Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character. It’s worse when he’s put away a couple ’drines. He and Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza are in Pemulis’s room, with Pemulis’s roommates Schacht and Troeltsch down at lunch, so they’re alone, Pemulis and Axford and Hal, stroking their chins, looking down at Michael Pemulis’s yachting cap on his bed. Lying inside the overturned hat are a bunch of fair-sized but bland-looking tablets of the allegedly incredibly potent DMZ.

  Pemulis looks all around behind them in the empty room. ‘This, Incster, Axhandle, is the incredibly potent DMZ. The Great White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens. ‘The gargantuan feral infant of —’

  Hal says ‘We get the picture.’

  ‘The Yale U. of the Ivy League of Acid,’ says Axford.

  ‘Your ultimate psychosensual distorter,’ Pemulis sums up.

  ‘Think you mean psychosensory, unless I don’t know the whole story here.’

  Axford gives Hal a narrow look. Interrupting Pemulis means having to watch him do the head-thing all over again each time.

  ‘Hard to find, gentlemen. As in very hard to find. Last lots came off the line in the early 70s. These tablets here are artifacts. Certain amount of decay in potency probably inevitable. Used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments.’

  Axford nods down at the hat. ‘Mind-control?’

  ‘More like getting the enemy to think their guns are hydrangea, the enemy’s a blood-relative, that sort of thing. Who knows. The accounts I’ve been reading have been incoherent, gistless. Experiments conducted. Things got out of hand. Let’s just say things got out of control. Potency judged too incredible to proceed. Subjects locked away in institutions and written off as casualties of peace. Formula shredded. Research team scattered, reassigned. Vague but I’ve got to tell you pretty sobering rumors.’

  ‘These are from the early 70s?’ Axhandle says.

  ‘See the little trademark on each one, with the guy in bell-bottoms and long sideburns?’

  ‘Is that what that is?’

  ‘Unprecedentedly potent, this stuff. The Swiss inventor they say was originally recommending LSD-25 as what to take to come down off the stuff.’ Pemulis takes one of the tablets and puts it in his palm and pokes at it with a callused finger. ‘What we’re looking at. We’re looking here at either a serious sudden injection of cash —’

  Axford makes a shocked noise. ‘You’d actually try to peddle the incredibly potent DMZ around this sorry place?’

  Pemulis’s snort sounds like the letter K. ‘Get a large economy-size clue, Axhandle. Nobody here’d have any clue what they’d even be dealing with. Not to mention be willing to pay what they’re worth. Why, there are pharmaceutical museums, left-wing think tanks, New York designer-drug consortiums I’m sure’d be dying to dissect these. Decoct like. Toss into the spectrometer and see what’s what.’

  ‘That we could get bids from, you’re saying,’ Axford says. Hal squeezes a ball, silently looking at the hat.

  Pemulis turns the tablet over. ‘Or certain very progressive and hip-type nursing homes I know guys that know of. Or down at Back Bay at that yogurt place with that picture of those historical guys Inc was saying at breakfast was up on the wall.’

  ‘Ram Das. William Burroughs.’

  ‘Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting.’

  Axford’s pretending to punch Hal’s arm in excitement.

  Pemulis says ‘Or of course I’m thinking I could just go the sheer-entertainment route and toss them in the Gatorade barrels at the meet with Port Washington Tuesday, or down at the WhataBurger — watch every-body run around clutching their heads or whatever. I’d be way into watching Wayne play with distorted senses.’

  Hal puts one foot up on Pemulis’s little frustum-shaped bedside stool and leans farther in. ‘Would it be prying to ask how you finally managed to get hold of these?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be prying at all,’ Pemulis says, removing from the yachting cap’s lining every piece of contraband he’s got and spreading it out on the bed, sort of the way older people will array all their valuables in quiet moments. He has a small quantity of personal-consumption Lamb’s Breath cannabis (bought back from Hal out of a 20-g. he’d sold Hal) in a dusty baggie, a little Saran-Wrapped cardboard rectangle with four black stars spaced evenly across it, the odd ’drine, and it looks like a baker’s dozen of the incredibly potent DMZ, Sweet Tart–sized tablets of no particular color with a tiny mod hipster in each center wishing the viewer peace. ‘We don’t even know how many hits this is,’ he muses quietly. There’s sun on the wall with the hanging viewer and poster of the paranoid king and an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket. In one of the three big mullioned west windows — the Academy is nothing if not well-fenestrated — there’s an oval flaw that’s casting a bubble of ale-colored autumn sunlight from the window’s left side to elongate onto Pemulis’s tightly made bed, 73 and he moves everything his hat’s got into the brighter bubble, going down on one knee to study a tablet between his forceps (Pemulis owns stuff like philatelic forceps, a loupe, a pharmaceutical scale, a postal scale, a personal-size Bunsen burner) with the calm precision of a jeweler. ‘The literature’s mute on the titration. Do you take one tablet?’ He looks up on one side and then back around on the other at the boys’ faces leaning in above. ‘Is like half a tab a regulation hit?’

