Infinite jest - David Wallace

It is O72Oh. and they are through with the active part of dawn drills. Nwangi, at the edge of the hillside, is whistling the next shift over for opening sprints. Schtitt shares more overall impressions as minimum-wage aides dispense Kleenex and paper cones. Nwangi’s reedy voice carries; he’s telling the B’s he wishes to see nothing but assholes and elbows on these sprints. It’s unclear to Hal what this might connote. The A-players have formed those ragged rows behind the baseline again, and Schtitt paces back and forth.

‘Am seeing sluggish drilling, by sluggards. Not meaning insults. This is the fact. Motions are gone through. Barely minimal efforts. Cold, yes? The cold hands and nose with mucus? Thoughts on getting through, going in, hot showers, water very hot. A meal. The thoughts are drifting toward the comfort of ending. Too cold to demand the total, yes? Master Chu, too cold for tennis at the high level, yes?’

Chu: ‘It does seem pretty cold out, sir.’

‘Ah.’ Pacing back and forth with about-faces at every tenth step, stopwatch around his neck, pipe and pouch and pointer in his hands behind his back, nodding to himself, clearly wishing he had a third hand so he could stroke his white chin, pretending to ruminate. Every A.M. essentially the same, except when Schtitt does the females and the males get dressed down by deLint. All the older boys’ eyes are glazed with repetition. Hal’s tooth gives off little electric shivers with each inbreath, and he feels slightly unwell. When he moves his head slightly the monitor-glass bits’ glitter shifts and dances along the opposite fence in a sort of sickening way.

‘Ah.’ Turns crisply toward them, looking briefly skyward. ‘And when is hot? Too pretty hot for the total self on the court? The other hand of the spectrum? Ach. Is always something that is too. Master Incandenza who cannot quickly get behind lob’s descent so weight can move forvart into overhand,[187] please tell your thinking: it is always hot or cold, yes?’

A small smile, “s been our general observation out there, sir.’

‘So then then so, Master Chu, from California’s temperance regions?’

Chu brings down his hankie. ‘I guess we have to learn to adjust to conditions, sir, I believe is what you’re saying.’

A full sharp half-turn to face the group. ‘Is what I am not saying, young LaMont Chu, is why you cease to seem to give total effort of self since you begin with the clipping pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls. No? Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overdose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. Look here is low net high net. Opponent’s relatives heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury. Bad knee and back. Hurt groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is sore. A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something.’

His turns as he paces are crisp and used to punctuate. ‘Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world mside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.’ Pacing gradually faster, the turns becoming pirouettic. The older kids stare straight ahead; some of the younger follow every move of the pointer with wide eyes. Trevor Axford is bent at the waist and moving his head slightly, trying to get the sweat dripping off his face to spell something out on the surface. Schtitt is silent for two fast about-faces, ranging before them, tapping his jaw with the pointer. ‘Not ever I think this adjusting. To what, this adjusting? This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there. This is what we are making, no? New type citizen. Not of cold and wind outside. Citizens of this sheltering second world we are working to show you every dawn, no? To make your introduction.’ The Big Buddies translate Schtitt into accessible language for the littler kids, is a big part of their assignment.

‘Borders of court for singles Mr. Rader are what.’

‘Twenty-four by eight sir,’ sounding hoarse and thin.

‘So. Second world without cold or purple dots of bright for you is 23.8 meters, 8 I think.2 meters. Yes? In that world is joy because there is shelter of something else, of purpose past sluggardly self and complaints about uncomfort. I am speaking to not just LaMont Chu of the temperance world. You have a chance to occur, playing. No? To make for you this second world that is always the same: there is in this world you, and in the hand a tool, there is a ball, there is opponent with his tool, and always only two of you, you and this other, inside the lines, with always a purpose to keep this world alive, yes?’ The pointer-motions through all this become too orchestral and intricate to describe. ‘This second world inside the lines. Yes? Is this adjusting? This is not adjusting. This is not adjusting to ignore cold and wind and tired. Not ignoring “as if.” Is no cold. Is no wind. No cold wind where you occur. No? Not “adjust to conditions.” Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions.’

