David Wallace - Infinite jest

Hal hasn’t heard one human sound since he came in. The place’s silence has that glittery sound of total silence. His footfalls make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels furtive and burglarish and holds the NASA glass down at his side and the NA booklet higher up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced landscapes on the walls, little low tables with glossy pamphlets, a framed print of Picasso’s ‘Seated Harlequin,’ and nothing else that wasn’t just institutional bullshit, visual Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it’s like the gauntlets of doors just glide by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that’s chosen to hold itself still. If you asked Hal to describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would be to say he wished he were somewhere else and feeling some way besides how he felt. His mouth pours spit. The glass’s one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much fun to look at. He’s missed the glass a couple of times and marred the tan carpet with dark spit. After two 90° turns it’s clear the hallway’s run is a perfect square around the cube’s ground level. He’s seen no stairs or entrances to stairways. He empties the NASA glass rather gooily into a potted rubber tree’s dirt. Q.R.S.’s building may be one of those infamous Rubikular cubes that looks topologically undeformed but is actually impossible to negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third corner start at 18, and now Hal can hear either very distant or very muffled voices. He carries the NA booklet in front of him like a crucifix. He has about $50 U.S. and another $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom-emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no idea what sort of introductory costs might be involved. Q.R.S. didn’t purchase prime Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a São-Paulo-School Geometric-Minimalist architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was for sure.

Room 32A’s wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the muffled voices were behind this one. The Meeting was listed in the book as starting at 1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some sort of pre-Meeting orientation for people who’ve come for the first time, sort of tentatively, just to scout the whole enterprise out, so he doesn’t knock.

He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he’s straightening a bow tie before he enters a strange room.

And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doorknobs on the Quabbin Recovery Systems doors are the same as at E.T.A. — flat bars of brass toggle-bolted to the latch mechanism, so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the door.

But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn’t near big enough to create a mood of anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or ten adult middle-class males are in the warm room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of the men has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same way, that Indian cross-legged style with their hands on their knees and their feet under their knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere in sight. Hal eases the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair, all the time conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet. The chairs are placed in no discernible order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room’s own colors, walls and ceiling the color of Thousand Island dressing — a color-scheme with unplaceable but uneasy associations for Hal — and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 32A is stuffy with CO 2and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta.

The only guy in the Meeting to acknowledge Hal’s entrance is at the front of the room, a man Hal would have to call almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks plaid and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously backward in his chair any minute, smiling warmly at Hal’s winter coat and NASA glass as Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man’s chair is positioned under a small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face it, and the man holds a Magic Marker in one hand and holds what looks quite a bit like a teddy bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit Norwegian sweater the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he’s got the blond eyebrows and creepy blond eyelashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian blond, and his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a truncated star. The morbidly round blond man’s pretty clearly the leader of the Meeting, possibly a high-ranking official of Narcotics Anonymous, whom Hal could casually approach about tracts and texts to buy and study, afterward.

Another middle-aged guy up near the front is crying, and he too holds what looks like a bear.

The blond brows hike up and down as the leader says ‘I’d like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin’s Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss.’

They’re all at subtly different angles to Hal, who’s slumped low over by the wall in the second-to-last row, but it turns out after some subtle casual neck-craning that, sure enough, all these middle-class guys in at least their thirties are sitting there clutching teddy bears to their sweatered chests — and identical teddy bears, plump and brown and splay-limbed and with a little red corduroy tongue protruding from the mouths, so the bears all look oddly throttled. The room is menacingly quiet now except for the sibilance of the heating vents and the sobbing guy Kevin, and the plip of Hal’s saliva hitting the bottom of the empty glass rather more loudly than he might have wished.

The back of the crying guy’s neck is turning redder and redder as he clutches his bear and rocks on his hams.

