David Wallace - Infinite jest

Hal spits Kodiak tobacco juice into an old rocket-emblazoned NASA glass on the bedside table, idly and for no special reason riffling through densely packed letters tri-folded and packed upright, a kind of Rolodex of different mementos and postal correspondence Mario’s rescued from wastebaskets and recycling bins and dumpsters and quietly saved in shoeboxes. Mario has no problem with Hal perusing his closet’s stuff. Mario’s closet has a canvas strap instead of a knob. Ideally there would also be a bucket of very cold water, and Hal would move the bad ankle from one bucket to the other and back again. A whistle sounds from down near the girls’ West Courts. Someone little in the hall outside the closed door shouts ‘Guess again!’ to someone else farther down the hall. None of the Hush Puppy box’s snail-mail letters are to or from Mario. Mario’s bed is loosely, unanally made. Hal’s bed is unmade. Hal and Mario’s mother had done her undergraduate Honors work at McGill on the use of hyphens, dashes, and colons in E. Dickinson. The Epsom-water whitens his calluses. Unlaundered bedding swims around him. The phone twitters. Ample make this bed, or Ample make this bed. The phone twitters again.

A MOVING EXAMPLE OF THE SORTS OF PHYSICAL-POST MAIL MRS. AVRIL INCANDENZA HAS SENT HER ELDEST CHILD ORIN SINCE the FELO DE SE OF DR. J. O. INCANDENZA, THE SORT OF CHIRPILY

QUOTIDIAN MAIL THAT — HERE’S THE MOVING PART — SEEMS to IMPLY A CONTEXT OF REGULAR INTER-PARTY COMMUNICATION, STILL

20 June Y.W.-Q.M.D.

Dear Filbert, 3

It’s been a quiet week here on Mount Gawdforsaken b— today is perishing hot, windless, quiet as a tomb, lush and pretty. Every floral unit on the grounds has its pistil aprick and petals atremble in a truly shameless fashion, for the bees are about. The whole hill hums drowsily. Yesterday, your Uncle Charles was accosted on the north path by a bumblebee that he alleges was so enormous it sounded like a tuba, and he dispatched Mr. Harde and the grounds crew with skeet rifles and orders to ‘ …bring the Sikorski-sized bugger down.’ I shall spare you details of the subsequent misadventures of the grounds crew, two of whom are now recovering satisfactorily.

The paucity of decibels here is due in part to all six A-teams’ departure yesterday for Milan, with Gerhardt, Aubrey, Carolyn, and Urquhart at the pedagogical tiller. It seems not so many moons ago that we were seeing you, Marlon, Ross, and the rest off on the European clay junket. I recall pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window’s glass, trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane’s impossible little bullet-hole windows. I cried like a fool every time, as of course I did all over again yesterday, embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.

As for me, I’ve swotted and wakked all morning, cranking up your Uncle Charles’s videophone and trying to cajole the editors of various supermarket trade publications to run M.G.M.’s clatest plea for amending Less to Fewer’m those!*#!*# Express Check-Out lanes. One old editorial codger said that he’d dearly love to help me out but that his newsletter was devoted exclusively to issues of promotional display. When I suggested that a little comic relief in the form of the L --- >F bulletin might not be amiss, he chortled. Chortling is good. We like chortling. However, I did manage to twist the arms (harder to do telephonically than one might think) of Produce Weekly, Star Market s Quarterly Register, and PriceChopper’s Shelf and Cart, so the wheels of adjectival justice continue, albeit creakily, to turn.

The very last gobbet of Academy news is that your Uncle Charles had his blood cholesterol tested late last week. Though the verdict rendered was no worse than a rather unperspicuous “Normal to Upper-normal” (sic), the penultimate modifier has caused, as you might anticipate, much pacing and high-decibel whingeing, as well as vows of eternal xerophagy from here on out. Your Uncle Charles has already, for some months now, made a practice of swallowing three teaspoons of fish-liver oil just before he hurls the administrative skeleton bedward for the night. Your brothers have taken to trekking over on slow nights to watch him swallow his oil, purely out of enthusiasm for the faces Charles makes as the stuff goes gulletward. I e-ordered the poor man a low-lipid, artery-friendly cookbook as a sort of Whatthehell present the day the results came in, and your Uncle Charles has already pored over the thing and marked several yummers. We’re to have a swot at cabbage patties tonight, fast-laners that we are. I do suppose the poor man will find a way to ladle rice bran dinto his toothpaste before this spasm of angst subsides. Bless his heart — as it were!

My, this machine does let one maunder on. I’d best get back to harrying grocers. One of this fall’s matriculates 6is the son of a man who’s apparently become an immensely wealthy Telegrocer fin the Upper Midwest, so perhaps the Express Lane-Solecism issue will simply disappear in these here parts as well.

It goes without saying that you are of course wearing your halo and mouth-guard at all appropriate times and eating at least one green, leafy vegetable per day.

