Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘But there was an inevitability-feeling about it, too, when it came.’

‘It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older.’

‘Tell me all about it.’

‘I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt.’

Gompert’s head isn’t all the way up, but now it’s about halfway up; her forehead has a major red impression-spot from her ankle-bone. She’s looking roughly halfway between straight ahead and Day beside her. ‘And there was this idea underneath that you’d brought it on, that you’d wakened it up. You went back up to the fan that second time. You like despised yourself for waking it up.’

Day is looking straight ahead. Mr. Bouncety-Bounce’s head is in no way mushroom-shaped, though it is large and — in the rubber infant-mask — apt to appear to the adult viewer kind of grotesque. ‘Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself.’

Green in his sleep cries out something that sounds like ‘For God’s sake no Mr. Ho don’t light it!’ His swollen black eyes and R.E.M.’s non sequiturs, plus the capering 130-kilo infant on the viewer, plus Day and Gompert conversing while both staring into space, all backed by the blurps and wonks of Gene M.’s hand-held game in the office, give the dark living room a dreamy and almost surreal atmosphere.

Day finally uncrosses his legs and switches them. ‘It’s never come back. Over twenty years. But I’ve not forgotten. And the worst times I have felt since then were like a day at the foot-masseur’s compared to the feeling of that black sail or wing rising inside me.’

‘Billowing.’

‘Not the nuts Jesus God not the nutsss.’

‘I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings.’

‘Or the corner it came up out of, inside, if they mean a place.’ Kate Gompert is now looking at him. Her face doesn’t look better but does look different. Her neck’s clearly stiff from having been contorted.

‘From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,’ Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, ‘I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I’d surely kill myself.’

‘Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.’

‘Oh God please,’ Green says very distinctly.

Day says: ‘There is no way it could feel worse.’

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Apparently some higher-up had sent Mary Esther Thode out on her little yellow Vespa with the order for their match; she’d pulled up alongside Stice and Wayne just as they cleared the Hammond golf course, Hal a good half km. behind them with galumphers Kornspan and Kahn. Schtitt was inscrutable about the whole thing. The match wasn’t like a ladder-challenge; Stice and Hal were in different age-divisions this year. The match was more like maybe an exhibition, and by the second set, as people got done with the weight room and showers, it was attended like one. The match. Helen Steeply of Moment, possessed of a certain thuggish allure but hardly the pericardium-piercer that Orin had made her sound like, to Hal, sat through the whole thing, accompanied for the first set by Aubrey deLint before Thierry Poutrincourt stole his spot on the bleacher. It was the first high-caliber junior tennis she’d ever seen, she said, the massive journalist. They played on #6, the best of the east Show Courts. Also the scene of some of the recent Eschaton’s worst carnage. It was a conditioning-heavy day, a very light schedule of matches. Bags of smoke burped steadily up from Schtitt’s crow’s nest high overhead, and sometimes you could hear the weatherman’s pointer tapping absently on the transom’s iron. The only other thing nearby was down on #10, a challenge in Girls’ 14’s, two baseliners sending parabolas back and forth: ponytails, an air of baseline attrition, the ball’s high heavy arc that of a loogy spat for distance. Shaw and Axford were also way out on =0=23, warming up. No one paid them or the 14’s much mind. The bleachers behind the Show Court filled steadily up. Schtitt had Mario film the whole first set from above, leaning way out over the transom’s railing with Watson braced and gripping his vest from behind, Mario’s police lock protruding and casting a weird needly shadow slanted northeast of Court 9’s net.

‘This is the first real match I’ve seen, after hearing so much about the junior tour,’ Helen Steeply told deLint, trying to cross her legs on a cramped bleacher a few tiers from the top. Aubrey deLint’s smile was notoriously bad, his face seeming to break into crescents and shards, wholly without cheer. It was almost more like a grimace. Orders that deLint keep the mammoth soft-profiler in direct sight at all times were explicit and emphatic. Helen Steeply had a notebook, and deLint was filling in both players’ names on performance charts Schtitt won’t ever let anyone look at.

