David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Q.’

‘I think the point being that with actual clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I had to watch much of my ex-doubles partner’s life grind to a halt because it’d take him three hours to shower and then another two to get out through the shower door. He was in this sort of paralysis of compulsive motions that didn’t serve any kind of function. The Moms, on the other hand, can function with the compulsions because she’s also compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions. Whether this makes her more insane than Marlon Bain or less insane than Marlon Bain, who can like say. As an instance the Moms solved a lot of her threshold-problems by having no real doors or doorways built on the first floor of HmH so the rooms are all split off by angles and partitions and plants. The Moms kept to a Prussian bathroom-schedule so she couldn’t spend hours in there washing her hands until the skin fell off the way Bain’s did, he had to wear cotton gloves the whole summer right before he left E.T.A. The Moms for a while had video cameras installed so she could obsessively check whether Mrs. Clarke’d left the oven on or check her plants’ arrangement or whether all the bathroom towels are lined up with their fringes flush without physically checking; she had a little wall of monitors in her study at HmH; The Stork put up with the cameras but the sense I get is that Tavis isn’t going to be keen on being photorecorded in the bathroom or anyplace else, so maybe she’s had to have other recourse. 3You can check that yourself out there. What I’m trying to say is she’s compulsively efficient even about her obsessions and compulsions. Of course there are doors upstairs, lockable doors, but that’s in service of other compulsions. The Moms’s. You can go ahead and ask her what I mean. She’s so compulsive she’s got the compulsions themselves arranged so efficiently that she can get everything done and still have plenty of time left over for her children. These are a constant drain on her batteries. She’s got to keep Hal’s skull lashed tight to hers without being so overt about it that Hallie has any idea what’s going on, to keep him from trying to pull his skull away. The kid’s still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands. He’s still performing for her, syntax- and vocabulary-wise, at seventeen, the same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something’s wrong. Plus the Moms has to obsess over Mario and Mario’s various challenges and tribulations and little patheticnesses and worship Mario and think Mario’s some kind of secular martyr to the mess she’d made of her adult life, all the while having to keep up a front of laissez-faire laid-back management where she pretends to let Mario go his own way and do his own thing.’

‘Q-’

‘I’m not going to talk about it.’

‘Q.’

‘No and don’t insult my intelligence, I’m not going to talk about why I don’t want to talk about it. If this is going to be a Moment article, Hallie’s going to read it, and then he’ll read it to Booboo, and I’m not talking about The Stork’s death or the Moms’s stability in a thing where they’ll read about it and have to read some authoritative report on my take on it instead of coming to their own terms about it. With it, rather. Terms with, terms about. No, terms with it.’

‘…’

‘They both might have to wait until they get away from there before they can even realize what’s going on, that the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats. All these terms that became cliches — denial, schizogenic, pathogenic family like systems and so on and so forth. A former acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.’

‘…’

‘I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy years, is all I’ll say.’ ‘Q.’

‘The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion, is all I’ll say.’

‘All right, I’ll relate one antidote bthat might be more revealing of the Moms’s emotional weather than any adjective. Jesus, see, I start explicitly referring to parts of speech just thinking about the whole thing. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.’

‘Q.’

‘I’m sorry? Right then, one illustrative thing. Which thing to pick. Embarrassment of riches. I’ll pick one at random. I think I was maybe twelve. I was in 12’s, I know, on that summer’s tour. Though I was playing 12’s when I was still ten. It was ten to thirteen that I was regarded as gifted, with a tennis future. I began to decline around what should have been puberty. Call me let’s say twelve. People were talking about NAFTA and something called the quote Information Turnpike and there was still broadcast TV, though we had a satellite dish. The Academy wasn’t even a twinkle in anybody’s eye. The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me age ten. We still lived in Weston, known also as Volvoland. The Moms gardened like a fiend out there. This was something else she had to do. Had a thing about. Hadn’t gone to indoor plants yet. Called the garden’s crops her Green Babies. Wouldn’t let us eat the zucchini. Never picked it, it got monstrous and dry and fell off and rotted. Big fun. But her real thing was preparing the garden every spring. She started making lists and pricing supplies and drafting outlines in January. Did I mention her own father had been a potato farmer, at one time a millionaire potato-baron-type farmer, in Quebec?

‘But so it’s early March. Are those earrings electric, or is it you? How come I’ve never seen those earrings up to now? I thought women who could bring off copper earrings never wore anything but copper. You should see yourself in this light. Fluorescence isn’t kind to most women. It must take an exceptional kind —’

‘Q.’

