Infinite Jest (117 page)

Wayne had gotten up and bussed his tray in the middle of the jejune breast thing. Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice is still staring into his salad. If you could open Stice's head you'd see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. Stice has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table. A lot of the guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice's still being in the magic can't-miss Zone from this p.m.'s match.

'The idea being that Nuck girls can only attract guys by being really easy to X, is the joke,' Coyle says into the noise.

Then there's a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line's end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid's tray for him. The hall's unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured patellar tendon that'll cost him at least six months of competitive development. Penn, whose femoral fracture'll cost him a year, isn't even back yet from St. E.'s orthopedic. But at least Ingersoll's back. Hal gets up to go over, Troeltsch rising to accompany him after a long look at Trevor Axford, Ingersoll's B.B. of record, who's sitting in his chair with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any sort of conciliatory gesture. A match-sore Hal not limping but stiff-legged and shoulders slightly rolling as he and Troeltsch move serpentine around tables, steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic's chyme out in a thinning circle that clears three tables, which Hal and Troeltsch avoid with practiced curves around tables whose layout they all know well, Hal to say Hey and How's the Limb, Troeltsch to say Hey and be basically relieved he's away from a discussion of females as sexual objects. Troeltsch's never come close to even dating anybody. Some guys here never do. It's the same at all the academies, this asexual contingent. Some junior players don't have the emotional juice left over after tennis to face what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys on the court who go slack and pale at the thought of approaching a female in any social context. Certain things not only can't be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting; some find the whole girl-issue thing brings them face to face with something in themselves they need to believe they've left far behind in order to hang in and develop. Troeltsch, Shaw, Axford: any sort of sexual tension makes them feel like they need more oxygen than is available right then. A couple of the girls at E.T.A. are kind of slutty, and some of the more aggressive Freer-type guys can break some of the girls down and get them to have sex — there's nothing if not time and proximity here. But E.T.A. is mostly a comparatively unsexual place, maybe almost surprisingly so, considering the constant roar and gurgle here of adolescent glands, the emphasis on physicality, the fears of mediocrity, the back-and-forth struggles with ego, the loneliness and close proximity. There's scattered homosexuality, much of it emotional and unconsummated. Keith Freer's pet theory is that the bulk of E.T.A. females are nascent lesbians who don't know it yet. That like any serious female athletes they're basically vigorously male inside, and so Sapphic-tending. The ones that get to the W.T.A.
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Show'll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes — dykes that is. The rest will marry and spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on their husbands' backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice's term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek's carried and prized the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years.

Ortho Stice of southwest Kansas looks briefly up at Hal and Troeltsch's departure before returning his attention to a certain cherry tomato perched somehow halfway up the shallow incline of his salad bowl. It's possible that the cherry tomato is attached halfway up the incline by an adhesive bit of yogurt dressing rather than just sitting there defying gravity on its own. Stice doesn't use a finger to move the tomato and check this. He's using only his concentrated will. He's trying to will the cherry tomato to roll of its own objectile power down the incline and into the bowl's center. He stares at the cherry tomato with enormous concentration, chewing his tri-level skinless-chicken-fillet sandwich. The chewing makes overlapping plates of muscle all the way up one side of his face and crew-cut scalp bulge and roll. He's trying to flex some kind of psychic muscle he's not sure he even has. The crew cut lends his head an anvil-like aspect. Complete concentration makes his round red fleshy face look crumpled. Stice is one of those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction with his face is so incongruous. He resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth — like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trials — on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the crew cut's V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he moves suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking itself dry. Tony Nwangi is saying something acerbic to Hal, who looks like he's kneeling penitent before Ingersoll, everyone at the surrounding tables inclined very subtly away from Hal. Troeltsch is signing Ingersoll's cast as he speaks into his fist. Off the court, Ortho Slice's flattop crew cut and penchant for cuff-rolled bluejeans and button-down short-sleeves with a checkered pattern are strictly from hick. The facial scrunching that attends concentration adds crevices and seams and an uneven flush to the bulldog face. His cheeks are ballooned with food as he stares at the perched cherry tomato, trying to respect this object with all his might. Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he'd felt this P.M. as several balls' sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they'd become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. He'd mishit one cross-court volley and seen the thing head for an area wide even of the doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the singles corner, and this at a time when the grounds' pines behind Hal Incandenza were breeze-leaning in the exact opposite direction. Hal had given Stice a little bit of a look on that one. Stice couldn't finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious curves and downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone; Hal had played with the wide-eyed but unfocused look of a tennis player right on the verge of falling apart out there, and yet strangely affectless, as if deep inside some well of his own private troubles; and Stice wills himself again not to wonder what had passed with the Headmaster and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist, whose lab-equipped van's unscheduled appearance in the E.T.A. parking lot yesterday afternoon had caused a tsunami of panic just before supper, especially since Pemulis and his supply of lab-ready Visine bottles were nowhere to be found.

Even among the small circle who know Hal gets secretly high, it doesn't make much sense that Hal's misery'd be Tavis- or urine-related, since Pemulis has never seemed blither than today; and if anyone were going to get the boot, chemically or otherwise, it was not going to be the E.T.A. administration's relative and second-best boy.

