David Wallace - Infinite jest

For reasons that Pemulis couldn’t for the life of him, Ortho Stice seemed to be in there in Dr. Dolores Rusk’s office, interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours. Pemulis paused at the door on his way by.

‘— nical assessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you’re suffering from counterphobia.’

‘Fear of linoleum?’ It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there through the door’s wood.

‘On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects’ relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.’

‘Over linoleum?’

‘My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an analytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects’ cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example small children’s dolls and Action-Figurines.’

‘I don’t play with no goddamn Action-Figurines.’

‘GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the “military” man, with “GI” representing at once the “General Issue” of a “weapon” the Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase’s desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote “win” the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother as image.’

‘So you’re saying I’m overestimating objects?’

‘I’m saying there’s a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.’

‘I ain’t omnipotent and I don’t want to X no Goddamn Barbiedoll.’ Then Dark’s voice went way up and cracked as he said something about his bed.

Dr. Rusk’s office door had a nonconducting rubberized sheath on the knob, and Dr. Rusk’s name and degrees and title, and a needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside a big heart and a cursive exhortation to Champion An Inner Child Today, which the little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by habit first at the silent locked infirmary door and then Rusk’s bottom-crack-lit door on his way across the Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could throw together. He wore maroon paratrooper’s pants with green stovepipe stripes down the sides. The pants’ cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks above ancient and radically uncool Clark’s Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk turtleneck under an English-cut sportcoat in a purple-and-tan windowpane check. He wore naval shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He wore his yachting cap, but with the bill bent up at a bumpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed, really. Dr. Rusk’s door was cool against his ear. Jim Troeltsch had been coming down B’s hall just as Pemulis was leaving and said Pemulis looked like a hangover. Through the door, Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man’s late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas. The old Wallabies were from Pemulis’s older brother’s incomplete public-school career and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the soles’ perimeter. The socks belonged to Jennie Bash and she made it explicit she wanted them back laundered. The sportcoat’s checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed ribbed cuffs of shiny orange acetate esters.

The Community & Administration Bldg.’s downstairs was real quiet. It was like 2100h., supposedly mandatory Study Period, and Harde’s crew had gone home but the custodial graveyard shift hadn’t come on yet. Pemulis moved noiselessly NE-SW across the lobby’s shag. Except for lines of lamplight from under a couple doors the E.T.A. lobby was pitch-black, and the outer Academy doors locked. There was an odd vehicular shape near the north wall’s trophy case that Pemulis didn’t pause to investigate. He lifted up slightly to keep the little SW hall’s door from squeaking as he opened it and entered the administrative reception area, snapping his fingers softly to himself. A loose music played in his head. Tavis’s reception area was empty and dim, the wallpaper’s clouds now stormy-dark. It wasn’t totally quiet. Light came from Mrs. Inc’s doorway and from the crack under Tavis’s inner door. Lateral Alice Moore had gone home. Pemulis activated her Third Rail and played with her chair as he made a very quick survey of the material on her desk. Activating the P.A. mike was out of all question. Two of her five drawers were still locked. Pemulis scanned behind him and popped another breath mint and sat quietly for a moment as Moore’s chair slid back and forth along the rail, his fingers in a steeple under his nose, considering.

Light shone from the crack of Tavis’s inner door because the outer door stood open. Pemulis didn’t even have to put any kind of ear to the wood of the inside door. He could hear the hiss and high-speed grind of Ta vis’s Stairßlaster, and Ta vis’s breathless recessive voice. You could tell there was nobody else in there. You could tell Tavis had no shirt on and an E.T.A. towel around his neck and his hair a sweaty curtain down one side of his little head as he ran to keep up with what reminded everybody of a Satanishly-possessed Filene’s escalator. He was exhorting himself in a kind of fast rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis like either Total worry total worry’ or ‘No don’t worry no don’t worry’ and c. Pemulis could envision Tavis’s round belly and little titties of fat bouncing with the action of the Stairßlaster. You could hear the sudden muffling when he probably brought the towel up to dab at his slanted mustache. Tavis’s doorknob had no insulating rubber sheath, Pemulis noticed.

Pemulis’s ensemble’s belt was a plastic thing with chintzy fake-Navajo beading, purchased by little Chip Sweeny at one of last fall’s Whataßurger’s souvenir stands and subsequently transferred to Pemulis during a Big Buddy tennis-as-game-of-chance exercise. The beading-patterns were in Gila-monster orange and black, the orange a different shade than Pemulis’s tur-tleneck.

He could never resist biting down once a mint’d melted to a certain size and texture.

The doorless Dean of Academic Affairs’s office was a blazing rectangle of light. The light didn’t spill very far into the reception area, however. At close-range, sounds issued from the office, but not exactly words. Pemulis checked his fly and snapped his fingers under his own nose and assumed a businesslike stride and rapped firmly on the doorless jamb without breaking stride. The heavier blue shag of the office itself slowed him down a bit. He stopped once he was all the way in. 18-A John Wayne and Hal’s Mumsly-Wumsly were both in the front of the office. They were about maybe two meters apart. The room was lit overhead and by four standing lamps. The seminar table and chairs cast a complicated shadow. Two homemade pompoms of shredded paper and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis racquets were on the seminar table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulderpads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He was down in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc’s incredibly tall and well-preserved mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader’s outfit and had one of deLint’s big brass whistles hanging around her neck. She was blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show of pushing the bumpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him.

‘I probably won’t even waste everybody’s time asking if I’m interrupting,’ Pemulis said.

