Infinite jest - David Wallace

Live-in Staffers’ evening duties are divided pretty evenly between the picayune and the unpleasant. Somebody has to hit the area meetings to verify residents’ attendance, while somebody else has to miss a nightly meeting to man the empty House and phones and do the picayune Daily Log. After the meetings let out, Gately’s supposed to do a head-count every hour and make a Log-entry on who all’s there and what’s going on. Gately has to do a Chore-patrol and Log-entry on Chore-performance and nail down tomorrow’s Chore-assignments off the weekly sheet. The residents need to have everything expected of them spelled out in advance so they can’t bitch if they get popped for something. Then people who haven’t performed on their Chore have to be told they’re on a week’s Restriction, which tends to be unpleasant. Gately has to unlock Pat’s cabinets and get the key to the meds locker and open the meds locker. Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize. Gately has to dispense oral insulin and Virus-meds and pimple medicine and antidepressants and lithium to the residents who materialize for meds, and then he has to enter everything in the Medical Log, which the M. Log is an incredible fucking mess. He has to get out Pat’s Week-At-A-Glance book and print out her next day’s appointments on a sheet of paper in block letters, because Pat finds her own palsied handwriting impossible to read. Gately has to confer with Johnette Foltz about how different residents conducted themselves at St. E.’s Sharing and Caring and Brookline’s B.Y.P. and a Women’s NA Step down in East Cambridge they let a couple of the senior females go to, and then Log all the data. Gately has to go up and check on Kate G., who claimed to be too sick to hit AA again tonight and has been in bed in her room more or less steadily for three days, reading somebody called Sylvia Plate. Going up onto the women’s side of the upstairs is an incredible pain in the ass because he has to unlock a little steel cage over a little button at the bottom of their stairway by the back office and press the button to sound an upstairs buzzer and shout up the stairs ‘Male on the floor’ and then give the female residents as much time as they need to get decent or whatever before he can come up.

Going up there has been educational for Gately because he’d always had this idea that women’s areas were essentially cleaner and pleasanter than men’s areas. Having to verify the Chore in the women’s two bathrooms smashed his longstanding delusion that women didn’t go to the bathroom with the same appalling vigor that men did. Gately’d done a fair amount of cleaning up after his mother, but he’d never much thought of her as a woman. So the whole unpleasant thing’s been an education.

Gately has to check on Doony Glynn, who has recurrent diverticulitis and has to lie fetal on his bunk when he gets an attack and has to be brought Motrin and a SlimFast shake that Gately had to make with 2 % milk because there was no skim left, and then Food Bank crackers and a tonic out of the basement’s machine when Glynn can’t drink the 2 % shake, and then Log Glynn’s comments and condition, neither of which are good.

Somebody has made those disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things in the kitchen and then not cleaned up after themselves, and Gately has to clomp around finding out who’s responsible and get them to clean it up, and the code about ratting among the residents is such that you’d think he was a narc all of a sudden. The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now empties him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit. It hadn’t been this way at the start, the soul-sucking aspect, and Gately every couple minutes wonders again what he’ll end up doing when his year’s Staff term is up and his soul is sucked out and he’s sober but without any money and still clueless and has to leave here and do something back Out There.

Kate Gompert, when he buzzed and went up to the 5-Woman room to look in, had made a possible sideways comment about hurting herself,[245] and Gately has to call Pat at home about it, and she’s out or not picking up, so then he has to call the House Manager and relay the verbatim comment and let her interpret it and tell Gately what action to take and how the comment stands in relation to Gompert’s Suicide Contract and how the whole thing should be Logged. A resident at Ennet had hung herself from a heating pipe in the basement a couple years before Gately arrived, and there are now baroque procedures for monitoring ideation among residents with psych issues. The number of 5-East at St. Elizabeth’s is on a red card in Pat’s Rolodex.

