Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  Later somebody who was either Joelle van D. or a St. E’s nurse in a U.H.I.D. veil was running a cold washcloth over his face. His face was so big it took some time to cover it all. It seemed too tender a touch on the cloth for a nurse, but then Gately heard the clink of I.V. bottles being changed or R.N.ishly messed with somewhere overhead behind him. He was unable to ask about changing the sheets or going to the bathroom. Some time after the veiled lady left, he just gave up and let the piss go, and instead of feeling wet heat he heard the rising metallic sound of something filling up somewhere near the bed. He couldn’t move to lift the covers and see what he was hooked up to. The blinds were up, and the room was so bright-white in the sunlight everything looked bleached and boiled. The guy with either the square head or the box on his head had been taken off someplace, his bed unmade and one crib-railing down. There were no ghostish figures or figures in mist. The hallway was no brighter than the room, and Gately couldn’t see any shadows of anybody in a hat. He didn’t even know if last night had been real. The pain kept making his lids flutter. He hadn’t cried over pain since he was four. His last thought before letting his lids stay shut against the brutal white of the room was that he’d maybe been castrated, which was how he’d always heard the term catheterized. He could smell rubbing alcohol and a kind of vitamin stink, and himself.

  At some point a probably real Pat Montesian came in and got her hair in his eye when she kissed his cheek and told him if he could just hang in and concentrate on getting well everything would be fine, that everything at the House was back to normal, more or less, and essentially fine, that she was so sorry he’d had to handle a situation like that alone, without support or counsel, and that she realized full well Lenz and the Canadian thugs hadn’t given him enough time to call anybody, that he’d done the very best he could with what he’d had to work with and had nothing to feel horrid about, to let it go, that the violence hadn’t been relapse-type thrill-seeking violence but simply doing the best he could at that moment and trying to stand up for himself and for a resident of the House. Pat Montesian was dressed as usual entirely in black, but formally, as in for taking somebody to court, and her formalwear looked like a Mexican widow’s. She really had said the words thug and horrid. She said not to worry, the House was a community and it took care of its own. She kept asking if he was sleepy. Her hair’s red was a different and less radiant red than the red of Joelle van D.’s hair. The left side of her face was very kind. Gately had very little understanding of what she was talking about. He was kind of surprised the Finest hadn’t come calling already. Pat didn’t know about the remorseless A.D.A. or the suffocated Nuck: Gately’d tried hard to share openly about the wreckage of his past, but some issues still seemed suicidal to share about. Pat said that Gately was showing tremendous humility and willingness sticking to his resolution about nothing stronger than non-narcotic painkillers, but that she hoped he’d remember that he wasn’t in charge of anything except putting himself in his Higher Power’s hands and following the dictates of his heart. That codeine or maybe Percoset 341 or maybe even Demerol wouldn’t be a relapse unless his heart of hearts that knew his motives thought it would be. Her red hair was down and looked uncombed and mashed in on the side; she looked frazzled. Gately wanted very much to ask Pat about the legal fallout of the other night’s thug-fracas. He realized she kept asking if he was sleepy because his attempts to speak looked like yawns. His inability to still speak was like speechlessness in bad dreams, airless and hellish, horrid.

  What made the whole interface with Pat M. possibly unreal was that right at the end for no reason Pat M. burst into tears, and for no reason Gately got so embarrassed he pretended to pass out, and slept again, and probably dreamed.

  Almost certainly dreamed and unreal was the interval when Gately came up with a start and saw Mrs. Lopate, the objay dart from the Shed that they come and install next to the Ennet House viewer some days, sitting there in a gunmetal wheelchair, face contorted, head cocked, hair stringy, looking not at him but more like seemingly at whatever array of I.V. bottles and signifying monitors hung above and behind his big crib, so not speaking or even looking at him but still in some sense being there with him, somehow. Even though there was no way she could have really been there, it was the first time Gately realized that the catatonic Mrs. L. had been the same lady he’d seen touching the tree in #5’s front lawn late at night, some nights, when he’d first come on Staff. That they were the same person. And that this realization was real even though the lady’s presence in the room was not, the complexities of which made his eyes roll up in his head again as he passed back out again.

  Then at some later point Joelle van Dyne was sitting in a chair just outside the railing of the bed, veiled, wearing sweatpants and a sweater that was starting to unravel, in a pink-bordered veil, not saying anything, probably looking at him, probably thinking he was unconscious with his eyes open, or delirious with Noxzema. The whole right side of himself hurt so bad each breath was like a hard decision. He wanted to cry like a small child. The girl’s silence and the blankness of her veil frightened him after a while, and he wished he could ask her to come back later.

  Nobody’d offered him anything to eat, but he wasn’t hungry. There were I.V. tubes going into the backs of both hands and the crook of his left elbow. Other tubing exited him lower down. He didn’t want to know. He kept trying to ask his heart if just codeine would be a relapse, according to the heart, but his heart was declining to comment.

  Then at some point Ennet House alum and senior counselor Calvin Thrust came roaring in and pulled up a chair and straddled it backwards like a slow-tease stripper, slumping and draping his arms over the back of the chair, gesturing with an unlit rodney as he spoke. He told Gately that man he looked like shit something heavy had fell on. But he told Gately he should get a gander of the other guys, the Nucks in Polynesian-wear. Thrust and the House Manager had got there before E.M.P.H.H. Security could drag the Finest away from issuing midnight street-side citations down on Comm. Ave., he told Gately. Lenz and Green and Alfonso Parias-Carbo had dragged/carried the passed-out Gately inside and laid him on the black vinyl couch in Pat’s office, where Gately had come to and told them ixnay on the ambulanceay and to please wake him up in five more minutes, and then passed out for serious real. Parias-Carbo seemed like he’d suffered a mild intestinal hernia from dragging/carrying Gately, but he was being a man about it and had refused codeine downstairs at the E.R. and was expressing gratitude for the growth experience, and the thoraxic lump was receding nicely. Calvin Thrust’s breath smelled of smoke and old scrambled eggs. Gately had once seen a cheap bootleg cartridge of a young Calvin Thrust having sex with a lady with only one arm on what looked like a crude homemade trapeze. The cartridge’s lighting and production values had been real low-quality, and Gately had been in and out of a Demerol-nod, but he was 98% sure it had been the young Calvin Thrust. Calvin Thrust said how right there over Gately’s unconscious form in the office Randy Lenz had begun womaning right off how of course he, Randy Lenz, was going to somehow get blamed for Gately and the Nucks getting fucked up and why didn’t they just get it over with and give him the administrative Shoe right now without going through the sham motions of deliberating. Bruce Green had rammed Lenz up against Pat’s cabinets and shaken him like a margarita, but refused to rat out Lenz or say why irate Canadians might think a specimen as dickless as Lenz might have demapped their friend. The matter was under investigation, but Thrust confessed to a certain admiration for Green’s refusal to eat cheese. Brucie G. had suffered a broken nose in the beef and now had a terrific set of twin shiners. Calvin Thrust said both he, Calvin Thrust, and the House Manager had immediately on arrival pegged Lenz as either coked up or ’drined to the gills on some ’drine, and Thrust said he summoned every Oreida of self-control sobriety’d blessed him with and had quietly taken Lenz out of the office into the special Disabled Bedroom next door and over the sound of Burt F. Smith coughing up little pieces of l
ung in his sleep he said he’d real controlledly given Lenz the choice of voluntarily resigning his Ennet residency on the spot or submitting to a spot-urine and a room-search and everything like that, plus to questioning by the Finest, who were pretty doubtless even now on route with the fleet of ambulances for the Nucks. Meanwhile, Thrust said — gesturing with the gasper and occasionally leaning forward to see whether Gately was still conscious and to tell him he looked like shit, meanwhile — Gately had been lying there passed out, wedged with two full filing cabinets to keep him from rolling off the couch he was wider than, and was bleeding in a very big way, and nobody knew how to, like, affix a turnipcut to a shoulder, and the good-bodied new girl with the cloth mask was bending over the arm of the couch applying pressure to towels on Gately’s bleeding, and her partly-open robe was yielding a view that even brought Alfonso P.