David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘You mean telemetry?’

‘How embarrassing. When the skills go they go.’

‘Listen

‘You know, why don’t you go ahead and ask me whatever standard ghoulish questions you want not to answer. This may be your only shot. Usually I seem not to talk about it.’

‘Was she there? The P.G.O.A.T.?’

‘Joelle hadn’t been around the grounds since you two split up. You knew about that. Himself met her at the brownstone, shooting. I’m sure you know way more about whatever it was they were trying to make. Joelle and Himself. Himself went underground too. C.T. was already doing most of the day-to-day administration. Himself was down in that little post-production closet off the lab for like a solid month. Mario’d bring food and … essentials down. Sometimes he’d eat with Lyle. I don’t think he came up to ground level for at least a month, except for just one trip out to Belmont to McLean’s for a two-day purge and detox. This was about a week after he came back. He’d flown off somewhere for three days, for what the impression I get was work-related business. Film-related. If Lyle didn’t go with him Lyle went somewhere, because he wasn’t in the weight room. I know Mario didn’t go with him and didn’t know what was up. Mario doesn’t lie. It was unclear whether he’d finished whatever he was editing. Himself I mean. He stopped living on April First, if you weren’t sure, was the day. I can tell you on April First he wasn’t back by the time P.M. matches started, because I’d been around the lab door right after lunch and he wasn’t back.’

‘He went in for another detox you say. In what, March?’

‘The Moms herself emerged and risked exterior transit and took him herself, so I gather it was urgent.’

‘He quit drinking in January, Hal. It was something Joelle was real specific about. She called even after we’d agreed not to call and told me about it even after I said I didn’t want to hear about him if she was going to still be in his things. She said he hadn’t had a drop in weeks. It was her condition for letting him put her in what he was doing. She said he said he’d do anything.’

‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you. By this time it was hard to tell whether he’d been ingesting anything or not. Apparently at a certain point it stops making a difference.’

‘Did he have film-related things with him when he flew somewhere? A film case? Equipment?’

‘O., I didn’t see him leave and didn’t see him come back. He wasn’t around by match-time, I know. Freer beat me badly and fast. It was 4 and 1, 4 and 2, something, and we were the first ones done. I came around HmH to do an emergency load of laundry before dinner. This was around 1630. I came over and came in and noticed something right away.’

‘And found him.’

‘And went to get the Moms, then changed my mind and went to get C.T., then changed my mind and went to get Lyle, but the first authority figure I ran into was Schtitt. Who was irreproachably brisk and efficient and sensible about everything and turned out to be just the authority figure to go get in the first place.’

‘I didn’t even think a microwave oven would go on unless the door was closed. What with microwaves oscillating all over, inside. I thought there was like a refrigerator-light or Read-Only-tab-like device.’

‘You seem to be forgetting the technical ingenuity of the person we’re talking about.’

‘And you were totally shocked and traumatized. He was asphyxuated, irradiated, and/or burnt.’

‘As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he’d gotten his head in he’d carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.’

‘Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’

‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.’

‘…’

‘And there was a large and half-full bottle of Wild Turkey found on the counter not far away, with a large red decorative giftwrappish bow on the neck.’

‘On the bottle’s neck, you mean.’

‘That is a Rog.’

‘As in he hadn’t been sober after all.’

‘That would seem to follow, O.’

‘And he left no note or living-will-type video or communique of any kind.’

‘O, I know you know very well he didn’t. You’re now asking me stuff I know you know, besides criticizing him and making sobriety-claims when you weren’t anywhere near the scene or the funeral. Are we just about through here? I’ve got a whole long-nailed foot waiting for me here.’

‘As you reconstructed the scene, you just said.’

‘Also it just hit me I’ve got a library book I was supposed to return. I’d forgotten all about it. Kertwang.’

‘ “Reconstructed the scene” as in the scene when you found him was somehow … deconstructed?’

‘You of all people, O. You know that was the one word he hated more than —’

‘So burned, then. Just say it. He was really really badly burned.’

‘…’

‘No, wait. Asphyxuated. The packed foil was to preserve the vacuum in a space that got automatically evacuated as soon as the magnitron started oscillating and generating the microwaves.’

‘Magnitron? What do you know about magnitrons and oscillators? Aren’t you the brother of mine who has to be reminded which way to turn the ignition key in a car?’

‘Brief liaison with this one Subject who used to model at kitchen-appliance trade shows.’

‘…’

‘It was kind of a brutal brand of modelling. She’d stand there on a huge rotating Lazy Susan in a one-piece with one thigh turned in and a hand out palm-up, indicating the appliance next to her. Stood there smiling and spinning day after day. She’d stagger around half the evening trying to get her balance back.’

‘Did this subject by any chance explain to you how microwaves actually cook things?’

‘…’

‘Or have you for example, say, ever like baked a potato in a microwave oven? Did you know you have to cut the potato open before you turn the oven on? Do you know why that is?’

‘Jesus.’

‘The B.P.D. [83]field pathologist said the build-up of internal pressures would have been almost instantaneous and equivalent in kg.s.cm. to over two sticks of TNT.’

