David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury’s still out.’ ‘Quit with the clipping a second. I’m not kidding. Take the other day. I strike up a conversation with a certain Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in a wheelchair behind us. No big deal. Are you listening?’ ‘What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.’

‘But so the conversation goes well and hits it off, Seduction Strategies 12 and 16 are employed, which I’ll tell you about sometime at length. The point is the Subject and I walk out together hitting it off and there’s another guy in a wheelchair whittling in the shade of a shop-awning just down the street. OK. Still not necessarily any kind of deal. But now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park —’

‘Phoenix has trailer parks? Not those silverish metal trailers.’

‘So but we get out of the car, and across the park’s lot here’s yet another wheelchaired guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel and not making a very good job of it.’

‘Doesn’t Arizona have more than its share of the old and infirm?’

‘But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for guys in wheelchairs. And three in an hour’s kind of stretching it, I was thinking.’

‘I always picture you having your little trysts in more domestic suburban settings. Or else tall motels with exotically shaped beds. Do women in metal trailers even have small children?’

‘This one had very sweet little twin girls who played very quietly with blocks without supervision the whole time.’

‘Cockle-warming, O.’

‘And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the guy’s still there, mired in gravel. And in the distance I could swear he’s got on some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheel-chaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.’

‘Very shy fans, possibly? Some club of leg-dysfunctional people all obsessed in that shy-fan-like way with one of the first North American sports figures people think of in connection with the word leg?’

‘It’s probably my imagination. A dead bird fell in my Jacuzzi.’

‘But now let me ask you a couple questions.’

‘This all wasn’t even why I originally called.’

‘But you brought up trailer parks and trailers. I need to confirm some suspicions — two points, right in there, ka-ching. Never having been in a trailer, and even the Discursive O.E.D. having pretty much of a lacuna where trailer-park trailers are concerned.’

‘And this is the one supposedly nonbats family-member I call. This is who I reach out to.’

‘It’d be whom, I think. But this trailer. This lady you met’s trailer. Confirm or deny the following. Its carpet was wall-to-wall and extremely thin, a kind of burnt yellow or orange.’

‘Yes.’

‘The living-room or like den area contained some or all of the following: a black velvet painting featuring an animal; a videophonic diorama on some sort of knickknack shelf; a needlepoint sampler with some kind of frothy biblical saw on it; at least one piece of chintz furniture with protective doilies on the arms; a Smoke-B-Gone air-filtration ashtray; the last couple years’ Reader’s Digests neatly displayed in their own special inclined magazine rack.’

‘Check on velvet painting of leopard, sampler sofa with doilies, ashtray. No Reader’s Digests. This isn’t especially funny, Hallie. The Moms comes out in you in these odd little ways sometimes.’

‘Last one. The trailer-person’s name. Jean. May. Nora. Vera. Nora-Jean or Vera-May.’

‘…’

‘That was my question.’

‘I guess I’ll have to get back to you on that.’

‘Boy, you really put the small r in romance, don’t you.’

‘But why I’m calling.’

‘It’s not clear whether the fragile can’t-miss magic’s still in force on the right foot. I’m seven for nine, but there’s a whole different feel of somehow deliberately trying to get them in.’

‘Hallie, I’ve got somebody from Moment fucking magazine out here doing a quote soft profile.’

‘You’ve got what?’

‘A human-interest thing. On me as a human. Moment doesn’t do hard sports, this lady says. They’re more people-oriented, human-interest. It’s for something called quote People Right Now, a section.’

‘Moment’s a supermarket-checkout-lane-display magazine. It’s in there with the rodneys and gum. Lateral Alice Moore reads it. It’s all over C.T.’s waiting room. They did a thing on the little blind Illinois kid Thorp thought so well of.’

‘Hal.’

T think Lateral Alice spends a lot of time in grocery-store checkout lanes, which if you think about it are almost the ideal environment for her.’

‘Hal.’

‘… Being that she can just locomote sideways right on through.’

‘Hallie, this physically imposing Moment girl’s asking all these soft-profilesque family-background questions.’

‘She wants to know about Himself?’

‘Everybody. You, the Mad Stork, the Moms. It’s gradually emerging it’s going to be some sort of memorial to the Stork as patriarch, everybody’s talents and accomplishments profiled as some sort of refracted tribute to el Storko’s careers.’

‘He always did cast a long shadow, you said.’

‘Of course and my first thought is to invite her to go piss up a string. But Moment’s been in touch with the team. The front office’s indicated a soft profile would be positive for the team. Cardinal Stadium isn’t exactly groaning under the weight of all the fannies, winning streak or no. I’ve also thought of referring her to Bain, let Bain rant at her or send her letters just trying to unparse for quotes’d take her a month.’

