Infinite jest - David Wallace

I looked at the door. ‘But that’s Axhandle’s single. What would Troeltsch be doing sleeping in Axhandle’s room?’

Ortho shrugged. ‘Trust that I’ve had plenty of time to listen and identify different folks’ snores, Inc.’

I looked from Stice to Axford’s door and back. ‘So you’ve just been sitting here listening to sleep-noises and watching your breath expand and freeze on the window?’ I said. Imagining it seemed somehow unendurable: me just sitting there, stuck, well before sunrise, alone, too embarrassed to call out, my own exhalations fouling the window and denying me even a view to divert attention from the horror. I stood there horrified, admiring The Darkness’s ballsy calm.

‘There was a kind of real bad half-hour when my upper lip up and got stuck too, in the breath, when the breath froze. But I breathed the sucker loose. I breathed real hot and fast. Goddamn near hyper-v’d. I was scared if I passed out I’d slump on forward and the whole face’d get stuck. Goddamn forehead’s bad enough.’

I put my toothbrush and NASA glass down on the cantilevered vent-module. Rooms’ vents were recessed, hallway-vents protrusive. E.T.A.’s annular heating system produced a lubricated hum I had stopped really hearing years ago. The Headmaster’s House still had oil heat; it always sounded like a maniac was hammering at the pipes far below.

‘Dark, prepare yourself mentally,’ I said. ‘I’m going to help pull you loose.’

Stice didn’t seem to hear this. He seemed oddly preoccupied for a man occlusively sealed to a frozen window. He was feeling at the back of his head with real vigor, which is what he did when he was preoccupied. ‘You believe in shit, Hal?’

‘Shit?’

‘I don’t know. Little-kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit.’

‘Just going to get around behind you and yank and we’ll pop you right off,’ I said.

‘Somebody did come by before,’ he said. ‘There was somebody standing back there about maybe an hour back. But he just stood there. Then he went away. Or … it.’ A full-body shiver.

‘It’ll be like that last little bit of ankle-tape. We’ll pull you back so hard and fast you won’t feel a thing.’

‘I’m getting these real unpleasant memories of that piece of IngersolPs tongue on Nine’s net-post that stayed there til spring.’

‘This is no saliva-and-subzero-metal situation, Dark. This is some freakish occlusive seal. Glass doesn’t conduct heat like metal conducts heat.’

‘There ain’t too fucking much heat involved in this window right here, buddy-ruff.’

‘And I’m not sure what you mean, paranormal. I believed in vampires when I was small. Himself allegedly used to see his father’s ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn’t speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him. So we kind of wrote it all off. Orth, I guess I don’t know what to think about paranormal shit.’

Then plus I think something bit me. On the back of the head here, some bug that knew I was helpless and couldn’t see.’ Stice dug again at the red area behind his ear. There was a kind of weltish bump there. It wasn’t in a vampire-related area of the neck.

‘And good old Mario says he’s seen paranormal figures, and he’s not kidding, and Mario doesn’t lie,’ I said. ‘So belief-wise I don’t know what to think. Subhadronic particles behave ghostishly. I think I withhold all pre-judgment on the whole thing.’

‘Well all right then. It was good it was you come by then.’

‘The big thing’s going to be to stiffen the old neck, Dark, to avoid whiplash. We’ll pull you off there like a cork from a bottle of Moët.’

‘Pull my sorry ass off here, Inc, and I’ll take and show you some parab-normal shit that’ll shake your personal tree but good,’ Stice said, bracing, “n’t said nothing to nobody but Lyle about it, and I’m sick of the secretness of it. You won’t pre-formulize any judgments, Inc, I know.’

‘You’re going to be fine,’ I said. I got right behind Stice and bent slightly and got an arm around his chest. His wooden chair creaked as I braced my knee against it. Stice began breathing fast and hard. His parotitic jowls flapped a little as he breathed. Our cheeks were almost pressed together. I told him I was going to pull on the count of Three. I actually pulled on Two, so he couldn’t brace himself. I pulled back as hard as I could, and after a stutter of resistance Stice pulled back with me.

There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort of elastic from hell. The dermis of Slice’s forehead was still stuck fast, but the abundant loose flesh of Stice’s bulldog face had risen and gathered to stretch and connect his head to the window. And for a second I saw what might be considered Stice’s real face, his features as they would be if not encased in loose jowly prairie flesh: as every mm. of spare flesh was pulled up to his forehead and stretched, I got a glimpse of Stice as he would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential face, aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window from beneath the pink visor of stretched spare skin.

