Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  GENTLE DECLARES ALL U.S. TERRITORY NORTH OF LINE FROM SYRACUSE TO TICONDEROGA, NY, TICONDEROGA, NY TO SALEM, MA FEDERAL DISASTERS, OFFERS FEDERAL AID FOR UPSTATE AND NEW ENGLAND RESIDENTS WISHING TO RELOCATE, CLAIMS FUNDS FOR EPA CLEAN-UP ‘ARE NOT WITHIN THE MAP OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE’ [SIC] — Header from Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner Eventually Fired Even from Sub-header Dept. for Exceeding Verbal Parameters and Now Starting to Get in the Same Hot Water All Over Again at a Much Less Prestigious Daily Paper;

  and so on and so forth. Himself’s old optical editing lab has imposing Compugraphic typesetting and matteing facilities: it’s hard to tell which of the headlines and other stuff are for real and which have been dickied with, usually, if you’re too young to recall the actual chronology. At least some of the headlines are phony, the kids know; miniature golf indeed. But the accuracy of Mario’s puppeteered account of the seminal meeting of what’s come to be known as ‘The Concavity Cabinet’ gets to stand uncontested by fact. Nobody who wasn’t actually there at the 16 January meeting knows just what was said when or by whom, the Gentle administration being of the position that extant Oval Office recording equipment was a veritable petri dish of organisms. Gentle’s claque of doo-wopping Motown cabinet-puppets have purple dresses and matching lipstick and nail polish, and bouffants so blindingly Afrosheened that there had been special lighting and film-speed problems in the custodial closet:

  SEC. TREAS.: You’re looking vigorous and hale today, sir.

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

  PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: May I ask, Señor, why my distinguished co-Vice Chair of O.N.A.N. is not with us in attendance today.

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

  MR. RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: The president’s taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has authorized me as his oral proxy on this may I say historically opportune day. The Canadian P.M.’s in a bit of a snit. He prefers to whinge in the media surrounded by Mounted Reserves and is off somewhere far from Québec in a Kevlar vest doing whatever the Canadian word is for pouting, doubtless poring over opinion polls prepared by chinless guys in Canadian hornrims.

  MEX. AND SOME OTHER SECS.: [Various puzzled apprehensive noises.]

  TINE: I’m sure you’ve all been briefed on the unprecedented but not unopportune crisis that obtains north of the almost perfectly horizontal line between Buffalo and Northeast Mass.

  TINE arranges photos on seal-crested easels: a New Hampshire runoff-ditch running off stuff a color nobody’s quite ever seen before; a wide-angle horizon-stretching vista of skull-embossed drums, with short-haired guys in white body-suits walking around adjusting knobs and reading dials on shiny hand-held devices; a very weird chemical sunrise, close in hue to the Cabinet members’ lipstick, over some forests in southern Maine that look way taller and generally lusher than January forests ought properly to be; a couple indoor-lit snapshots of a multi-eyed infant crawling backwards, its ear to the carpet, dragging its shapeless head like a sack of spuds. The last display’s a real heartstringplucker.

  ALL SECS.: [Various concerned and sympathetic noises.]

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

  TINE: Gentlemen, let the president just say that no one’s prepared to say they’re quite sure what’s happened, or just which quote unquote loyal part of the Union or Organization might reasonably be said to be culpable, but it’s not the administration’s immediate concern to point the levelling finger of blame or aspersion just yet or right now. Our concern is to act, to respond, and act and respond decisively. Swiftly. And decisively.

  SEC. INT.: We’ve come up with some extremely preliminary projections on the costs of detoxifying and/or deradiating the better part of four U.S. states, sir, and I have to tell you gentlemen that even with the atmosphere of uncertainty at this point in time of not yet having a definitive handle on just what kinds and combinations of compounds were — umm — found there and how wide your — not ‘your’ personally, sir, J.G., ‘your’ just being a shorthand way for — to say something like I suppose simply ‘the’ — how wide the dispersal- and toxicity-parameters are shaping up to look — umm — I have to relate that the figures we’re looking at are almost staggeringly multi-zeroed, sir, gentlemen.

  TINE: Tighten in and expand on staggering if you will, Blaine.

  SEC. INT.: We’re talking at bare minimum a staggering amount of Private-Sector-caliber guys in white suits and helmets, not unlike your own helmet, sir, with a commensurately massive tab for the suits and helmets, plus gloves and throwaway booties, and a lot of really shiny equipment with a great many knobs and dials. Sir.