‘In the Moms’s family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad’s plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms’s home town’s wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country. I’d have to try to recall the town. But so but then so the Moms is out in the cold garden. It’s March and it’s co-wold. I’ve got this story down. I’ve related this incident to several family-type professionals, and not one eyebrow stayed steady among them. This is the sort of antidote that makes pathogenic-systems-pros’ eyebrows go all the way up and over their skull and disappear down the back of their neck.’

‘So then I’m let’s say thirteen, which means Hallie’s four. The Moms is in the backyard garden, tilling the infamously flinty New England soil with a rented Rototiller. The situation is ambiguous between whether it’s the Moms steering the Rototiller or vice versa. The old machine, full of gas I’d slopped through a funnel — the Moms secretly believes petroleum products give you leukemia, her solution is to pretend to herself she doesn’t know what’s wrong when the thing won’t work and to stand there wringing her hands and let some eager-to-please thirteen-year-old puff out his chest at being able to diagnose the problem, and then I pour the gas. The Rototiller is loud and hard to control. It roars and snorts and bucks and my mother’s stride behind it is like the stride of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard, she’s leaving drunken staggery footprints behind her in the tilled dirt, behind the thing. There’s something about a very very tall woman trying to operate a Rototiller. The Moms is incredibly tall, way taller than everybody except The Stork, who towered even over the Moms. Of course she’d be horrified if she ever brought herself to recognize what she was doing, orchestrating a little kid into handling the gas that she thinks might be cancerous; she doesn’t even know she’s phobic about gas. She’s wearing two pairs of work-gloves and plastic surgery-type bags over her espadrilles, which were the only footwear she could garden in. And a Fukoama microfiltration pollution mask, which you might remember those from that period. Her toes are blue in the dirty plastic bags. I’m a few meters ahead of the Moms, in charge of preemptive rock- and clod-removal. That’s her term. Preemptive rock- and clod-removal.

‘Now work with me, see this with me. In the middle of this tilling here comes my little brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing some kind of fuzzy red pajamas and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day yellow smile-faces on both toes. We’ve been at it maybe an hour and half, and the garden’s dirt is just about tilled when Hal conies out and down off the pressure-treated redwood deck and comes walking very steadily and seriously toward the border of the garden the Moms had surveyed out with little sticks and string. He has his little hand out, he’s holding out something small and dark and he’s coming toward the garden as the Rototiller snorts and rattles behind me, dragging the Moms. As he gets closer the thing in his hand resolves into something that just doesn’t look pleasant at all. Hal and I look at each other. His expression is very serious even despite that his lower lip is having a sort of little epileptic fit, which means he’s getting ready to bawl. That’s with a w. I remember the air was gray with dust and the Moms had her glasses on. He holds the thing out toward the Moms’s figure. I squint. The thing covering his palm and hanging over the sides of the palm is a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold. Underline big and old. It must have come from some hot furnace-hidden corner of the basement, some corner she must have missed with the flamethrower, after the flooding we had every January thaw. I heft a clod or rock, I’m staring, every follicle I’ve got is bunched and straining. You could feel the tension, it was like standing down at Sunstrand Plaza when they fired the transformers, every follicle bunches and strains. It was a sort of nasal green, black-speckled, hairy like a peach is hairy. Also some orange speckles. A patch of very bad-news-type mold. Hal looks at me in the noise, his lower lip all over the place. He looks to the Moms, the Moms is intent on a plumb-straight Rototilled line, weaving. The piece is that the mold looks, like, strangely incomplete. As in it dawns on me right then chewed on, Helen. And yes as I squint some sickening hairy stuff is still there like impacted in the kid’s front teeth and hairily smeared around the mouth.

‘Be there with me, Helen. Feel the sort of Wagnerish clouds gather. Hallie always said there was always this sense as a kid with the Moms that the whole cosmos was just this side of fulminating into boiling clouds of elemental gas and was being held materially together only through heroic exercise of will and ingenuity on the part of the Moms.

‘Everything slows waaay down. She’s coming around with the machine at the end of a row and sees Hallie wearing his happy-slippers outside in the cold, which just in itself is enough to gut-shot the cosmos as far as she’s concerned, usually. Now we’re seeing the Rototiller get shut down as she bends way down to where I’d showed her the choke. The machine diesels a little and farts some blue smoke. The machine sucks the nub of its starter-rope into itself. I can feel the voltage like I’m still there. Post-racket tingling quiet descends. There’s the tentative chirp of a bird. The Moms comes toward Hal standing there in his little red coat. She’s tucking a wisp of hair back under the special plastic cap’s elastic. Her hair at that time was dark brown, she’s addressing him, she has an unbelievably humiliating little family pet name for the kid that I’ll show him the mercy of never telling anybody.