David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Wasn’t that pretty,’ he said blandly.

Steeply rooted for a hankie. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Hal’s in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight-out killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne,’ deLint said. ‘This is why you don’t stay back or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep you trying, running. He yanks you around. Always two or three shots ahead. He won that point on the deep forehand after the serve — the second he had Stice wrong-footed you could see the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in advance, and without the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn’t need pace, we’ve helped him find.’

‘When might I get a chance to talk to him?’

‘Incandenza took a lot of bringing along. He didn’t used to quite have the complete game to be able to do this. Slice the court up into sections and chinks, then all of a sudden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he’s been setting up the angle since the start of the point. It makes you think of chess.’

The journalist blew her red nose. ‘ “Chess on the run.”

‘Nice term.’

Hal went into his service motion to the ad court.

‘Do the students play chess here?’

A mirthless chuckle. ‘No time.’

‘Do you play chess?’

Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal’s second serve; mild applause.

‘I don’t have time to play anything,’ deLint said, filling in a square.

You could tell by the sound that the other boy’s racquet was strung tighter than Hal’s.

‘When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do.’

The journalist’s rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. ‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s not my decision. My guess is you don’t. Dr. Tavis didn’t already tell you?’

T really couldn’t tell what he was telling me.’

‘We’ve never had a kid here interviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds, versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in.’

‘I’m here for background only, for your alumnus, the punter.’

DeLint was making his lips look like he was whistling even though no whistling-sound was emerging. ‘We’ve never let somebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while he’s still in training and inculcation.’

‘Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why? What if the boy wants to chat with me about his brother’s transition from tennis to football?’

DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a way that was supposed to let you know you had very little of his attention. ‘Talk to Tavis about it.’

‘I was in there for over two hours.’

‘You pick up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into a Yes-No corner where you can finally say I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty minutes if you’re sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people. The answer’s not for me to officially say, but I’m guessing a No. The Boston press guys come around after a big event, they get match results and physical stats and hometowns and nothing more.’

‘Moment is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some sportswriter with a cigar and a deadline.’

‘It’s a command-decision, babe. I’m not in command. I know they teach us to teach that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.’

‘I’m here only for the human-interest perspective of a talented boy on his talented brother’s bold transition to a major sport where he’s shown himself to be even more talented. One exceptional brother on another. Hal is not the profile’s focus.’

‘Get Tavis in the right corner and he’ll tell you about seeing and being seen. These kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. Schtitt’s thing is self-transcendence through pain. These kids —’ gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that stopped rolling well inside the service line; mild applause — ‘they’re here to get lost in something bigger than them. To have it stay the way it was when they started, the game as something bigger, at first. Then they show talent, start winning, become big fish in their ponds out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside the game and see. Fucks with a junior’s head, talent. They pay top dollar to come here and go back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and develop. To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them. They didn’t come here to get read about as some soft-news item or background. Babe.’

DeLint read Steeply’s expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair protruded from one of her nostrils, which deLint found repellent. She said, ‘Were you ever written about, as a player?’

DeLint smiled coolly at his charts. ‘Never had the sort of ranking or promise this issue’d even come up for me.’

‘But some of these do. Hal’s brother did.’

DeLint felt along his lip’s outline with his pencil, sniffed. ‘Orin was OK. Orin was essentially a one-trick pony as a player. And between you and me and the fence he was kind of a head-case. His game left here on the downswing. Now his little brother’s got a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls — Kent, Caryn and Sharyn here,’ indicating the Vaught-apparition below them. ‘The really gifted ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the Show — ‘

‘Meaning professional you mean.’

‘In the Show they’ll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at and poked at and discussed, and then some. For now they’re here to get to be the ones who look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.’

‘But even you call it “The Show.” They’ll be entertainers.’

‘You bet your ass they will be.’

‘So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses of entertaining an audience, get them used to being seen?’

The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint made kind of a show of putting his clipboard down. ‘Assume wrongly for a second that I can speak for the Enfield Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show won’t fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and want only them and the game’s incidental to you, for you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it’s what you do.’

‘We chew statues?’

‘Whether you mean to or no. You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, Inter-Lace, the audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking literally. It’s the nature of the game. It’s the machine they’re all dying to throw themselves into. They don’t know the machine. But we do. Gerhardt’s teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can’t be chewed. It takes time and total focus. The man’s a fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you want to profile somebody.’

‘And I’m not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this inside chew-proof place. It’s a secret place.’

Hal mishit a second serve and it flew off his frame and way down to where the girls were sending each other squeaks and lobs, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6–5, and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation. DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice’s direction. Hal chipped his balls out along the baseline and made some small adjustments in his cross-hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the nastier kids applauded Hal’s mishit a little.

‘Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it’s not my command-decision. I wouldn’t get sardonic with Tavis, though.’

‘But if it were. Your command.’

‘Lady, if it was me you’d be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down there is as far in as you’d get. You’re coming into a little slice of space and/or time that’s been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn’t even wear pads. A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? A more dramatic story, geopolitics, privation, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even. A more complete game. Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top Five if he doesn’t fuck up or burn down. Wayne’s your ideal food-group. Which is why we’ll keep you off him as long as he’s here.’

The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. ‘Carved out of what, though, this place?’

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. Marlon K. Bain Saprogenic Greetings, Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

In Phoenix on other business, it has been my good fortune to meet your adolescent friend, Mr. Orin J. Incandenza, and to have become intrigued with the possibilities of a profile of the Incandenza family and its accomplishments in not only sports but wide-ranging topics such as independent film circa metropolitan Boston, past and present.

I am writing to ask for your cooperation in contacting you with questions which you could answer in writing, as I am informed by Mr. Orin Incandenza you dislike to meet people outside your home and office.

I am hoping to hear from you in response to this request at your earliest convenience, Etc. etc. etc.

Saprogenic Greetings*

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags ‘N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises

Ms. Helen Steepley And So On November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Ms. Steepley: Fire away.

V.D., MK Bain

Saprogenic Greetings/ACME

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. MK Bain Saprogenic Greetings Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

Q, Q, Q (Q, Q[Q], Q, Q, Q), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q.[269]

Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud — at more or less the same time the hilltop’s bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level for tennis — are E.T.A.’s abundant tunnels. There are access tunnels and hallway tunnels, with rooms and labs and Pump Room’s Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels and storage tunnels and little blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels. Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that’s more generally ovoid than anything else.