Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘I gather now the Dad’s trying to restructure the original deal all of a sudden.’

Pemulis undid his belt. ‘The dangled carrot’s snatched away, the brass ring plays hard to get, to coin a maxim.’

‘Something about Disney World, before the wa-wa started.’

Pemulis removed his nonplay sneakers by scraping downward at one heel with the other sneaker’s toe, looking down into the tender little whorl in the center of Possalth-waite’s hair. He’d never be so ephebic as to verbally ask Freer if he had plans to suit up so they could get out there; he’d never let Freer think he was renting Freer space in his head before the match started. ‘Postman, is this because of the Eschaton incident? Is it because of the nose? Because I can get on the horn and tell old Postal Weight Sr. they’re blaming nobody under 17, it turns out, you should tell him, Todder. There’s whole land-barges of shit, but none of it’s spraying in you guys’s direction, you should take comfort.’

‘Nothing’s true,” Possalthwaite keened, not looking up, muffled, ílat-nippled, fatless in the young gut, feet spectral below his legs’ brown, rocking, shaking his head, looking terribly young and innocently vulnerable, sort of pre-moral. Little white strips of bandage protuded from his palms’ outer edges, from I.-Day’s apocalypse.

‘Well, not much is fair, anyway,’ Pemulis conceded. The Viking made a noise at himself.

Pemulis calls Postal Weight’s father up on-screen. Minneapolis-area developer. Malls, corporate parks, bustling places at the edges of roaring beltways. Late forties, slim, an overmanaged tan, a little oversharp in the dress dept., with a motivational-seminar-type hard-sell charm. A dagger of a Dad, with a pencil mustache and blinding shoe-leather. He tried to conjure an image of this paternal figure hitting Keith Freer on the noggin with a rolling pin and a bald cartoon lump rising from Freer’s skull. (Pemulis calculates a win or even three-setter w/ Freer would mean a place on the WhataBurger plane, is why he’s willing to violate a kind of personal honor-code and take pre-match Tenuate, which even with the 36-hour-elimination curve is kind of cavalier, given that he and Inc’d escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that he’d tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John Wayne, and Avril is kind of a coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-be-fucked-with administrative figure, and along with C. [‘Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Cow’] Tavis isn’t exactly a fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation incident. The ‘drines didn’t seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of stomachless competitive verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a kind of enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he’s facing into a warm wind.) Pemulis had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T-shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms.

‘Nothing’s fair because nothing’s true,’ Possalthwaite wept into his palms. His little flannel shoulders shook.

Something old in one of the shower drains sighed and gurgled, a nauseous sound.

‘Buck up.’ Pemulis was removing all necessary match-articles and refolding them and placing them in his noncomplimentary Dunlop gear-bag with military precision. He put a foot on the bench and looked briefly to either side. ‘Because if that’s your burr then rest in my assurance, Postalcode: certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true.’

Freer had made a pincer of his fingers and was at the other cheek. ‘Let him cry. Let baby have his dinkle. Piss and moan. Thirteen for Christ’s sake. A kid thirteen hasn’t even been in the same room with real disappointment yet. Hasn’t even locked eyes across a room with real disillusion and and frustration and pain. Thirteen: pain’s a rumor. What’s the word. Angst. Baby wouldn’t know genuine-article angst if it walked up and got him in a headlock.’

‘Not like real true real possible-little-cheek-pimple angst, Vike, hey?’

‘Flip it over and squat, Pemulis,’ without bothering to look. Both Pemulis and Freer had pronounced a hard g in angst, Hal would have observed. The Viking contorted his mouth and raised his big chin to check the flesh of his jaw, turning slightly to use the side-mirrors as well.

