David Wallace - Infinite jest

The Darkness splayed out stiff on the deuce side of the center line, ratcheting slowly into his service motion. He overhit the first serve long and Hal angled it softly off-court, moving two steps in for the second ball. Stice hit his second serve as hard as he could again and netted it, and pursed his thick lips a little as he walked into the net’s shadow to retrieve the ball, and Hal jogged over to the fence behind the next court to get the ball he’d angled over. DeLint was putting a pejorative hieroglyphic in a box on his chart marked STICE.

At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room’s ceiling.

Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library, right near the onion-domed Watertown Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages and personae of time.

M. M. Pemulis and J. G. Struck, wet-haired after their P.M. runs, had blarneyed their way past the library-attendant at the B.U. School of Pharmacy 2.8 clicks down Commonwealth on Comm. and Cook St. and were seated at a table in Reference, Pemulis’s yachting cap pushed way back to accommodate his rising eyebrows, licking his finger to turn pages.

H. Steeply’s green sedan with its neuralgiac full-front Nunhagen ad on the side sat in an Authorized Guest parking spot in the E.T.A. lot.

Between appointments, [266]in an office whose west windows yielded no view of the match, Charles Tavis had his head mashed up against the upholstered seat-rail of his sofa, his arm under the gray-and-red ruffle and sweeping back and forth for the bathroom scale he keeps under there.

Avril Incandenza’s whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown.

At just this moment M.S.T., Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain ‘Swiss’ hand-model before a wall-width window in a rented suite halfway up a different tall hotel (from before) in Phoenix AZ. The win-dowlight was fiery with heat. Way below, tiny cars’ roofs glared so bright with reflected light their colors were obscured. Pedestrians hunched and sprinted between different areas of shade and refrigeration. The cityscape’s glass and metal twinkled but seemed to sag — the whole vista looked somehow stunned. The cool air through the room’s vent whispered. They’d put down their glasses of ice and come together upright and embraced. The embrace was not like a hug. There was no talking — the only sound was the vent and their breath. Orin’s linen knee probed the deltoid fork of the hand-model’s parted legs. He let the ‘Swiss’ woman grind against the muscular knee of his good leg. They got so close no light shone between them, and ground together. Her lids fluttered; his closed; their breath became somehow coded. Again the concentrated tactile languor of the sexual mode. Again they stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn’t have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her like that, the left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore her.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the sun’s the same sun over all different parts of the planet. The NNE sun was at this same moment the color of hollandaise and gave off no heat. Between points, both Hal and Slice switched their sticks to their right hands and clamped their left hands tight under their arms to keep from losing sensation in the chill. Stice was double-faulting more than his average because he was trying to get enough on his second serve to follow it credibly to net. DeLint estimated he was charting Stice at one double-fault per 1.3 games, and his a./d.f. ratio [267]was an undistinguished.6, but he, deLint, told Helen Steeply of Moment, spread way out next to him on the third row from the top and using Gregg shorthand, deLint told this Ms. Steeply that Stice was nevertheless wise to crank the second serve and eat the occasional double-fault. Stice wound up to serve so stiff, his motion so sprocketed and serial, that the journalist told deLint Stice looked to her as if he’d learned to serve by studying still photos of the motion’s different stages, no offense intended. There was none of real highspeed motion’s liquid flow until the very end, when Stice pivoted toward the net and seemed to sort of fall out into the court, his tennis racquet whirling behind his back and snapping upward to impact the yellow ball hanging at just the height of his maximum reach, and there was a solid pock as this Stice cracked it flat into Orin’s brother’s body, handcuffing Hal at such speeds the ball’s movement presented only as afterimage, the creamy retinal trail of something too fast to track. Hal’s awkward return had too much slice, and floated, and Stice hurtled forward to volley it chest-high, blocking it acute into open court for a clean winner. There was mild applause. DeLint invited Helen Steeply to note that The Darkness really won that point on the serve itself. Hal Incandenza walked to the fence to retrieve the ball, impassive, wiping his nose against his sweatshirt’s sleeve; ad-in. Hal was up 5–4 in the first and had saved three ads off Stice’s fifth service game, two off double-faults; but deLint still maintained Stice was wise.

‘Hal’s got to the point in the last year here where a kid’s only real chance is to totally press, attack at all times, whale the serve, haul ass to the net, assume the aggressor role.’

‘Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?’ Helen Steeply asked him. ‘I was noticing.’

‘You stay back against this Hal kid, you try to out-think him and move him around, he’ll yank you back and forth and chew you up and spit you out and step on the remains. We’ve spent years getting him to this point. Nobody stays back and out-controls Incandenza anymore.’

