David Wallace - Infinite jest

Marathe pretended to sniff.

‘Then at some point it was as if he was no longer able to converse or communicate on any topic without bringing it back to the program. The topic. Without some system of references to the program.’ Steeply gave small indications of paying attention to the small squeaks as Marathe turned his chair slightly this way and that way, achieving different angles of sight on his small shadow. Steeply exhaled air through the nostrils with a forceful sound. ‘Though it wasn’t as though he was wholly uncritical of it.’

It sometimes from somewhere blue occurred to Marathe that he did not dislike this Steeply, though like or respect would be too far in going, to say.

‘It was not that type of obsession with it, it, you are saying.’

‘It was gradual and slow. He started at some point I remember to refer to the kitchen as the Mess Tent and his den as the Marsh or Swamp. These were fictional locations on the show. He began renting films with even crowd-extra or cameo appearances by the program’s actors. He bought what was then called a Betamixer, [263]a kind of early magnetic-video recorder. He began a practice of magnetically recording each week’s 29 broadcasts and reruns. He stored the tapes, organizing them in baroque systems of cross-reference that had nothing discernible to do with dates of recording. I remember Mummykins didn’t say anything when he moved his bedding and began to sleep at night in the easy chair in his den, the Swamp. Or pretend to. Sleep.’

‘But you had your suspicions of not real sleeping.’

‘It was gradually obvious he was viewing his magnetic recordings of the program “M*A*S*H” throughout the night, probably over and over again, using a crude white plastic earplug to hide the noise, scribbling feverishly in his notebook.’

In contrast with the violence and transperçant puncturing of the sunset, the dawn sun seemed slowly exhaled from the more rounded salience of the Mountains of Rincon, its heat a moister heat and the light the vague red of a type of fond sentiment; and U.S.O.U.S.’s Steeply’s standing shadow was cast back over the outcropping toward Marathe behind him, close enough that Marathe might reach his arm out and touch the shadow.

‘You can tell I don’t have a good recall of the exact progression of the thing,’ Steeply said.

‘The gradual.’

‘I do know that Mummykins, I remember one day in the garbage can out behind the house she found a number of letters addressed to a “M*A*S*H” character named — this I fucking-A sure remember — Major Burns. She found them.’

Marathe did not allow himself the chuckle. ‘While searching inside the can of waste in the back. For evidence of unbalance.’

Steeply waved Marathe off. He was incapable of amused. ‘She didn’t search through the garbage. Mumkinsky had too much class. She probably forgot and threw away the day’s Troy Record before she’d clipped her food-coupons. She was an inveterate coupon-clipper.’

‘This was prior to the days of North American laws of recircling [264]of newspapers.’

Steeply did not wave off or give a glare. He wore the look of concentrating. This character — this I remember, too well — was portrayed by I remember the actor Maury Linville, a plain old employee of 20th Century Fox.’

‘Which later upstarted the fourth network of the Large Four.’

Steeply’s luridly run makeup from the heat of the day before had now over the night hardened into a configuration of almost horror. ‘But the letters, the letters were addressed to Major Burns. Not to Maury Linville. And not c/o Fox Studios or wherever, but addressed to an involved military address, with a Seoul routing code.’

‘In the South Korea of history.’

‘The letters were hostile, savage, and lavishly descriptive. He’d come to think the show’s character Major Burns embodied some type of cataclysmic, Armageddon-type theme that was slowly assembling itself on the program and progressively being hinted at and emerging in the gradual succession of seasons of this “M*A*S*H.” ‘ Steeply felt at his lip. ‘I remember Mum-mykins never mentioned the letters. From the garbage. She just left them around where my kid sister and I would see them.’

‘You are not meaning your sister was a goat.’

Steeply was not provokable into some different emotion, however, Marathe observed. ‘Younger sister. But my old man, the progression of the program from fun to obsession — crucial distinctions had collapsed, I think, now. Between the fictional Burns and this Linville who portrayed Burns.’

Marathe raised a brow for concurring: ‘This is signifying a severe loss of balance.’

‘I remember something about he seemed to believe the name of the character Burns also somehow hiddenly signified the English verb for the promise of the consuming fire of apocalypse.’

Marathe looked puzzled or else squinted because of a rising sun. ‘But he threw the letters into the waste receptacle, you stated, instead of the Snail’s Mail.’

‘He’d already started missing whole weeks at a time from work. He’d been at Cheery for decades. He was only a few years from retirement.’

Marathe was looking at his lap’s blanket’s brightening colors of plaid.

‘Mo Cheery and the old man — they’d bowled together, they were in Knights of Columbus together. Missing all the weeks of work made things awkward. Mo didn’t want to can the old man. He wanted the old man to see somebody.’

‘A professional person.’

‘A lot of this I wasn’t even there for. The “M*A*S*H” thing. I was at college by the time the really crucial distinctions had collapsed.’

‘Studying the multiple cultures.’