  ‘Two or even three tablets, maybe?’ Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself.

  ‘The accessible data’s vague,’ Pemulis says, his profile contorted around the loupe in his socket. ‘The literature on muscimole-lysergic blends is spotty and vague and hard to read except to say how massively powerful the supposed yields are.’

  Hal looks at the top of Pemulis’s head. ‘Did you hit a medical library?’

  ‘I got on MED.COM off Lateral Alice’s WATS line and went back and forth and up and down through MED.COM. Plenty on lysergics, plenty on methoxy-class hybrids. Vague and almost gossip-columny shit on fitviavi-compounds. To get anything you got to cross-key Ergotics with the phrase muscimole or muscimolated. Only a couple things ring the bell when you key in DMZ. Then they’re all potent this, sinister that. Nothing with any specifics. And jumbly polysyllables out the ass. Whole thing gave me a migraine.’

  ‘Yes but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real med- library?’ Hal’s his mother Avril’s child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc. Axford now really does punch him once in the shoulder, albeit the right one. Pemulis is scratching absently at the little hair-hurricane at the center of his hair. It’s close to 1430h., and the flawed bubble of light on the bed is getting to be the slightly sad color of early winter P.M. There are still no sounds from the West Courts outside, but there’s high song of much volume through the wall’s water-pipes — a lot of the guys who are drilled past caring in the A.M. don’t get it up to shower until after lunch, then sit through P.M. classes with wet hair and different clothes than their A.M. classes.

  Pemulis rises to stand between them and looks around the empty three-bedded room again, with neat stacks of three players’ clothes and bright gear on shelves and three wicker laundry hampers bulging slightly. There is the rich scent of athletic laundry, but other than that the room looks almost professionally clean. Pemulis and Schacht’s room makes Hal and Mario’s room look like an insane asylum, Hal thinks. Axford drew one of only two single upperclass rooms in last spring’s lottery, the other having gone to the Vaught twins, who get counted as one entry in Room Draw.

  Pemulis still has his cheek screwed up to keep the loupe in as he looks around. ‘One monograph had this toss-off about DMZ where the guy invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid.’

  �
�Holy crow.’

  ‘One article out of fucking Moment of all sources talks about how this one Army convict at Leavenworth got allegedly injected with some massive unspecified dose of early DMZ as part of some Army experiment in Christ only knows what and about how this convict’s family sued over how the guy reportedly lost his mind.’ He directs the loupe dramatically at first Hal and then Axford. ‘I mean literally lost his mind, like the massive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where.’

  ‘I think we get the picture, Mike.’

  ‘Allegedly Moment says how the guy’s found later in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice.’

  Axford says maybe Pemulis stumbled on a possible explanation for poor old Lyle and his lotus position down in the weight room, gesturing with the bad right hand in the direction of Comm.-Ad.

  Again Pemulis with the thing with the head. The slackening of a cheek lets the loupe fall out and bounce off the drum-tight bed, and Pemulis gets it to rebound into his palm without even looking. ‘I think we can err on the side of not dickying the Gatorade barrels, anyway. This soldier’s story’s moral was proceed with caution, big time. The guy’s mind’s still allegedly AWOL. An old soldier, now, still belting out Broadway medleys in some secretive institution someplace. Blood-relatives try to sue on the guy’s behalf, Army apparently came up with enough arguments to give the jury reasonable doubt about if the guy can even be said to legally exist enough to bring suit, anymore, since the dose misplaced his mind.’

  Axford feels absently at his elbow. ‘So you’re saying let’s proceed with care why don’t we.’

  Hal kneels to prod one of the tablets up against the dusty baggie’s side. His finger looks dark in the elongated bubble of light. ‘I’m thinking these look like two tablets are possibly a hit. A kind of Motrinish look to them.’

  ‘Visual guesswork isn’t going to do it. This is not Bob Hope, Inc.’

