Infinite jest - David Wallace

It strikes Schacht as odd that Pemulis makes such a big deal of stopping all substances the day before competitive play but never connects the neurasthenic stomach to any kind of withdrawal or dependence. He’d never say this to Pemulis unless Pemulis asked him directly, but Schacht suspects Pemulis is physically ‘drine-dependent, Preludin or Tenuate or something. It’s not his business.

Schacht’s supposedly French-Canadian guy is as broad as Schacht but shorter, his face dark and with a kind of Eskimoid structure to it, at eighteen his hairline recessed in the sort of way where you just know the kid’s already got hair on his back, and he warms up with crazy spins, moony top off a western forehand and weird inside-out shit off a one-hand back, his knees dipping oddly whenever he makes contact and his follow-through full of the dancerly flourishes that characterize a case of nerves. A nervous spin-artist can be eaten more or less for lunch, if you hit as hard as Schacht does, and what Pemulis said is true: the guy’s backhand is always sliced and lands shallow. Schacht looks over at Pemulis’s guy, a grunter with a moody profile and the storky look of recent puberty. Pemulis is looking oddly sanguine and confident after a couple minutes futzing with the cans of water, rinsing out the oral cavity and so on. Pemulis is maybe going to win, too, despite himself. Schacht figures he can run in and get one of the twelve-year-olds he Big Buddies to go back into the passage and empty Pemulis’s bucket on the sly before anybody coming off court sees it. Evidence of nervous incapacity of any kind gets noted and logged, at E.T.A., and Schacht’s observed Pemulis having some kind of vested emotional interest in attending the WhataBurger Inv. over Thanksgiving. He thought Mario’s lurking around in the cold passage scratching his poor big head over technical lighting problems was kind of funny. There will be no Lungs or tarps or dim passages at the WhataBurger: the Tucson tournament is outside, and Tucson cruised around 40 °C even in November, and the sun there was a retinal horror-show on overheads and serves.

Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them, it seems to Pemulis that Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism; and Schacht doesn’t even have to worry about obsessive training like Inc or Stice or get sick so often from the physical stress of constant ‘drines like Troeltsch or suffer from thinly disguised psychological fallout like Inc or Struck or Pemulis himself. The way Pemulis and Troeltsch and Struck and Axford ingest substances and recover from substances and have a whole jargony argot based around various substances gives Schacht the creeps, a bit, but since the knee injury broke and remade him at sixteen he’s learned to go his own interior way and let others go theirs. Like most very large men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller — which is a big reason he can sometimes forget to finish his portion of a given substance, so interested does he become in the way he’s already started to feel. He’s one of these people who don’t need much, much less much more.

Schacht and his opponent warm up their groundstrokes with the fluid economy of years of warming up groundstrokes. They take turns feeding each other some volleys at net and then each take a ‘couple up,’ lobs, hitting loose easy overheads, slowly adjusting the idle from half-speed to three-quarter-speed. The knee feels fundamentally all right, springy. Slow indoor composite surfaces do not like Schacht’s hard flat game, but they are kind to the knee, which after some days outside on hard cement swells to about the size of a volleyball. Schacht feels blandly happy down here on 9, playing in private, way down past the gallery’s panel. There is a nourishing sense of pregnable space in a big indoor club that you never get playing outside, especially playing outside in the cold, when the balls feel hard and sullen and come off the stick’s strung face with an echoless ping. Here everything cracks and booms, the grunts and shoe-squeaks and booming pocks of impact and curses unfolding across the white-on-green plane and echoing off each tarp. Soon they’ll all go inside for the winter. Schtitt will yield and let them inflate the E.T.A. Lung over the sixteen Center Courts; it’s like a barn-raising, inflation-day; it’s communal and fun, and they’ll take down the central fences and outdoor night-lamps and unbolt all the posts into sections and stack them and store them, and the TesTar and ATHSCME guys will come up in vans smoking cigarettes and squinting with weary expertise at tubes of plans in draftsman-blue, and there’ll be one and sometimes two ATHSCME helicopters w/ slings and grappling hooks for the Lung’s dome and nacelle; and Schtitt and deLint will let the younger E.T.A.s get the infrared indoor heaters out of the same corrugated shed the disassembled fences and lamps will go in, leaf-cutter-ant- or Korean-like armies of 14- and 16-year-olds carrying sections and heaters and Gore-Tex swatches and long halo-lithiated bulbs while the 18s get to sit on canvas chairs and kibitz because they did their leaf-cutter Lung-raising bits at 13–16 already. Two TesTar guys’ll supervise Otis P. Lord and all this year’s conspicuous tech-wonks in mounting the heaters and stringing the lights and running coaxial shunts with ceramic jacks between the Pump Room’s main breaker and the Sunstrand grid and booting up the circulation-fans and pneumatic hoists that’ll raise the Lung to the inflated shape of a distended igloo, sixteen courts in four rows of four, enclosed and warmed by nothing but fibrous Gore-Tex and AC current and an enormous ATHSCME Exhaust-Flow Effectuator that an ATHSCME crew in one of the ATHSCME helicopters will bring in in a sling and cable and mount and secure on the Lung’s nipply nacelle at the top of the inflating dome. And that first night after Inflation, traditionally the fourth Monday of November, all the upperclass 18s so inclined will crank up the infrareds and get high and eat low-lipid microwave pizza and play all night, sweating magnificently, sheltered for the winter atop Enfield’s levelheaded hill.

