Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘Q.’

‘What Found Drama was — and you’ve got to keep in mind that Duquette and a Brandeis critic named like Posener who was in on the revenge each got a mammoth grant for this, and The Mad Stork got two smaller ones somewhere, grants, to go cross-country to graduate film programs giving turgid theoretical deadly-serious lectures on this Found Drama, and then they’d come back up home to Boston and The Stork and the couple critics would lay up drunk and invent new Found-Drama theoretical lectures and chortle and laugh till there was evidence it was time for Himself to go back to detox again.’

‘Q.’

‘Like a family nickname. Hal and I either called him Himself or The Sad Stork. The Moms was the first to say Himself, which I think is a Canadian thing. Hal mostly said Himself. God knows what Mario used to call him. Who knows. I said Mad, The Mad Stork.’

‘Q.’

‘No see there weren’t any real cartridges or pieces of Found Drama. This was the joke. All it was was you and a couple cronies like Leith or Duquette got out a metro Boston phone book and tore a White Pages page out at random and thumbtacked it to the wall and then The Stork would throw a dart at it from across the room. At the page. And the name it hit becomes the subject of the Found Drama. And whatever happens to the protagonist with the name you hit with the dart for like the next hour and a half is the Drama. And when the hour and a half is up, you go out and have drinks with critics who like chortlingly congratulate you on the ultimate in Neorealism.’

‘Q.’

‘You do whatever you want during the Drama. You’re not there. Nobody knows what the name in the phone book’s doing.’

‘Q.’

‘The joke’s theory was there’s no audience and no director and no stage or set because, The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn’t know he’s the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobody thinks they’re in any sort of Drama.’

‘Q.’

‘Almost nobody. That’s a very good point. Almost nobody. I’m going to take a chance and just tell you I’m a little bit intimidated here.’

‘Q.’

‘I’m worried this might sound sexist or offensive. I’ve been around very, very beautiful women before, but I’m not accustomed to them being really acute and sharp and politically savvy and penetrating and multilevelled and intimidatingly intelligent. I’m sorry if that sounds sexist. It’s simply been my experience. I’ll go ahead and simply tell you the truth and take the chance that you might think I’m some kind of stereotypical Neanderthal athlete or sexist clown.’

‘Q.’

‘Absolutely no, no, nothing got recorded or filmed. Reality being camera-free, being the joke I’ll again underline. Nobody even knew what the guy in the phone book had been doing, nobody knew what the Drama had been. Although they liked to speculate when they’d go out after the time was up to have drinks and pretend to review how the Drama went. Himself usually imagined the guy was sitting there watching cartridges, or counting some pattern in his wallpaper, or looking out the window. It wasn’t impossible maybe even the name you hit with the dart was somebody dead in the last year and the phone book hadn’t caught up, and here was this guy who was dead and just a random name in a phone book and the subject of what people for a few months — until Himself couldn’t keep a straight face anymore or had had enough revenge on the critics, because the critics were hailing — not just the critics in on the joke, but actual tenure-jockeys who were getting tenure to assess and dismiss and hail — they were hailing this as the ultimate in avant-garde Neorealism, and saying maybe The Stork deserved reappraisal, for a Drama with no audience and oblivious actors who might have moved away or died. A certain Mad Stork got two grants out of it and later made a lot of enemies because he refused to give them back after the hoax was like unveiled. The whole thing was kind of bats. He spread the grant money for Found Drama around a couple of local improvisation companies. It’s not like he kept the money. It’s not like he needed it. I think he especially liked the idea that the star of the show might have already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know.’

[146] See for example Incandenza’s first narrative collaboration w/ Infernatron-Canada, the animated Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, made at the acknowledged height of his anticonfluential period — B.S. Private Release, L.M.P.

[147] The festivity here being due largely to the fact that both he and Gerhardt Schtitt returned from putting on little E.T.A. presentations at various tennis clubs too late to have been informed about the degenerative Eschaton free-for-all and serious Lord-, Ingersoll-, and Penn-injuries, both trainer Barry Loach and prorector Rik Dunkel having told Avril, and Schtitt to be told by whichever of Nwangi and deLint first works up the pluck, and the issue of telling Tavis being as would be S.O.P. left up to Avril, who will — because Tavis has already lost a certain amount of sleep preparing emotionally and rhetorically for the impending arrival of putative Moment journalist ‘Helen’ Steeply, whom he’s been convinced to let onto the grounds by Avril’s argument that the Moment office promises the profile’s subject and inevitable hype involve only an E.T.A. alumnus (Avril neglected to tell Tavis she was pretty sure it was Orin) and that a certain amount of soft-news-publicity for E.T.A.-qua-institution couldn’t hurt in either the fundraising- or the recruiting-goodwill department — who will almost certainly wait and tell Tavis (who’s in far too festive a mood to notice three or four younger kids ominously absent from the supper and gala) in the morning, if the poor man’s to have a chance at any real sleep at all (also giving Avril time to figure out how upperclass heads can roll, as of course they must, given chaos and season-ending injuries under the direct gaze of designated Big Buddies, without those heads including that of Hal, who — unlike, thank God, John — was identified at the scene with that Pemulis person). Hal can tell just by the dining hall’s emotional gestalt that neither Schtitt nor Tavis knows about the Eschaton, but the Moms is next to impossible to read, and Hal won’t know whether she’s been told of the debacle until he is able to pry Mario away from Anton (The Boogerman’) Doucette and get the Moms-skinny right from Booboo direct, after the film.

[148] Troeltsch wears an InterLace Sports baseball cap, and Keith Freer a two-horned operatic Viking helmet along with his leather vest, and Fran Unwin a fez, and fierce little Josh Gopnik the white beanie with the dirty cart-wheel-track across it from this afternoon’s debacle. Tex Watson wears a tan Stetson with a really high crown, and little Tina Echt an outlandishly large plaid beret that covers half her little head, the Vaught twins a freakish bowler with two domes and one brim, Stephan Wagenknecht a plastic sallet — this is just scanning at random; the headwear goes on and on, a whole topography of hats — and Carol Spodek a painter’s cap with the name of a paint company, and Ber-nadette Longley a calpac that obstructs the view of people behind her. Duncan van Slack in a harquebus w/ buckle. Should probably also mention Avril’s wearing a Fukoama microfiltration mask, it being way too early in the day for supper for her anyway. Ortho Stice wears a calotte and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent a slanted noir-style fedora and Tall Paul Shaw, way in back, a conquistadorial helmet and escudo, and Mary Esther Thode a plain piece of cardboard propped on her head that says HAT. Idris Arslanian’s spectacular bearskin shako is held in place with a chinstrap.

[149] (I.e. silk-suited Vocalists snapping their fingers and telling their casino audiences they were beautiful human beings and but when it comes time to actually start crooning the Vocalists’ lips move but nothing Velvety emerges, all sound withheld, a Job Action, rendered even more chilling by the skill with which the Frankies and Tonies lip-synch to utter silence — and the way the beautiful casino audiences, hit someplace they lived, somehow, clearly, responded with near-psychotic feelings of deprivation and abandonment, became a mob, almost tore lounges down, upended little round tables, threw free ice-intensive drinks, audiences in their well-heeled majority behaving like dysfunctional or inadequately nurtured children.)

[150] The years right around the millennium being a terrible U.S. time for waste, then, ozone-wise and landfill-wise and shoddily-disposed-of-dioxins-wise, w/ DT-cycle annular fusion at the stage where they had the generating-massive-amounts-of-high-R-waste part down a lot more pat than the consuming-the-waste-in-a-nuclear-process-whose-own-waste-was-the-fuel-for-the-first-waste-intensive-phase-of-the-circle-of-reactions part.

[151] Actual term employed is downer-type.

[152] A lightless and eye-averted late-night weight room being not exactly a last-name type of place.

[153] Sometimes it’s as straightforward as directing someone to give her fiance the roundhouse forehand slap she’s been secretly aching to give him ever since he’d once teased her about putting some Band-Aids on those insect bites on her chest.

[154] = the anticoníluental Cage HI — Free Show; q.v. Note 24 supra.

[155] The Medusa wears a kind of chain-mail backless evening gown and Hellenic sandals, the Odalisque a Merry Widow.

[156] Mario’s speculative puppet-show comes down maybe a little hard on the implication that former O.C.D.-support-group-sponsor and later Clean U.S. Party campaign manager and now O.U.S. Chief Rodney P. Tine is the real dark force behind Reconfiguration and New England’s de-mapping and the transfer of the Great Concavity, that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner was and remains a slightly unbent but basically genial and befuddled figurehead, content mostly to twirl his mike and immolate his epidermis so long as his office is clean and his food’s pre-tasted, and that it’s actually been Tine behind C.U.S.P.’s geopolitical anality and Experialism, and that Tine was essentially pulling Gentle’s strings all through the Concavity Cabinet and subsequent Reconfiguration and mass relocation. This is, in point of fact, simply one theory and direction for finger-pointing, and tends to founder on the unexplained issue of just what would motivate Tine to undertake all this anyway, since his own O.C.D. has been documented to be ruminative rather than hygienic, not to mention the fact that he’s hopelessly smitten with the Québecer Luria P---. J. O. Incandenza’s own ONANtiad, being an adult production, was considerably more restrained and ambiguous on the whole Tine-as-dark-force issue.

[157] An oblique little in-tribute from Mario to the Moms, at which line every year Avril at the Headmaster’s Table takes off the witch’s hat and holds it by the brim and whips it around in an enthused circle three times over her head.

[158] The umpires on the U.S. junior tour tend to be retired high-school principals whose only renumeration is the chance to exercise again some slight authority over the young.

[159] Clipperton eventually perfecting the toss-with-the-same-hand-you-serve-with maneuver pioneered by South African doubles specialist Colin van der Hingle after a hideous turbo-prop-charter-aircraft-propeller accident took off his right arm, ear, and sideburn in only the second year of his Show career, in Durban.

[160] Certain other and doubtless really disturbing footage of Clipperton’s suicide still exists, having — with perhaps half a dozen other emotionally or professionally sensitive cartridge-Masters — been designated Unviewable by testatory codicil and, as far as either Hal or Orin knows, enclosed in some sort of vault-apparatus that only Himself’s attorneys and maybe Avril have access to. As far as can be determined, only those lawyers, Avril, Disney Leith, and perhaps Mario know that the cartridges were, in fact, along with his case of special lenses, interred right there with J. O. Incandenza’s dead bodya — yickily enough — there having been room in the bronze casket only because Incandenza’s extreme height dictated a casket-size that his thin physique didn’t nearly fill the width and depth of.

a. (in the Mondragon-family-plot area of Le Cimetière du St. Adalbert in the now over-lush potato-growing country off Provincial Autoroute 204 in L’Islet Province, Quebec, just over the border from what is now the eastern Concavity, such that the funeral had to be delayed and then rushed to be fit in between annulation-cycles)

[161] The other having been that predictive call for the catatonic hero, also for Ogilvie’s Entertainment 2-termer.

[162] Every Nielsen respondent seemed to respond with especial neural repulsion to one or another particular portrait. There was one of a woman with every carpenter’s tool known to God exiting her face. One of a young male with a spear of scarlet light through the right temple and coming clear out the other side. A woman with her crown between the incisors of some sort of shark so huge it passes from view past the frame. A grandmotherly type with roses, human hands, a pencil, and other lush-type flora all coming serpentine out of her open skull’s top. A head coming out in a long string from a throttled tube of paste; a Talmudic scholar bearded in needles; a Baconian pope with his hat on fire. Three or four dental ones that sent people scrambling to the bathroom to floss themselves bloody. The painting that had particularly nailed nine-year-old Hal and had had him popping Nunhagen compulsively until his ears started ringing and didn’t stop for almost a week had been of a deeply parlor-tanned and vaguely familiar upscale male, a disembodied fist yanking a handful of brains out of the guy’s left ear while the guy’s overhealthy face, like most of the ad’s faces, wears a queer look of intense unhappy concentration, one more of like brooding than conventionally expressive of pain.

[163] NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst’s CBS, Hal noted with surprisingly little irony.

[164] Granted that this stuff is all grossly simplified in Hal’s ephebic account; Lace-Forché and Veals are in fact transcendent geniuses of a particularly complex right-time-and-place sort, and their appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom almost unanalyzably compelling.

[165] Granted, pace critics, this was partly to forestall A.C.D.C.’s apellate-court claims that InterLace was basically hopping up and down on the B.S. 1890 Sherman Act with spike heels.

[166] ‘Reduced Instruct-Set Computers,’ descendents of the IBM/Apple ‘Power PCs,’ with mainframe-caliber response-time and.25 terabytes of DRAM and numerous expansion-slots for various killer apps.

[167] A couple of Incandenza’s more accessible early documentaries were bought by Inter-Lace on a distribution-factored contingency basis, but except for a flat PBS-ish one on the lay priciples of DT-annulation they never brought Meniscus/Latrodectus more than a fraction of the interest on the interest from Himself’s rearview-mirror fortune. InterLace ended up optioning rights to only a couple of his higherbrow productions for its ‘Howls from the Margin’ low-volume-expectation product-line during Himself’s lifetime; the bulk of his stuff didn’t make any ILT menus until after his untimely death.