David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’

She especially likes to hold the coffee’s mug in both hands. ‘Pardon me?’

‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’

One thing that’s happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she doesn’t follow you. Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same little line, and she’s twenty-eight. T don’t follow you. How can someone be too much himself?’

‘I think I wanted to ask you that.’

‘Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?’

‘Hey Moms?’

She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. ‘Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether I’ve been sensing that you yourself are sad?’

Mario’s gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the Bolex’s foot-treadle with his hands, if necessary. The Center Courts’ towering lights cast an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin high clouds whose movement’s pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the faint reflections of the lit room, and up, the tennis lights’ odd small lumes like criss-crossing spots.

‘Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume you’d simply come and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.’

And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’ headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.

The dark had a distanceless shape. The room’s ceiling might as well have been clouds.

‘Skkkkk.’

‘Booboo?’

‘Skk-kkk.’

‘Mario.’

‘Hal!’

‘Were you asleep there, Boo?’

‘I don’t think I was.’

‘Cause I don’t want to wake you up if you were.’

‘Is it dark or is it me?’

‘The sun won’t be up for a while, I don’t think.’

‘So it’s dark then.’

‘Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’

‘You were saying “Thank you Sir may I have another” several times.’

‘Sorry Boo.’

‘Numerous times.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I think I slept right through it.’

‘Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores’ vibrations in your midsection.’

‘I slept right through it. I didn’t hear you even come in.’

‘Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in his rack again.’

‘…’

‘I hope you didn’t move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’

‘I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don’t know to borrow tapes, if we’re both devoted.’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’

‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine. Moms asked me where’s Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up.’

‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’

‘She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you’re too trustworthy to worry about or check up on.’

‘Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are for somebody else’s teeth, not my teeth, and I can’t seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they’re not for my teeth.’

‘I promised LaMont Chu I’d tell him whatever information you told me, he was so concerned.’

‘The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’

‘LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.’

‘Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?’

‘S. Johnson used to be the Moms’s dog. That passed away.’

‘And you remember how he died, then.’

‘Hey Hal, you remember a period in time back in Weston when we were little that the Moms wouldn’t go anywhere without S. Johnson? She took him with her to work, and had that unique car seat for him when she had the Volvo, before Himself had the accident in the Volvo. The seat was from the Fisher-Price Company. We went to Himself’s opening of Kinds of Light at the Hayden [320]that wouldn’t let in cigarettes or dogs and the Moms brought S. Johnson in a blind dog’s harness-collar that went all the way around his chest with the square bar on the leash thing and the Moms wore those sunglasses and looked up and to the right the whole time so it looked like she was legally blind so they’d let S.J. into the Hayden with us, because he had to be there. And how Himself just thought it was a good one on the Hayden, he said.’

‘I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about S. Johnson’s map getting eliminated.’

‘She was sad.’

‘I’ve been thinking compulsively about Orin ever since C.T. called us all in. When you think about Orin what do you think, Boo?’

‘The best was remember when she had to fly and wouldn’t put him in a cagey box and they wouldn’t even let a blind dog on the plane, so she’d leave S. Johnson and leave him out tied to the Volvo and she’d make Orin put a phone out there with its antenna up during the day out by where S. Johnson was tied to the Volvo and she’d call on the phone and let it ring next to S. Johnson because she said how S. Johnson knew her unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he was thought about and cared about from afar, she said?’

‘She was unbent where that dog was concerned, I remember. She bought some kind of esoteric food for it. Remember how often she bathed it?

‘…’

‘What was it with her and that dog, Boo?’

‘And the day we were out rolling balls in the driveway and Orin and Marlon were there and S. Johnson was there lying there on the driveway tied to the bumper with the phone right there and it rang and rang and Orin picked it up and barked into it like a dog and hung it up and turned it off?’

‘…’

‘So she’d think it was S. Johnson? The joke that Orin thought was such a good one?’

‘Jesus, Boo, I don’t remember any of that.’

‘And he said we’d get Indian Rub-Burns down both arms if we didn’t pretend how we didn’t know what she was talking about if and when she asked us about the bark on the phone when she got home?

‘The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well.’

‘We were supposed to shrug and look at her like she was minus cards from her deck, or else?’

‘Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I’ve been remembering.’

‘He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him.’

‘I don’t know whether I miss him or not.’

‘I miss Family Trivia. Do you remember four times he let us sit in on when they played Family Trivia?’

‘You’ve got a phenomenal memory for this stuff, Boo.’

‘…’

‘You probably think I’m wondering why you don’t ask me about the thing with C.T. and Pemulis and the impromptu urine, after the Eschaton debacle, where the urologist took us right down to the administrative loo and was going to watch personally while we filled his cups, like watch it go in, the urine, to make sure it came from us personally.’

‘I think I especially have a phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked.’

‘You can ask, if you like.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn’t actually extract urine samples from us. We got to hold on to our urine, as the Moms no doubt knows quite well, don’t kid yourself, from C.T.’

‘I have a phenomenal memory for things that make me laugh is what I think it is.’

‘That Pemulis, without self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got the guy to give us thirty days — the Fundraiser, the What-aBurger, Thanksgiving Break, then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized receptacles he wants, is the arrangement we made.’

‘I can hear Schacht, you’re right. Also the fans.’

‘Boo?’

T like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.’

‘Pemulis — the alleged weak-stomached clutch-artist — Pemulis showed some serious brass under pressure, standing there over that urinal. He played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument. I found myself feeling almost proud for him.’

‘…’

‘You might think I’m wondering why you aren’t asking me why thirty days, why it was so important to extract thirty days from the blue-blazered guy before a G.C./M.S. scan. As in what is there to be afraid of, you might ask.’

‘Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal.’

‘Jesus, it’s just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Except with you I can feel you mean it.’

‘You’re up on your elbow. You’re on your side, facing my way. I can see your shadow.’

‘How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you’re ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?’

‘You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.’

‘Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.’

‘…’

‘You know, for me, Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.’