Infinite jest - David Wallace

Orin, before that seminal moment, had never tried to kick any sort of ball before in his whole life, was the unengineered and kind of vulnerable revelation that ended up moving Joelle van Dyne way more than status or hang-time.

And but as of that moment, as whistles fell from lips and people pointed, and under that same green and sprinkler-hazed gaze Orin found for himself, within competitive U.S. football, a new niche and carrot. A Show-type career he could never have dreamed of trying to engineer. Within days he was punting 60 yards without a rush, practicing solo on an outside field with the Special Teams Assistant, a dreamy Gauloise-smoking man who invoked ideas of sky and flight and called Orin ‘ephebe,’ which a discreet phone call to his youngest brother revealed not to be the insult Orin had feared it sounded like. By the second week O. was up around 65 yards, still without a snap or rush, his rhythm clean and faultless, his concentration on the transaction between one foot and one leather egg almost frighteningly total. Nor, by the third week, was he much distracted by the ten crazed pituitary giants bearing down as he took the snap and stepped forward, the gasps and crunching and meaty splats of interpersonal contact around him, the cooly-type shuffle of the stretcher-bearers who came and went after the whistles blew. He’d been taken aside and the empty-scrotum crack apologized for, and it had been explained — complete with blow-ups of Rulebook pages — that regulations against direct physical contact with the punter were draconian, enforced by the threat of massive yardage and loss of possession. The rifle-shot sounds of the ex-punter’s now useless leg were one-in-a-million sounds, he was assured. The Head Coach let Orin overhear him telling the defense that any man misfortunate enough to impact the team’s new stellar punt-man might could just keep on walking after the play was over, all the way to the south tunnel and the stadium exit and the nearest transportation to some other institution of learning and ball.

It was, pretty obviously, the start of football season. Crisp air, everything half dead, burning leaves, hot chocolate, raccoon coats and halftime-twirling and something called the Wave. Crowds exponentially larger and more demonstrative than tennis-tournament crowds. HOME v. SUNY-Buffalo, HOME v. Syracuse, AT Boston College, AT Rhode Island, HOME v. the despised Minutemen of UMass-Amherst. Orin’s average reached 69 yards per kick and was still improving, his eyes fixed on the twin inducements of a gleaming baton and a massive developmental carrot he hadn’t felt since age fourteen. He punted the football better and better as his motion — a dancerly combination of moves and weight-transfers every bit as complex and precise as a kick serve — got more instinctive and he found his hamstrings and adductors loosening through constant and high-impact competitive punting, his left cleat finishing at 90° to the turf, knee to his nose, Rockette-kicking in the midst of crowd-noise so rabid and entire it seemed to remove stadiums’ air, the one huge wordless orgasmic voice rising and creating a vacuum that sucked the ball after it into the sky, the leather egg receding as it climbed in a perfect spiral, seeming to chase the very crowd-roar it had produced.

By Halloween his control was even better than his distance. It wasn’t by accident that the Special Teams Assistant described it as ‘touch.’ Consider that a football field is basically just a grass tennis court tugged unnaturally long, and that white lines at complex right angles still define tactics and movement, the very possibility of play. And that Orin Incandenza, who tennis-historically had had mediocre passing shots, had been indicted by Schtitt for depending way too often on the lob he’d developed as compensation. Like the equally weak-passing Eschaton-prodigy Michael Pemulis after him, Orin’s whole limited game had been built around a preternatural lob, which of course a lob is just a higher-than-opponent parabola that ideally lands just shy of the area of play’s rear boundary and is hard to retrieve and return. Gerhardt Schtitt and deLínt and their depressed prorectors had had to sit eating butterless popcorn through only one cartridge of one B.U. game to understand how Orin had found his major-sport niche. Orin was still just only lobbing, Schtitt observed, illustrating with the pointer and a multiple-replayed fourth down, but now with the leg instead, the only punting, and now with ten armored and testosterone-flushed factota to deal with what ever return an opponent could muster; Schtitt posited that Orin had stumbled by accident on a way, in this grotesquely physical and territorial U.S. game, to legitimate the same dependency on the one shot of lob that had kept him from developing the courage to develop his weaker areas, which this unwillingness to risk the temporary failure and weakness for long-term gaining had been the real herbicide on the carrot of Orin Incandenza’s tennis. Puberty Schmüberty, as the real reason for burning down the inside fire for tennis, Schtitt knew. Schtitt’s remarks were nodded vigorously at and largely ignored, in the Viewing Room. Schtitt later told deLint he had several very bad feelings about Orin’s future, inside.