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

  TINE: Gentlemen, let’s pay the president the due tribute of proceeding right to the bone of the matter. I think the president’s position is rendered patently clear by the pure oxygen he’s been forced to take here with us today. No way we can possibly permit territory publicly exposed as this befouled and waste-impacted to continue to besmirch the already tight and tidier territory of a new era’s U.S. of A. The president shudders at the mere thought. Just the mere thought of it forces him to resort to oxygen.

  PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: I do not anticipate what options your federal and our continental government might consider options to this permitting, señors.

  OTHER SECS.: [Tentative puzzled nods and slightly off-key agreement-noises.]

  TINE: Having been elected and conferred with a mandate on the clear and public anti-waste platform of the C.U.S.P., the president is inexorably driven to see the only viable option being to give it away.

  SEC. STATE: Give it away?

  TINE: Expressly.

  SEC. STATE: You mean simply tell the truth? That Johnny’s C.U.S.P. platform necessitates — given the unfeasibility of shooting national wastes into space, since NASA hasn’t put a successful launch on in over a decade and the rockets simply fall over and blow up and become more waste — that — given the amount of additional waste annular fusion’s start-up is going to start putting in circulation the minute start-up commences — that his platform all but necessitates the second-tier option of transforming certain vast stretches of U.S. territory into uninhabitable and probably barbed-wired landfills and fly-shrouded dumps and saprogenic magenta-fogged toxic-disposal sites? Concede publicly that those EPA softball games weren’t casual or pick-up in the least? That you allowed Rod the God here to convince you 156 to authorize Unspecified Services to undertake massive toxic dumping and skull-softening against local statute for basically the same hard-choice, Greater-Good-of-the-Union reasons that prompted Lincoln to suspend the Constitution and jail Confederate activists without charge for the duration of the last great U.S. territorial crisis? And/or not least that these particular territories were chosen essentially because New Hampshire and Maine didn’t let C.U.S.P. on their Independent ballots and the Mayor of Syracuse had the misfortune to sneeze on the president during a campaign swing? Give away the entire strategy the two of you have apparently huddled in some sterilized corner and mapped out? Can this be what you mean by Give it away, Rod?

  TINE: Bôf. Don’t be a maroon, Billingsley. The it in the president’s Give it away signifies the territory.

  GENTLE: Hhhaaaahhh.

  TINE: We’re going to give away the whole benighted smirch of ground.

  SEC. INT.: Export it, one might venture to sally.

  TINE: It’s a novel and pro-active resource no prior statesman’s had the vision or environmental cojones to envision. If there’s one natural resource we’ve still got in spades, it’s territory.

  PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. AND SEVERAL OTHER SECS.: [Attempt to bring eyebrows back down below hairlines.]

  TINE: President Gentle’s decided we’re going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past. Manifest a new destiny. Boys, we’re going to institute some serious intra-O.N.A.N. interdependence.

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhh.

  TINE: Gentlemen, we
’re going to make an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast American territories, in return for the faute-de-mieux continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to those territories. Allow me to illustrate what Lur— just what the president means.

  TINE places two large maps (also courtesy of Ms. Heath’s crafts class) on Govt.-issue easels. They look both to be of the good old U.S.A.. The first map is your more or less traditional standard issue, with the U.S. looking really big in white and Mexico’s northern fringes a tasteful ladies’-room pink and Canada’s brooding bottom hem a garish, almost menacing red. The second North American map looks neither old nor all that good, traditionally speaking. It has a concavity. It looks sort of like some person or persons have taken a deep wicked canine-intensive bite out of its upper right bit, in which an ascending and then descending line has its near-right-angle at what looks to be the historic and now hideously befouled Ticonderoga NY; and the areas north of that jagged line look to be that pushy shade of Canadian red, now. Some little rubber practical-joke-type flies, the blue-bellied kind that live on filth, are stapled in a raisinesque dispersal over the red Concavity. TINE has a trademark telescoping weatherman’s pointer that he plays with instead of using to point at much of anything.

  SEC. STATE: A kind of ecological gerrymandering?

  TINE: The president invites you gentlemen to conceive these two visuals as a sort of before-and-after representation of ‘projected intra-O.N.A.N. territorial re-allocations,’ or some public term like that. Redemisement’s probably too technical.

  SEC. STATE: Still respectfully not quite sure we at State see how inhabited territories can be sold to the public as quote expendable when a decent slice of that public by all reports inhabits that territory, Rod.

