David Wallace - Infinite jest

The Enfield Tennis Academy has an accredited capacity of 148 junior players — of whom 80 are to be male — but an actual Fall Y.D.A.U. population of 95 paying and 41 scholarship students, so 136, of which 72 are female, right now, for some reason, meaning that while there’s room for twelve more (preferably full-tuition) junior players, there ought ideally to be fully sixteen more males than there are, meaning Charles Tavis and Co. are wanting to fill all twelve available spots with males — plus they wouldn’t exactly mind, is the general scuttlebutt, if a half dozen or so of the better girls left before graduation and tried for the Show, simply because housing more than 68 girls means putting some in the male dorms, which creates tensions and licensing- and conservative-parent-problems, given that coed hall bathrooms are not a good idea what with all the adolescent glands firing all over the place.

It also means that, since there are twice as many male prorectors as female, A.M. drills have to be complexly staggered, the boys in two sets of 32, the girls in three of 24, which creates problems in terms of early-p.M. classes for the lowest-ranked C-squad girls, who drill last.

Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes, rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring, accommodating changes in drill schedule consequent to a player’s movement up or down a squad. It’s all the sort of thing that’s uninteresting unless you’re the one responsible, in which case it’s cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex. The stress of all the complexities and priorities to be triaged and then weighted against one another gets Charles Tavis out of bed in the Headmaster’s House at an ungodly hour most mornings, his sleep-swollen face twitching with permutations. He stands in leather slippers at the living-room window, looking southeast past West and Center Courts at the array of A-team players assembling stiffly in the gray glow, carrying gear with their heads down and some still asleep on their feet, the first bit of snout of the sun protruding through the city’s little skyline far beyond them, the aluminum glints of river and sea, east, Tavis’s hands working nervously around the cup of hazlenut decaf that steams upward into his face as he holds it, hair unarranged and one side hanging, high forehead up against the window’s glass so he can feel the mean chill of the dawn just outside, his lips moving slightly and without sound, the thing it’s not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system with its claws on its chest and four pillows for bradypnea-afflicted breathing that sounds like soft repetitions of the words sky or ski, making no unnecessary sound, not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it’s quite possible is nothing but Tavis’s imagination, so lips moving w/o sound but breath and cup’s steam spreading on the glass, and little icicles from the rainy melt of yesterday’s snow hanging from the anodized gutters just above the window and seen by Tavis as a distant skyline upside-down. In the lightening sky the same two or three clouds seem to move back and forth like sentries. The heat comes on with a distant whoom and the glass against his forehead trembles slightly. A hiss of low static from the speaker it had fallen into sleep without turning off. The A-team’s array keeps shifting and melding as they await Schtitt. Permutations of complications.

Tavis watches the boys stretch and confer and sips from the cup with both hands, the concerns of the day assembling themselves in a sort of tree-diagram of worry. Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

So the best E.T.A. players’ special perk is they get hauled out of bed at dawn, still crusty-eyed and pale with sleep, to drill in the first shift.

Dawn drills are of course alfresco until they erect and inflate the Lung, which Hal Incandenza hopes is soon. His circulation is poor because of tobacco and/or marijuana, and even with his DUNLOp-down-both-legs sweatpants and a turtleneck and thick old white alpaca tennis jacket that had been his father’s and has to be rolled up at the sleeves, he’s sullen and chilled, Hal is, and by the time they’ve run the pre-stretch sprints up and down the E.T.A. hill four times, swinging their sticks madly in all directions and (at A. deLint’s dictate) making various half-hearted warrior-noises, Hal is both chilled and wet, and his sneakers squelch from dew as he hops in place and looks at his breath, wincing as the cold air hits the one bad tooth.

By the time they’re all stretching out, lined up in rows along the service-and baselines, flexing and bowing, genuflecting to nothing, changing postures at the sound of a whistle, by this time the sky has lightened to the color of Kaopectate. The ATHSCME fans are idle and the E.T.A.s can hear birds. Smoke from the stacks of the Sunstrand complex is weakly sunlit as it hangs in plumes, completely still, as if painted on the air. Tiny cries and a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace downhill to the east, presumably Enfield Marine. This is the one time of day the Charles doesn’t look bright blue. The pines’ birds don’t sound any happier than the players. The grounds’ non-pines are bare and canted at circuitous hillside angles all up and down the hill when they sprint again, four more times, then on bad days another four, maybe the most hated part of the day’s conditioning. Somebody always throws up a little; it’s like the drills’ reveille. The river at dawn is a strip of foil’s dull side. Kyle Coyle keeps saying it’s co-wo -wold. All the lesser players are still abed. Today there’s multiple retching, from last night’s sweets. Hal’s breath hangs before his face until he moves through it. Sprints produce the sick sound of much squelching; everyone wishes the hill’s grass would die.