Oh — ‘twas wonderful to hear about the arbitration and contract. Mr. deLint read a detailed account and told us all about it. Proud, as ever, to know you.

Miss You and Love You Lots, and c.

AND AN EXAMPLE OF THE INVARIANT RESPONSE THESE PIECES OF MAIL ELICIT

Ms. Incandenza Dear__________________

Due to the large number of mail the New Orleans Saints® are so fortunate enough to receive from all across the 2nd InterLace Grid 8, we regrettably say

ORTKTINCANDENZA #71__________can not answer your letter in person, however, on behalf of the New Orleans Saints”________________ ______has asked me to say

Thank-You for your message of support, and best wishes.

Inclosed, please accept a special, color 20 X 25 centimeter personally autographed

action photo ofORIN INCANDENZA_______________#71___________________ } as

our way of saying Thank-You and how important you’re letter has been to us. Cordjally, Jethro Bodine

Assistant Mailroom Technician

And c.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’

‘Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’

‘A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’

‘And not every Dickinson poem is singable to ‘Yellow Rose,’ O. Sorry to disappoint you. For instance like “Ample make this bed — Make this bed with awe” isn’t even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’

‘Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine’s consideration.’

‘A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory’s unfortunately a dink. Plus I don’t think you quite meant proviso.’’

‘Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.’

‘You know I hate these Strategy calls.’

‘Also of course works if you really do happen to be married. In which case you’ve got a ring already.’

Tm sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’

‘The object being, to present yourself to the Subject as married, as in happily married, and you engage her in a conversation in which you make a big deal of how head-over-heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean the pilot-light of passion still burns in the central heating system of your love for her, your wife, even after all these several years you’ve been hitched.’

Tm sitting here looking through an old box of letters to kill just a very few minutes before a bunch of us climb in the tow truck for Pemulis’s annual I.-Day-Eve town-painting.’

‘But as you’re saying all this to the Subject, your manner is nevertheless indicating that you’re attracted to her.’

‘It’s poignant somehow that you always use the word Subject when you mean the exact obverse.’

‘But it’s not like flirtatious or salivious, your manner. More like just strongly involuntarily attracted. Almost as if hypnotized against your will. Your manner can indicate this just by following the Subject’s conversational movements and changes of posture or facial expression in that sort of vacant intense way a hungry person watches somebody eating. Following the movements of the fork as if memerized. With, of course now, the occasional flicker of pain and conflict in your eyes, at the fact that here you are involuntarily memerized by somebody other than your serapic wife, which the point —’

‘Time. Yo. I think you mean seraphic. I also think you meant lascivious and mesmerized.’

‘You know what your problem is, Hallie?’

‘I have just one problem?’

‘But hang on until you see that 7’s worth not making me digress away from, though. Because the point being to get across how it’s an incredible tribute to the Subject’s overwhelming female charms that you can even really even see her, the Subject, since you’re so in love with your wife you barely even see most women as even female anymore, much less be involuntarily attracted to the Subject, much less have maybe the thought of infidelity skitter no matter how involuntarily across your devoted mind. And it’s not like you’ll have to volunteer any of this directly. The Subject’ll draw the observations on her own. That’s the point of the conflicted flickers in your memerized eyes, or at the most an involuntary tortured groan, a quick bite of the knuckle of the forefinger.’

‘A heel of the hand to the forehead or something like that.’

‘Get your manner down just conflicted-looking enough and the Subject herself’ll actually start drawing you out on this fact, the involuntary attraction that’s so painful to you and so flattering and tributary to her.’

‘So wait. This is like a conversation where you’re affecting all this flickering and groaning? Like you mean a cocktail-party-small-talk conversation? Or do you just brandish your fake ring at some girl at a bus stop and start a tortured tribute to your seraphic wife?’

‘It takes place anywhere. Venue-adjustable. 7’s portable and never-miss. The point is to maneuver the issue of your devoted attracted conflicted pain to the point where you can appear to almost sort of break down and can ask the Subject in all tortured sincerity if she thinks your involuntarily finding her so visibly female and attractive makes you a bad husband. Display vulnerability and ask her to evaluate the like integrity of your heart. Seem desperate. Your whole married self-concept shaken. Practically beg the Subject to reassure you you’re not a bad-hearted man. Plead with the Subject to say what she thinks it might be about her charms that could drive your serapic wife even momentarily from your heart. You present the attraction you feel for the Subject as this involuntary identity-threatening soul-searing-type crisis you just desperately need her help with, the Subject’s, person to person.’

‘Sounds very moving.’

‘And if it so happens you really are married, the additional advantage to 7’s pitch is that you and the Subject both, however briefly, get to believe it. The pitch. The involuntary passionate doomed knight-errant-type pitch.’

‘And of course, O., the Subject just happens to be married herself, often with small children, putting her directly in your crosshairs.’