-C. around from his herniated fetal posture on the floor, and Thrust and the House Manager were taking turns Asking for Help to intuitively know what they ought to do with Gately, because it was well known that he was on Probie against a real serious bit, and with all due trust and respect to Don it wasn’t clear at that point from the scattered damaged Canadian forms still in different prone positions out in the street who’d done what to who in defense of whatever or not, and the Finest tend to take a keen interest in huge guys who come into E.R.’s with spectacular gunshot wounds, and but then when Pat M. pulled up in the Aventura laying rubber a couple minutes later she’d screamed rather unserenely at Thrust for not having already rikky-ticked Don Gately over to St. E.’s on his own already. Thrust said he’d let go of Pat’s screaming like water off a duck, revealing that Pat M. had been under felony-weight domestic stress at home, he knew. He said and but so Gately was too heavy to carry unconscious for more than a few meters, even with the masked girl filling in for Parias-Carbo, and they’d just barely got Gately outside still in his wet bowling shirt and laid him briefly on the sidewalk and covered him with Pat’s black suede car-coat while Thrust maneuvered his beloved Corvette up as close to Gately as possible. The sounds of sirens on the way up Comm. Ave. mixed with the sounds of severely fucked-up Canadians returning to whatever passed with Nucks for consciousness and calling for what they called medecins, and with the crazed-squirrel sound of Lenz trying to start his rusted-out brown Duster, which had a bad solenoid. They’d heaved Gately’s dead weight in the ’Vette and Pat M. drove interference like a madwoman in her turbocharged Aventura. Pat let the masked girl ride shotgun with her because the masked girl wouldn’t quit asking her to let her come too. The House Manager stayed behind to represent Ennet House to E.M.P.H.H. Security and the somewhat less bullshittable BPD-Finest. The sirens got steadily closer, which added to the confusion because senile and mobile-vegetable residents of both Unit #4 and the Shed had been drawn out on the frozen lawns by the freakas, and the mix of several kinds of sirens didn’t do them a bit of good, and they started flapping and shrieking and running around and adding to the medical confusion of the whole scene, which by the time him and Pat pulled out of there was a fucking millhouse and everything like that. Thrust asks rhetorically how much does Don fucking weigh, anyway, because moving the front buckets way up to where like dwarfs put them and putting Gately’s carcass across the back seat of the ’Vette had required all available hands and even Burt F.S.’s stumps, had been like trying to get something humongous through a door that’s way smaller than the humongous thing was and everything like that. Thrust occasionally tapped his gasper like he thought it was lit. The first squad cars had come fishtailing around the Warren-Comm. corner just as they all came out of the E.M. driveway onto Warren. Pat in her car up ahead had made an arm-motion that could have been either waving coolly at the passing Finest or uncoolly clutching her head. Thrust said had he mentioned Gately’s blood? Gately’d bled all over Pat M.’s vinyl couch and filing cabinets and carpet, the little E.M. streetlet, the sidewalk, Pat M.’s black suede car-coat, pretty much everybody’s winter coats, and the beloved upholstery of Thrust’s beloved Corvette, which upholstery Thrust might add had been new, and dear. But he said not to worry about it, Thrust said: the fucking blood was the least of the problems. Gately didn’t like the sound of that at all, and started trying to blink at him in a kind of crude code, to get his attention, but Thrust either didn’t notice it or thought it was like a postoperative tic. Thrust’s hair was always combed straight back like a mobster. Thrust said at the St. E.’s E.R. how the E.R. crew had been quick and ingenious about getting Gately out of the ’Vette and onto a double-width gurney, though they did have some trouble lifting the gurney so they could get the legs with wheels set up under it so the guys in white could roll him in with more guys in white walking briskly alongside of him and leaning over him and applying pressure and barking little orders in terse code like they always do in E.R.s and everything like that, in emergencies. Thrust says he couldn’t tell if they could tell right away it was a spectacular gunshot wound, nobody used the G-word or anything like that. Thrust had babbled something about a chain-saw while Pat nodded furiously. The chief two things Gately kept blinking rhythmically to try to find out were: did anybody end up getting killed, meaning the Nucks; and has this one certain A.D.A.