Infinite jest - David Wallace

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping edge of tabletop with ruler.]

MR. TINE SR.: [Pointing at tapping ruler with weatherman’s pointer.] You’re close to losing that hand, bucko.

Ms. HOOLEY: [Referring to notes.] Then Phil looks up and pops the thought-bubble with a needle and says But it’s a liar, this smiling cartridge is, a wicked thing, lying, like the stranger who leans out of his car and offers you a ride home to your Mommy and Daddy but really wants to grab you and put his sweaty hand over your mouth and lock you in the car and take you far away with him to where you’ll never see your Mommy, Daddy, or Mr. Bouncety-Bounce ever again.

MR. VEALS: Which and here’s the traumatic graphic at fourteen, a dark-bordered new thought-bubble over Phil in which now the cartridge’s limbs are like a dockworker’s, it’s a swart leering cartridge with yellow fangs and long nails in a plaid cap and overalls driving off with an animated kid splayed all screaming and horrified against the car’s rear window, spirals starting to roll in the kid’s eyes. Wait’ll you see it.

Ms. HOOLEY: It’s so scary it’s positively riveting.

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes twice.] Stuff of fucking nightmares.

MR. YEE: Urgle. Urgle urgle. Splarg. Kaa. [Falls from chair.]

MR. TINE JR.: Holy mackerel.

MR. TINE SR.: Buster? Buster?

Ms. HOOLEY: Mr. Yee’s epileptic. Severe. Untreatable. Happened twice on the chopper in. Stress or embarrassment brings it on. He’ll be back up in a minute. Just act natural when he comes back up.

MR. YEE: [Heels drumming on terrazzo State House Annex floor tile.] Ack. Kaa.

MR. TINE SR.: Jesus.

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping ruler on tabletop’s edge.] Jesus W. Christ.

MR. TINE SR.: [Rising, indicating tapping ruler with extended weatherman’s pointer.] All right, God damn it. Give me that thing. Give it here.

MR. TINE JR.: But Chief-

MR. TINE SR.: You heard me God damn it. You know it drives me bats. You’ll get it back when we’re done. Drives me up the wall. Always has. What is it with you and that ruler.

Ms. HOOLEY: Be up and back in the game in a jiff. He won’t remember the fit. Just don’t mention it. The embarrassment of mentioning it’ll set it off again. That’s why twice on the chopper. I learned the hard way.

MR. YEE: Splar. Kak.

MR. VEALS: [Hawking.] For Christ’s sake.

Ms. HOOLEY: [Referring to notes.] As the cartridge in the car in the thought-bubble drives the splayed kid away, Phil prances a bit and warns that we don’t even know for sure what the cartridge to watch out for is even about. He warns that the police only know that it’s something that looks like you’d really want to watch it. He says all we know is it looks really entertaining. But that it really just wants to take away your functionality. He says we know it’s … Canadian.

MR. VEALS: That’s why the plaid cap in the traumatic graphic. Response data indicates a plaid cap with earflaps signifies the Big C to over 70 % of the spot’s target. The overalls drive the association home.

Ms. HOOLEY: At nineteen seconds, Fully Functional Phil then dances his Warning Dance, a Native-American-cum-Breakdance-type dance we’re hoping will catch on among younger dancers. His rhetorical thrust is to play it functional and safe and make sure and check with Mommy and/ or Daddy before watching any entertainment you haven’t seen before. I.e. to accept no Spontaneous Dissemination and play no post-delivered entertainment without checking with an authority figure.

MR. TINE JR.: But as a peer. More like, ‘I’m thinking this is what / better do, if I want to stay fully functional.’

MR. YEE: [Back upright in chair.] Somebody’s mentioned the floppy-ear and plastic-buck-teeth product tie-ins.

MR. TINE JR.: Jesus Mr. Yee, are you sure you’re OK?

Ms. HOOLEY: Ixnay on the entionmay.

MR. YEE: [Sweat-soaked, looking around.] What did he mean? He didn’t mean …?

MR. TINE SR.: God damn it, Rodney.

MR. YEE: Urg. Splarg. [Falls from chair.]

Ms. HOOLEY: [Clears throat.] And finally, direly — can I say direly?

MR. VEALS: This is at 25.35 seconds.

Ms. HOOLEY: Emphatically warns that if Mommy and/or Daddy have been observed sitting in one position in front of the home’s viewer for an unusually long period of time —

MR. VEALS: — Without speaking. Without responding to stimuli.

Ms. HOOLEY: — or acting in any way unusual or distracted or creepy or spooky with respect to an entertainment on the viewer —

MR. VEALS: We cut spooky on the last pass.

