David Wallace - Infinite jest

Even among the small circle who know Hal gets secretly high, it doesn’t make much sense that Hal’s misery’d be Tavis- or urine-related, since Pemulis has never seemed blither than today; and if anyone were going to get the boot, chemically or otherwise, it was not going to be the E.T.A. administration’s relative and second-best boy.

Hal and his brother Mario both know that the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed powdered milk since Charles Tavis assumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. Clarke he wanted the kids’ animal-fat intake halved in a month by any and all means. The kitchen’s graveyard shift power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls and then strains out the foam and pours the milk into real-milk milk-dispenser bags for a kind of placebo effect; it’s mostly just the concept of powdered milk that gags people.

Struck has traded his shiny clean plate for the absent Incandenza’s fortification-structured plate of uneaten fillets, low-gluten bread, corn-bread, baby boileds, a pea-chickpea-based olla, half a fresh squash, mashed potatoes packed in a stelliform gelatin mold, and a shallow bowl of dessert-tsimmes featuring mostly it seemed like plums. Hal is still down on one knee by Ingersoll’s chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across Ingersoll and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nwangi. Keith Freer remarks blandly on how Hal seems like he’s feeling sort of punk this evening, checking Stice for a reaction. Struck utters truisms about wasting food and global hunger through a full mouth. Struck is wearing a Sox cap to the side so the bill shadows half his face. The bread is unkind to his braces. Freer is wearing the leather vest with no shirt under, which is what he favors after weights have pumped his torso full of air. Stice had had a traumatic psychic experience at fourteen when he’d set the weight on the pull-down station too high, and Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very basic weights, pending resolution of his fear of weights. The joke around E.T.A. is that Stice, who’s surely Show-bound after graduation, has no fear of heights, but does fear weights. Keith Freer, though kind of a second-rank junior player, does look beautiful in his calfskin vest — his face and body match. Troeltsch wants a sportscasting career, but Freer is the E.T.A. with looks InterLace would favor. Freer’s from inland Maryland, originally, his family’s riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. ‘90s with his now-deceased father’s invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases — the so-called Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho’s first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody now much even gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer’s old man had invested his windfall shrewdly.

‘My own father,’ Steeply said. Steeply again faced outward, one hip out and a hand on that hip. The scratch on his triceps was now ugly and puffed. Also, an area of Steeply’s left finger was whiter than the skin around it. The removal of a university ring, or more probably a wedding band. It seemed curious to Marathe that Steeply would undergo electrolysis but not take trouble to fix his finger’s annular pallor.

Steeply said ‘My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn’t pretty. I was never sure how it started or what it was about.’

‘You are now imparting a personal anecdote of you,’ Marathe stated.

Steeply did not shrug. He was pretending to study something particular out on the floor of the desert. ‘But nothing like this sort of Entertainment — a plain old television program.’

‘Television of broadcasting and — how did one express it? — the passivity.’

‘Yes. Broadcast television. The program in question was called “M*A*S*H.” The title was an acronym, not a command. As a boy I can recall some confusion on this point.’

‘I am knowing of the U.S.A. historical broadcast television comedy program “M*A*S*H,” ‘ Marathe stated.

‘The fucking thing ran forever, it seemed. The program that would not die. B.S. ‘70s and ‘80s before it finally died, mercifully. Set in a military hospital during the U.N.’s action on Korea.’

Marathe remained without expression. ‘Police Action.’

Many small birds of the mountain of the outcropping had begun to whistle and twitter somewhere off above and behind them. Also maybe the tentative rattle of some serpent. Marathe pretended to search for the watch in his pocket.

Steeply said ‘Now, nothing prima facie exceptional about getting attached to a show. God knows I was attached to my share of shows. That’s all it started as. An attachment or habit. Thursday nights at 2lOOh. “Nine O’Clock Eastern, Eight O’Clock Central and Mountain.” They used to broadcast this, to alert you to when to watch, or if you were going to tape it.’ Marathe watched the big man shrug from behind. ‘So the show was important to him. So, fine. OK. So he took pleasure in the program. God knows the guy was entitled — he’d worked like a dog his whole life. So OK, so at the start he scheduled his Thursday around the show, to an extent. It was hard to pinpoint anything wrong or consumptive. He was, yes, always home from work by 2050 on Thursdays. And he always had his supper watching the program. It seemed almost cute. Mummykins used to tease him, think it was adorable.’

‘Cuteness in fathers, this is rare.’ There was no way Marathe was going to touch the evident U.S.A. childhood expression Mummykins.

‘My old man worked for a heating-oil distributorship. Home heating-oil. Have your files got this? A tidbit for M. Fortier: U.S.O.U.S.’s Steeply, H.H.: late father a heating-oil-delivery dispatcher, Cheery Oil, Troy, New York.’

