Infinite Jest (17 page)

'The, Rémy.' It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts' directions without pulling down severely his décolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag sunglasses and put on the sunglasses. They were embellished with rhinestones and looked absurd. 'Rod the God.’

Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several matches to light a cigarette in the wind. The encroachment of true dusk began to erase his wig's chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills east of the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter for the flame.

It's a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremíc-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable — it's that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

All these territories are now property of Canada.

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegetablish if in the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own. If American, north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border metropolis — Rome NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered points between them at which the giant protective ATHSCME fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.

The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a cigarette in the mouth. He said, 'And you'll of course report this little interface of you and me right back to Fortier.’

Marathe shrugged. ' 'n sûr.’

Steeply got it lit. He was a large and soft man, some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat. He appeared to Marathe to look less like a woman than a twisted parody of womanhood. Electrolysis had caused patches of tiny red pimples along his jowls and upper lip. He also held his elbow out, the arm holding the match for lighting, which is how no woman lights a cigarette, who is used to breasts and keeps the lighting elbow in. Also Steeply teetered ungracefully on his pumps' heels on the stone's uneven surface. He never for a moment turned his back completely at Marathe as he stood on the lip of the outcropping. And Marathe had his chair's wheels' clamps now locked down tight and a firm grip on the machine pistol's pebbled grip. Steeply's purse was small and glossy black, and the sunglasses he wore had womanly frames with small false jewels at the temples. Mar-athe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors requested of him.

Steeply now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark glasses. 'And also that I just right now asked you if you'd report it, and that you said bien sûr?’

Marathe's laugh had this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not sincere. He made a mustache of his finger, pretending for some reason to stifle a need to sneeze. 'You verify this because of why?’

Steeply scratched under the hem of his blonde wig with (stupidly, dangerously) the thumb of his hand that held the cigarette. 'Well you are already tripling, Rémy, aren't you? Or would it be quadrupling. We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you're here with me now.’

'But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this, that they have sent me to pretend I double?’

Marathe's sidearm, a Sterling UL35 9 mm machine pistol with a Mag Na Port silencer, did not have a safety. Its fat and texture-of-pebbles grip was hot from Marathe's palm, and in turn caused Marathe's palm to perspire beneath the blanket. From Steeply there merely was silence.

Marathe said: '. . . have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray.'
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And the desert U.S.A.'s light had become now sad, more than half the round sun gone behind the Tortolitas. Only now the chair's wheels and Steeply's thick legs cast shadows below the dusk-line, and these shadows were becoming squat and retreating back up toward the two men.

Steeply did a brief pretend-Charleston, playing with his legs' shadows. 'Nothing personal. You know that. It's the obsessive caution. Who was it — who once said we get paid to drive ourselves crazy, the caution thing? You guys and Tine — your DuPlessis always suspected he tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.’

Marathe shrugged hard. 'And abruptly M. DuPlessis has now passed away from life. Under circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion.' Again with the false-sounding laugh. 'An inept burglary and grippe indeed.’

Both men were silent. Steeply's left arm had on it a nasty mesquite scratch, Marathe could observe.

Marathe finally glanced at his watch, its dial illuminated in his body's shadow. Both men's shadows were now climbing the steep incline, returning up to them. 'Me, I think that we go about our affairs in a more simple manner than your B.S.S. office. If M. Tine's betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware.’

'Because of Luria.’

Marathe pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it. 'But yes. The caution. Luria would be aware.’

Steeply stepped gingerly up to the edge and tossed out his cigarette's stub. The wind caught the stub and it soared slightly upward from his hand, moving east. Both men were silent until the butt fell and hit the dark mountainside off below them, a tiny bloom of orange. Their silence then became contemplative. Something tight in the air between them loosened. Marathe no longer felt the sun on his skull. Dusk settled about them. Steeply had found his triceps' scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine it, his rouged lips rounded with concern.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy: a.m. drills, shower, eat, class, lab, class, class, eat, prescriptive-grammar exam, lab/class, conditioning run, p.m. drills, play challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight room, sauna, shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players.

'. . . to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel it in the first place?’

