Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘Unbalanced letters were no longer being discarded as waste, but now mailed.’

‘And Mummykins was uncomplaining throughout. It was enough to break your heart. She was a rock. She did, granted, begin taking prescription anti-anxiety medication.’

Land of the freely brave: Marathe did not say this aloud. He looked at his pocket’s watch and was trying to remember a time when he had ever with Steeply had to consider the tact of departing.

Steeply, at this time, gave the impression somehow of having several cigarettes going at one time. ‘Somewhere along late in the progression the old man let it be known he was working on a secret book that revised and explicated much of the world’s military, medical, philosophical and religious history by analogies to certain subtle and complex thematic codes in “M*A*S*H.” ‘ Steeply would stand on one foot to raise the other foot to look at a shoe’s inflicted damage, all the time smoking. ‘Even when he went in to work, there were problems. Heating-oil customers who called for deliveries or information or whatever began to complain that the old man kept trying to engage them in bizarre theoretical discussions of the thematics of “M*A*S*H.” ‘

‘Because it is necessary that I leave soon, a central point must be soon emerging,’ Marathe worked in as gracefully as possible.

Steeply seemed not to hear this other man. He seemed not only uncalcu-lated and self-enmeshed; his demeanor itself seemed more young, that of some young person. This unless this was part of some performance beyond Marathe, Marathe knew he must consider.

‘Then the double blow,’ Steeply said. ‘In B.S. 1983. My memory’s clear on this. The Mumkinsky opened an alarming letter from attorneys for CBS and 20th Century Fox. Certain letters had been apparently rerouted by do-goodnik military postal clerks to Fox. The old man’d been trying to correspond with different past and present “M*A*S*H” personas in letters the family never saw get mailed but whose content, the attorneys said, raised quote grave concern and could quote constitute grounds for strenuous legal action.’ Steeply raised the foot to look, his face in pain. He said, ‘Then the program’s final episode ran. Late autumn of B.S. 1983.1 was on an ROTC marching-band trip to Fort Ticonderoga. My kid sister, who’d by this time left home herself, and who could blame the kid, she reported that the Mumkinsky was talking very casually and uncomplainingly of the old man’s now refusing to leave his den.’

‘This, the final enclosing isolation of obsession.’

Steeply looked over his shoulder on one awkward foot to look slightly at Marathe. ‘As in even to go to the bathroom, now, the not leaving.’

‘Your mother’s prescriptions prevented some episodes of great anxiety, I think.’

‘He’d gotten a special A.C.D.C. cable hook-up that brought in extra syndication. When reruns weren’t running, the video-magnetic tapes ran constantly. He was haggard and spectral and his easy chair was all but unrecognizable. Cheery Oil was keeping him on the books until he could get his thirty years in at age sixty. My kid sister and I started reluctantly discussing intervening on Mummykins to intervene on the old man and force him to see somebody.’

‘Yourselves, you could not reach him.’

‘He died just before his birthday. He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline, watching an episode in which Alda’s Hawkeye can’t stop sleepwalking and fears he’s going out of his fucking mind until a professional military therapist reassures him, I remember.’

‘Me, I too have seen this episode rerunning, in my childhood.’

‘All I can recall of it is the army professional telling Alda not to worry, that if he was truly crazy he’d sleep like a newborn, as did the notorious Burns-slash-Linville.’

‘The program’s character of Burns slept exceptionally well, I remember.’

‘His secret book’s manuscript filled scores of notebooks. This is what the notebooks turned out to be. One closet in the den had to be forced open. All these notebooks tumbled out. The whole thing was written in a kind of medical-slash-military-looking code, though, indecipherable — Sis and her first husband and I spent some time trying to decode them. After his death in the chair.’

‘His unbalance of temptation cost him life. An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast television program took his life, because of the consuming obsession. This is your anecdote.’

‘No. It was a transmural infarction. Blew out a whole ventricle. His whole family had a history: the heart. The pathologist said it was amazing he’d lasted this long.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘The obsessed frequently endure.’

Steeply shook the head. ‘It must have been hell on the poor old Mumkinsky.’

‘She never complained, however.’

Already the sun was up and pulsing. Light ran over everything in a sickening yellow way like gravy. All birds and living animals had been silenced, stunned already by heat, and the site’s bright loaders had not yet been started in movement. All was calm. All was bright. Steeply’s shadow on the shelf was squat and blunt, already shorter than the living figure of Steeply himself, who was leaning outward to try to find a spot far below to litter with a crumpled Belgian packing with one prayed no more finally to smoke.

Marathe took his watch from out of the windbreaker’s pocket.

Steeply shrugged. ‘I think you’re right, that it’s part of both the horror and the pull. When I’m east and thinking of Flatto’s lab and I sort of look up and find myself tempted.’

‘About the Entertainment of now.’

‘And I kind of half-picture Hank Hoyne in the old man’s old recliner, hunched and scribbling feverishly.’

‘In military coding.’

‘His eyes, they got like that, too, the old man’s, like Hoyne’s. Periodically.’

Heat began to shimmer, as well, off the lionhide floor of a desert. The mesquite and cactus wobbled, and Tucson AZ resumed once more the appearance of the mirage, as it had appeared when Marathe had first arrived and found his shadow so entrancing in its size and reach. The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to look upon. Marathe allowed himself a few diverting seconds of watching the Mountains of the Rincons’ widening shadows melt slowly backward into the base of the Mountains of the Rincons. Steeply hawked and spat, still holding the last crumpled pack of Flanderfumes.

‘My time is sharply finite to remain.’ Marathe said this. Every change of his postures brought small squeaks of leather and metal. ‘I would feel gratitude if you departed first.’

Steeply figured Marathe wanted him to have no idea how he got up and down, in and out. To no real purpose; a personal point of pride. Steeply squatted for adjusting the straps of his high heels. His prostheses were still not quite aligned. He spoke with the faintly breathless quality of large men trying to bend:

‘Well. Rémy, but I don’t think Dick Willis’s “empty of intent” quite does it. Captures it. The eye-factor. Hoyne, the Arab internist. The old man. Not for eyes like that.’

‘You would say it does not capture these eyes’ expression.’

Looking up while squatting, this made Steeply’s neck appear thick. He stared past Marathe, at the shale. He said ‘The expressions seem more like — fuck, how to say it. Fuck,’ Steeply said in concentration.

‘Petrified,’ Marathe said. ‘Ossified. Inanimate.’

‘No. Not inanimate. More like the opposite. More as if… stuck in some way.’

Marathe’s neck itself was stiff from so much time looking out and down from a height. ‘What is it this wishes here to mean? Glued?’

Steeply was doing something to a toenail’s cracked polish. ‘Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions.’

Marathe’s eyes searched the sky, which this was already too light blue for his pleasure, filmed with a sort of eggy plura of heat. ‘Meaning between different cravings of great intensity, this.’

‘Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that. As if he were stuck wondering. As if there was something he’d forgotten.’

‘Misplaced. Lost.’

‘Misplaced.’ ‘Lost.’ ‘Misplaced.’ ‘As you wish.’

13 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

0245h., Ennet House, the hours that are truly wee. Eugenio M., voluntarily filling in for Johnette Foltz on Dream Duty, is out in the office playing some sort of hand-held sports game that blips and tweets. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy and Bruce Green are in the living room with the lights mostly out and the old jumpy-picture D.E.C. viewer on. Cartridges not allowed after 0000h., to encourage sleep. Sober cocaine-and stimulant-addicts sleep pretty well by the second month, straight alcoholics by the fourth. Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first year. Though Bruce Green is asleep and would be in violation of the no-lying-on-the-couch rule if his legs weren’t twisted over and his feet on the floor. All the Ennet House viewer gets on Spontaneous Dissemination is basic InterLace, and from 0200 to 0400 InterLace NNE downloads for the next dissemination-day and cuts all transmissions except one line’s four straight redissemms of ‘The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,’ and when Mr. Bouncety-Bounce appears in his old cloth-and-safety-pin diaper and paunch and rubber infant-head mask he is not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for the sleepless adult. Ken Erdedy has started to smoke cigarettes and sits smoking, joggling one leather slipper. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day are on the nonleather couch. Kate Gompert sits cross-legged on the couch with her head all the way forward so her forehead touches her foot. It looks like some kind of spiritually advanced yoga position or stretching exercise, but it’s really just the way Kate Gompert has been sitting on the sofa all night every night since Wednesday’s free-for-all unpleasantness with Lenz and Gately in the streetlet, from which the whole House is still reeling and spiritually palsied. Day’s bare calves are completely hairless and look sort of absurd with dress shoes and black socks and a velour bathrobe, but Day’s proven kind of admirably resistant to caring what other people think, in a way.

‘Like you really care.’ Kate Gompert’s voice is toneless and hard to hear because it issues from out of the circle formed by her crossed legs.

‘It isn’t a question of caring or not caring,’ Day says quietly. ‘I meant only that I identify to an extent.’

Gompert’s sarcastic chuff of air raises a section of her unwashed bangs.

Bruce Green doesn’t snore, even with his nose broken and cross-hatched in white tape. Neither he nor Erdedy is listening to them.

Day speaks softly and doesn’t cross his legs to incline over to the side toward her. ‘When I was a little boy —’

Gompert chuffs air again.

‘— just a boy with a violin and a dream and special roundabout routes to school to avoid the boys who took my violin case and played keep-away over my head with it, one summer afternoon I was upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, alone, practicing my violin. It was very hot, and there was an electric fan in the window, blowing out, acting as an exhaust fan.’

‘I know from exhaust fans, believe you me.’

‘The direction of flow is beside the point. It was on, and its position in the window made the glass of the upraised pane vibrate somehow. It produced an odd high-pitched vibration, invariant and constant. By itself it was strange but benign. But on this one afternoon, the fan’s vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of this resonance that produced it.’

‘A thing.’

‘As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there.’

‘But it was inside you, though.’

‘Katherine, Kate, it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room.’

‘Was it triangular? The shape? When you say billowing, do you mean like a triangle?’

‘Shapeless. Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly.’

A mirthless laugh into the ankle. ‘Alcoholics Anomalous.’

Day hasn’t switched legs or moved, and he isn’t looking at her ear or her scalp, which are in view. ‘In just the way any child will probe a wound or pick at a scab I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted.’

‘But you still forgot and went back up there and brought it back. And it was inside you.’

Completely incongruously, Ken Erdedy says ‘His head’s shaped like a mushroom.’ Day has no idea what he was referring to or talking about.

‘Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede.’

‘The triangular horror.’

‘It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me.’

It isn’t like a real interface or conversation. Day doesn’t seem to be addressing anybody in particular. ‘The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college. I attended Brown University in Providence RI, graduating magna cum laude. One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years.’