Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Oh I definitely I’d suspect some kind of conspiracy or trap. It’s obvious everything’s pointing toward getting you in a cell belting out Mermanalia. Inc, I think your hinges are starting to squeak. I think this is what plateaux-hopping up to the top does to somebody. I think a meaningful transcendent DMZ-type non-uremic-fallout interlude before Tucson is just what the carpenter ordered, for the old hinges. Keep you from going back to just smoking that Bob Hope day in day out when the test’s up. Shit’ll kill your lungs. Shit’ll make you fat, soft, moist and pale, Inc. Seen it happen. You need something more than a 30-day cleanout. The tu-sais-qué could be just the reconfiguration you need to start branching out, leave the Bob Hope alone, find something you can take to college or the Show and not get paralyzed. Shit’ll paralyze you over time, Incblob. Saw it happen time and over, back in the neighborhood. Once-promising stand-up guys spending their lives in front of the TP, eating Nutter Butters and whacking off into an old sock. The shit-fairy moves in with luggage for an extended stay, Inc. Plus indecisive? You haven’t seen indecisive til you’ve seen a guy with little fat-titties slumped in a chair in his tenth year of nonstop Bob Hope. It’s not pretty. Incster my friend it’s not pretty at all. A transcendent experience with me and the Axhandle could be just what the hinges are squeaking for. Be around some other people for a change. Don’t make me sit there with just Axhandle babbling about Yale. Leave the Visine at home.’

  ‘Was it transcendent? The term in Struck’s literature? Or was it transcendental?’

  ‘ ’s the difference for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Mike, what if I said I’ve been moving toward more than just a month off.’

  ‘Abandon All Hope. a This what I was talking.’

  ‘I mean maybe make a decision. Forever. What if it was that I was doing it more and more and it was getting less fun but I was still doing it more and more, and the only way to moderate would be to like wave a hankie at it altogether.’

  ‘I applaud. Some low-risk transcendentalism with me and the Human Hatchet could be just the impotence for this kind of like major re—’

  ‘But it’d be everything. Blue Flames, the odd ’drine. If I do anything I know I’d go back to the Bob. I’d drop Madame Psychosis with you guys and all my firmest resolve would melt and I’d have the one-hitter out and be sniveling at you to spring some eternal Hope on me.’

  ‘You’re so naïve, Inc. You’re so sharp in one way and such a little bald little fat-legged baby in the woods in others. You think you’re just going to go Here I go, deciding, and reverse total thrust and quit everything?’

  ‘What I said was what if.’

  ‘Hal, you are my friend, and I’ve been friends to you in ways you don’t even have a clue. So brace yourself for a growth-spurt. You want to quit because you’re starting to see you need it, and —’

  ‘That’s exactly it. Peems, think how horrible that’d be, if somebody needed it. Not just liked it a great great great deal. Needing it becomes a whole separate order of. … It seems horrific. It seems like the difference between really loving something and being —’

  ‘Say the word, Inc.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Because you know why? What if it’s true? The word. What if you are? So the answer’s just walk away? If you’re addicted you need it, Hallie, and if you need it what do you imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag and try to go on without it, without anything?’

  ‘…’

  ‘You lose your mind, Inc. You die inside. What happens if you try and go without something the machine needs? Food, moisture, sleep, O2? What happens to the machine? Think about it.’

  ‘You were just now applauding the idea of Abandoning All Hope. You were just invoking an image of me with breasts, masturbating into laundry, with cobwebs between my ass and a chair.’

  ‘That’s the Bob. I didn’t hear me say everything. If you need the Bob, Inc, you can only quit the Bob if you move onward and up to something else.’

  ‘Harder drugs. Just like those old filmstrips about pot opening the door to larger drugs, where Jiminy Cricket —’

  ‘Oh fuck you. It doesn’t have to be harder. It just has to be something. I know guys quit heroin, coke. How? They make the strategic move to a case a day of Coors. Or to methadone, whatever. I know hard-drinking guys Inc that got off the booze by switching to the Bob Hope. Me myself, you’ve seen, I switch all the time. The trick is the right switch for a man’s wiring. I’m saying a real cobweb-blaster with me and Axford after the Fundraiser could help you get some serious perspective, cut the babytalk and sweeping bullshit decisions there’s no way you can do and start getting a real handle on how you’re going to branch out away from this Bob thing, which I applaud the getting away from the Bob for you, Inc, it’s not your thing, you were starting to get that look of a guy that’ll end up with tits.’

