Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  The Union’s soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy pia-mater pink except in spots where it’s eroded down to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions. From the air it looks wrinkled; from the roof’s fire door it’s an almost nauseous system of serpentine trenches, like water-slides in hell. The Union itself, the late A.Y. (‘V.F.’) Rickey’s summum opus,is a great hollow brain-frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from the second floor’s optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus — a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura) — which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum’s edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

  Topside in the bitter river wind, wearing a khaki parka with a fake fur fringe, the student engineer makes his way and settles into the first intraparietal sulcus that catches his fancy, makes a kind of nest in the soft trench — the convoluted latex is filled with those little non-FHC Styrofoam peanuts everything industrially soft is filled with, and the pia-mater surface gives rather like one of those old beanbag-chairs of more innocent times — settles in and back with his Millennial Fizzy and inhaler and cigarette and pocket-size Heathkit digital FM-band receiver under a high-CO night sky that makes the stars’ points look extra sharp. The Boston P.M. is 10°C. The postcentral sulcus he sits in is just outside the circumference of the YYY aerial’s high-speed spin, so five m. overhead its tip’s aircraft-light describes a blurred oval, vascularly hued. His FM receiver’s power cells, tested daily against the Low-Temp Lab’s mercuric resistors, are fresh, the wooferless tuner’s sound tinny and crisp, so that Madame sounds like a faithful but radically miniaturized copy of her studio self.

  ‘Those with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag’s-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptotic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.’

  The pulsing aircraft-alert light of the aerial is magenta, a sharp and much closer star, now, with his fingers laced behind his head, reclined and gazing upward, listening, the centrifugal whirl’s speed making its tip’s light trail color across the eyes. The light’s oval a bloody halo over the very barest of all possible heads. Madame Psychosis has done U.H.I.D. stuff before, once or twice. He is listening to her read four levels below the Oblangated Recess that becomes the heating shaft’s nubbin of spine, ad-lib-style reading from one of the PR-circulars of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, an agnostic-style 12-step support-group deal for what it calls the ‘aesthetically challenged.’ 62 She sometimes reads circulars and catalogues and PR-type things, though not regularly. Some things take several successive shows to get through. Ratings stay solid; listeners hang in. The engineer’s pretty sure he’d hang in even if he weren’t paid to. He does like to settle into a sulcus and smoke slowly and exhale up past the blurred red ellipse of the aerial, monitoring. Madame’s themes are at once unpredictable and somehow rhythmic, more like probability-waves for subhadronics than anything else. 63 The student engineer has never once seen Madame Psychosis enter or leave WYYY; she probably takes the elevator. It’s 22 October in the O.N.A.N.ite year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

  Like most marriages, Avril and the late James Incandenza’s was an evolved product of concordance and compromise, and the scholastic curriculum at E.T.A. is the product of negotiated compromises between Avril’s academic hard-assery and James’s and Schtitt’s keen sense of athletic pragmatics. It is because of Avril — who quit M.I.T. entirely and went down to half-time at Brandeis and even turned down an extremely plummy-type stipended fellowship at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute that first year to design and assume the helm of E.T.A.’s curriculum — that the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium of the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition, 64 and thus one of the very few extant sports academies that makes a real stab at being a genuine pre-college school and not just an Iron Curtainish jock-factory. But Schtitt never let Incandenza forget what the place was supposed to be about, and so Avril’s flinty mens-sana pedagogy wasn’t diluted so much as ad-valoremized, pragmatically focused toward the corpore-potis-type goals kids were coming up the hill to give their childhoods for. Some E.T.A. twists Avril’d allowed into the classic L.A.S. path are e.g. that the seven subjects of the T and Q are mixed and not divided into Quadrivial Upper-class v. Trivial Ephebic; that E.T.A. geometry classes pretty much ignore the study of closed figures (excepting rectangles) to concentrate (also except for Thorp’s Trigonometry of Cubes, which is elective and mostly aesthetic) for two increasingly brutal semesters on the involution and expansion of bare angles; that the quadrivial requirement of astronomy has at E.T.A. become a two-term elementary optics survey, since vision issues are obviously more germane to the Game, and since all the hardware required for everything from aphotic to apochromatic lenswork were and are right there in the lab off the Comm.-Ad. tunnel. Music’s been pretty much bagged. Plus the triviumoid fetish for classical oratory has by now at E.T.A. been converted to a wide range of history and studio courses in various types of entertainment, mostly recorded film — again, way too much of Incandenza’s lavish equipment lying around not to exploit, plus the legally willed and endowed-for-perpetuity presence on the academic payroll of Mrs. Pricket, Mr. Ogilvie, Mr. Disney R. Leith, and Ms. Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf, the late founder/director’s loyal sound engineer, Best Boy, production assistant, and third-favorite actress, respectively.

  Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza’s line, one of the few philosophical points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant.

  Mario Incandenza has sat in on a back-row stool for every session of an E.T.A. Entertainment Dept. offering ever since he was finally three years ago December asked to disenroll from the Winter Hill Special School in Cam-bridgeport for cheerfully declining even to try to learn to really read, explaining he’d way rather listen and watch. And he is a fanatical listener/ observer. He tre
ats the lavish Tatsuoka fringe-FM-band tuner in the living room of the Headmaster’s House like kids of three generations past, listening the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close to one of the speakers with his head cocked dog-like, listening, staring into that special pocket of near-middle distance reserved for the serious listener. He really does have to sit right up close to listen to ‘Sixty Minutes +/–…’ when he’s over at the HmH 65 with C.T. and sometimes Hal at his mother’s late suppers, because Avril has some auditory thing about broadcast sound and gets the howling fantods from any voice that does not exit a living corporeal head, and though Avril’s made it clear that Mario’s free at any time to activate and align the Tatsuoka’s ghostly-green tuner to whatever he wishes, he keeps the volume so low that he has to be lowered onto a low coffee table and lean in and almost put his ear up against the woofer’s tremble and concentrate closely to hear YYY’s signal over the conversation in the dining room, which tends to get sort of manically high-pitched toward the end of supper. Avril never actually asks Mario to keep it down; he does it out of unspoken consideration for her thing about sound. Another of her unspoken but stressful things involves issues of enclosure, and the HmH has no interior doors between rooms, and not even much in the way of walls, and the living and dining rooms are separated only by a vast multileveled tangle of house-plants in pots and on little stools of different heights and arrayed under hanging UV lamps of an intensity that tends to give the diners strange little patterns of tan that differ according to where someone usually sits at the table. Hal sometimes complains privately to Mario that he gets more than enough UV during the day thank you very much. The plants are incredibly lush and hale and sometimes threaten to block off the whole easement from dining to living room, and the rope-handled Brazilian machete C.T. had mounted on the wall by the tremulous china-case has stopped really being a joke. The Moms calls the houseplants her Green Babies, and she has a rather spectacular thumb, plant-wise, for a Canadian.

