David Wallace - Infinite jest

Gately has to answer the phone and tell people who call the office for a resident that residents can receive calls only on the pay phone in the basement, which he has to say yes is frequently busy all the time. The House prohibits cellular/mobiles and has a Boundary about the office phone for residents. Gately has to kick residents off down there when other residents in line come and complain they’ve exceeded their five minutes. This also tends to be unpleasant: the pay phone down there is undigital and un-shutoffable and a constant source of aggravation and beefs; every conversation is life-and-death; crisis down there 24/7. There’s a special way to kick somebody off a pay phone that’s respectful and nonshaming but also firm. Gately has gotten good at assuming a blank but not passive expression when residents are abusive. There’s this look of weary expertise the House Staffers cultivate, then have to flex their face to get rid of when they’re off-duty. Gately’s gotten so stoic in the face of abuse that a resident has to mention actual unnatural acts in connection with his name for Gately to Log the abuse and give out a Restriction. He’s respected and well-liked by almost all the residents, which the House Manager says causes the veteran Staff some concern, because Gately’s job is not to be these people’s friend all the time.

Then in the kitchen with the fucking Krispie-treat bowls and pans still a fucking mess Wade McDade and some other residents were standing around waiting for various things to toast and boil and McDade was using his finger and pushing the tip of his nose up so that his nostrils faced straight out at everybody. He was looking piggishly around and asking if people knew any people where their nose looked like this right here, and some people said yes, sure, why. Gately checked the fridge and again saw evidence that his special meatloaf had a secret admirer, it looked like, another big rectangle cut out of the leftovers he’d carefully wrapped and laid out on the sturdiest shelf in there. McDade, who Gately struggles daily with the urge to hit McDade so hard there’d be nothing but eyes and a nose down over the tops of his cowboy boots, McDade’s telling everybody he’s constructing a Gratitude List at Calvin T.’s tough-love suggestion and he says he’s decided one of the things he’s grateful for is his nose don’t look like this here. Gately tries not to judge on the basis of who laughs and who doesn’t. When Pat’s phone rings and Gately leaves, McDade’s squunching his upper lip up in his hand and asking people about acquaintance with cleft palates.

Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger to the wind for potential conflicts and issues and rumors. A subtle art here is maintaining access to the residents’ gossip-grapevine and keeping on top of rumors without seeming like you’re inducing a resident to cross the line and actually eat cheese on another resident. The only thing a resident is actually encouraged to rat out another resident on here is picking up a Substance. All other-type issues it’s supposed to be Staff’s job to glean and ferret out etc., to decoct legitimate infractions out of the tides of innuendo and bullshit complaint 20+ bored crammed-together street-canny people in detox from wrecked lives can generate. Rumors that so-and-so blew so-and-so on the couch at 0300, that thus-and-such’s got a knife, that X was using what had to be some kind of code on the pay phone, that Y’s gone back to carrying a beeper, that so-and-so’s making book on football out of the 5-Man room, that Belbin had led Diehl to believe she’d clean up if he made Krispie Treats and then she weaseled out, and etc. Almost all of it’s picayune and, over time, as it accretes, unpleasant.

Rarely a feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward — just an abrupt loss of hope. Plus there is the contempt he belies so well with gentleness and caring during that post-coital period of small sounds and adjustments.

Orin can only give, not receive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of them think he is a wonderful lover, almost a dream-type lover; and this fuels the contempt. But he cannot show the contempt, since this would pretty clearly detract from the Subject’s pleasure.

Because the Subject’s pleasure in him has become his food, he is conscientious in the consideration and gentleness he shows after coitus, making clear his desire to stay right there very close and be intimate, when so many other male lovers, the Subjects say, seem afterward to become uneasy, contemptuous, or distant, rolling over to stare at the wall or tamping down a smoke before they’ve even stopped twitching.

The hand-model told him very softly how the photograph’s big pink Swiss husband after coitus hove himself off her and lay there stunned under his stomach’s weight, his eyes narrowed to piggy slits and the faint smirk on his face that of a gorged predator: not like the punter: uncaring. As was S.O.P. with Subjects she became then briefly stricken and anxious and said no one must ever know, she could lose her children. Orin administered the standard assurances in a very soft intimate voice. Orin was resoundingly gentle and caring afterward, as she could somehow just intuitively tell he would be. It was true. It gave him real pleasure to give the impression of care and intimacy in this interval; if someone asked about his favorite part of the anticlimactic time after the Subject lay back and glisteningly opened and he could see her eyes holding him whole, Orin would say his #2 favorite is this post-seminal interval of clingy vulnerability on the Subject’s part and gentle intimate care on his own.

