Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘I’d rather just agree it’s a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt and grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we hit the truck.’

  ‘Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different Separatist flanges?’

  ‘Not according to Poutrincourt they don’t.’

  ‘So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Québec Go or we stick knives in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on Rue Sherbrooke during St. Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and stretch mirrors across U.S. highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monuments and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and dicky with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot O.N.A.N.ite V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from injecting anaerobic toxins into jars of Planters peanuts?’

  ‘The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.’

  ‘Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what’s the political motivation for the about-face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound soberly considered.’

  ‘Orin, I’m trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with your choice of me as co-ponderer.’

  ‘All —’

  ‘I’m a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I’m a student at a tennis academy that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by design. I’m sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it you hope to get from me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding line of patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been seduced into believing it’s really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians. Of fringe anybody. How consistent do the Brazilian Nuevo Contras’ objectives look? The Noie Störkraft’s? Shining Path’s? The Belgian CCC’s’? Pro-Life assault squads? The Ez-ed-Dean-el-Qassan? P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists’ objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?’ k

  ‘Poor C.U.S.P.s?’ ‘Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term wacko and leave it at that? Why not tell her you’re a radically simple and somewhat sick young man who kicks balls really high in the air for a living?’

  ‘All I —’

  ‘Why not just say who cares? This stuff isn’t about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you say you’ve erased from all RAM. Why not tell the damn truth for once?’

  ‘Me tell the truth? Me lie?’

  ‘What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT entrance-test on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance exam? You have to place above a certain percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery right next to the bassinet? Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can’t even admit it over the fucking phone?’

  ‘…’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘…’

  ‘I’m sorry, O. I apologize.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. I know you didn’t mean it.’

  ‘I hate losing the temper.’

  ‘You don’t sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.’

  Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. ‘These tooth-episodes make me feel like that wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.’

  ‘That chew’s going to eat right through your membranes. It’s a vicious vice. I’m urging in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.’

  Michael Pemulis cracks Hal’s door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and his right eye gets wobbly in this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting cap, gold epaulets of fake naval braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that lights up in sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in he brings his other arm in over from behind like it’s not his arm, his hand in the shape of a claw just over his head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling him back out into the hall. W/ an eye-rolling look of fake terror.

  Hal is hunched, examining his finger for eye-material. ‘In all the excitement we’ve neglected the most obvious response, then, O. Your answer for the exam, and then I can go dry the ankle.’ He can hear Pemulis asking Petropolis Kahn and Stephan Wagenknecht something off down the hall through the cracked door.

  ‘I think I already tried the obvious response on her, but hit me.’

  ‘Pemulis just made his first pass and left the door ajar. I’m sitting here nude in a draft through an open door neglecting the maybe deceptively obvious fact that something like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity’s northern border runs contiguous to Québec.’

  ‘Exactamundo.’

  ‘So that so what if Ottawa didn’t formally subjoin the Concavity to any particular province. Really big favor, I’m sure. Because the map speaks for itself. Bits of western New Brunswick and a smidgeon of Ontario aside, the Concavity — the physical fact and fallout of the Concavity — it’s Québec’s problem. Something like 750 clicks of border along the Concavity, with attendant seepage, for Notre Rai Pays.’

  ‘Yes plus the brunt of the airborne wastes from the high-altitude ATHSCMEs, plus being the province that gets splatted when the E.W.D. vehicles overshoot the Concavity. This is what I tried right off the bat on her.’

  ‘So what’s the puzzle. Put yourself in Québec’s shoes. Once again they get the gooey end of the Canadian dipstick. It’s mostly now western Québecer kids the size of Volkswagens shlumpfing around with no skulls. It’s Québecers with cloracne and tremors and olfactory hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead. It’s eastern Québec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant-depredations and the corrosive fogs.’

  ‘Although people aren’t exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either. And the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over Fundy, and supposedly the lobsters out there are like monsters in old Japanese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia glows, at night, in satellite photos.’

