David Wallace - Infinite jest

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.

‘I’m not a math person, Dad says,’ said Postal Weight. Again the nose made the words come out dot and bath and persod. Csikszentmihalyi feinted a lunge and then really lunged and there was brief flurry of terrycloth.

Pemulis unzipped the cover. ‘The axiom. The lemma. Listen: “If two different sets of parametric equations represent the same curve J, but the curve is traced in opposite directions in the two cases, then the two sets of equations produce values for a line integral over J that are negatives of each other.” Not “If thus-and-such.” Not “unless a gladhand-ing commercial realtor from Boardman MN in $400 Banfi loafers changes his mind.” Always and ever. As in puts the am a priori. An honest lamp in the inkiest black, Tod-dleposter.’

There were voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus. McKenna stuck his head in and looked wildly around and withdrew without saying anything. Csikszentmihalyi went out after him. Freer and Rader both said What the fuck. Pemulis had only one button of his fly buttoned and was pointing at the ceiling with a finger:

‘… Only that at times like this, when you’re directionless in a dark wood, trust to the abstract deductive. When driven to your knees, kneel and revere the double S. Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hubert, L’Hôpital. You will be lifted up. Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey. Borne up. Never let fall. Wiener, Reimann, Frege, Green.’

Csikszentmihalyi came back in with Ortho Stice, their color high.

Pemulis compulsively zips and unzips zippers, is the reason why he wears only button-fly pants and tennis shorts.

Cs/yi said ‘There is expression. You must immediately come.’

Freer turned from the mirror, both hands on a comb. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears.’

‘Never trust the father you can see,’ Pemulis told Possalthwaite.

Stice was already on his way back out and said over his shoulder, ‘Troeltsch’s got Wayne on the air and Wayne’s lost his mind.’

a. Like dry loamy clay, highly absorbent, used by some for traction on their grips, eschewed by others because it has a lot of aluminum silicates and the Y.T.M.P.’s ‘aluminum-causes-impotence’ panic still weighs hard on some pubescent players’ minds.

b. A good many seniors’ schedules have no last-period classes, or have Independent-Study stuff slated for last period, and when two of these seniors — e.g. Pemulis & Freer — are scheduled for a P.M. challenge-match, they get to start at 1430h. instead of 1515h., and usually then finish up early, which is a great perk, given that they’ll get to hit both the weight room and the locker room at slack and empty times.

c. An advantage of competitive mediocrity is you get to sit in the stands and get lots of sun on your feet and chest, because you’re knocked out of competition by like the second round. Hence grotesquely pale feet are sort of a perverse mark of competitive status, maybe like toothlessness in hockey or something.

d. Specially engineered to react very fast with the hydrolytic enzyme esterase and thus to be completely out of the tissues within 36 hrs.

e. Q.v. Note 22 supra.

f. For example, during the first month of last summer’s Euroclay junket, at some prearranged signal the male 16s would all hunch and hop around brachiatishly with their knuckles just off the ground in a circle, hitting their chests and going ‘Er ah ee oo ah,’ over and over, until prorector N. Hartigan finally lost his patience as they did it again in the line for Customs at L’Aéroport Orly and had hysterics so gruesome in someone that tall that the practice stopped as mysteriously as it’d started.

[325] (whose theories of detection and interview are strongly informed by the b/w noir films Tine so enjoyed as a boy late at night on local broadcast television, and misses)

[326] (and then some)

[327] Bolex H64, -32 and -16 models come with a turret that accepts three C-mount lenses, which gives the models a kind of multi-eyed, alien-facial look.

[328] (though never unveiled)

[329] (which is actually complete horseshit, but goes unchallenged by the O.U.S. operatives, who are pretty savvy at choosing their heuristic battles)

[330] (given the guy’s track record with ingestion)

[331] Picaresque pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson’s Potted Psalm’s mother-and-Death stuff and The Cage’s cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are pretty obvious touchstones in a lot of Himself’s more parodic-slapstick productions.

[332] 17 NOV. Y.D.A.U.

‘Gracious me and mine,’ Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he’d crossed to keep the foot from joggling.

‘Rusk and Charles and Mrs. Incandenza are with him now. Schtitt’s been up to see him. Loach has done a thorough reflex-check. John Wayne’s going to be OK.’

‘Well thank heavens for that load off everyone’s mind,’ Pemulis said.

It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs’ Office. Mrs. Inc’s ventilator hissed and something up in there whirred a little. DeLint was behind the high desk, looking like a mean little boy. Nobody’d said if anybody higher up than deLint was going to show. Pemulis didn’t know if this was good or bad.

‘Let’s make perfectly sure we got this in order and in your words.’ Nwangi and Watson were window-dressing. This was A. deLint’s show. His face kind of came apart when he smiled. ‘With no prior knowledge of anything untoward, you’re pulled from the locker room and stand out in the hall with several other students, which is your first knowledge anything’s untoward with Wayne.’

Pemulis figured none of the administrators had heard the thing; they always shut their soundproof doors at I435h.; Pemulis had no idea what Wayne’s said about anything, or Jim Troeltsch, who very prudently hasn’t shown facial-feature one in their room since the apocalyptic broadcast. It’d taken Pemulis about half the salivaless sprint up to B-204 to figure out what had happened and to find his pilfered Tenuates in the little pecker’s Sel-dane bottle. Pemulis sort of shuddered to imagine the impact of the ‘drine on Wayne’s cherry-red and virgin bloodstream. The slight whir of his cortex working at full speed was masked by the hiss of the ventilator and the sound of whistles and play and Schtitt’s megaphone outside.

‘I’m in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on Pos-salthwaite who was in crisis and Zoltan and The Darkness come like spasming in saying Troeltsch’d jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast.’

‘They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without awareness it’s going out over WETA into all the rooms?’

Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody’d see that Wayne’d have to have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little old-time gunmetal handheld mike at Lateral Alice Moore’s curved desk. He’d already heard from Lateral Alice that it was more like Wayne had come rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed the mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on aghastly; and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.’s deactivated third rail, had been so aghasted he’d pitched forward narcoleptically and stayed like that with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that Lateral Alice’s own stress had brought on an aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to the point where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis had got to her.

‘This was more like a general sort of impression which I feel like I might have misbegotten from the agitation of the guys. Plus how completely un-Wayneish Wayne sounded, like how could anybody ever have said that shit if they thought it wasn’t just them and Troeltsch alone, much less Wayne, who as we all know is pretty much reserve in motion.’

DeLint’s nostrils got that pale flare they got, Pemulis knew, when he smelled horseshit and knew you knew it. Pemulis knows deLint’s been laying for him ever since the incident with the P.W.T.A. guy who started to wobble and then rant down at P.W.T.A., which was a totally different type of deal. The irony was that the Wayne-dosing had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis’s deal, if anybody’s Troeltsch’s, but the cortex couldn’t nail down any way to get this across without admitting to possession of a ‘drine, which given the shaky pharmaceutical ground since the Eschaton and O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist would be tantamount to Clippertonizing himself. Nwangi showed almost blinding 3rd-World teeth but was saying nothing. Watson’s eyes had almost this nictitater of stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light of nobody home at chez Tex Watson. Pemulis saw the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. and deviant division in the papers deLint held.

‘Which is in your words your first knowledge of untowardness with Wayne.’

‘My first is I get out there still trying to counsel the Postheimer and here on the speaker’s Wayne doing what Keith observed may have been a sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis.’

It had been uncanny. It had made Stice look like a rank amateur. Wayne had told Troeltsch to pretend he was some adolescent girl: this was adolescent Tavis asking her for a date; Pemulis shuddered; he couldn’t exactly remember all the little mannerisms, which Wayne’d clearly gotten locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the bus back from victories going at him nonstop, but in outline it was Chuckie Tavis coming up to some Canadian cheerleader or something and telling her he was going to be completely open with her: he had a terrible fear of rejection; he was telling her up-front now that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was begging her not openly to reject him if she didn’t want to go, to think up some plausible excuse — though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that excuse hard to believe, now that he’s openly asked her to make up an excuse.

‘Whereupon the whole Academy hears Mr. Troeltsch prompt Wayne into making public castigations of his various peers and instructors.’

‘I’ve got to say it did seem like Troeltsch had kind of orchestrated things somehow, sir, was my impression.’

‘Referring to Corbett Thorp as a —’ pretending to riffle through the papers so Pemulis’d have to see the 17-into-56 leaflet several times as it came up in the riffle.

‘I believe the expression was “a palsied twit,” ‘ Nwangi said to deLint.

‘Yes “palsied twit.” And Francis Unwin quote “has the on-court look of a cornered rodent.” And Disney R. Leith: the quote “sort of man you always end up sitting next to at civic functions.” Ms. Richardson-Levy-o’Byrne-Chawaf as chair of some sort of committee dealing with the topic of the quote “Itty Bitty Titty.” On Coach Schtitt, quote, seeming as if he’d been “denied some kind of vitally important moisture from birth henceforward.” Our own Mr. Nwangi here being in rough quote if I’ve got it quote “the sort of fellow who’ll be in a Chinese restaurant with you and won’t even share food or trade food.” ‘

‘Meaning mean-spirited.’ Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind. What was chilling was that in Wayne’s scenario Tavis does succeed, Wayne projects, in seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he’s totally open on the date about the fact that he’d deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in the first place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys, more honest and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting she’d basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except — chillingly — he hadn’t shut up.

‘— including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the act of sexual intercourse,’ deLint said, trying to find it in the sheaf. ‘On Bernadette Long-ley: “Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around.” On Mary Esther Thode: “a face like a pancake.” On the Academy’s own late Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: “so full of himself he could have shit limbs.” Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: “by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth.” ‘

‘I’m remembering the word as insertable.’ Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode’s face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. Plus somehow even more chilling was that Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne’s pseudo-Tavis ‘I-live-in-fear-of-rejection’ ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling ‘Strategies’ that Inc’s brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.

‘Donni Stott has we’re informed “skin like an attache case and is a compelling advertisement for sunscreen.” I myself am, here I quote, quote “a man who would not lend his own mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch.” ‘

‘Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?’

Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark hatchet. Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by and brought out Pemulis’s special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to jump for. From someplace under Nwangi’s chair were brought out two pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller’s loupes, the tow truck’s supply of empty sterile Visine bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch’s bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.

Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. ‘I request to see the Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.’

‘We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone’s mind very much today, now said to be the sort of person who quote “cries at card tricks.” We have a Rik Dunkel who “could not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting precision.” We have a return engagement with Ms. Heath, described as “dwelling always at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria.” We have our own beloved Tex, sitting right here, described as having “a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the spine” in lieu of higher cortex function.’