1640h.: the Comm.-Ad. Bldg.'s males' locker room is full of clean upper-classmen in towels after p.m. matches, the players' hair wet-combed and shining with Barbicide. Pemulis uses the comb's big-toothed end to get that wide-furrowed look that kids from Allston favor. Hal's own hair tends to look wet-combed even when it's dry.

'So,' Jim Troeltsch says, looking around. 'So what do you think?’

Pemulis lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, leaning up against the cabinet where they keep all the disinfectants. He has this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything. 'Was there like a central point to all that, Troeltsch?’

'The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy families,' Hal says quietly.

John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart, like the fart was some kind of task, standing at his locker, waiting for his feet to get dry enough to put on socks.

There is a silence. Showerheads dribble on tile. Steam hangs. Distant ghastly sounds from T. Schacht over in one of the stalls off the showers. Everyone stares into the middle distance, stunned with fatigue. Michael Pemulis, who can stand about ten seconds of communal silence tops, clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into the sink behind him. The plate mirrors caught part of its quivering flight, Hal sees. Hal closes his eyes.

'Tired,' someone exhales.

Ortho Stice and John ('N.R.') Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the really top player's way of shutting the whole neural net down for brief periods, staring at the space they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events.

'Right then,' Troeltsch says. 'Pop quiz. Pop test-question. Most crucial difference, for Leith tomorrow, between your historical broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable TP.’

Disney R. Leith teaches E.T.A.'s History of Entertainment I and II as well as certain high-level esoteric Optics things you needed Permission of Inst. to get into.

'The Cathodeluminescent Panel. No cathode gun. No phosphenic screen. Two to the screen's diagonal width in cm. lines of resolution, total.’

'You mean a high-def. viewer in general, or a specifically TP-component viewer?’

'No analogs,' Struck says.

'No snow, no faint weird like ghostly double next to UHF images, no vertical roll when planes fly over.’

'Analogs v. digitals.’

'You referring to broadcast as in network versus a TP, or network-plus-cable versus a TP?’

'Did cable TV use analogs? What, like pre-fiber phones?’

'It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour.’

'What did pre-fiber phones use, exactly?’

'The old tin-can-and-string principle.' "Seminal." He keeps saying it. "Seminal, seminal."

'The biggest advance in home communications since the phone he says.’

'In home entertainment since the TV itself.’

'Leith might say the Write-Capable CD, for entertainment.’

'He's hard to pin down if you get him on entertainment qua entertainment.’

'The Diz'll say use your own judgment,' Pemulis says. 'Axford took it last year. He wants an argument made. He'll skewer you if you treat it like there's an obvious answer.’

'Plus there's the InterLace de-digitizer instead of an antenna, with a TP,' Jim Struck says, squeezing at something behind his ear. Graham ('Yard-guard') Rader is checking his underarm for more hair. Freer and Shaw might be asleep.

Stice has pulled his towel down slightly and is fingering the deep red abdominal stripe a jock's waistband leaves. 'Boys, I ever become president, the first thing to go's elastic.’

Troeltsch pretends to shuffle cards. 'Next item. Next like flash-card. Define acutance. Anybody?’

'A measure of resolution directly proportional to the resolved ratio of a given pulse's digital code,' Hal says.

'The Incster has the last word once again,' says Struck. Which invites a chorus:

The Halster.’

'Halorama.’

'Halation.’

'Halation,' Rader says. 'A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on chemical film at low speed.’

'That most angelic of distortions.’

Struck says 'We'll be like vying for the seats all around Inc tomorrow.' Hal shuts his eyes: he can see the page of text right there, all highlighted, all yellowed up.

'He can scan the page, rotate it, fold the corner down and clean under his nails with it, all mentally.’

'Leave him alone,' Pemulis says.

Freer opens his eyes. 'Do a dictionary-page for us, man, Inc.’

Stice says 'Leave him be.’

It's all only half-nasty. Hal is placid about getting his balls smacked around; they all are. He does his share of chops-busting. Some of the littler kids who take their showers after the upperclassmen are hanging around listening. Hal sits on the floor, quiescent, chin on his chest, just thinking it's nice finally to breathe and get enough air.

