Infinite jest - David Wallace

Just before dessert — which was on fire — Orin’s Moms had asked whether they could perhaps all join hands secularly for a moment and simply be grateful for all being together. She made a special point of asking Joelle to include her hands in the hand-holding. Joelle held Orin’s hand and Hal’s smaller friend’s hand, which was so callused up it felt like some sort of rind. Dessert was Cherries Jubilee with gourmet New Brunswick ice cream. Dr. Incandenza’s absence from the table went unmentioned, almost unnoticed, it seemed. Both Hal and his nonstimulating friend pleaded for Kahlua, and Mario flapped pathetically at the tabletop in imitation. Avril made a show of gazing at Orin in mock-horror as he produced a cigar and clipper. There was also a blancmange. The coffee was decaf with chickory. When Joelle looked over again, Orin had put his cigar away without lighting it.

The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill.

Joelle’d felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady’s grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts’ pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle’s pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.

On the way back home, in a cab whose company’s phone-number Hal had summoned from memory, Orin hung his leg over Joelle’s crossed legs and said that if anybody could have been counted on to see that the Stork needed to use Joelle somehow, it was the Moms. He asked Joelle twice how she’d liked her. Joelle’s cheek muscles ached something awful. When they got back to the brownstone co-op on that last pre-Subsidized Thanksgiving was the first historical time Joelle intentionally did lines of cocaine to keep from sleeping. Orin couldn’t ingest anything during the season even if he wanted to: B.U.’s major-sport teams Tested randomly. So Joelle was awake at 0400, cleaning back behind the refrigerator for the second time, when Orin cried out in the nightmare she’d somehow felt should have been hers.

Shaking to the confidence of his judgment of these persons, the one Marathe had believed a desperate addict was revealed as the woman in authority for the demi-maison of Ennet. The clip boarded woman was a mere subaltern. Marathe very seldom misjudged persons or their roles.

The woman in authority was negative on the telephone. ‘No, no. No,’ she said into the telephone. ‘No.’

T am sorry,’ she spoke to Marathe over the telephone’s speaker without placing the hand of privacy over the speaker. ‘This won’t take a second. No she can’t, Mars. Promises don’t matter. She’s promised before. How many times. No. Mars, because it’ll end up hurting us again and just enabling her.’ The other side’s man’s voice came loudly, and the authority stopped a sobbing with the back of her wrist, then stiffened. Marathe watched expres-sionlessly. He had the great fatigue, a time at which English was straining, There were dogs upon the floor. ‘I know, but no. For today, no. Next time she calls, ask her to call me here. Yes.’

She deactivated this transmission and stared at her top of the desk for a moment. Two dogs lay on the floor between her chair and Marathe’s fau-teuil, one dog of which was licking its private organs. Marathe stifled a shudder and pulled up his blanket slightly, hunching to minimalize the musculature of health of his upper torso, also.

‘Good night…,’ Marathe began.

‘Well, don’t go,’ the woman of authority ejaculated from coming out of her reverie of sadness, giving her seat the rotation to face him. She tried to smile in the professional manner of U.S.A. ‘After you waited all that time out there. I saw you sharing with Selwyn. Selwyn tends to show up whenever we’re doing group intakes.’

‘Me, I think he suffers with mental illness.’ Marathe noticed one leg of the woman was thinner by far of her other leg. He was being driven distracted also by this habit to pretend to sniff. The false sniffs came from nowhere.

She crossed these legs. Two autos’ horns mightily blew upon the avenue far beyond the concave window of her desk.

‘This Selwyn, he advised me to stroke your animals, which I have regret but I will not.’

This woman quietly laughed and leaned forward above the crossed legs. In addition, one of the dogs had flatulence. ‘You listed your citizenship as Swiss.’

‘I am a residing alien addicted to smack, to scag, and to H, seeking desperately the residential treatment.’

‘But legally residing? With a Green Card? An O.I.N.S.[311] Residency Code?’

Marathe from his sportcoat produced the documents M. DuPlessis had arranged with foresight in the long past.

‘Disabled, also. Also deformed,’ Marathe said, shrugging stoically, inclining his veil at the dark carpet.

The woman was examining his O.I.N.S. documents with the pursed mouth and face for poker of O.N.A.N. authorities in all places. One of her hands was twisted in the manner of a claw. ‘We all come in with issues, Henry,’ she said.

‘Henri. Pardon. Henn.’

Some woman just outside the door near the demi-maison’s front door, she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon. Wet sounds were audible from beneath the rear leg of the dog with private organs, of which the head hid beneath the raised leg. The woman of authority had to support the body by placing the hands on the desk to rise and unlock and lift the door of a black metal cabinet over her TP and console of her desk. The door of old black metal lifted outward. Marathe committed to memory the model numbers of this teleputer, which was Indonesian and of cheap cost.

