Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  The engineer moves his upturned face back and forth. First, Madame was replaced by a Mass Comm. graduate student who proved a crushing disappointment as a Miss Diagnosis; then Madame was publicly deemed irreplaceable by management, and the engineer is now paid simply to cue her background music and then sit monitoring a live mike for a noiseless 60 minutes, which means he has to stay in his booth maintaining 0-levels with a live mike and can’t ascend with his receiver and cigarettes even if he wanted to. The station’s student manager’s given the engineer written instructions on just what to say when people phone in during the hour to inquire and wish Psychosis a speedy recovery from whatever might ail her. At once denying and encouraging rumors of suicide, institutionalization, spiritual crisis, silent retreat, pilgrimage to the snow-capped East. The disappearance of someone who’s been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better. A terrible silence now, weeknights. A different silence altogether from the radio-silence-type silence that used to take up over half her nightly show. Silence of presence v. silence of absence, maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst. Some listeners have actually come in and down through the deep cortex and into the cold pink studio itself, to inquire. Some to allay this firm conviction that Madame was still actually still showing up and sitting there by the mike but not saying anything. Another of the men sleeping nearby keeps punching at the air in his sleep. Almost all the personal wee-hour inquiries are from listeners somehow bent, misshapen, speech-defective, vacantly grinning, damaged in some way. The type whose spectacles have been repaired with electrician’s tape. Shyly inquiring. Apologies for bothering someone they can clearly see is not even there. Before the student manager’s written instructions, the student engineer’d wordlessly directed their attention to Madame’s triptych screen with no silhouette behind it. Another white Dodge van, just as unevenly clean and opaque-windowed, has appeared on the ridge above and behind the hillside’s littered forms. It casts no visible shadow. A Frisbee-ring caroms off the clean grille of its snout. It idles, its panel door facing the declivity and the other white van’s panel door far below. One hideous little inquirer had had a hat with a lens on it and seemed about to fall forward into the engineer’s lap. His attendant wanting some address where they might send something supportive and floral. The NASA blanket’s micronized aluminumoid coating is designed to refract every possible UV ray into the student engineer’s bare skin. The engineer knows about the ambulance and the Brigham and Women’s ICU and five-day rehab ward from the thick swart girl Notkin, the one with the disreputable hat and Film-Dept. I.D. who came down via the Basilar elevator late at night to retrieve some old tapes of the program for the Madame’s personal listening use, she said, and was fortunate enough to know the Madame in private life, she said. The term is Treatment, Madame Psychosis is in long-term Treatment at something the bearded girl in the sooty hat obliquely described as only half a house in some unbelievably unpleasant and low-rent part of the metro-area. This is the precise total of what the WYYY engineer knows. He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more. Q.v. the dimpled steel ramp now protruding from the squeakily opened panel door of the van on the ridge above and behind him. Q.v. the utter darkness inside the idling van down along the Arlington St. curb, whose side panel’s also been slid open from within. The southwest hillside is copless: the Gardens’ platoon of M.D.C. Finest are all in their souped-up golf carts over at the drained pond, throwing curved sections of glazed doughnut into the ducks’ shrubbery and telling a largely-dispersed-already crowd to please move along. The ridge’s Frisbees and hackysackers have abruptly vanished; there’s now an eerie stillness like a reef when a shark cruises through; the ridge’s van’s idling maw open and black, silver-tongued.

  Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside’s van’s ramp as a madly squeaking brass-colored blur, a snowplow-like scoop-type thing welded to it and out front skimming the ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of grass it’s mowing, moving terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on burly stumps in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a skier’s pure speed, the huddled fetal hillside figures the speeding chair slaloms, the dim glittered movements of arrangement for reception deep within the curbside van way at the bottom of the steep grade, the engineer arching his neck way out to capture sun on the scarred hollows under his jaw, the shopping cart with the calculator clipped by a squeaking rubberized wheel at an angle and sent clattering off down the hillside, spraying possessions, the homeless shoe to which it had been roped skittering empty behind it and the cart’s now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the air in front of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and worldly goods, the calculating cart whumping into the side of the hunched man vomiting and flipping over and bouncing several times and the vomiting man rolling and yelping, vulgarities echoing, the WYYY engineer now to be seen hiking himself up on a chill-reddened elbow with a start and starting to turn and look above and behind him up at the ridge just as the speeding wheelchair with the hunched figure reaches him and the chair’s shovel scoops the engineer and his NASA blanket and shirt and book up and runs over the glasses and bottle of M. Fizzy with one wheel and bears the engineer in the scoop up and away and down the steep grade toward the idling van at the bottom, a van whose own angled ramp now slides out like a tongue or Autoteller’s transaction-receipt, the NASA blanket blowing away from the scooped engineer’s flailing form about halfway down and suddenly aloft in a hillside thermal and blown far out over Arlington St. traffic by the keen November wind, the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls and coming back down and up again, the snatched engineer in the chair’s scoop appearing to the hillside’s roused figures mostly as a hallucinatory waggle of bare limbs and strangely wheezy shrieks for Help or at least to Look Out Below, all as the modified chair squeaks frantically straight down the hillside’s most efficient downward line toward the van with the ramp now idling in gear, its pipe’s exhaust beating the street in high-rpm idle, the NASA blanket twisting coruscant in the air high above the street, and the shriek-roused figures on the hillside lying there still bent in and barely moving, stiff with cold and general woe, except for the hunched man, the unwell man who’d been hit by the dislodged cart, who’s rolled to a stop and is thrashing, holding the parts that were hit.

