David Wallace - Infinite jest

Interdependence Day Y.D.A.U.’s Eschaton enters probably its most crucial phase. Lord, at his cart and portable TP, puts on the white beanie (n.b.: not the black or the red beanie) that signals a temporary cessation of SPASEX between two Combatants but allows all other Combatants to go on pursuing their strategic interests as they see fit. SOVWAR and AMNAT are thus pretty vulnerable right now. SOVWAR’s Premier Peterson and Air Marshal Kittenplan, carrying their white janitorial stockpile-bucket between them, walk across Europe and the Atlantic to parley with AMNAT President Chu and Supreme Commander Possalthwaite in what looks to be roughly Sierra Leone. Various territories smolder quietly. The other players are mostly standing around beating their arms against their chests to stay warm. A few hesitant white flakes appear and swirl around and melt into dark stars the moment they hit court. A couple ostensible world leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall’s first snow. Yesterday it had been warmer and rained. Axford speculates about whether snow will mean Schtitt might consent to inflate the Lung even before the Fundraiser two weeks hence. Struck is threatening to fall out of his chair. Pemulis, leaning forward intently, wearing his Mr. Howell yachting cap, ignores everyone. He hates to type and keeps his tallies via pencil and clipboard a la deLint. The idling Ford sedan is conspicuous for the excruciated full-color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of its right rear door. Hal and Axford are passing what looks to the Combatants like a suckerless Tootsie-Roll stick back and forth between them, and occasionally to Troeltsch. Trevor (‘The Axhandle’) Axford has a total of only three-and-a-half digits on his right hand. From West House you can hear Mrs. Clarke and the time-and-a-half holiday kitchen staff preparing the Interdependence Day gala dinner, which always includes dessert.

Now REDCHI, itself quietly trying to rack up some unanswered INDDIR, sends a towering topspin Job into INDPAK’s quadrant, scoring what REDCHI claims is a direct hit on Karachi and what warheadless INDPAK claims is only an indirect hit on Karachi. It’s an uneasy moment: a dispute such as this would never occur in the real God’s real world, since the truth would be manifest in the actual size of the actual wienie roast in the actual Karachi. But God here is played by Otis P. Lord, and Lord is number-crunching so fiendishly at the cart’s Yushityu, trying to confirm the verisimilitude of the peace terms AMNAT and SOVWAR are hashing out, that he can’t even pretend to have seen where REDCHI’s strike against INDPAK landed w/ respect to Karachi’s T-shirt — which is admittedly kind of mashed and woppsed up, though this could be primarily from breezes and feet — and in his lapse of omniscience cannot see how he’s supposed to allocate the relevant INDDIR- and SUFDDIR-points. Troeltsch doesn’t know whether to say ‘Holy CROW!’ or not. Lord, vexed by a lapse it’s tough to see how any mortal could have avoided, appeals over to Michael Pemulis for an independent ruling; and when Pemulis gravely shakes his white-hatted head, pointing out that Lord is God and either sees or doesn’t, in Eschaton, Lord has an intense little crying fit that’s made abruptly worse when now J. J. Penn of INDPAK all of a sudden gets the idea to start claiming that now that it’s snowing the snow totally affects blast area and fire area and pulse-intensity and maybe also has fallout implications, and he says Lord has to now completely redo everybody’s damage parameters before anybody can form realistic strategies from here on out.

Pemulis’s chairlegs shriek and make red-skin peanuts spill out in a kind of cornucopic cone-shape and he’s up in his capacity as sort of eminence grise of Eschaton and ranging up and down just outside the theater’s chain-link fencing, giving J. J. Penn the very roughest imaginable side of his tongue. Besides being real sensitive to any theater-boundary-puncturing threats to the map’s integrity — threats that’ve come up before, and that as Pemulis sees it threaten the game’s whole sense of animating realism (which realism depends on buying the artifice of 1300 m. 2of composition tennis court representing the whole rectangular projection of the planet earth) — Pemulis is also a sworn foe of all Penns for all time: it had been J. J. Penn’s much older brother Miles Penn, now twenty-one and flailing away on the grim Third-World Satellite pro tour, playing for travel-expenses in bleak dysenteric locales, who when Pemulis first arrived at E.T.A. at age eleven had christened him Michael Penisless and had had Pemulis convinced for almost a year that if he pressed on his belly-button his ass would fall off.[129]

‘It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!’ Pemulis yells at Penn, whose lower lip is out and quivering. Pemulis’s face is the face of a man who will someday need blood-pressure medication, a constitution the Tenuate doesn’t help one bit. Troeltsch is sitting up straight and speaking very intensely and quietly into his headset. Hal, who in his day never wore the beanie, and usually portrayed some marginal nation somewhere out in the nuclear boondocks, finds himself more intrigued by Penn’s map/ territory faux pas than upset by it, or even amused.

Pemulis turns back to the pavilion and seems to be looking at Hal in some kind of appeal: ‘Jaysusl’

‘Except is the territory the real world, quote unquote, though!’ Axford calls across to Pemulis, who’s pacing like the fence is between him and some sort of prey. Axford knows quite well Pemulis can be fucked with when he’s like this: when he’s hot he always cools down and becomes contrite.

Struck tries to yell out a Kertwang on Pemulis but can’t get the megaphone he makes of his hands to fit over the mouth.

