Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Not like real true real possible-little-cheek-pimple angst, Vike, hey?’

  ‘Flip it over and squat, Pemulis,’ without bothering to look. Both Pemulis and Freer had pronounced a hard g in angst, Hal would have observed. The Viking contorted his mouth and raised his big chin to check the flesh of his jaw, turning slightly to use the side-mirrors as well.

  Pemulis smiled broadly, trying to envision Keith Freer sitting in a canvas restraint-wrap in full lotus, staring blankly, hitting all the high notes in ‘No Business Like Show Business’ as orderlies in boiled whites and prim nurses in bent hats stand around snapping their fingers, clean white cheap institutional-care sneakers tapping noiselessly through all eternity. He was down to chinos and bare light-brown feet. He considered a blue T-shirt with a black wolf-spider on it v. a coincidentally red-on-gray T-shirt that had ‘Vodka is the Enemy of Production’ in presumably Russian. His good four Dunlop sticks were stacked on the bench to Possalthwaite’s left. He picked up two and tested the strings’ tension by hitting the side of one stick’s head against the the strung face of the other and listening to the strings and then switching sticks and repeating the process. The exact right tension has a certain pitch. Midsized Dunlop Enqvist TL Composites. $304.95 U.S. retail. Real catgut strings have a kind of a dentalish sweet stink. The dot-and-circumflex logo. He didn’t much look at Possalthwaite. He chose the Cyrillic shirt with the bottle-glyph. He rolled it up and put his head through the head-hole first, his late great Da’s old-fashioned way. The upscaler kids here all did the arm-holes first. Then they did the head. You can also tell the scholarship kids because for some reason they put on a sock and a shoe and then a sock and a shoe. See for instance Wayne, who’d been in their room right after lunch when Pemulis had made the decision to come up for some pre-match Tenuate. Wayne’s room was right nearby and he was standing there over Troeltsch’s pharmacopic bedside table with no shirt and wet hair, rheumy-eyed and shiny-nostriled from moisturizer on his Kleenex-chafed nostrils. The Viking was squeezing a damp tennis ball with his left hand while he scanned his forehead by mostly feel. Pemulis’s psychic counter-strategy was not to appear in any hurry to dress and stretch and get out there either. Pemulis — who feared and hated unauthorized people being in his room, and who was constantly on Schacht’s back about forgetting to lock up when he left, and who wasn’t intimidated by Wayne’s talent and success and affectless reserve, but was cautious around him, John Wayne, sort of the way a formidable predator will be unintimidated but cautious around another formidable predator, particularly since the virtuosic but tense performance in a certain administrative office a week ago, which had been mentioned by neither man — had coolly asked Wayne if he could help him, and Wayne had just as coolly not looked up from rattling through sickly Jim Troeltsch’s bedside table’s stuff and said he’d come in for some of Troeltsch’s Seldane e , which Pemulis had indeed heard Troeltsch at breakfast describing to a nose-blowing Wayne as the battlefield-nuke of anti-histamines that didn’t make you too drowsy to function at an incredibly high level of function. Pemulis adjusted his jock’s rear straps, trying to remember this Wayne-memory’s point. Wayne had wanted a clear head and high pulmonary function because he was down to play the Syrian Satelliter in an informal exhibition at 1515h. Wayne hadn’t offered this explanation; Pemulis got it off the e-board. One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne’s unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn’t impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis’s hand in the Olde-English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TPs’ communal e-board for 11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times. The point was that the half-dressed Wayne had been standing there with one foot bare and one in a sock and shoe. Pemulis shook his head slightly and looked down at Possalthwaite and tried to gather spit.

  The speaker out up by the clock in the cement hall by the sauna crackled to life for the start of weekly WETA, with its glass-shattering Joan Sutherland theme. Pemulis put his street-sneakers on his street-shoe shelf. ‘Buck up, T.P. It’s just an angst-spasm. You’re just reeling from a temporary paternal kertwang. Philosophical truth’s jutting out all over the place. Disney World or no. Nose or no. Eschaton lives on, believe me. Underground or no. You have a calling, a talent. A missileman of your caliber. Reach down and rally, me little button.’