‘Well Henri, Ennet House, in the years I’ve been on Staff here, we’ve had aliens, resident aliens, E.S.L.’s whose English was worse than yours by a long shot.’ She stood on the thicker leg to reach into this cabinet deeply for some item. Marathe took the opportunity of her inattention to commit to his memory the office’s facts. The office’s door had a decoration of a triangle within a circle, and no bolt of death for locking, but merely a sadly cheap recess-lock in the knob. Nowhere the small nozzle of standard 10.525 GHz microwave alarming. The large windows had no small ends of wires about their frames. This left the possibility only of a magnet-contact alarm, which if so was difficult to jumper but also possible. Marathe felt himself missing his wife intensely, which always signalled his deep fatigue. Twice he sniffed.

The woman was speaking into the cabinet to him: ‘… get you to sign some releases for me so we can make copies of your O.I.N.S. proofs and get an Outtake faxed from your detox, which was in …?’

‘The Chit Chat Farms Rehabilitation of Pennsylvania State. Last month.’ The A.F.R.’s data liaison in Montreal had promised to arrange all records without some delay.

‘In, what, Wernersdale, something?’

Marathe cocked his veiled head ever so slightly. ‘Wernersberg of Pennsylvania.’

‘Well we know Chit Chat, we’ve had some Chit Chat graduates come through the House. Highest … respect.’ Her head was inside the cabinet, with an arm. It appeared difficult for her to rummage inside the cabinet and keep at the same time her balance. Deciding the bay windows were the optimal office’s entry if required, Marathe looked at the woman’s attempt to balance and the old cabinet. Then he blinked slowly. In this cabinet visibly, in twin stacks near the front of the open cabinet, were many cartridges of TP entertainment.

The woman said ‘And we’ve been Disabled-Accessible since the beginning. One of only a handful of Houses in the metro area that are fully equipped to take disabled clients, I assume they told you down at Chit Chat.’ The wall banged with the impact of boisterousness in the outside room, and somebody either laughed or was in pain. Marathe sniffed. The woman was continuing to speak: ‘… why I got to come here in the first place. Which I came in in a chair, too, originally, by the way.’ She teetered back out from the cabinet with a folder of Manila. ‘At the time I declared up and down I was too disabled to kneel and pray, to give you an idea of where I was at.’ She laughed gaily. She was attractive.

‘Me,’ Marathe responded, ‘I will attempt to pray at a moment’s order.’ Aiding the ruse of application, he and Fortier discovered, was that U.S.A. recovery from the addictions was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying of orders. The A.F.R. had reviewed cartridges of antique U.S.A. programming, which they had found through luck in the inventory of Antitoi, and had watched to learn many things. But casting his veiled face desperately upward while saying allowed that Marathe could scan along the plastic cases of cartridges’ spines. Among the small-of-font titles such as Focal Length Parameters X–XL and Drop Volley Ex. II were two cases of plain brown plastic, blank, except for — this was why his veil, it remained tilted upward for so much longer that he was concerned that this woman of authority — except for — but it was difficult of sureness, for the office’s light was the deadening fluorescence of U.S.A., and the cabinet’s mouth in the shadow of the lid and the cheesecloth veil made less his focus — except maybe for tiny round faces of embossed smiles upon the brown cases. Marathe felt suddenly the excitement of himself — M. Hugh Steeply’s wording for this had been from somewhere blue.

The authority spoke also: ‘Not to mention U.H.I.D. members, you might want to know.’ Gesturing then at the veil of Marathe neither was mentioning. The woman attempted to affix a sheet of faint toner to a board with a clip. ‘In fact we have a U.H.I.D. member in early residency right now.’

Marathe blinked twice more. He said ‘I am deformed, me.’

‘She might be able to help you adjust, identify. Be good for her, too.’

Marathe had begun locking down in RAM every detail of every moment since his entering the Ennet House demi-maison. He in another part of his brain considered whether he would report truly first to M. Fortier or to the Steeply of U.S.B.S.S., whose contact number had always the prefix of 8000, he had jested. In another part was whether to seem eager for meeting the Entertainment’s performer here now, a fellow veil. To think of what a desperate addict would have eagerness in. Marathe was throughout this thinking smiling largely at the woman, forgetting she could not witness it. ‘This is happy,’ finally he said.

‘Your facial issues —’ the person stated, leaning in over the crossed legs in her chair. ‘Are they connected to your use and abuse? Did they work with you on progression and Y.E.T.s[312] and owning consequences at Chit Chat?’

Marathe was in little hurry now to leave for returning to chez Antitoi. He utilized his abilities to recite complex lines of covering-story on addiction while also at the time reviewed locking down the face and locations of every person at the Ennet House he had regarded. For they would come here again, the A.F.R., and maybe Services Without Specificity of Steeply and Tine, as well. He had the ability of splitting his mind’s thinking along several parallel tracks.