Looks around.

‘So put a lid on it about the fucking cold,’ says deLint, with his clipboard under his arm and his strangler-sized hands in his pockets, hopping a little in place.

Schtitt is looking around. Like most Germans outside popular entertainment, he gets quieter when he wants to impress or menace. (There are very few shrill Germans, actually.) ‘If it is hard,’ he says softly, hard to hear because of the rising wind, ‘difficult, for you to move between the two worlds, from cold hot wind and sun to this inside place inside the lines where is always the same,’ he says, seeming now to study the weatherman’s pointer he holds down and out with both hands, ‘it can be arranged for you gentlemen not to leave, ever here, this world inside the lines of court. You know. Can stay here until there is citizenship. Right here.’ The pointer is pointed at the spots they’re standing at breathing and blotting their faces and blowing their noses. ‘Can today put up Testar Lung, for world’s shelter. Sleep bags. Meals brought to you. Never across the lines. Never leave the court. Study here. A bucket for hygienic needs. At Gymnasium Kaiserslautern where I am privileged boy who whining about cold wind, we live inside tennis court for months, to learn to live inside. Very lucky days when they bring us meals. Not possible to cross a line for months of living.’

Left-hander Brian van Vleck picks a bad moment to break wind.

Schtitt shrugs, half-turning away from them to look off somewhere. ‘Or else leave here into large external world where is cold and pain without purpose or tool, eyelash in eye and pretty girl — not worry anymore about how to occur.’ Looks around. ‘No one is a prisoner here. Who would like to escape into large world? Master Sweeny?’

Little eyes down.

‘Mr. Coyle, with always too co-wold to give total?’

Coyle studies the vasculature on the inside of his elbow with deep interest as he shakes his head. John Wayne is joggling his head around like a Raggedy-Andy-head, stretching out the neck hardware. John Wayne is notoriously tight and can’t touch anything below the knee with straight legs during stretches.

‘Mr. Peter Beak with always the weeping to home on the telephone?’

The twelve-year-old says Not Me Sir several times.

Hal very subtly shoots in a small plug of Kodiak. Aubrey deLint has his arms crossed over the clipboard and is looking around beadily like a crow. Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection. The kids of the next shift are walking downhill and sprinting back up and walking down, warrior-whooping without conviction. The other male prorectors are drinking cones of Gatorade, clustered in the little pavilion, feet up on patio-chairs, Dunkel’s and Watson’s eyes closed. Neil Hartígan, in his traditional Tahitian shirt and Gaugin-motif sweater, has to stay sitting down to fit under the Gatorade awning.

‘Simple,’ Schtitt shrugs, so that the upraised pointer seems to stab at the sky. ‘Hit,’ he suggests. ‘Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else. Learn. Try. Drink your green juice. Perform the Butterfly exercises on all eight of these courts, please, to warm down. Mr. deLint, please to bring them back down, make sure of stretching the groins. Gentlemen: hit tennis balls. Fire at your will. Use a head. You are not arms. Arm in the real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either. Where is where you apply for citizenship in second world Mr. consciousness of ankle Incan-denza, our revenant?’

Hal can lean out and spit in a way that isn’t insolent. ‘Head, sir.’

‘Excuse?’

‘The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I’m going to occur as a player. The game’s two heads’ one world. One world, sir.’

Schtitt sweeps the pointer in an ironic morendo arc and laughs aloud:

‘Play.’