  Possalthwaite had taken his face from his hands and was staring stonily up somewhere past Pemulis, lips moving in the habitual sucking reflex for which he took so much guff. His face had the pink scrubbed look of a crying child all right. His hands had left brown spiders of tincture of benzoin on his cheeks. He had two little smudges of bruise under the eyes. He sniffed meatily through a nose still covered in horizontal strips of surgical tape. ‘I ab dot a little button.’

  ‘That’s what all the little buttons say, kid,’ the Viking said levelly, removing something from a nostril with tweezers. Pemulis’s sinuses felt like four-laners and his sense of smell was a lot keener than a man in a locker room might wish. Freer’s locker next to Gloeckner’s next to good old Inc’s was agape, the bolted colposcope gleaming in the overhead lights and his Fox large-head sticks a nauseous West-Coast fluorescent orange with the trademark fox-glyph painted on the strings.

  Possalthwaite scratched at one foot with the nails of the other foot. ‘If you can’t trust your folks…’

  ‘Let me both validate and remind you that the kertwang you’re reeling under is emotion-based and not fact-based.’

  Possalthwaite opened his mouth.

  ‘You’re getting ready to say if you can’t trust the ostensively loving patriarchal bosom you can’t trust anyone at all, and if you can’t trust people what can you trust, in terms of unvarying dependability, Postal Weight, am I right?’

  ‘Oh Jesus H. Christmastree here it comes,’ the Viking said to his forehead’s reflection.

  Pemulis was putting on a sock and a shoe, his mouth right down by Postal Weight’s ear. ‘This is not a bullshit problem. This is a like serious emotiono-philosophical deal you’re confronting. I think it’s a good sign you’re coming to me instead of holding it all impactedly inside.’

  ‘Who’s coming to you?’ Freer turned the big face this way and that. ‘He was already in here having his little wa-wa-dinkle.’

  Pemulis tried envisioning Keith Freer being bent over the net by Bedouins in purple turbans and roundly buggered, making the sort of sounds Leith’s historical b/w J. Gleason made when in pain. To Possalthwaite he was saying ‘Cause I can remember staring down the exact same-type thing, though from a more like philosophicalized kertwang than emotions.’

  Freer said ‘Do not ask him what he means, kid.’

  Then a couple of 16s came in, G. (‘Yardguard’) Rader and a marginal Slavic kid whose first name was Zoltan and whose last name nobody could pronounce, and ignored Freer’s advice to run for their lives because the good Dr. Pemulis had been prescribing for himself again and was going to begin to rant, and threw down their gear and proceeded immediately to get fresh towels from the dispenser over by the showers and to snap them at each other.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Possalthwaite.

  ‘The snare closes, the trap closes, here it comes.’

  Rader rolled his wrists and spiraled the towel for what he called maximum painage. The Viking turned and said if he felt so much as a terrycloth breeze on this personal ass right here they were toast, the two. Pemulis was taking racquets out. E.T.A.’s male 16s were as a group inbent, conspiratorial, glandular, cliqueish. They excluded anyone not in their set. They had techniques and strategems of exclusion way more advanced than the 18s or 14s. (They tended to exclude Stice, mostly because he roomed with Coyle and drilled a lot of the time up with the 18s, and mixed with them, and more recently Kornspan, excluded, basically because he was cretinous and cruel and now
consensually suspected of having tortured and killed the two collarless cats whose burnt corpses had been found on the hillside during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks back.) They had their own dialect and codes, in-jokes inside in-jokes. f And at E.T.A. only 16s snapped towels, and only for a year or two, but they went at it with a vengeance, towel-snapping, a brief flared genuflection to jock-stereotype, a stage where there’s this primate-like passion for redassed bonding in steamy rooms. They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange.

