David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘And then now the ultimate dietary cluster-fuck: attempted powdered milk.’

‘Trying to foist it you’re saying.’

‘I’m saying and look at us and what do we do?’

‘Fake a cold and stay in bed playing sportscaster with the TP, in protest?’ says Pemulis.

Troeltsch uses the bottle of Seldane to point for emphasis. ‘We don’t want to hear about it. We look the other way with our heads in the sand.’

‘Sounds fucking painful.’

‘Go find some fucking synonyms for beat.’

Slice swallows hugely: ‘Never open your eyes underground: my old man’s dictum.’

‘And so we distract ourselves,’ Troeltsch says; ‘we yuck it up.’

Pemulis makes a k-sound. ‘Here’s the real question: how dumb is Troeltsch?’

‘Troeltsch’s so dumb he thinks a manila folder’s a Filipino contortionist.’

‘Troeltsch, who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’

Kyle Coyle says surely they’ve all heard the one about what do Canadian girls put behind their ears to attract boys. John Wayne gives him not a look. Wayne’s peering inside his own tumbler, where there does seem to be some sort of residue. There are fragments of lettuce in his eyelashes. Ortho Stice’s cheeks are ballooned with food, his eyes on his own salad’s remains, expression abstract and furrowed. A terrible kind of community energy in the whole dining hall, a kind of anxious sound-carpet under the surf of voices and the tinkle of flatware, and The Darkness is at some vague center of this energy, somehow, you can feel. Neither Wayne nor Hal’s been approachable all fall, on-court. Kids at other tables say low-toned things to their seatmates, and then the seatmate looks covertly over at Stice’s table. Forehead purply crumpled, Slice stares hard at his salad and tries to block input from his phenomenal peripheral vision. Two 14’s are contending over toast. Petropolis Kahn is preparing to catapult a chickpea at somebody. Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent returning for what Struck counts as Fourths, and Stice blocks the sight out. The sad pretty sunset out over the hilltops of Newton cannot be seen because the room’s big windows face east, out over the hillside and the Enfield Marine complex that the Academy has bathed in shadow, so E.M.’s porch lights are already on, and tall cubist bits of the old metropolis beyond that, east, with shadows encroaching. The afternoon just past was a glory, scrubbed and cool and windless, cloud-free, the sun a disk, the sky a dome, soaked in light, even the northern horizons bell-clear against a faint green-yellow cast. Schacht has about eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn’s Disease, and a whole ritual of administration. A couple of the black girls who work kitchen and custodial day-shifts can be seen against the shadowy tree-line, making their way down the steep hillside’s unauthorized path back down to the halfway-house thing for wretched people who come up here to work short-time. The girls’ bright cheap jackets are vivid in the shadow and trees’ tangle. The girls are having to hold hands against the grade, walking sideways and digging heavily in at each step. The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in as she left C.T.’s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage, [261]her arms strung way out between the other black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in sideways with each step, the hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers.

A girl with bangs rises and tings her tumbler with a spoon to make an announcement; nobody pays any attention.

Now Kahn’s by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post-prandially.

Wayne and Stice both shiver at the same time as the overhead lighting suddenly becomes the big room’s primary light.

There’s a brief and sort of ignorant discussion on why girls who hit backhands one-handed seem prone to having different-sized breasts. Hal recalls his brother’s late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl. This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross between a chart and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read. This was back when his brother Orin needed only to have sexual intercourse with them instead of getting them to fall so terribly in love with him they’d never be able to want anyone else. He’d taken obscure massage and psych courses and read tantric books whose illustrations seemed about as sexy to Hal as Twister.

Coyle says ‘Their ankles’; everybody ignores him. Wayne’s already left the table.

Little 14-C Bernard Makulic, two tables over from the milk dispenser and constitutionally delicate and not long for E.T.A., throws up in a silky tan cataract onto the floor by his chair, and there is the shriek of the feet of other chairs being scooted in a star pattern away from the table, and the protracted vowels of repulsed children.

Struck, Pemulis, Schacht and Freer have all had sexual intercourse. Coyle’s a probable, but reticent. Axford has trouble even publicly showering, much less submitting nude to a female’s inspection. Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a conscious goal. He sort of feels like O.’s having enough acrobatic coitus for all three of them. Freer even has a like souvenir-colposcope bolted to the inside of his locker door where a pin-up’d have been in days of yore, and Pemulis and Struck have allegedly patronized the Combat Zone after the fiscally pressed city’d buckled and rehung the Combat Zone’s red lights, east of the Common. But Jim Troeltsch and sex: no way. And with Wayne and Stice the question seems somehow beside the point. Hal’s mouth feels like it’s overflowing with spit. He should by all rights have lost to Stice today, and he knows it. Stice was in physical control of the third set. Stice choked it away only because he didn’t believe he could beat Hal yet, deep down, since Hal’s competitive explosion. But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It’s now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head. No one except Pemulis and Axford know it’s a whole new and chemical-free Hal who should by all rights have lost to a 16-year-old out there in public on what ended up a gorgeous NNE autumn day.