  ‘So you’re in a very subtle way lobbying for a DMZ-drop by saying you don’t believe I could simply quit everything. Since you sure don’t plan to quit. With your left eye wobbling all over the place. You haven’t even quit the Tenuate. “Winners don’t ever have to quit” and all deLint’s little —’

  ‘I didn’t hear me say none of that. And I think you probably could quit it all. For a while. You’re not a pussy. You’ve got balls, I know. I bet you could gut it out.’

  ‘For a while, you’re saying.’

  ‘And but what do you think would happen after a while, though? Without something you need?’

  ‘What, you’re saying I’d grab my chest and keel over? Clutch my head in the middle of a Tap & Whack and die of an aneurism like that girl last year at Atwood?’

  ‘No. But you’d die inside. Maybe outside too. But what I’ve seen, if you’re the real thing and need it and just cut yourself off of it altogether, you die inside. You lose your mind. I’ve seen it happen. Cold Turkey they call it, the Bird. White-knuckling. Guys that’d just quit everything because they were in too deep and quit it all and just died.’

  ‘A Clipperton, you mean? You’re saying Himself killed himself because he got sober? Because he didn’t get sober. There was a thing of Wild Turkey right there on the counter by the oven he blew his fucking head up with. So don’t try to kertwang me with him, Mike.’

  ‘Inc, what I know about your Da could be inscribed with a blunt crayon along the rim of a shot glass. I’m talking guys I know. Wolf Spiders. Allston guys, that quit. Some did a Clipperton, yes. Some ended up in the Mental Marriott. Some got through by they joined NA or a cult or some bug-eyed church and went around with ties talking about Jesus or Surrendering, but that shit’s not going to work for you because you’re too sharp to ever buy the God-Squad shit. Most nothing big happened, that needed it and quit. They got up and went to work and came home and ate and went to sleep and got up, day after day. But dead. Like machines; you could almost see the keys in their backs. You looked into their maps and something was gone. The walking dead. They loved it so much they needed it and gave it up and now they were waiting to die. Something was all over, inside.’

  ‘Their joie de vivre. The fire in the belly.’

  ‘Hal, it’s been what, now, for you, two-and-a-half days without? three days? How you feeling in there already, brother?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Incpuddle, all I know’s I’m your friend. I am. You don’t want to communate with the Madame, you can hold me and Ax’s purses for us. You do what you want and point me toward whoever tells you different. I’m just giving you the advice to look a little further past that second of deciding something I know you won’t let yourself take back.’

  ‘Some vital part of my like personhood would die without something to ingest. This is your view.’

  ‘Sometimes you don’t listen real well, Hallie. That’s all right. Spend some time figuring out this needing. Like what part of you’s come to need it, do you think.’

  ‘You’re alleging that’s the part that’ll die.’

  ‘Just whatever p
art you feel has come to need what you’re planning to take away from it.’

  ‘The part that’s dependent or incomplete, you mean. The addict.’

  ‘That’s just a word.’ (back to text)

  322. Johnette F., whose very first stepmother had been a Chelsea MA police officer, was conditioned in early childhood to refer to police as ‘police’ or ‘the Law,’ since most B.P.D. personnel find the street term the Finest sardonic. (back to text)

  323. People outside the Boston AA community always use The and say The Ennet House; this is one way to always tell somebody new or from outside the community. (back to text)

  324.