Pretending to flip to a fresh page, Helen Steeply dropped her pen, which fell into the bleachers’ struts and supports and clattered as only something dropped into a system of metal bleachers can clatter. The prolonged noise made Stice take some extra bounces before he served. He bounced the ball several times, leaning forward, lined up splayed and violently sideways. He went into his odd segmented windup; Helen Steeply produced another pen from the pocket of her fiberfill parka; Stice cracked it flat down the center, aiming for an ace on the service lines’ T. It went by Hal unplayable and literally too close to call. There are no linesmen for internal E.T.A. matches. Hal looked down the line at where the thing hit and skidded, pausing before indicating his call, the hand to his cheek indicating deliberation. He shrugged and shook his head and laid a hand out flat in the air before him to signify to Slice he was calling the serve good. This meant game Stice. The Darkness was walking toward the net, kneading his neck, looking at where Hal was still standing.

‘We can go on and play two,’ Stice said. ‘Didn’t see it neither.’

Hal was coming in closer to Stice because he was going to the net-post for his towel. ‘Not your job to see it.’ He looked unhappy and tried to smile. ‘You hit it too hard to see, you deserve the point.’

Stice shrugged and nodded, chewing. ‘You take the next gimme then.’ He sliced two balls soft so they ended their roll down near the opposite baseline, where Hal could use them to serve. The Darkness still made huge man-dibular chewing faces on-court even though he hadn’t been allowed to chew gum in play since he accidentally inhaled gum and had to be Heimliched by his opponent in the semis of last spring’s Easter Bowl.

‘Ortho’s saying how the next debatable call goes immediately to Hal; they don’t take two,’ deLint said, darkening in half-squares on the two charts.

‘Take two?’

‘Play a let, babe. Do it over. Two serves: one point.’ Aubrey deLint was a lightly pockmarked man with thick yellow hair in an anchorman’s helmety style and a hypertensive flush, and eyes, oval and close-set and lightless, that seemed like a second set of nostrils in his face. ‘Do a whole lot of sports at Moment do you?’

‘So they’re being sporting,’ Steeply said. ‘Generous, fair.’

‘We inculcate that as a priority here,’ deLint said, gesturing vaguely at the space around them, head bent to his charts.

‘They seem like friends.’

‘The angle here for Moment might be the good-friends-off-the-court-and-remorseless-pitiless-foes-on-court angle.’

‘I mean they seem like friends even playing,’ Helen Steeply said, watching Hal dry off his leather grip with a white towel as Stice jumped up and down in place back at his deuce corner, one hand in his armpit.

DeLint’s laugh sounded to Steeply’s keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less fit man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer to know who he was. ‘Don’t kid yourself, babe,’ de Lint got out. The Vaught twins on the bleacher below looked up and around and pretended to shush him, the left mouth grinning, deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal Incandenza bounced the ball three times and went into his own service motion.

Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel twenty-six meters below the Show Courts.

Steeply’s face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for a motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal Incandenza’s serve. At the start a violinist maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand with the ball at the racket’s throat like a bow. The down-together-up-together of the downswing and toss could be a child making angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and eyes at the sky. But Hal’s face was pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The service motion’s middle might be a man at a precipice, falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own weight, and the serve’s terminus and impact a hammering man, the driven nail just within range at the top of his tiptoed reach. But all these were only parts, and made the motion seem segmented, when the smaller crew-cutted jowly boy was the one with the stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis only a couple times, with his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The punter’s discourses on the game had been lengthy but not much use. It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment.

Hal ïncandenza’s first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put the ball away on the next shot, up at net. Hal’s serve seemed to set in motion a much more involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive. His first serve hadn’t Stice’s pace, but it had depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved with an arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made the serve curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box and hop up high, so that Stice couldn’t do more than send back a deep backhand chip from shoulder-height, and then couldn’t come in behind a return that’d been robbed of all pace. Stice moved to the baseline’s center as the chip floated back to Hal. Hal’s pivot moved him right so he could take it on the forehand, [268]another looper dripping with top, right back in the same corner he’d served to, so that Stice had to stop and sprint back the same way he’d come. Stice drove this backhand hard down the line to Hal’s forehand, a blazing thing that made the audience inhale, but as the samizdat’s director’s other son glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had a whole open court to hit cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he’d backpedalled a bit off the shot and was now scrambling to get back out of the deuce corner, arid Hal hit the flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so, and the diagonal of the ball kept it travelling out wide after it hit Stice’s ad sideline, carrying it away from the boy in black’s outstretched racquet, and for a second it looked as if Stice at a dead run might get his strings on the ball, but the ball stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-court diagonal, and it passed Slice’s racquet half a meter past its rim, and Slice’s momentum carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice slowed to a jog to go retrieve the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot on the ad side, waiting for Stice to get back and let him serve again. DeLint, whose peripheral vision’s acuity and disguise was an E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second and then put down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for pretty, shaking her fuchsia cap.