But so by freshman Halloween Orin was regularly placing his punts inside the opponents’ 20, spinning the ball off his cleats’ laces so it either hit and squiggled outside the white sideline and out of play or else landed on its point and bounced straight up and seemed to squat in the air, hovering and spinning, waiting for some downfield Terrier to kill it just by touching. The Special Teams Assistant told Orin that these were historically called coffin-corner kicks, and that Orin Incandenza was the best natural coffin-corner man he’d lived to see. You almost had to smile. Orin’s Full-Ride scholarship was renewed under the aegis of a brutaler but way more popular North American sport than competitive tennis. This was after the second home game, around the time that a certain Actaeonizingly pretty baton-twirler, invoking mass Pep during breaks in the action, seemed to begin somehow directing her glittering sideline routines at Orin in particular. So and then the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship of Orin’s life took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged personal phoneme, a love communicated — across grassy expanses, against stadiums’ monovocal roar — entirely through stylized repetitive motions — his functional, hers celebratory — their respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle they were both — in their different roles — trying to make as entertaining as possible.

But so the point was that the accuracy came after the distance. In his first couple games Orin had approached his fourth-down task as one of simply kicking the ball out of sight and past hope of return. The dreamy S.T. Assistant said this was a punter’s natural pattern of growth and development. Your raw force tends to precede your control. In his initial Home start, wearing a padless uniform that didn’t fit and a wide receiver’s number, he was summoned when B.U.’s first drive stalled on the 40 of a Syracuse team that had no idea it was in its last season of representing an American university. A side-issue. College-sport analysts would later use the game to contrast the beginning and end of different eras. But a side-issue. Orin had a book-long of 73 yards that day, and an average hang of eight-point-something seconds; but that first official punt, exhilarated — the carrot, the P.G.O.A.T., the monovocal roar of a major-sport crowd — he sent over the head of the Orangeman back waiting to receive it, over the goalposts and the safety-nets behind the goalposts, over the first three sections of seats and into the lap of an Emeritus theology prof in Row 52 who’d needed opera glasses to make out the play itself. It went in the books at 40 yards, that baptismal competitive punt. It was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams Asst. said you could have tender and sensitive intercourse during. The sound of the podiatric impact had silenced a major-sport crowd, and a retired USMC flier who always came with petroleum-jelly samples he hawked to the knuckle-chapped crowds in the Nickerson stands told his cronies in a Brookline watering hole after the game that this Incandenza kid’s first public punt had sounded just the way Rolling Thunder’s big-bellied Berthas had sounded, the exaggerated WHUMP of incendiary tonnage, way larger than life.

After four weeks, Orin’s success at kicking big egg-shaped balls was way past anything he’d accomplished hitting little round ones. Granted, the tennis and Eschaton hadn’t hurt. But it wasn’t all athletic, this affinity for the public punt. It wasn’t all just high-level competitive training and high-pressure experience transported inter-sport. He told Joelle van Dyne, she of the accent and baton and brainlocking beauty, told her in the course of an increasingly revealing conversation after kind of amazingly she had approached him at a Columbus Day Major Sport function and asked him to autograph a squooshy-sided football he’d kicked a hole through in practice — the deflated bladder had landed in the Marching Terriers’ sousaphone player’s sousaphone and had been handed over to Joelle after extrication by the lardy tubist, sweaty and dumb under the girl’s Ac-taeonizingly imploring gaze — asked him — Orin now also suddenly damp and blank on anything attractive to say or recite — asked him in an emptily resonant drawl to inscribe the punctured thing for her Own Personal Daddy, one Joe Lon van Dyne of Shiny Prize KY and she said also of the Dyne-Riney Proton Donor Reagent Corp. of nearby Boaz KY, and engaged him (O.) in a slowly decreasingly one-sided social-function-type conversation — the P.G.O.A.T. was pretty easy to stay in a one-to-one like tête-à-tête with, since no other Terrier could bring himself within four meters of her — and Orin gradually found himself almost meeting her eye as he shared that he believed it wasn’t all athletic, punting’s pull for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. He invoked the raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking out loud here. Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what might as well be God. None of tennis’s prim applause cut short by an umpire’s patrician shush. He said he was just speculating here, ad-libbing; he was meeting her eye and not drowning, his dread now transformed into whatever it had been dread of. He said the sound of all those souls as One Sound, too loud to bear, building, waiting for his foot to release it: Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a cliche, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as he’d never escaped himself on the court, a sense of a presence in the sky, the crowd-sound congregational, the stadium-shaking climax as the ball climbed and inscribed a cathedran arch, seeming to take forever to fall… It never even occurred to him to ask her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn’t have to strategize or even scheme. Later he knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn’t had to promise her anything, it turned out. It was all for free.

By the end of his freshman fall and B.U.’s championship of the Yankee Conference, plus its nonvictorious but still unprecedented appearance at Las Vegas’s dignitary-attended K-L-RMKI/Forsythia Bowl, Orin had taken his off-campus housing subsidy and moved with Joelle van Dyne the heart-stopping Kentuckian into an East Cambridge co-op three subway stops distant from B.U. and the all-new inconveniences of being publicly stellar at a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death in bars over stats and fealty.

Joelle had done the midnight Thanksgiving dinner at E.T.A., and survived Avril, and then Orin spent his first Xmas ever away from home, flying to Paducah and then driving a rented 4WD to kudzu-hung Shiny Prize, Kentucky, to drink toddies under a little white reusable Xmas tree with all red balls with Joelle and her mother and Personal Daddy and his loyal pointers, getting a storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon’s incredible Pyrex collection of every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper red, little red rectangles floating in the flasks for proof, Orin nodding a lot and trying incredibly hard and Joelle saying that Mr. van D.’s not once smiling at him was just His Way, was all, the way his own Moms had Her Way Joelle’d had trouble with. Orin wired Marlon Bain and Ross Real and the strabismic Nickerson that he was by all indications in love with somebody.

Freshman New Year’s Eve in Shiny Prize, far from the O.N.A.N.ite upheavals of the new Northeast, the last P.M. Before Subsidization, was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest very small amounts of cocaine. Orin had exited his own substance-phase about the time he discovered sex, plus of course the N./O.N.A.N.C.A.A.-urine considerations, and he declined it, the cocaine, but not in a judgmental or killjoy way, and found he liked being with his P.G.O.A.T. straight while she ingested, he found it exciting, a vicariously on-the-edge feeling he associated with giving yourself not to any one game’s definition but to yourself and how you unjudgmentally feel about somebody who’s high and feeling even freer and better than normal, with you, alone, under the red balls. They were a natural match here: her ingestion then was recreational, and he not only didn’t mind but never made a show of not minding, nor she that he abstained; the whole substance issue was natural and kind of free. Another reason they seemed star-fated was that Joelle had in her sophomore year decided to concentrate in Film/Cartridge, academically, at B.U. Either Film-Cartridge Theory or Film-Cartridge Production. Or maybe both. The P.G.O.A.T. was a film fanatic, though her tastes were pretty corporate: she told O. she preferred movies where ‘a whole bunch of shit blows up.’[101] Orinina low-key way introduced her to art film, conceptual and highbrow academic avant- and après-garde film, and taught her how to use some of InterLace’s more esoteric menus. He blasted up the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork’s own Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, which had a major impact on her. Right after Thanksgiving Himself let the P.G.O.A.T. understudy with Leith on the set of The American Century as Seen Through a Brick in return for getting to film her thumb against a plucked string. After an only mildly disappointing sophomore season O. flew with her to Toronto to watch part of the filming of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Himself would take Orin and his beloved out after dailies, entertaining Joelle with his freakish gift for Canadian-cab-hailing while Orin stood turtle-headed in his topcoat; and then later Orin would shepherd the two of them back to their Ontario Place hotel, stopping the cab to let them both throw up, fireman-carrying Joelle while he watched The Mad Stork negotiate his suite by holding on to walls. Himself showed them the U. Toronto Conference Center where he and the Moms had first met. This might have been the end’s start, gradually, in hindsight. Joelle that summer declined a sixth summer at the Dixie Baton-Twirling Institute in Oxford MS and let Himself give her a stage name and use her in rapid succession in Low Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to Desire, and Safe Boating Is No Accident, travelling with Himself and Mario while Orin stayed in Boston recuperating from minor surgery on a hypertrophied left quadriceps at a Massachusetts General Hospital where no fewer than four nurses and P.T.s in the Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation from their husbands, with custody.