Pemulis smiled broadly, trying to envision Keith Freer sitting in a canvas restraint-wrap in full lotus, staring blankly, hitting all the high notes in ‘No Business Like Show Business’ as orderlies in boiled whites and prim nurses in bent hats stand around snapping their fingers, clean white cheap institutional-care sneakers tapping noiselessly through all eternity. He was down to chinos and bare light-brown feet. He considered a blue T-shirt with a black wolf-spider on it v. a coincidentally red-on-gray T-shirt that had ‘Vodka is the Enemy of Production’ in presumably Russian. His good four Dunlop sticks were stacked on the bench to Possalthwaite’s left. He picked up two and tested the strings’ tension by hitting the side of one stick’s head against the the strung face of the other and listening to the strings and then switching sticks and repeating the process. The exact right tension has a certain pitch. Midsized Dunlop Enqvist TL Composites. $304.95 U.S. retail. Real catgut strings have a kind of a dentalish sweet stink. The dot-and-circumflex logo. He didn’t much look at Possalthwaite. He chose the Cyrillic shirt with the bottle-glyph. He rolled it up and put his head through the head-hole first, his late great Da’s old-fashioned way. The upscaler kids here all did the arm-holes first. Then they did the head. You can also tell the scholarship kids because for some reason they put on a sock and a shoe and then a sock and a shoe. See for instance Wayne, who’d been in their room right after lunch when Pemulis had made the decision to come up for some pre-match Tenuate. Wayne’s room was right nearby and he was standing there over Troeltsch’s pharmacopic bedside table with no shirt and wet hair, rheumy-eyed and shiny-nostriled from moisturizer on his Kleenex-chafed nostrils. The Viking was squeezing a damp tennis ball with his left hand while he scanned his forehead by mostly feel. Pemulis’s psychic counter-strategy was not to appear in any hurry to dress and stretch and get out there either. Pemulis — who feared and hated unauthorized people being in his room, and who was constantly on Schacht’s back about forgetting to lock up when he left, and who wasn’t intimidated by Wayne’s talent and success and affectless reserve, but was cautious around him, John Wayne, sort of the way a formidable predator will be unintimidated but cautious around another formidable predator, particularly since the virtuosic but tense performance in a certain administrative office a week ago, which had been mentioned by neither man — had coolly asked Wayne if he could help him, and Wayne had just as coolly not looked up from rattling through sickly Jim Troeltsch’s bedside table’s stuff and said he’d come in for some of Troeltsch’s Seldane6, which Pemulis had indeed heard Troeltsch at breakfast describing to a nose-blowing Wayne as the battlefield-nuke of anti-histamines that didn’t make you too drowsy to function at an incredibly high level of function. Pemulis adjusted his jock’s rear straps, trying to remember this Wayne-memory’s point. Wayne had wanted a clear head and high pulmonary function because he was down to play the Syrian Satelliter in an informal exhibition at I5l5h. Wayne hadn’t offered this explanation; Pemulis got it off the e-board. One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne’s unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn’t impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis’s hand in the Olde-English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TPs’ communal e-board for 11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times. The point was that the half-dressed Wayne had been standing there with one foot bare and one in a sock and shoe. Pemulis shook his head slightly and looked down at Possalthwaite and tried to gather spit.

The speaker out up by the clock in the cement hall by the sauna crackled to life for the start of weekly WETA, with its glass-shattering Joan Sutherland theme. Pemulis put his street-sneakers on his street-shoe shelf. ‘Buck up, T.P. It’s just an angst-spasm. You’re just reeling from a temporary paternal kertwang. Philosophical truth’s jutting out all over the place. Disney World or no. Nose or no. Eschaton lives on, believe me. Underground or no. You have a calling, a talent. A missileman of your caliber. Reach down and rally, me little button.’

Possalthwaite had taken his face from his hands and was staring stonily up somewhere past Pemulis, lips moving in the habitual sucking reflex for which he took so much guff. His face had the pink scrubbed look of a crying child all right. His hands had left brown spiders of tincture of benzoin on his cheeks. He had two little smudges of bruise under the eyes. He sniffed meatily through a nose still covered in horizontal strips of surgical tape. ‘I ab dot a little button.’

‘That’s what all the little buttons say, kid,’ the Viking said levelly, removing something from a nostril with tweezers. Pemulis’s sinuses felt like four-laners and his sense of smell was a lot keener than a man in a locker room might wish. Freer’s locker next to Gloeckner’s next to good old Inc’s was agape, the bolted colposcope gleaming in the overhead lights and his Fox large-head sticks a nauseous West-Coast fluorescent orange with the trademark fox-glyph painted on the strings.

Possalthwaite scratched at one foot with the nails of the other foot. ‘If you can’t trust your folks…’

‘Let me both validate and remind you that the kertwang you’re reeling under is emotion-based and not fact-based.’

Possalthwaite opened his mouth.

‘You’re getting ready to say if you can’t trust the ostensively loving patriarchal bosom you can’t trust anyone at all, and if you can’t trust people what can you trust, in terms of unvarying dependability, Postal Weight, am I right?’