Part of Don Gately’s live-in Staff job is that he hurtles here and there on selected Ennet House errands. He cooks the communal supper on weekdays,[188] which means he does the House’s weekly shopping, which means that at least a couple times a week he gets to take Pat Montesian’s black 1964 Ford Aventura and drive to the Purity Supreme Market. The Aventura is an antique variant of the Mustang, the sort of car you usually only see waxed and static in car shows with somebody in a bikini pointing at it. Pat’s is functional and mint-reconditioned — her shadowy husband with something like ten years sober being big into cars — with such a wicked nice multilayer paint job that its black has the bottomless quality of water at night. It has two different alarm systems and a red metal bar you’re supposed to lock across the steering wheel when you get out. The engine sounds more like a jet engine than a piston engine, plus there’s a scoop poking periscopically from the hood, and for Gately the vehicle’s so terrifically tight and sleek it’s like being strapped into a missile and launched at the site of a domestic errand. He can barely fit in the driver’s seat. The steering wheel is about the size of an old video-arcade game’s steering wheel, and the thin canted six-speed shift is encased in a red leather baglet that smells strongly of leather. The height of the car’s roof compromises Gately’s driving-posture, and his right ham like exceeds the seat and squeezes against the gearshift so that shifting pinches his hip. He does not care. Some of the profoundest spiritual feelings of his sobriety so far are for this car. He’d drive this car if the driver’s seat was just a sharp pointy spike, he told John-ette Foltz. Johnette Foltz is the other live-in Staffer, though between ultra-rabid Commitment-activity in NA and a somehow damaged NA fiance she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker wheelchair, she’s around Ennet House less and less now, and there are rumblings about a possible replacement, which Gately and the heterosexual male residents pray daily will be the leggy alumna and part-time counselor Danielle Steen-bok, who’s rumored also to attend Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which engages everyone’s imagination to the max.

It’s a mark of serious regard and questionable judgment that Director Pat M. lets Don Gately drive her priceless Aventura, even just to like the Metro Food Bank or Purity Supreme, because Gately lost his license more or less permanently back in the Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster for getting pinched on a DUI in Peabody on a license that had already been suspended for a previous DUI in Lowell. This was not the only Loss Don Gately incurred as his chemical careers moved toward their life-reversing climax. Once every couple months now, still, he has to put on his brown dress slacks and slightly irregular green sportcoat from Brighton Budget Large ‘N Tall Menswear and take the commuter rail up to selected District Court venues on the North Shore and meet with his various P.D.s and P.O.s and caseworkers and sometimes appear briefly up in front of Judges and Review Boards to review the progress of his sobriety and reparations. When he first came to Ennet House last year, Gately had Bad-Check and Forgery issues, he had a Malicious Destruction of Property issue, plus two D&Ds and a bullshit Public Urination out of Tewksbury. He had a Break-and-Enter from a silent-alarmed Peabody mansion where he and a colleague got pinched before anything could get promoted. He had a Possession With Intent from 38 50-mg. tablets of Demerol[189] in a Pez container which he’d shoved down into the crack of the Peabody Finest’s cruiser’s back seat, but which got found anyway on the routine post-transport cruiser-search all cops perform when the arrestee’s pupils are unresponsive both to light and to head-slaps.

There was, too, of course, a certain darker issue, vis-à-vis a certain upscale Brookline home whose late owner had been eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in both the Globe and Herald. After eight months of indescribable psychic cringing, waiting for the legal footwear to drop on the Nuck-VIP issue — toward the end of his drug-use Gately’d gotten sloppy and crazy and stuck idiotically with a method of straight meter-shunting that he’d learned up at MCI-Billerica and was pretty sure now constituted a signature Gately M.O., since the older guy that’d taught it to him in the Billerica metal-shop had subsequently got out and gone to Utah and died of a morphine overdose (and like who on earth hopes to get reliable morphine in fucking Utah?) over two years ago — after eight months of cringing and nail-biting, the last couple months of the torment in Ennet House — even though the House’s D.S.A.S.-license put it legally off-limits to all constabulary without Pat Montesian’s physical presence and notarized permission — after he was down to the cuticles on all ten digits, Gately had very discreetly approached a certain Percodan-devoted court stenographer an old girlfriend had once dealt to, and had the guy make equally discreet inquiries, and found that the potential Murder-2 investigation of the botched burglary[190] had been taken over — pace the loud howls of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A. — by something federal the addled stenographer called ‘Non-Specific Services Bureau,’ whereupon the case vanished from any sort of investigative scene the stenographer could make inquiries about, though quiet rumor had it that current suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec, far north of the Enfield MA where Gately had been cringing his way to nightly AA meetings with his fingers in his mouth.