Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘The point is togetherness?’

  ‘Shouldn’t there be violas for this part, Hal, if this is the point?’

  ‘Ingersoll, I — ’

  Beak’s cold-weather adenoids wake him periodically, and he gurgles and his eyes roll up briefly before they level out and he settles back, seeming to stare.

  Hal creatively visualizes that Smith’s velvety backhand is him slo-mo slapping Evan Ingersoll into the opposite wall. Ingersoll’s parents founded the Rhode Island version of the service where you order groceries by TP and teenagers in fleets of station wagons bring them out to you, instead of supermarkets. ‘What the point is is that we’d all just spent three hours playing challenges against each other in scrotum-tightening cold, assailing each other, trying to take away each other’s spots on the squads. Trying to defend them against each other’s assaults. The system’s got inequality as an axiom. We know where we stand entirely in relation to one another. John Wayne’s over me, and I’m over Struck and Shaw, who two years back were both over me but under Troeltsch and Schacht, and now are over Troeltsch who as of today is over Freer who’s substantially over Schacht, who can’t beat anyone in the room except Pemulis since his knee and Crohn’s Disease got so much worse, and is barely hanging on in terms of ranking, and is showing incredible balls just hanging on. Freer beat me 4 and 2 in the quarters of the U.S. Clays two summers ago, and now he’s on the B-squad and five slots below me, six slots if Troeltsch can still beat him when they play again after that illness-default.’

  ‘I am over Blott. I am over Ingersoll,’ Idris Arslanian nods.

  ‘Well Blott’s just ten, Idris. And you’re under Chu, who’s on an odd year and is under Possalthwaite. And Blott’s under Beak and Ingersoll simply by virtue of age-division.’

  ‘I know just where I stand at all times,’ muses Ingersoll.

  SyberVision edits its visualization sequences with a melt-filter so Stan Smith’s follow-through loops seamlessly into his backswing for the exact same next stroke; the transitions are gauzy and dreamlike. Hal struggles to hike himself up onto his elbows:

  ‘We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’

  ‘E Unibus Pluram,’ Ingersoll muses.

  Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll’s face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. ‘So how can we also be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris’s singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot again?’

  ‘I do not require his root, for I am ready.’ Arslanian bares canines.

  ‘Well that’s the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?’

  ‘You’re talking about community. This is a community-spiel.’

  ‘I think alienation,’ Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he’s talking to Ingersoll. ‘Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism.’ His upper lip goes up and down over his teeth.

  Hal says, ‘In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness.’

  Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak’s palsied eyes and little limb-spasms signify a troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose furiously with the heel of his hand.

  ‘I miss my dog,’ Ingersoll concedes.

  ‘Ah.’ Hal rolls onto one elbow to hike a finger into the air. ‘Ah. But then so notice the instant group-cohesion that formed itself around all the pissing and moaning down there why don’t you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering unites us. They want to let us sit around and bitch. Together. After a bad P.M. set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.’

  ‘Mr. deLint.’

  ‘Dr. Tavis. Schtitt.’

  ‘DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt’s henchmen and henchwomen.’

  ‘I hate them!’ Blott cries out.

  ‘And you’ve been here this long and you still think this hatred’s an accident?’

  ‘Purchase a clue Kent Blott!’ Arslanian says.

  ‘The large and economy-size clue, Blott,’ Ingersoll chimes.

  Beak sits up and says ‘God no not with pliers!’ and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble.

  Hal is pretending incredulity. ‘You guys haven’t noticed yet the way Schtitt’s whole staff gets progressively more foul-tempered and sadistic as an important competitive week comes up?’

  Ingersoll up on one elbow at Blott. ‘The Port Washington meet. I.D. Day. The Tucson WhataBurger the week after. They want us in absolute top shape, Blott.’

  Hal lies back and lets Smith’s ballet de se loosen his facial muscles again, staring. ‘Shit, Ingersoll, we’re all in top shape already. That’s not it. That’s the least of it. We’re off the charts, shape-wise.’

  Ingersoll: ‘The average North American kid can’t even do one pull-up, according to Nwangi.’

  Arslanian points down at his own chest. ‘Twenty-eight pull-ups.’

