2π
(1 / total Toronto area in m.2)
of target center. Five megatons of heavy-hydrogen fusion yields at least 1,400,000 curies worth of strontium-90, meaning microcephalic kids in Montreal for roughly twenty-two generations, and yes wiseacre McKenna of AMNAT the world will probably notice the difference. Struck and Trevor Axford hoot loudly from under the green GATORADE THIRST AID awning of the open-air pavilion outside the fence along the south side of the East Courts, where (the pavilion) they and Michael Pemulis and Jim Troeltsch and Hal Incandenza are splayed on reticulate-mesh patio chairs in street clothes and with their street-sneakers up on reticulate-mesh foot-stools, Struck and Axford with suspiciously bracing Gatorades and what looks like a hand-rolled psychochemical cigarette of some sort being passed between them. 11/8 is an E.T.A. day of mandatory total R&R, though the public intoxicants are a bit much. Pemulis has a bag of red-skinned peanuts he hasn’t eaten much of. Trevor Axford has overinhaled from the cigarette and is hunched coughing, his forehead purple. Hal Incandenza is squeezing a tennis ball and leaning out far to starboard to spit into a NASA glass on the ground and struggling with a strong desire to get high again for the second time since breakfast v. a strong distaste about smoking dope with/in front of all these others, especially out in the open in front of Little Buddies, which seems to him to violate some sort of issue of taste that he struggles to articulate satisfactorily to himself. A tooth way back on the upper left is twinging electrically in the cold air. Pemulis, though from his twitchy right eye he’s clearly had recent recourse to some Tenuate (which helps explain the uneaten nuts), is currently abstaining and sitting on his hands for warmth, peanuts on the floor well away from Hal’s NASA glass. The pavilion is open on all sides and compliments of Stokely-van Camp Corp. and little more than like a big fancy tent with a green felt cover over the expanse’s real grass and white-iron patio furniture with reticulate plastic mesh; it’s mostly used for civilians’ spectation during exhibition matches on the East Show Courts 7, 8, 9; sometimes E.T.A.s cluster under it during drill-breaks in the summer in the heat of the day. The green awning gets taken down when they go into the Lung for the winter. Eschaton traditionally commandeers Courts 6–9, the really nice East Courts, unless there’s legit tennis going on. All the upperclass spectators except Jim Struck are former Eschaton devotees, though Hal and Troeltsch were both marginal. Troeltsch, who’s also pretty clearly had some Tenuate, is left-eye-nystagmic and is calling the action into a disconnected broadcast-headset, but Eschaton’s tough to enliven, verbally, even for the stimulated. Being generally too slow and cerebral.
Struck is telling Axford to put his hands over his head and Pemulis is telling Axford to hold his breath. Now, in a stress-heightened voice, Otis P. Lord says he needs Pemulis to real quick come zip inside through the Cyclone-fence gate south of Court 12 and walk across the theater’s four-court map to show Lord how to access the EndStat calculation that every thousand Roentgens of straight X and gamma produces 6.36 deaths per hundred POP and for the other 93.64 means reduced lifespans of
(Total R−100) (.0636(Total R−100)2)
years, meaning nobody’s exactly going to have to be pricing dentures in Minsk, so to speak, in the future. And so on.
After about half the planet’s extant megatonnage has been expended, things are looking pretty good for the AMNAT crew. Even though they and SOVWAR are SPASEXing back and forth with chilling accuracy — SOVWAR’s designated launcher is the butch and suspiciously muscular Ann Kittenplan (who at twelve-and-a-half looks like a Belorussian shot-putter and has to buy urine more than quarter-annually and has a way more lush and impressive mustache than for instance Hal himself could raise, and who gets these terrible rages) but so Kittenplan’s landed nothing worse than an indirect hit all afternoon, while AMNAT’s launchman is Todd (‘Postal Weight’) Possalthwaite, an endomorphic thirteen-year-old from Edina MN whose whole infuriating tennis-game consists of nothing but kick serves and topspin lobs, and who’s been the Eschaton MVL 128 for the last two years, and accuracy-wise has to be seen to be believed — still, both sides have artfully avoided the escalation to SACPOP that often takes both super-Combatants right out of the game; and AMNAT’s president LaMont Chu has used the excuse of Gopnik’s emotional strikes against the U.S. South, plus Penn’s arational lobbing at an Israel that at the summit was explicitly placed under AMNAT’s mutual-defense umbrella, has used these as golden tactical geese, racking up serious INDDIR-points against a SOUTHAF and INDPAK whose hasty defensive alliance and shaky aim produce nothing more than a lot of irradiated cod off Gloucester. Whenever there’s a direct hit, Troeltsch sits up straight and gets to use the exclamation he’s hit on for a kind of announcerial trademark: ‘Ho-ly CROW!’ But SOVWAR, beset from two vectors by AMNAT and IRLIBSYR (whose occasional lob Israel’s way AMNAT, drawing a storm of diplomatic protest from SOUTHAF and INDPAK, keeps instructing Lord to log as ‘regrettable mistargetings’), even with cutting-edge civil defense and EMP-resistant communications, poor old SOVWAR is absorbing such serious collateral SUFDDIR that it’s being inexorably impelled by game-theoretic logic to a position where it’s going to pretty much have no choice but to go SACPOP against AMNAT.
