David Wallace - Infinite jest

A big rangy kid, with a big sharp face and tight short hair and a smile and a shave-twice jaw since he was fourteen. Now balding smoothly back from a high clear forehead. A permanent smile that always seemed like he was trying not to but just couldn’t help it. His Da always formerly saying to Wipe it off.

Inman Square: Little Lisbon. The soup has bits of calamari that make the muscles in his face flex, chewing.

Now two Brazilians in bell bottoms and tall shoes along the sidewalk across the window over the diners’ heads, what might be a brewing street-fight, one walking forward and one walking backward, facing off as they move, each missing the dollop of bowel-movement on the walk, speaking high-volume street-Portuguese muffled by windows and hot clatter, but each looking around and then pointing at his own chest like: ‘You saying this shit to me?’ Then the forward man’s sudden charge carrying them both past the window’s right frame.

Matty’s Da’d come over on a boat from Louth in Lenster in 1989. Matty’d been three or four. Da’d worked on the Southie docks, coiling lengths of rope as big around as phone poles into tall cones, and had died when Matty was seventeen, of pancreatic complaints.

Matty looked up from the roll he was dipping in the soup and saw two underweight interracial girls moving across the window, one a nigger, neither even looking at the shit everyone’s stepping around; and then a few seconds behind them Poor Tony Krause, who because of the trousers and cap Matty didn’t even recognize as Poor Tony Krause until he’d looked back down and then up again: Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: sucked-out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face’s skin the greenish white of extreme-depth marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat’s hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always reminded him of black-and-white-era starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome given Krause’s spectral mien, passing across the Grille’s window, his eyes either on or looking right through the two skinny girls plodding ahead of him, following them out of the window’s right-hand side.

His Da’d begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A fook in t’boom. Matty had complete recall of the whole thing. He’d seen sometimes where persons that had unpleasant things happen to them as children blocked the unpleasantness out in their mentality as adults and forgot it. Not so with Matty Pemulis. He remembered every inch and pimple of every single time. His father outside the little room Matt and Micky slept in, late at night, the cat’s-eye sliver of lit hallway through the crack in the door Da’d opened, the door on well-oiled hinges opening with the implacable slowness of a rising moon, Da’s shadow lengthening across the floor and then the man his very self weaving in behind it, crossing the moonlit floor in darned socks and that smell about him that later Matty’d know was malt liquor but at that age he and Mickey called something else, when they smelled it. Matty lay and pretended to sleep; he didn’t know why tonight he pretended not to know the man was there; he was afraid. Even the first time. Micky just five. All the times were the same. Da drunk. Tacking across the bedroom floor. A certain stealth. Managing somehow never to break his neck on the toy trucks and tiny cars scattered on the floor, left there that first time by accident. Sitting on the edge of the bed so his weight changed the bed’s angle. A big man smelling of tobacco and something else, his breath always audible when drunk. Sitting on the edge of the bed. Shaking Matty ‘awake’ to the point where Matty’d have to pretend to wake up. Asking if he’d been asleep, sleeping, there, was he. Tenderness, caresses that were somehow just over the line from true ethnic-Irish fatherly affection, the emotional largesse of a man without a Green Card who daily broke his back for his family’s food. Caresses that were in some vague way just over the line from that and from the emotional largesse of something else, drunk, when all the rules of mood were suspended and you never knew from minute to minute whether you were to be kissed or hit — impossible to say how or even know how they were just over those lines. But they were, the caresses. Tenderness, caresses, low soft oversweet hot bad breath, soft apologies for some flash of savagery or discipline from the day. A way of cupping the pillow-warm cheek and jaw in the hollow of the hand, the huge pinkie finger tracing the hollow between throat and jaw. Matty’d shrink away: shy are we sone scared are we? Matty’d shrink away even after he knew the shrinking fear was part of what brought it on, for Da’d get angry: who are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to be scared so of our own Da? As if the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more than a. Can’t a Da show his son some love without being taken for a. As if Matty could lie here with his food inside him under bedding he’d paid for and think his Da were no better than a. Is it a fookin you’re scared of, then. You think a Da what comes in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da has nought on his mind but a fook? As if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the docks? As if the Da were a. Is that what you take me for. Is that what you take me for then. Matty shrinking back into a flattening pillow the Da’d paid for, the springs of the convertible bed singing with his fear; he shook. Why then so then I’ve a mind to give you just what you’re thinking t’fear. Take me for. Matty knew early on that his being afraid fueled the thing somehow, made his Da want to. He was unable not to be afraid. He tried and tried, cursed himself for a coward and deserving, all but calling his father a. It was years before he snapped to the fact that his Da’d have fooked him in t’boom no matter what he’d done. That the event was laid out before the first slim line of doorlight broadened, and whatever Matty’d felt or betrayed made no difference. An advantage to not blocking it out is you can snap to things later, with ma-turer perspective; you can come to see no sone on the planet could in any way ask for that, regardless. At a certain later age he started lying there when his Da shook him and pretended to sleep on, even when the shakes got to where his teeth clacked together in a mouth that wore the slight smile Matty’d decided truly sleeping people’s faces always wore. The harder his father shook him, the tighter Matty’d shut his eyes and the more set the slight smile and the louder the rasps of the cartoon snores he alternated with exhaled whistles. Mickey over in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb, on his side, face to the wall and hidden. Never a word between them about anything more than the chances of being kissed v. hit. Finally Da’d grab both his shoulders and flip him over with a sound of disgust and frustration. Matty thought just the smell of the fear was maybe enough to deserve it, until (later on) he got some maturer perspective. He remembered the oval sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum jelly, that special stone-in-pond plop of a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in an era of Child-Proof caps), hearing his Da muttering as he applied it to himself, feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him as his Da smeared the stuff roughly around Matty’s rosebud, his dark star.