  Then 18’s-B/C fence-sitter Duncan van Slack, the kid who carried a guitar around with himself everyplace but never played it, and refused all late-night-sitting-around-someone’s-room requests to play, and who was suspected of not being able to play the thing at all, and whose own Da was supposedly a redoubted gene-sequencer in Savannah, poked his head and guitar’s neck in the door and said to come quick and then withdrew his head before anybody could ask what was up.

  ‘If you didn’t have such a way with a launch-vector I wouldn’t be sure you’re ready to hear this, Postalscale.’

  ‘It occurs to me this is your boring man’s true talent: the talent for ensnaring,’ says the Viking. ‘Flee while you can, kid.’

  Possalthwaite blew his nose in the crook of his elbow and left it there.

  Pemulis, who still used genuine catgut strings, zipped the two sticks he’d chosen into their Dunlop covers. He put an arch-support shoe up on the bench by Postalweight’s bottom, looking quickly right and left:

  ‘Todder, you can trust math.’

  Freer said ‘You heard it here first.’

  Pemulis compulsively zipped and unzipped one of the covers. ‘Take a breather, Keith. Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all else fails. When the boulder’s slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven’s theme song. The nightlight on life’s dark wall, late at night. Heaven’s recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane, ammonia, H2O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it’s true.’

  ‘This from a man on academic probation for who knows the length.’

  Something involving Freer and a saline-moistened cattle-prod refused to quite mentally gel. There was still none of Tenuate’s stomachless verve or well-being, just a glittered hum in his head and sinuses that felt like wind-tunnels. Pemulis tended to be a mouth-breather. The Viking raised one leg to fart toward Pemulis in a vaudevillian way, getting a laugh from Csikszentmihalyi and Rader, who’d mostly undressed and taken seats on the bench opposite Pemulis and Postal Weight, towels hung unwinding in their hands, watching, and were only every once in a while and in a halfhearted way pretending to look like they were getting ready to snap each other.

  ‘I’m not a math person, Dad says,’ said Postal Weight. Again the nose made the words come out dot and bath and persod. Csikszentmihalyi feinted a lunge and then really lunged and there was brief flurry of terrycloth.

  Pemulis unzipped the cover. ‘The axiom. The lemma. Listen: “If two different sets of parametric equations represent the same curve J, but the curve is traced in opposite directions in the two cases, then the two sets of equations produce values for a line integral over J that are negatives of each other.” Not “If thus-and-such.” Not “unless a gladhanding commercial realtor from Boardman MN in $400 Banfi loafers changes his mind.” Always and ever. As in puts the a in a priori. An honest lamp in the inkiest black, Toddleposter.’

  There were voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus. McKenna stuck his head in and looked wildly around and withdrew without saying anything. Csikszentmihalyi went out after him. Freer and Rader both said What the fuck. Pemulis had only one button of his fly buttoned and was pointing at the ceiling with a finger:

  ‘… Only that at times like this, when you’re directionless in a dark wood, trust to the abstract deductive. When driven to your knees, kneel and revere the double S. Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hilbert, L’Hôpital. You will be lifted up. Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey. Borne up. Never let fall. Wiener, Reimann, Frege, Green.’

  Csikszentmihalyi came back in with Ortho Stice, their color high.

  Pemulis compulsively zips and unzips zippers, is the reason why he wears only button-fly pants and tennis shorts.

  Cs/yi said ‘There is expression. You must immediately come.’

  Freer turned from the mirror, both hands on a comb. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

  ‘John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears.’

  ‘Never trust the father you can see,’ Pemulis told Possalthwaite.

