David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Why do I suspect it’s simply that you tried to make the big X with her and she demurred and this simply piqued your interest? During my can’t-miss nail-interval you were saying how enormous interior linemen were making comments about her bottom being so huge and soft you could whack it over and over with a car antenna and not hurt it.’

‘Hallie I never said any such fucking thing. You pulled that out of the air. And I’m sick?’

‘You said she was obese.’

‘I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this sudden flash of understanding how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant.’

‘And she declined a casual advance, and showed you pictures of her like enormous offspring, and you came to attention.’

‘With a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome, like big pretty girls get.’

Tm going to have to keep her away from this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he really is a Rubensophile. After P.M.s when we sit around he’ll go on and on about enormous breasts and melon bellies and quivering laps until we’re all grimacing and pinching our nose-bridges. And whatever you meant was not lissome.’

‘The reserve QB who’s next to me in these godawful pre-game costumed swoop-and-glides said something I liked. Helen passed him in the locker room and he — do you want to hear this?’

‘She was in the locker room?’

‘It’s the law. The pros aren’t a PR-gulag. He said she had a face that’d break your heart and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed over to your aid as you pitched over sideways grabbing your chest.’

‘That is a pretty good one, O.’

‘But so far we concur on the basic oddness, it sounds like. If the radicals want Quebec loose from Canada still, and that’s always been the priceless pearl, why like dissipate themselves trying to wreak mayhem down here almost the precise moment Interdependence is declared? ‘ce pas?’

‘I’d rather just agree it’s a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt and grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we hit the truck.’

‘Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different Separatist flanges?’

‘Not according to Poutrincourt they don’t.’

‘So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Quebec Go or we stick knives in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on Rue Sherbrooke during St. Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and stretch mirrors across U.S. highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monuments and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and dicky with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot O.N.A.N.ite V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from injecting anaerobic toxins into jars of Planters peanuts?’

‘The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.’

‘Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what’s the political motivation for the about-face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound soberly considered.’

‘Orin, I’m trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with your choice of me as co-ponderer.’

‘All—’

Tm a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I’m a student at a tennis academy that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by design. I’m sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it you hope to get from me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding line of patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been seduced into believing it’s really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians. Of fringe anybody. How consistent do the Brazilian Nuevo Contras’ objectives look? The Noie Störkraffs? Shining Path’s? The Belgian CCCY? Pro-Life assault squads? The Ez-ed-Dean-el-Qassan? P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists’ objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?’ k

‘Poor C.U.S.P.s?’

‘Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term wacko and leave it at that? Why not tell her you’re a radically simple and somewhat sick young man who kicks balls really high in the air for a living?’

‘All I—’

‘Why not just say who cares? This stuff isn’t about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you say you’ve erased from all RAM. Why not tell the damn truth for once?’

‘Me tell the truth? Me lie?’

‘What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT entrance-test on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance exam? You have to place above a certain percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery right next to the bassinet? Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can’t even admit it over the fucking phone?’

‘Or what?’

‘I’m sorry, O. I apologize.’

‘Think nothing of it. I know you didn’t mean it.’

‘I hate losing the temper.’

‘You don’t sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.’

Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. ‘These tooth-episodes make me feel like that wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.’

‘That chew’s going to eat right through your membranes. It’s a vicious vice. I’m urging in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.’

Michael Pemulis cracks Hal’s door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and his right eye gets wobbly in this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting cap, gold epaulets of fake naval braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that lights up in sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in he brings his other arm in over from behind like it’s not his arm, his hand in the shape of a claw just over his head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling him back out into the hall. W/ an eye-rolling look of fake terror.

Hal is hunched, examining his finger for eye-material. ‘In all the excitement we’ve neglected the most obvious response, then, O. Your answer for the exam, and then I can go dry the ankle.’ He can hear PemuJis asking Petropolis Kahn and Stephan Wagenknecht something off down the hall through the cracked door.

‘I think I already tried the obvious response on her, but hit me.’

‘Pemulis just made his first pass and left the door ajar. I’m sitting here nude in a draft through an open door neglecting the maybe deceptively obvious fact that something like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity’s northern border runs contiguous to Quebec.’

‘Exactamundo.’

‘So that so what if Ottawa didn’t formally subjoin the Concavity to any particular province. Really big favor, I’m sure. Because the map speaks for itself. Bits of western New Brunswick and a smidgeon of Ontario aside, the Concavity — the physical fact and fallout of the Concavity — it’s Quebec’s problem. Something like 750 clicks of border along the Concavity, with attendant seepage, for Notre Rai Pays.’

‘Yes plus the brunt of the airborne wastes from the high-altitude ATHSCMEs, plus being the province that gets splatted when the E.W.D. vehicles overshoot the Concavity. This is what í tried right off the bat on her.’

‘So what’s the puzzle. Put yourself in Quebec’s shoes. Once again they get the gooey end of the Canadian dipstick. It’s mostly now western Québecer kids the size of Volkswagens shlumpfing around with no skulls. It’s Québecers with cloracne and tremors and olfactory hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead. It’s eastern Quebec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant-depredations and the corrosive fogs.’

‘Although people aren’t exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either. And the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over Fundy, and supposedly the lobsters out there are like monsters in old Japanese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia glows, at night, in satellite photos.’

‘Still and all, O., tell her proportionally speaking it’s Quebec that’s borne the brunt of what Canada had to take. The brunt again, to their way of thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There’s got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the whole thing.’

The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael Pemulis has pretended to kick it in. ‘Good Lard preserve us he’s nekkid,’ he says, coming in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a second.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered patch of Hal’s half of the floor and makes a show of looking at his wrist as if there were a watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin is saying. ‘The issue she raises is is there really any sort of realistic hope of Quebec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge the waste as fundamentally American waste.’

‘Well probably of course not.’ Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into a claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is compulsively going around zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes. ‘But now she’s got you falling back into demanding realistic and consistent logic from fringe mentalities again.’

‘But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn’t oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn’t. Ottawa’s so far in now they wouldn’t say shit if they had three times the mouthful they already have. Of shit I mean.’

Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry Vlll-like rending and chewing motions. His eyes, under the waning influence of P.M. stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed.

They just get tiny and lightless and even closer together in his narrow face, like a second set of nostrils. The right eye’s little wobble is out of sync with the pulse of his earring.

There’s the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. ‘So then I’ll ask you what she seemed like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists’ and fringe cells’ pathetic little anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?’

‘Does fish-shit drift slowly bottomward, O.? How could she see it as anything but, if she’s as savvy as you say?’ Hal removes his pruned white foot from the janitor-bucket and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis’s Dock-sider. Pemulis picks the briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them to Hal with a pretend-shudder.

‘So simply largely symbolic at best, then?’