Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘And but then I can anticipate somebody on your side of the chasm retorting with something like, quote, Yes my very good ami, but what if your rival for the pleasurable soup is some individual outside your community, for example, you’ll say, let’s just make the example that it a hapless Canadian, foreign, “un autre,” separated from me by a chasm of history and language and value and deep respect for individual freedom — then in this wholly random instance there would be no community-minded constraints on my natural impulse to bonk your head and commandeer the desired soup, since the poor Canadian is outside the equation of “pursuivre le bonheur” of each individual, since he is not a part of the community whose environment of mutual respect I depend on for pursuing my interest of maximal pleasure-to-pain.’

  Marathe, during this time, was smiling up and to the left, north, rolling his head like a blind person. His favorite personal place of off-duty in the U.S.A.’s city Boston was in the Public Garden of summer, a broad and treeless declivity leading down to the mare des canards, the duck pond, a grassy wedge facing south and west so that the grass of the slope turns pale green and then gold as the sun circles over the head, the pond’s water cool and muddy green and overhung with impressionist willows, persons beneath the willows, also pigeons, and ducks with tight emerald heads gliding in circles, their eyes round stones, moving as if without effort, gliding upon the water as if legless below. Like films’ idylls in cities the moment before the nuclear blast, in old films of U.S.A. death and horror. He was missing this time in U.S.A. Boston MA of refilling the pond for the ducks’ return, the willows greening, the winelight of a northern sunset curving gently in to land without explosion. Children flew taut kites and adults lay supine on the slope absorbing the suntan, eyes closed as if in concentration. He was giving out a small and desolate smile, as of fatigue. His wrist’s watch was unilluminated. Steeply threw a butt without turning away from Marathe to watch it fall.

  ‘And you’ll accuse me of you’ll say I won’t only poke him in the eye and commandeer the whole serving of soup for myself,’ Steeply said, ‘but will, after eating it, I’ll give him the dirty bowl and spoon and maybe even the no-deposit Habitant can to have to deal with, saddle him with my greed’s waste, all under some sham-arrangement of quote Interdependence that’s really just a crude nationalist scheme to indulge my own U.S. individual pleasure-lust without the complications or annoyance of considering some neighbor’s own desires and interests.’

  Marathe said ‘You will notice that I do not with sarcasm say “And herrrrrrrrrre we go off together once more,” which you enjoy saying.’

  Steeply’s use of the body to shelter the lighting match for his smoking was not feminine, either. His parody of Marathe’s accent sounded guttural and U.S.A.-Cajun with the cigarette in the mouth. He looked up past the flame. ‘But no? Am I off-base?’

  Marathe had an almost Buddhist way of studying the blanket on his lap. For some seconds he behaved as if almost asleep, nodding very smally with the rise and fall of his lungs. The ponderous rectangles of moving light within Tucson’s nightly spread were ‘Barges of Land’ ministering to nests of dumpsters in the deep part of night. Part of Marathe always felt almost a desire to shoot persons who anticipated his responses and inserted words and said they were from Marathe, not letting him speak. Marathe suspected Steeply of knowing this, sensing this in Marathe. All two of Marathe’s older brothers from childhood had engaged in this, arguing every side and silencing Rémy by inserting his words. Both had kissed trains head-on before reaching marriageable age; 173 Marathe had been part of the audience for the death of the better one. Some of the Barges of Land’s waste would be vectored into the Sonora region of Mexico, but much would be shipped north for displacement-launch into the Convexity. Steeply was regarding him.

  ‘No, Rémy? Am I off-base in terms of what you’d say?’

  The smile around Marathe’s mouth cost him all his training in restraint. ‘The cans containing Habitant, they say boldly “Veuillez Recycler Ce Contenant.” You are not false, maybe. But I think I am asking less for nations’ arguing and more for the example of you and me only, we two, if we pretend we are both of your U.S.A. type, each separate, both sacred, both desiring soupe aux pois. I am asking how is community and your respect part of my happiness in this moment, with the soup, if I am a U.S.A. person?’

  Steeply worked a finger under one strap of the brassiere to relieve the throttling pressure. ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Well. We both crave badly the entire recyclable Single-Serving can of this Habitant.’ Marathe sniffed. ‘In my mind I know it is true that I must not simply make a bonking of your head and take away the soup, because my overall happiness of pleasure of the long term needs a community of “rien de bonk.” 174 But this is the long term, Steeply. This is down the road of my happiness, this respecting of you. How do I calculate this distant road of long term into my action of this moment, now, with our dead comrade clutching the soup and both of us with spittle on our chins as we regard the soup? My question is trying to say: if the most pleasure right now, en ce moment, is in the whole serving of Habitant, how is my self able to put aside this moment’s desire to make bonk on you and take this soup? How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my road?’

