Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.’

‘Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.’

‘…’

‘You know, for me, Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.’

‘…’

‘Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they’re lying. Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a win-dowscreen.’

‘Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn’t think he was.’

‘Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.’

‘Maybe if we call him he’ll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him if you want to if you ask, maybe.’

‘Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.’

‘The merciful type of lie.’

‘Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that’s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal.’

‘Rococo’s a pretty word.’

‘So now I’ve established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.’

‘…’

‘I’ve established that as a sort of subtype.’ ‘You sound like you can always tell.’

‘Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed he had that kind of performance in him.’

‘Psychosis live on the radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: “The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation,” quote.’

‘The truth is nobody can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.’

‘I can’t ever tell. You wanted to know. You’re right. It never crosses my mind.’

‘…’

‘I’m the type that’d buy land, I think.’

‘You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?’

‘Boy do I ever.’

‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’

‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’

‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’

‘Golly Ned.’

‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’

‘Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?’

Thing?’

‘You know. Don’t play dumb and embarrass me.’

‘A wheelchair is a thing which: you prefer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. Difference. You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?’

‘I can’t believe I’m drinking. There’s all these people in the House they’re always worried they’re going to drink. I’m in there for drugs. I’ve never had more than a beer ever in my life. I only came in here to throw up from getting mugged. Some street guy was offering to be a witness and he would not leave me alone. I didn’t even have any money. I came in here to vomit.’

‘I know what it is you are meaning.’

‘What’s your name one more time?’

‘I call myself Rémy.’

‘This is a beautiful thing as Hester would say. I don’t feel horrid anymore. Ramy I feel better than I feel, felt in ever so I don’t know how long. This is like novocaine of the soul. I’m like: why was I spending all that time doing one-hitters when this is really what / call feeling better.’

‘Us, I do not take any drugs. I drink infrequently.’

‘Well you’re making up for lost time I have to say.’

‘When I drink I have many drinks. This is how it is for my people.’

‘My mom won’t even have it in the house. She said it’s what made her father drive into concrete and wipe out his entire family. Which like I’m so tired of hearing it. I came in here — what is this place?’

‘This, it is Ryle’s Inman Square Club of Jazz. My wife is dying at home in my native province.’

‘There’s this thing in the Big Book they make us every Sunday we have to drag ourselves out of bed at the absolute crack of dawn and sit in a circle and read out of it and half the people can barely even read and it’s excruciating to listen to!’

‘You should make your voice lower, for in the hours of no jazz they enjoy low voices, coming in for quiet.’

‘And there’s a thing about a car salesman trying to quit drinking, it’s about the they call it the insanity of the first one, drink — he comes in a bar for a sandwich and a glass of milk — are you hungry?’

‘Non.’

‘What am I saying I don’t have any money. I don’t even have my purse. This stuff makes you stupid but it makes you feel quite a bit improved. He wasn’t thinking of a drink and then all of a sudden he thinks of a drink. This guy-’

‘Out of a blue place, in one flashing instant.’

‘Exactly. But the insanity is after all this time in hospitals and losing his business and his wife because of drinking he suddenly gets it into his head that one drink won’t hurt him if he puts it in a glass of milk.’1

‘Crazy in his head.’

‘So when this absolutely reptilian character you saved me from by sitting down, rolling over, whatever. Sor-ry. When he says can he buy me a drink the book flashes in my mind and for sort of as it felt like a joke I ordered Kahlua and milk.’

‘Me, I come in for nights I am tired, after the music has packed away, for the quiet. I use the telephone here as well, sometimes.’

‘I mean even before the mugging I was walking along soberly deciding how to kill myself, so it seems a little silly to worry about drinking.’

‘You have a certain expression of resemblance of my wife.’

‘Your wife is dying. Jesus I’m sitting here laughing and your wife is dying. I think it’s that I haven’t felt decent in so freaking long, do you know what I’m saying? I’m not talking like good, I’m not talking like pleasure, I wouldn’t want to go overboard with this thing, but at least at like zero, even, what do they call it Feeling No Pain.’

‘I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife. I think: Rémy, it is time for many drinks.’

‘Well / think you’re nice. I think you just about saved my life. I’ve spent like nine weeks feeling so bad I wanted to just about kill myself, both getting high and not. Dr. Garton never mentioned this. He talked plenty about shock but he never even freaking mentioned Kahlua and milk.’

‘Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know you but we are drunk together now, and will you hear this story?’

‘It’s not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender, is it?’

‘My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, they were lost in the teenage years being struck by a train.’

‘That must have smarted.’

‘I would have temptation to say you have no idea. But I am sensing you have an idea of hurting.’

‘You have no idea.’

‘I am in early twenty years, without the legs. Many of my friends also: without legs.’

‘Must have been an awful train crash.’

‘Also my own father: dead when his Kenbeck pacemaker came within range of a misdialed number of a cellular phone far away in Trois Rivieres, in a freakish occurrence of tragedy.’

‘My dad emotionally abandoned us and moved to Portland, which is in Oregon, with his therapist.’

‘Also in this time, my Swiss nation, we are a strong people but not strong as a nation, surrounded by strong nations. There is much hatred of our neighbors, and unfairness.’

‘It all started when my mom found a picture of his therapist in his wallet and goes “What’s that doing in here?” ‘

‘It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. One feels grotesque to people; one’s freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for jobs in the mines of Switzerland.’

‘The Swiss have gold mines.’

‘As you say. And much beautiful territory, which the stronger nations at the time of losing my legs committed paper atrocities to my nation’s land.’

Trucking bastards.’

‘It is a long story to the side of this story, but my part of the Swiss nation is in my time of no legs invaded and despoiled by stronger and evil hated and neighboring nations, who claim as in the Anschluss of Hitler that they are friends and are not invading the Swiss but conferring on us gifts of alliance.’

‘Total dicks.’

‘It is to the side, but for my Swiss friends and myself without legs it is a dark period of injustice and dishonor, and of terrible pain. Some of my friends roll themselves off to fight against the invasion of paper, but me, I am too painful to care enough to fight. To me, the fight seems without point: our own Swiss leaders have been subverted to pretend the invasion is alliance; we very few legless young cannot repel an invasion; we cannot even make our government admit that there is an invasion. I am weak and, in pain, see all is pointless: I do not see the meaning of choosing to fight.’

‘You’re depressed is what you are.’

‘I see no point and do no work and belong to nothing; I am alone. I think of death. I do nothing but frequently drink, roll around the despoiled countryside, sometimes dodging falling projectiles of invasion, thinking of death, bemoaning the depredation of the Swiss land, in great pain. But it is myself I bemoan. I have pain. I have no legs.’

‘I’m Identifying every step of the way with you, Ramy. Oh God, what did I say?’

‘And us, our Swiss countryside is very hilly. The fauteuil, it is hard to push up many hills, then one is braking with all the might to keep from flying out of control on the downhill.’

‘Sometimes it’s like that walking, too.’

‘Katherine, I am, in English, moribund. I have no legs, no Swiss honor, no leaders who will fight the truth. I am not alive, Katherine. I roll from skiing lodge to tavern, frequently drinking, alone, wishing for my death, locked inside my pain in the heart. I wish for my death but have not the courage to make actions to cause death. I twice try to roll over the side of a tall Swiss hill but cannot bring myself. I curse myself for cowardice and inutile. I roll about, hoping to be hit by a vehicle of someone else, but at the last minute rolling out of the path of vehicles on Autoroutes, for I am unable to will my death. The more pain in my self, the more I am inside the self and cannot will my death, I think. I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything outside it. Unable to see anything or feel anything outside my pain.’

‘The billowing shaped black sailing wing. I am so totally Identifying it’s not even funny.’

‘My story it was one day at the top of a hill I had drunkenly labored for many minutes to roll to the crest, and looking out over the downhill slope I see a small hunched woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat far below at the bottom, attempting the crossing of the Swiss Provincial Autoroute at the bottom, in the middle of the Provincial Autoroute, this woman, standing and staring in the terror at one of the hated long and shiny many-wheeled trucks of our paper invaders, bearing down upon her at high speeds in the hurry to come despoil part of the Swiss land.’

‘Like one of those Swiss metal helmets? Is she scrambling crazily to get out of the way?’