‘Jesus Christ, Hallie.’

‘Hence the need to reconstruct the scene.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Don’t feel bad. There’s no guarantee anybody would have told you even if you’d popped in for, say, the memorial service. I for one wasn’t exactly a jabberjaw at the time. I seemed to have been evincing shock and trauma throughout the whole funeral period. What I mostly recall is a great deal of quiet talk about my psychic well-being. It got so I kind of enjoyed popping in and out of rooms just to enjoy the quiet conversations stopping in mid-clause.’

‘You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief.’

‘Your concern is much appreciated, believe me.’

‘…’

‘Trauma seems to have been the consensus. It turns out Rusk and the Moms had begun interviewing top-flight trauma- and grief-counselors for me within hours after it happened. I was shunted directly into concentrated grief- and trauma-therapy. Four days a week for over a month, right in the April-May gearing-up-for-summer-tour period. I lost two spots on the 14’s ladder just because of all the P.M. matches I missed. I missed the Hard Court Qualies and would have missed Indianapolis if… if I hadn’t finally figured out the grief- and trauma-therapy process.’

‘But it helped. Ultimately. The grief-therapy.’

‘The therapy ended up taking place in that Professional Building right up Comm. Ave. past the Sunstrand Plaza by Lake Street, the one with bricks the color of Thousand Island dressing we all run by four days a week. Who was to know one of the continent’s top grief-men was right up the street.’

‘The Moms didn’t want the process going on too far from the old web, if need be, I’m sure.’

‘This grief-counselor insisted I call him by his first name, which I forget. A large red meaty character with eyebrows at a demonic-looking synclinal angle and very small nubbly gray teeth. And a mustache. He always had the remains of a sneeze in his mustache. I got to know that mustache very well. His face had that same blood-pressure flush C.T.’s face gets. And let’s not even go into the man’s hands.’

‘The Moms had Rusk shunt you to a top grief-pro so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about practically sawing the hole in the microwave door herself. Among other little guilt and antiguilt operations. She always did believe Himself was doing more with Joelle than work. Poor old Himself never had eyes for anybody but the Moms.’

‘This was one tough hombré, O., this grief-counselor. He made a Rusk-session look like a day on the Adriatic. He wouldn’t let up: “How did it feel, how does it feel, how do you feel when I ask how it feels.”

‘Rusk always reminded me of a freshman fumbling with some Subject’s bra, the way she’d sort of tug and fumble at your head.’

‘The man was unsatisfiable and scary. Those eyebrows, that ham-rind face, bland little eyes. He never once turned his face away or looked away at anything but right at me. It was the most brutal six weeks of full-bore professional conversation anybody could imagine.’

‘With fucking C.T. already moving his collection of platform shoes and unconvincing hairpieces and StairMaster in upstairs at HmH already.’

‘The whole thing was nightmarish. I just could not figure out what the guy wanted. I went down and chewed through the Copley Square library’s grief section. Not disk. The actual books. I read Kübler-Ross, Hinton. I slogged through Kastenbaum and Kastenbaum. I read things like Elizabeth Harper Neeld’s Seven Choices: Taking the Steps to New Life After Losing Someone You Love, [84] which was 352 pages of sheer goo. I went in and presented with textbook-perfect symptoms of denial, bargaining, anger, still more denial, depression. I listed my seven textbook choices and vacillated plausibly between and among them. I provided etymological data on the word acceptance all the way back to Wyclif and 14th-century langue-d’oc French. The grief-therapist was having none of it. It was like one of those final exams in nightmares where you prepare immaculately and then you get there and all the exam questions are in Hindi. I even tried telling him Himself was miserable and pancreatitic and out of his tree half the time by then anyway, that he and the Moms were basically estranged, that even work and Wild Turkey weren’t helping anymore, that he was despondent about something he was editing that turned out so bad he didn’t want it released. That the … that what happened was probably kind of a mercy, in the end.’

‘Himself didn’t suffer, then. In the microwave.’

‘The B.P.D. field pathologist who drew the chalk lines around Himself’s shoes on the floor said maybe ten seconds tops. He said the pressure buildup would have been almost instantaneous. Then he gestured at the kitchen walls. Then he threw up. The field pathologist.’

‘Jesus Christ, Hallie.’

‘But the grief-therapist was having none of it, the at-least-his-suffering’s-over angle that Kastenbaum and Kastenbaum said is basically a neon-bright sign of real acceptance. This grief-therapist hung on like a Gila monster. I even tried telling him I really didn’t feel anything.’

‘Which was a fiction.’

‘Of course it was a fiction. What could I do? I was panic-stricken. This guy was a nightmare. His face just hung there over his desk like a hypertensive moon, never turning away. With this glistening mucoidal dew in his mustache. And don’t even ask me about his hands. He was my worst nightmare. Talk about self-consciousness and fear. Here was a top-rank authority figure and I was failing to supply what he wanted. He made it manifestly clear I wasn’t delivering the goods. I’d never failed to deliver the goods before.’