Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  The wraith says Just to give Gately an idea, he, the wraith, in order to appear as visible and interface with him, Gately, he, the wraith, has been sitting, still as a root, in the chair by Gately’s bedside for the wraith-equivalent of three weeks, which Gately can’t even imagine. It occurs to Gately that none of the people that’ve dropped by to tell him their troubles has bothered to say how many days he’s even been in the Trauma Wing now, or what day it’s going to be when the sun comes up, and so Gately has no idea how long he’s gone now without an AA meeting. Gately wishes his sponsor Ferocious Francis G. would hobble by instead of Ennet Staff that want to talk about prosfeces and residents who come just to share remembered wreckage with somebody they don’t even think can even hear them, sort of the way a little kid confides to a dog. He doesn’t let himself even contemplate why no Finest or federally crew-cut guys have visited yet, if he’s been in here a while, if they’ve been all over the House like hamsters on wheat already, as Thrust had said. The seated shadow of somebody in a hat is still there out there in the hall, though if the whole interlude was a dream it isn’t and has never been there, Gately realizes, squinting a little to try to make sure the shadow is the shadow of a hat and not a fire-extinguisher box on the hall wall or something. The wraith excuses himself and disappears but then reappears two slow blinks later, back in the same position. ‘That was worth an Excuse Me?’ Gately thinks at the wraith dryly, almost laughing. The sheet of pain from the near-laugh send his eyes way up back up in his head. The chassis of the heart monitor doesn’t look broad enough to support even a wraith’s ass. The heart monitor’s the silent kind. It’s got the moving white line with big speed bumps moving across it for Gately’s pulse, but it doesn’t make the sterile beeping that old hospital-drama monitors did. Patients in hospital-dramas were frequently unconscious figurants, Gately reflects. The wraith says he’d just paid a small quantumish call to the old spotless Brighton two-decker of one Ferocious Francis Gehaney, and from the way the old Crocodile’s shaving and putting on a clean white T-shirt, the wraith says, he predicts F.F. will be visiting the Trauma Wing soon to offer Gately unconditional empathy and fellowship and acerbic Crocodilian counsel. Unless this was just Gately himself thinking this up to keep a stiff upper attitude, Gately thinks. The wraith pushes his glasses up sadly. You never think of a wraith looking sad or unsad, but this dream-wraith displays the whole affective range. Gately can hear the horns and raised voices and U-turn squeals way down below on Wash. that indicate it’s around 0000h., the switching hour. He wonders what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not figurant, Gately meant, he corrects himself. He’s lying here correcting his thoughts like he was talking. He wonders if his brain-voice talks fast enough for the wraith not to have to like tap its foot and look at its watch between words. Are they words if they’re only in your head, though? The wraith blows its nose in a hankie that’s visibly seen better epochs and says he, the wraith, when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end. His end, not the son’s end, the wraith clarifies. Gately wonders if it offends the wraith when he sometimes refers to it mentally as it. The wraith opens and examines the used hankie just like an alive person can never help but do and says No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own off-spring open his mouth and have nothing come out. The wraith says it mars the memory of the end of his animate life, this son’s retreat to the periphery of life’s frame. The wraith confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy’s mother for his silence. But what good does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might have been shrugging. Gately remembers the former Navy M.P. telling Gately’s mother why it was her fault he lost his job at the chowder plant. ‘Resentment Is The #1 Offender’ is another Boston AA cliché Gately’d started to believe. That blame’s a shell-game. Not that he wouldn’t mind a private couple of minutes alone in a doorless room with Randy Lenz, once he was up and capable again, though.