‘The legs — I do an overdose in Berne, which is in my home of Switzerland, while alone, and I fall down face-down while my legs, they remain how you say tangle, tangled in the chair on which occurred this injection, fix. A stupid. I lie down without conscious or to move for many days, and my legs, they — comment-on-dití — they are sleepy, lose the circulating, suffer gangrene, become infectious.’ Marathe sniffed while stoically shrugging. ‘As well the nose and mouth, from facial squishing of lying face-down in a position without conscious for days. I die almost. All is amputated, for my life. I withdraw from the scag, smack, and H, in I’infirmière. A result of abuse of the drugs.’

‘This is your story. This is your first step.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘My legs, my nose and oral. All as a consequence of the progression. At the Chit Chat, I admit all the things, I realize I am addicted desperately.’ Marathe was trying to decide if to find ways to make the authority woman briefly leave the office, so that Marathe might rapidly arm-climb up to the cabinet to regard the smiling cases of cartridge closely before the cabinet’s locking. Or instead also to return on pretext to remain and hang roundly in the living room for waiting persons, to find a glimpse of who is this mentioned resident with her female U.H.I.D. veil; for this is the purpose of coming to demi-maisons M. Fortier gave. Marathe could give the fact of the cartridges to Fortier and the veiled girl to Steeply, or oppositely. The fatigue returned. But Steeply, before committing to overt action, will wish for confirmation that those in the cabinet were items of the true Entertainment, not the blank and joking F.L.Q. displays. There was truly a faint whirring noise coming from the head, he imagined. Marathe’s sidearm sat in its holster under the seat of him, hidden by the plaid-colored blanket of his lap. To easily kill the person in authority was inutile at this time of not glimpsing the girl, he had decided, plus impractical of surrounding witness. Marathe’s fauteuil could travel 45 kph on a level surface over short distance. The authority figure liked to comb at the bright hair with her claw of the deformed hand. She was telling Marathe the false addict that she found his honesty encouraging and saying to sign these forms, for releasing. As Marathe signed slowly the name of a deceased Health-Benefits administrator at the Caisse de Depot et Placement,[313]the woman began to ask about what lengths he believed he was willing to go to.

The whole family was lousy with secrets, she’d decided, was part of the nonturkey dinner’s sadness. From each other, themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness. I.e. that they were all ‘exactly as crazy as they seem’ — the punter’s phrase.

We’re all a lot more intuitive about our lovers’ families than we are about our own families, she knew. Charlotte Treat’s face glistened; her cheek’s deep scars were a more violent red than the rest. Her ribs under the wet Michelob Dry T-shirt were starting to stand out, her neck to get that skinny stemmy look of katexia. She looked like a ravaged fowl. Kate Gompert’s bed sat unmade, a copy of some yellow paperback called Feeling Good open facedown on the mattress and starting to curl. Joelle had this weird fear that Gompert, who made Joelle extremely nervous at the best of times, would come home and walk in and find Joelle cleaning with her hair in a kerchief and veil damply clinging. She used the last of the room’s Kleenex dusting all five bedside tables, wiping in careful rings around objects she wasn’t to touch.

There was then some trickiness in the situation when the demi-maison’s woman offered the extension of a place for Marathe. Desperately addicted Henri the Swiss could sleep upon the Convertisofa in the rear office this very P.M., she said, if he was willing to endure the mess and sometimes insects of the rear office. The woman had a ripe spot of sympathique for the disableds, Marathe could see. For trickiness in the situation, no lines had been prepared by Fortier to defer this offer of the extension of the spot of treatment in the demi-maìson. The woman in authority smiled that she could see in his playing with the fauteuil’s wheels the addicted struggle between desperation and denial, she said. Marathe was rapidly calculating should he falsely accept and remain here for one night to observe for himself the description of the veiled patient from U.H.I.D., against should he exit and roll like no person’s business to the nearest place of private telephoning to alert the A.F.R. at the shop that here at this demi-maison were of possibility real cartridges of the Entertainment, perhaps including a duplicatable Master or the anti-samizdat remedy cartridge of F.L.Q.’s allegation, to return to chez Antitoi and return later in squeaking force to the demi-maison and acquire both the cartridges and the veiled performer, if the U.H.I.D. patient of treatment is revealed as the disguised performer. The engineer of radio had spoken volubly of this person’s veil and screen. Or calculating also whether to telephone not Antitoi Entertainent but the 24-hour costless prefix of M./Mlle. Steeply and convey the very same information instead, finally, first, to Bureau des Services sans Spécificité, placing bets on O.N.A.N. and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side only, conveying his restenotic wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remi-d’Amherst’s Convexity-ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of their lives down here among U.S.A.’s confusion of choices, demanding hidden protection from Steeply and high-income medical care for the heart- and head-difficulties of beloved Gertraude.