Infinite jest - David Wallace

The homeward ride’s camaraderie was marred only by the fact that someone near the back of the bus started the passing around of a Gothic-fonted leaflet offering the kingdom of prehistoric England to the man who could pull Keith Freer out of Bernadette Longley. Freer had been discovered by prorector Mary Esther Thode more or less Xing poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket in the very back seat on the bus trip to the East Coast Clays in Providence in September, and it had been a nasty scene, because there were some basic Academy-license rules that it was just unacceptable to flout under the nose of staff. Keith Freer was deeply asleep when the leaflet was getting passed around, but Bernadette Longley wasn’t, and when the leaflet hit the front half where all the females now had to sit since September she’d buried her face in her hands and flushed even on the back of her pretty neck, and her doubles partner[92] came all the way back to where Jim Struck and Michael Pemulis were sitting and told them in no uncertain terms that somebody on this bus was so immature it was really sad.

Charles Tavis was irrepressible. He did a Pierre Trudeau impersonation no one except the driver was old enough to laugh at. And the whole mammoth travelling squad, three buses’ worth, got to stop and have the Mega-breakfast at Denny’s, over next to Empire Waste, at like 0030, when they got in.

Hal’s eldest brother Orin Incandenza got out of competitive tennis when Hal was nine and Mario nearly eleven. This was during the period of great pre-Experialist upheaval and the emergence of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism. At late seventeen, Orin was ranked in the low 70s nationally; he was a senior; he was at that awful age for a low-70s player where age eighteen and the terminus of a junior career are looming and either: (1) you’re going to surrender your dreams of the Show and go to college and play college tennis; or (2) you’re going to get your full spectrum of gram-negative and cholera and amoebic-dysentery shots and try to eke outsome kind of sad diasporic existence on a Eurasian satellite pro tour and try to hop those last few competitive plateaux up to Show-caliber as an adult; or (3) or you don’t know what you’re going to do; and it’s often an awful time.[93]

E.T.A. tries to dilute the awfulness a little by letting eight or nine postgraduates stay on for two years and serve in deLint’s platoon of prorec-tors[94] in exchange for room and board and travel expenses to small sad satellite tourneys, and Orin’s being directly related to E.T.A. Administration obviously gave him kind of a lock on a prorector appointment if he wanted it, but a prorector’s job was only for maybe at most a few years, and was regarded as sad and purgatorial … and then of course what then, what are you going to do after that, etc.

Orin’s decision to attend college pleased his parents a great deal, though Mrs. Avril Incandenza, especially, had gone out of her way to make it clear that whatever Orin decided to do would please them because they stood squarely behind and in full support of him, Orin, and any decision his very best thinking yielded. But they were still in favor of college, privately, you could tell. Orin was clearly not ever going to be a professional-caliber adult tennis player. His competitive peak had come at thirteen, when he’d gotten to the 14-and-Under quarterfinals of the National Clays in Indianapolis IN and in the Quarters had taken a set off the second seed; but starting soon after that he’d suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he’d cleaned the clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin’s own clock at fourteen and fifteen — this had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit, Orin, and his U.S.T.A. ranking had nosedived through three years until it levelled off somewhere in the low 70s, which meant that by age fifteen he wasn’t even qualifying for the major events’ main 64-man draw. When E.T.A. opened, his ranking among the Boys’ 18s hovered around 10 and he was relegated to a middle spot on the Academy’s B-squad, a mediocrity that sort of becalmed his verve even further. His style was essentially that of a baseliner, a coun-terpuncher, but without the return of serve or passing shots you need to stand much of a chance against a quality net-man. The E.T.A. rap on Orin was that he lobbed well but too often. He did have a phenomenal lob: he could hug the curve of the dome of the Lung and three times out of four nail a large-sized coin placed on the opposite baseline; he and Marlon Bain and two or three other marginal counterpunching boys at E.T.A. all had phenomenal lobs, honed through spare P.M. devoted more and more to Es-chaton, which by the most plausible account a Croatian-refugee transfer had brought up from the Palmer Academy in Tampa. Orin was Eschaton’s first game-master at E.T.A., where in the first Eschaton generations it was mostly marginal and deafflatusized upperclassmen who played.