  11 NOVEMBER

  YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

  1810h., 133 kids and thirteen assorted staff sitting down at suppertime, the E.T.A. dining hall taking most of the first floor of West House, a sort of airy atrium-like commons, broad and knotty-pine-panelled, the east wall hugely fenestrated and columns running the length of the room at center, with ceiling fans high overhead circulating the rich and slightly sour smell of bulk-prepared food, the oceanic sound of 20 different tables’ conversation, the flat clink of utensils on plates, much chewing, the clank and tinkle of the dishwasher’s conveyor belt behind the tray-bus window with its sign saying YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY, the muffled shouts of kitchen workers in steam. The top upperclassmen get the best table, an un-spoken tradition, the one nearest the gas fireplace in winter and the AC venting in July, the one whose chairs’ legs are all pretty much even, both seats and backs with thin corduroy cushions in E.T.A. red and gray. The prorectors have their own permanent table near the carbs bar; the Syrian Satelliter and enormous peasant-skirted Moment soft-profiler are with them.

  The players can all do some very serious eating, some of them still in sweaty sweats with salt-stiff hair, too hungry after three-set P.M.s to shower before refueling. Coed tables are quietly discouraged. The Boys 18’s and the cream of the 16’s are all at the best table. Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, E.T.A.’s 16’s A-1, has just this P.M. gone three sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen, E.T.A.’s second-best overall boy, taking Hal all the way to 7–5 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish engagement Schtitt had them play out on the West Cour
ts that afternoon for reasons no one has yet pinned down. The match’s audience had grown steadily as other challenges got done and people came up from the weight room and showers. News that Stice had very nearly beaten an Inc nobody but John Wayne has been able to beat has made its figure-eight way around the tables and serving line and salad bar, and lots of younger kids keep looking to the best table and Stice, sixteen, crew-cutted and still in his black Fila sweats with no shirt under the unzipped top, assembling a complex sandwich on his plate, and they let their eyes widen and postures sag to communicate awe: R.H.I.P.

  Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it’s the wrist of an assailant. The only sound at the table for the first few minutes is of forkwork and mastication and the slight gasping sounds of people trying to breathe while they eat. You rarely speak for the first few minutes here, eating. Supper is deadly-serious. Some of the kids even start in on their trays while still in line at the milk dispenser. Now Coyle bites in. Wayne has made his entree into a sandwich and lowers and bites. Keith Freer’s eyes are half closed as his jaw muscles bulge and slacken. Some of the players’ inclined heads are hard to see over the height of their food. Struck and Schacht, side by side, bite in sync and chew. The only one at the table not eating like a refugee is Trevor Axford, who as a small child back in Short Beach CT once fell off his bike onto his head and received a tiny lesion-type brain injury after which all food everywhere tastes horrible to him. His clearest explanation of the way food tastes to him is that it tastes the way vomit smells. He’s discouraged from speaking at meals and holds his nose while he eats and eats with the neutral joyless expression of somebody dispensing fuel into his car. Hal Incandenza dismantles the stelliform-mold shape E.T.A. mashed potatoes come in, mixing baby-boileds in with the mashed. Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kornspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit with them — they’re by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or spray. Jim Troeltsch keeps holding a clear tumbler of milk up to the ceiling’s full-spectrum lights and swirling the milk around in the light, looking at it. Pemulis chews with his mouth open, producing moist noises, a habit so family-of-origin-ingrained no amount of peer pressure can break him of it.

  Eventually The Darkness clears his throat to speak. In the showers he’d gotten up to the middle of an Xmas story about one of his parents’ epic rows. His parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS on the Oklahoma border — met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms’ flesh and kept it there till one of them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm. Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn’t jerk away and reel away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burn-scar. They’d toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explained. They’d been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how you defined certain juris-prudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice — whom both Mr. Stice and The Darkness called ‘The Bride’ — while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she’d feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as ‘The Brood’) and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride’s own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclassmen with them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out. Troeltsch and Pemulis are arguing about whether E.T.A.’s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them powdered milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing, very intent. Hal’s making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the table at all times and utensils in his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis always listens to Stice’s tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his head in admiration.

  ‘I’m just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that’s gone down the disposal.’ Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines. ‘Just look at it. Who could eat with something like that.’

  ‘The old man is a son of a bitch that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,’ Stice says, leaning in to bite and chew. The tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree and unless it’s a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra carbs. It’s like Pemulis can’t really taste his food unless he mashes it against his palate. The Academy’s wheat bread is bicycled in by guys in Birkenstock sandals from Bread & Circus Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it’s got to be not only sugarless but low in glutens, which Tavis and Schtitt believe promote torpor and excess mucus. Axford, who lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow goes down to #5-A, stares stonily into space, his motions less like somebody eating than like somebody miming eating. Hal’s made an intricate fortification-structure of his food, complete with turrets and archer-slits, and even though he’s not much eating or drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his structure. As the eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give Hal and Ax-ford tiny sideways looks, the players’ different CPUs humming through Decision Trees on whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much-rumored showdown with Dr. Tavis and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho Stice, might not have shaken Inc and Axhandle along some psychic competitive fault-line, different guys with different rankings calculating the permuted advantages to themselves of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though Michael Pemulis, the other rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford’s expression and Hal’s excessive swallowing altogether, though possibly studiously ignoring them, staring meditatively at the squeegees 259 taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the tabletop with the other.