‘And so. No different, maybe,’ Schtitt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated aluminum chair with Mario beneath an askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table it’s rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk’s breeze. ‘Maybe no different, so,’ biting hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where there’s some sort of red welt, it looks like. ‘Not different’ — looking out into the Ave.’s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill — ‘except the chance to play.’ He brightens in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying ‘No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?’ And Mario loses a dollop of chocolate down his chin, because he has this involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does, and Schtitt is finding what he has just said very amusing indeed.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
There is no jolly irony in Tiny Ewell’s name. He is tiny, an elf-sized U.S. male. His feet barely reach the floor of the taxi. He is seated, being driven east into the grim three-decker districts of East Watertown, west of Boston proper. A rehabilitative staffer wearing custodial whites under a bombardier’s jacket sits beside Tiny Ewell, big arms crossed and staring placid as a cow at the intricately creased back of the cabbie’s neck. The window Tiny is next to has a sticker that thanks him in advance for not smoking. Tiny Ewell wears no winter gear over a jacket and tie that don’t quite go together and stares out his window with unplacid intensity at the same district he grew up in. He normally takes involved routes to avoid Watertown. His jacket a 26S, his slacks a 26/24, his shirt one of the shirts his wife had so considerately packed for him to bring into the hospital detox and hang on hangers that won’t leave the rod. As with all Tiny Ewell’s business shirts, only the front and cuffs are ironed. He wears size 6 Florsheim wingtips that gleam nicely except for one big incongruous scuff-mark of white from where he’d kicked at his front door when he’d returned home just before dawn from an extremely important get-together with potential clients to find that his wife had had the locks changed and filed a restraining order and would communicate with him only by notes passed through the mail-slot below the white door’s black brass (the brass had been painted black) knocker. When Tiny leans down and wipes at the scuff-mark with a slim thumb it only pales and smears. It is Tiny’s first time out of Happy Slippers since his second day at the detox. They took away his Florsheims after 24 abstinent hours had passed and he started to perhaps D.T. a little. He’d kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze through the room’s electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be fumigated. They gave him slippers of green foam-rubber with smiley-faces embossed on the tops. The detox’s in-patients are encouraged to call these Happy Slippers. The staff refer to the footwear in private as ‘pisscatchers.’ It is Tiny Ewell’s first day out of rubber slippers and ass-exposing detox pajamas and striped cotton robe in two weeks. The early-November day is foggy and colorless. The sky and the street are the same color. The trees look skeletal. There is bright wet wadded litter all along the seams of street and curb. The houses are skinny three-deckers, mashed together, wharf-gray w/ salt-white trim, madonnas in the yards, bowlegged dogs hurling themselves against the fencing. Some schoolboys in knee-pads and skallycaps are playing street hockey on a passing school’s cement playground. Except none of the boys seems to be moving. The trees’ bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pass. East Watertown is the obvious straight-line easement between St. Mel’s detox and the halfway house’s Enfield, and Ewell’s insurance is paying for the cab. With his small round shape and bit of white goatee and a violent flush that could pass for health of some jolly sort, Tiny Ewell looks like a radically downscaled Burl Ives, the late Burl Ives as an impossible bearded child. Tiny looks out the window at the rose window of the church next to the school playground where the boys are playing/not playing. The rose window is not illuminated from either side.
The man who for the last three days has been Tiny Ewell’s roommate at St. Mel’s Hospital’s detoxification unit sits in a blue plastic straight-back chair in front of his and Ewell’s room’s window’s air conditioner, watching it. The air conditioner hums and gushes, and the man gazes with rapt intensity into its screen of horizontal vents. The air conditioner’s cord is thick and white and leads into a three-prong outlet with black heel-marks on the wall all around it. The November room is around 12° C. The man turns the air conditioner’s dial from setting #4 to setting #5. The curtains above it shake and billow around the window. The man’s face falls into and out of amused expressions as he watches the air conditioner. He sits in the blue chair with a trembling Styrofoam cup of coffee and a paper plate of brownies into which he taps ashes from the cigarettes whose smoke the air conditioner blows straight back over his head. The cigarette smoke is starting to pile up against the wall behind him, and to ooze and run chilled down the wall and form a sort of cloud-bank near the floor. The man’s raptly amused profile appears in the mirror on the wall beside the dresser the two in-patients share. The man, like Tiny Ewell, has the rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. The man is in addition a burnt-yellow beneath his flush, from chronic hepatitis. The mirror he appears in is treated with shatterproof Lucite polymers. The man leans carefully forward with the plate of brownies in his lap and changes the setting on the air conditioner from 5 to 3 and then to 7, then 8, scanning the screen of gushing vents. He finally turns the selector’s dial all the way around to 9. The air conditioner roars and blows his long hair straight back, and his beard blows back over his shoulder, ashes fly and swirl around from his plate of brownies, plus crumbs, and his rodney’s tip glows cherry and gives sparks. He is deeply engaged by whatever he sees on 9. He gives Tiny Ewell the screaming meemies, Ewell has complained. He wears pisscatchers, a striped cotton St. Mel’s robe, and a pair of glasses missing one lens. He has been watching the air conditioner all day. His face produces the little smiles and grimaces of a person who’s being thoroughly entertained.