  ‘Still and all, O., tell her proportionally speaking it’s Québec that’s borne the brunt of what Canada had to take. The brunt again, to their way of thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There’s got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the whole thing.’

  The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael Pemulis has pretended to kick it in. ‘Good Lard preserve us he’s nekkid,’ he says, coming in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a second.

  ‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered patch of Hal’s half of the floor and makes a show of looking at his wrist as if there were a watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger.

  ‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin is saying. ‘The issue she raises is is there really any sort of realistic hope of Québec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge the waste as fundamentally American waste.’

  ‘Well probably of course not.’ Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into a claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is compulsively going around zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes. ‘But now she’s got you falling back into demanding realistic and consistent logic from fringe mentalities again.’

  ‘But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn’t oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn’t. Ottawa’s so far in now they w
ouldn’t say shit if they had three times the mouthful they already have. Of shit I mean.’

  Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry VIII–like rending and chewing motions. His eyes, under the waning influence of P.M. stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed. They just get tiny and lightless and even closer together in his narrow face, like a second set of nostrils. The right eye’s little wobble is out of sync with the pulse of his earring.

  There’s the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. ‘So then I’ll ask you what she seemed like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists’ and fringe cells’ pathetic little anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?’

  ‘Does fish-shit drift slowly bottomward, O.? How could she see it as anything but, if she’s as savvy as you say?’ Hal removes his pruned white foot from the janitor-bucket and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis’s Docksider. Pemulis picks the briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them to Hal with a pretend-shudder.

  ‘So simply largely symbolic at best, then?’

  Hal’s lying back trying to get his legs into the briefs with one hand. ‘Tell her after much chin-stroking simply yes, O. O., Pemulis is standing here already in his hat pretending to clang a dinner bell. He’s got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.’ Pemulis is actually making a complex system of motions indicating both the procedures for rolling a duBois and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and Pemulis and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping out to the little hidden clearing behind West House’s parking lot’s dumpsters and sharing an obscene cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, while Schacht and sometimes Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the green glow of the truck’s instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling go-on-ahead-on-down motion to Pemulis.

  ‘But you have the… Mr. Hope,’ Pemulis stage-whispers.

  ‘One moment please.’ Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and hand with two pillows and some bedding, and stage-whispers ‘Where’s your part of the Mr. H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of my part of the Hope I bought retail from you not three days ago?’

  The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. ‘Extenuations. We can get it all sorted out right later. Nobody’s going to like exploit you.’

  And then it’s hard to extract the hand and phone. ‘O., I’m going to have to book out of here in just about one second.’

  ‘Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you can call me back. This was the Subject’s crux-type proposal. You can call collect if you want.’

  ‘I don’t have to respond,’ Hal says.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I just listen and then break the connection.’

  ‘Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day’s full-toll.’

  ‘I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation’s over and we can go.’ Hal’s directing all this more at Pemulis, who’s pacing and holding the Constantine bust in his hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head.

  ‘All set? This is it. Are you set?’

  ‘So go already.’

  ‘Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists’ big object has always been to independently secede, and if they’ve got about a snowball’s chance of ever really getting O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle and the transfer of the Concavity and the whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially the Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity in theirs, that the maps now say it’s Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant that all this is obviously right; then why don’t the Separatists in Québec use the fact of the odiousness of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and go to Ottawa to parliament and say to the rest of Canada like: Look, let us secede, and we’ll take the Concavity with us when we secede, it’ll be our problem not yours, it’ll go on the maps as Québecois and not Canadian, it’ll be our blot and our bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada’s pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa’s parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.’s map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don’t they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why the Nucks don’t see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada’s persuadability into letting Québec go. She hit me with Why wouldn’t your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?’

  ‘Who’s this you’re talking to you can’t call back?’ Pemulis says loudly, pacing back and forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering like mad.