MR. YEE: Sklah. Nnngg.

Ms. HOOLEY: — that the fully functional kid’ll never attempt to rouse them himself, and Fully Functional Phil leans way in in a kind of fish-eye-lens close-up and says ‘No-ho-ho-ho way’ would he ever be so dumb as to even for a second plunk himself passively down and have a look at what it is his parents are so silently, creepily engrossed by, but to vacate the premises and prance as fast as he can to get a policeman, who’ll know just how to cut the premises’ power and help Mum and Dad.

MR. VEALS: His trademark expression is ‘No-ho-ho-ho way.’ He works it in whenever possible.

MR. TINE JR.: His equivalent to the Kleenex’s ‘No-Thankee.’

MR. TINE SR.: We’re ready to view, I think.

MR. YEE: [Back in seat, necktie now wrapped all the way around neck like aviator’s scarf.] Still hashing out the tie-ins with Hasbro et al.

MR. VEALS: We’re all cued and ready.

MR. TINE SR.: Let’s have a look at the sucker.

Ms. HOOLEY: Since Tom’s too modest to say so, I should say that Tom’s already storyboarded an extremely exciting adolescent-targeted version of Fully Functional Phil, for music-video and soft-core disseminations, where Phil engages in a great deal more ironic self-parody, and in this version his trademark expression becomes ‘It’s your ass, ace.’

MR. TINE JR.: So let’s have a look at the bastard.

MR. TINE SR.: Kid, your job here from here on out is to pipe down, now do you —?

MR. YEE: I’ve been asked to say for transcription how pleased the Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation is, during this potentially grave interval, to be a proud —

MR. VEALS: [At the Infernatron 210 Viewer.] Hit those lights over behind you, kid.

MR. TINE JR.: This’ll make it difficult for the transcriber to transcribe, can I say.

MR. YEE: This spot doesn’t happen to in any way optically pulse or strobe, does it?

MR. VEALS: Are we all set?

MR. TINE SR.: So lights already.

Gately’s memories of ‘Cheers!’ ‘s Nom now are clearer and vivider than any memory of the wraith-dream or the whirling wraith who said death was just everything outside you getting really slow. The implication that there might at any given time in any room be whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn’t affect anybody living, all way too fast to see and dropping by to watch Gately’s chest rise and fall at the rate of the sun, none of this has sunk in enough to give him the howlers, not in the wake of Joelle’s visit and the fantasies of romance and rescue, and the consequent shame. There’s now a sandy sound of gritty sleetish stuff wind-driven against the room’s window, the hiss of the heater, sounds of gunfire and brass bands from cartridge viewers on in other rooms. The room’s other bed’s still empty and tightly made. The intercom gives that triple ding every few minutes; he wonders if they just do it to bug people. The fact that he couldn’t even finish Ethan From in 10th-grade English and hasn’t got clue one about where ghostwords like SINISTRAL or LIEBESTOD mean or come from, much less OMMATOPHORIC, is just starting to percolate up to awareness when there’s a cold hand on his good shoulder and he opens his eyes. Not to mention ghostwords, which is a real and esoteric word. He’s been floating just under sleep’s lid again. Joelle van D.’s gone. The hand is the nurse that had changed the catheter-bag. She looks hassled and unserene, and one cheekbone sticks out farther than the other, and her little slot of a mouth’s got little vertical wrinkles all around it from being held tight all the time, not unlike the basically-late Mrs. G.’s tight little mouth.

‘The visitor said you’d requested this, because of the tube.’ It’s a little stenographic notebook and Bic. ‘Are you left-handed?’ The nurse means sinistral. She’s penguin-shaped and smells of cheap soap. The notebook is STENOGRAPHIC because its pages turn over at the top instead of to the side. Gately shakes his head gingerly and opens his left hand for the stuff. It makes him feel good all over again that Joelle had understood what he’d meant. She hadn’t just come to tell her troubles to somebody that couldn’t make human judgment-noises. Shaking his head slowly lets him see past the nurse’s white hip. Ferocious Francis is sitting in the chair that the wraith and Ewell and Calvin Thrust had all sat in, his skinny legs uncrossed, gnarled and crew-cutted and clear-eyed behind his glasses and totally relaxed, holding his portable O2-tank, his chest rising and falling at about the rate a phone rings, watching the nurse waddle tensely out. Gately can see a clean white T- under the open buttons of Ferocious Francis’s flannel shirt. Coughing is F.F.’s way of saying hello.

‘Still sucking air I see,’ Ferocious Francis says when the fit’s passed, making sure the little blue tubes are still taped under his nose.