Gately has to collect the previous week’s counselor-reports and collate them and get the residents’ files together and get any updates or changes printed out and into the files for tomorrow’s All-Staff Meeting, where the Staff gets together in Pat’s office and interfaces on how each resident seems to be doing. Residents have a pretty good idea that their alumni counselors basically rat them out in toto at each Staff meeting, which is why counselling sessions tend to be so incredibly dull that only really grateful giving Ennet alumni are willing to serve as counselors. Filing-organization is picayune, and for Gately using the back office’s TP array to print stuff out is unpleasant, mostly because each of his fingers covers almost three keys of the keyboard and he has to hit each key carefully with the tip of a pen, which sometimes he forgets to retract the nub of, leaving blue smears on the keys that the House Manager always gives him an ass-chewing for.

And Gately has to have each newer resident in to the office for at least a couple minutes to like touch base and see how they’re doing and make it clear they’re regarded as existing so they can’t just melt into the living room’s decor and disappear. The newest guy’s still sitting in the linen closet claiming he’s comfortablest there with the door open and the new ‘helpless’ Amy Johnson hasn’t come back yet. A brand-new Court-Ordered female, Ruth van Cleve, who looks like one of those people you see in pictures of African famine, has to fill out Intake forms and go through Orientation, and Gately goes over the House rules with her and gives her a copy of the Ennet House Survival Guide, which some resident years gone had written for Pat.

Gately has to answer the phone and tell people who call the office for a resident that residents can receive calls only on the pay phone in the basement, which he has to say yes is frequently busy all the time. The House prohibits cellular/mobiles and has a Boundary about the office phone for residents. Gately has to kick residents off down there when other residents in line come and complain they’ve exceeded their five minutes. This also tends to be unpleasant: the pay phone down there is undigital and un-shutoffable and a constant source of aggravation and beefs; every conversation is life-and-death; crisis down there 24/7. There’s a special way to kick somebody off a pay phone that’s respectful and nonshaming but also firm. Gately has gotten good at assuming a blank but not passive expression when residents are abusive. There’s this look of weary expertise the House Staffers cultivate, then have to flex their face to get rid of when they’re off-duty. Gately’s gotten so stoic in the face of abuse that a resident has to mention actual unnatural acts in connection with his name for Gately to Log the abuse and give out a Restriction. He’s respected and well-liked by almost all the residents, which the House Manager says causes the veteran Staff some concern, because Gately’s job is not to be these people’s friend all the time.

Then in the kitchen with the fucking Krispie-treat bowls and pans still a fucking mess Wade McDade and some other residents were standing around waiting for various things to toast and boil and McDade was using his finger and pushing the tip of his nose up so that his nostrils faced straight out at everybody. He was looking piggishly around and asking if people knew any people where their nose looked like this right here, and some people said yes, sure, why. Gately checked the fridge and again saw evidence that his special meatloaf had a secret admirer, it looked like, another big rectangle cut out of the leftovers he’d carefully wrapped and laid out on the sturdiest shelf in there. McDade, who Gately struggles daily with the urge to hit McDade so hard there’d be nothing but eyes and a nose down over the tops of his cowboy boots, McDade’s telling everybody he’s constructing a Gratitude List at Calvin T.’s tough-love suggestion and he says he’s decided one of the things he’s grateful for is his nose don’t look like this here. Gately tries not to judge on the basis of who laughs and who doesn’t. When Pat’s phone rings and Gately leaves, McDade’s squunching his upper lip up in his hand and asking people about acquaintance with cleft palates.

Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger to the wind for potential conflicts and issues and rumors. A subtle art here is maintaining access to the residents’ gossip-grapevine and keeping on top of rumors without seeming like you’re inducing a resident to cross the line and actually eat cheese on another resident. The only thing a resident is actually encouraged to rat out another resident on here is picking up a Substance. All other-type issues it’s supposed to be Staff’s job to glean and ferret out etc., to decoct legitimate infractions out of the tides of innuendo and bullshit complaint 20+ bored crammed-together street-canny people in detox from wrecked lives can generate. Rumors that so-and-so blew so-and-so on the couch at 0300, that thus-and-such’s got a knife, that X was using what had to be some kind of code on the pay phone, that Y’s gone back to carrying a beeper, that so-and-so’s making book on football out of the 5-Man room, that Belbin had led Diehl to believe she’d clean up if he made Krispie Treats and then she weaseled out, and etc. Almost all of it’s picayune and, over time, as it accretes, unpleasant.

Rarely a feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward — just an abrupt loss of hope. Plus there is the contempt he belies so well with gentleness and caring during that post-coital period of small sounds and adjustments.

Orin can only give, not receive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of them think he is a wonderful lover, almost a dream-type lover; and this fuels the contempt. But he cannot show the contempt, since this would pretty clearly detract from the Subject’s pleasure.

Because the Subject’s pleasure in him has become his food, he is conscientious in the consideration and gentleness he shows after coitus, making clear his desire to stay right there very close and be intimate, when so many other male lovers, the Subjects say, seem afterward to become uneasy, contemptuous, or distant, rolling over to stare at the wall or tamping down a smoke before they’ve even stopped twitching.

The hand-model told him very softly how the photograph’s big pink Swiss husband after coitus hove himself off her and lay there stunned under his stomach’s weight, his eyes narrowed to piggy slits and the faint smirk on his face that of a gorged predator: not like the punter: uncaring. As was S.O.P. with Subjects she became then briefly stricken and anxious and said no one must ever know, she could lose her children. Orin administered the standard assurances in a very soft intimate voice. Orin was resoundingly gentle and caring afterward, as she could somehow just intuitively tell he would be. It was true. It gave him real pleasure to give the impression of care and intimacy in this interval; if someone asked about his favorite part of the anticlimactic time after the Subject lay back and glisteningly opened and he could see her eyes holding him whole, Orin would say his #2 favorite is this post-seminal interval of clingy vulnerability on the Subject’s part and gentle intimate care on his own.

When the knock on the room door came it seemed like a further grace, for the Subject had been up on an elbow in bed, exhaling slim tusks of cigarette-smoke from her nose and starting to ask him to tell her things about his own family, and Orin was stroking her very tenderly and watching the twin curves of smoke pale and spread and trying not to shudder at the thought of what the inside of the Subject’s fine nose must look like, what gray-white tangles of necrotic snot must hang and twine up in there, from the smoke, whether she had the stomach to look at a hankie she’d used or whether she balled the thing up and flung it from her with the sort of shudder O. knew he’d feel; and when the brisk action of male knuckles sounded against the room’s door he watched her face whiten from the forehead down as she pleaded that no one must know of her whoever was there and stabbed out her butt and dove beneath the blankets as he called out for patience to the door and veered to the bathroom to wrap a towel around him before he went to it, the sort of bland hotel door you used a card and not a key for. The defiled, guilty, and frightened married hand-model’s wrist and hand protruded for a moment from the edge of the bedding and felt the floor for shoes and clothes, the hand moving like a blind spider and sucking things up under the blankets. Orin didn’t ask who it was at the door; be had nothing to hide. His mood at the door became extraordinarily fine. When the wife and mother had erased all evidence of herself and heaped the bedding over her so she could lie there sniffing grayly and imagining that she was hidden from view, just one lumpy part of a celibate napper’s dishevelled bed, Orin checked the door’s fish-eye peeper, saw only the hallway’s claret-colored wall opposite, and opened the door with a smile he felt all the way down to his bare soles. Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Eastern medical attaches, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything.

The man in the hall at the door was handicapped, challenged, in a wheelchair, looking up at him from well below peephole-range, bushy-haired and mostly nose and looking up into the swell of Orin’s pectorals, making no attempt to see around him into the room. One of the disabled. Orin looked down and felt both let down and almost touched. The little fellow’s wheelchair shiny and his lap blanketed and his string tie half-hidden by the clipboard he held to his chest with a curled and motherly arm.

‘Survey,’ the man said, nothing else, joggling the clipboard a little like an infant, presenting it as evidence.

Orin imagined the terrified Subject lying there hidden and trying to hear, and despite a sort of mild disappointment he felt touched at whatever this shy ruse of an excuse for proximity to his leg and autograph might be. He felt for the Subject the sort of clinical contempt you feel for an insect you’ve looked down and seen and know you’re going to torture for a while. From the way she smoked and performed certain other manual operations, Orin’d noted she was left-handed.

He said to the man in the wheelchair, ‘Goody.’

‘Plus or minus three percent sample.’

‘Eager to cooperate in any way.’