College was the comparatively obvious choice, then, for Orin, as the time of decision drew nigh. Oblique family pressures aside, as a low-ranked player at E.T.A. he’d had stiffer academic demands than did those for whom the real Show had seemed like a viable goal. And the Eschatonology helped a great deal with the math/computer stuff E.T.A. tended to be a bit weak in, both Himself and Schtitt being at that point pretty anti-quantitative. His grades were solid. His board-scores weren’t going to embarrass anybody. Orin was basically academically sound, especially for a somebody with a top-level competitive sport on his secondary transcript.

And you have to understand that mediocrity is relative in a sport like junior tennis. A national ranking of 74 in Boys 18-and-Under Singles, while mediocre by the standards of aspiring pros, is enough to make most college coaches’ chins shiny. Orin got a couple Pac-10 offers. Big 10 offers. U. New Mexico actually hired a mariachi band that established itself under his dorm-room’s window six nights running until Mrs. Incandenza got Himself to authorize ‘F. D. V.’ Harde to electrify the fences. Ohio State flew him out to Columbus for such a weekend of ‘prospective orientation’ that when Orin got back he had to stay in bed for three days drinking Alka-Seltzer with an ice pack on his groin. Cal-Tech offered him an ROTC waiver and A.P. standing in their elite Strategic Studies program after Decade Magazine had run a short interest-piece on Orin and the Croate and Eschaton’s applied use of c: Pink2.[95]