All this took place in less than second. For just an instant we both stayed there, straining backward, listening to the little Rice-Krispie sound of his skin’s collagen-bundles stretching and popping. His chair was leaning way back on its two rear legs. Then Stice shrieked in pain: ‘Jesus God put it back!’ The little second face’s blue eyes protruded like cartoon eyes. The fine little thin-lipped second mouth was a round coin of pain and fear.

‘Put it back put it back put it back!’ Stice yelled.

I couldn’t just let go, though, for fear that the elastic stretch would snap Stice forward into the window and send his face through the glass. I eased him forward, watching the chair’s front legs descend slowly to the floor; and the tension of the forehead’s skin decreased, and Slice’s full fleshy round face reappeared over the small second face, and covered it, and we eased him forward until nothing but a few centimeters of decollagenated forehead-skin hanging and sagging at about eyelash-level remained as evidence of the horrific stretch.

‘Jesus God,’ Stice panted.

‘You are really and truly stuck, Orth.’

‘Fuck me skating did that ever hurt.’

I tried to rotate a kink out of my shoulder. ‘We’re going to have to thaw it off, Dark.’

‘You’re not getting close to this forehead with a saw, bud. I’ll set right-cheer till spring first, see if I don’t.’

Then Jim Troeltsch’s towering A.M.-cowlick and then face and fist emerged through Axford’s doorway just over Stice’s hunched shoulder. Stice had been right. Being in somebody else’s room even after Lights Out was an infraction; staying there overnight was too far out even to mention in the regulations. ‘Reports of screaming have reached us here in the Eyewitness News-Center,’ Troeltsch said into his fist.

‘The fuck out of here, Troeltsch,’ Stice said.

‘Thaw, Ortho. Warm water. Heat the window. Hot water. Dissolve the adhesion. Heating pad. Hot pack from Loach’s office or something.’

‘Loach’s door can’t be dickied,’ Stice said. ‘Don’t wake him up on Fundraiser day yet.’

Troeltsch extended the fist. ‘Reports of high-pitched screams have led this reporter to an unfolding scene of dramatic crisis, and we’re going to attempt to get a word with the youngster at the center of all the commotion.’

‘Tell him to pipe down and get back with that hand or so help me Jesus, Hal.’

‘The Darkness accidentally put his forehead against the window here when it was wet and it froze and he’s been out here stuck all night,’ I told Troeltsch, ignoring the big fist he held to my face. I squeezed Stice’s shoulder. ‘I’ll go get Brandt to rig something warm.’

It was as if some tacit agreement had been reached not even to bring up Troeltsch’s being in Axford’s room or where Axford was. It was hard to know which would be more disturbing, Axford’s not being in his room all night or Axford being in there behind the ajar door, meaning Troeltsch and Axford had both spent the night in one small single with exactly one bed. The universe seemed to have aligned itself so that even acknowledging it would violate some tacit law. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to any appearance of impropriety or unthinkable possibilities. It was hard to imagine he’d be this obnoxious if he felt he had something to be discreet about. He was standing on tiptoe to see over the window’s breath-line, one hand cupped over his ear as if to hold a headset. He whistled softly. ‘Plus in addition now reports of mind-boggling snowfall are coming in to the News-Center.’

I grabbed my toothbrush and NASA glass from the vent’s protrusion; since the Betel Caper,[352] only the worst kind of naïf leaves his toothbrush unattended around E.T.A. ‘Keep an eye on Stice and my NASA glass right there, Jim, if you would.’

‘Any comment on the mixture of pain, cold, embarrassment, and weather-related feelings you must be feeling, Mr. Stice is it?’

‘Don’t leave me immobilated with Troeltsch, man, Hal. He’s going to make me talk to his hand.’

‘A weather-related drama unfolding around the original plight of an embarrassed man trapped by his own forehead,’ Troeltsch was saying into his fist, facing his own reflection in the window, trying with the other big hand to quash the cowlick, as I trotted and slid to a stop in my socks just past the door to the stairwell.