The P.M. was moving fast from a chilly noon cloud-cover into blue autumn glory, but in the first set it was still very cold, the sun still pale and seeming to flutter as if poorly wired. Hal and Stice didn’t have to stretch and barely warmed up at all, after the run. They’d changed clothes and were both expressionless. Stice was in all-black, Hal in E.T.A. sweats with his left shoe’s upper bulging distended around his AirStirrup brace.

A born net-man, Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace. He was shorter than Hal but better-built and with quicker feet. A southpaw with factory-painted W’s on his Wilson Pro Staff 5.8 si’s.

Hal was left-handed too, which complicated strategy and percentages hideously, deLint told the journalist beside him.

The Darkness’s service motion was in the McEnroe-Esconja tradition, legs splayed, feet parallel, a figure off an Egyptian frieze, side so severely to the net he’s almost facing away. Both arms out straight and stiff on the serve’s downswing. Hal bobbed on his feet’s balls a little in the ad court, waiting. Stice started his service-motion motion in little segments — it looks a little like bad animation — then grimaced, tossed, pivoted netward and served it with a hard flat spang way out to Hal’s forehand, pulling Hal wide. The finish of Stice’s pivot lets his momentum carry him naturally up to net, following the serve. Hal lunged for the serve and chipped a little forehand return down the line and scrambled right to get back into court. The return was lucky, a feeble chip that just cleared the net’s tape, so shallow that Stice had to half-volley it at the service line, still moving in, his backhand two-handed and clumsy for half-volleys; he had to sort of scoop it and hit up soft so it wouldn’t float out deep. Axiom: the man who has to hit up from the net is going to get passed. And Stice’s half-volley landed in the ad court squishy and slow and sat up for Hal, who was waiting for it. Hal’s stick was back for the forehand, waiting, and there was a moment of total mentation as the ball hung there. Statistically, Hal was book to pass a left-handed volleyer cross-court off a ball this ripe, though he also always loved a good humiliating topspin lob, and Stice’s fractional chance at saving the point was to guess what Hal would do — Stice couldn’t crowd the net because Hal would put it up over him; he stayed a couple stick-lengths off the net, leaning for a cross. Everything seemed to hang distended in air now so clear it seemed washed, after the clouds. The bleachers’ people could feel Hal feel Stice letting the point go, inside, figuring it lost, knowing he could only guess and stab, hoping. Little hope of Hal fucking up: Hal Incandenza does not fuck up passes off floater half-volleys. Hal’s forehand’s wind-up was nicely disguised, prepped for either lob or pass. When he hit it so hard his forearm’s musculature stood starkly out it was a pass but not cross-court; he went inside-out on it, a flat forehand as hard as he could from the baseline’s center back toward Stice’s deuce-sideline. Stice had finally guessed lob at the start of the stroke and had half-turned to sprint back for where it would land, and the inside-out pass wrong-footed him; he could do no more than stand there flat-footed and watching as the fresh ball landed a meter fair to get Hal back to deuce in the fifth game. There was applause off thirty hands for the point as a whole, which was faultless and on Hal’s part imaginative, anti-book. One of very few total inspired points from Incandenza, deLint’s chart would show. Neither player’s face moved as a couple people shouted for Hal. The basic ten-level R.A.S.U.[265] from the Universal Bleacher Co. sat right behind the court. At the start it was mostly staff and the A’s who were running alongside when Thode brought Stice and Hal the directive to play. But the stands gradually filled as word got down to the locker rooms that The Darkness was playing 18’s A-2 dead-even in the first set of something Schtitt had actually dispatched a scooter to order. The bleachers’ E.T.A.s hunched forward with hands warmed in the crease between hamstrings and calves, or else gloved and layered and stretched out with their heads and bottoms and heels on three different levels, watching both sky and play. The lozenges of shadow from the court’s mesh fences elongated as the sun wheeled southwest to west. Several sets of legs and sneakers hung swinging from the transom above. Mario allowed himself several reaction-shots from staff and partisans in the bleachers. Aubrey deLint spent the set with the punter’s ca-thected profiler, who allegedly came to see Hal only about Orin but whom Charles Tavis won’t let see Hal yet, even chaperoned, Tavis’s reasons for the reticence too detailed for Helen Steeply to understand, probably, but she was watching from the Show-bleachers’ top row, poised over a notebook, wearing a fuchsia ski cap with a rooster-comb top instead of a pompom top, blowing into her fist, her weight making the bleacher below her bow and inclining deLint oddly toward her. For the spectators not perched on the transom overhead, the players looked waffle-cut by the chain-link fencing. The green windscreens that wrecked spectation were used only in the spring in the weeks right after the Lung’s disassembly. DeLint hadn’t stopped talking into the big lady’s ear.