‘Oh Jesus H. Christmastree here it comes,’ the Viking said to his forehead’s reflection.

Pemulis was putting on a sock and a shoe, his mouth right down by Postal Weight’s ear. ‘This is not a bullshit problem. This is a like serious emotiono-philosophical deal you’re confronting. I think it’s a good sign you’re coming to me instead of holding it all impactedly inside.’

‘Who’s coming to you?’ Freer turned the big face this way and that. ‘He was already in here having his little wa-wa-dinkle.’

Pemulis tried envisioning Keith Freer being bent over the net by Bedouins in purple turbans and roundly buggered, making the sort of sounds Leith’s historical b/w J. Gleason made when in pain. To Possalthwaite he was saying ‘Cause I can remember staring down the exact same-type thing, though from a more like philosophicalized kertwang than emotions.’

Freer said ‘Do not ask him what he means, kid.’

Then a couple of 16s came in, G. (‘Yardguard’) Rader and a marginal Slavic kid whose first name was Zoltan and whose last name nobody could pronounce, and ignored Freer’s advice to run for their lives because the good Dr. Pemulis had been prescribing for himself again and was going to begin to rant, and threw down their gear and proceeded immediately to get fresh towels from the dispenser over by the showers and to snap them at each other.

‘What do you mean?’ said Possalthwaite.

‘The snare closes, the trap closes, here it comes.’

Rader rolled his wrists and spiraled the towel for what he called maximum painage. The Viking turned and said if he felt so much as a terrycloth breeze on this personal ass right here they were toast, the two. Pemulis was taking racquets out. E.T.A.’s male 16s were as a group inbent, conspiratorial, glandular, cliqueish. They excluded anyone not in their set. They had techniques and strategems of exclusion way more advanced than the 18s or 14s. (They tended to exclude Stice, mostly because he roomed with Coyle and drilled a lot of the time up with the 18s, and mixed with them, and more recently Kornspan, excluded, basically because he was cretinous and cruel and now consensually suspected of having tortured and killed the two collarless cats whose burnt corpses had been found on the hillside during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks back.) They had their own dialect and codes, in-jokes inside in-jokes.f And at E.T.A. only 16s snapped towels, and only for a year or two, but they went at it with a vengeance, towel-snapping, a brief flared genuflection to jock-stereotype, a stage where there’s this primate-like passion for red-assed bonding in steamy rooms. They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange.

Then 18’s-B/C fence-sitter Duncan van Slack, the kid who carried a guitar around with himself everyplace but never played it, and refused all late-night-sitting-around-someone’s-room requests to play, and who was suspected of not being able to play the thing at all, and whose own Da was supposedly a redoubted gene-sequencer in Savannah, poked his head and guitar’s neck in the door and said to come quick and then withdrew his head before anybody could ask what was up.

‘If you didn’t have such a way with a launch-vector I wouldn’t be sure you’re ready to hear this, Postalscale.’

‘It occurs to me this is your boring man’s true talent: the talent for ensnaring,’ says the Viking. ‘Flee while you can, kid.’

Possalthwaite blew his nose in the crook of his elbow and left it there.

Pemulis, who still used genuine catgut strings, zipped the two sticks he’d chosen into their Dunlop covers. He put an arch-support shoe up on the bench by Postalweight’s bottom, looking quickly right and left:

‘Todder, you can trust math.’

Freer said ‘You heard it here first.’

Pemulis compulsively zipped and unzipped one of the covers. ‘Take a breather, Keith. Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all else fails. When the boulder’s slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven’s theme song. The nightlight on life’s dark wall, late at night. Heaven’s recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane, ammonia, H2O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it’s true.’

‘This from a man on academic probation for who knows the length.’

Something involving Freer and a saline-moistened cattle-prod refused to quite mentally gel. There was still none of Tenuate’s stomachless verve or well-being, just a glittered hum in his head and sinuses that felt like wind-tunnels. Pemulis tended to be a mouth-breather. The Viking raised one leg to fart toward Pemulis in a vaudevillian way, getting a laugh from Csikszentmihalyi and Rader, who’d mostly undressed and taken seats on the bench opposite Pemulis and Postal Weight, towels hung unwinding in their hands, watching, and were only every once in a while and in a halfhearted way pretending to look like they were getting ready to snap each other.