Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  Though he, too, has to struggle with a strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, who reminds him of someone he dislikes but can’t quite place, Hal on the whole rather likes being a Big B. He likes being there to come to, and likes delivering little unpretentious minilectures on tennis theory and E.T.A. pedagogy and tradition, and getting to be kind in a way that costs him nothing. Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces. The twice-weekly (more like once-weekly, as things usually pan out) group interfaces with his quintet are unpleasant only after a particularly bad P.M. session on the courts, when he’s tired and on edge and would far rather go off by himself and do secret stuff in underground ventilated private.

  Jim Troeltsch feels at his glands. John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe school.

  ‘Tired,’ Ortho Stice again sighs. He pronounces it ‘tard.’ To a man, now, the upperclassmen are down slumped on the locker room’s blue crush carpet, their legs straight out in front of them, toes pointing out at that distinctive morgue-angle, their backs up against the blue steel of the lockers, careful to avoid the six sharp little louvered antimildew vents at each locker’s base. All of them look a bit silly naked because of their tennis tans: legs and arms the deep sienna of a quality catcher’s mitt, from the summer, the tan just now this late starting to fade, but feet and ankles of toadbelly-white, the white of the grave, with chests and shoulders and upper arms more like off-white — the players can sit shirtless in the stands at tournaments when they’re not playing and get at least a bit of thoracic sun. The faces are the worst, maybe, most red and shiny, some still deep-peeling from three straight weeks of outdoor tournaments in August-September. Besides Hal, who’s atavistically dark-complected anyway, the ones here with the least bad piebald coloring are the players who can tolerate spraying themselves down with Lemon Pledge before outdoor play. It turns out Lemon Pledge, when it’s applied in pre-play stasis and allowed to dry to a thin crust, is a phenomenal sunscreen, UV-rating like 40+, and the only stuff anywhere that can survive a three-set sweat. No one knows what jr. player at what academy found this out about Pledge, years back, or how: rather bizarre discovery-circumstances are envisioned. The smell of sweat-wet Pledge out on the court makes some of the more delicately constituted kids sick, though. Others feel sunscreen of any kind to be unconscionably pussified, like white visors or on-court sunglasses. So most of the E.T.A. upperclassmen have these vivid shoe-and-shirt tans that give them the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from different bodies’ parts, especially when you throw in the heavily muscled legs and usually shallow chests and the two arms of different sizes.

  ‘Tard tard tard,’ Stice says.

  Group empathy is expressed via sighs, further slumping, small spastic gestures of exhaustion, the soft clanks of skulls’ backs against the lockers’ thin steel.

  ‘My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.’

  ‘I’m waiting til the last possible second to even breathe. I’m not expanding the cage till driven by necessity of air.’

  ‘So tired it’s out of tired’s word-range,’ Pemulis says. ‘Tired just doesn’t do it.’

  ‘Exhausted, shot, depleted,’ says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of his hand. ‘Cashed. Totalled.’

  ‘Look.’ Pemulis pointing at Struck. ‘It’s trying to think.’

  ‘A moving thing to see.’

  ‘Beat. Worn the heck out.’

  ‘Worn the fuck-all out is more like.’

  ‘Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.’

  ‘None even come close, the words.’

  ‘Word-inflation,’ Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and clears. ‘Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.’

  ‘Should be so lucky,’ says Struck, who’s been on academic probation since fifteen.

  Stice is from a part of southwest Kansas that might as well be Oklahoma. He makes the companies that give him clothes and gear give him all black clothes and gear, and his E.T.A. cognomen is ‘The Darkness.’

  Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. ‘Hyperbolicker?’

  ‘My daddy as a boy, he’d have said “tuckered out”’ll do just fine.’

  ‘Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.’

  ‘Phrases and clauses and models and structures,’ Troeltsch says, referring again to a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget. ‘We need an inflation-generative grammar.’

  Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out at Troeltsch: ‘Generate this.’

  ‘Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this,’ Struck says. ‘E.T.A.’s best minds on the problem. Whole thesauruses digested, analyzed.’ Makes a sarcastic motion. ‘Hal?’