  ‘The point,’ Hal says softly, ‘is that it’s not about the physical anymore, men. The physical stuff’s just pro forma. It’s the heads they’re working on here, boys. Day and year in and out. A whole program. It’ll help your attitude to look for evidence of design. They always give us something to hate, really hate together, as big stuff looms. The dreaded May drills during finals before the summer tour. The post-Christmas crackdown before Australia. The November freezathon, the snot-fest, the delay in upping the Lung and getting us under cover. A common enemy. I may despise K. B. Freer, or’ (can’t quite resist) ‘Evan Ingersoll, or Jennie Bash. But we despise Schtitt’s men, the double matches on top of runs, the insensitivity to exams, the repetition, the stress. The loneliness. But we get together and bitch, all of a sudden we’re giving something group expression. A community voice. Community, Evan. Oh they’re cunning. They give themselves up to our dislike, calculate our breaking points and aim for just over them, then send us into the locker room with an unstructured forty-five before Big Buddy sessions. Accident? Random happenstance? You guys ever see evidence of the tiniest lack of coolly calculated structure around here?’

  ‘The structure’s what I hate the most of all,’ Ingersoll says.

  ‘They know what’s going on,’ Blott says, bouncing a little on his tailbone. ‘They want us to get together and complain.’

  ‘Oh they’re cunning,’ Ingersoll says.

  Hal curls himself a bit on one elbow to put in a small plug of Kodiak. He can’t tell whether Ingersoll’s being insolent. He lies there very slack, visualizing Smith pounding overheads down onto Ingersoll’s skull. Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle’s diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll — this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama’s boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself — that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself he can’t or won’t accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll’s in the room. He wishes him ill.

  Blott and Arslanian are looking at him. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘He is tired,’ Arslanian says.

  Ingersoll drums idly on his own ribcage.

  Hal usually gets secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he hasn’t gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit — some rebound effect from B. Hope’s desiccating action — and his eyes start to water as if he’s just yawned. The smokeless tobacco started almost as an excuse to spit, sometimes. Hal’s struck by the fact that he reall
y for the most part believes what he’s said about loneliness and the structured need for a we here; and this, together with the Ingersoll-repulsion and spit-flood, makes him uncomfortable again, brooding uncomfortably for a moment on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high in secret more than on the getting high itself, possibly. He always gets the feeling there’s some clue to it on the tip of his tongue, some mute and inaccessible part of the cortex, and then he always feels vaguely sick, scanning for it. The other thing that happens if he doesn’t do one-hitters sometime before dinner is he feels slightly sick to his stomach, and it’s hard to eat enough at dinner, and then later when he does go off and get off he gets ravenous, and goes out to Father & Son Market for candy, or else floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the Headmaster’s House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats like such a feral animal that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see him pack it away, but then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.

  ‘So the suffering gets less lonely,’ Blott prompts him.

  Two curves down the hall in V.R.5, where the viewer’s on the south wall and doesn’t get turned on, the Canadian John Wayne’s got LaMont Chu and ‘Sleepy T.P.’ Peterson and Kieran McKenna and Brian van Vleck.

  ‘He’s talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,’ Chu tells the other three. They’re on the floor Indian-style, Wayne standing with his back against the door, rotating his head to stretch the neck. ‘His point is that progress towards genuine Show-caliber mastery is slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than temperament.’

  ‘Is this right Mr. Wayne?’

  Chu says ‘… that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’

  ‘Plateaux,’ Wayne says, looking at the ceiling and pushing the back of his head isometrically against the door. ‘With an X. Plateaux.’

  The inactive viewer’s screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day. Chu’s cross-legged posture is text-book. ‘What John’s saying is the types who don’t hang in there and slog on the patient road toward mastery are basically three. Types. You’ve got what he calls your Despairing type, who’s fine as long as he’s in the quick-improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn’t got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog, and he can’t stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?’

  ‘Geronimo!’ the other kids yell, not quite in sync.

  ‘He bails, right,’ Chu says. He refers to index cards. Wayne’s head makes the door rattle slightly. Chu says, ‘Then you’ve got your Obsessive type, J.W. says, so eager to plateau-hop he doesn’t even know the word patient, much less humble or slog, when he gets stalled at a plateau he tries to like will and force himself off it, by sheer force of work and drill and will and practice, drilling and obsessively honing and working more and more, as in frantically, and he overdoes it and gets hurt, and pretty soon he’s all chronically messed up with injuries, and he hobbles around on the court still obsessively overworking, until finally he’s hardly even able to walk or swing, and his ranking plummets, until finally one P.M. there’s a little knock on his door and it’s deLint, here for a little chat about your progress here at E.T.A.’

  ‘Banzai! El Bailo! See ya!’

  ‘Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You’ve got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he’s made to get to the plateau, and doesn’t mind staying at the plateau because it’s comfortable and familiar, and he doesn’t worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he’s designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still — his whole game is based on this plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he’ll say he doesn’t care, he says he’s in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he’s content. Until one day there’s a quiet knock at the door.’