The temperature had fallen with the sun. Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind roll across the incline and desert floor. Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew. The American Steeply produced small exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm. Only one or two remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun found crevices between the Tortolitas' peaks and probed at the roof of the sky. There were the slight and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night, emerging. The sky was violet.

Everyone in the locker room's got a towel around his waist like a kilt. Everyone except Stice has a white E.T.A. towel; Stice uses his own sort of trademark towels, black ones. After a silence Stice shoots some air out through his nose. Jim Struck picks liberally at his face and neck. There are one or two sighs. Peter Beak and Evan Ingersoll and Kent Blott, twelve, eleven, ten, are up sitting on the blond-wood benches that run in front of the lockers' rows, sitting there in towels, elbows on knees, not taking part. So is Zoltan Csikzentmihalyi, who's sixteen but speaks very little English. Idris Arslanian, new this year, ethnically vague, fourteen, all feet and teeth, is a shadowy lurking presence just outside the locker-room door, poking the non-Caucasoid snout in occasionally and then withdrawing, terribly shy. Each E.T.A. player in 18-and-Unders has like four to six 14-and-Unders kids he's supposed to keep his more experienced wing over, look out for. The more the E.T.A. administration trusts you, the younger and more generally clueless the little kids in your charge. Charles Tavis instituted the practice and calls it the Big Buddy System in the literature he sends new kids' parents. So the parents can feel their kid's not getting lost in the institutional shuffle. Beak, Blott, and Arslanian are all in Hal's Big Buddy group for Y.D.A.U. He also in effect has Ingersoll, having traded Todd ('Postal-Weight') Possalthwaite to Axford off the books for Ingersoll, because Trevor Axford found he so despised the Ingersoll kid for some unanalyzable reason that he was struggling against a horrible compulsion to put Inger-soll's little fingers into the gap by the hinges of an open door and then very slowly close the door, and came to Hal almost in tears, Axford had. Though technically Ingersoll is still Axford's and Possalthwaite Hal's. Possalthwaite, the great lobber, has a weird young-old face and little wet lips that lapse into a sucking reflex under stress. In theory, a Big Buddy's somewhere between an R.A. and a prorector. He's there to answer questions, ease bumpy transitions, show ropes, act as liaison with Tony Nwangi and Tex Watson and the other prorectors specializing in little kids. Be somebody they can come to off the record. A shoulder to climb up on a footstool and cry on. If a 16-and-Under gets made a Big Buddy it's kind of an honor; it means they think you're going places. When there's no tournament or travel, etc., Big Buddies get together with their quar-to-sextet in small-group private twice a week, in the interval between P.M. challenge matches and dinner, usually after saunas and showers and a few minutes of sitting slumped around the locker room sucking air. Sometimes Hal sits with his Little Buddies at dinner and eats with them. Not often, however. The savvier Big Buddies don't get too overly close with their L.B. ephebes, don't let them forget about the unbridgeable gaps of experience and ability and general status that separate ephebes from upperclassmen who've hung in and stuck it out at E.T.A. for years and years. Gives them more to look up to. The savvy Big Buddy doesn't rush in or tread heavy; he holds his own ground and lets the suppliants realize when they need his help and come to him. You have to know when to tread in and take an active hand and when to hang back and let the littler kids learn from the personal experience they'll have to learn from, inevitably, if they want to be able to hang. Every year, the biggest source of attrition, besides graduating 18s, is 13-15s who've had enough and just can't hang. This happens; the administration accepts it; not everyone's cut out for what's required of you here. Though C.T. makes his administrative assistant Lateral Alice Moore drive the prorectors bats trying to ferret out data on littler kids' psychic states, so he can forecast probable burnouts and attritive defections, so he'll know how many slots he and Admissions'll have to offer Incomings for the next term. Big Buddies are in a tricky position, requested to keep the prorectors generally informed about who among their charges seems shaky in terms of resolve, capacity for suffering and stress, physical punishment, homesickness, deep fatigue, but at the same time wanting to remain a trustworthy confidential shoulder and wing for their Little Buddies' most private and delicate issues.