‘State of New York, U.S.A., prior to Reconfiguration.’

Hugh Steeply turned around but not all the way, scratching absently at his wens. ‘But then: syndication. “M*A*S*H.” The show was incredibly popular, and after a few years of Thursday nights it started also to run daily, during the day, or late at night, sometimes, in what I remember all too well was called syndication, where local stations bought old episodes and chopped them up and loaded them with ads, and ran them. And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still appearing on Thursdays at 2100. I think this was the start.’

‘The cuteness, it was over.’

‘My old man started to find the syndicated reruns extremely important to him, too. As in like not to be missed.’

‘Even though he had viewed and enjoyed them before, these reruns.’

‘The fucking show ran on two different local stations in the Capital District. Albany and environs. For a while, this one station even had a “M*A*S*H” hour, two of them, back to back, every night, from 2300. Plus another half an hour in the early P.M., for the unemployed or something.’

Marathe said ‘Virtually a bombardment of this U.S.A. broadcast comedy program.’

After a brief pause of attention to some wens of the face, Steeply said ‘He started to keep a small television down at work. Down at the distributorship.’

‘For the broadcast of afternoon.’

Steeply appeared to Marathe uncalculating in his statements. ‘Broadcast TVs, toward the end they made some of them really small. Kind of a pathetic try at keeping cable down. Some as small as like wrist-size. You’d be too young to remember.’

‘I remember well a pre-digital television.’ Marathe, if Steeply’s anecdote of himself had a political point or communique, Marathe could not yet determine this.

Steeply moved his foul Belgian cigarette into his right hand to flick it out into the space below. ‘It progressed very slowly. The gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life. I remember guys from his bowling league calling, that he’d quit. Our Mummykins found out he’d dropped out of Knights of Columbus. Thursdays the jokes and cuteness stopped — him all hunched in front of the set, barely even eating from his tray. And every night late at night, for the nightly hour, the old man too wide awake, and hunched over weirdly, head out, as if pulled toward the screen.’

‘I too have seen this posture of viewing,’ Marathe grimly said, recalling his second-oldest of brothers and the Canadiens of the N.L. of H.

‘And he got anxious, ugly, if something made him miss even one. Even one episode. And he’d get ugly if you pointed out he’d already seen most of them about seven times before. Mummykins began to have to lie to get them out of engagements that would have infringed. Neither of them talked about it. I don’t remember any of us trying to name the thing out loud — this dark shift in his attachment to the program “M*A*S*H.” ‘

‘The organism of family simply shifted to accommodate.’

‘Which it wasn’t even all that consuming an entertainment,’ Steeply said. He sounded to Marathe uncalculated and somewhat younger. ‘I mean it was OK. But it was broadcast TV. Broad comedy and canned laughter.’

‘I am remembering well this rerunning program, do not worry about me,’ said Marathe.

‘It was at some point during this gradual shift the notebook first appeared. He began writing notes in a notebook as he viewed. But only when viewing “M*A*S*H.” And he never left the notebook lying around where you could get any kind of look at it. He wasn’t openly secretive about it; you couldn’t even point to that and say something was wrong. The “M*A*S*H” notebook just never seemed to be lying around.’

With the hand that was not below the blanket still gripping the Sterling UL35, Marathe was holding his thumb and forefinger up against the smear of red which was just over the Mountains of Rincon and craning his neck to see his shadow behind them on the hillside.

Steeply changed the hip which was out, in his standing, to his other hip. ‘As a child, this is when it became impossible to ignore the odor of obsession about the whole thing. The secrecy about the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy. The scrupulous recording of tiny details, in careful order, for purposes you could just tell were both urgent and furtive.’

‘This is unbalance,’ Marathe concurred. ‘This attaching of excessive importance.’

‘Jesus, you don’t know the half of it.’

‘And for you also,’ Marathe said, ‘excessive unbalance. For your father progresses downhill in this obsessing, but always so slowly that always you could question yourself, whether you were maybe yourself the one out of balance, attaching too much importance to any one thing — a notebook, a posture. Crazy making.’

‘And the toll on Mummykins.’

Marathe had turned the chair to a slight angle to be able to see his shadow, which appeared blunt and deformed by the topography of the steep hillside above the outcropping, and in general pathetic and small. There would be no titanic or menacing Bröckengespenstphänom with the sunrise of dawn. Marathe said ‘The whole organism of family becomes out of balance, questioning its perceptions.’

‘The old man — then he started developing this habit of quoting little lines and scenes from “M*A*S*H,” to illustrate some idea, make some point in conversation. At the beginning of the habit he seemed casual about it, as if the little bits and scenes simply occurred to him. But this changed, but slowly. Plus I remember he started seeking out feature films that also featured the television program’s actors.’