Infinite jest - David Wallace

Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de roll-ent[37]on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe’s well-known ‘Bröckengespensf phenomenon[38] enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels’ rubber rims; and his head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.

He appeared to remain concentrated on his huge shadow-play as gravel and then also breath sounded from the steep hillside back above him, grit and dirty stones cascading onto the outcropping and gushing past his chair and off the front lip, and then the unmistakable yelp of an individual’s impact with a cactus somewhere up behind. But Marathe, he had all the time without turning watched the other man’s clumsy sliding descent’s own mammoth shadow, cast as far east as the Rincon range just past the city Tucson, and could see the shadow rush in west toward his own as Unspecified Services’ M. Hugh Steeply descended, falling twice and cursing in U.S.A. English, until the shadow collapsed nearly into Marathe’s monstrous own. Another yelp took place as the Unspecified Services field-operative’s fall and slide the last several meters carried him upon his bottom down onto the outcropping and then nearly all the way out and off it, Marathe having to release the machine pistol under his blanket to grab Steeply’s bare arm and halt this sliding. Steeply’s skirt was pulled obscenely up and his hosiery full of runs and stubs of thorns. The operative sat at Marathe’s feet, glowing redly in the backlight, legs hanging over the shelf’s edge, breathing with difficulty.

Marathe smiled and released the operative’s arm. ‘Stealth becomes you,’ he said.

‘Go shit in your chapeau,’ Steeply wheezed, bring up his legs to survey the hosiery’s damage.

They spoke for the most part U.S.A. English when they met like this, covertly, in the field. M. Fortier[39] had wished Marathe to require that they interface always in Québecois French, as for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of the Office of Unspecified Services, which the Québecois Sepératiste Left referred to always as B.S.S., the ‘Bureau des Services sans Spécificité.’

Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert’s floor as Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on heels. The two men sent together a strange Bröckengespenst-shndow out toward the city Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply’s wig becoming uncombed in his descent. Steeply’s gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky. The matte curtain of sunset’s true dusk-shadow was moving itself very slowly in across the Rin-cons and Sonora desert east of the city Tucson, still many km. from obscuring their own large shadow.

But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this — betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S.[40] — once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply’s preference.

In fact, Steeply’s Québecois was better than Marathe’s English, but c’était la guerre, as one says.

Marathe sniffed slightly. ‘Thus, so, we now are both here.’ He wore a windbreaker and did not perspire.

Steeply’s eyes were luridly made up. The rear area of his dress was dirty. Some of his makeup had started to run. He was forming a type of salute to shade his eyes and looking upward behind them at what remained of the explosive and trembling sun. ‘How in God’s name did you get up here?’

Marathe slowly shrugged. As usual, he appeared to Steeply as if he were half-asleep. He ignored the question and said only, shrugging, ‘My time is finite.’

Steeply had also with him a woman’s handbag or purse. ‘And the wife?’ he said, gazing upward as yet. ‘How’s the wife doing?’

‘Holding her own weight, thank you,’ Marathe said. His tone of his voice betrayed nothing. ‘And so thus what is it your Offices believe they wish to know?’

Steeply tottered on a leg as he removed one shoe and poured from it grit.

‘Nothing terribly surprising. A bit of razzle-dazzle up northeast in your so-called Ops-area, certainly you heard.’

Marathe sniffed. A large odor of inexpensive and high-alcohol perfume came not from Steeply’s person but from his handbag, which failed to complement his shoes. Marathe said, ‘Dazzle?’

‘As in a civilian-type individual receives a certain item. Don’t tell me this is news to you guys. Not on InterLace pulse, this item. Arrives via normal physical mail. We’re sure you heard, Rémy. A cartridge-copy of a certain let’s call it between ourselves “the Entertainment.” As in in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.’

‘From somewhere blue?’

The B.S.S. operative had perspired also through his rouge, and his mascara had melted to become whorish. ‘A person with no political value to anybody except that the Saudi Ministry of Entertainment made one the hell of a shrill stink.’

‘The medical attache, the specialist of digesting, you refer to.’ Marathe shrugged again in that maddening Francophone way that can mean several things. ‘Your offices wish to ask was the Entertainment’s cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?’

‘Don’t let’s waste your finite time, ami old friend,’ Steeply said. ‘The mischief happens to occur in metropolitan Boston. Postal codes route the package through the desert Southwest, and we know your dissemination-scheme’s routing mechanism is proposed for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here.’ Steeply had worked hard at feminizing his expressions and gesturing. ‘It would be a bit starry-eyed of O.U.S. not to think of your distinguished cell, no?’

Beneath Marathe’s windbreaker was a sportshirt whose breast pocket was filled with many pens. He said: ‘Us, we don’t have the information on even casualties. From this blue dazzle you speak of.’

