David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Meaning mean-spirited.’ Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind. What was chilling was that in Wayne’s scenario Tavis does succeed, Wayne projects, in seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he’s totally open on the date about the fact that he’d deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in the first place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys, more honest and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting she’d basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except — chillingly — he hadn’t shut up.

‘— including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the act of sexual intercourse,’ deLint said, trying to find it in the sheaf. ‘On Bernadette Long-ley: “Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around.” On Mary Esther Thode: “a face like a pancake.” On the Academy’s own late Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: “so full of himself he could have shit limbs.” Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: “by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth.” ‘

‘I’m remembering the word as insertable.’ Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode’s face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. Plus somehow even more chilling was that Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne’s pseudo-Tavis ‘I-live-in-fear-of-rejection’ ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling ‘Strategies’ that Inc’s brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.

‘Donni Stott has we’re informed “skin like an attache case and is a compelling advertisement for sunscreen.” I myself am, here I quote, quote “a man who would not lend his own mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch.” ‘

‘Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?’

Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark hatchet. Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by and brought out Pemulis’s special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to jump for. From someplace under Nwangi’s chair were brought out two pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller’s loupes, the tow truck’s supply of empty sterile Visine bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch’s bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.

Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. ‘I request to see the Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.’

‘We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone’s mind very much today, now said to be the sort of person who quote “cries at card tricks.” We have a Rik Dunkel who “could not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting precision.” We have a return engagement with Ms. Heath, described as “dwelling always at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria.” We have our own beloved Tex, sitting right here, described as having “a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the spine” in lieu of higher cortex function.’

‘Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell her it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations.’

Nwangi’s laugh was high and had the slight teakettle-wheeze to it of the laughs of large black men the world over. ‘She sends you her regards, the Dean said to tell you.’ He slapped his knee three times.

DeLint looked a little less happy because he clearly didn’t know what any of it was about and didn’t like playing coded messenger, but he still looked pretty happy: ‘Michael Mathew Pemulis, the Academy’s Dean of Academic Affairs said to tell you the administration’s too naturally concerned about the state of one of our two very finest current talents, who it’s clear he’s been unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant prohibited by federal statute, O.N.A.N.T.A. regulations, and the Enfield Tennis Academy Honor-Code Specs on Artificial Substances, to permit itself the satisfaction of giving you the Dean’s very best regards and her wish that quote “may the road rise up to meet you whitherever your future travels lie.” ‘ DeLint probed his ear. ‘I think that was it in a nutshell.’

Pemulis got very cool and brass-mask-faced. He was breathing very clearly through his nose, and the office air seemed mentholated. Everything got very cool and formal inside and glycerine-clear. ‘Aubs, before anything gets nailed in stone that we’ll all I promise you and Mrs. Inc we’ll all of us regret —’

DeLint said ‘I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they’ll take a senior without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’

Tex Watson said something about urine.

Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:

‘I believe the kid is speechless.’

‘I believe he has nothing to say.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘And something about you’re invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon won’t be this one.’

Nwangi got out through laughter: ‘And that the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone’s room’s mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’

The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da’s saggy frown. Pemulis scratched very coolly next to his ear. ‘And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’

DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious.

[333] Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket.

[334] Hal’s Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn’t a very promising way to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity.

[335] Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships.

[336] (according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)

[337] Latin blunder for self-defense’s se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 9.

[338] Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition — ®Syntex Labs.

[339] International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

[340] Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic — ®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals.

[341] Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C–III narcotic oral analgesic — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

[342] Or possibly Babel.

[343] Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any kind of Recovery Program.

[344] E.T.S.V Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza’s signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French.

a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.

[345] The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A.

[346] Montreal International Airport-D’Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted to intra-Québec flights only.

[347] (Which in fact she doesn’t, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the hulpil.)

[348] An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center.

[349] Sic.

[350] Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.’s own armlessness and hook, maybe.

[351] As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: ‘My Life Is Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share It With You.’

[352] Reference to January-February Y.D.A.U., when person or persons unknown went around coating selected toothbrushes of the Boys and Girls 16’s with what was finally pinpointed as betel-nut extract, causing panic and internecine finger-pointing and resulting in serial oxidation-treatment visits to Dr. E. Zegarelli, D.D.S., by half a dozen E.T.A.s until the brush-tamperings ceased as suddenly as they’d begun; and now nine months later no one still has the slightest idea re perpetrator or point.

[353] Which runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan, places where it is very bad nighttime joss indeed to be both white and incapacitated.

[354] Q.v. note a to Note 12.

[355] Anexsia — ®SmithKline Beecham Laboratories.

[356] Levo-Dromoran— ®Roche Laboratories.

[357] Numorphan, kind of a watered-down Dilaudid — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

[358] Perwin NX — ® Bos well Medications Ltd., Canada — which accounts for the C–III, because the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes to forecasting abuse-potential.

[359] A.k.a. Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride — ®Roche, Inc. — a low-grade Valiumish tranq.

[360] A C–III and sort of entry-level oral narcotic, the side-effects and inconsistent buzz of which often send abusers up the ladder to C–II compounds.

[361] A.k.a. hyoscyamine sulfate — ®Schwarz Pharma Kremers Urban, Inc. — an anti-spasmodic for anything from colitis to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

[362] A.k.a. methaqualone, now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction under the trade name Parestol.

[363] Later one-third of the rent-and-strip-luxury-apts. crew, and even later Gately’s trusted colleague on some of his most disastrous and bottom-hastening home-invasions, including that of one G. DuPlessis, which Kite ended up regretting exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him.

[364] MDA, MDMA (‘X’), MMDA-2 (‘Love Boat’), MMDA- 3a (‘Eve’), DMMDA-2

(‘Starry Night’), etc.

[365] Long-Term Institution.

[366] Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza — though it’s unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson’s low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the ‘disjunction’ or ‘disconnection’ between the screen’s film and Ph.D.’s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point. 3

a. (Which of course assumes there’s a point.)

[367] Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential taps or Pen Registers — Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s’ cellulars and then returning them after a few days. One of Gately’s biggest challenges in this career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of luxury-apts.-of-the-week when he was strafed on Barn-Bams just about all the time.