When the big black rehabilitative staffer placed Tiny Ewell in the taxi and then squeezed in and told the cabbie they wanted Unit #6 in the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. in Enfield, the cabbie, whose photo was on the Mass. Livery License taped to the glove compartment, the cabbie, looking back and down at little Tiny Ewell’s neat white beard and ruddy complexion and sharp threads, had scratched under his skallycap and asked if he was sick or something.
Tiny Ewell had said, ‘So it would seem.’
By mid-afternoon on 2 April Y.D.A.U.: the Near Eastern medical attaché; his devout wife; the Saudi Prince Q ——— ’s personal physician’s personal assistant, who’d been sent over to see why the medical attaché hadn’t appeared at the Back Bay Hilton in the A.M. and then hadn’t answered his beeper’s page; the personal physician himself, who’d come to see why his personal assistant hadn’t come back; two Embassy security guards w/ sidearms, who’d been dispatched by a candidiatic, heartily pissed-off Prince Q ———; and two neatly groomed Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers who’d seen human heads through the living room window and found the front door unlocked and come in with all good spiritual intentions — all were watching the recursive loop the medical attaché had rigged on the TP’s viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed.
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
He sat alone above the desert, redly backlit and framed in shale, watching very yellow payloaders crawl over the beaten dirt of some U.S.A. construction
site several km. to the southeast. The outcropping’s height allowed him, Marathe, to look out over most of U.S.A. area code 6026. His shadow did not yet reach the downtown regions of the city Tucson; not yet quite. Of sounds in the arid hush were only a faint and occasional hot wind, the blurred sound of the wings of sometimes an insect, some tentative trickling of loosened grit and small stones moving farther down the upslope behind.
And as well the sunset over the foothills and mountains behind him: such a difference from the watery and somehow sad spring sunsets of southwestern Québec’s Papineau regions, where his wife had need of care. This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall. It hung just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly was sinking.
Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de rollent 37 on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe’s well-known ‘Bröckengespenst’ phenomenon 38 enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels’ rubber rims; and his head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.
He appeared to remain concentrated on his huge shadow-play as gravel and then also breath sounded from the steep hillside back above him, grit and dirty stones cascading onto the outcropping and gushing past his chair and off the front lip, and then the unmistakable yelp of an individual’s impact with a cactus somewhere up behind. But Marathe, he had all the time without turning watched the other man’s clumsy sliding descent’s own mammoth shadow, cast as far east as the Rincon range just past the city Tucson, and could see the shadow rush in west toward his own as Unspecified Services’ M. Hugh Steeply descended, falling twice and cursing in U.S.A. English, until the shadow collapsed nearly into Marathe’s monstrous own. Another yelp took place as the Unspecified Services field-operative’s fall and slide the last several meters carried him upon his bottom down onto the outcropping and then nearly all the way out and off it, Marathe having to release the machine pistol under his blanket to grab Steeply’s bare arm and halt this sliding. Steeply’s skirt was pulled obscenely up and his hosiery full of runs and stubs of thorns. The operative sat at Marathe’s feet, glowing redly in the backlight, legs hanging over the shelf’s edge, breathing with difficulty.
Marathe smiled and released the operative’s arm. ‘Stealth becomes you,’ he said.
‘Go shit in your chapeau,’ Steeply wheezed, bring up his legs to survey the hosiery’s damage.
They spoke for the most part U.S.A. English when they met like this, covertly, in the field. M. Fortier 39 had wished Marathe to require that they interface always in Québecois French, as for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of the Office of Unspecified Services, which the Québecois Sepératiste Left referred to always as B.S.S., the ‘Bureau des Services sans Spécificité.’
Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert’s floor as Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on heels. The two men sent together a strange Bröckengespenst-shadow out toward the city Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply’s wig becoming un-combed in his descent. Steeply’s gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky. The matte curtain of sunset’s true dusk-shadow was moving itself very slowly in across the Rincons and Sonora desert east of the city Tucson, still many km. from obscuring their own large shadow.
But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this — betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S. 40 — once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply’s preference.
In fact, Steeply’s Québecois was better than Marathe’s English, but c’était la guerre, as one says.