  ‘It’s DeLint!’

  ‘A quiet chat!’

  ‘Geronzai!’

  Van Vleck looks up at Wayne, who’s now turned away with his hands against the door frame, shoving, one leg back, stretching the right calf. ‘This is your advice, Mr. Wayne sir? This isn’t Chu palming himself off as you again?’

  They all want to know how Wayne does it, #2 continentally in 18’s at just seventeen, and very likely #1 after the WhataBurger and already getting calls from ProServ agents Tavis has Lateral Alice Moore screen. Wayne’s the most sought-after Big Buddy at E.T.A. You have to apply for Wayne as Buddy by random drawing.

  LaMont Chu and T. P. Peterson are sending van Vleck optical daggers as Wayne turns around to stretch a hip-flexor and says he’s said pretty much all he has to say.

  ‘Todder, I admire your savvy, I admire a kid’s certain worldly skepticism, no matter how misplaced it is here. So even though it fucks me on the odds, so there’s now like practically no way I can come out square,’ M. Pemulis says in V.R.2, subdorm C, sitting on the very edge of the divan with a few feet of beige shag between him and his four kids, all cross-legged on cushions; he says, ‘I’ll reward your worldly skepticism this once by letting you try it with only two, so like I’ve got just two cards here, and I hold them up, one in each hand….’ He stops abruptly, knocks his temple with the heel of a hand that holds a Jack. ‘Whoa, what am I thinking. We all gotta put in our fiveski here first.’

  Otis P. Lord clears his throat: ‘The ante.’

  ‘Or it’s called the pot,’ says Todd Possalthwaite, laying a five on the little pile.

  ‘Jaysus I’m thinking, sweet Jaysus what am I getting into with these kids that speak the lingo like veteran Jersey-shore croupiers. I got to be missing a widget or something. ’t the fuck, though, you know what I’m saying? So Todd man you choose just one of the cards, we got the clubby Jack and the spade Queen here, and you choose… and so down they go both of them face-down, and I like swirl them around on the floor a little, not shuffle but swirl so they’re in plain view the whole time, and you follllllowwwwwwww the card you chose, around and around, which like with three cards maybe I’ve got some chance you lose track but with two? With just two?’

  Ted Schacht in V.R.3 at his giant plasticene oral demonstrator, the huge dental mock-up, white planks of teeth and obscene pink gums, twine-size floss anchored around both wrists:

  ‘The vital thing here gentlemen being not the force or how often you rotate to particulate-free floss but the motion, see, a soft sawing motion, gently up and down both ancipitals of the enamel’ — demonstrating down the side of a bicuspid big as the kids’ heads, the plasticene gum-stuff yielding with sick sucking sounds, Schacht’s five kids all either glazed-looking or glued to their watch’s second-hand — ‘and then here’s the key, here’s the thing so few people understand: down below the ostensible gumline into the basal recessions at either side of the gingival mound that obtrudes between the teeth, down below, where your most pernicious particulates hide and breed.’

  Troeltsch holds court in his, Pemulis and Schacht’s room in Subdorm C, supinely upright against both of his and one of Schacht’s pillows, the
vaporizer chugging, one of his kids holding Kleenex at the ready.

  ‘Boys, what it is is I’ll tell you it’s repetition. First last always. It’s hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut. It’s making the same pivots and lunges and strokes over and over and over again, at you boys’s age it’s reps for their own sake, putting results on the back burner, why they never give anybody the boot for insufficient progress under fourteen, it’s repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe and sweat. It’s no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. At like fourteen, give and take, they figure here. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don’t need for the mechanics anymore, after they’ve sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball. The ball starts being something that you just know ought to be in the air, spinning. This is when they start getting on you about concentration. Right now of course you have to concentrate, there’s no choice, it’s not wired down into the language yet, you have to think about it every time you do it. But wait till fourteen or fifteen. Then they see you as being at one of the like crucial plateaus. Fifteen, tops. Then the concentration and character shit starts. Then they really come after you. This is the crucial plateau where character starts to matter. Focus, self-consciousness, the chattering head, the cackling voices, the choking-issue, fear versus whatever isn’t fear, self-image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped cold-footed men inside your mind, cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor. Now these start to matter. Thirteen at the earliest. Staff looks at a range of thirteen to fifteen. Also the age of manhood-rituals in various cultures. Think about it. Until then, repetition. Until then you might as well be machines, here, is their view. You’re just going through the motions. Think about the phrase: Going Through The Motions. Wiring them into the motherboard. You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it right now.’