  ‘We could even designate it “Ethel,” for on the phone,’ Axford suggests. Pemulis watches Hal arranging the tablets into the same general cardioid-shape as E.T.A. itself. ‘What I’m saying. This is not a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show-tune soldier like left the planet.’

  ‘Well, so long as he waves every so often.’

  ‘The sense I got is the only thing he waves at is his food.’

  ‘But that was from a massive early dose,’ Axford says.

  Hal’s arrangement of the tablets on the red-and-gray counterpane is almost Zen in its precision. ‘These are from the 70s?’

  After intricate third-party negotiations, Michael Pemulis finally landed 650 mg. of the vaunted and elusive compound DMZ or ‘Madame Psychosis’ from a small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents who now undertook small and probably kind of pathetic outdated insurgency-projects from behind the front-operation of a cut-rate mirror, blown-glass, practical joke ’n gag, trendy postcard, and low-demand old film-cartridge emporium called Antitoi Entertainment, just up Prospect St. from Inman Square in Cambridge’s decayed Portugo/Brazilian district. Because Pemulis always conducts business solo and speaks no French, the whole transaction with the Nuck in charge had to be negotiated in dumbshow, and since this lumberjackish Antitoi Nuckwad tended to look from side to side before he communicated even more than Pemulis looked all around himself, with his dim-looking partner standing there cradling a broom and also scanning for eavesdroppers in the closed shop the whole time, the whole negotiated deal had resembled a kind of group psychomotor seizure, with different bits of whipping and waggling heads reflected in dislocated sections and at jagged angles in more mirrors and pebbled blown-glass vases than Pemulis had ever seen crammed into anywhere. A very low-rent TP indeed had a hardcoreporn cartridge going at five times the normal speed so it looked like crazed rodents and may have turned Pemulis’s sexual glands off for all time, he feels. God alone knew where these clowns had acquired thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts of the B.S. 1970s. But the good news is they were Canadians, and like fucking Nucksters about almost anything they had no idea what what they were in possession of was worth, as it slowly emerged. Pemulis, w/ aid of 150 mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post-transaction jig on his way up the steps of the otiose Cambridge bus, feeling the way W. Penn in his Quaker Oats hat in like the 16th century must have felt trading a few trinkets to babe-in-the-woods Natives for New Jersey, he imagines, doffing the nautical cap to two nuns in the aisle.