  The wraith reappears slumped back in the chair with his weight on his tailbone and his legs crossed in that Erdedyish upscale way. He says Just imagine the horror of spending your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard and seen but not so well that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad’s) projections of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen, gesturing wildly through the distilled haze, so that in adulthood you still carried the moist flabby weight of your failure ever to make him hear you really speak, carried it on through the animate years on your increasingly slumped shoulders — only to find, near the end, that your very own child had himself become blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute. I.e. that his son had become what he (the wraith) had feared as a child he (the wraith) was. Gately’s eyes roll up in his head. The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith’s life’s end; and no one else in the wraith and boy’s nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility. And they listened but did not hear the wraith’s warning. Gately has that slight tight absent smile again. The wraith says the nuclear family had believed he (the wraith) was unstable and was confusing the boy with his own (the wraith’s) boyhood self, or with the wraith’s father’s father, the blank wooden man who according to family mythology had ‘driven’ the wraith’s father to ‘the bottle’ and unrealized potential and an early cerebral hemorrhage. Toward the end, he’d begun privately to fear that his son was experimenting with Substances. The wraith keeps having to push its glasses up. The wraith says almost bitterly that when he’d stand up and wave his arms for them all to attend to the fact that his youngest and most promising son was disappearing, they’d thought all his agitation meant was that he had gone bats from Wild Turkey–intake and needed to try to get sober, again, one more time.

  This gets Gately’s attention. Here at last could be some sort of point to the unpleasantness and confusion of the dream. ‘You tried to get sober?’ he thinks, rolling his eyes over to the wraith. ‘More than once, you tried? Was it White-Knuckle? 343 Did you ever Surrender and Come In?’

  The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out — even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.

  Gately’s not too agonized and feverish not to recognize gross self-pity when he hears it, wraith or no. As in the slogan ‘Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink.’ With all due respect, pretty hard to believe this wraith could stay sober, if he needed to get sober, with the combination of abstraction and tragically-misunderstood-me attitude he’s betraying, in the dream.

  He’
d been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life, the wraith avers, now back up on the silent heart monitor, though Boston AA had a humorless evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty. And he never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction. Not to mention the cigarette smoke. The atmosphere of the meeting rooms had been like a poker game in hell, had been his impression. The wraith stops and says he bets Gately’s struggling to hide his curiosity about whether the wraith succeeded in coming up with a figurantless entertainment so thoroughly engaging it’d make even an in-bent figurant of a boy laugh and cry out for more.

  Father-figure-wise, Gately’s tried his best these last few sober months to fend off uninvited memories of his own grim conversations and interchanges with the M.P.

