Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  By the end of his freshman fall and B.U.’s championship of the Yankee Conference, plus its nonvictorious but still unprecedented appearance at Las Vegas’s dignitary-attended K-L-RMKI/Forsythia Bowl, Orin had taken his off-campus housing subsidy and moved with Joelle van Dyne the heart-stopping Kentuckian into an East Cambridge co-op three subway stops distant from B.U. and the all-new inconveniences of being publicly stellar at a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death in bars over stats and fealty.

  Joelle had done the midnight Thanksgiving dinner at E.T.A., and survived Avril, and then Orin spent his first Xmas ever away from home, flying to Paducah and then driving a rented 4WD to kudzu-hung Shiny Prize, Kentucky, to drink toddies under a little white reusable Xmas tree with all red balls with Joelle and her mother and Personal Daddy and his loyal pointers, getting a storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon’s incredible Pyrex collection of every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper red, little red rectangles floating in the flasks for proof, Orin nodding a lot and trying incredibly hard and Joelle saying that Mr. van D.’s not once smiling at him was just His Way, was all, the way his own Moms had Her Way Joelle’d had trouble with. Orin wired Marlon Bain and Ross Reat and the strabismic Nickerson that he was by all indications in love with somebody.

  Freshman New Year’s Eve in Shiny Prize, far from the O.N.A.N.ite upheavals of the new Northeast, the last P.M. Before Subsidization, was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest very small amounts of cocaine. Orin had exited his own substance-phase about the time he discovered sex, plus of course the N./O.N.A.N.C.A.A.-urine considerations, and he declined it, the cocaine, but not in a judgmental or killjoy way, and found he liked being with his P.G.O.A.T. straight while she ingested, he found it exciting, a vicariously on-the-edge feeling he associated with giving yourself not to any one game’s definition but to yourself and how you unjudgmentally feel about somebody who’s high and feeling even freer and better than normal, with you, alone, under the red balls. They were a natural match here: her ingestion then was recreational, and he not only didn’t mind but never made a show of not minding, nor she that he abstained; the whole substance issue was natural and kind of free. Another reason they seemed star-fated was that Joelle had in her sophomore year decided to concentrate in Film/Cartridge, academically, at B.U. Either Film-Cartridge Theory or Film-Cartridge Production. Or maybe both. The P.G.O.A.T. was a film fanatic, though her tastes were pretty corporate: she told O. she preferred movies where ‘a whole bunch of shit blows up.’ 101 Orin in a low-key way introduced her to art film, conceptual and highbrow academic avant- and après-garde film, and taught her how to use some of InterLace’s more esoteric menus. He blasted up the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork’s own Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,which had a major impact on her. Right after Thanksgiving Himself let the P.G.O.A.T. understudy with Leith on the set of The American Century as Seen Through a Brickin return for getting to film her thumb against a plucked string. After an only mildly disappointing sophomore season O. flew with her to Toronto to watch part of the filming of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun.Himself would take Orin and his beloved out after dailies, entertaining Joelle with his freakish gift for Canadian-cab-hailing while Orin stood turtle-headed in his topcoat; and then later Orin would shepherd the two of them back to their Ontario Place hotel, stopping the cab to let them both throw up, fireman-carrying Joelle while he watched The Mad Stork negotiate his suite by holding on to walls. Himself showed them the U. Toronto Conference Center where he and the Moms had first met. This might have been the end’s start, gradually, in hindsight. Joelle that summer declined a sixth summer at the Dixie Baton-Twirling Institute in Oxford MS and let Himself give her a stage name and use her in rapid succession in Low Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to Desire,and Safe Boating Is No Accident, travelling with Himself and Mario while Orin stayed in Boston recuperating from minor surgery on a hypertrophied left quadriceps at a Massachusetts General Hospital where no fewer than four nurses and P.T.s in the Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation from their husbands, with custody.