Now SOVWAR premier Timmy (‘Sleepy T.P.’) Peterson petitions O. P. Lord for capacity/authorization to place a scrambled call to Air Force One. ‘Scrambled call’ means they don’t yell at each other publicly across the courts’ map; Lord has to ferry messages from one side the other, complete with inclined heads and hushed tones etc. Premier and president exchange standard formalities. Premier apologizes for the Prince Albert crack. Hal, who’s declining all public chemicals, he’s decided, has a gander at Pemulis’s rough tallies of Combatants’ INDDIR/SUFDDIR ratios so far and agrees to bet Axford a U.S. finski no way AMNAT accepts SOVWAR’s invitation to possible terms. During actionless diplomatic intervals like this, Troeltsch is reduced to saying ‘What a beautiful day for an Eschaton’ over and over and asking people for their thoughts on the game until Pemulis tells him he’s cruising to get dope-slapped. There’s pretty much nobody around: Tavis and Schtitt are off giving what are essentially recruiting-talks at indoor clubs in the west suburbs; Pemulis’d let Tall Paul Shaw take the multi-emblazoned tow truck to take Mario down to the Public Gardens to watch the public I.-Day festivities with the Bolex H64; the local kids often go home for the day; a lot of the rest like to lie in the Viewing Rooms barely moving all I. Day until the dinner gala. Lord tear-asses back and forth between Courts 6 and 8, food cart clattering (the food cart, which Pemulis and Axford picked up from a kind of a seedy-looking orderly at SJOG hospital that Pemulis knew from Allston, has one of those crazy left front wheels that e.g. seems always to afflict only your particular grocery cart in supermarkets, and makes a hell of a clattering racket when rushed), ferrying messages which the 18-and-Under guys can tell AMNAT and SOVWAR are making deliberately oblique and obtuse so Lord has to do that much more running: God is never a particularly popular role to have to play, and Lord this fall has already been the victim of several boarding-school-type pranks too puerile even to detail. J. A. L. Struck Jr., who as usual has made a swine of himself with the suspiciously bracing cups of Gatorade, is abruptly ill all over his own lap and then sort of slumps to one side in his patio-chair with his face slack and white and doesn’t hear Pemulis’s quick analysis that Hal might as well give Axhandle the $ right now, because LaMont Chu can parse a Decision Tree with the best of them, and the D. Tree’s now indicating peace terms in whatever a D. Tree’s version of neon letters is, because the biggest priority for AMNAT right at 1515h. is to avoid having to SACPOP with SOVWAR, since if the game stops right now AMNAT’s probably won, whereas if they SACPOP with SOVWAR, trading massive infliction of INDDIR for massive body-shots of SUFDDIR, staying more or less even with each other, AMNAT’ll still be the same number of points ahead of SOVWAR overall, but it’ll have taken such heavy SUFDDIR debits that IRLIBSYR — never forget IRLIBSYR, brilliantly if obnoxiously Imam’d to
day by eleven-year-old eyebrowless Evan Ingersoll of Binghamton NNY — by staying out of the SACPOP-fest and lobbing sporadically at SOVWAR just often enough to rack up serious INDDIR but not quite enough to piss SOVWAR off enough to provoke the retaliatory SS10-wave that would mean significant SUFDDIR, could well have a serious shot at overtaking AMNAT for the overall Eschaton, especially when you factored in the f(x) advantages for bellicosity and nonexistent civil defense. At some point Axford has passed the remainder of the cigarette back over toward Struck without looking to see that Struck is no longer in his chair, and Hal finds himself taking the proffered duBois and smoking dope in public without even thinking about it or having consciously decided to go ahead. Sure enough, poor red-faced runny-nosed Lord is making way too many clattering trips between Courts 6 and 8 for it to mean anything but peace terms. Evan Ingersoll is positively strip-mining his right nostril. Finally Lord stops with the running back and forth and positions himself in the ad service box of Court 7 and loads a new diskette into the Yushityu. Struck moans something in a possibly foreign tongue. All the other upperclass spectators have scooted their chairs well away from Struck. Troeltsch extends a blood-blistered palm and rubs the tips of the hand’s fingers together at Hal, and Hal forks over the fin without handing the thin cigarette back over to Axford, somehow. Pemulis has leaned forward intently with his pointy chin in his hands; he seems completely absorbed.
Interdependence Day Y.D.A.U.’s Eschaton enters probably its most crucial phase. Lord, at his cart and portable TP, puts on the white beanie (n.b.: not the black or the red beanie) that signals a temporary cessation of SPASEX between two Combatants but allows all other Combatants to go on pursuing their strategic interests as they see fit. SOVWAR and AMNAT are thus pretty vulnerable right now. SOVWAR’s Premier Peterson and Air Marshal Kittenplan, carrying their white janitorial stockpile-bucket between them, walk across Europe and the Atlantic to parley with AMNAT President Chu and Supreme Commander Possalthwaite in what looks to be roughly Sierra Leone. Various territories smolder quietly. The other players are mostly standing around beating their arms against their chests to stay warm. A few hesitant white flakes appear and swirl around and melt into dark stars the moment they hit court. A couple ostensible world leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall’s first snow. Yesterday it had been warmer and rained. Axford speculates about whether snow will mean Schtitt might consent to inflate the Lung even before the Fundraiser two weeks hence. Struck is threatening to fall out of his chair. Pemulis, leaning forward intently, wearing his Mr. Howell yachting cap, ignores everyone. He hates to type and keeps his tallies via pencil and clipboard à la deLint. The idling Ford sedan is conspicuous for the excruciated full-color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of its right rear door. Hal and Axford are passing what looks to the Combatants like a suckerless Tootsie-Roll stick back and forth between them, and occasionally to Troeltsch. Trevor (‘The Axhandle’) Axford has a total of only three-and-a-half digits on his right hand. From West House you can hear Mrs. Clarke and the time-anda-half holiday kitchen staff preparing the Interdependence Day gala dinner, which always includes dessert.
Now REDCHI, itself quietly trying to rack up some unanswered INDDIR, sends a towering topspin lob into INDPAK’s quadrant, scoring what REDCHI claims is a direct hit on Karachi and what warheadless INDPAK claims is only an indirect hit on Karachi. It’s an uneasy moment: a dispute such as this would never occur in the real God’s real world, since the truth would be manifest in the actual size of the actual wienie roast in the actual Karachi. But God here is played by Otis P. Lord, and Lord is number-crunching so fiendishly at the cart’s Yushityu, trying to confirm the verisimilitude of the peace terms AMNAT and SOVWAR are hashing out, that he can’t even pretend to have seen where REDCHI’s strike against INDPAK landed w/ respect to Karachi’s T-shirt — which is admittedly kind of mashed and woppsed up, though this could be primarily from breezes and feet — and in his lapse of omniscience cannot see how he’s supposed to allocate the relevant INDDIR- and SUFDDIR-points. Troeltsch doesn’t know whether to say ‘Holy CROW!’ or not. Lord, vexed by a lapse it’s tough to see how any mortal could have avoided, appeals over to Michael Pemulis for an independent ruling; and when Pemulis gravely shakes his white-hatted head, pointing out that Lord is God and either sees or doesn’t, in Eschaton, Lord has an intense little crying fit that’s made abruptly worse when now J. J. Penn of INDPAK all of a sudden gets the idea to start claiming that now that it’s snowing the snow totally affects blast area and fire area and pulse-intensity and maybe also has fallout implications, and he says Lord has to now completely redo everybody’s damage parameters before anybody can form realistic strategies from here on out.