Mrs. Inc seemed frozen in place. Her one hand was still up in the air, fine fingers splayed. Wayne craned his neck to look over at Pemulis from under his helmet without changing his three-point stance. The football-noises trailed off. Wayne’s got a narrow nose and close-set witchy eyes. He wore a plastic mouthguard. The musculature of his legs and buttocks was clearly outlined as he squatted forward with his weight on his knuckles. There was way less time passing in the office than there seemed to be.

‘Hoping for a second of your time,’ Pemulis told Mrs. Inc. He was standing schoolboy-straight, hands clasped demurely over his fly, which on Pemulis this posture did look insolent.

Wayne straightened up and moved toward his clothing with no little dignity. His sweats were neatly folded on the Dean’s desk at the rear of the office. The mouthguard was attached to the facemask and hung from it when removed. The chin strap had several snaps Wayne had to undo.

‘Nice-looking helmet,’ Pemulis told him.

Wayne, pulling hard on his sweatpants’ cuffs to fit them over a shoe, didn’t reply. He was so fit that his supporter’s straps didn’t even dent his buttocks.

Mrs. Incandenza removed the mute whistle. She was still split down on the floor. Pemulis made rather a show of not looking south of her face. She pursed her lips to chuff hair out of her eyes.

‘I predict this’ll take about two minutes at most,’ Pemulis said, smiling.

Lenz wears a worsted topcoat and dark slacks and Brazilian loafers with a high-wattage shine and a disguise that makes him look like Andy Warhol with a tan. Bruce Green wears a cheesy off-the-rack leather jacket of stiff cheap leather that makes the jacket creak when he breathes.

‘This is when you man this is when you find out your like what like true character, is when it’s pointed right at you and some bugeyed fucking spic’s not five mitts [230]away pointing it, and I strangely I get real calm see and said I said Pepito I said I Pepito man you go on and do what you need to do man go on and shoot but man you better I mean fucking better kill me with the first shot man or you won’t get another one I said. Not even bullshitting man I’m serious it’s like I found right then I meant it. You know what I’m saying?’ Green lights both their smokes. Lenz exhales with that hiss of people in a rush to drive their point home. ‘You know what I’m saying?’

‘I don’t know.’

It’s an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon looks like it doesn’t feel very well. The click of Lenz’s loafers and the crunchy thud of Green’s old asphalt-spreader’s boots with the thick black soles. Green’s little noises of attention and assent. He says he’s been broken by life, is all he’ll personally say. Green. Life has kicked his ass, and he’s regrouping. Lenz likes him, and there’s always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging, whenever he likes somebody. It’s like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear than a kind of tension in the region of stomach and ass, an all-body wince. Deciding to go ahead and think somebody’s a stand-up guy: it’s like you drop something, you give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody. There would be no way to say any of this out loud to Green. As it gets past 22OOh. and the meatloaf in his pocket’s baggie’s gotten dark and hard from disuse the pressure to exploit the c. 2216 interval for resolution builds to a terrible pitch, but Lenz still can’t yet quite get it up to ask Green to walk back some other way at least once in a while. How does he do it and still have Green know he thinks he’s OK? But you don’t come right out there and let somebody hear you say you think they’re OK. When it’s a girl you’re just trying to X it’s a different thing, straightforwarder; but like for instance where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say? You can’t look right at them, because then what if their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and you lock eyes as you’re saying it, and then there’d be some awful like voltage or energy there, hanging between you. But you can’t look away like you’re nervous, like some nervous kid asking for a date or something. You can’t go around giving that kind of thing of yourself away. Plus the knowing that the whole fucking thing’s not worth this kind of wince and stress: the whole thing’s enraging. The afternoon of tonight earlier at circa 1610h. Lenz’d sprayed RIJID-brand male hairspray in the face of a one-eyed Ennet House stray cat that had wandered by mischance into the men’s head upstairs, but the result: unsatisfying. The cat had just run away downstairs, clunking into the bannister only once. Lenz then got diarrhea, which always disgusts him, and he had to stay in the head and open the little warped frosted-glass window and run the shower on C until the smell’s evidence cleared, with fucking Glynn pounding on the door and attracting attention howling about who’s flailing the whale in there all this time is it by any chance Lenz. But then how would he be supposed to act henceforward toward Green if he blows him off and says to let him walk solo home? How would he be supposed to act if it’d seemed like he’d like spurned Green? What does he henceforward say if he and Green pass each other in the aisle at Saturday Night Lively or both reach for the same sandwich at the raffle-break at White Flag, or get caught standing there half-naked in towels in the hall waiting for somebody to get out of the shower? What if he like spurns Green and Green ends up in the 3-Man room while Lenz is still in there and they have to room together and interface constantly? And if Lenz tries to temper the spurning by telling Green he likes him, where the fuck is he supposed to look when he says it? If trying to X a female species Lenz would have nullo problemo with where to look. He’d have no problem with looking deep into some bitch’s eyes and looking so sincere it’s like he’s dying inside him. Or if like assuring a bad-complected Brazilian he hadn’t stepped on a half-kilo three separate times with Ino-sitol. [231]Or if high: zero problem. If he got high, he’d have no problem telling somebody he liked him even if he really did. For it’d give his spirits a voltage that’d more than overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might hang in the air between somebody. A few lineskers and there’d be no stress-issues about telling Bruce G. with all due respects to screw, go peddle his papers, go play in the freeway, go play with a chain saw, go find a short pier, that no disrespect but Lenz needed to fly solo in the urban night. So after the incident with the cat and diarrhea and some hard words with D. R. Glynn, who was slumped holding his abdomen down against the south wall of the upstairs hall, Lenz decides enough is enough and goes and gets a little square of foil off the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink and goes and takes a half-gram, maybe a gram at most out of the emergency stash out of the vault-thing he’s razored out of the Principles of Natural Lectures. Far from your scenario of relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth — Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself.