David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘What you want to know, watching juniors at this level,’ deLint says, still back on an elbow so his upper body was out of sight and he was just legs and a voice in Steeply’s cold ear. ‘They all have different strengths, areas of the game they’re better at, and you can drown in profiling a match or a player in terms of the different strengths and the number of individual strengths.’

‘I am not here to profile the boy,’ Steeply said, but in French again.

DeLint ignored him. ‘It’s not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It’s do they come together to make a game. How complete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those kids at lunch you got to meet.’

‘But not speak to.’

‘The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike’s got great, great volleys, he’s a natural at net, great, great hand-eye. Mike’s other strength is he’s got the best lob in East Coast juniors bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you’re looking at out here right now can beat the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis’s strengths don’t give him a complete game. Volleys’re an offensive shot. A lob’s a baseliner’s weapon, counterpuncher. You can’t lob from the net or volley from the baseline.’

‘He says Michael Pemulis’s abilities cancel each other out,’ [275]Poutrin-court said in the other ear.

DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. ‘Pemulis’s strengths cancel each other out. Now Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid with the bandage on his nose from the soap-and-shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite’s also got a great lob, and while Pemulis’d take him right now on pure age and power Possalthwaite’s the technically superior player with the better future, because Todd’s built a complete game out of his lob.’

‘This deLint is wrong,’ Poutrincourt said in Québecois, smiling rictally across Steeply at deLint.

‘Because Possalthwaite won’t come in to net. Possalthwaite hangs back at any cost, and unlike Pemulis he works to develop the groundstrokes to let him stay back and draw the other guy in and use that venomous lob.’

‘Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, and if he grows strong and wishes to attack he will never be able,’ Poutrincourt said.

DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply wondered if he had some French on the sly, and made a private ideogram to this effect. ‘Possalthwaite’s a pure defensive strategist. He’s got a gestalt. The term we use here for a complete game is either gestalt or complete game.’

Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck in an intersticial diamond in the chain-link fencing, and Hal had to put his stick down and use both hands to force the thing out.

‘Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter’s brother — Hal can’t lob half as good as even Possalthwaite, and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play’s pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal’s strengths have started to fit together. He’s got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great groundstrokes, with great control and great touch, great command of touch and spin; and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control, and he can take an attacking player and use the guy’s own pace against him.’

Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more surprised than Hal did. The punter’s brother’s face registered nothing as he stood at the ad corner, adjusting something on his strings.

‘But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you have given your life to be. Not merely very good but the best. The good philosophy of here and Schtitt — I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than American, so you may see I have prejudice — is that you must have also — so, leave to one side for a moment the talent and work to become best — that you are doomed [276]if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend the success of the best, if you get to there.’

Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo-Georgian cube of the Community and Administration Building, several small boys carrying and dragging white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the parking lot’s rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves and casting anxious looks across the grounds at the crowd behind the Show Court.

‘Then,’ Poutrincourt said, ‘and for the ones who do become the étoiles, the lucky who become profiled and photographed for readers and in the U.S.A. religion make it, they must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or they are doomed. We see this in experience. One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years. This task of us at the Enfield is more delicate still, with the étoiles. For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, [277]so, then, one of two things we see will happen.’

Steeply had to keep breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed.

‘One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “OK” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga of Eric Clipperton.’

‘With two p’s?’

‘Just so. Or the other possibility of doom, for the étoiles who attain. They attain the goal, thus, and put as much equal passion into celebrating their attainment as they had put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here the Syndrome of the Endless Party. The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and substances. The glitter. They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.’

‘Our best boy is better than Hal, you’ll see him play tomorrow if you want, John Wayne. No relation to the real John Wayne. A fellow compatriot of Terry here.’ Aubrey deLint was sitting back up beside them, the cold giving his pitted cheeks a second flush, two feverish harlequin ovals. ‘John Wayne’s got a gestalt because Wayne’s simply got everything, and everything with him’s got the sort of pace that a touch-artist and thinker like Hal just can’t handle.’

‘This was the Founder’s philosophy, too, of doom, the punter Incan-denza’s father, who also I am being told dabbled in filming?’ Steeply asked the Canadian.

Poutrincourt’s shrug could have meant too many things to note. ‘I came after. M. Schtitt, his different goal for the étoiles is to walk between these.’ Nor did Steeply quite notice the woman’s shifts between dialects. ‘To map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of the success.’

DeLint leaned in. ‘Wayne’s got everything. Hal’s strength has become knowing he doesn’t have everything, and constructing a game as much out of what’s missing as what’s there.’

Steeply pretended to arrange the cap but was really adjusting the wig. ‘It all sounds awfully abstract for something so physical.’

Poutrincourt’s shrug pushed her glasses slightly up. ‘It is contradictory. Two selves, one not there. M. Schtitt, when the Academy Founder died …’

‘The punter’s father, who dabbled in films.’ Steeply’s raglan sweater had been his wife’s.

Again nodding blandly, Poutrincourt: ‘This academic Founder, M. Schtitt tells that this Founder was a student of types of sight.’

DeLint said ‘Wayne’s only possible limits being also his strength, the tungsten-steel will and resolve, the insistence on imposing his game and his will on his man, totally unwilling to change the pace of his game if he’s not doing good. Wayne’s got the touch and the lobs to hang back on an off-day, but he won’t — if he’s down or things aren’t going his way, he just hits harder. His pace is so overwhelming he can get away with being uncompromising about attack against North American juniors. But in the Show, which Wayne’ll go pro maybe as soon as next year, in the Show flexibility is more important, he’ll find. What do you call, a humility.’

Poutrincourt was looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed. ‘The studying was not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees. He translated this numerously across different fields, M. Schtitt tells.’

The son described his father as quote “genre-dysphoric.”

Poutrincourt cocked her head. ‘This does not sound like Hal Incan-denza.’

DeLint sniffed meatily. ‘But Wayne’s gestalt’s chief edge over Hal is the head. Wayne is pure force. He doesn’t feel fear, pity, remorse — when a point’s over, it might as well have never happened. For Wayne. Hal actually has finer groundstrokes than Wayne, and he could have Wayne’s pace if he wanted. But the reason Wayne is Three continentally and Hal’s Six is the head. Hal looks just as perfectly dead out there, but he’s more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends in a match. Wayne doesn’t. Hal’s susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long lapses in concentration. Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.’

The Troeltsch person said ‘Holy crow.’

‘So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,’ Thierry Poutrincourt said quietly, in nearly accentless English, as if to herself.

‘This emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female thing. Schtitt and I think it’s a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here. We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin. We don’t see this forgetful will in the Vaughts, or in Spodek, who you can watch if you want.’

The Troeltsch person said ‘Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?’

Steeply was looking at the side of Poutrincourt’s face as deLint on the other side was saying ‘But the one we see this most in is Hal.’

The Man o’ War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. A waiter brought his soup. The waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible reason wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He’d been the neat eater in the family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three.

The Man o’ War Grille is on Prospect Street in Cambridge and its front windows overlook the heavy foot traffic between Inman and Central Squares. As Matty waited for his soup he’d seen across the restaurant and out the front’s glass a bag-lady-type older female in several clothing-layers lift her skirts and lower herself to the pavement and move her scaggly old bowels right there in full view of passersby and diners both, then gather all her plastic shopping bags together and walk stolidly out of view. The pile of bowel movement sat there on the pavement, steaming slightly. Matty’d heard the college kids at the next table say they didn’t know whether to be totally illed or totally awed.