David Wallace - Infinite jest
And then its mouth opens at your light.
And then you wake like that, quivering like a struck drum, lying there awake and quivering, summoning courage and spit, roll to the right just as in the dream for the nametagged flashlight on the floor by the bed just in case, lie there on your shank and side, shining the light all over, just as in the dream. Lie there panning, looking, all ribs and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty clothes, blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny in the windows’ snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in the floor, awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated, playing beam over floor again and again, not sure all night forever unsure you’re not missing something that’s right there: you lie there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.
AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The Enfield Tennis Academy has been in accredited operation for three pre-Subsidized years and then eight Subsidized years, first under the direction of Dr. James Incandenza and then under the administration of his half-brother-in-law Charles Tavis, Ed.D. James Orin Incandenza — the only child of a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then promising young pre-Method actor who, during the interval of J. O. Incandenza’s early formative years, had become a disrespected and largely unemployable actor, driven back to his native Tucson AZ and dividing his remaining energies between stints as a tennis pro at ranch-type resorts and then short-run productions at something called the Desert Beat Theater Project, the father, a dipsomania-cal tragedian progressively crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright and with a bitterness of ambiguous origin but consuming intensity toward the Method school of professional acting and its more promising exponents, a father who somewhere around the nadir of his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed basement workshop and build a promising junior athlete the way other fathers might restore vintage autos or build ships inside bottles, or like refinish chairs, etc. — James Incandenza proved a withdrawn but compliant student of the game and soon a gifted jr. player — tall, bespectacled, domineering at net — who used tennis scholarships to finance, on his own, private secondary and then higher education at places just about as far away from the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning. The United States government’s prestigious O.N.R.[23] financed his doctorate in optical physics, fulfilling something of a childhood dream. His strategic value, during the Federal interval G. Ford-early G. Bush, as more or less the top applied-geometrical-optics man in the O.N.R. and S.A.C., designing neutron-scattering reflectors for thermo-strategic weapons systems, then in the Atomic Energy Commission — where his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels is commonly regarded as one of the big half-dozen discoveries that made possible cold annular fusion and approximate energy-independence for the U.S. and its various allies and protectorates — his optical acumen translated, after an early retirement from the public sector, into a patented fortune in rearview mirrors, light-sensitive eyewear, holographic birthday and Xmas greeting cartridges, vid-eophonic Tableaux, homolosine-cartography software, nonfluorescent public-lighting systems and film-equipment; then, in the optative retirement from hard science that building and opening a U.S.T.A.-accredited and ped-agogically experimental tennis academy apparently represented for him, into ‘après-garde’ experimental- and conceptual-film work too far either ahead of or behind its time, possibly, to be much appreciated at the time of his death in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar — although a lot of it (the experimental- and conceptual-film work) was admittedly just plain pretentious and unengaging and bad, and probably not helped at all by the man’s very gradual spiral into the crippling dipsomania of his late father.24[24]
The tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking Dr. Incandenza’s May-December[25] marriage to one of the few bona fide bombshell-type females in North American academia, the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and gainly and teetotalling and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon, the only female academic ever to hold the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill University, whom Incandenza’d met at a U. Toronto conference on Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems, was rendered even more romantic by the bureaucratic tribulations involved in obtaining an Exit- and then an Entrance-Visa, to say nothing of a Green Card, for even a U.S.-spoused Professor Mondragon whose involvement, however demonstrably nonviolent, with certain members of the Québecois-Separatist Left while in graduate school had placed her name on the R.C.M.P.’s notorious ‘Personnes a Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement’ List. The birth of the Incandenzas’ first child, Orin, had been at least partly a legal maneuver.
It is known that, during the last five years of his life, Dr. James O. Incan-denza liquidated his assets and patent-licenses, ceded control over most of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s operations to his wife’s half-brother — a former engineer most recently employed in Amateur Sports Administration at Throppinghamshire Provincial College, New Brunswick, Canada — and devoted his unimpaired hours almost exclusively to the production of documentaries, technically recondite art films, and mordantly obscure and obsessive dramatic cartridges, leaving behind a substantial (given the late age at which he bloomed, creatively) number of completed films and cartridges, some of which have earned a small academic following for their technical feck and for a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.
Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great loss in at least three worlds. President J. Gentle (EC.), acting on behalf of the U.S.D.D.’s O.N.R. and O.N.A.N.’s post-annular A.E.C., conferred a posthumous citation and conveyed his condolences by classified ARPA-NET Electronic Mail. Incandenza’s burial in Quebec’s L’Islet County was twice delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles. Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift. Certain leading young quote ‘après-garde’ and ‘anticonfluential’ filmmakers employed, in their output for the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, certain oblique visual gestures — most involving the chiaroscuro lamping and custom-lens effects for which Incandenza’s distinctive deep focus was known — that paid the sort of deep-insider’s elegaic tribute no audience could be expected to notice. An interview with Incan-denza was posthumously included in a book on the genesis of annulation. And those of E.T.A.’s junior players whose hypertrophied arms could fit inside them wore black bands on court for almost a year.
DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
‘I hate this!’ Orin yells out to whoever glides near. He doesn’t loop or spiral like the showboats; he sort of tacks, the gliding equivalent of snow-plowing, unspectacular and aiming to get it over ASAP and intact. The fake red wings’ nylon clatters in an updraft; ill-glued feathers keep peeling off and rising. The updraft is the oxides from Mile-High’s thousands of open mouths. Far and away the loudest stadium anyplace. He feels like a dick. The beak makes it hard to breathe and see. Two reserve ends do some kind of combined barrel-roll thing. The worst is the moment right before they make the jump off the stadium’s rim. Hands in the top rows reaching and clutching. People laughing. The Interlace cameras panning and tightening; Orin knows too well the light on the side that means Zoom. Once they’re out over the field the voices melt and merge into oxides and updraft. The left guard is soaring up instead of down. A couple beaks and a claw fall off somebody and go pinwheeling down toward the green. Orin tacks grimly back and forth. He’s among those who steadfastly refuse to whistle or squawk. Bonus or no. The stadium loudspeaker’s a steely gargle. You can never hear it clearly even on the ground.
The sad old ex-QB who now just holds on place-kicks falls in beside Orin’s slow back-and-forth about 100 meters over the 40. He’s one of the token females, his beak blunter and wings’ red nongarish.
‘Hate and loathe this with a clusterfucking passion, Clayt!’
The holder tries to make a resigned wing-gesture and is almost blown into Orin’s pinfeathers. ‘Almost down! Enjoy the ride! Yo — cleavage-check in 22G, just by the —’ and then lost in the roar as the first player touches down and sheds the red-feathered promotional apparatus. You have to scream to even be heard. At some point it starts sounding like the crowd’s roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something’ll blow. One of the Broncos in the rear end of a costume takes a header at midfield so it looks like the thing’s ass went flying off. Orin has told no Cardinal, not even the team’s counselor and visualization-therapist, about his morbid fear of heights and high-altitude descent.
‘I punt! I’m paid to punt long, high, well, and always! Making me do personal interviews on my personal side’s bad enough! But this crosses every line! Why do we stand for this! I’m an athlete! I’m not a freak-show performer! Nobody mentioned flying at the trade-table. In New Orleans it was just robes and halos and once a season a zither. But just once a season. This is fucking awful!’
‘Could be worse!’
Spiralling down toward the line of X’s and the bill-capped guys that help strip the wings off, runty potbellied volunteer front-office-connected guys who always smirk in a way you couldn’t quite level the accusation.
‘I’m paid to punt!’
‘It’s worse in Philly! … had fucking water-drops in Seattle for three seaso—’
‘Please Lord, spare the Leg,’ Orin whispers each time just before touchdown.
‘… of how you could be an Oiler! You could be a Brown.’
The organopsychedelic muscimole, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from Amanita muscaria, a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom — by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species of North America’s Amanita genus, as the little kids sit there Indian-style on the Viewing Room floor, glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn — goes by the structural moniker 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per ingestion, making it two to three times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in the following alterations in consciousness (not reading or referring to notes in any way): a kind of semi-sleep-like trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness and increased strength, heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable distortions in body-image. This is supposed to be a pre-dinner ‘Big Buddy’ powwow, where the littler kids receive general big-brotherly-type support and counsel from an upperclass-man. Pemulis sometimes treats his group’s powwows like a kind of colloquium, sharing personal findings and interests. The viewer’s on Read from the room’s laptop, and the screen’s got block-capitaled METHOXYLATED BASES FOR PHENYLKYLAMINE MANIPULATION on it, and underneath some stuff that might as well be Greek to the Little Buds. Two of the kids squeeze tennis balls; two rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert; one has a hat with a pair of fake antennae made of tight-coiled spring. More or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what’s now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity, Pemulis tells them, the fly agaric ‘shroom was both loved and hated for its powerful but not always unless carefully titrated pleasant psycho-spiritual effects. A boy probes at his own navel with great interest. Another pretends to fall over.
Some of the more marginal players start in as early as maybe twelve, I’m sorry to say, particularly ‘drines before matches and then enkephaline[26] after, which can generate a whole vicious circle of individual neurochemis-try; but I myself, having taken certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences, didn’t even get downwind of my first bit of Bob Hope[27] until fifteen, more like nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep, perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. Low-grade synthetic Bob or not, the bongs worked like a charm.
In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I’m in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It’s hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It’s simply huge. And it’s public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court’s periphery, dressed in summer’s citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks’ flies. High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I’m supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.
The umpire whispers Please Play.
We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession’s practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they’re entering is a hospital’s fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D. — who’s usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good — approaches any psych patient under his care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that’s divided evenly between the patient’s subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.