Kenkle and Brandt were ageless in the special desiccated way janitors are ageless, somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. They were inseparable and essentially unemployable. Boredom had years ago led us to Lateral Alice Moore’s minimally crypto-protected employee files, and Brandt’s file had listed his S.-B. I.Q. as Submoronic-to-Moronic. He was bald and somehow at once overweight and wiry. Both right and left temples carried red jagged surgical scars of unknown origin. His affective range consisted of different intensities of grin. He lived with Kenkle in an attic apartment in Roxbury Crossing overlooking Madison Park High School’s locked and cordoned playground, famed site of unsolved ritual mutilations in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. His major attraction for Kenkle seemed to consist in the fact that he neither walked away nor interrupted when Kenkle was speaking. Even in the stairwell I could hear Kenkle discoursing on their Thanksgiving plans and directing Brandt’s mop-work. Kenkle was technically black, as in Negroid, though he was more the burnt-sienna color of a spoiled pumpkin. But his hair was a black person’s hair, and he wore it in thick dreadlocks that looked like a crown of wet cigars. An academic diamond in the very rough Roxbury Crossing, he’d received his doctorate in low-temperature physics from U.Mass. at twenty-one and taken a prestigious sinecure at the U.S. Office of Naval Research, then at twenty-three had been court-martialed out of the O.N.R. for offenses that changed each time you asked him. Some event between twenty-one and twenty-three seemed to have broken him at several strategic points, and he’d retreated from Bethesda back to the front stoop of his old Roxbury Crossing apartment building, where he read Ba’hai texts whose jackets he covered with intricately folded newspaper, and spat spectacular parabolas of quivering phlegm into New Dudley Street. He was dark-freckled and carbuncular and afflicted with excess phlegm. He was an incredible spitter, and alleged his missing incisors had been removed ‘for facilitating the expec-toratory process.’ We all suspected he was either hypomanic or ‘drine-addicted or both. His expression was very serious at all times. He discoursed nonstop to poor Brandt, using spit as a sort of conjunction between clauses. He spoke loudly because they both wore earplugs of expanding foam — people’s nightmare-cries gave them the fantods. Their custodial technique consisted of Kenkle spitting with pinpoint accuracy onto whatever surface Brandt was to clean next and Brandt trotting like a fine hunting dog from glob to glob, listening and grinning, laughing when appropriate. They were moving away from me down the hall toward the second floor’s east window, Brandt making great shining arcs with his doh”s-head mop, Kenkle pulling the gunmetal bucket and lobbing signifying phlegm over Brandt’s bent back.

‘And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas morning — What is the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface, for a child? — A present, Brandt — Something you have not earned and which formerly was out of your possession is now in your po-ssession — Can you sit there and try to say there is no symbolic rela-tion between unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing a young lady?’

Brandt bobbed and mopped, uncertain whether to laugh.

Himself had met Kenkle and Brandt on the T (Kenkle and Brandt apparently rode the T at night, recreationally), trying somehow to make it up to Enfield from the Back Bay via the Orange Line,[353] and somewhat the worse for wear. Kenkle and Brandt not only got Himself onto the right color train and kept him propped up between them all the way up the eternity of Comm. Ave., they’d seen him safely down the T-stop’s steep iron stairs and across traffic and up the hill’s serpentine driveway to the portcullis, and had been invited in at 0200 by Himself to continue whatever low-temperature discussion he and Kenkle had been having as Brandt carried Himself up the hill in a fireman’s carry (Kenkle recalls that night’s discussion being about the human nose as an erectile organ, but the only really sure bet is that it was one-sided); and the duo had ended up being cast as black-veiled Noh-style attendants in Himself’s Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and had been menially employed at E.T.A. ever since, though always on the graveyard shift, since Mr. Harde loathed Kenkle with a passion.

Kenkle hawked and hit a small strip of dust at the crease of baseboard and floor that the mop’s arc had missed. ‘For I am a missionary man, Brandt, is what I am — Brandt — as in give me the straight-forward venereal in-terface of missionary congress or give me nihil and zilch — You know what I am saying? — Give me your best thoughts on alter-native positions, Brandt — Brandt — For me, for my part at least, I say nix and nihil on the rear-entry or you might hear it termed Dog- or Canine-Style interface so favored in huts, blue car-tridges, Tan-tric etchings — Brandt, it’s animal-istic — Why? — Why you say? — Brandt, it is an ess-entially hunched way to have interface — She hunches, you hunch over her — In-ordinately too much hunching, to my own way of—’

It was Brandt who heard me as I came up behind them in socks, trying to keep to the drier patches. I almost slipped twice. It was still coming down hard outside the east window.