  The P.G.O.A.T.’s real ambitions weren’t thespian, Orin knew, is one reason he hung in so long. Joelle when he’d met her already owned some modest personal film equipment, courtesy of her Personal Daddy. And she now had access to nothing if not serious digital gear. By Orin’s sophomore year she no longer twirled or incited Pep in any way. In his first full season she stood behind various white lines with a little Bolex R32 digital recorder and BTL meters and lenses, including a bitching Angenieux zoom O.’d gone and paid for, as a gesture, and she shot little half-disk-sector clips of #78, B.U. Punter, sometimes with Leith in attendance (never Himself), experimenting with speed and focal length and digital mattes, extending herself technically. Orin, despite his interests in upgrading the P.G.O.A.T.’s commercial tastes, was himself pretty luke-warm on film and cartridges and theater and pretty much anything that reduced him to herd-like spectation, but he respected Joelle’s own creative drives, to an extent; and he found out that he really did like watching the football footage of Joelle van Dyne, featuring pretty much him only, strongly preferred the little .5-sector clips to Himself’s cartridges or corporate films where things blew up while Joelle bounced in her seat and pointed at the viewer; and he found them (her clips of him at play) way more engaging than the grainy overcluttered game- and play-celluloids the Head Coach made everybody sit through. Orin liked to adjust the co-op’s rheostat way down when Joelle wasn’t home and haul out the diskettes and make Jiffy Pop and watch her little ten-second clips of him over and over. He saw something different each time he rewound, something more. The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt. It only happened when he watched them alone. Sometimes he got an erection. He never masturbated; Joelle came home. Still in the last stages of a late puberty and the prettiness getting visibly worse day by day, Joelle had been maiden, still, when Orin met her. She’d been shunned theretofore, both at B.U. and Shiny Prize–Boaz Consolidated: the beauty had repelled every comer. She’d devoted her life to her twirling and amateur film. Disney Leith said she had the knack: her camera-hand was rock-steady; even the early clips from the start of the Y.W. season looked shot off a tripod. There’d been no audio in the sophomore clips, and you could hear the high-pitched noise of the cartridge in the TP’s disk drive. A cartridge revolving at a digital diskette’s 450 rpm sounds a bit like a distant vacuum cleaner. Late-night car-noises and sirens drifted in through the bars from as far away as the Storrow 500. Silence was not part of what Orin was after, watching. (Joelle housekeeps like a fiend. The place is always sterile. The resemblance to the Moms’s housekeeping he finds a bit creepy. Except Joelle doesn’t mind a mess or give anybody the creeps worrying about hiding that she minds it so nobody’s feelings will be hurt. With Joelle the mess just disappears sometime during the night and you wake up and the place is sterile. It’s like elves.) Soon after he started watching the clips in his junior year, Orin had blasted up Comm.’s hill and brought Joelle back a Bolex-compatible Tatsuoka recorder w/ sync pulse, a cardioid mike, a low-end tripod w/ a barney to muffle the Bolex’s whir, a classy Pilotone blooper and sync-pulse cords, a whole auracopia. It took Leith three weeks to teach her to use the Pilotone. Now the clips had sound. Orin has trouble not burning the Jiffy Pop popcorn. It tends to burn as the foil top inflates; you have to take it off the stove before the foil forms a dome. No microwave popcorn for Orin, even then. He liked to dim the track-lights when Joelle was out and haul out the cartridge-rack and watch her little ten-second clips of his punts over and over. Here he is back against Delaware in the second Home game of Y.T.M.P. The sky is dull and pale, the five Yankee Conference flags — U. Vermont and UNH now history — are all right out straight with the gale off the Charles for which Nickerson Field is infamous. It’s fourth down, obviously. Thousands of kilos of padded meat assume four-point stances and chuff
at each other, poised to charge and stave. Orin is twelve yards back from scrimmage, his cleated feet together, his weight just ahead of himself, his mismatched arms out before him in the attitude of the blind before walls. His eyes are fixed on the distant grass-stained Valentine of the center’s ass. His stance, waiting to receive the snap, is not unlike a diver’s, he sees. Nine men on line, four-pointed, poised to stave off ten men’s assault. The other team’s deep back is back to receive, seventy yards away or more. The fullback whose sole job is to keep Orin from harm is ahead and to the left, bent at the knees, his taped fists together and elbows out like a winged thing ready to hurl itself at whatever breaches the line and comes at the punter. Joelle’s equipment isn’t quite pro-caliber but her technique is very good. By junior year there’s also color. There’s only one sound, and it is utter: the crowd’s noise and its response to that noise, building. Orin’s back against Delaware, ready, his helmet a bright noncontact white and his head’s insides scrubbed free for ten seconds of every thought not connected to receiving the long snap and stepping martially forward to lob the leather egg beyond sight at an altitude that makes the wind no factor. Madame P.G.O.A.T. gets it all, zooming in from the opposite end zone. She gets his timing; a punt’s timing is minutely precise, like a serve’s; it’s like a solo dance; she gets the ungodly WHUMP against and above the crowd’s vowel’s climax; she captures the pendular 180-arc of Orin’s leg, the gluteal follow-through that puts his cleat’s laces way over his helmet, the perfect right angle between leg and turf. Her technique is superb on the Delaware debacle Orin can just barely take reviewing, the one time all year the big chuffing center oversnaps and arcs the ball over Orin’s up-raised hands so by the time he’s run back and grabbed the crazy-bouncing thing ten yards farther back the Delaware defense has breached the line, are through the line, the fullback supine and trampled, all ten rushers rushing, wanting nothing more than personal physical contact with Orin and his leather egg. Joelle gets him sprinting, a three-meter lateral burst as he avoids the first few sets of hands and the beefy curling lips and but is just about to get personally contacted and knocked out of his cleats by the Delaware strong safety flying in on a slant from way outside when the tiny .5-sector of digital space each punt’s programmed to require runs out and the crowd-sound moos and dies and you can hear the disk-drive stalled at the terminal byte and Orin’s chin-strapped plastic-barred face is there on the giant viewer, frozen and High-Def in his helmet, right before impact, zoomed in on with a quality lens. Of particular interest are the eyes.