When the knock on the room door came it seemed like a further grace, for the Subject had been up on an elbow in bed, exhaling slim tusks of cigarette-smoke from her nose and starting to ask him to tell her things about his own family, and Orin was stroking her very tenderly and watching the twin curves of smoke pale and spread and trying not to shudder at the thought of what the inside of the Subject’s fine nose must look like, what gray-white tangles of necrotic snot must hang and twine up in there, from the smoke, whether she had the stomach to look at a hankie she’d used or whether she balled the thing up and flung it from her with the sort of shudder O. knew he’d feel; and when the brisk action of male knuckles sounded against the room’s door he watched her face whiten from the forehead down as she pleaded that no one must know of her whoever was there and stabbed out her butt and dove beneath the blankets as he called out for patience to the door and veered to the bathroom to wrap a towel around him before he went to it, the sort of bland hotel door you used a card and not a key for. The defiled, guilty, and frightened married hand-model’s wrist and hand protruded for a moment from the edge of the bedding and felt the floor for shoes and clothes, the hand moving like a blind spider and sucking things up under the blankets. Orin didn’t ask who it was at the door; be had nothing to hide. His mood at the door became extraordinarily fine. When the wife and mother had erased all evidence of herself and heaped the bedding over her so she could lie there sniffing grayly and imagining that she was hidden from view, just one lumpy part of a celibate napper’s dishevelled bed, Orin checked the door’s fish-eye peeper, saw only the hallway’s claret-colored wall opposite, and opened the door with a smile he felt all the way down to his bare soles. Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Eastern medical attaches, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything.

The man in the hall at the door was handicapped, challenged, in a wheelchair, looking up at him from well below peephole-range, bushy-haired and mostly nose and looking up into the swell of Orin’s pectorals, making no attempt to see around him into the room. One of the disabled. Orin looked down and felt both let down and almost touched. The little fellow’s wheelchair shiny and his lap blanketed and his string tie half-hidden by the clipboard he held to his chest with a curled and motherly arm.

‘Survey,’ the man said, nothing else, joggling the clipboard a little like an infant, presenting it as evidence.

Orin imagined the terrified Subject lying there hidden and trying to hear, and despite a sort of mild disappointment he felt touched at whatever this shy ruse of an excuse for proximity to his leg and autograph might be. He felt for the Subject the sort of clinical contempt you feel for an insect you’ve looked down and seen and know you’re going to torture for a while. From the way she smoked and performed certain other manual operations, Orin’d noted she was left-handed.

He said to the man in the wheelchair, ‘Goody.’

‘Plus or minus three percent sample.’

‘Eager to cooperate in any way.’

The man cocked his head in that way people in wheelchairs do. ‘Scholarly academic study.’

‘Pisser.’ Leaning against the jamb with arms crossed, watching the man try to process the dissimilarity in the size of his limbs. No shins or extremities, however withery, extended below the wheelchair’s blanket’s hem. The guy was like totally legless. Orin’s rising heart went out.

‘Chamber of Commerce survey. Concerned veterans’ group systematic inquiry. Consumer advocacy polling operation. Three percentage points error on either of two sides of the issue.’

‘Bully.’

‘Consumer-advocacy group opinion sweep. Very little time involved. Government study. Ad council demographic assessment. Sweeps. Random anonymity. Minimum in terms of time or trouble.’

‘I’m clearing my mind to be of maximum help.’

When the man had taken out his pen with a flourish and looked down at his board Orin got a look at the yarmulke of skin in the center of the seated man’s hair. There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man.

‘What do you miss, please?’

Orin smiled coolly. ‘Very little, I like to think.’

‘Backtrack. U.S.A. citizen?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have how many years?’

‘Age?’

‘You have which age?’

‘Age is twenty-six.’

‘Over twenty-five?’

‘That’d follow.’ Orin was waiting for the ruse involving the pen that’d get him to sign something so the very shy fan club’d get their autograph. He tried to remember from Mario’s childhood how long under blankets before it got unbearably hot and you started to smother and thrash.

The man pretended to notate. ‘Employed, self-employed, unemployed?’

Orin smiled. ‘The first.’

‘Please list what you miss.’

The whisper of the vent, hush of the wine-colored hallway, vaguest whisper of rustling sheets behind, imagining the growing bubble of CO 2under the sheets.

‘Please list lifestyle elements of your U.S.A. lifetime you recall, and/or at present lack, and miss.’

Tm not sure I follow.’

The man flipped a page over to check. ‘Pine, yearn, winsome, nostalgia. Lump of throat.’ Flipping one more sheet. ‘Wistful, as well.’

‘You mean childhood memories. You mean like cocoa with half-melted marshmallows floating on top in a checker-tiled kitchen warmed by an enamel gas range, that sort of thing. Or omnissent doors at airports and Star Markets that somehow knew you were there and slid open. Before they disappeared. Where did those doors go?’

‘Enamel is with the e?’

‘And then some.’

Orin’s gaze now was up at the ceiling’s acoustic tile, the little blinking disk of the hall’s smoke detector, as if memories were always lighter than air. The seated man stared blandly up at the throb of Orin’s internal jugular vein. Orin’s face changed a little. Behind him, under the blankets, the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the portable O z-mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol.