Infinite jest - David Wallace

‘Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell her it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations.’

Nwangi’s laugh was high and had the slight teakettle-wheeze to it of the laughs of large black men the world over. ‘She sends you her regards, the Dean said to tell you.’ He slapped his knee three times.

DeLint looked a little less happy because he clearly didn’t know what any of it was about and didn’t like playing coded messenger, but he still looked pretty happy: ‘Michael Mathew Pemulis, the Academy’s Dean of Academic Affairs said to tell you the administration’s too naturally concerned about the state of one of our two very finest current talents, who it’s clear he’s been unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant prohibited by federal statute, O.N.A.N.T.A. regulations, and the Enfield Tennis Academy Honor-Code Specs on Artificial Substances, to permit itself the satisfaction of giving you the Dean’s very best regards and her wish that quote “may the road rise up to meet you whitherever your future travels lie.” ‘ DeLint probed his ear. ‘I think that was it in a nutshell.’

Pemulis got very cool and brass-mask-faced. He was breathing very clearly through his nose, and the office air seemed mentholated. Everything got very cool and formal inside and glycerine-clear. ‘Aubs, before anything gets nailed in stone that we’ll all I promise you and Mrs. Inc we’ll all of us regret —’

DeLint said ‘I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they’ll take a senior without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’

Tex Watson said something about urine.

Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:

‘I believe the kid is speechless.’

‘I believe he has nothing to say.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘And something about you’re invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon won’t be this one.’

Nwangi got out through laughter: ‘And that the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone’s room’s mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’

The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da’s saggy frown. Pemulis scratched very coolly next to his ear. ‘And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’

DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious.

[333] Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket.

[334] Hal’s Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn’t a very promising way to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity.

[335] Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships.

[336] (according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)

[337] Latin blunder for self-defense’s se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 9.

[338] Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition — ®Syntex Labs.

[339] International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

[340] Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic — ®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals.

[341] Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C–III narcotic oral analgesic — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

[342] Or possibly Babel.

[343] Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any kind of Recovery Program.

[344] E.T.S.V Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza’s signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French.

a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.

[345] The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A.

[346] Montreal International Airport-D’Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted to intra-Québec flights only.

[347] (Which in fact she doesn’t, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the hulpil.)

[348] An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center.

[349] Sic.

[350] Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.’s own armlessness and hook, maybe.

[351] As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: ‘My Life Is Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share It With You.’

[352] Reference to January-February Y.D.A.U., when person or persons unknown went around coating selected toothbrushes of the Boys and Girls 16’s with what was finally pinpointed as betel-nut extract, causing panic and internecine finger-pointing and resulting in serial oxidation-treatment visits to Dr. E. Zegarelli, D.D.S., by half a dozen E.T.A.s until the brush-tamperings ceased as suddenly as they’d begun; and now nine months later no one still has the slightest idea re perpetrator or point.

[353] Which runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan, places where it is very bad nighttime joss indeed to be both white and incapacitated.

[354] Q.v. note a to Note 12.

[355] Anexsia — ®SmithKline Beecham Laboratories.

[356] Levo-Dromoran— ®Roche Laboratories.

[357] Numorphan, kind of a watered-down Dilaudid — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

[358] Perwin NX — ® Bos well Medications Ltd., Canada — which accounts for the C–III, because the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes to forecasting abuse-potential.

[359] A.k.a. Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride — ®Roche, Inc. — a low-grade Valiumish tranq.

[360] A C–III and sort of entry-level oral narcotic, the side-effects and inconsistent buzz of which often send abusers up the ladder to C–II compounds.

[361] A.k.a. hyoscyamine sulfate — ®Schwarz Pharma Kremers Urban, Inc. — an anti-spasmodic for anything from colitis to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

[362] A.k.a. methaqualone, now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction under the trade name Parestol.

[363] Later one-third of the rent-and-strip-luxury-apts. crew, and even later Gately’s trusted colleague on some of his most disastrous and bottom-hastening home-invasions, including that of one G. DuPlessis, which Kite ended up regretting exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him.

[364] MDA, MDMA (‘X’), MMDA-2 (‘Love Boat’), MMDA-3a (‘Eve’), DMMDA-2

(‘Starry Night’), etc.

[365] Long-Term Institution.

[366] Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza — though it’s unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson’s low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the ‘disjunction’ or ‘disconnection’ between the screen’s film and Ph.D.’s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point.3

a. (Which of course assumes there’s a point.)

[367] Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential taps or Pen Registers — Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s’ cellulars and then returning them after a few days. One of Gately’s biggest challenges in this career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of luxury-apts.-of-the-week when he was strafed on Barn-Bams just about all the time.

[368] Cimetidine — ®SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals — 8oo-mg. spansules for generalized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly, from the same ergot rye-mold as LSD).

[369] For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it’s maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and instead used the thuggish ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè, who had no real loyalties or membership in any community and hired themselves out as enforcers for books and high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he’d squirted Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately’s sight, and when he’d come back to himself the debtor’s head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone.

[370] Purified pork insulin in a zinc suspension — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals.

[371] An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient.

[372] Surely skeet and vig, meaning debt and bookmaker’s automatic percentage (usually 10 % subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not just metro Boston terms.

[373] A.k.a. Acetylcysteine-zo — ®Bristol Laboratories — a nebulizable prophylaxis against the post-traumatic buildup of abnormal, viscid, or inspissated mucus.

[374] With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and champagne.

[375] Known less sensitively among neuro-urology residents as ‘Dizzy Dick Disorder’ or sometimes just ‘3-D.’

[376] Knoll Laboratories’ good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations.

[377] A ‘Phillips Screwdriver,’ vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a ‘lowball.’

[378] (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.)

[379] See Note 144 supra.

[380] The 1.3:1-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now replaced by multi-interlace3 solid-field HD digital imaging.

a. Why Noreen Lace-Forché’s seminal corporation’s name was a kind of wry pun: 2:1 interlace was pre-HD television’s term for breaking the picture frame into two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning… A very in-type joke designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen L.-F. was then wooing.

[381] More like B.S. 1926, according to the Still Photo Archive at NNY City’s Museum of Modern Art. Plus n.b. the print — which Hal correctly remembers Avril always loathing a — long pre-dated J.O.I.’s ever picking up a camera.

a. Hence the relative queerness of its still being up on the HmH living room wall four years after Incandenza’s felo de se — it’s not like anybody asked her to keep the thing up.

[382] Whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, when Hal is on-court with Wayne he always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control out there not just of his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his pupils, etc., which feeling is not only creepy but distracting, adding to the tension of playing with Wayne.

[383] Winter Park FL facility for enmeshment-, codependency-, and compulsivity-related Issues.

[384] A.k.a. Lorazepam — ®Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale.

[385] Probably meaning Doryx, Parke-Davis’s doxycycline hyclate, the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics.

[386] Nalaxone hydrochloride, the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists — ®DuPont Pharm. — 2 ml./2Oml.-saline pre-filled syringes.

[387] Metro Boston’s third-hardest thing to street-cop after raw Vietnamese opium and the incredibly potent DMZ, Sunshine is pentazocine hydrochloride and mefenamic acid3 — ®Sanofi Winthrop, Canada, Inc. — w/ trade-name Talwin-PX — Day-Glo-yellow serum, 7ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes.

a. A non-narc analgesic marketed in the U.S. as Ponstel — ®Parke-Davis — mostly (oddly enough) for dysmenorrhea, sort of like nuclear-grade Mydol.

[388] Talwin-NX — ®Sanofi Winthrop U.S.