It was only the maturer perspective of years and experience that let Matty find something to be thankful for, that the Da’d at least used a lube. The origins of the big man’s clear familiarity with the stuff and its nighttime use not even adult perspective could illuminate, let Matty snap to, still, now, at twenty-three.

One hears, say, cirrhosis and acute pancreatitis and thinks of the subject clutching his middle like an old film’s gutshot actor and slumping quietly over to eternal rest with lids shut and face composed. Matty’s Da’d died choking on aspirated blood, a veritable fountain of the darkest possible blood, Matty coated a spray-paint-russet as he held the man’s yellow wrists and Mum lumbered off down the ward in search of a crash-cart team. Particles aspirated so terribly fine, like almost atomized, so that they hung in the air like the air itself over the cribbed bed as the man expired, cat-yellow eyes wide open and face screwed into the very most godawful rictusized grin of pain, his last thoughts (if any) unknowable. Matty still toasted the man’s final memory with his first shot, whenever he indulged.[278]

First thing after supper Hal drops around to Schtitt’s room off the Comm.-Ad. lobby to go through the motions of getting some input on just what had gone so terribly wrong against Stice. Also to get maybe some kind of bead on why he’d had to play The Darkness publicly in the first place, so close to the WhataBurger. I.e. like what the exhibition might have signified. This endless tension among E.T.A.s about how the coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress — is your stock going up or down. But A. deLint’s the only one in there, working on some sort of oversized spreadsheetish chart, lying prone and shirtless on the bare floor with his chin in his hand and a pungent Magic Marker, and says Schtitt has gone off on the cycle somewhere after confections, but to sit down. Presumably meaning in a chair. So Hal’s subjected to several minutes of deLint’s take on the match, complete with stats out of the prorector’s head. DeLint’s back is pale and constellated with red pits of old pimples, though the back’s nothing compared to Struck’s or Shaw’s back. There’s a cane chair and a wood chair. DeLint’s liquid-crystal laptop screen pulses grayly on the floor next to him. Schtitt’s room’s overlit and there’s no dust anywhere, not even in the very corners. Schtitt’s sound system’s lights are on but nothing’s playing. Neither Hal nor deLint mentions Orin’s profiler’s presence in the match’s stands, nor the big lady’s long interchange with Poutrincourt, which had been conspicuous. Stice’s and Wayne’s names are at the top of the huge chart on the floor, but Hal’s name isn’t. Hal says he can’t tell whether he’d made some sort of basic tactical error or whether he just wasn’t quite up to snuff this afternoon or what.

‘You just never quite occurred out there, kid,’ deLint apprises him. He has regressed certain figures to back this up, this nonoccurrence. His choice of words chills Hal to the root.

After which, during what’s supposed to be mandatory P.M. Study Period, and despite the three chapters of Boards-prep his Boards-prep schedule calls for, Hal sits alone up in Viewing Room 6, the bad leg out along the couch in front of him, flexing the bad ankle idly, holding the other leg’s knee to his chest, squeezing a ball but with the hand he doesn’t play with, chewing Kodiak and spitting directly into an unlined wastebasket, his expression neutral, watching some cartridges of his late father’s entertainments. Anyone else looking at him in there tonight would call Hal depressed. He watches several cartridges all in a row. He watches The American Century as Seen Through a Brick and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell and then part of Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed, which is maddening because it’s all a monologue from some bespectacled little contemporary of Miles Penn and Heath Pearson who was almost as ubiquitous as Reat and Bain in Himself’s work but whose name right now Hal can’t for the life of him recall. He watches parts of Death in Scarsdale and Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn and Various Small Flames and Kinds of Pain. The Viewing Room has insulated panelling behind the wallpaper and is essentially soundproof. Hal watches half of the ‘Medusa v. Odalisque’ thing but takes it out abruptly when people in the audience start getting turned to stone.