David Wallace - Infinite jest

And Steeply raised his bare arms and held them out and crossed them, maybe as if signalling for distant aid; this made X’s and pedentive V’s over much in the city Tucson. ‘Still, Rémy, but born in the hated-by-you Ottawa, this civilian attache, and connected to a major buyer of trans-grid entertainment. And follow-up out of the Boston offices reports possible indications of the victim’s prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first place. The samizdat.’

‘Prior?’

Steeply produced from his handbag Belgian cigarettes of a many-mm. and habitually female type. ‘Film director’s wife’d taught out at Brandeis where the victim’d done his residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies’ background checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse.’ With the slight pause of which Steeply could excel: ‘Particularly a Canadian pulse.’

‘Involvement of sexuality is what you are meaning, then, not politics.’

Steeply said, ‘This wife herself a Québecer, Rémy, from L’Islet county — Chief Tine says three years spent on Ottawa’s “Personnes Qui On Doit” list. There’s such a thing as political sex.’

‘I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are not our desire. This is known by you.’ Marathe’s eyes looked nearly closed. ‘And your tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you. Services Without Specificity, they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently.’

Steeply looked down at himself. One of the false breasts (surely false: surely they would not go as far as the hormonal, Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. ‘I was asked to secure personal verification, is all,’ he said. ‘My general sense at the Office is the brass consider the whole incident a stumper. There’re theories and countertheories. There are even antitheories positing error, mistaken identity, sick hoax.’ His shrugging, with his hands on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic. ‘Still: twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that’d be some hoax, no?’

Marathe sniffed. ‘Asked to verify by our mutual M. Tine? How you call him: “Rod, a God”?’

(Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and whose stenographer had long doubled as the steno- grapher-cum-jeune-fille-de-Vendredi of M. DuPlessis, former asst. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose passionate, ill-disguised attachment (Tine’s) to this double-amaneunsis — one Mile. Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L’Islet, Quebec — gave rise to these questions of the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he ‘doubled’ [41]for Quebec out of the love for Luria or ‘tripled’ the loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it was said.)

‘The, Rémy.’ It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts’ directions without pulling down severely his décolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag sunglasses and put on the sunglasses. They were embellished with rhinestones and looked absurd. ‘Rod the God.’

Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several matches to light a cigarette in the wind. The encroachment of true dusk began to erase his wig’s chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills east of the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter for the flame.

It’s a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremíc-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters’ whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable — it’s that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

All these territories are now property of Canada.

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegetablish if in the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own. If American, north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border metropolis — Rome NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered points between them at which the giant protective ATHSCME fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.

The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a cigarette in the mouth. He said, ‘And you’ll of course report this little interface of you and me right back to Fortier.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘ ‘n sûr.’

Steeply got it lit. He was a large and soft man, some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat. He appeared to Marathe to look less like a woman than a twisted parody of womanhood. Electrolysis had caused patches of tiny red pimples along his jowls and upper lip. He also held his elbow out, the arm holding the match for lighting, which is how no woman lights a cigarette, who is used to breasts and keeps the lighting elbow in. Also Steeply teetered ungracefully on his pumps’ heels on the stone’s uneven surface. He never for a moment turned his back completely at Marathe as he stood on the lip of the outcropping. And Marathe had his chair’s wheels’ clamps now locked down tight and a firm grip on the machine pistol’s pebbled grip. Steeply’s purse was small and glossy black, and the sunglasses he wore had womanly frames with small false jewels at the temples. Mar-athe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors requested of him.

Steeply now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark glasses. ‘And also that I just right now asked you if you’d report it, and that you said bien sûr?’

Marathe’s laugh had this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not sincere. He made a mustache of his finger, pretending for some reason to stifle a need to sneeze. ‘You verify this because of why?’

Steeply scratched under the hem of his blonde wig with (stupidly, dangerously) the thumb of his hand that held the cigarette. ‘Well you are already tripling, Rémy, aren’t you? Or would it be quadrupling. We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you’re here with me now.’

‘But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this, that they have sent me to pretend I double?’

Marathe’s sidearm, a Sterling UL35 9 mm machine pistol with a Mag Na Port silencer, did not have a safety. Its fat and texture-of-pebbles grip was hot from Marathe’s palm, and in turn caused Marathe’s palm to perspire beneath the blanket. From Steeply there merely was silence.

Marathe said: ‘… have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray.’[42]

And the desert U.S.A.’s light had become now sad, more than half the round sun gone behind the Tortolitas. Only now the chair’s wheels and Steeply’s thick legs cast shadows below the dusk-line, and these shadows were becoming squat and retreating back up toward the two men.

Steeply did a brief pretend-Charleston, playing with his legs’ shadows. ‘Nothing personal. You know that. It’s the obsessive caution. Who was it — who once said we get paid to drive ourselves crazy, the caution thing? You guys and Tine — your DuPlessis always suspected he tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.’

Marathe shrugged hard. ‘And abruptly M. DuPlessis has now passed away from life. Under circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion.’ Again with the false-sounding laugh. ‘An inept burglary and grippe indeed.’

Both men were silent. Steeply’s left arm had on it a nasty mesquite scratch, Marathe could observe.

Marathe finally glanced at his watch, its dial illuminated in his body’s shadow. Both men’s shadows were now climbing the steep incline, returning up to them. ‘Me, I think that we go about our affairs in a more simple manner than your B.S.S. office. If M. Tine’s betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware.’

‘Because of Luria.’

Marathe pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it. ‘But yes. The caution. Luria would be aware.’

Steeply stepped gingerly up to the edge and tossed out his cigarette’s stub. The wind caught the stub and it soared slightly upward from his hand, moving east. Both men were silent until the butt fell and hit the dark mountainside off below them, a tiny bloom of orange. Their silence then became contemplative. Something tight in the air between them loosened. Marathe no longer felt the sun on his skull. Dusk settled about them. Steeply had found his triceps’ scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine it, his rouged lips rounded with concern.

Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy: A.M. drills, shower, eat, class, lab, class, class, eat, prescriptive-grammar exam, lab/class, conditioning run, P.M. drills, play challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight room, sauna, shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players.

‘… to even realize what they’re sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel it in the first place?’

1640h.: the Comm.-Ad. Bldg.’s males’ locker room is full of clean upper-classmen in towels after P.M. matches, the players’ hair wet-combed and shining with Barbicide. Pemulis uses the comb’s big-toothed end to get that wide-furrowed look that kids from Allston favor. Hal’s own hair tends to look wet-combed even when it’s dry.

‘So,’ Jim Troeltsch says, looking around. ‘So what do you think?’

Pemulis lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, leaning up against the cabinet where they keep all the disinfectants. He has this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything. ‘Was there like a central point to all that, Troeltsch?’

‘The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy’s sentence, not about real unhappy families,’ Hal says quietly.

John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart, like the fart was some kind of task, standing at his locker, waiting for his feet to get dry enough to put on socks.

There is a silence. Showerheads dribble on tile. Steam hangs. Distant ghastly sounds from T. Schacht over in one of the stalls off the showers. Everyone stares into the middle distance, stunned with fatigue. Michael Pemulis, who can stand about ten seconds of communal silence tops, clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into the sink behind him. The plate mirrors caught part of its quivering flight, Hal sees. Hal closes his eyes.