  The wraith on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his face is upside-down only cm. from Gately’s face — the wraith’s face is only about half the size of Gately’s face, and has no odor — and responds vehemently that No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side. The wraith apparently can’t tell the difference between Gately just thinking to himself and Gately using his brain-voice to sort of think at the wraith. His shoulder suddenly sends up a flare of pain so sickening Gately’s afraid he might shit the bed. The wraith gasps and almost falls off the monitor as if he can totally empathize with the dextral flare. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure the same pain as Gately in order to hear his brain-voice and have a conversation with him. Even in a dream, that’d be a higher price than anybody’s ever paid to interface with D. W. Gately. Maybe the pain’s supposed to lend credibility to some Diseased argument for Demerol the wraith’s going to make. Gately feels somehow too self-conscious or stupid to ask the wraith if it’s here on behalf of the Higher Power or maybe the Disease, so instead of thinking at the wraith he simply concentrates on pretending to wonder to himself why the wraith is spending probably months of aggregate wraith-time flitting around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with crooner-photos and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn’t know from a rock instead of just quantuming over to wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking son. Though maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would drive the youngest son bats, though, might be the thing. The son didn’t exactly sound like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith’s shared. Of course this was assuming the mute figurant son even existed, this was assuming this wasn’t all some roundabout way of the Disease starting to talk Gately into succumbing to a shot of Demerol. He tries to concentrate on all this instead of remembering what Demerol’s warm rush of utter well-being felt like, remembering the comfortable sound of the clunk of his chin against his chest. Or instead of remembering any of his own interchanges with his mother’s live-in retired M.P. One of the highest prices of sobriety was not being able to keep from remembering things you didn’t want to remember, see for instance Ewell and the fraudulent-grandiosity thing from his wienieish childhood. The ex-M.P. had referred to small children and toddlers as ‘rug-rats.’ It was not a term of gruff affection. The M.P. had made the toddler Don Gately return empty Heineken bottles to the neighborhood packy and then haul-ass on back with the bottle-deposits, timing him with a U.S.N.-issue chronometer. He never laid a hand on Gately personally, that Don could recall. But he’d still been afraid of the M.P. The M.P.’d beaten his mother up on an almost daily basis. The most hazardous time for Gately’s mother was between eight Heinekens and ten Heinekens. When the M.P. threw her on the floor and knelt down very intently over her, picking his spots and hitting her very intently, he’d looked like a lobsterman pulling at his outboard’s rope. The M.P. was slightly shorter than Mrs. Gately but was broad and very muscular, and proud of his muscles, going shirtless whenever possible. Or in like sleeveless khaki military T’s. He had bars and weights and benches, and had taught the child Don Gately the fundamentals of free-weight training, with special emphasis on control and form as opposed to just sloppily lifting as much weight as possible. The weights were old and greasy and their poundage pre-metric. The M.P. was very precise and controlled in his approach to things, in a way Gately has some-how come to associate with all blond-haired men. When Gately, at age ten, began to be able to bench-press more weight than the M.P., the M.P. had not taken it in a good spirit and began refusing to spot him on his sets. The M.P. entered his own weights and repetitions carefully in a little notebook, pausing to do this after each set. He always licked the point of the pencil before he wrote, a habit Gately still finds repellent. In a different little notebook, the M.P. noted the date and time of each Heineken he consumed. He was the sort of person who equated incredibly careful record-keeping with control. In other words he was by nature a turd-counter. Gately had realized this at a very young age, and that it was bullshit and maybe crazy. The M.P. was very possibly crazy. The circumstances of his leaving the Navy were like: shadowy. When Gately involuntarily remembers the M.P. now he also remembers — and wonders why, and feels bad — that he never once asked his mother about the M.P. and why the fuck was he even there and did she actually love him, and why did she love him when he flang her down and beat her up on a more or less daily basis for fucking years on end. The intensifying rose-colors behind Gately’s closed lids are from the hospital room lightening as the light outside the window gets licoricey and pre-dawn. Gately lies below the unoccupied heart-monitor snoring so hard the railings on either side of his bed shiver and rattle. When the M.P. was sleeping or out of the house, Don Gately and Mrs. Gately never once talked about him. His memory is clear on this. It wasn’t just that they never discussed him, or the notebooks or weights or chronometer or his beating up Mrs. Gately. The M.P.’s name was never even mentioned. The M.P. worked nights a lot — driving a cheese-and-egg delivery truck for Cheese King Inc. until he was terminated for embezzling wheels of Stilton and fencing them, then for a time on a mostly automated canning line, pulling a lever that sent New England chowder out of hundreds of spigots into hundreds of lidless cans with an indescribable plopping sound — and the Gately home was like a different world when the M.P. was working or out: it was like the very idea of the M.P. walked out the door with him, leaving Don and his mother not just behind but alone, together, at night, she on the couch and he on the floor, both gradually losing consciousness in front of broadcast TV’s final seasons. Gately tries especially hard now not to explore why it never occurred to him to step in and pull the M.P. off his mother, even after he could bench-press more than the M.P. The precise daily beatings had always seemed in some strangely emphatic way not his business. He rarely even felt anything, he remembers, watching him hit her. The M.P. was totally unshy about hitting her in front of Gately. It was like everybody unspokenly agreed the whole thing was none of Bimmy’s beeswax. When he was a toddler he’d flee the room and cry about it, he seems to recall. By a certain age, though, all he’d do is raise the volume on the television, not even bothering to look over at the beating, watching ‘Cheers!’ Sometimes he’d leave the room and go into the garage and lift weights, but when he left the room it was never like he was fleeing the room. When he’d been small he’d sometimes hear the springs and sounds from their bedroom sometimes in the A.M. and worry that the M.P. was beating her up on their bed, but at a certain point without anybody taking him aside and explaining anything to him he realized that the sounds then didn’t mean she was getting hurt. The similarity of her hurt sounds in the kitchen and living room and her sex-sounds through the asbestos fiberboard bedroom wall troubles Gately, though, when he remembers now, and is one reason why he fends off remembering, when awake.