-type figure that always wore a hat come in from Essex County or given any sign of getting wind of Gately’s whereabouts or involvement; and — so really three things — and will any of the Ennet House residents that were right there on the scene from start to finish look respectable enough on paper to have creditibility as like legal witnesses. Plus he wouldn’t mind knowing what the fuck Thrust was thinking of, scaring Lenz off and letting him screw off into the urban night leaving Gately maybe holding the statutory bag. Most of Calvin Thrust’s legality-experience was filmic and petty-vice. Thrust eventually describes that one of the House Manager’s key coups of quick thinking was doing a quick TP-scan and finding out which of the residents out there milling around with the catatonics on the street had up-in-the-air legal issues such that they needed to be secloistered in the protected area of the House out of legal sight by the time the BPD’s Finest hit the scene. He says in his view it was lucky for Gately that he (Gately) was such a massive son of a bitch and had so much blood, because even so Gately’d lost huge volumes of blood all over people’s upholstery and was in shock and everything like that by the time they got him on the double-width gurney, his face cheese-colored and his lips blue and muttering all this shock-type stuff, but even so here he (Gately) was, not exactly ready for a GQ cover but still sucking air. Thrust said in the waiting room at the E.R., where they wouldn’t let a working man smoke down there either, he said then the arrogant new girl resident in the white veil had up and tried to take Thrust’s inventory for letting Randy L. resign and decamp before his part in Gately’s legal embryoglio could be nailed down, and Pat M. had been pretty unconditionally loving about it but it was obvious she wasn’t thrilled with Thrust’s tactics either and everything like that. Gately blinked furiously to signify his agreement with Joelle’s position. Calvin Thrust gestured stoically with his cigarette and said he’d told Pat M. the truth: he always told the truth, no matter how unpleasant for himself, today: he said he’d said he’d encouraged Lenz to rikky-tick out of there because otherwise he was afraid that he (Thrust) was going to eliminate Lenz’s map on the spot, out of rage. Lenz’s solenoid appeared to have been on the permanent dicky, because the rusty Duster was seen by new resident Amy J. real early the next A.M. getting towed from its wrong-side-of-the-street spot in front of #3 when Amy J. slunk back to the House all jonesy and hungover to get her Hefty bag full of evicted personal shit, Lenz apparently having abandoned his wheels and fleen off by foot during all the Finest’s confusion and static with the ambulance drivers that who could blame them didn’t want to take Canadians because of horrible paperwork for Health Card reimbursement for Nucks. The House Manager had gone so far as planting herself out in front of the House’s locked front door with her not-all-that-small arms and legs spread out, blocking the door, assertively stati
ng at whatever Finest tried to enter that Ennet House was court-mandated Protected by the Commonwealth of MA and could only be entered with a Court Order and three working days’ mandated time for the House to file an injunction and wait for a ruling, and the Finest and even the booger-eating morons from E.M.P.H.H. Security were successfully held in bay and kept out, therefore, by her, alone, and Pat M. was considering rewarding the House Manager’s coolness under fire by promoting her to Assistant Director next month when the present Assistant Director left to go get certified in jet-engine maintenance at East Coast Aerotech on a Mass Rehab grant.