  One semion that still works fine is holding your fist up and cranking at it with the other hand so the finger you’re giving somebody goes up like a drawbridge. Though of course Hal’s mocking himself at the same time. Everybody agrees it speaks volumes. Idris Arslanian’s shoes and incisors appear briefly in the doorway’s steam, then withdraw. Everyone’s reflection is sort of cubist in the walls’ shiny tiling. The name handed down paternally from an Umbrian five generations past and now much diluted by N.E. Yankee, a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding, Hal is the only extant Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic. His late father had been as a young man darkly tall, high flat Pima-tribe cheekbones and very black hair Brylcreemed back so tight there’d been a kind of enforced widow’s peak. Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn’t extant. Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unburnable even w/o sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. His sleekness isn’t oily so much as moist, milky; Hal worries secretly that he looks half-feminine. His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war: Hal’s eldest brother Orin had got the Moms’s Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype, the deep-socketed and lighter-blue eyes, the faultless posture and incredible flexibility (Orin was the only male anybody at E.T.A.’d ever heard of who could do a fully splayed cheerleader-type split), the rounder and more protrusive zygomatics.

  Hal’s next-oldest brother Mario doesn’t seem to resemble much of anyone they know.

  On most of the nontravel days that he doesn’t Big Buddy with his charges, Hal will wait till most everybody’s busy in the sauna and shower and stow his sticks in his locker and stroll casually down the cement steps into E.T.A.’s system of tunnels and chambers. He has some way he can casually drift off and have quite a while go by before anyone even notices his absence. He’ll often stroll casually back into the locker room just as people are slumped on the floor in towels discussing fatigue, carrying his gear bag and substantially altered in mood, and go in when most of the littler kids are in there peeling Pledge-husks off their limbs and taking their turn showering, and shower, using one of the kids’ shampoo out of a bottle shaped like a cartoon character, then hike the head back and apply Visine in a Schacht-free stall, gargle and brush and floss and dress, usually not even needing to comb his hair. He carries Visine AC, mint-flavored floss, and a traveller’s toothbrush in a pocket of his Dunlop gear bag. Ted Schacht, big into oral hygiene, regards Hal’s bag’s floss and brush as an example to them all.

  ‘So tired it’s like I’m almost high.’

  ‘But not pleasantly high,’ Troeltsch says. ‘It’d be a pleasanter tiredness-high if I didn’t have to wait till fucking 1900 to start all this studyin’,’ Stice says.

  ‘You’d think Schtitt could at least not turn up the juice the week before midterms.’

  ‘You’d think that the coaches and the teachers could try and ge
t together on their scheduling.’

  ‘It’d be like a pleasant fatigue if I could just go up after dinner and hunker on down with the mind in neutral and watch something uncomplex.’

  ‘Not have to worry about prescriptive forms or acutance.’ ‘Kick back.’ ‘Watch something with chase scenes and lots of stuff blowing up all over the place.’

  ‘Relax, do bongs, kick back, look at lingerie catalogues, eat granola with a great big wooden spoon,’ Struck says wistfully.

  ‘Get laid.’ ‘Just get one night off to like R and R.’ ‘Slip on the old environmental suit and listen to some atonal jazz.’ ‘Have sex. Get laid.’ ‘Bump uglies. Do the nasty. Haul ashes.’ ‘Find me one of them Northeast Oklahoma drive-in burger-stand waitresses with the great big huge titties.’

  ‘Those enormous pink-white French-painting tits that sort of like tumble out.’

  ‘One of those wooden spoons so big you can barely get your mouth around it.’

  ‘Just one night to relax and indulge.’

  Pemulis belts out two quick verses of Johnny Mathis’s ‘Chances Are,’ left over from the shower, then subsides to examine something on his left thigh. Shaw has a spit-bubble going, growing to such exceptional size for just spit that half the room watches until it finally goes at the same moment Pemulis breaks off.

  Evan Ingersoll says ‘We get off Saturday for Interdependence Day Eve, though, the board said.’

  Several upperclass heads are cocked up at Ingersoll. Pemulis makes a bulge in his cheek with his tongue and moves it around.

  ‘Flubbaflubba’: Stice makes his jowls fly around. ‘We get off classes is all. Drills and challenges go merrily on, deLint says,’ Freer points out.

  ‘But no drills Sunday, before the Gala.’ ‘But still matches.’

  Every jr. player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continentally, except Pemulis, Yardley and Blott.

  There’d be clear evidence that T. Schacht’s still in one of the toilet stalls off the showers even if Hal couldn’t see the tip of one of Schacht’s enormous purple shower thongs under the door of the stall right by where the shower-area entryway cuts into his line of sight. Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors. The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious. Luther’s shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther’s 16th-century shoes, awaiting epiphany. The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station johns, heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush. Women’s slippers, centurions’ dusty sandals, dock-workers’ hobnailed boots, Popes’ slippers. All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping. Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched just past the firelight’s circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting. Schacht suffered from Crohn’s Disease, 43 a bequest from his ulcerative-colitic dad, and had to take carminative medication with every meal, and took a lot of guff about his digestive troubles, and had developed of all things arthritic gout, too, somehow, because of the Crohn’s Disease, which had settled in his right knee and caused him terrible pain on the court.