  Hal lowers the phone but doesn’t cover it. ‘It’s Orin, wanting to know why Québec and the F.L.Q. and so on haven’t tried bargaining with the Canadian administration, offering Québec’s cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation.’ Hal cocks his head slightly. ‘This could be Poutrincourt’s so-called Separation and return’s real meaning, it occurs to me.’

  ‘Orin as in your brother, with the leg?’

  ‘He’s all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.’

  Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. ‘Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart! Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a dozen D-bases off of the Net! Tell him you’re pretty sure he can afford it!’ Pemulis’s hands are slender and red-knuckled and his fingers long and sort of falcate. ‘Tell him you can hear the truck getting impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we ever get our friends get ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat on schedule up here or we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly access D-bases and run our asses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don’t just stand there and swing one leg up and down over and over for seven-plus figures.’

  ‘Tell Penisless to go sit on something sharp,’ Orin says.

  ‘O., he’s right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You said I could think and call you back. I’ll use your pager if you like.’

  Pemulis has used one foot to clear a path through laundry and diskettes and books and gear to the west window, where he’s making broad involved gestures with a person or persons outside down on the grounds whom the window’s big sill keeps Hal from being able to see. Hal’s underwear is at a diagonal across his pelvis. Orin on the phone is saying:

  ‘Picture this and see what you think. Imagine this. The F.L.Q. and other various Separatist cells all suddenly divert their terror’s energies away from Canada and suddenly start mounting an insurgent campaign of U.S. and Mexican harassment. But the thing is they make a big deal of terroristically insurging against O.N.A.N. on the behalf of all of Canada. They even find a way to bring the Albertan ultra-rightists in on it, plus other provincial fringes, so it looks to O.N.A.N. like maybe all of Canada as a whole is in on the insurging.’

  ‘I don’t have to picture it. It’s what’s going on. The C.P.C.P. l makes incursions against Montana like clockwork. There was that horrific jamming of InterLace pulses and substitution of porn-films for children’s programming around Duluth in June traced to that psycho quintet in southwest Ontario. The Interstates north of Saratoga are still supposed to be undrivable after sunset.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So some point for me to ponder needs to emerge really fast, here, Orin.’

  ‘The po
int is I was rhetorically invited by the Subject to entertain the picture of it all really being the Nucks. The pan-Canadian thing being a dodge. The Separatists all some-how united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question becomes to imagine this and ask: Why would they do this?’

  ‘We’re wearing a groove in the same track again, O. It’s because the Concavity impacts mainly Québec.’

  ‘No, I mean she meant why would they make such a noise about insurging on behalf of all of Canada and go to such lengths to orchestrate the appearance of pan-Canadian anti-O.N.A.N.ism.’

  ‘And then judging by precedent the Subject gave a hypothetical answer to her own question. Have you gotten to get a word in edgewise throughout this series of interviews, O.?’

  ‘What if it’s that the Nuck Separatists know totally well that if the O.N.A.N. administration sees Canada as a big enough roach in the ointment, Gentle and Unspecified Services’ boys in white can get together with Mexico’s Vichified puppet-state and make things like really unpleasant indeed for Ottawa. They could make Canada the sort of black scapegoat of all of O.N.A.N. There’s little you can picture that might be worse than being the one country in a three-country continental Anschluss that the other two countries are ganging up on and making things unpleasant for.’

  ‘Vichified? Anschluss? This doesn’t sound like any Orin I know. These are rabidly political catchwords. What kind of heartbreaking Rubensian Moment -type fluff-journalist is this you’re so determined to —?’

  ‘The unpleasantness is pretty easy to imagine a picture of. The E.W.D. vectors could easily be recalibrated further north, Gentle could tell them. Our waste-resources are extensive. At the mildest, he could say, good-sized chunks of Canada could be Concavitized.’

  ‘I have to go. Pemulis is slumped back against the wall with his hands over his stomach and is slumping all the way down the wall looking wobbly and pale.’