David Wallace - Infinite jest

Axhandle has his eyes closed and is repeating a mnemonic limerick about Brewster’s Angle for the Leith-taught Quadrivial colloquium ‘Reflections on Refraction.’ Michael Pemulis is still scanning a serrated scroll of EndStat-axiomatic Pink 2, which looks to be all math and spiky brackets, and bobbing, ignoring Ann Kittenplan’s murderous looks and tubercular throat-clearings at the squeaking of his bobbing blue chair. You can tell Pemulis really is studying because he keeps turning something upside-down and then rightside-up. Hal declines to share his Rusk-being-in-there-with-Tavis worries with Michael Pemulis, not just because Hal avoids ever mentioning Rusk’s name but also because Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gem-like flame, and though he’d never admit it is already clearly nauseated with worry that he’s going to get the lion’s share of the blame for damage to Lord and Possalthwaite and not only receive corrective on-court discipline but maybe get denied a spot on the trip to Tucson’s WhataBurger, or worse.[211]

Avril is indirect but syntactically crisp with the couple dozen little girls in there, probing. The girls’ outfits involve blue at many levels of hue and intensity in varied combination. Avril Incandenza’s voice is higher on the register than one would expect from a woman so imposingly tall. It is high and sort of airy. Oddly insubstantial, is the E.T.A. consensus. Orin says one reason Avril dislikes music is that whenever she hums along she sounds insane.

The absence of a door to the Moms’s office means you might as well be in there, in terms of being able to hear what’s going on. She has little sense of spatial privacy or boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child. Lateral Alice Moore wears a sort of surreal combination of black Lycra Spandex and filmy green tulle. The portable-stereo headphones she wears — entering what appear to be Response-macros for 80+ received invitations to next week’s WhataBurger Invitational — are powder-blue. Her typing is clearly in synch with something’s backbeat. Her lips and cheek-points are the vague robin’s-egg of cyanosis.

Just why Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk is unclear and seems free-floating; Hal gets a different answer from Pemulis every time. Hal himself feels uncomfortable around Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn’t aware of any particular reason for being uncomfortable around her. But Pemulis positively detests Rusk. It was Pemulis who’d dickied in at night and hooked a Delco battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked office door, at age fifteen, Rusk’s office door, the first door over in the other little hallway at the lobby’s NE corner, next to the shift-nurses’ office and infirmary, then exiting Rusk’s office by a window and thorny hedge, which Pemulis was extremely fortunate no one but Hal and Schacht and maybe Mario knew he authored the hot knob, because the whole scheme turned quickly disastrous, because it was an elderly Brighton-Irish cleaning lady who got to the hot knob first, at like 0500h., and it turned out Pemulis had seriously under-calculated the brass-conducted Delco voltage involved, and if the cleaning lady hadn’t been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she would have ended up with way worse than the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes she regained consciousness with, and the cleaning lady’s Ward Boss was upper Brighton’s infamous F. X. (‘Follow That Ambulance’) Byrne, rapacious personal-injury J.D., and the Academy’s Workman’s Comp. premiums had skyrocketed, and the whole thing was still in litigation.

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. [212]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.[213]

Pemulis has finally quit with the bobbing and folded the printout scroll of Pink 2into 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 [214]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 [215]alike as just drills assigned for your overall cardiovascular benefit, with all the actual sadism completely sub rosa.