Marathe sniffed slightly. ‘Thus, so, we now are both here.’ He wore a windbreaker and did not perspire.
Steeply’s eyes were luridly made up. The rear area of his dress was dirty. Some of his makeup had started to run. He was forming a type of salute to shade his eyes and looking upward behind them at what remained of the explosive and trembling sun. ‘How in God’s name did you get up here?’
Marathe slowly shrugged. As usual, he appeared to Steeply as if he were half-asleep. He ignored the question and said only, shrugging, ‘My time is finite.’
Steeply had also with him a woman’s handbag or purse. ‘And the wife?’ he said, gazing upward as yet. ‘How’s the wife doing?’
‘Holding her own weight, thank you,’ Marathe said. His tone of his voice betrayed nothing. ‘And so thus what is it your Offices believe they wish to know?’
Steeply tottered on a leg as he removed one shoe and poured from it grit. ‘Nothing terribly surprising. A bit of razzle-dazzle up northeast in your so-called Ops-area, certainly you heard.’
Marathe sniffed. A large odor of inexpensive and high-alcohol perfume came not from Steeply’s person but from his handbag, which failed to complement his shoes. Marathe said, ‘Dazzle?’
‘As in a civilian-type individual receives a certain item. Don’t tell me this is news to you guys. Not on InterLace pulse, this item. Arrives via normal physical mail. We’re sure you heard, Rémy. A cartridge-copy of a certain let’s call it between ourselves “the Entertainment.” As in in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.’
‘From somewhere blue?’
The B.S.S. operative had perspired also through his rouge, and his mascara had melted to become whorish. ‘A person with no political value to anybody except that the Saudi Ministry of Entertainment made one the hell of a shrill stink.’
‘The medical attaché, the specialist of digesting, you refer to.’ Marathe shrugged again in that maddening Francophone way that can mean several things. ‘Your offices wish to ask was the Entertainment’s cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?’
‘Don’t let’s waste your finite time, ami old friend,’ Steeply said. ‘The mischief happens to occur in metropolitan Boston. Postal codes route the package through the desert Southwest, and we know your dissemination-scheme’s routing mechanism is proposed for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here.’ Steeply had worked hard at feminizing his expressions and gesturing. ‘It would be a bit starry-eyed of O.U.S. not to think of your distinguished cell, no?’
Beneath Marathe’s windbreaker was a sportshirt whose breast pocket was filled with many pens. He said: ‘Us, we don’t have the information on even casualties. From this blue dazzle you speak of.’
Steeply was trying to extract something stubborn from inside his other shoe. ‘Upwards of twenty, Rémy. Out of commission altogether. The attaché and his wife, the wife a Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with embassy cards. Couple neighbors or something. The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going in before they killed the power.’
‘Local police forces. Gendarmes.’
‘The local constabulary.’
‘The minions of the law of the land.’
‘The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this.’ Steeply even removed and replaced his pumps in the upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other-foot-up-behind-his-botto
m way of a feminine U.S.A. woman. But he appeared huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair. He said, ‘The attaché had diplomatic status, Rémy. Mideast. Saudi. Said to be close to minor members of the royal family.’
Marathe sniffed hard, as if congested of the nose. ‘A puzzling,’ he said.
‘But also a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab émigrés. Visa lists a residence in Montreal.’
‘And Services Without Specificity wishes maybe to ask were there below-the-surface connections that make the individual not such a civilian, unconnected. To ask of us would the A.F.R. wish to make of him the example.’
Steeply was removing dirt from his bottom, swatting himself on the bottom. He stood more or less directly over Marathe. Marathe sniffed. ‘We have neither digestive medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action. You have personally seen A.F.R.’s initial lists. Nor in particular Montreal civilians. We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.’
Steeply was looking out over the desert and city, also, as he swatted at himself. He seemed to have noticed the gespenst-phenomenon of his own shadow. Marathe for some reason pretended again to sniff the nose. The wind was moderate and constant and of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low. It made the shrill whistling sounds. Also sounds of the blowing grit. Weeds-of-tumbling like enormous hairballs rolled often across the Interstate Highway of I-10 far below. Their specular perspective, the reddening light on vast tan stone and the oncoming curtain of dusk, the further elongation of their monstrous agnate shadows: all was almost mesmerizing. Neither man seemed able to look at anything but the vista below. Marathe could simultaneously speak in English and think in French. The desert was the tawny color of the hide of the lion. Their speaking without looking at one another, facing both the same direction — this gave their conversing an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple. Marathe thought this as he opened and closed his upheld hand, making over the city Tucson a huge and black blossom open itself and close itself.
Infinite Jest Page 14