  Over the course of the next academic day — the incredibly potent stash now wrapped tight in Saran and stashed deep in the toe of an old sneaker that sits atop the aluminum strut between two panels in subdorm B’s drop ceiling, Pemulis’s time-tested entrepôt — over the course of the next day or so the matter’s hashed out and it’s decided that while there’s no real reason to involve Boone or Stice or Struck or Troeltsch, it’s really Pemulis and Axford and Hal’s right — duty, almost, to the spirits of inquiry and good trade practice — to sample the potentially incredibly potent DMZ in predeterminedly safe amounts before unleashing it on Boone or Troeltsch or any unwitting civilians. Axford having been allowed in on the front end, the question of Hal’s defraying the opportunity-cost of his part in the experiment is tactfully broached and turns out to be no problem. Pemulis’s mark-up isn’t anything beyond accepted norms, and there’s always room in Hal’s budget for spirited inquiry. Hal’s one condition is that somebody tech-literate actually take the truck down to B.U. or M.I.T.’s medical library and physically verify that the compound is both organic and nonaddictive, which Pemulis says a physical hands-on library assault is already down in his day-planner in pen, anyway. After P.M. drills on Thursday, as Hal Incandenza and Pemulis with camera-mounted Mario Incandenza in tow stand with their hands in the chainlink mesh of one of the Show Courts’ fencing and watch Teddy Schacht play a private exhibition against a Syrian Satellite-pro who’s at E.T.A. for two paid weeks of corrective instruction on a service-motion that’s eroding his rotator cuff — the guy wears thick glasses with a black athletic band around his head and plays with an upright square-jawed liquid precision and is dispatching Ted Schacht handily, which Schacht is taking with his customary sanguine good temper, giving his stolid all, learning what he can, one of very few genuinely stocky players at E.T.A. and one of the even fewer ranked junior players around without an apparent ego, wholly noninsecure since he blew out his knee on a contre-pied in the pre-Thanksgiving exhibition three years back, which is odd, now still in and at it for just the fun — and more or less doomed, therefore, to a purgatorial existence in 128-256 Alphabetville — as Pemulis and Hal stand there sweaty in full redand-gray E.T.A. sweats on a raw 11/5 P.M., the sweat in their hair starting to accrete and freeze, Mario’s head bowed under the weight of the head-mount rig and his hideously arachnodactylic fingers whitening as the fence takes his forward weight, Hal’s posture subtly but warmly inclined ever so slightly toward his tiny older brother, who resembles him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble one another — as they stand watching and hashing matters out, Hal and Pemulis, there’s the thud and sprong of an E.W.D. transnational catapult off way below to their left and then the high keen sound of a waste-displacement projectile the clouds are too low to let them see the flight of — though a weirdly yellow sheep-shaped cloud is visible somewhere up off past Acton, connecting the horizon’s seam to some kind of coming storm-front held off by the ATHSCME fans along the Lowell-Methuen stretch of border, northwest. Pemulis finally nixes the notion of performing the spirited controlled experiment here in Enfield, where Axford has to be at the A squad’s dawn drills every morning at 0500, and also Hal, unless he’s slept over at HmH the night before, with HmH just not being a good DMZ-dropping venue at all. Pemulis, scanning up and down the length of the fence and winking at Mario, posits that a solid 36 hours of demand-free time will be advisable for any interact
ion with the incredibly potent you-know-whatski. That also lets out the inter-academy thing with Port Washington tomorrow, for which Charles Tavis has chartered two buses, because so many E.T.A. players are getting to go and do battle in this one — Port Washington Academy is gargantuan, the Xerox Inc. of North American tennis academies, with over 300 students and 64 courts, half of which they’ll have already put under warm inflatable TesTar cover as of like Halloween, P.W.’s staff being less into the value of elemental suffering than Schtitt & Co. — so many that Tavis will almost surely go ahead and bus them all back up from Long Island just as soon as the post-competition dance is over, rather than shell out for all those motel rooms without corporate support. This E.T.A.–P.W. meet and buffet and dance are a private, inter-academy tradition, an epic rivalry almost a decade old. Plus Pemulis says he’ll need a couple weeks of quality med-library-stacks-tossing time to do the more exacting titration and side-effects research Hal agrees the soldier’s sobering story seems to dictate. So, they conclude, the window of opportunity looks to be 11/20–21 — the weekend right after the big End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition with the E.T.A. A & B squads in singles against (this year) Québec’s notoriously hapless Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup squads, 74 invited down under very quiet lowprofile political conditions via the good expatriate offices of Avril Incandenza to get vivisected by Wayne and Hal et al for the philanthropic amusement of E.T.A. patrons and alums, then to dance the P.M. away at a catered supper and Alumni Ball — the weekend right before Thanksgiving week and the WhataBurger Invitational in sunny AZ, because this year in addition to Friday 11/20 they also get Saturday 11/21 off, as in from both class and practice, because C.T. and Schtitt have arranged a special one-match doubles exhibition for the Saturday A.M. following the big meet, one between two female coaches of the Québecois Wightmans and E.T.A.’s infamous Vaught twins, Caryn and Sharyn Vaught, seventeen, O.N.A.N.’s top-ranked junior women’s doubles team, unbeaten in three years, an unbeatable duo, uncanny in their cooperation on the court, moving as One at all times, playing not just as if but in fact because they shared a brain, or at least the psychomotor lobes of one, the twins Siamese, fused at the left and right temple, banned from Singles by O.N.A.N. regs, the broad-shadow-casting Vaughts, flinty-eyed tire-executive’s daughters out of Akron, using her/their four legs to cover chilling amounts of court, plus to sweep the Charleston competition at every post-exhibition formal ball for the last five years running. Tavis’ll be on Wayne to play some sort of exhibitory thing, too, though asking Wayne to publicly smear a second Québecer in two days might be a bit much. And but everyone who’s anyone’ll be down at the Lung, watching the Vaughts vivisect some adult-ranked Nucks, plus maybe Wayne, 75 then the E.T.A.s will get Saturday to rest and recharge before starting both the pre-WhataBurger training week and the bell-lap of prep for 12/12’s Boards, meaning late Friday night– Sunday A.M. will give Pemulis, Hal, and Axford (and maybe Struck if Pemulis needs to let Struck in, for help with library-tossing) enough time to psychospiritually rally from whatever meninges-withering hangover the incredibly potent DMZ might involve… and Axford in the sauna predicted it would be a witherer indeed, since even just LSD alone he observed left you the next day not just sick or down but utterly empty, a shell, void inside, like your soul was a wrung-out sponge. Hal wasn’t sure he concurred. An alcohol hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said the dawn seemed to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence. 76 Halation, Axford observed.