Pemulis’s chairlegs shriek and make red-skin peanuts spill out in a kind of cornucopic cone-shape and he’s up in his capacity as sort of eminence grise of Eschaton and ranging up and down just outside the theater’s chainlink fencing, giving J. J. Penn the very roughest imaginable side of his tongue. Besides being real sensitive to any theater-boundary-puncturing threats to the map’s integrity — threats that’ve come up before, and that as Pemulis sees it threaten the game’s whole sense of animating realism (which realism depends on buying the artifice of 1300 m.2 of composition tennis court representing the whole rectangular projection of the planet earth) — Pemulis is also a sworn foe of all Penns for all time: it had been J. J. Penn’s much older brother Miles Penn, now twenty-one and flailing away on the grim Third-World Satellite pro tour, playing for travel-expenses in bleak dysenteric locales, who when Pemulis first arrived at E.T.A. at age eleven had christened him Michael Penisless and had had Pemulis convinced for almost a year that if he pressed on his belly-button his ass would fall off. 129
‘It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!’ Pemulis yells at Penn, whose lower lip is out and quivering. Pemulis’s face is the face of a man who will someday need blood-pressure medication, a constitution the Tenuate doesn’t help one bit. Troeltsch is sitting up straight and speaking very intensely and quietly into his headset. Hal, who in his day never wore the beanie, and usually portrayed some marginal nation somewhere out in the nuclear boondocks, finds himself more intrigued by Penn’s map/ territory faux pas than upset by it, or even amused.
Pemulis turns back to the pavilion and seems to be looking at Hal in some kind of appeal: ‘Jaysus!’
‘Except is the territory the real world, quote unquote, though!’ Axford calls across to Pemulis, who’s pacing like the fence is between him and some sort of prey. Axford knows quite well Pemulis can be fucked with when he’s like this: when he’s hot he always cools down and becomes contrite.
Struck tries to yell out a Kertwang on Pemulis but can’t get the mega-phone he makes of his hands to fit over the mouth.
‘The real world’s what the map here stands for!’ Lord lifts his head from the Yushityu and cries over at Axhandle, trying to please Pemulis.
‘Kind of looks like real-world-type snow from here, M.P.,’ Axford calls out. His forehead’s still maroon from the coughing fit. Troeltsch is trying to describe the distinction between the symbolic map of the gear-littered courts and the global strategic theater it stands for using all and only sports-broadcast clichés. Hal looks from Axhandle to Pemulis to Lord.
Struck finally falls out of his chair with a clunk but his legs are still somehow entangled in the legs of the chair. It starts to snow harder, and dark stars of melt begin to multiply and then merge all over the courts. Otis Lord is trying to type and wipe his nose on his sleeve at the same time. J. Gopnik and K. McKenna are running around well outside their assigned quadrants with their tongues outstretched.
‘Real-world snow isn’t a factor if it’s falling on the fucking map!’
Ann Kittenplan’s crew-cutted head now protrudes from the kind of rugby-scrum AMNAT’s and SOVWAR’s heads of state form around Lord’s computational food cart.
‘For Christ’s sake leave us alone!’ she shrieks at Pemulis. Troeltsch is going ‘Oh, my’ into his headset. O. Lord is struggling with the cart’s protective umbrella, his head’s beanie’s little white propeller rotating in a rising wind. A light dusting of snow is starting to appear in the players’ hair.
‘It’s only real-world snow if it’s already in the scenario!’ Pemulis keeps directing everything at Penn, who hasn’t said a word since his original suggestion and is busy sort of casually kicking the Karachi-shirt over into the Arabian Sea, clearly hoping the original detonation will get forgotten about in all the metatheoretical fuss. Pemulis rages along the East Courts’ western fence. The combination of several Tenuate spansules plus Eschaton-adrenaline bring his blue-collar Irish right out. He’s a muscular but fundamentally physically narrow guy: head, hands, the sharp little wad of cartilage at the tip of Pemulis’s nose — everything about him seems to Hal to taper and come to a point, like a bad El Greco. Hal leans to spit and watches him pace like a caged thing as Lord works feverishly over EndStat’s peace-terms decision-matrix. Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob. Though Hal hasn’t had more than four or five total very small hits off the public duBois, this is a prime example of what’s sometimes called ‘marijuana thinking.’ You can tell because Hal’s leaned way over to spit but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and hasn’t yet spit, even though he’s right in bombing-position over the NASA glass. It also occurs to him that he finds the real-snow/unreal-snow snag in the Eschaton extremely abstract but somehow way more interesting than the Eschaton itself, so far.
Infinite Jest Page 51