  17 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

  Sometimes at odd little times of day the E.T.A. males’ locker room downstairs in Comm.-Ad. is empty, and you can go in there and sort of moon around and listen to the showers drip and the drains gurgle. You can feel the odd stunned quality customarily crowded places have at empty times. You can take your time dressing, flex in front of the big plate mirror over the sink; the mirror has projecting side-mirrors so you can check out the old biceps from either side, see the jawline in profile, practice expressions, try to look all natural and uncomposed so you can try to see what you really might normally look like to other people. The air in the locker room hangs heavy with the smells of underarms, deodorant, benzoin, camphonated powder, serious feet, old steam. Also Lemon Pledge and a slight smell of electrical burn from overused blow-dryers. Traces of powder and fuller’s earth a on the blue carpeting, down in too deep to get out without a steamer. You can take a comb out of the big jar of Barbicide on the shelf by the sink, and like a .38-caliber blow-dryer, and experiment boldly. It’s the best mirror in the Academy, intricately lit from all perspectives. Dr. J. O. Incandenza knew his adolescents. At slack times, sometimes head custodian Dave (‘F.D.V.’) Harde can be found in here, taking a tiny nap on one of the benches that run in front of the lockers, which he claims the benches do something palliative for his spinal funiculi. More often there’s one of Dave’s incredibly old and interchangeable menial-task janitors in here running a carpet sweeper or spraying industrial disinfectant in the urinals. You can go into the shower area and not turn the water on and sing, really let go. Michael Pemulis’s own vocals sound pro-quality good to him, but only when he’s surrounded by shower-tile. Sometimes when it’s empty in here you can catch snatches of voices and intriguing feminine-hygienic noises from the females’ locker room on the other side of the lockers’ wall.

  At most other times of day, your certain type of more delicately constituted E.T.A. jr. uses the primitive subdorm hall showers and sinks and avoids the packed locker room at almost all costs. No way Western man ever should have conceived of commodes and hot showers in the same crowded air-space. T. Schacht can clear out most of a steamy locker room just by lumbering into a commode-stall and driving the latch home with a certain purposeful force.

  The prorectors have their own showers in a kind of lounge near their rooms in the secondary tunnel, with a Viewer and recliners and a little fridgelet and a dicky-proof door.

  When M. M. Pemulis came down to dress for P.M.s at about 1420h., b the only people in the locker room were 14-A lobber nonpareil Todd Possalthwaite, hunched and weeping, and Keith Freer, whom Pemulis was to play and who looked in no hurry to get dressed and out there to play, and could very possibly have been the thing that was making Postal Weight weep. The so-called ‘Viking’ was shirtless and had a towel around his neck and was at the mirror ministering to his skin. He had high hard white-blond hair and an extremely muscular neck and lower jaw, with a certain type of protrusive gonions that made his upper face look tapered and sly. His hair always reminded Hal Incandenza of frozen surf, Hal said. Todd Possalthwaite was near-nude and hunched on the bench under his locker, his face in his hands, with its nose’s white bandages visible through spread fingers, weeping softly, shoulders trembling.

  Pemulis, who’s Postal Weight’s Big Buddy and sort of lob-and-Eschaton-mentor and genuinely likes the kid, dropped his gear and gave him a sort of male-affectionate fake one-two punch like Think Fast. ‘ ’s the nose, Todder?’ Like all of them, Pemulis could do his locker’s combination by feel, from months and years of constant combination-doing. He was looking all around himself and the room. Freer made a slight noise when Pemulis asked the Postman if there was anything he could do.

  ‘Nothing’s true,’ Postal Weight sobbed, his voice palm-muffled, rocking slightly on the bench. His locker was open and little-boy cluttered. He was wearing only an an unbuttoned little flannel shirt and a Johnson & Johnson jr. jock strap, and had tiny white feet c and delicate little shell-like toes. He was supposed to be in Donni Stott’s Valley-Map laugher right now, Pemulis knew.

  ‘What, metaphysical angst at thirteen?’ Pemulis directs the question to the quote-Viking’s reflection’s eye in the mirror. Freer’s back is tapered and uncolloped and for a tennis player’s back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated applications and defoliations of Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because he is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning. He still has his jeans and loafers on, Pemulis sees. Pemulis keeps waiting for the distinctive attitudinal upswing of two pre-match Tenuate spansules. d Pemulis’s locker is both full and very precisely ordered, practically alphabetized, like the trunk of an experienced seaman. Disassemblable scale and armamentarium and mood-altering substances used to be concealed in several factory-concealed niches in the special system of niche-riddled portable shelving Pemulis had installed at age 15. Plus small cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the always-remotely-possible sniffer-dog, when he was a callow youth. This was before the discovery of the ultimate entrepôt above the false ceiling in Subdorm B’s male hallway.

