Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Malheureusement, ton collégue est décédé. Il faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.’ He looks amused. ‘Non? Ou c’était toi, faisait-elle?’ The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing wiry hair and a small and strangely banal bald-spot, and gently removes the hot revolver from Lucien’s hand. He engages the safety without having to look at the revolver. Spanish-language music is thinly audible from somewhere up above the alley. The A.F.R. looks warmly into Lucien’s eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded motion pegs the gun at Bertraund’s profiled head, striking Bertraund in the side of the head; and Bertraund rocks away and then toward and forward and slides forward-left off the rickety camping-chair and with a ghastly and moist thump comes to rest chairless but upright, his left hip on the floor, the eye’s sturdy railroad spike’s thick tip caught on the edge of the card table and tilted up as the table tilts downward and cookery slides nautically off and onto the tile as the weight of Bertraund’s large upper body is somehow held by the spike and tilted table. His brother’s face is now turned away from Lucien, and his overall posture is of some person crumpled with hilarity or regret, maybe beer — a man overcome. Lucien, who never has apprehended what the safety-switch is or where, thinks it a small miracle that the Colt .44 with its tail of thread does not discharge again as it wangs off Bertraund’s temple and hits the slick tile and slides from sight under a cot. Somewhere in the tall house next door a toilet flushes, and the back room’s pipes sing. The black thread has remained snagged on the Colt’s sight-blade and in the middle caught somewhere on Bertraund’s ear; the other remains also attached to Lucien by a persistent hangnail on his well-gnawed right thumb, so that a black filament still connects the knelt Lucien to his hidden revolver, with a surreal angled turn at the ear of his overcome frère.

  The happy-masked A.F.R. leader, politely ignoring the fact that Lucien’s sphincter has failed them all in the small room, after complimenting them both on the craftsmanship of some of the front’s blown-glass notions, pulls his velvet gloves tighter and tells Lucien that it has fallen to him, Lucien, to direct their attention without delay to an entertainment item they have come here to acquire. And require, this Copy-Capable item. They are here on business, ne pas plaisanter, this is not the social call. They will acquire this thing and then iront paître. They have no wish to disturb anyone’s repast, but the A.F.R. fears that it is fearfully urgent and key, this Master item they now require without delay or dissembly from Lucien — entend-il?

  The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader’s meaningless sounds can’t help but be misinterpreted, probably.

  Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running Masters?

  Same vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension.

  Can a mask’s drawn smile widen?

  From the front of the shop come whole symphonies of squeaks and low trilled r’s and the sounds of a densely packed area being swiftly dismantled and searched. A few legless thick-armed men climb the shelves by hand and hang up near the drop-ceiling by special climbing equipment and suction-cups fitted to their stumps, brown arms busy in the upper shelving, dismantling and searching upside-down like obscene industrious bugs. The outline of Lucien’s quivering mouth is being traced by a mammoth-torso’d A.F.R. in a Jesuitical collar who holds Lucien’s own trusty broom inverted and leans in his chair to caress Lucien’s full Gaspé-provincial lips (the lips are quivering) with the handle’s wicked tip, which is sharply white, whittled free of the sienna glaze of broomstick-varnish that patinas the rest of the big stick’s length. Lucien’s lips are quivering not so much from fear — although there is certainly fear — but not from fear so much as in an attempt to form words. 207 Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.F.R. leader can sense, perhaps that is why his sigh is sincere, his complaint sincere when he complains that what will follow will be inutile, Lucien’s failure to assist will be inutile, there will be no point serviced, there are several dozen highly trained and motivated wheelchaired personnel here who will find whatever they seek and more, anyhow, perhaps it is sincere, the Gallic shrug and fatigue of the voice through the leader’s mask-hole, as Lucien’s leonine head is tilted back by a hand in his hair and his mouth opened wide by callused fingers that appear overhead and around the sides of his head from behind and jack his writhing mouth open so wide that the tendons in his jaws tear audibly and Lucien’s first sounds are reduced from howls to a natal gargle as the pale wicked tip of the broom he loves is inserted, the wood piney-tasting then white tasteless pain as the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared A.F.R., thrust farther in rhythmically in strokes that accompany each syllable in the wearily repeated ‘In-U-Tile’ of the technical interviewer, down into Lucien’s wide throat and lower, small natal cries escaping around the brown-glazed shaft, the strangled impeded sounds of absolute aphonia, the landed-fish gasps that accompany speechlessness in a dream, the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage as the fibers that protect the esophagal terminus resist and then give with a crunching pop and splat of red that bathes Lucien’s teeth and tongue and makes of itself in the air a spout, and his gargled sounds now sound drowned; and behind fluttering lids the aphrasiac half-cellular insurgent who loves only to sweep and dance in a clean pane sees snow on the round hills of his native Gaspé, pretty curls of smoke from chimneys, his mother’s linen apron, her kind red face above his crib, homemade skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes seen stretching away from the Cap-Chat hillside they skied down to Mass, the red face’s noises he knows from the tone are tender, beyond crib and rimed window Gaspésie lake after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic sun and stretching out in the southeastern distance like chips of broken glass thrown to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure; and as the culcate handle navigates the inguinal canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and with a grunt and shove completes its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the back of his red sopped johns, bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock’s canted angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely skewered, and as the attentions of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to the shelves and trunks of the Antitois’ sad insurgents’ lives, and Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.

  PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U.

  OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL

  M. Hugh Steeply spoke quietly, after a prolonged silence of both operatives alone with their thoughts, upon this mountain. Steeply faced still out, standing on the outcropping’s lip, bare arms around him for some warmth, his dress’s soiled back to Marathe. Around the bonfire, far out below upon the desert floor, rotated a ring of smaller and palsied fires, persons carrying torches or fires.

  ‘Do you ever think of viewing it?’

  Marathe did not reply. It was not impossible that the young persons carrying the torches were dancing.

  ‘Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary,’ Steeply said quietly; ‘still, you guys have a Read-Only copy, at least one, you’ve told us, no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nobody has this mysterious Master, but we’ve all got Read-Only’s — all the anti-O.N.A.N. cells have at least one Read-Only, we’re pretty sure.’

&nbs
p; Marathe said, ‘M. Brullîme, he tells Fortier he thinks the CPCP of Alberta do not have any copy.’

  ‘Fuck the Albertans,’ Steeply said. ‘Who’s worried about the Albertans? The Albertans’ idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is they blow up rangeland in Montana. They’re wackos.’

  ‘I have not been tempted,’ Marathe said.

  Steeply’s sound appeared as if he did not hear. ‘We have more than one. Copies. Sure we can assume your boys know this.’

  Marathe dryly laughed. ‘Confiscated from razzles of Berkeley, Boston. But who can know what is on them? Who can study the Entertainment while detached?’

  Steeply’s scratch on the arm had become overnight puffed, and there were cross-hatches of his scratching. ‘But just between us two, though. Tête to tête. You’ve never been even slightly tempted? I mean personally. You the person. Wife’s condition be damned. Kids be damned. Just for a second, slip into wherever you guys keep it and load it and have a quick look? To see what’s all the fuss, the irresistible pull of the thing?’ He pivoted on one heel and looked, and cocked his head in a way of cynicism that seemed to Marathe consummately U.S.A.

  Marathe coughed softly into his fist. His own dead father’s Kenbeck pacemaker, it had been damaged accidentally by a videophonic pulse of waves. This from a telephone call from the telephone company, a video call, advertising the videophony. M. Marathe had picked up the ringing telephone; the videophonic pulse, it had come; M. Marathe had fallen, still holding a telephone Rémy had never been instructed to answer first, to check. The advertisement, which was recorded, played its audible portion out upon the floor beside his father’s ear, audible between Marathe’s mother’s cries.

  Steeply raised and lowered himself on his shoes’ toes. ‘Us, Rod the God Tine’s got Tom Flatto’s I/O boys running tests around the clock. 24-dash-7.’

  ‘Flatto, Thomas M., B.S.S. director of Input/Output testing, resident of Falls Church’s community, a widower with three children, one child with cystic fibrosis.’

  ‘Funny as an impacted follicle, Rémy. And no doubt the insurgent cells are all each doing work of your own, you guys with your own Dr. Brullent or whomever, trying to find out what the Entertainment’s appeal could be without sacrificing any of your own.’ Steeply again turned; he did this for emphasis. ‘Or maybe you’re willingly sacrificing your own. Yes? Willing volunteers in chairs. Sacrificing self for the Greater and all that. By adult choice and all that. Just for the sake of causing us harm. Wouldn’t even want to think about how the A.F.R.’s conducting tests of the thing.’

  ‘C’est ça.’

  ‘But not so much for content,’ Steeply said. ‘Input/Output’s exhaustive testing. Flatto’s got them working on conditions and environments for possible nonlethal viewing. Certain departments in Virginia, the developing theory is that it’s holography.’

  ‘The samizdat.’

  ‘The filmmaker’d been a cutting-edge optics man. Holography, diffraction. He’d used holography a couple times before, and in the context of a kind of filmed assault on the viewer. He was of the Hostile School or some such shit.’

  ‘Also a maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important Annulateur, also, and amasser of the capital from opticals, before hostility and film,’ Marathe said.

  Steeply embraced himself. ‘Tom Flatto’s personal theory is the appeal’s got something to do with density. The visual compulsion. Theory’s that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you’d get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer- screen. That the density plus the realism might be too much to take. Dick Desai in Data Production wants to go in with ALGOL and see if there are Fourier Equations in the root code’s ALGOL, which would signify holo-grammatical activity going on.’

  ‘M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant.’

  Steeply cocked his head sometimes in a way that was both feminine and birdlike. He did this most often during silences. Also he again removed something small from his painted lip. Also he spoke with more feminine inflection. Marathe committed all this to his memories.

  WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA

  I remember 208 I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and hadn’t yet removed the television makeup that gave his real face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and finished and rinsed my dishes in the sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were both in there. The master bedroom’s valance curtains and the heavy lightproof curtain behind them were all slid back and the venetian blinds up, and the daylight was very bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder-blue.

  My father was bent over my parents’ large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the way down to the mattress protector. He was bent over, pushing down on the bed’s mattress with the heels of his hands. The bed’s sheets and pillows and powder-blue coverlet were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his tumbler of tomato juice to hold for him and got all the way on top of the bed and knelt on it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress, then let up and pivoted slightly on his knees and bore down with equal vigor on a different area of the mattress. He did this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on the mattress on his knees to get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember thinking the bearing-down action looked very much like emergency compression of a heart patient’s chest. I remember my father’s tomato juice had grains of pepperish material floating on the surface. My mother was standing at the bedroom window, smoking a long cigarette and looking at the lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch. The uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight.