Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘My head is spinning on its axis.’

  ‘Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and -utilization. See? And when are we going to get you out on the old Eschaton map for a little geopolitical sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob? Incidentally, the arrhythmic meaty whacking sound is Booger hitting himself in the thigh and chest in there, which self-abuse is a textbook symptom of an anxiously depressed episode.’

  ‘With this I can create sympathy. For, confusingly to me, fusion produces no waste. This we are taught in the science of my home nation. This is the very essence of the promise of the attraction of fusion for a densely populous and waste-impacted nation such as mine, we are taught fusion to be self-sufficient and wasteless perpetuation. Alas, my need to visit the lavatory is becoming distended.’

  ‘But except no, although this was the very roadblock that’d stymified annulation, and what had to be overcome, and was overcome, though in a way so unintuitive and abstracto-conceptual that this is where your Third World educational system’s real sadly in need of like a massive up-to-date-textbook airlift or something. It’s also at just this point in the fusion-wastelessness problem where our own glorious optical Founder, Inc’s ex-Da, Mrs. Inc’s poor cuc —’

  ‘I know who you refer.’

  ‘The man himself, at just this point, makes his final lasting contribution to state science after he quit designing neutron-diffusion reflectors for Defense. You’ve seen the coprolite placque in Tavis’s office. This is from the A.E.C., for the Incster’s Da’s, like, lasting contribution to the energy of waste.’

  ‘The purpose for which I was upon the stairs and became disoriented was to visit a lavatory. This was long ago.’

  ‘Hold your water one second is all this’ll take. You wouldn’t even fucking be here without Inc’s Da, you know. What the guy did was he helped design these special holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the behavior of subatomics in highly poisonous environments. Without getting poisoned themselves.’

  ‘They thus are studying holographic conversions of the poisons instead of the poisons.’

  ‘Men’s Sanity in Corporate Sterno, Ars. Like an optical glove-box. The ultimate prophylactic.’

  ‘Please conduct me.’

  ‘Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?’

  ‘This means what? A bottle of medicine?’

  ‘The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted now, but the whole idea of treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer was anathematic just a couple decades back.’

  ‘Anathematic?’

  ‘As in like radical, fringe. Wacko. Laughed out of town on a rail by quote mainstream established science. Whose idea of treatment was to like poison the whole body and see what was left. Though annular chemotherapy did start out kind of wacko. You can see these early microphotos Schacht’s got that poster of that he won’t take down even after you’re sick of it, the early microphotos of cancer cells getting force-fed micromassive quantities of overdone beef and diet soda, forced to chain-smoke microsized Marlboros near tiny little cellular phones —’ 238

  ‘I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot.’

  ‘— except and corollarying out of the micromedical model was this equally radical idea that maybe you could achieve a high-waste annulating fusion by bombarding highly toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the radioactive particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and produces relatively stable plutonium fluoride and uranium tetrafluoride. All you turn out to need is access to mind-staggering volumes of toxic material.’

  ‘Therefore placing the natural fusion site in the Great Concavity.’

  ‘Roger and Jawohl. Here things get abstractly furry and I’ll just skim through the fact that the only kertwang in the whole process environmentally is that the resultant fusion turns out so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of the surrounding ecosystem, all inhibitors to organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in every direction.’

  ‘Hence the eastern Concavity of anxiety and myth.’

  ‘You end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable.’

  ‘A rain forest on sterebolic anoids.’

  ‘Close enough.’

  ‘Therefore rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism and the unmacheteable regions of forests of the mythic eastern Concavity.’

  ‘Yes Ars and you find you need to keep steadily dumping in toxins to keep the uninhibited ecosystem from spreading and overrunning more ecologically stable areas, exhausting the atmosphere’s poisons so that everything hyperventilates. And thus and such. So this is why E.W.D.’s major catapulting is from the metro area due north.’

  ‘Into the eastern Concavity, keeping it at bay.’

  ‘See how it all comes together?’

  ‘Mr. Thorp will evince keen disappointment if I resort to remove my blindfold to locate a lavatory.’

  ‘Ars, I hear you. I hear fine. You don’t need to go on and on. The thing to keep in mind for if you have to take Watson is the cyclic effects of the waste-delivery and fusion. Major catapulting is on what days?’

  ‘The dates which are in each month prime numbers, until midnight.’

  ‘Which eradicates the overgrowth until the toxins are fused and utilized. The satellite scenario is that the eastern part of Grid 3 goes from overgrown to wasteland to overgrown several times a month. With the first week of the month being especially barren and the last week being like nothing on earth.’

  ‘As if time itself were vastly sped up. As if nature itself had desperately to visit the lavatory.’

  ‘Accelerated phenomena, which is actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time. The mnemonic rhyme Watson tried to get the Boog to remember here is “Wasteland to lush: time’s in no rush.” ’

  ‘Decelerated time, I have got you.’

  ‘And this is what the Boog’s saying is eating him alive the worst, conceptually. He says he’s toast if he can’t wrap his head around the concept of time in flux, conceptually. It jacklights him for the whole annular model overall. Granted, it’s abstract. But you should see him. One half of the face is like spasming around while the half with the mole just like hangs there staring like a bunny you’re about to run over. Lyle’s trying to walk him real slowly through the most basic kiddie-physical principles of the relativity of time in extreme organic environments. In between Booger’s trips back to the sauna. The irony for the Boogerman is you don’t really even have to know that much about the temporal-flux stuff, since Watson’s forehead gets all mottled and pruny-looking when he thinks about it himself.’

  ‘Do not please necessitate begging from me, Idris Arslanian.’

  ‘The eastern Concavity of course being a whole different kettle of colored horses from what Inc calls the barren Eliotical wastes of the western Concavity, let me tell you.’

  ‘I will let you tell me anything as long as it is told to me over the porcelain of a lavatory.’

  ‘Interesting step you’re doing there, Id, I have to say.’

  ‘I beg without frequency. My home culture views begging as low-caste.’

  ‘Hmm. Ars, I’m standing here thinking we could work something out, maybe.’

  ‘I commit no illegal or degrading acts. But I will, if forced, beg.’

  ‘Forget that. I’m just thinking. You’re Muslimic, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Devoutly. I pray five times daily in the prescribed fashion. I eschew representational art and carnality in all its four-thousand-four-hundred-and-four forms and guises.’

  ‘Body a temple and suchlike?

  �
��I eschew. Neither stimulants nor depressing compounds pass my lips, as is prescribed in the holy teachings of my faith.’

  ‘I’m wondering if you had any specific plans for this urine you’re so anxious to get rid of, Ars, then.’

  ‘I am not following.’

  ‘What say we hash it all out over some porcelain, then, brother.’

  ‘Mike Pemulis, you are in motion a prince and in repose a sage.’

  ‘Brother, it’ll be a cold day in a warm climate when this kid right here’s in repose.’

  It was strange upon strange; it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy punting-groupies were somehow afraid of Moment’s Junoesque Ms. Steeply — Orin had seen his last wheelchair the day before she came up, and now (he realized, driving) it was only hours after she’d left that they were now back, with their shy ruses. The Excitement-Hope-Acquisition-Contempt cycle of seduction always left Orin stunned and wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake. It was only after he’d cleaned up and dressed and exchanged the standard compliments and assurances, taken the elevator’s glass pod down the tall hotel’s round glass core into the lobby, gone out through the pressurized revolving door into the scalp-crackling gust of Phoenix heat, waited for the car’s directional AC to render the steering wheel touchable, and then injected himself into the teeming arteries of Rt. 85 and Bell Rd. west, back out toward Sun City, ruminating as he drove, that it kertwanged on him that the handicapped man at the hotel room’s door had had a wheelchair, that it was the first wheelchair he’d seen since Hal’d hit him with his theory, and that the legless surveyer had had (stranger) the same Swiss accent as the hand-model.

  En route, R. Lenz’s mouth writhes and he scratches at the little rhynophemic rash and sniffs terribly and complains of terrible late-autumn leaf-mold allergies, forgetting that Bruce Green knows all too well what coke-hydrolysis’s symptoms are from having done so many lines himself, back when life with M. Bonk was one big party.

  Lenz details how the vegetarian new Joel girl’s veil is because of this condition people get where she’s got only one eye that’s right in the middle of her forehead, from birth, like a seahorse, and asks Green not even to think of asking how he knows this fact.

  While Green acts as lookout while Lenz relieves himself against a Market St. dumpster, Lenz swears Green to secrecy about how poor old scarred-up diseased Charlotte Treat had sworn him to secrecy about her secret dream in sobriety was to someday get her G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist specializing in educating youngsters pathologically frightened of dental anesthesia, because her dream was to help youngsters, and but how she feared her Virus has placed her secret dream forever out of reach. 239

  All the way up the Spur’s Harvard St. toward Union Square, in a barely NW vector, Lenz consumes several minutes and less than twenty breaths sharing with Green some painful Family-Of-Origin Issues about how Lenz’s mother Mrs. Lenz, a thrice-divorcée and Data Processor, was so unspeakably obese she had to make her own mumus out of brocade drapes and cotton tablecloths and never once did come to Parents’ Day at Bishop Anthony McDiardama Elementary School in Fall River MA because of the parents had to sit in the youngsters’ little liftable-desktop desks during the Parents’ Day presentations and skits, and the one time Mrs. L. hove her way down to B.A.M.E.S. for Parents’ Day and tried to seat herself at little Randall L.’s desk between Mrs. Lamb and Mrs. Leroux she broke the desk into kindling and needed four stocky cranberry-farmer dads and a textbook-dolly to arise back up from the classroom floor, and never went back, fabricating thin excuses of busyness with Data Processing and basic disinterest in Randy L.’s schoolwork. Lenz shares how then in adolescence (his), his mother died because one day she was riding a Greyhound bus from Fall River MA north to Quincy MA to visit her son in a Commonwealth Youth Corrections facility Lenz was doing research for a possible screenplay in, and during the voyage on the bus she had to go potty, and she was in the bus’s tiny potty in the rear of the bus going about her private business of going potty, as she later testified, and even though it was the height of winter she had the little window of the potty wide open, for reasons Lenz predicts Green doesn’t want to hear about, on the northbound bus, and how this was one of the last years of Unsubsidized ordinational year-dating, and the final fiscal year that actual maintenance-work had ever been done on the infernous six-lane commuter-ravaged Commonwealth Route 24 from Fall River to Boston’s South Shore by the pre-O.N.A.N.ite Governor Claprood’s Commonwealth Highway Authority, and the Greyhound bus encountered a poorly marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION area where 24 was all stripped down to the dimpled-iron sheeting below and was tooth-rattlingly striated and chuckholed and torn up and just in general basically a mess, and the poorly marked and unflag-manned debris plus the excessive speed of the northbound bus made it jounce godawfully, the bus, and swerve violently to and forth, fighting to maintain control of what there was of the road, and passengers were hurled violently from their seats while, meanwhile, back in the closet-sized rear potty, Mrs. Lenz, right in the process of going potty, was hurled from the toilet by the first swerve and proceeded to do some high-velocity and human-waste-flinging pinballing back and forth against the potty’s plastic walls; and when the bus finally regained total control and resumed course Mrs. Lenz had, freakishly enough, ended up her human pinballing with her bare and unspeakably huge backside wedged tight in the open window of the potty, so forcefully ensconced into the recesstacle that she was unable to extricate, and the bus continued on its northward sojourn the rest of the way up 24 with Mrs. Lenz’s bare backside protruding from the ensconcing window, prompting car horns and derisive oratory from other vehicles; and Mrs. Lenz’s plaintiff shouts for Help were unavailed by the passengers that were arising back up off the floor and rubbing their sore noggins and hearing Mrs. Lenz’s mortified screams from behind the potty’s locked reinforced plastic door, but were unable to excretate her because the potty’s door locked from the interior by sliding across a deadbolt that made the door’s outside say OCCUPIED/OCCUPADO/OCCUPÉ, and the door was locked, and Mrs. Lenz was wedged beyond the reach of arm-length and couldn’t reach the deadbolt no matter how plaintiffly she reached out her mammoth fatwattled arm; and, like fully 88% of all clinically obese Americans, Mrs. Lenz was diagnosed clinically claustrophobic and took prescription medication for anxiety and ensconcement-phobias, and she ended up successfully filing a Seven-Figure suit against Greyhound Lines and the almost-defunct Commonwealth Highway Authority for psychiatric trauma, public mortification, and second-degree frostbite, and received such a morbidly obese settlement from the Dukakis-appointed 18th-Circus Civil Court that when the check arrived, in an extra-long-size envelope to accommodate all the zeroes, Mrs. L. lost all will to Data Process or cook or clean, or nurture, or finally even move, simply reclining in a custom-designed 1.5-meter-wide recliner watching InterLace Gothic Romances and consuming mammoth volumes of high-lipid pastry brought on gold trays by a pastry chef she’d had put at her individual 24-hour disposal and outfitted with a cellular beeper, until four months after the huge settlement she ruptured and died, her mouth so crammed with peach cobbler the paramedics were hapless to administer C.P.R., which Lenz says he knows, by the way — C.P.R.