  ‘Just a disappointed dinkle.’ Freer’s chuckle tends to be mirthless. ‘What I could get out of him before the waterworks, Postal Weight’s old man promised him so-and-so if the kid accomplishes thus-and-such.’ His speech was distorted because he was ballooning his cheek with his tongue and applying flesh-tinted cream to a possible pimple there. ‘And the Postmaster here feels like he’s held up his side of the accomplishment, and now I get the drift Daddy’s backing out.’

  Possalthwaite’s shoulders continued to tremble as he cried into his hands.

  ‘In other words welching you’re saying the Dad is,’ Pemulis said to Freer.

  ‘I gather now the Dad’s trying to restructure the original deal all of a sudden.’

  Pemulis undid his belt. ‘The dangled carrot’s snatched away, the brass ring plays hard to get, to coin a maxim.’

  ‘Something about Disney World, before the wa-wa started.’

  Pemulis removed his nonplay sneakers by scraping downward at one heel with the other sneaker’s toe, looking down into the tender little whorl in the center of Possalth-waite’s hair. He’d never be so ephebic as to verbally ask Freer if he had plans to suit up so they could get out there; he’d never let Freer think he was renting Freer space in his head before the match started. ‘Postman, is this because of the Eschaton incident? Is it because of the nose? Because I can get on the horn and tell old Postal Weight Sr. they’re blaming nobody under 17, it turns out, you should tell him, Todder. There’s whole land-barges of shit, but none of it’s spraying in you guys’s direction, you should take comfort.’

  ‘Nothing’s true,’ Possalthwaite keened, not looking up, muffled, flat-nippled, fatless in the young gut, feet spectral below his legs’ brown, rocking, shaking his head, looking terribly young and innocently vulnerable, sort of pre-moral. Little white strips of bandage protuded from his palms’ outer edges, from I.-Day’s apocalypse.

  ‘Well, not much is fair, anyway,’ Pemulis conceded. The Viking made a noise at himself.

  Pemulis calls Postal Weight’s father up on-screen. Minneapolis-area developer. Malls, corporate parks, bustling places at the edges of roaring beltways. Late f
orties, slim, an overmanaged tan, a little oversharp in the dress dept., with a motivational-seminar-type hard-sell charm. A dagger of a Dad, with a pencil mustache and blinding shoe-leather. He tried to conjure an image of this paternal figure hitting Keith Freer on the noggin with a rolling pin and a bald cartoon lump rising from Freer’s skull. (Pemulis calculates a win or even three-setter w/ Freer would mean a place on the WhataBurger plane, is why he’s willing to violate a kind of personal honor-code and take pre-match Tenuate, which even with the 36-hour-elimination curve is kind of cavalier, given that he and Inc’d escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that he’d tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John Wayne, and Avril is kind of a coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-be-fucked-with administrative figure, and along with C. [‘Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Cow’] Tavis isn’t exactly a fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation incident. The ’drines didn’t seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of stomachless competitive verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a kind of enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he’s facing into a warm wind.) Pemulis had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T-shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms.

  ‘Nothing’s fair because nothing’s true,’ Possalthwaite wept into his palms. His little flannel shoulders shook.

  Something old in one of the shower drains sighed and gurgled, a nauseous sound.

  ‘Buck up.’ Pemulis was removing all necessary match-articles and refolding them and placing them in his noncomplimentary Dunlop gear-bag with military precision. He put a foot on the bench and looked briefly to either side. ‘Because if that’s your burr then rest in my assurance, Postalcode: certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true.’

  Freer had made a pincer of his fingers and was at the other cheek. ‘Let him cry. Let baby have his dinkle. Piss and moan. Thirteen for Christ’s sake. A kid thirteen hasn’t even been in the same room with real disappointment yet. Hasn’t even locked eyes across a room with real disillusion and and frustration and pain. Thirteen: pain’s a rumor. What’s the word. Angst. Baby wouldn’t know genuine-article angst if it walked up and got him in a headlock.’