  ‘In other words delayed gratification.’

  ‘Good. This is well. Delayed gratification. How is my U.S.A. type able in my mind to calculate my long-term overall pleasure, then decide to sacrifice this intense soup-craving of this moment to the long term and overall?’

  Steeply sent out two hard tusks of smoke from the nostrils of his nose. His expression was one of patience together with polite impatience. ‘I think it’s called simply being a mature and adult American instead of a childish and immature American. A term we might use might be “enlightened self-interest.” ’

  ‘D’éclaisant.’

  Steeply, he did not smile back. ‘Enlightened. For example your example from before. The little kid who’ll eat candy all day because it’s what tastes best at each individual moment.’

  ‘Even if he knows inside his mind that it will hurt his stomach and rot his little fangs.’

  ‘Teeth,’ Steeply corrected. ‘But see that here it can’t be a Fascist matter of screaming at the kid or giving him electric shocks each time he overindulges in candy. You can’t induce a moral sensibility the same way you’d train a rat. The kid has to learn by his own experience how to learn to balance the short- and long-term pursuit of what he wants.’

  ‘He must be freely enlightened to self.’

  ‘This is the crux of the educational system you find so appalling. Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free. To teach how to make knowledgeable choices about pleasure and delay and the kid’s overall down-the-road maximal interests.’

  Marathe farted mildly into his cushion, nodding as if with thought.

  ‘And I know what you’ll say,’ Steeply said, ‘and no, the system isn’t perfect. There is greed, there is crime, there are drugs and cruelty and ruin and infidelity and divorce and suicide. Murder.’

  ‘To bonk the head.’

  Steeply again dug at this strap. He would snap open the purse and then pause to move the brassiere’s tight strap and then dig into the purse, which sounded femininely full and cluttered. He said ‘But this is just the price. This is the price of the free pursuit. Not everybody learns it in childhood, how to balance his interests.’

  Marathe tried to envision thin men with horn-rim spectacles and natural-shoulder sportcoats or white coats of the laboratory, carefully packing with clutter the purse of a field-operative to create the female effect. Now Steeply had his pack of Flanderfumes cigarettes and his finger of pinkie in the pack’s hole, evidently trying to gauge how many were left. Venus was low in the northeast rim. When Marathe’s wife was born as an infant without a skull, there had been at first suspicion that the cause was that her parents smoked cigarettes as a habit. The light of the stars and moon had bec
ome sullen. The moon had not yet set. It seemed as if sometimes the bonfire of youthful mafficking was there and then when the eyes were averted in the next moment it was not there. Time was passing in a silence. Steeply was using a nail to extract slowly one of the cigarettes. Marathe, as a small child and with legs, had always disliked persons who made comments about how much others smoked. Steeply now had learned here just how he must stand to keep the match alive. Some wind had died down, but there were scattered chill gusts that it seemed came from nowhere. Marathe sniffed so deeply that it became a sigh. The struck match sounded loud; there was no echo.

  Marathe sniffed again and said:

  ‘But of these types of your persons — the different types, the mature who see down the road, the puerile type that eats the candy and soup in the moment only. Entre nous, here on this shelf, Hugh Steeply: which do you think describes the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N. and the Great Convexity, this U.S.A. you feel pain that others might wish to harm?’ Hands which shake out matches act always as if they are burned, this motion of snapping. Marathe sniffed. ‘Are you understanding? I am asking between only us. How could it be that A.F.R. malice could hurt all of the U.S.A. culture by making available something as momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment? You know there can be no forcing to watch a thing. If we disseminate the samizdat, the choice will be free, no? Free from force, no? Yes? Freely chosen?’

  M. Hugh Steeply of B.S.S. was standing then with his weight on one hip and looked his most female when he smoked, with his elbow in his arm and the hand to his mouth and the back of this hand to Marathe, a type of fussy ennui that reminded Marathe of women in hats and padded shoulders in black-and-white films, smoking. Marathe said:

  ‘You believe we are underestimating to see all you as selfish, decadent. But the question has been raised: are we cells of Canada alone in this view? Aren’t you afraid, you of your government and gendarmes? If not, your B.S.S., why work so hard to prevent dissemination? Why make a simple Entertainment, no matter how seducing its pleasures, a samizdat and forbidden in the first place, if you do not fear so many U.S.A.s cannot make the enlightened choices?’