‘The real world’s what the map here stands for!’ Lord lifts his head from the Yushityu and cries over at Axhandle, trying to please Pemulis.

‘Kind of looks like real-world-type snow from here, M.P.,’ Axford calls out. His forehead’s still maroon from the coughing fit. Troeltsch is trying to describe the distinction between the symbolic map of the gear-littered courts and the global strategic theater it stands for using all and only sports-broadcast cliches. Hal looks from Axhandle to Pemulis to Lord.

Struck finally falls out of his chair with a clunk but his legs are still somehow entangled in the legs of the chair. It starts to snow harder, and dark stars of melt begin to multiply and then merge all over the courts. Otis Lord is trying to type and wipe his nose on his sleeve at the same time. J. Gopnik and K. McKenna are running around well outside their assigned quadrants with their tongues outstretched.

‘Real-world snow isn’t a factor if it’s falling on the fucking map!’

Ann Kittenplan’s crew-cutted head now protrudes from the kind of rugby-scrum AMNAT’s and SOVWAR’s heads of state form around Lord’s computational food cart. ‘For Christ’s sake leave us alone!’ she shrieks at Pemulis. Troeltsch is going ‘Oh, my’ into his headset. O. Lord is struggling with the cart’s protective umbrella, his head’s beanie’s little white propeller rotating in a rising wind. A light dusting of snow is starting to appear in the players’ hair.

‘It’s only real-world snow if it’s already in the scenario!’ Pemulis keeps directing everything at Penn, who hasn’t said a word since his original suggestion and is busy sort of casually kicking the Karachi-shirt over into the Arabian Sea, clearly hoping the original detonation will get forgotten about in all the metatheoretical fuss. Pemulis rages along the East Courts’ western fence. The combination of several Tenuate spansules plus Eschaton-adrenaline bring his blue-collar Irish right out. He’s a muscular but fundamentally physically narrow guy: head, hands, the sharp little wad of cartilage at the tip of Pemulis’s nose — everything about him seems to Hal to taper and come to a point, like a bad El Greco. Hal leans to spit and watches him pace like a caged thing as Lord works feverishly over EndStat’s peace-terms decision-matrix. Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob. Though Hal hasn’t had more than four or five total very small hits off the public duBois, this is a prime example of what’s sometimes called ‘marijuana thinking.’ You can tell because Hal’s leaned way over to spit but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and hasn’t yet spit, even though he’s right in bombing-position over the NASA glass. It also occurs to him that he finds the real-snow/unreal-snow snag in the Eschaton extremely abstract but somehow way more interesting than the Eschaton itself, so far.

IRLIBSYR’s strongman Evan Ingersoll, all of 1.3 m. tall, warmed by baby-fat and high-calorie cerebral endeavor, has been squatting on his heels like a catcher just west of Damascus, spinning his Rossignol launcher idly in his hand, watching the one-sided exchange between Pemulis and Ingersoll’s roommate J. J. Penn, who’s now threatening to quit and go in for cocoa if they can’t for once play Eschaton without the big guys horning in again like always. There’s a tiny whirring sound as Ingersoll’s mental gears grind. From the duration of the little Sierra Leone summit and the studious blankness on everybody’s face it’s pretty clear that SOVWAR and AMNAT are going to come to terms, and the terms are likely to involve SOVWAR agreeing not to go SACPOP against AMNAT in return for AMNAT letting SOVWAR go SACPOP against Ingersoll’s IRLIBSYR, because if SOVWAR goes SACPOP against an IRLIBSYR that can’t have many warheads left in the old bucket by now (Ingersoll knows they know) then SOVWAR’ll get to rack up a lot of INDDIR without much SUFDDIR, while inflicting such SUFDDIR on IRLIBSYR that IRLIBSYR’ll be effectively eliminated as a threat to AMNAT’s commanding lead in points, which is what has the most utility in the old game-theoretic matrix right now. The exact utility transformations are too oogly for an Ingersoll who’s still grappling with fractions, but he can see clearly that this’d be the most remorselessly logical best-interest-conducive scenario for both LaMont Chu and especially the Sleepster, Peterson, who’s hated Ingersoll for months now anyway without any good reason or cause or anything, Ingersoll can just somehow tell.

Hal, paralyzed and absorbed, watches Ingersoll bob on his haunches and shift his stick from hand to hand and cerebrate furiously and logically conclude, then, that IRLIBSYR’s highest possible strategic utility lies in AMNAT and SOVWAR failing to come to terms.

Hal can almost visualize a dark lightbulb going on above Ingersoll’s head. Pemulis is telling Penn that there’s a critical distinction between horning in and letting asswipes like Jeffrey Joseph Penn run roughshod over the delimiting boundaries that are Eschaton’s very life-blood. Chu and Peterson are nodding soberly at little things they’re saying to each other while Kittenplan cracks her knuckles and Possalthwaite bounces a warhead idly on his strings.

So now Evan Ingersoll rises from his squat now only to bend again and take a warhead out of IRLIBSYR’s ordnance-bucket, and Hal seems to be the only one who sees Ingersoll line up the vector very carefully with his slim thumb and take a lavish backswing and fire the ball directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West Africa. It’s not a lob. It flies straight as if shot from a rifle and strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud thock. She whirls to face east, a hand at the back of her bristly skull, scanning and then locking on Damascus, her face a stony Toltec death-mask.