Steeply was trying to extract something stubborn from inside his other shoe. ‘Upwards of twenty, Rémy. Out of commission altogether. The attache and his wife, the wife a Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with embassy cards. Couple neighbors or something. The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going in before they killed the power.’

‘Local police forces. Gendarmes.’

‘The local constabulary.’

‘The minions of the law of the land.’

‘The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this.’ Steeply even removed and replaced his pumps in the upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other-foot-up-behind-his-bottom way of a feminine U.S.A. woman. But he appeared huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair. He said, ‘The attaché had diplomatic status, Rémy. Mideast. Saudi. Said to be close to minor members of the royal family.’

Marathe sniffed hard, as if congested of the nose. ‘A puzzling,’ he said.

‘But also a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab emigres. Visa lists a residence in Montreal.’

‘And Services Without Specificity wishes maybe to ask were there below-the-surface connections that make the individual not such a civilian, unconnected. To ask of us would the A.F.R. wish to make of him the example.’

Steeply was removing dirt from his bottom, swatting himself on the bottom. He stood more or less directly over Marathe. Marathe sniffed. ‘We have neither digestive medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action. You have personally seen A.F.R.’s initial lists. Nor in particular Montreal civilians. We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.’

Steeply was looking out over the desert and city, also, as he swatted at himself. He seemed to have noticed the gespenst-phenomenon of his own shadow. Marathe for some reason pretended again to sniff the nose. The wind was moderate and constant and of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low. It made the shrill whistling sounds. Also sounds of the blowing grit. Weeds-of-tumbling like enormous hairballs rolled often across the Interstate Highway of I-10 far below. Their specular perspective, the reddening light on vast tan stone and the oncoming curtain of dusk, the further elongation of their monstrous agnate shadows: all was almost mesmerizing. Neither man seemed able to look at anything but the vista below. Marathe could simultaneously speak in English and think in French. The desert was the tawny color of the hide of the lion. Their speaking without looking at one another, facing both the same direction — this gave their conversing an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple. Marathe thought this as he opened and closed his upheld hand, making over the city Tucson a huge and black blossom open itself and close itself.

And Steeply raised his bare arms and held them out and crossed them, maybe as if signalling for distant aid; this made X’s and pedentive V’s over much in the city Tucson. ‘Still, Rémy, but born in the hated-by-you Ottawa, this civilian attache, and connected to a major buyer of trans-grid entertainment. And follow-up out of the Boston offices reports possible indications of the victim’s prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first place. The samizdat.’

‘Prior?’

Steeply produced from his handbag Belgian cigarettes of a many-mm. and habitually female type. ‘Film director’s wife’d taught out at Brandeis where the victim’d done his residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies’ background checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse.’ With the slight pause of which Steeply could excel: ‘Particularly a Canadian pulse.’

‘Involvement of sexuality is what you are meaning, then, not politics.’

Steeply said, ‘This wife herself a Québecer, Rémy, from L’Islet county — Chief Tine says three years spent on Ottawa’s “Personnes Qui On Doit” list. There’s such a thing as political sex.’

‘I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are not our desire. This is known by you.’ Marathe’s eyes looked nearly closed. ‘And your tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you. Services Without Specificity, they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently.’

Steeply looked down at himself. One of the false breasts (surely false: surely they would not go as far as the hormonal, Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. ‘I was asked to secure personal verification, is all,’ he said. ‘My general sense at the Office is the brass consider the whole incident a stumper. There’re theories and countertheories. There are even antitheories positing error, mistaken identity, sick hoax.’ His shrugging, with his hands on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic. ‘Still: twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that’d be some hoax, no?’

Marathe sniffed. ‘Asked to verify by our mutual M. Tine? How you call him: “Rod, a God”?’

(Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and whose stenographer had long doubled as the steno-grapher-cum-jeune-fille-de-Vendredi of M. DuPlessis, former asst. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose passionate, ill-disguised attachment (Tine’s) to this double-amaneunsis — one Mile. Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L’Islet, Quebec — gave rise to these questions of the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he ‘doubled’[41] for Quebec out of the love for Luria or ‘tripled’ the loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it was said.)

‘The, Rémy.’ It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts’ directions without pulling down severely his décolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag sunglasses and put on the sunglasses. They were embellished with rhinestones and looked absurd. ‘Rod the God.’

Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several matches to light a cigarette in the wind. The encroachment of true dusk began to erase his wig’s chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills east of the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter for the flame.

It’s a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremíc-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters’ whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable — it’s that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

All these territories are now property of Canada.

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegetablish if in the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own. If American, north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border metropolis — Rome NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered points between them at which the giant protective ATHSCME fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.