  This now was the closest large Steeply had come, to stand over Marathe to look down, looming. The rising astral body Venus lit his left side of the face to the color of pallid cheese. ‘Get real. The Entertainment isn’t candy or beer. Look at Boston just now. You can’t compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases of sugar and soup.’

  Marathe smiled bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of this round and hairless U.S.A. face. ‘Perhaps the facts are true, after the first watching: that then there seems to be no choice. But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still a choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?’

  During that last pre-Subsidized year, after each tournament’s perfunctory final, at the little post-final award-presentations and dance, Eric Clipperton would attend unarmed and eat maybe a little shaved turkey from the buffet and mutter out of the side of his slot-like mouth to Mario Incandenza, and would stand there expressionless and receive his outsized first-place trophy amid witheringly slight and scattered applause, and would melt into the crowd soon after and dematerialize back to wherever he lived and trained and target-practiced. Clipperton by this time must have had a whole mantel plus bookcase’s worth of tall U.S.T.A. trophies, each U.S.T.A. trophy a marbled plastic base with a tall metal boy on top arched in mid-serve, looking rather like a wedding-cake groom with a very good outside slider. Clipperton must have been just broke out in brass and plastic, but he had no official ranking whatsoever: since his Glock 9 mm. and public intentions were instantly legendary, he was regarded by the U.S.T.A. as never having had a legitimate victory, or even a legit match, in sanctioned play. People on the jr. tour sometimes asked tiny Mario if that’s why Eric Clipperton always seemed so terrifically glum and withdrawn and made such a big deal out of materializing and dematerializing at tournaments, that the very tactic that let him win in the first place kept the wins, and in a way Clipperton himself, from being treated as real.

  All this until the erection of O.N.A.N. and the inception, in Clipperton’s eighteenth summer, of Subsidized Time, the adverted Year of the Whopper, when the U.S.T.A. became the O.N.A.N.T.A, and some Mexican systems analyst — who barely spoke English and had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data — this guy stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and ranking center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn’t know enough not to treat Clipperton’s string of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanctioned and real. And when the first biweekly issue of the trilingual North American Junior Tennis that’s replaced American Junior Tennis comes out, there’s one E. R. Clipperton, Home Town ‘Ind.,’ ranked #1 in Boys’ Continental 18-and-Unders; and competitive eyebrows ascend at all latitudes; and but everyone at E.T.A., from Schtitt on down, is highly amused, and some of them wonder whether maybe now Eric Clipperton will put down his psychic cuirass and take his unarmed competitive chances with the rest of them, now that he’s got what he’s surely been burning over and holding himself hostage for all along, a real and sanctioned #1; and the Continental Jr. Clay-Courts are coming up the following week, in Indianapolis IN, and little Michael Pemulis of Allston takes his PowerBook and odds-software and makes a killing on vig in the frenzy of locker-room wagering over whether Clipperton’ll even bother to materialize at Indy now that he’s extorted himself to the sanctioned top he must have craved so terribly, or whether he’ll retire from the tour now and lie around masturbating over the Glock in one hand and the latest issue of NAJT in the other. 175 And so everyone’s taken aback when Eric Clipperton of all people suddenly appears at the E.T.A. front gate’s portcullis on a rainy warm late A.M. two days before the Clays, wearing a flap-frayed trench-type coat and toe-abraded sneakers and a five-day growth of armpitty adolescent beard, but without any sticks or anything in the way of competitive gear, not even his Glock 17’s custom-made wooden case, and he makes the cold-eyed part-time portcullis attendant from the halfway place down the hill just about lean on the intercom-buzzer, pleading for entry and counsel — he’s in a terrible way, is the portcullis attendant’s intercom diagnosis — and rules about nonenrolled jr. players being on academies’ grounds are strict and complex, and but little Mario Incandenza sways down the steep path to the portcullis in the warm rain and interfaces with Clipperton through the bars and has the attendant hold the intercom-button down for him and personally requests that Clipperton be admitted under a special nonplay codicil to the regulations, saying the kid is truly in desperate psychic straits, Mario speaking first to Lateral Alice Moore and then to this prorector Cantrell and then to the Headmaster himself as Clipperton stares wordlessly up at the little wrought-iron racquet-heads that serve as spikes at the top of the portcullis and fencing around E.T.A., his expression so blackly haunted that even the hard-boiled attendant told some of the people back at the halfway place later that the spectral trench-coated figure had given him sobriety’s worst fantods, so far; and J. O. Incandenza finally lets Clipperton in over Cantrell’s and then Schtitt’s vehement objections when it’s established that Clipperton wants only a few private minutes to obtain the counsel of Incandenza Sr. himself — of whom I think we can presume Mario’s spoken glowingly to Clipperton — and Incandenza, while not quite strictly sober, is lucid, and has a very low melting-point of compassion for traumas connected with early success; and so up goes the portcullis, and the Clipperton and the two Incandenzas go at high noon up to an unused top-floor room in Subdorm C of East House, the structure nearest the front gate, for some sort of psycho-existential CPR-session or something — Mario has never spoken of what he got to sit in on, not even at night to Hal when Hal’s trying to go to sleep. But it’s a matter of record that at some point first E.T.A. counselor Dolores Rusk was beeped by Himself at her Winchester home and then her beep was canceled and
Lateral Alice Moore was beeped and asked with due speed to get Lyle up from the weight room/sauna and over to East House ASAP, and that at some point while Lyle was delotusing from the dispenser and making his way with sideways Lateral Alice to this emergency-type huddle, at some point in this interval — in front of Dr. James O. Incandenza and a Mario whose tiny borrowed head-clamped Bolex H128 Incandenza required Clipperton to consent to having digitally record the whole crisis-conversation, to protect E.T.A. from the O.N.A.N.T.A.’s Kafkaesque rules on unregistered recipients of any sort of counsel at U.S. academies — at some point, w/ Lyle in transit, Clipperton pulls out of various pockets in his wet complicated coat an elaborately altered copy of NAJT’s biweekly ranking report, a sepia’d snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern couple’s wedding, and the hideous blunt-barreled Glock 17 9 mm. semiautomatic, which even as both Incandenzas reach for the sky Clipperton places to his right — not left — temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some; and there’s just an ungodly subsequent mess in there, and the Incandenzas respectively stagger and totter from the room all green-gilled and red-mist-stained, and — because reports of Lyle’s appearance outside the weight room upright and walking across the grounds have spread and caused enormous excitement and student-snapshots — it’s because it was just as Lyle and L. A. Moore hit the upstairs hallway that they reeled out of the room in a miasma of cordite and ghastly mist that they’re preserved in various snapshots as resembling miners of some sort of really grisly coal.