  By the time they hit the Spur, their northwest tacking has wheeled broadly right to become more truly north. Their route down here is a Mondrian of alleys narrowed to near-defiles from all the dumpsters. Lenz goes first, blaze-trailing. Lenz gives these sort of smoky looks to every female that passes within eyeshot. Their vector is now mostly N/NW. They stroll through the rich smell of dryer-exhaust from the backside of a laundromat off Dustin and Comm. The city of metro Boston MA at night. The ding and trundle of the B and C Greenie trains heading up Comm. Ave.’s hill, west. Street-drunks sitting with their backs to sooted walls, seeming to study their laps, even the mist of their breath discolored. The complex hiss of bus-brakes. The jagged shadows distending with headlights’ passage. Latin music drifting through the Spur’s Projects, twined
around some 5/4 ’shine stuff from a boombox over off Feeny Park, and in between these a haunting plasm of Hawaiian-type music that sounds at once top-volume and far far away. The zithery drifting Polynesian strains make Bruce Green’s face spread in a flat mask of psychic pain he doesn’t even feel is there, and then the music’s gone. Lenz asks Green what it’s like to work with ice all day at Leisure Time Ice and then himself theorizes on what it must be like, he’ll bet, with your crushed ice and ice cubes in pale-blue plastic bags with a staple for a Twistie and dry ice in wood tubs pouring out white smoke and then your huge blocks of industrial ice packed in fragrant sawdust, the huge blocks of man-sized ice with flaws way inside like trapped white faces, white flames of internal cracks. Your picks and hatchets and really big tongs, red knuckles and rimed windows and thin bitter freezer-smell with runny-nosed Poles in plaid coats and kalpacs, your older ones with a chronic cant to one side from all the time lugging ice.

  They crunch through iridescent chunks of what Lenz I.D.s as a busted windshield. Lenz shares feelings on how between three ex-husbands and feral attorneys and a pastry-chef that used pastry-dependence to warp and twist her into distorting a testament toward the chef and Lenz’s being through red-tape still in Quincy’s Y.C.A. hold and in a weak litigational vantage, the ruptured Mrs. L.’s will had left him out in the cold to self-fend by his urban wits while ex-husbands and patissiers lay on Riviera beach-furniture fanning themselves with high-denomination currency, about all which Lenz says he grapples with the Issues of on a like daily basis; leaving Green a gap to make understanding sounds. Green’s jacket creaks as he breathes. The windshield-glass is in an alley whose fire escapes are hung with what look like wet frozen tarps. The alley’s tight-packed dumpsters and knobless steel doors and the dull black of total grime. The blunt snout of a bus protrudes into the frame of the alley’s end, idling.

  Dumpsters’ garbage doesn’t have just one smell, depending. The urban lume makes the urban night only semidark, as in licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of the dark, and swelling. Green keeps them updated re time. Lenz has begun to refer to Green as ‘brother.’ Lenz says he has to piss like a racehorse. He says the nice thing about the urban city is that it’s one big commode. The way Lenz pronounces brother involves one r. Green moves up to stand in the mouth of the alley, facing out, giving Lenz a little privacy several dumpsters behind. Green stands there in the start of the alley’s shadow, in the bus’s warm backwash, his elbows out and hands in the jacket’s little pockets, looking out. It’s unclear whether Green knows Lenz is under the influence of Bing. All he feels is a moment of deep wrenching loss, of wishing getting high was still pleasurable for him so he could get high. This feeling comes and goes all day every day, still. Green takes a gasper from behind his ear and lights it and puts a fresh one on-deck behind the ear. Union Square, Allston: Kiss me where it smells, she said, so I took her to Allston, unquote. Union Square’s lights throb. Whenever somebody stops blowing their horn somebody else starts blowing their horn. There’s three Chinese women waiting at the light across the street from the guy with the lobsters. Each of them’s got a shopping bag. An old VW Bug like Doony Glynn’s VW Bug idling mufflerless outside Riley’s Roast Beef, except Doony’s Bug’s engine is exposed where the back hood got removed to expose the Bug’s guts. It’s like impossible to ever spot a Chinese woman on a Boston street that’s under sixty or over 1.5 m. or not carrying a shopping bag, except never more than one bag. If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient. The searing facts of the case of Bruce Green’s natural parents’ deaths when he was a toddler are so deeply repressed inside Green that whole strata and substrata of silence and mute dumb animal suffering will have to be strip-mined up and dealt with a Day at a Time in sobriety for Green even to remember how, on his fifth Xmas Eve, in Waltham MA, his Pop had taken the hydrant-sized little Brucie Green aside and given him, to give his beloved Mama for Xmas, a gaily Gauguin-colored can of Polynesian Mauna Loa-brand 240 macadamia nuts, said cylindrical can of nuts then toted upstairs by the child and painstakingly wrapped in so much foil-sheen paper that the final wrapped present looked like an oversized dachshund that had required first bludgeoning and then restraint at both ends with two rolls each of Scotch tape and garish fuchsia ribbon to be subdued and wrapped and placed under the gaily lit pine, and even then the package seemed mushily to struggle as the substrata of paper shifted and settled.