Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Hal’s got to the point in the last year here where a kid’s only real chance is to totally press, attack at all times, whale the serve, haul ass to the net, assume the aggressor role.’

  ‘Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?’ Helen Steeply asked him. ‘I was noticing.’

  ‘You stay back against this Hal kid, you try to out-think him and move him around, he’ll yank you back and forth and chew you up and spit you out and step on the remains. We’ve spent years getting him to this point. Nobody stays back and out-controls Incandenza anymore.’

  Pretending to flip to a fresh page, Helen Steeply dropped her pen, which fell into the bleachers’ struts and supports and clattered as only something dropped into a system of metal bleachers can clatter. The prolonged noise made Stice take some extra bounces before he served. He bounced the ball several times, leaning forward, lined up splayed and violently sideways. He went into his odd segmented windup; Helen Steeply produced another pen from the pocket of her fiberfill parka; Stice cracked it flat down the center, aiming for an ace on the service lines’ T. It went by Hal unplayable and literally too close to call. There are no linesmen for internal E.T.A. matches. Hal looked down the line at where the thing hit and skidded, pausing before indicating his call, the hand to his cheek indicating deliberation. He shrugged and shook his head and laid a hand out flat in the air before him to signify to Stice he was calling the serve good. This meant game Stice. The Darkness was walking toward the net, kneading his neck, looking at where Hal was still standing.

  ‘We can go on and play two,’ Stice said. ‘Didn’t see it neither.’

  Hal was coming in closer to Stice because he was going to the net-post for his towel. ‘Not your job to see it.’ He looked unhappy and tried to smile. ‘You hit it too hard to see, you deserve the point.’

  Stice shrugged and nodded, chewing. ‘You take the next gimme then.’ He sliced two balls soft so they ended their roll down near the opposite baseline, where Hal could use them to serve. The Darkness still made huge mandibular chewing faces on-court even though he hadn’t been allowed to chew gum in play since he accidentally inhaled gum and had to be Heimliched by his opponent in the semis of last spring’s Easter Bowl.

  ‘Ortho’s saying how the next debatable call goes immediately to Hal; they don’t take two,’ deLint said, darkening in half-squares on the two charts.

  ‘Take two?’

  ‘Play a let, babe. Do it over. Two serves: one point.’ Aubrey deLint was a lightly pockmarked man with thick yellow hair in an anchorman’s helmety style and a hypertensive flush, and eyes, oval and close-set and lightless, that seemed like a second set of nostrils in his face. ‘Do a whole lot of sports at Moment do you?’

  ‘So they’re being sporting,’ Steeply said. ‘Generous, fair.’

  ‘We inculcate that as a priority here,’ deLint said, gesturing vaguely at the space around them, head bent to his charts.

  ‘They seem like friends.’

  ‘The angle here for Moment might be the good-friends-off-the-court-andremorseless-pitiless-foes-on-court angle.’

  ‘I mean they seem like friends even playing,’ Helen Steeply said, watching Hal dry off his leather grip with a white towel as Stice jumped up and down in place back at his deuce corner, one hand in his armpit.

  DeLint’s laugh sounded to Steeply’s keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less fit man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer to know who he was. ‘Don’t kid yourself, babe,’ de Lint got out. The Vaught twins on the bleacher below looked up and around and pretended to shush him, the left mouth grinning, deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal Incandenza bounced the ball three times and went into his own service motion.

  Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel twenty-six meters below the Show Courts.

  Steeply’s face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for a motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal Incandenza’s serve. At the start a violinist maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand with the ball at the racket’s throat like a bow. The down-together-up-together of the downswing and toss could be a child making angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and eyes at the sky. But Hal’s face was pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The service motion’s middle might be a man at a precipice, falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own weight, and the serve’s terminus and impact a hammering man, the driven nail just within range at the top of his tiptoed reach. But all these were only parts, and made the motion seem segmented, when the smaller crew-cutted jowly boy was the one with the stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis only a couple times, with his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The punter’s discourses on the game had been lengthy but not much use. It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment.

  Hal Incandenza’s first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put the ball away on the next shot, up at net. Hal’s serve seemed to set in motion a much more involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive. His first serve hadn’t Stice’s pace, but it had depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved with an arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made the serve curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box and hop up high, so that Stice couldn’t do more than send back a deep backhand chip from shoulder-height, and then couldn’t come in behind a return that’d been robbed of all pace. Stice moved to the baseline’s center as the chip floated back to Hal. Hal’s pivot moved him right so he could take it on the forehand 268 another looper dripping with top, right back in the same corner he’d served to, so that Stice had to stop and sprint back the same way he’d come. Stice drove this backhand hard down the line to Hal’s forehand, a blazing thing that made the audience inhale, but as the samizdat’s director’s other son glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had a whole open court to hit cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he’d backpedalled a bit off the shot and was now scrambling to get back out of the deuce corner, and Hal hit the flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so, and the diagonal of the ball kept it travelling out wide after it hit Stice’s ad sideline, carrying it away from the boy in black’s outstretched racquet, and for a second it looked as if Stice at a dead run might get his strings on the ball, but the ball stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-court diagonal, and it passed Stice’s racquet half a meter past its rim, and Stice’s momentum carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice slowed to a jog to go retrieve the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot on the ad side, waiting for Stice to get back and let him serve again. DeLint, whose peripheral vision’s acuity and disguise was an E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second and then put down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for pretty, shaking her fuchsia cap.