Hal sits with his leg crossed good-ankle-on-knee and joggles his white hightop and looks at his callused thumb and listens to the Kevin guy sob and snuffle. The guy wipes his nose with the heel of his hand just like the littler Buddies at E.T.A. Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the Meeting is probably on the verge of coming around to talking explicitly about drugs and how to give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched and bereft, or maybe at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness of giving up drugs to continue before the old nervous system and salivary glands returned to normal. Even though Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Doloros Rusk’s dreaded Inner Child, Hal’d be willing to bet that here it’s some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous sobriquet for like ‘limbic component of the CNS’ or ‘the part of our cortex that’s not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been pulling us through the day, secretly’ or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.

The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy bear’s head and is breathing slowly and evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under the blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-as-California-surfer-dude. The leader inhales gently and says ‘The energies I’m feeling in the group are energies of unconditional love and acceptance for Kevin’s Inner Infant.’ Nobody else says anything, and the leader doesn’t seem to need anybody to say anything. He looks down at the cage his hands have made on the bear and keeps subtly changing the shape of the cage. The guy Kevin, whose neck is now not only beet-red but shiny with embarrassed sweat between his shirt-collar and hair’s hem, sobs even harder at the affirmation of love and support. The round leader’s high hoarse voice had the same blandly kind didactic quality as Rusk’s, as if always speaking to a not-too-bright child.

After some more cage-play and deep breathing the leader looks up and around and nods at nothing and says ‘Maybe we could all name our feelings right now for Kevin and share how much we’re caring for him and his Inner Infant right now, in his pain.’

Various bearded cross-legged guys speak up:

‘I love you, Kevin.’

‘I’m not judging you, Kevin.’

‘Know just how you and the I.I. feel.’

‘I’m feeling really close to you.’

‘I’m feeling a lot of love for you right now, Kevin.’

‘You’re crying for two, guy.’

‘Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin.’

‘I’m not feeling like your crying is one bit unmanly or pathetic, fella.’

It’s at this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open-mindedness and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous (‘NA’) Meeting, which seems already deeply under way and isn’t one bit like he’s imagined an even remotely hopeful antidrug Meeting would be like. It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing. Not one Substance or symptom of Substance-deprivation has been mentioned so far. And none of these guys looks like they’ve ever been engaged with anything more substantial than an occasional wine cooler, if he had to guess.

Hal’s grim mood deepens as the round man up front now leans precariously over and down and opens a sort of toy-box under the blackboard by his chair and produces a cheap plastic portable CD laser-scanner and sets it on top of the toy-box, where it begins to issue a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music, mostly cello, with sporadic harps and chimes. The stuff spreads through the hot little room like melted butter, and Hal sinks lower in his orange chair and looks hard at the space-and-spacecraft emblem on his NASA glass.

‘Kevin?’ the leader says over the music. ‘Kevin?’ The sobbing man’s hand lies over his face like a spider, and he doesn’t even start to look up until the leader has said several times very blandly and kindly ‘Kevin, do you feel okay about looking at the rest of the group?’

Kevin’s red neck wrinkles as he looks up at the blond leader through his fingers.

The leader’s made the cage again on his poor bear’s squashed head. ‘Can you share what you’re feeling, Kevin?’ he says. ‘Can you name it?’

Kevin’s voice is muffled by the hand he hides behind. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant’s abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,’ he says, drawing shuddering breaths. His mauve sweater’s shoulders tremble. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant standing holding the bars of his crib and looking out of the bars … bars of his crib and crying for his Mommy and Daddy to come hold him and nurture him.’ Kevin sobs twice in an apneated way. One arm holds his lap’s bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a little stuffing start to come out of its mouth around its tongue, and a stalactite of that clear thin weepy-type mucus hangs from Kevin’s nose just mm. over the throttled bear’s head. ‘And nobody’s coming!’ he sobs. ‘Nobody’s coming. I feel alone with my bear and plastic airplane-mobile and teething ring.’

Everybody’s nodding in an affirming and pained way. No two beards are exactly the same fullness and design. A couple other sobs break out across the room. Everyone’s bear stares blankly ahead.