Gately struggles with one hand to flip the notebook open and write’ YO!’ in block caps. Except there’s nothing to really hold the notebook up against and write; he has to sort of balance it flat on one thigh, so he can’t see what he’s writing, and writing with his left hand makes him feel like a stroke-victim must feel, and what he holds up at his sponsor looks more like

‘Figured God needed a little help the other night did you?’ Francis says, leaning way out to the side to get a red bandanna hankie out of a back pocket. ‘What I heard.’

Gately tries to shrug, can’t, smiles weakly. His right shoulder is so thickly bandaged it looks like a turbanned head. The old man probes a nostril and then examines the hankie with interest, just like the dream-wraith did. His fingers are swollen and misshapen and his nails are long and square and the color of old turtleshell.

‘Poor sick bastard going around cutting up people’s pets, cut up the wrong people’s pets. This is the way I heard it.’

Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he’s discovered how no one second of even unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must. He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how bad the pain of it is, how he doesn’t think he can stand it one more second.

‘You saw yourself as in charge. Thought you’d step in. Protect your fel-lowman from his consequences. Which poor sick green Ennet House fuck was it?’

Gately struggles to try and get his knee up so he can see to write ‘LENZ. WHITE WIG. ALWAYS NORTH. ALWAYS ON PHONE.’ Again it looks cuneiform though, illegible. Ferocious Francis blows out a nostril and replaces the little tube. The tank in his lap makes no sound. It has a little valve but no dial or needles.

‘You stepped in against six armed Hawaiians, I hear. Marshall Plan. Captain Courageous. God’s personal Shane.’ F.F. likes to send air through his nose’s tubes in a mirthless burst, a kind of anti-laugh. His nose is large and cucumber-shaped and wide-pored, and pretty much its whole circulatory system is visible. ‘Glenny Kubitz calls me and describes the thing blow by blowjob. Says I should see the other guys. Says about breaking a Hawaiian’s nose, shoving the bits up into the brain. The old chop-and-stiff-arm he says. Big Don G.’s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment. Said the way he heard it you could fight like you was born in a barfight. I tell Glenny I say I’m sure you’ll be proud to hear him say it.’

Gately was trying with maddening sinistral care to write out ‘HURT? DEAD ANY? FINIST? WHO HAT IN HALL?’ more like drawing than writing, when without warning one of the day-shift Trauma M.D.s sweeps in, radiating brisk health and painless cheer. Gately remembers dealing with this one M.D. some days ago in a kind of gray post-surgical fog. This M.D. is Indian or Pakistani and is glossily dark but with a sort of weirdly classically white-type face you could easily imagine profiling on a coin, plus teeth you could read by the gleam of. Gately hates him.

‘So I am here with you again in this room!’ The M.D. sings, kind of, when he talks. The name in gold piping on his white coat has a D and a K and a shitload of vowels. Gately almost had to reach up and swat this M.D. after surgery to keep him from hooking up a Demerol drip. That was between let’s say four and eight days ago. It’s probably But for the Grace that his Crocodilian sponsor Ferocious Francis G.’s sitting here watching blandly when the Pakistani M.D. sweeps in this time.

Plus they all have this flourishy M.D. way of sweeping Gately’s chart up off their hip and holding it up to read it. The Pakistani purses his lips and puffs them out absently and sucks off his pen a little.

‘Grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation. The pain of the trauma is very much worse today, yes?’ the M.D. says to the chart. He looks up, the teeth emerge. ‘Synovial inflammation: nasty nasty. The pain of synovial inflammation is compared in the medical literature to renal calculus and ec-topic labor.’ Partly it’s the darkness of the classic face around them that makes the teeth seem so high-watt. The smile widens steadily without seeming to run out of new teeth to expose. ‘And so you are now ready to let us provide the level of analgesia the trauma warrants instead of Toradol, simple headache ibuprofen, which these medications are boys doing a large man’s duty here, yes? There has been reconsidering in light of the level? Yes?’

Gately is inscribing an enormous vowel in the notebook with incredible care.

‘I make you aware of synthetic anipyretic analgesics which are no higher than Category C–III[354] for dependence.’ Gately imagines the M.D. smiling incandescently as he wields a shepherd’s crook. The guy has that odd clipped singsong way of talking of skinny guys in loincloths on mountains in films. Gately superimposes a big skull and crossbones over the glossy face, mentally. He holds up a palsied page-high A and brandishes it at the M.D. and then brings the notebook back down and swiftly up again, spells it out, figuring Ferocious Francis will step in and set this ad-man for the Disease straight once and for all, so Gately’ll never have to face this kind of Pakistani temptation again with maybe nobody supportive here next time. C–III his ass. Fucking Talwin’s C–III, too.