Infinite jest - David Wallace

7 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

You can be at certain parties and not really be there. You can hear how certain parties have their own implied ends embedded in the choreography of the party itself. One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a party ends — even a bad party — that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind’s five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door. When everybody’s voices recede down the hall. When the hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter silence in the party’s wake.

Joelle, at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it, listening, is supported by a polished hardwood floor above both river and Bay’s edge, perched uncomfortably in striated light in one of Molly Notkin’s chairs molded in the likeness of great filmmakers from the celluloid canon, seated between empty Cukor and frightening Murnau in Méliès’s fiberglass lap, his trousers’ crease uncomfortable and his cummerbund M.I.T.-crested. The lurid chairs’ directors are larger than life: Joelle’s feet dangle well off the floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn under a damp thick cotton Brazilian skirt which is vivid, curled pale purples and fresh red against a Latin black that seems to glow above pale knees and white rayon kneesocks and feet in clogs that are hanging half off, legs swinging like a child’s, always feeling like a child in Molly’s chairs, conspicuously perched in the eye of a bad party’s somewhat forced-feeling storm of wit and good cheer, sitting by herself under what used to be her window, the daughter of a low-pH chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky, a lot of fun to be with, normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil.

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

There are decorative bars, slender and of black iron that pigeon droppings have made piebald, over the west windows to this third-floor cooperative apartment on the East Cambridge fringes of the Back Bay, where near-Professor Notkin is holding a party to celebrate passing her Orals in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory, the doctoral program where Joelle — before her retreat into broadcast sound — had met her.

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Notkin’s life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he’ll suffer the same order of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur. Molly still takes the high-speed rail down to visit him every couple weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance he happens to harden, prompting in him black waves of self-disgust and an extreme neediness for understanding and nonjudgmental love. She and poor Molly Notkin are just the same, Joelle reflects, seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine — sisters, sororal twins. With her fear of direct light, Notkin. And the disguises and whiskers are simply veiled veils. How many sub-rosa twins are there, out there, really? What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it’s not arousal that’s so finitely circumscribed? What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

Joelle is thinking about what she has in her purse. She sits alone in her linen veil and pretty skirt, obliquely looked at, listening to bits of conversation she reels in out of the overall voices’ noise but seeing no one really else, the absolute end of her life and beauty running in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm before her eyes, projected against the white screen on her side, for once, from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY, all the way up to today’s wet walk here from the Red Line’s Downtown stop, walking the whole way from East Charles St., employing a self-conscious and kind of formal stride, but undeniably pretty, the overall walk toward her last hour was, on this last day before the great O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence revel. East Charles to the Back Bay today is a route full of rained-on sienna-glazed streets and upscale businesses with awnings and wooden signs hung with cute Colonial script, and people looking at her like you look at the blind, naked gazes, not knowing she could see everything at all times. She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil’s damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine, holding the collar of her overcoat closed at her poncho’s neckline in a way that lets her hold the veil secure against her face with a finger on her chin, thinking always about what she has in her purse, stopping in at a discount tobacconist and buying a quality cigar in a glass tube and then a block later placing the cigar inside carefully in among the overflowing waste atop a corner receptacle of pine-green mesh, but keeps the tube, puts the glass tube in her purse, can hear the rain’s thup on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and can see droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound of cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis’ shining windshields. In every alley are green I.W.D. dumpsters and the smaller red I.W.D. dumpsters to take the overflow from the green dumpsters. And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against the receding staccato of brittle women’s high heels on brick westward as Charles St. now approaches Boston Common and becomes less quaint and upscale: sodden litter — flat the way only wet litter can be flat — appears on the sidewalk and in the curb’s seam, and now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, squatting to lift and sift through litter; and the rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters being sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and other people’s blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in each block’s three alleys, and the little cataract of rainwater off the edge of each dumpster’s red annex’s downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes’ tops with a rhythmless thappathappappathap; somebody going Pssssst from an alley’s lip, and ghastly-white or blotched faces declaiming to thin air from recessed doorways curtained by rain, and for an other-directed second Joelle wishes she’d hung on to the cigar, to give away, and moving westward into the territory of the Endless Stem near the end of Charles she starts to dispense change she is asked for from doorways and inverted up-tilted boxes; and she gets asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers. A sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins — a puffed red cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing.

She buys a.473-liter Pepsi Cola in a blunt plastic bottle at a Store 24 whose Jordanian clerk just looks at her blankly when she asks if they carry Big Red Soda Water, and settles for the Pepsi and comes out and pours the pop out down a storm-drain and watches it pool there foaming brownly and stay put because the drain’s grate is clogged solid with leaves and sodden litter. She walks on toward the Common with the empty bottle and glass tube in her purse. There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the Store 24.

Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director’s lap can call up everything from all times. What will be that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin’s bedroom or bath and get so high that she’s going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and forth. Boston Common is like a lush hole Boston’s built itself around, a two-k. square of shiny trees and dripping limbs and green benches over wet grass. Pigeons all over, the same sooty cream as the willows’ rinds. Three young black men perched like tough crows along a bench’s back approve her body and call her bitch with harmless affection and ask where’s the wedding at. No more deciding to stop at 2300h. and then barely getting through the hour’s show and hurtling back home at 0l30h. and smoking the Chore Boy’s resins and not stopping after all. No more throwing the Material away and then half an hour later rooting through the trash, no more all-fours scrutiny of the carpet in hopes of a piece of lint that looks enough like the Material to try to smoke. No more singeing the selvage of veils. The Common’s south edge is Boylston Street with its 24/7 commerce, upscale, cashmere scarves and cellular holsters, doormen with gold braid, jewelers with three names, women with valence-curtain bangs, stores disgorging shoppers with their wide white monogrammed twine-handle bags. The rain’s wet veil blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur things in imitation of a neonatal retina, everything recognizable and yet without outline. A blur that’s more deforming than fuzzy. No more clutching her heart on a nightly basis. What looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon’s meshes. The entrance says EXIT. There isn’t an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim’s own Cage III: Free Show. It is the cage that has entered her, somehow. The ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much. She’s lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole. There’s a certain smell to a rain-wet veil. Something about that caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not. She had hurtled on back home on the night’s final T and gone home and at least finally not turned her face away from the situation, the predicament that she didn’t love it anymore she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn’t stop or imagine stopping or living without it. She had in a way done as they’d made Jim do near the end and admitted powerlessness over this cage, this unfree show, weeping, literally clutching her heart, smoking first the Chore Boy-scrap she’d used to trap the vapors and form a smokable resin, then bits of the carpet and the acetate panties she’d filtered the solution through hours earlier, weeping and veílless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little room’s walls.

CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR

(1) Year of the Whopper

(2) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad

(3) Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar

(4) Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken

(5) Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster

(6) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)

(7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland

(8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

(9) Year of Glad[78]

Jim’s eldest, Orin — punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extraordinaire — had once shown Joelle van Dyne his childhood collection of husks of the Lemon Pledge that the school’s players used to keep the sun off. Different-sized legs and portions of legs, well-muscled arms, a battery of five-holed masks hung on nails from an upright fiberboard sheet. Not all the husks had names below them.

Boylston St. east means she passes again the black-bronze equestrian statue of Boston’s Colonel Shaw and the MA 54th, illuminated now by a patch of emergent sunlight, Shaw’s metal head and raised sword illicitly draped in a large Québecois fleur-de-lis flag with all four irises’ stems altered to red blades, so it’s absurdly now a red white and blue flag; three Boston cops on ladders with poles and shears; the Canadian militants come in the night, on the eve of Interdependence, thinking anyone cares whether they hang things from historic icons, hang anti-O.N.A.N. flags, as if anyone not paid to remove them cares one way or the other. The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything. And here too are E. Boylston’s dealers, sirens of the other, second cage, standing as always outside F.A.O. Schwartz, young little black boys, boys so black they’re blue, horrifically skinny and young, little more than living shadows in knit caps and knee-length sweatshirts and very white hightops, shifting and blowing into their cupped hands, alluding to the availability of a certain Material, just barely alluding is all, with their postures and bored blank important gaze. Certain salesmen have only to stand there. Certain types of sales: the customer comes to you; and Lo. The cops at the flag across the street don’t give them a look. Joelle hurries past the line of dealers, she tries to, her clogs loose and clocking, tarrying for just a moment at the end, just past the gauntlet’s end, still within two extended hands’ reach of the last bored dealer; for here on the street outside Schwartz is placed an odd adverting display, not a live salesman of any sort but rather a humanoid figure of something that’s better than cardboard, untouched by the vendors who don’t seem even to look, a display on an angled rear-mount stand like a photo-frame’s stand, 2-D, the figure a man in a wheelchair, in a coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile’s arc of the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his head hairless and plastic and cast back, his eyes on the blue harlequin-patches of the post-storm sky, looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the receptacle for the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge being advertised for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm; except there is only this display, this ecstatic figure and a cartridge no feral vendor’s removed, no mention of title, no blurbs or quoted references to critics’ thumbs, the case’s spine itself bare black slightly pebbled generic plastic, conspicuously unlabelled. Two Oriental women’s shopping bags catch and make her raincoat billow slightly as Joelle stands there briefly, feeling the lines’ dealers looking at her, assessing; and then someone calls something to one of the cops halfway up the statue, using his first name, which echoes slightly and breaks the spell; the little black boys look away. None of the passersby seem to notice the display she stands before, reflecting. It’s some kind of anti-ad. To direct attention at what is not said. Lead up to an inevitability you deny. Not new. But an expensive and affecting display. The film-cartridge itself would be a blank, too, or the case empty, worthless because it really can be removed all the way from the slot in the figure’s hand. Joelle removes it and looks at it and puts it back. She’s had her last fling with film cartridges. Jim had used her several times. Jim at the end had filmed her at prodigious and multilensed length, and refused to share what he’d made of it, and died w/o a note.[79] Her mental name for the man had been ‘Infinite Jim.’ The display cartridge shoves home with a click. One of the such young dealers calls her Mama and asks where’s the funeral at.