Orin chose B.U. Boston U. Not a tennis power. Not in Cal-Tech’s league academically. Not the sort of place that hires bands or flies you out for Roman orgies of inducement. And only just about three clicks down the hill and Comm. Ave. from E.T.A., west of the Bay, around the intersection of Commonwealth and Beacon, Boston. It was kind of a joint Orin Incandenza/ Avril Incandenza decision. Orin’s Moms privately thought it was important for Orin to be away from home, psychologically speaking, but still to be able to come home whenever he wished. She put everything to Orin in terms of worrying that her concern over what’d be best for him psychologically might prompt her to overstep her maternal bounds and speak out of turn or give intrusive advice. According to all her lists and advantage-disadvantage charts, B.U. was from every angle far and away O.’s best choice, but to keep ever from overstepping or lobbying intrusively the Moms actually for six weeks would flee any room Orin entered, both hands clapped over her mouth. Orin had this way his face would get when she’d beg him not to let her influence his choice. It was during this period that Orin had characterized the Moms to Hal as a kind of contortionist with other people’s bodies, which Hal’s never been able to forget. Himself, from his own experience, probably thought it’d be better for Orin to get the hell out of Dodge altogether, do something Midwest or PAC, but he kept his own counsel. He never had to struggle not to overstep. He probably figured Orin was a big boy. This was four years and 30-some released entertainments before Himself put his head in a microwave oven, fatally. Then it turned out Avril’s adoptive-slash-half-brother Charles Tavis, who at this time was back chairing A.S.A. at Throppinghamshire,[96] turned out to be old minor-sport-athletic-administration-network friends with Boston University’s varsity tennis coach. Tavis flew down special on Air Canada to set up a meet between the four of them, Avril and son and Tavis and the B.U. tennis coach. The B.U. tennis coach was a septuagenaric Ivy League guy, one of those emptily craggily handsome old patrician men whose profile looks like it ought to be on a coin, who liked his ‘lads’ to wear all white and actually literally vault the net, win or lose, after matches. B.U. had only had a couple nationally ranked players, like ever, and that had been in the A.D. 1960s, way before this fashion-conscious guy’s tenure; and when the coach saw Orin play he about fell over sideways. Recall how mediocrity is contextual. B.U.’s players all hailed (literally) from New England country clubs and wore ironed shorts and those faggy white tennis sweaters with that blood-colored stripe across the chest, and talked without moving their jaw, and played the sort of stiff and patrician serve-and-volley game you play if you’ve had lots of summer lessons and club round-robins but had never ever had to get out there and kill or die, psychically. Orin wore cut-off jeans and deck-sneakers w/o socks and yawned compulsively as he beat B.U.’s immaculately groomed #l Singles man 2 and 0, hitting something like 40 offensive lobs for winners. Then at the four-way meeting Tavis arranged, the old B.U. coach showed up in L.L. Bean chinos and a Lacoste polo shirt and got a look at the size of Orin’s left arm, and then at Orin’s Moms in a tight black skirt and levantine jacket with kohl around her eyes and a moussed tower of hair and about fell back over sideways the other way. She had this effect on older men, somehow. Orin was in a position to dictate terms limited only by the parameters of B.U.’s own sports-budget mar-ginality.[97] Orin signed a Letter of Intent accepting a Full Ride to B.U., plus books and a Hitachi lap-top w/ software and off-campus housing and living expenses and a lucrative work-study job where his job was to turn on the sprinklers every morning at the B.U. football Terriers’ historic Nickerson Field, sprinklers that were already on automatic timers — the sprinkler job was B.U.’s tennis team’s one plum, recruitment-wise. Charles Tavis — who at Avril’s urging that fall cashed in his Canadian return ticket and stayed on as Assistant Headmaster to assist Orin’s father’s oversight of the Academy[98] in a progressively more and more total capacity as both in- and external travels took J. O. Incandenza away from Enfield more and more often — said 3½ years later that he’d never really expected a Thank-You from Orin anyway, for liaisoning with the B.U. tennis apparatus, that he wasn’t in this for the Thank-Yous, that a person who did a service for somebody’s gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person; at least that’s what he thought, he said; he said what did Avril and Hal and Mario think? was he a genuine 3-D person? was he perhaps just rationalizing away some legitimate hurt? did Orin maybe resent him for seeming to move in just as he, Orin, moved out? though surely not for Tavis’s assuming more and more total control of the E.T.A. helm as J. O. Incandenza spent increasingly long hiati either off with Mario on shoots or editing in his room off the tunnel or in alcohol-rehabilitative facilities (13 of them over those final three years; Tavis has the Blue Cross statements right here), and even more surely not for the final felo de se anyone with any kind of denial-free sensitivity could have predicted for the past 3½ years; but, C.T. opined on 4 July Y.D.P.A.H. after Orin, who now had plenty of free summer time, declined his fifth straight invitation back to Enfield and his family’s annual barbecue and Wimbledon-Finals-InterLace-spontaneous-dissemination-watching, Orin might just be harboring a resentment over C.T. moving into the Headmaster’s office and changing the door’s TE OCCIDERE POS-SUNT…’ before Himself’s microwaved head had even cooled, even if it was to take over a Headmaster’s job that had been positively keening to have someone sedulous and brisk take over. Incandenza Himself having eliminated his own map on 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar just as spring Letters of Intent were due from seniors who’d decided to slouch off to college tennis, just as invitations for the European-dirt-circuit Invitationals were pouring in all over Lateral Alice Moore’s paraboloid desk, just as E.T.A.’s tax-exempt status was coming up for review before the M.D.R.