  Stice was already on his way back out and said over his shoulder, ‘Troeltsch’s got Wayne on the air and Wayne’s lost his mind.’ (back to text)

  325. (whose theories of detection and interview are strongly informed by the b/w noir films Tine so enjoyed as a boy late at night on local broadcast television, and misses) (back to text)

  326. (and then some) (back to text)

  327. Bolex H64, -32 and -16 models come with a turret that accepts three C-mount lenses, which gives the models a kind of multi-eyed, alien-facial look. (back to text)

  328. (though never unveiled) (back to text)

  329. (which is actually complete horseshit, but goes unchallenged by the O.U.S. operatives, who are pretty savvy at choosing their heuristic battles) (back to text)

  330. (given the guy’s track record with ingestion) (back to text)

  331. Picaresque pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson’s Potted Psalm’s mother-and-Death stuff and The Cage’s cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are pretty obvious touchstones in a lot of Himself’s more parodic-slapstick productions. (back to text)

  332.

  17 NOV. Y.D.A.U.

  ‘Gracious me and mine,’ Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he’d crossed to keep the foot from joggling.

  ‘Rusk and Charles and Mrs. Incandenza are with him now. Schtitt’s been up to see him. Loach has done a thorough reflex-check. John Wayne’s going to be OK.’

  ‘Well thank heavens for that load off everyone’s mind,’ Pemulis said.

  It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs’ Office. Mrs. Inc’s ventilator hissed and something up in there whirred a little. DeLint was behind the high desk, looking like a mean little boy. Nobody’d said if anybody higher up than deLint was going to show. Pemulis didn’t know if this was good or bad.

  ‘Let’s make perfectly sure we got this in order and in your words.’ Nwangi and Watson were window-dressing. This was A. deLint’s show. His face kind of came apart when he smiled. ‘With no prior knowledge of anything untoward, you’re pulled from the locker room and stand out in the hall with several other students, which is your first knowledge anything’s untoward with Wayne.’

  Pemulis figured none of the administrators had heard the thing; they always shut their soundproof doors at 1435h.; Pemulis had no idea what Wayne’s said about anything, or Jim Troeltsch, who very prudently hasn’t shown facial-feature one in their room since the apocalyptic broadcast. It’d taken Pemulis about half the salivaless sprint up to B-204 to figure out what had happened and to find his pilfered Tenuates in the little pecker’s Sel-dane bottle. Pemulis sort of shuddered to imagine the impact of the ’drine on Wayne’s cherry-red and virgin bloodstream. The slight whir of his cortex working at full speed was masked by the hiss of the ventilator and the sound of whistles and play and Schtitt’s m
egaphone outside.

  ‘I’m in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on Possalthwaite who was in crisis and Zoltan and The Darkness come like spasming in saying Troeltsch’d jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast.’

  ‘They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without awareness it’s going out over WETA into all the rooms?’

  Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody’d see that Wayne’d have to have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little old-time gunmetal handheld mike at Lateral Alice Moore’s curved desk. He’d already heard from Lateral Alice that it was more like Wayne had come rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed the mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on aghastly; and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.’s deactivated third rail, had been so aghasted he’d pitched forward narcoleptically and stayed like that with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that Lateral Alice’s own stress had brought on an aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to the point where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis had got to her.

  ‘This was more like a general sort of impression which I feel like I might have misbegotten from the agitation of the guys. Plus how completely un-Wayneish Wayne sounded, like how could anybody ever have said that shit if they thought it wasn’t just them and Troeltsch alone, much less Wayne, who as we all know is pretty much reserve in motion.’

  DeLint’s nostrils got that pale flare they got, Pemulis knew, when he smelled horseshit and knew you knew it. Pemulis knows deLint’s been laying for him ever since the incident with the P.W.T.A. guy who started to wobble and then rant down at P.W.T.A., which was a totally different type of deal. The irony was that the Wayne-dosing had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis’s deal, if anybody’s Troeltsch’s, but the cortex couldn’t nail down any way to get this across without admitting to possession of a ’drine, which given the shaky pharmaceutical ground since the Eschaton and O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist would be tantamount to Clippertonizing himself. Nwangi showed almost blinding 3rd-World teeth but was saying nothing. Watson’s eyes had almost this nictitater of stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light of nobody home at chez Tex Watson. Pemulis saw the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. and deviant division in the papers deLint held.