  People in the competitive jr. tennis community somehow regarded it as healthy that Mario Incandenza’s perfectly even smile never faltered even through tears at Clipperton’s funeral. The funeral was poorly attended. It turned out Eric Clipperton had hailed from Crawfordsville, Indiana, where his Ma was a late-stage Valium addict and his ex-soybean-farmer Pa, blinded in the infamous hailstorms of B.S. ’94, now spent all day every day playing with one of those little wooden paddles with a red rubber ball attached by elastic string, paddle-ball, with an understandable lack of success; and the tranquilized and sightless Clippertons had had no clue about where Eric had even disappeared off to most weekends, and bought his explanation that all the tall trophies came from an after-school job as a freelance tennis-trophy designer, the parents apparently being not exactly the two brightest bulbs in the great U.S. parental light-show. They held the interment under a threat of rain in Veedersburg IN, where there’s a budget cemetery, and Himself skipped Indianapolis and took Mario to the first of his life’s two funerals so far; and it was probably moving that Incandenza acceded to Mario’s request that nothing get filmed or documented, at the funeral, for Himself’s jr.-tennis documentary. Mario probably told Lyle all about everything, back down in the weight room, but he sure never told Hal or the Moms; and Himself was already in and out of rehabs and hardly a credible source on much of anything by this point. But Incandenza did let Mario insist that no one else get to clean up the scene in Subdorm C after Enfield’s Finest had come and peered around and drawn a chalk ectoplasm around Clipperton’s sprawled form and written things down in little spiral notebooks which they kept checking against one another with maddening care, and then EMTs had zipped Clipperton up in a huge rubber bag and taken him down and out on a wheeled stretcher with retractable legs they had to retract on all the stairs. Lyle was long gone by this time. It took the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room with his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the 18’s girls in the rooms on either side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and again; and the finally spotless room in question had been locked ever since, with its tasteless sign — except G. Schtitt holds a special key, and when an E.T.A. jr. whinges too loudly about some tennis-connected vicissitude or hardship or something, he’s invited to go chill for a bit in the Clipperton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with.