  ‘Wasn’t that pretty,’ he said blandly.

  Steeply rooted for a hankie. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Hal’s in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight-out killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne,’ deLint said. ‘This is why you don’t stay back or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep you trying, running. He yanks you around. Always two or three shots ahead. He won that point on the deep forehand after the serve — the second he had Stice wrong-footed you could see the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in advance, and without the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn’t need pace, we’ve helped him find.’

  ‘When might I get a chance to talk to him?’


  ‘Incandenza took a lot of bringing along. He didn’t used to quite have the complete game to be able to do this. Slice the court up into sections and chinks, then all of a sudden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he’s been setting up the angle since the start of the point. It makes you think of chess.’

  The journalist blew her red nose. ‘ “Chess on the run.” ’

  ‘Nice term.’

  Hal went into his service motion to the ad court.

  ‘Do the students play chess here?’

  A mirthless chuckle. ‘No time.’

  ‘Do you play chess?’

  Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal’s second serve; mild applause.

  ‘I don’t have time to play anything,’ deLint said, filling in a square. You could tell by the sound that the other boy’s racquet was strung tighter than Hal’s.

  ‘When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do.’

  The journalist’s rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘It’s not my decision. My guess is you don’t. Dr. Tavis didn’t already tell you?’

  ‘I really couldn’t tell what he was telling me.’

  ‘We’ve never had a kid here interviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds, versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in.’

  ‘I’m here for background only, for your alumnus, the punter.’

  DeLint was making his lips look like he was whistling even though no whistling-sound was emerging. ‘We’ve never let somebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while he’s still in training and inculcation.’

  ‘Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why? What if the boy wants to chat with me about his brother’s transition from tennis to football?’

  DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a way that was supposed to let you know you had very little of his attention. ‘Talk to Tavis about it.’

  ‘I was in there for over two hours.’

  ‘You pick up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into a Yes-No corner where you can finally say I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty minutes if you’re sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people. The answer’s not for me to officially say, but I’m guessing a No. The Boston press guys come around after a big event, they get match results and physical stats and hometowns and nothing more.’

  ‘Moment is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some sportswriter with a cigar and a deadline.’

  ‘It’s a command-decision, babe. I’m not in command. I know they teach us to teach that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.’

  ‘I’m here only for the human-interest perspective of a talented boy on his talented brother’s bold transition to a major sport where he’s shown himself to be even more talented. One exceptional brother on another. Hal is not the profile’s focus.’

  ‘Get Tavis in the right corner and he’ll tell you about seeing and being seen. These kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. Schtitt’s thing is self-transcendence through pain. These kids —’ gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that stopped rolling well inside the service line; mild applause — ‘they’re here to get lost in something bigger than them. To have it stay the way it was when they started, the game as something bigger, at first. Then they show talent, start winning, become big fish in their ponds out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside the game and see. Fucks with a junior’s head, talent. They pay top dollar to come here and go back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and develop. To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them. They didn’t come here to get read about as some soft-news item or background. Babe.’

  DeLint read Steeply’s expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair protruded from one of her nostrils, which deLint found repellent. She said, ‘Were you ever written about, as a player?’

  DeLint smiled coolly at his charts. ‘Never had the sort of ranking or promise this issue’d even come up for me.’

  ‘But some of these do. Hal’s brother did.’

  DeLint felt along his lip’s outline with his pencil, sniffed. ‘Orin was OK. Orin was essentially a one-trick pony as a player. And between you and me and the fence he was kind of a head-case. His game left here on the down-swing. Now his little brother’s got a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls — Kent, Caryn and Sharyn here,’ indicating the Vaught-apparition below them. ‘The really gifted ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the Show — ’

  ‘Meaning professional you mean.’

  ‘In the Show they’ll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at and poked at and discussed, and then some. For now they’re here to get to be the ones who look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.’

  ‘But even you call it “The Show.” They’ll be entertainers.’

  ‘You bet your ass they will be.’

  ‘So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses of entertaining an audience, get them used to being seen?’

  The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint made kind of a show of putting his clipboard down. ‘Assume wrongly for a second that I can speak for the Enfield Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show won’t fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and want only them and the game’s incidental to you, for you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it’s what you do.’

  ‘We chew statues?’

  ‘Whether you mean to or no. You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, Inter-Lace, the audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking literally. It’s the nature of the game. It’s the machine they’re all dying to throw themselves into. They don’t know the machine. But we do. Gerhardt’s teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can’t be chewed. It takes time and total focus. The man’s a fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you want to profile somebody.’

  ‘And I’m not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this inside chew-proof place. It’s a secret place.’

  Hal mishit a second serve and it flew off his frame and way down to where the girls were sending each other squeaks and lobs, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6–5, and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation. DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice’s direction. Hal chipped his balls out along the baseline and made some small adjustments in his cross-hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the nastier kids applauded Hal’s mishit a little.

  ‘Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it’s not my command-decision. I wouldn’t get sardonic with Tavis, though.’

  ‘But if it were. Your command.’

  ‘Lady, if it was me you’d be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down there is as far in as you’d get. You’re coming into a little slice of space and/or time that’s been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn’t even wear pads. A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? A more dramatic story, geopolitics, privatio
n, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even. A more complete game. Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top Five if he doesn’t fuck up or burn down. Wayne’s your ideal food-group. Which is why we’ll keep you off him as long as he’s here.’

  The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. ‘Carved out of what, though, this place?’