Wayne had gotten up and bussed his tray in the middle of the jejune breast thing. Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice is still staring into his salad. If you could open Stice’s head you’d see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. Stice has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table. A lot of the guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice’s still being in the magic can’t-miss Zone from this P.M.’S match.

‘The idea being that Nuck girls can only attract guys by being really easy to X, is the joke,’ Coyle says into the noise.

Then there’s a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line’s end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid’s tray for him. The hall’s unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured patellar tendon that’ll cost him at least six months of competitive development. Penn, whose femoral fracture’ll cost him a year, isn’t even back yet from St. E.’s orthopedic. But at least Ingersoll’s back. Hal gets up to go over, Troeltsch rising to accompany him after a long look at Trevor Axford, Ingersoll’s B.B. of record, who’s sitting in his chair with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any sort of conciliatory gesture. A match-sore Hal not limping but stiff-legged and shoulders slightly rolling as he and Troeltsch move serpentine around tables, steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic’s chyme out in a thinning circle that clears three tables, which Hal and Troeltsch avoid with practiced curves around tables whose layout they all know well, Hal to say Hey and How’s the Limb, Troeltsch to say Hey and be basically relieved he’s away from a discussion of females as sexual objects. Troeltsch’s never come close to even dating anybody. Some guys here never do. It’s the same at all the academies, this asexual contingent. Some junior players don’t have the emotional juice left over after tennis to face what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys on the court who go slack and pale at the thought of approaching a female in any social context. Certain things not only can’t be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting; some find the whole girl-issue thing brings them face to face with something in themselves they need to believe they’ve left far behind in order to hang in and develop. Troeltsch, Shaw, Axford: any sort of sexual tension makes them feel like they need more oxygen than is available right then. A couple of the girls at E.T.A. are kind of slutty, and some of the more aggressive Freer-type guys can break some of the girls down and get them to have sex — there’s nothing if not time and proximity here. But E.T.A. is mostly a comparatively unsexual place, maybe almost surprisingly so, considering the constant roar and gurgle here of adolescent glands, the emphasis on physicality, the fears of mediocrity, the back-and-forth struggles with ego, the loneliness and close proximity. There’s scattered homosexuality, much of it emotional and unconsummated. Keith Freer’s pet theory is that the bulk of E.T.A. females are nascent lesbians who don’t know it yet. That like any serious female athletes they’re basically vigorously male inside, and so Sapphic-tending. The ones that get to the W.T.A. [262]Show’ll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes — dykes that is. The rest will marry and spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on their husbands’ backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice’s term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek’s carried and prized the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years.

Ortho Stice of southwest Kansas looks briefly up at Hal and Troeltsch’s departure before returning his attention to a certain cherry tomato perched somehow halfway up the shallow incline of his salad bowl. It’s possible that the cherry tomato is attached halfway up the incline by an adhesive bit of yogurt dressing rather than just sitting there defying gravity on its own. Stice doesn’t use a finger to move the tomato and check this. He’s using only his concentrated will. He’s trying to will the cherry tomato to roll of its own objectile power down the incline and into the bowl’s center. He stares at the cherry tomato with enormous concentration, chewing his tri-level skinless-chicken-fillet sandwich. The chewing makes overlapping plates of muscle all the way up one side of his face and crew-cut scalp bulge and roll. He’s trying to flex some kind of psychic muscle he’s not sure he even has. The crew cut lends his head an anvil-like aspect. Complete concentration makes his round red fleshy face look crumpled. Stice is one of those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction with his face is so incongruous. He resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth — like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trials — on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the crew cut’s V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he moves suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking itself dry. Tony Nwangi is saying something acerbic to Hal, who looks like he’s kneeling penitent before Ingersoll, everyone at the surrounding tables inclined very subtly away from Hal. Troeltsch is signing Ingersoll’s cast as he speaks into his fist. Off the court, Ortho Slice’s flattop crew cut and penchant for cuff-rolled bluejeans and button-down short-sleeves with a checkered pattern are strictly from hick. The facial scrunching that attends concentration adds crevices and seams and an uneven flush to the bulldog face. His cheeks are ballooned with food as he stares at the perched cherry tomato, trying to respect this object with all his might. Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he’d felt this P.M. as several balls’ sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they’d become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. He’d mishit one cross-court volley and seen the thing head for an area wide even of the doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the singles corner, and this at a time when the grounds’ pines behind Hal Incandenza were breeze-leaning in the exact opposite direction. Hal had given Stice a little bit of a look on that one. Stice couldn’t finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious curves and downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone; Hal had played with the wide-eyed but unfocused look of a tennis player right on the verge of falling apart out there, and yet strangely affectless, as if deep inside some well of his own private troubles; and Stice wills himself again not to wonder what had passed with the Headmaster and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist, whose lab-equipped van’s unscheduled appearance in the E.T.A. parking lot yesterday afternoon had caused a tsunami of panic just before supper, especially since Pemulis and his supply of lab-ready Visine bottles were nowhere to be found.