Hal and his brother Mario both know that the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed powdered milk since Charles Tavis assumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. Clarke he wanted the kids' animal-fat intake halved in a month by any and all means. The kitchen's graveyard shift power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls and then strains out the foam and pours the milk into real-milk milk-dispenser bags for a kind of placebo effect; it's mostly just the concept of powdered milk that gags people.

Struck has traded his shiny clean plate for the absent Incandenza's fortification-structured plate of uneaten fillets, low-gluten bread, corn-bread, baby boileds, a pea-chickpea-based olla, half a fresh squash, mashed potatoes packed in a stelliform gelatin mold, and a shallow bowl of dessert-tsimmes featuring mostly it seemed like plums. Hal is still down on one knee by Ingersoll's chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across Ingersoll and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nwangi. Keith Freer remarks blandly on how Hal seems like he's feeling sort of punk this evening, checking Stice for a reaction. Struck utters truisms about wasting food and global hunger through a full mouth. Struck is wearing a Sox cap to the side so the bill shadows half his face. The bread is unkind to his braces. Freer is wearing the leather vest with no shirt under, which is what he favors after weights have pumped his torso full of air. Stice had had a traumatic psychic experience at fourteen when he'd set the weight on the pull-down station too high, and Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very basic weights, pending resolution of his fear of weights. The joke around E.T.A. is that Stice, who's surely Show-bound after graduation, has no fear of heights, but does fear weights. Keith Freer, though kind of a second-rank junior player, does look beautiful in his calfskin vest — his face and body match. Troeltsch wants a sportscasting career, but Freer is the E.T.A. with looks InterLace would favor. Freer's from inland Maryland, originally, his family's riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. '90s with his now-deceased father's invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases — the so-called Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho's first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody now much even gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer's old man had invested his windfall shrewdly.

1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A.

'My own father,' Steeply said. Steeply again faced outward, one hip out and a hand on that hip. The scratch on his triceps was now ugly and puffed. Also, an area of Steeply's left finger was whiter than the skin around it. The removal of a university ring, or more probably a wedding band. It seemed curious to Marathe that Steeply would undergo electrolysis but not take trouble to fix his finger's annular pallor.

Steeply said 'My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn't pretty. I was never sure how it started or what it was about.’

'You are now imparting a personal anecdote of you,' Marathe stated.

Steeply did not shrug. He was pretending to study something particular out on the floor of the desert. 'But nothing like this sort of Entertainment — a plain old television program.’

'Television of broadcasting and — how did one express it? — the passivity.’

'Yes. Broadcast television. The program in question was called "M*A*S*H." The title was an acronym, not a command. As a boy I can recall some confusion on this point.’

'I am knowing of the U.S.A. historical broadcast television comedy program "M*A*S*H," ' Marathe stated.

'The fucking thing ran forever, it seemed. The program that would not die. B.S. '70s and '80s before it finally died, mercifully. Set in a military hospital during the U.N.'s action on Korea.’

Marathe remained without expression. 'Police Action.’

Many small birds of the mountain of the outcropping had begun to whistle and twitter somewhere off above and behind them. Also maybe the tentative rattle of some serpent. Marathe pretended to search for the watch in his pocket.

Steeply said 'Now, nothing prima facie exceptional about getting attached to a show. God knows I was attached to my share of shows. That's all it started as. An attachment or habit. Thursday nights at 2lOOh. "Nine O'Clock Eastern, Eight O'Clock Central and Mountain." They used to broadcast this, to alert you to when to watch, or if you were going to tape it.' Marathe watched the big man shrug from behind. 'So the show was important to him. So, fine. OK. So he took pleasure in the program. God knows the guy was entitled — he'd worked like a dog his whole life. So OK, so at the start he scheduled his Thursday around the show, to an extent. It was hard to pinpoint anything wrong or consumptive. He was, yes, always home from work by 2050 on Thursdays. And he always had his supper watching the program. It seemed almost cute. Mummykins used to tease him, think it was adorable.’

'Cuteness in fathers, this is rare.' There was no way Marathe was going to touch the evident U.S.A. childhood expression Mummykins.

'My old man worked for a heating-oil distributorship. Home heating-oil. Have your files got this? A tidbit for M. Fortier: U.S.O.U.S.'s Steeply, H.H.: late father a heating-oil-delivery dispatcher, Cheery Oil, Troy, New York.’

'State of New York, U.S.A., prior to Reconfiguration.’

Hugh Steeply turned around but not all the way, scratching absently at his wens. 'But then: syndication. "M*A*S*H." The show was incredibly popular, and after a few years of Thursday nights it started also to run daily, during the day, or late at night, sometimes, in what I remember all too well was called syndication, where local stations bought old episodes and chopped them up and loaded them with ads, and ran them. And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still appearing on Thursdays at 2100. I think this was the start.’

'The cuteness, it was over.’

'My old man started to find the syndicated reruns extremely important to him, too. As in like not to be missed.’