Schacht stands back in the deuce court and lets his guy warm up his serves, oddly flat and low-margin for a nervous touch-artist. Schacht bloops each return up with severe backspin so the balls’ll roll back to him and he can serve them back to his guy, also warming up. The warm-up routine has become automatic and requires no attention. Way up on #l, Schacht sees John Wayne just plaster a backhand cross-court. Wayne hits it so hard a little mushroom cloud of green fuzz hangs in the air where ball had met strings. Their cards were too far to read in the sour-apple light, but you could tell by the way Port Washington’s best boy walked back to the baseline to take the next serve that his ass had already been presented to him. In a lot of junior matches everything past the fourth game or so is kind of a formality. Both players tend to know the overall score by then. The big picture. They’ll have decided who’s going to lose. Competitive tennis is largely mental, once you’re at a certain plateau of skill and conditioning. Schtitt’d say spiritual instead of mental, but as far as Schacht can see it’s the same thing. As Schacht sees it, Schtitt’s philosophical stance is that to win enough of the time to be considered successful you have to both care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all.[89] Schacht does not care enough, probably, anymore, and has met his gradual displacement from E.T.A.’s A singles squad with an equanimity some E.T.A.’s thought was spiritual and others regarded as the surest sign of dicklessness and burnout. Only one or two people have ever used the word brave in connection with Schacht’s radical reconfiguration after the things with the Crohn’s Disease and knee. Hal Incandenza, who’s probably as asymetrically hobbled on the care-too-much side as Schacht is on the not-enough, privately puts Schacht’s laissez-faire down to some interior decline, some doom-gray surrender of his childhood’s promise to adult gray mediocrity, and fears it; but since Schacht is an old friend and a dependable designated driver and has actually gotten pleasanter to be around since the knee — which Hal prays fervently that the ankle won’t start being the size of a volleyball itself at the end of each outdoor day — Hal in a weird and deeper internal way almost somehow admires and envies the fact that Schacht’s stoically committed himself to the oral professions and stopped dreaming of getting to the Show after graduation — an air of something other than failure about Schacht’s not caring enough, something you can’t quite define, the way you can’t quite remember a word that you know you know, inside — Hal can’t quite feel the contempt for Teddy Schacht’s competitive slide that would be a pretty much natural contempt in one who cared so dreadfully secretly much, and so the two of them tend to settle for not talking about it, just as Schacht cheerfully wordlessly drives the tow truck on occasions when the rest of the crew are so incapacitated they’d have to hold one eye closed even to see an undoubled road, and consents w/o protest to pay retail for clean quarterly urine, and doesn’t say a word about Hal’s devolution from occasional tourist to subterranean compulsive, substance-wise, with his Pump Room visits and Visine, even though Schacht deep down believes that the substance-compulsion’s strange apparent contribution to Hal’s erumpent explosion up the rankings has got to be a temporary thing, that there’s like a psychic credit-card bill for Hal in the mail, somewhere, coming, and is sad for him in advance about whatever’s surely got to give, eventually. Though it won’t be the Boards. Hal’ll murder his Boards, and Schacht may well be among those jockeying to sit near him, he’d be the first to admit. On 2 Hal now kicks a second serve to the ad court with so much left-handed top on it that it almost kicks up over Port Washington’s #2 guy’s head. It’s clearly carnage up there on Show Courts 1 and 2. Dr. Tavis will be irrepressible. The gallery is barely even applauding Wayne and Incandenza anymore; at a certain point it becomes like Romans applauding lions. All the coaches and staff and P.W.T.A. parents and civilians in the overhead gallery wear tennis outfits, the high white socks and tucked-in shirts of people who do not really play.

Schacht and his man play.

Both Pat Montesian and Gately’s AA sponsor like to remind Gately how this new resident Geoffrey Day could end up being an invaluable teacher of patience and tolerance for him, Gately, as Ennet House Staff.

‘So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by cliches,’ is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was, again, at 0825. ‘To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.’

Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlepointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch that just came from Goodwill, purses her lips. ‘You need to ask for some gratitude.’

‘Oh no but the point is I’ve already been fortunate enough to receive gratitude.’ Day crosses one leg over the other in a way that inclines his whole little soft body toward her. ‘For which, believe you me, I’m grateful. I cultivate gratitude. That’s part of the system of cliches I’m here to live by. An attitude of gratitude. A grateful drunk will never drink. I know the actual cliche is “A grateful heart will never drink,” but since organs can’t properly be said to imbibe and I’m still afflicted with just enough self-will to decline to live by utter non sequiturs, as opposed to just good old cliches, I’m taking the liberty of light amendment.’ He gives with this a look like butter wouldn’t melt. ‘Albeit grateful amendment, of course.’

Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still. Gately reminds himself that he too is probably mostly still clueless, still, even after all these hundreds of days. ‘I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know’ is another of the slogans that looks so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drops off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily A.M. meditation he always tries to remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie-slice of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what’s true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of what they’re trying to do.

‘I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in the room. Gratitude-Ups, you could call them. Ask Randy over there if I don’t do them like clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.’

‘Well’it’s true is all,’ Treat sniffs. ‘About gratitude.’

Everybody else except Gately, lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring this exchange, watching an old InterLace cartridge whose tracking is a little messed up so that staticky stripes eat at the screen’s picture’s bottom and top. Day is not done talking. Pat M. encourages newer Staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon to death as valuable teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, restraint.

Day is not done talking. ‘One of the exercises is being grateful that life is so much easier now. I used sometimes to think. I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn’t. Now I live by the dictates of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader’s Digest or Saturday Evening Post. Easy does it. Remember to remember. But for the grace of capital-g God. Turn it over. Terse, hard-boiled. Monosyllabic. Good old Norman Rockwell-Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these cliches. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliche-pool? “No inflection necessary”? Too many syllables, probably.’

Randy Lenz says ‘I ain’t got time for this shit.’

Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is trying to look primmer and primmer. She looks again over to Gately, lying on his back, taking up the living room’s whole other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa’s square frayed fabric arm-thing, his eyes almost closed. Only Staff get to lie on the couches.

‘Denial,’ Charlotte finally says, ‘is not a river in Egypt.’ ‘Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,’ says Emil Minty. Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet House six days. He came from Roxbury’s infamous Dimock Detox, where he was the only white person, which Gately bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a squished blank smeared flat face, one requiring like great self-effort to like, and eyes that are just starting to lose the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Day is a newcomer and a wreck. A red-wine-and-Quaalude man who finally nodded out in late October and put his Saab through the window of a Maiden sporting goods store and then got out and proceeded to browse until the Finest came and got him. Who taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some jr. college up the Expressway in Medford and came in saying on his Intake he also manned the helm of a Scholarly Quarterly. Word for word, the House Manager had said: ‘manned the helm’’ and ‘Scholarly.’ His Intake estimated that Day’s been in and out of a blackout for most of the last several years, and his wiring is still as they say a bit frayed. His detox at Dimock, where they barely have the resources to give you a Librium if you start to D.T., must have been just real grim, because Geoffrey D. alleges it never happened: now his story is he just strolled into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home 10+ clicks away in Maiden and found the place too hilariously egregulous to want to ever leave. It’s the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Gene M. They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.[90] Day wears chinos of indeterminate hue, brown socks with black shoes, and shirts that Pat Montesian had described in the Intake as ‘Eastern-European-type Hawaiian shirts.’ Day’s now on the vinyl couch with Charlotte Treat after breakfast in the Ennet House living room with a few of the other residents that either aren’t working or don’t have to be at work early, and with Gately, who’d pulled an all-night Dream Duty shift out in the front office till 0400, then got temp-relieved by Johnette Foltz so he could go to work janitoring down at the Shattuck Shelter till 0700, then came and hauled ass back up here and took back over so’s that Johnette could go off to her NA thing with a bunch of NA people in what looked like a dune buggy if the dunes in question were in Hell, and is now, Gately, trying to unclench and center himself inside by tracing the cracks in the paint of the living room ceiling with his eyes. Gately often feels a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the A.M., still, even after this long clean. His sponsor over at the White Flag Group says some people never get over the loss of what they’d thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for acceptance and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab. The sponsor, Ferocious Francis G., doesn’t give Gately one iona of shit for feeling some negative feelings about it: on the contrary, he commends Gately for his candor in breaking down and crying like a baby and telling him about it early one A.M. over the pay phone, the sense of loss. It’s a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn’t need help if you didn’t miss it. You just have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask For Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of cliches — Day’s right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him then he’s a dead man for sure. Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say. But he’ll only get to say it if Day comes and asks. Personally, Gately gives Geoffrey D. like a month at the outside before he’s back tipping his hat to parking meters. Except who is Gately to judge who’ll end up getting the Gift of the program v. who won’t, he needs to remember. He tries to feel like Day is teaching him patience and tolerance. It takes great patience and tolerance not to want to punt the soft little guy out into the Comm. Ave. ravine and open up his bunk to somebody that really desperately wants it, the Gift. Except who is Gately to think he can know who wants it and who doesn’t, deep down. Gately’s arm is behind his head, up against the sofa’s other arm. The old D.E.C. viewer is on to something violent and color-enhanced Gately neither sees nor hears. It was part of his gifts as a burglar: he can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light. Even when he was a resident here he’d had this prescient housebreaker’s ability to screen input, to do sensory triage. It was one reason he’d even been able to stick out his nine residential months here with twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers, hoods, whores, fired execs, Avon ladies, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction workers, vagrants, indignant car salesmen, bulimic trauma-mamas, bunko artists, mincing pillow-biters, North End hard guys, pimply kids with electric noserings, denial-ridden housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and mokus and grieving and basically whacked out and producing nonstopping output 24-7-365.