  14 NOVEMBER

  YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

  Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the T. It happened on a Gray Line train from Watertown to Inman Square, Cambridge. He’d been drinking codeine cough syrup in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library in horrid central Watertown MA for over a week, darting out from cover only to beg a scrip from hideous Equus Reese and then dash in at Brooks Pharmacy, wearing a simply vile ensemble of synthetic-fiber slacks and suspenders and tweed Donegal cap he’d had to cadge from a longshoremen’s union hall. Poor Tony couldn’t dare wear anything comely, not even the Antitoi brothers’ red leather coat, not since that poor woman’s bag had turned out to have a heart inside. He had simply never felt so beset and overcome on all sides as the black July day when it fell to his lot to boost a heart. Who wouldn’t wonder Why Me? He didn’t dare dress expressive or ever go back to the Square. And Emil still had him marked for de-mapping as a consequence of that horrid thing with Wo and Bobby C last winter. Poor Tony hadn’t dared show one feather east of Tremont St. or at the Brighton Projects or even Delphina’s in backwater Enfield since last Xmas, even after Emil simply dematerialized from the street-scene; and now since 29 July he was non grata at Harvard Square and environs; and even the sight of an Oriental now gave him palpitations — say nothing of an Aigner accessory.

  Thus Poor Tony had no way to cop for himself. He could trust no one enough to inject their wares. S. T. Cheese and Lolasister were no more trustworthy than he himself; he didn’t even want them to know where he slept. He began drinking cough syrup. He managed to get Bridget Tenderhole and the strictly rough-trade Stokely Dark Star to cop for him on the wink for a few weeks, until Stokely died in a Fenway hospice and then Bridget Tenderhole was shipped by her pimp to Brockton under maddeningly vague circumstances. Then Poor Tony had read the dark portents and swallowed the first of his pride and hid himself even more deeply in a dumpster-complex behind the I.B.P.W.D.W. 102 Local #4 Hall in Fort Point downtown and resolved to stay hidden there for as long as he could swallow the pride to send Lolasister out to acquire heroin, accepting w/o pride or complaint the shameless rip-offs the miserable bitch perpetrated upon him, until a period in October when Lolasister went down with hepatitis-G and the supply of heroin dried horribly up and the only people even copping enough to chip were people in a position to dash here and there to great beastly lengths under an open public-access sky and no friend, no matter how dear or indebted, could afford to cop for another. Then, wholly friend- and connectionless, Poor Tony, in hiding, began to Withdraw From Heroin. Not just get strung out or sick. Withdraw. The words echoed in his neuralgiac and wigless head with the simply most awful sinister-footsteps-echoing-in-deserted-corridor quality. Withdrawal. The Wingless Fowl. Turkeyfication. Kicking. The Old Cold Bird. Poor Tony had never once had to Withdraw, not all the way down the deserted corridor of Withdrawal, not since he first got strung at seventeen. At the very worst, someone kind had always found him charming, if things got dire enough to have to rent out his charms. Alas thus about the fact that his charms were now at low ebb. He weighed fifty kilos and his skin was the color of summer squash. He had terrible shivering-attacks and also perspired. He had a sty that had scraped one eyeball as pink as a bunny’s. His nose ran like twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he didn’t think looked promising at all. There was an uncomely dry-rot smell about him that even he could smell. In Watertown he tried to pawn his fine auburn wig w/ removable chignon and was cursed at in Armenian because the wig had infestations from his own hair below. Let’s not even mention the Armenian pawnbroker’s critique of his red leather coat.

  Poor Tony got more and more ill as he further Withdrew. His symptoms themselves developed symptoms, troughs and nodes he charted with morbid attention in the dumpster, in his suspenders and horrid tweed cap, clutching a shopping bag with his wig and coat and comely habilements he could neither wear nor pawn. The empty Empire Displacement Co. dumpster he was hiding in was new and apple-green and the inside was bare dimpled iron, and it remained new and unutilized because persons declined to come near enough to utilize it. It took some time for Poor Tony to realize why this was so; for a brief interval it had seemed like a break, fortune’s one wan smile. An E.W.D. land-barge crew set him straight in language that left quite a bit of tact to be wished for, he felt. The dumpster’s green iron cover also leaked when it rained, and it contained already a colony of ants along one wall, which insects Poor Tony had ever since a neurasthenic childhood feared and detested in particular, ants; and in direct sunlight the quarters became a hellish living environment from which even the ants seemed to vanish.