  Freer’s and Tall Paul Shaw’s racquets fall off the bench with a clatter, and Beak and Blott move fast to pick them up and stack them back on the bench, Beak one-handed because the other hand is keeping his towel fastened.

  ‘Because so that was let’s see,’ Struck says.

  Pemulis loves to sing around tile.

  Struck’s hitting his palm with a finger for either emphasis or ordinal counting. ‘Close to let’s call it an hour run for the A-squads, an hour-fifteen drills, two matches back to back.’

  ‘I only played one,’ Troeltsch injects. ‘Had a measurable fever in the A.M., deLint said to throttle down today.’

  ‘Folks that went three sets only played one match, Spodek and Kent for an instance,’ Stice says.

  ‘Funny how Troeltsch how his health always seems to rally when A.M.

  drills get out,’ Freer says.

  ‘— like conservatively two hours for the matches. Conservatively. Then half an hour on the machines under fucking Loach’s beady browns, sitting there with the clipboard. That’s let’s call it five hours of vigorous nonstop straight-out motion.’

  ‘Sustained and strenuous exertion.’ ‘Schtitt’s determinated this year we ain’t singing no silly songs at Port Washington.’

  John Wayne hasn’t said one word this whole time. The contents of his locker are neat and organized. He always buttons his shirt all the way up to the top button as if he were going to put on a tie, which he doesn’t even own. Ingersoll’s also getting dressed out of his underclassman’s small square locker.

  Stice says ‘Except they seem to forget we’re still in our puberty.’

  Ingersoll is a kid seemingly wholly devoid of eyebrows, as far as Hal can see.

  ‘Speak for yourself, Darkness.’

  ‘I’m saying how stressing the pubertyizing skeleton like this, it’s real short-sighted.’ Stice’s voice rises. ‘ ’m I supposed to do when I’m twenty and in the Show playing nonstop and I’m skeletally stressed and injury-proned?’

  ‘Dark’s right.’

  A curled bit of cloudy old Pledge-husk and a green thread from a strip of GauzeTex wrap are complexly entwined in the blue fibers of the carpet near Hal’s left ankle, which ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue tinge. He keeps flexing the ankle whenever it occurs to him to. Struck and Troeltsch spar briefly with open hands, feinting and bobbing their heads, both still seated on the floor. Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck, Rader, and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per Academy mandate. Struck’s shoulders and neck have furious purple inflammations; Hal had also noticed a boil on the inside of Schacht’s thigh, when Ted’d sat down. Hal’s face’s reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical twang in the next tile. That post-shower community feeling is dissipating. Even Evan Ingersoll looks quickly at his watch and clears his throat. Wayne and Shaw have dressed and left; Freer, a major Pledge-devotee, is at his hair in the mirror, Pemulis also rising now to get away from Freer’s feet and legs. Freer’s eyes have a protrusive wideness to them that the Axhandle says makes Freer always look like he’s getting shocked or throttled.

  And time in the P.M. locker room seems of limitless depth; they’ve all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows.

  ‘I’m thinking it’s Tavis,’ Freer says to them all in the mirror. ‘Where there’s excess work and suffering can fucking Tavis be far behind.’

  ‘No, it’s Schtitt,’ Hal says.

  ‘Schtitt was short a few wickets out of the old croquet set long before he got hold of us, men,’ Pemulis says.

  ‘Peemster and Hal.’

  ‘Halation and Pemurama.’

  Freer purses his little lips and expels air like he’s blowing out a match, blowing some tiny grooming-remnant off the big mirror’s glass. ‘Schtitt just does what he’s told like a good Nazi.’

  ‘What the hail is that supposed to mean?’ asks a Stice who’s well known for asking How High Sir when Schtitt says Jump, now feeling at the carpet around him for something to throw at Freer. Ingersoll tosses Stice a woppsed-up towel, trying to be helpful, but Stice’s eyes are on Freer’s in the glass, and the towel hits him on the head and sits there, on his head. The room’s emotions seem to be inverting themselves every couple seconds. There’s half-cruel laughter at Stice as Hal struggles to his feet, rising in careful stages, putting most of his weight on the good ankle. Hal’s towel falls off as he does his combination. Struck says something that’s lost in the roar of a high-pressure toilet.