[99] Exemption Panel, just as the school was trying to readjust to new O.N.A.N.T.A.-accreditation procedures after years of U.S.T.A.-accreditation procedures, just as litigations with Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital over alleged damage from E.T.A.’s initial hilltop-flattening and with Empire Waste Displacement over the flight-paths of Concavity-bound displacement vehicles were reaching the appellate stage, just as applications and fellowships for the Fall term were in the final stages of review and response. Well someone had had to come in and fill the void, and that person was going to have to be someone who could achieve Total Worry without becoming paralyzed by the worry or by the absence of minimal Thank-Yous for inglorious duties discharged in the stead of a person whose replacement was naturally, naturally going to come in for some resentment, Tavis felt, since since you can’t get mad at a dying man, much less at a dead man, who better to assume the stress of filling in as anger-object than that dead man’s thankless inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucratic assistant and replacement, whose own upstairs room was right next to the HmH’s master bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of interloping usurper. Tavis had been ready for all this stress and more, he told the assembled Academy in preparatory remarks before last year’s Fall term Convocation, speaking through amplification from the red-and-gray-bunting-draped crow’s nest of Gerhardt Schtitt’s transom down into the rows of folding chairs arranged all along the base-and sidelines of E.T.A. Courts 6–9: he not only fully accepted the stress and resentment, he said he had worked hard and would continue, in his dull quiet unromantic fashion, to work hard to remain open to it, to this resentment and sense of loss and irreplaceability, even after four years, to let everyone who needed to get it out get it out, the anger and resentment and possible contempt, for their own psychological health, since Tavis acknowledged publicly that there was more than enough on every E.T.A.’s plate to begin with as it was. The Convocation assembly was outside, on the Center Courts that in winter are sheltered by the Lung. It was 31 August in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, hot and muggy. Upper-classmen who’d heard these same basic remarks for the past four years made little razor-to-jugular and hangman’s-noose-over-imaginary-cross-beam motions, listening. The sky overhead was glassy blue between clots and strings of clouds moving swiftly north. On Courts 30–32 the Applied Music Chorus guys kept up a background of ‘Tenabrae Factae Sunt,’ sotto v. Everybody had had on the black armbands everybody still wore for functions and assemblies, to keep from forgetting; and the cotton U.S. and crisp nylon O.N.A.N. flags flapped and clanked halfway down the driveway’s poles in remembrance. The Sunstrand Plaza still as of that fall hadn’t yet found a way to muffle its East Newton ATHSCME fans, and Tavis’s voice, which even with the police bullhorn tended to sound distant and receding anyway, wove in and out of the sound of the fans and the whump of the E.W.D. catapults and locusts’ electric screams and the exhaust-rich hot rush of the summer wind up off Comm. Ave. and the car-horns and Green Line’s trundle and clang and the clank of the flags’ poles and wires, and everybody but the staff and littlest kids up front missed most of Tavis’s explanation that Salic law’d nothing to do with the fact that there was simply no way the late Headmaster’s beloved spouse and E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs and of Females Mrs. Avril Incandenza could have become Headmaster: how would ‘Headmistress’ have sounded? and she had the females and female prorectors and Harde’s custodians to oversee, and curricula and assignments and schedules, and complex new O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation to finalize the Kafkan application for, plus daily HmH-sterilization and personal-ablution rituals and the constant battle against anthracnose and dry-climate blight in the dining room’s Green Babies, plus of course E.T.A. teaching duties on top of that, with the addition of untold sleepless nights with the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, the academic PAC that watchdogged media-syntax and invited florid fish-lipped guys from the French Academy to come speak with trilled r’s on prescriptive preservation, and held marathon multireadings of e.g. Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language,’ and whose Avril-chaired Tactical Phalanx (MGM’s) was then (unsuccessfully, it turned out) court-fighting the new Gentle administration’s Title-II/G-public-funded-library-phaseout-fat-trimming initiative, besides of course being practically laid out flat with grief and having to do all the emotional-processing work attendant on working through that kind of personal trauma, on top of all of which assuming the administrative tiller of E.T.A. itself would have been simply an insupportable burden she’s thanked C.T. effusively on more than one public occasion for leaving the plush sinecure of Throppinghamshire and coming down to undertake the stress-ridden tasks not only of bureaucratic administration and insuring as smooth a transition as possible but of being there for the Incandenza family itself, w/ or w/o Thank-Yous, and for helping support not only Orin’s career and institutional decision-processes but also for being there supportively for all involved when Orin made his seminal choice not to go ahead and play competitive college tennis after all, at B.U.