  With each step further into the black corridor of actual Withdrawal, Poor Tony Krause stamped his foot and simply refused to believe things could feel any worse. Then he stopped being able to anticipate when he needed to as it were visit the powder room. A fastidious gender-dysphoric’s horror of incontinence cannot properly be described. Fluids of varying consistency began to pour w/o advance notice from several openings. Then of course they stayed there, the fluids, on the summer dumpster’s iron floor. There they were, not going anywhere. He had no way to clean up and no way to cop. His entire set of interpersonal associations consisted of persons who did not care about him plus persons who wished him harm. His own late obstetrician father had rended his own clothing in symbolic shiva in the Year of the Whopper in the kitchen of the Krause home, 412 Mount Auburn S
treet, horrid central Watertown. It was the incontinence plus the prospect of 11/4’s monthly Social Assistance checks that drove Poor Tony out for a mad scampering relocation to an obscure Armenian Foundation Library men’s room in Watertown Center, wherein he tried to arrange a stall as comfortingly as he could with shiny magazine photos and cherished knickknacks and toilet paper laid down around the seat, and flushed repeatedly, and tried to keep true Withdrawal at some sort of bay with bottles of Codinex Plus. A tiny percentage of codeine gets metabolized into good old C17-morphine, affording an agonizing hint of what real relief from The Bird might feel like. I.e. the cough syrup did little more than draw the process out, extend the corridor — it slowed up time.

  Poor Tony Krause sat on the insulated toilet in the domesticated stall all day and night, alternately swilling and gushing. He held his high heels up at 1900h. when the library staff checked the stalls and turned off all the lights and left Poor Tony in a darkness within darkness so utter he had no idea where his own limbs were or went. He left that stall maybe once every two days, scampering madly to Brooks in cast-off shades and a kind of hood or shawl made pathetically of brown men’s-room paper towels.

  Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed. Time began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dimlit stall was like time was being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony’s flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal. By the second week in the stall time itself seemed the corridor, lightless at either end. After more time time then ceased to move or be moved or be move-throughable and assumed a shape above and apart, a huge, musty-feathered, orange-eyed wingless fowl hunched incontinent atop the stall, with a kind of watchful but deeply uncaring personality that didn’t seem keen on Poor Tony Krause as a person at all, or to wish him well. Not one little bit. It spoke to him from atop the stall, the same things, over and over. They were unrepeatable. Nothing in even Poor Tony’s grim life-experience prepared him for the experience of time with a shape and an odor, squatting; and the worsening physical symptoms were a spree at Bonwit’s compared to time’s black assurances that the symptoms were merely hints, signposts pointing up at a larger, far more dire set of Withdrawal phenomena that hung just overhead by a string that unravelled steadily with the passage of time. It would not keep still and would not end; it changed shape and smell. It moved in and out of him like the very most feared prison-shower assailant. Poor Tony had once had the hubris to fancy he’d had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly really shivered until time’s cadences — jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant — entered his body via several openings — cold the way only damp cold is cold — the phrase he’d had the gall to have imagined he understood was the phrase chilled to the bone — shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints’ glassy crunch with every slightest shift of hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, coldly; and the pain of his breath against his teeth. Time came to him in the falcon-black of the library night in an orange mohawk and Merry Widow w/ tacky Amalfo pumps and nothing else. Time spread him and entered him roughly and had its way and left him again in the form of endless gushing liquid shit that he could not flush enough to keep up with. He spent the longest morbid time trying to fathom whence all the shit came from when he was ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus. Then at some point he realized: time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow. He now weighed more like 45 kg. His legs were the size his comely arms had been, before Withdrawal. He was haunted by the word Zuckung, a foreign and possibly Yiddish word he did not recall ever before hearing. The word kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head without meaning anything. He’d naïvely assumed that going mad meant you were not aware of going mad; he’d naïvely pictured madmen as forever laughing. He kept seeing his sonless father again — removing the training wheels, looking at his pager, wearing a green gown and mask, pouring iced tea in a pebbled glass, tearing his sportshirt in filial woe, grabbing his shoulder, sinking to his knees. Stiffening in a bronze casket. Being lowered under the snow at Mount Auburn Cemetery, through dark glasses from a distance. ‘Chilled to the Zuckung.’ When, then, even the funds for the codeine syrup were exhausted, he still sat on the toilet of the rear stall of the A.F.L. loo, surrounded by previously comforting hung habilements and fashion-magazine photographs he’d fastened to the wall with tape cadged on the way in from the Reference desk, sat for almost a whole nother night and day, because he had no faith that he could stem the flow of diarrhea long enough to make it anywhere — if anywhere to go presented itself — in his only pair of gender-appropriate slacks. During hours of lit operation, the men’s room was full of old men who wore identical brown loafers and spoke Slavic and whose rapid-fire flatulence smelled of cabbage.