they're still to all outward appearances exempt from any kind of VIII-Amendment protest or sniveling calls home to parents, insidiously, since they can be described to parents and police
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alike as just drills assigned for your overall cardiovascular benefit, with all the actual sadism completely sub rosa.

Kittenplan's prediction that the upperclassmen are going to wear the whole brown helmet for the Eschaton free-for-all is hopefully rebuttable by Pemulis's observation that Eschaton's extracurricular impulse and structure had been firmly in place before any of them'd even enrolled. All Michael Pemulis had done was codify basic principles and impose a sort of matrix of decidable strategy. Maybe helped create a mythology and established, mostly through personal example, a certain level of expectation. All Hal'd done was act as amanuensis on a lousy manual. The I.-Day Combatants had been out there of their own volition. Pemulis and Axford'd gotten Hal to write out most of all this in maximally rhetorical diction, which Pemulis had then embedded in a Pink
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printout so he could carry it around and study it and have it all nailed down before Tavis tried any boom-lowering. The strategy is to let Pemulis do all the talking but let Hal interject at will, the voice of reason, good-cop/bad. Axford's been instructed to count the An-tron fibers between his shoes the whole time they're in there.

Hal has no idea what it might signify that the Headmaster's summons hasn't come for almost 48 hours. It might be odd that it hadn't once occurred to him to see Tavis personally, or to go to HmH and ask the Moms for intercession or info. It's not like he had the urge but resisted it; it hadn't even occurred to him.

For somebody who not only lives on the same institutional grounds as his family but also has his training and education and pretty much his whole overall raíson-d'être directly overseen by relatives, Hal devotes an unusually small part of his brain and time ever thinking about people in his family qua family-members. Sometimes when he'll be chatting with somebody in the endless registration-line for a tournament or at a post-meet dance or something and somebody'll say something like 'How's Avril getting along?' or 'I saw Orin kicking the everliving shit out of the ball on an O.N.A.N.F.L. highlights cartridge last week,' there will be this odd tense moment where Hal's mind will go utterly blank and his mouth slack and flabby, working soundlessly, as if the names were words on the tip of his tongue. Except for Mario, about whom Hal will talk your ear off, it's almost like some ponderous creaky machine has to get up and running for Hal even to think about members of his immediate family as standing in relation to himself. It's a possible reason Hal avoids Dr. Dolores Rusk, who always wants to probe him on issues of space and self-definition and something she keeps calling the 'Coatlicue Complex.'
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Hal's maternal half-uncle Charles Tavis is a little like the late Himself in that Tavis's C.V. is a back-and-forth but not indecisive mix of athletics and hard science. A B.A. and doctorate in engineering, an M.B.A. in athletics administration — in his professional youth Tavis had put them together as a civil engineer, his specialty the accommodation of stress through patterned dispersal, i.e. distributing the weight of gargantuan athletic-spectatorial crowds. I.e., he'd say, he'd handled large live audiences; he'd been in his own small way a minor pioneer in polymer-reinforced cement and mobile fulcra. He'd been on design teams for stadia and civic centers and grandstands and micological-looking superdomes. He'd admit up-front that he'd been a far better team-player engineer than out there up-front stage-center in the architectural limelight. He'd apologize profusely when you had no idea what that sentence meant and say maybe the obfuscation had been unconsciously deliberate, out of some kind of embarrassment over his first and last limelighted architectural supervision, up in Ontario, before the rise of O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence, when he'd designed the Toronto Blue Jays' novel and much-ballyhooed SkyDome ballpark-and-hotel complex. Because Tavis had been the one to take the lion's share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays' spectators in the stands, many of them innocent children wearing caps and pounding their little fists into the gloves they'd brought with hopes of nothing more exotic than a speared foul ball, that spectators at a distressing number of different points all along both foul-lines could see right into the windows of guests having various and sometimes exotic sex in the hotel bedrooms over the center-field wall. The bulk of the call for Tavis's rolling head had come, he'd tell you, when the cameraman in charge of the SkyDome's Instant-Replay-Video Scoreboard, disgruntled or professionally suicidal or both, started training his camera on the bedroom windows and routing the resultant multi-limbed coital images up onto the 75-meter Scoreboard screen, etc. Sometimes in slow motion and with multiple replays, etc. Tavis will admit his reluctance to talk about it, still, after all this time. He'll confess that his usual former-career-summary is to say just that he'd specialized in athletic venues that could safely and comfortably seat enormous numbers of live spectators, and that the market for his services had bottomed out as more and more events were designed for cartridge-dissemination and private home-viewing, which he'll point out is not technically untrue so much as just not entirely open and forthcoming.