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh.

  TINE: The president’s pro-actively chosen not to hedge that high-cost tough-choice possibly unpopular lonely-at-the-top fact one bit, guys. We’ve been moving forward full-bore on anticipating various highly involved relocation scenarios. Scenaria? Is it scenarios or scenaria? 157 Marty’s on-task on the scenario front. Care to bring us to speed, Marty?

  SEC. TRANSP.: We foresee a whole lot of people moving south really really fast. We foresee cars, light trucks, heavier trucks, buses, Winnebagos — Winnebaga? — commandeered vans and buses, and possibly commandeered Winnebagos or Winnebaga. We foresee 4-wheel-drive vehicles, motorcycles, Jeeps, boats, mopeds, bicycles, canoes and the odd makeshift raft. Snowmobiles and cross-country skiers and roller-skaters on those strange-looking roller-skates with only one line of wheels down each skate. We foresee backpack-type folks speed-walking in walking-shorts and boots and Tyrolean hats and a stick. We foresee some folks just outright running like hell, possibly, Rod. We foresee homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods. We foresee BMW war-surplus motorcycles with sidecars and guys in goggles and leather helmets. We foresee the occasional skateboard. We foresee a strictly temporary breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened stampeding animals. We foresee looting, shooting, price-gouging, ethnic tensions, promiscuous sex, births in transit.

  SEC. H.E.W.: Rollerblades I think you mean, Marty.

  SEC. TRANSP.: All feedback and input welcome, Trent. Someone junior in the office foresaw hang-gliders. I don’t foresee demographically significant hang-gliding, personally, at this juncture. Nor I need to stress do we foresee anything you could call true refugees.

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhhhhhhh.

  TINE: Absolutely not, Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like refugee is going to be applicable here. I cannot overstress this too assertively. Eminent nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era’s breed of new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul American territory: bien sûr.

  SEC. STATE: Bien sûr?

  PRESS SEC. [w/ queer combination of bangs and bouffant and pair of bifocals on slim bead chain around neck and resting in cleavage]: Neil over in Spin has been poring through resource materials. Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both — I’m quoting direct from Neil’s memo here — if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in transit. It’s true that Neil’s key resource here is Pol and Diang’s Totalitarian’s Guide to Iron-Fisted Spin, but they’re thinking this fact can be spun away from without much to-do, over in Spin.

  GENTLE: Hhhuuuhh.

  TINE: Marty and Jay’s staffs have been day-and-nighting on strategies to forestall anything like ostensible refugeeism.

  PRESS SEC. [Holding brillantined head at that angle people in bifocals have to, to read]: Anything bovine with curvy horns gets shot on sight. Rod’s top U.S.O. operatives in shiny trucks at strategic intervals handing out free toddler-wear courtesy of Sears’ Winnie-the-Pooh line, to nip nakedness in the bud.

  SEC. TREAS.: Still hammering out the boilerplate on the Sears agreement, Rod.

  TINE: The president has every confidence, Chet. I believe Marty and Jay were just getting to the transportational coup de grâce.

  SEC. TRANSP.: We’re soliciting bids for signs for up there making it legal to drive really really fast in the breakdown lanes.

  PRESS SEC.: South-bound breakdown lanes.

  ALL SECS.: [Harmonic murmurs.]

  SEC. STATE: Still don’t see why not just retain cartographic title to the toxified areas, relocate citizenry and portable capital, use them as our own designated disposal area. Sort of the back of the hall closet or special wastebasket underneath the national kitchen sink as it were. Hammer out systems for delivering all national refuse and waste into the area, cordon it off, keep the rest of the nation edible-off as per Johnny’s platform.

  SEC. H.E.W.: Why cede vitally needed waste-disposal resources to a recalcitrant ally?

  TINE: Billingsley, Trent, and yet who as I stated says we can’t utilize these territories for just this purpose no matter whose nation’s name they’re in? Interdependence is as Interdependence does, after all.

  PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: ¿Qué?

  GENTLE: Hhhaaahh?

  TINE: Yet Billingsley’s right that this kind of sprawling, depopulated, newly Canadian territory can accommodate the tidiness-needs of this whole great continental alliance for decades to come. After that, look out Yukon!

  PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. [Face green and mask wetly dark over upper lip]: May I respectfully ask President Gentle how you are proposing to ask my newly succeeded Co-Vice Chair of our continental Organization to possibly be able to accept vast arenas of egregiously poisoned terrain on behalf of his peoples?

  TINE: Valid question. Simple answer. Three answers. Statesmanship. Gamesmanship [counting, now, on fine strong white clean fingers]. Brinksmanship.

  W/ now more — and rather more jejune — journalistic f/x spinning out of the black at high-camp speeds to a 45-rpm playing of custodian Dave (‘F.D.V.’) Harde’s 1⁄3-rpm disc of ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’:

  GENTLE TO CANADIAN PM: HAVE SOME TERRITORY — Header;

  CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: NO, REALLY, THANKS ANYWAY — Header;

  GENTLE TO CANADIAN P.M.: BUT I INSIST — Header;

  BLOC QUEBECOIS TO CANADIAN P.M.: ACCEPT TOXICLY CONVEX ADDITION TO OUR PROVINCE AND WE ARE OUT OF HERE SO FAST YOUR HEAD WILL SPIN ALL THE WAY AROUND — Header from That Guy Again;

  CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: LOOK, WE’RE SWIMMING IN TERRITORY ALREADY, HAVE A LOOK AT AN ATLAS WHY DON’T YOU, WE HAVE WAY MORE TERRITORY THAN WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALREADY, PLUS I DON’T MEAN TO BE RUDE EITHER BUT WE’RE ESPECIALLY UNKEEN ON ACCEPTING HOPELESSLY BEFOULED TERRITORY FROM YOU GUYS, INTERDEPENDENCE RHETORIC OR NO, THERE’S REALLY JUST NO WAY — And Again;

  abon26-MEMBER EEC ACCUSES U.S. OF ‘EXPERIALIST DOMINATION’
— Header; THIRD-WORLD VEGETABLES HURLED IN U.N. IMBROGLIO — 10-point Subheader;

  GENTLE TO P.M.: LOOK, BABE, TAKE THE TERRITORY OR YOU’RE GOING TO BE REALLY REALLY SORRY — Header;

  SIN CITY SHRINK: NATION’S VELVETIEST VOCALIST WAS HOSPITALIZED TWICE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS — Tabloid Header;

  PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY OF ‘EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY’ ALLEGED BY LAS VEGAS M.D. — Respectable Header;

  MY GARDEN NOW’S GOT TOMATOES I COULDN’T LIFT EVEN IF I COULD HACK THROUGH THEIR VINES WITH A MACHETE TO EVEN REACH THEM — Tabloid Header, Dateline Montpelier VT, with Photo That Simply Has Got to Have Been Doctored;

  F.E.C. CALLED TO INVESTIGATE C.U.S.P.s — Header; ‘STRATEGIC MISREPRESENTATION’ OF CANDIDATE’S PSYCH HISTORY HAS PUT NATION, CONTINENT AT RISK, DEMS CHARGE — 12-point Supersubheader;

  TOP AIDES HUDDLE AS WORRIES OVER GENTLE’S ‘PATHOLOGICAL INABILITY TO DEAL PROACTIVELY WITH ANY SORT OF REAL OR IMAGINED REJECTION’ MOUNT IN FACE OF CANADIAN SHOWDOWN — Meth-Dependent Headliner, Now at Third Daily in 17 Months;

  ‘Both financial and diplomatic communities have reacted with increasing concern to reports that President Gentle has isolated himself in a small private suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital with several thousand dollars’ worth of sound and sterilization equipment and is spending all day every day singing morose show-tunes in inappropriate keys to the U.S.M.C. Colonel who stands near the Dermalatix Hypospectral sterilization appliance handcuffed to the Black Box of United States nuclear codes. Unspecified Services Office spokespersons have declined to comment on reports of such erratic Executive directives as: ordering the Defense Department to commandeer department store giant Searsco’s entire inventory of Winnie-the-Pooh toddler wear under National Security Emergency Proviso 414; requiring Armed Forces personnel to take target practice at cardboard silhouettes of what appear to be oxen, water buffalo, or Texas longhorn cattle; preparing the release of a Presidential Address to the Nation cartridge that purportedly consists entirely of the president seated at his desk with his head in his gloves intoning “What’s the point of going on?” over and over; instructing silo personnel at all S.A.C. installations north of 44° to remove their missiles from the silos and then reinsert them upside-down; and ordering the installation of massive “air displacement effectuators” 28 km. south of each such silo, facing north.’ — Anchor’s Lead for Kind of Semi-Cheesy Weekly Lurid-News-Intensive Summary Cartridge;