  ‘The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen. Those with distorted orbits of all kinds. Get out from under the sun’s cove-lighting is what this says. Come in from the spectral rain.’ Madame Psychosis’s broadcast accent is not Boston. There are r’s, for one thing, and there is no cultured Cambridge stutter. It’s the accent of someone who’s spent time either losing a southern lilt or cultivating one. It’s not flat and twangy like Stice’s, and it’s not a drawl like the people at Gainesville’s academy. Her voice itself is sparely modulated and strangely empty, as if she were speaking from inside a small box. It’s not bored or laconic or ironic or tongue-in-cheek. ‘The basilisk-breathed and pyorrheic.’ It’s reflective but not judgmental, somehow. Her voice seems low-depth familiar to Mario the way certain childhood smells will strike you as familiar and oddly sad. ‘All ye peronic or teratoidal. The phrenologically malformed. The suppuratively lesioned. The endocrinologically malodorous of whatever ilk. Run don’t walk on down. The acervulus-nosed. The radically -ectomied. The morbidly diaphoretic with a hankie in every pocket. The chronically granulomatous. The ones it says here the ones the cruel call Two-Baggers — one bag for your head, one bag for the observer’s head in case your bag falls off. The hated and dateless and shunned, who keep to the shadows. Those who undress only in front of their pets. The quote aesthetically challenged. Leave your lazarettes and oubliettes, I’m reading this right here, your closets and cellars and TP Tableaux, find Nurturing and Support and the Inner Resources to face your own unblinking sight, is what this goes on to say, a bit overheatedly maybe. Is it our place to say. It says here Hugs Not Ughs. It says Come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what’s hidden inside. To hold and cherish. The almost unbelievably thick-ankled. The kyphotic and lordotic. The irremediably cellulitic. It says Progress Not Perfection. It says Never Perfection. The fatally pulchritudinous: Welcome. The Actaeonizing, side by side with the Medusoid. The papuled, the macular, the albinic. Medusas and odalisques both: Come find common ground. All meeting rooms windowless. That’s in ital: all meeting rooms windowless.’ Plus the music she’s cued for this inflectionless reading is weirdly compelling. You can never predict what it will be, but over time some kind of pattern emerges, a trend or rhythm. Tonight’s background fits, somehow, as she reads. There’s not any real forwardness to it. You don’t sense it’s straining to get anywhere. The thing it makes you see as she reads is something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope. It’s minor-key enough to be eerie against the empty lilt of the voice and the clinks of tines and china as Mario’s relations eat turkey salad and steamed crosiers and drink lager and milk and vin blanc from Hull over behind the plants bathed in purple light. Mario can see the back of the Moms’s head high above the table, and then over to the left Hal’s bigger right arm, and then Hal’s profile when he lowers it to eat. There’s a ball by his plate. The E.T.A. players seem to need to eat six or seven times a day. Hal and Mario had walked over for 2100 supper at HmH after Hal had read something for Mr. Leith’s class and then disappeared for about half an hour while Mario stood supported by his police lock and waited for him. Mario rubs his nose with the heel of his hand. Madame Psychosis has an unironic but generally gloomy outlook on the universe in general. One of the reasons Mario’s obsessed with her show is that he’s somehow sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow. He has visions of interfacing with her and telling her she’d feel a lot better if she listened to her own show, he bets. Madame Psychosis is one of only two people Mario would love to talk to but would be scared to try. The word periodic pops into his head.

  ‘Hey Hal?’ he calls across the plants.

  Like for months in the spring semester of Y.D.P.A.H. she referred to her own program as ‘Madame’s Downer-Lit Hour’ and read depressing book after depressing book — Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streetsand Giovanni’s Roomand Under the Volcano,plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent — in a monotone, really slowly, night after night. Mario sits on the low little van der Rohe–knockoff coffee table with bowed legs (the table) with his head cocked right up next the speaker and his claws in his lap. His toes tend to point inward when he sits. The background music is both predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it’s periodic. It suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies. It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman. Mario thinks of the word haunting, like in ‘a haunting echo of thus-and-such.’ Madame Psychosis’s cued music — which the student engineer never chooses or even sees her bring in — is always terribly obscure 66 but often just as queerly powerful and compelling as her voice and show itself, the M.I.T. community feels. It tends to give you the feeling there’s an in-joke that you and she alone are in on. Very few devoted WYYY listeners sleep well M-F. Mario has horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that he sleeps like a babe. Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L’Islet-region practice of taking just tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat seriously until right before bed. Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen. Some of Orin and Mario and Hal’s earliest memories are of nodding off at the dining-room table and being gently carried by a very tall man to bed. This was in a different house. Madame Psychosis’s cued musics stir very early memories of Mario’s father. Avril is more than willing to take some good-natured guff about her inability to eat before like 2230h. Prandial music holds little charm or associations for Hal, who like most of the kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats like a wild dog.