‘Her as in female. Not your typical Orin-type subject. A hardened, fast-lane, gum-cracking, maybe even small-childless journalist-type female, in from New Youok on the red-eye. Plus you said imposing.’

‘Not all that tough or hard, but physically imposing. Large but not un-erotic. A girl and a half in all directions.’

‘A girl to dominate the space of any trailer she lives in.’

‘Enough with the trailerisms.’

‘The strained quality is me trying to speak and pick caromed toenail-parings up off the floor at the same time.’

‘This girl’s immune to most of your standard conversational distractions.’

‘You’re afraid you’re losing your touch. An immune girl and a half.’

‘I said distraction not seduction.’

‘You kind of wisely avoid any female who you suspect could beat you up if things came down to that.’

‘She’s more imposing than like most of our starting backfield. But weirdly sexy. The linemen are gaga. The tackles keep making all these cracks about does she maybe want to see their hard profile.’

‘Let’s hope her prose is better than whoever did that human-interest thing on the blind kid last spring. Have you bounced this new fear of the handicapped off her?’

‘Listen. You of all people should know I have zero intent of forthrightly answering any stained-family-linen-type questions from anybody, much less somebody who takes shorthand. Physical charms or no.’

‘You and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Quebec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annu-lation, Himself and Lyle, Himself and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, the Moms and C.T., you v. the Moms, E.T.A., nonexistent films, et cetera.’

‘But you can see how it’s all going to get me thinking. How to avoid being forthright about the Stork material unless I know what the really forthright answers would be.’

‘Everybody said you’d regret not coming to the funeral. But I don’t think this is what they meant.’

‘For example the Stork took himself down before C.T. moved in upstairs at HmH? or after?’

‘This is you asking me?’

‘Don’t make this appalling for me, Hal.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of even trying.’

‘…’

‘Immediately before. Two, three days before. C.T. had had what’s now deLint’s room, next to Schtitt’s, in Comm.-Ad.’ ‘And Dad knew they were …?’ ‘Very close? I don’t know, O.’ ‘You don’t know?’

‘Mario might know. Like to chew the fat with Booboo on this, O.?’ ‘Don’t make this like this Hallie.’

‘And Dad … the Mad Stork put his head in the oven?’

‘The microwave, O. The rotisserie microwave over next to the fridge, on the freezer side, on the counter, under the cabinet with the plates and bowls to the left of the fridge as you face the fridge.’

‘A microwave oven.’

‘That is a Rog and Wile, O.’

‘Nobody ever said microwave.’

‘I think it came out generally at the funeral.’

‘I keep getting your point, if you’re wondering.’

‘…’

‘So where was he found, then?’

‘20 for 28 is what, 65 %?’

‘It’s not like this is all that —’

‘The microwave was in the kitchen I already explained, O.’

‘All right.’

‘All right.’

‘So OK now, who would you say speaks most about the guy, keeps his memory alive, verbally, the most now: you, C.T., or the Moms?’

T think it’s a three-way tie.’

‘So it’s never mentioned. Nobody talks about him. It’s taboo.’

‘But you seem to be forgetting somebody.’

‘Mario talks about him. About it.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘To what and/or who all this talking?’

‘To me, for one, I suppose.’

‘And so you do talk about it, but only to him, and only after he initiates it.’

‘Orin I lied. I haven’t even started on the right foot yet. I’ve been too afraid to change my angle of approach to the nails. The right foot’s a whole different angle of approach. I’m afraid the magic is left-foot-dependent. I’m like your superstitious lineman. Talking about it’s broken the spell. Now I’m self-conscious and afraid. I’ve been sitting here on the edge of the bed with my right knee up under my chin, poised, studying the foot, frozen with aboriginal terror. And lying about it to my own brother.’

‘Can I ask you who it was who found him? His — who found him at the oven?’

‘Found by one Harold James Incandenza, thirteen going on really old.’

‘You were who found him? Not the Moms?’

‘Listen, may I ask why this sudden interest after four years 216 days, and with two years of that not even once even calling?’

‘I’ve already said I don’t feel safe not answering Helen’s questions if I haven’t got a handle on what I’m not saying.’

‘Helen. So you did.’

‘Is why.’

‘I’m still frozen, by the way. The self-consciousness that kills the magic is getting worse and worse. This is why Pemulis and Troeltsch always seem to let a lead slip away. The standard term is Tightening Up. The clippers are poised, blades on either side of the nail. I just can’t achieve the unconsciousness to actually clip. Maybe it was cleaning up the few that missed. Suddenly the wastebasket seems small and far away. I’ve lost the magic by talking about it instead of just giving in to it. Launching the nail out toward the wastebasket now seems like an exercise in telemachry.’