‘My kid sister had to keep me abreast of developments during the term. Good old Mo Cheery’d come by the house, view magnetic tapes of the show with the old man a while, listen to the old man’s theories and views, then on his way out he’d collar Mummykins and take her out into the garage and talk to her very quietly about the fact that the old man was in a high-angle psychic nose-dive and needed with all due regard in his opinion to see somebody in the direst fucking way. My kid sister said the Mumkinsky always acted like she had no idea what Mo Cheery was talking about.’

Marathe smoothed at his blanket.

‘Mumkinsky being a type of pet family name,’ Steeply said, looking a little bit of embarrassed.

Marathe nodded.

‘I’m trying to reconstruct this out of memory,’ Steeply said. ‘The old man is by this time pretty much unable to converse about anything except the television program “M*A*S*H.” The theory of the theme of this Burns-slash- Burn ing apocalypse now sort of spreads out to become huge and complex theories about wide-ranging and deeply hidden themes having to do with death and time, on the show. Like evidence of some sort of coded communication to certain viewers about an end to our familiar type of world-time and the advent of a whole different order of world-time.’

‘Your mother continues to play-act at normalcy, however.’

Tm trying to reconstruct things that weren’t even clear at the time,’ Steeply said, his wet and then dried makeup now grotesque in his concentration in the sunrise, like a mask of a mentally ill clown. He said ‘One theory involved the fact, which the old man found extremely significant, that the historical Korean Police Action of the U.N. lasted only roughly two-odd years, but that “M*A*S*H” itself was by then into something like its seventh year of new episodes. Some characters of the program were getting gray hair, receding hair, face-lifts. The old man was convinced this signified intentional themes. According to my kid sister, who bore the brunt of time spent with him, watching,’ Steeply said, ‘the old man’s theories were almost inconceivably complex and wide-ranging. As the years of new seasons went on and some actors retired and characters were replaced by other characters, the old man generated baroquoco theories about what it was that had quote-underline ‘‘‘really” happened to the absent characters. Where they’d gone, where they were, what it all augured. Then the next thing was one or two of the letters started to appear, canceled and returned, stamped as unde-liverable, or to addresses that were not just nonexistent but absurd.’

‘Unbalanced letters were no longer being discarded as waste, but now mailed.’

‘And Mummykins was uncomplaining throughout. It was enough to break your heart. She was a rock. She did, granted, begin taking prescription anti-anxiety medication.’

Land of the freely brave: Marathe did not say this aloud. He looked at his pocket’s watch and was trying to remember a time when he had ever with Steeply had to consider the tact of departing.

Steeply, at this time, gave the impression somehow of having several cigarettes going at one time. ‘Somewhere along late in the progression the old man let it be known he was working on a secret book that revised and explicated much of the world’s military, medical, philosophical and religious history by analogies to certain subtle and complex thematic codes in “M*A*S*H.” ‘ Steeply would stand on one foot to raise the other foot to look at a shoe’s inflicted damage, all the time smoking. ‘Even when he went in to work, there were problems. Heating-oil customers who called for deliveries or information or whatever began to complain that the old man kept trying to engage them in bizarre theoretical discussions of the thematics of “M*A*S*H.” ‘

‘Because it is necessary that I leave soon, a central point must be soon emerging,’ Marathe worked in as gracefully as possible.

Steeply seemed not to hear this other man. He seemed not only uncalcu-lated and self-enmeshed; his demeanor itself seemed more young, that of some young person. This unless this was part of some performance beyond Marathe, Marathe knew he must consider.

‘Then the double blow,’ Steeply said. ‘In B.S. 1983. My memory’s clear on this. The Mumkinsky opened an alarming letter from attorneys for CBS and 20th Century Fox. Certain letters had been apparently rerouted by do-goodnik military postal clerks to Fox. The old man’d been trying to correspond with different past and present “M*A*S*H” personas in letters the family never saw get mailed but whose content, the attorneys said, raised quote grave concern and could quote constitute grounds for strenuous legal action.’ Steeply raised the foot to look, his face in pain. He said, ‘Then the program’s final episode ran. Late autumn of B.S. 1983.1 was on an ROTC marching-band trip to Fort Ticonderoga. My kid sister, who’d by this time left home herself, and who could blame the kid, she reported that the Mumkinsky was talking very casually and uncomplainingly of the old man’s now refusing to leave his den.’

‘This, the final enclosing isolation of obsession.’

Steeply looked over his shoulder on one awkward foot to look slightly at Marathe. ‘As in even to go to the bathroom, now, the not leaving.’

‘Your mother’s prescriptions prevented some episodes of great anxiety, I think.’

‘He’d gotten a special A.C.D.C. cable hook-up that brought in extra syndication. When reruns weren’t running, the video-magnetic tapes ran constantly. He was haggard and spectral and his easy chair was all but unrecognizable. Cheery Oil was keeping him on the books until he could get his thirty years in at age sixty. My kid sister and I started reluctantly discussing intervening on Mummykins to intervene on the old man and force him to see somebody.’