Twenty-four girls are drilled in groups of six on four of the Center Courts. The 32 boys (minus, rather ominously, J. J. Penn) are split by rough age into fours and take a semi-staggered eight of the East Courts. Schtitt is up in his little observational crow’s nest, a sort of apse at the end of the iron transom players call the Tower that extends west to east over the centers of all three sets of courts and terminates w/ the nest high above the Show Courts. He has a chair and an ashtray up there. Sometimes from the courts you can see him leaning over the railing, tapping the edge of the bullhorn with his weatherman’s pointer; from the West and Center Courts the rising sun behind him gives his white head a pinkish corona. When he’s seated you just see misshapen smoke-rings coming up out of the nest and moving off with the wind. The sound of the bullhorn is scarier when you can’t see him. The waffled iron stairs leading up to the transom are west of the West Courts, all the way across from the nest, so sometimes Schtitt paces back and forth along the transom with his pointer behind his back, his boots ringing out on the iron. Schtitt seems immune to all weather and always dresses the same for drills: the warm-ups and boots. When the E.T.A.s’ strokes or play’s being filmed for study, Mario Incandenza is positioned on the railing of Schtitt’s nest, leaning way out and filming down, his police lock protruding into empty air, with somebody beefy assigned to stand behind him and grip the back of the Velcro vest: it always scares hell out of Hal because you can never see Dunkel or Nwangi behind Mario and it always looks like he’s leaning way out to dive Bolex-first down onto Court 7’s net.

Except during periods of disciplinary conditioning, alfresco A.M. drills work like this. A prorector is at each relevant court with two yellow Ball-Hopper-brand baskets of used balls, plus a ball machine, which machine looks like an open footlocker with a blunt muzzle at one end pointed across the net at a quartet of boys and connected by long orange industrial cords to a three-prong outdoor outlet at the base of each light-pole. Some of the light-poles cast long thin shadows across the courts as soon as the sun is strong enough for there to be shadows; in summertime players try to sort of huddle in the thin lines of shade. Ortho Stice keeps yawning and shivering; John Wayne wears a small cold smile. Hal hops up and down in his capacious jacket and plum turtleneck and looks at his breath and tries a la Lyle to focus very intently on the pain of his tooth without judging it as bad or good. K. D. Coyle, out of the infirmary after the weekend, opines that he doesn’t see why the better players’ reward for hard slogging to the upper rungs is dawn drills while for instance Pemulis and the Vikemeister et al. are still horizontal and sawing logs. Coyle says this every morning. Stice tells him he’s surprised at how little they’ve missed him. Coyle is from the small Tucson AZ suburb of Erythema and claims to have thin desert blood and special sensitivity to the wet chill of Boston’s dawn. The WhataBurger Jr. Invitational is a sort of double-edged Thanksgiving homecoming for Coyle, who at thirteen was lured from Tucson’s own Rancho Vista Golf and Tennis Academy by promises of self-transcendence from Schtitt.

Drills work like this. Eight different emphases on eight different courts. Each quartet starts at a different court and rotates around. The top four traditionally start drills on the first court: backhands down the line, two boys to a side. Corbett Thorp lays down squares of electrician’s tape at the court’s corners and they are strongly encouraged to hit the balls into the little squares. Hal hits with Stice, Coyle with Wayne; Axford’s been sent down with Shaw and Struck for some reason. Second court: forehands, same deal. Stice consistently misses the square and gets a low-pH rejoinder from Tex Watson, hatless and pattern-balding at twenty-seven. Hal’s tooth hurts and his ankle is stiff and the cold balls come off his strings with a dead sound like chung. Tiny bratwursts of smoke ascend rhythmically from Schtitt’s little nest. Third court is ‘Butterflies,’ a complex VAPS deal where Hal hits a backhand down the line to Stice while Coyle forehands it to Wayne and then Wayne and Stice cross-court the balls back to Hal and Coyle, who have to switch sides without bashing into each other and hit back down the line now to Wayne and Stice, respectively. Wayne and Hal amuse themselves by making their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so — this is known around E.T.A. as ‘atom-smashing’ and is understandably hard to do — and the collided balls sprong wildly out onto the other practice courts, and Rik Dunkel is less amused than Wayne and Hal are, so, nicely warm now and arms singing, they’re shunted quickly onto the fourth court: volleys for depth, then for angle, then lobs and overheads, which latter drill can be converted into a disciplinary Puker if a pro-rector’s feeding you the lobs: the overhead drill’s called Tap & Whack’: Hal pedals back, terribly ankle-conscious, jumps, kicks out, nails Slice’s lob, then has to sprint up and tap the net’s tape with his Dunlop’s head as Stice lobs deep again, and Hal has to backpedal again and jump and kick and hit it, and so on. Then Hal and Coyle, both sucking wind after twenty and trying to stand up straight, feed lobs to Wayne and Stice, neither of whom is fatiguable as far as anyone can tell. You have to kick out on overheads to keep your balance in the air. Overhead, Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn and careful enunciation to call out for everyone to hear that Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza was letting the ball get the little much behind him on overheads, fears of the ankle maybe. Hal raises his stick in acknowledgment without looking up. To hang in past age fourteen here is to become immune to humiliation from staff. Coyle tells Hal between the lobs they send up he’d love to see Schtitt have to do twenty Tap & Whacks in a row. They’re all flushed to a shine, all chill washed off, noses running freely and heads squeaking with blood, the sun well above the sea’s dull glint and starting to melt the frozen slush from I.-Day’s snow and rain that night-custodians had swept into little wedged lines up against the lengthwise fences, which grimy wedges are now starting to melt and run. There’s still no movement in the Sunstrand stacks’ plumes. The watching prorectors stand easy with their legs apart and their arms crossed over their racquets’ faces. The same three or four booger-shaped clouds seem to pass back and forth overhead, and when they cover the sun people’s breath reappears. Stice blows on his racquet-hand and cries out thinly for the inflation of the Lung. Mr. A. F. deLint ranges behind the fence with his clipboard and whistle, blowing his nose. The girls behind him are too bundled up to be worth watching, their hair rubber-banded into little bouncing tails.