All the E.T.A. players loved the Show Courts 6–9 because they loved to be watched, and also hated the Show Courts because the transom’s crow’s-nested shadow covered the north halves of the courts around noon and all through the P.M. wheeled around gradually east like some giant hooded shadowed moving presence, brooding. Sometimes just the sight of Schtitt’s little head’s shadow could make a younger kid on the Show Courts clutch and freeze. By Hal and Stice’s seventh game, the sky was cloudless, and the transom’s monolithic shadow, black as ink, gave everyone watching the fantods as it elongated along the nets, completely obscuring Slice when he followed a serve in. Another advantage of the Lung was that it afforded no overhead view, which was one more reason why staff waited as long as possible before its erection. There was no indication Hal even saw it, the shadow, hunched and waiting for Stice.

The Darkness splayed out stiff on the deuce side of the center line, ratcheting slowly into his service motion. He overhit the first serve long and Hal angled it softly off-court, moving two steps in for the second ball. Stice hit his second serve as hard as he could again and netted it, and pursed his thick lips a little as he walked into the net’s shadow to retrieve the ball, and Hal jogged over to the fence behind the next court to get the ball he’d angled over. DeLint was putting a pejorative hieroglyphic in a box on his chart marked STICE.

At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room’s ceiling.

Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library, right near the onion-domed Watertown Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages and personae of time.

M. M. Pemulis and J. G. Struck, wet-haired after their P.M. runs, had blarneyed their way past the library-attendant at the B.U. School of Pharmacy 2.8 clicks down Commonwealth on Comm. and Cook St. and were seated at a table in Reference, Pemulis’s yachting cap pushed way back to accommodate his rising eyebrows, licking his finger to turn pages.

H. Steeply’s green sedan with its neuralgiac full-front Nunhagen ad on the side sat in an Authorized Guest parking spot in the E.T.A. lot.

Between appointments,[266] in an office whose west windows yielded no view of the match, Charles Tavis had his head mashed up against the upholstered seat-rail of his sofa, his arm under the gray-and-red ruffle and sweeping back and forth for the bathroom scale he keeps under there.

Avril Incandenza’s whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown.

At just this moment M.S.T., Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain ‘Swiss’ hand-model before a wall-width window in a rented suite halfway up a different tall hotel (from before) in Phoenix AZ. The win-dowlight was fiery with heat. Way below, tiny cars’ roofs glared so bright with reflected light their colors were obscured. Pedestrians hunched and sprinted between different areas of shade and refrigeration. The cityscape’s glass and metal twinkled but seemed to sag — the whole vista looked somehow stunned. The cool air through the room’s vent whispered. They’d put down their glasses of ice and come together upright and embraced. The embrace was not like a hug. There was no talking — the only sound was the vent and their breath. Orin’s linen knee probed the deltoid fork of the hand-model’s parted legs. He let the ‘Swiss’ woman grind against the muscular knee of his good leg. They got so close no light shone between them, and ground together. Her lids fluttered; his closed; their breath became somehow coded. Again the concentrated tactile languor of the sexual mode. Again they stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn’t have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her like that, the left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore her.