Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,’ Poutrincourt said in English.

  Hal aced Stice down the center to go up either 2–1 or 3–2 in the third.

  ‘The thing you want to know about Hal, babe, is he’s got a complete game,’ deLint said as the boys changed ends of the court, Stice holding two balls out before him on the face of his racquet. Hal went to the towel again. The children along the bottom tier were leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The apparition with the lens and metal pole was gone, overhead.

  ‘What you want to know, watching juniors at this level,’ deLint says, still back on an elbow so his upper body was out of sight and he was just legs and a voice in Steeply’s cold ear. ‘They all have different strengths, areas of the game they’re better at, and you can drown in profiling a match or a player in terms of the different strengths and the number of individual strengths.’

  ‘I am not here to profile the boy,’ Steeply said, but in French again.

  DeLint ignored him. ‘It’s not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It’s do they come together to make a game. How complete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those kids at lunch you got to meet.’

  ‘But not speak to.’

  ‘The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike’s got great, great volleys, he’s a natural at net, great, great hand-eye. Mike’s other strength is he’s got the best lob in East Coast juniors bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you’re looking at out here right now can beat the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis’s strengths don’t give him a complete game. Volleys’re an offensive shot. A lob’s a baseliner’s weapon, counterpuncher. You can’t lob from the net or volley from the baseline.’

  ‘He says Michael Pemulis’s abilities cancel each other out,’ 275 Poutrincourt said in the other ear.

  DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. ‘Pemulis’s strengths cancel each other out. Now Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid with the bandage on his nose from the soap-and-shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite’s also got a great lob, and while Pemulis’d take him right now on pure age and power Possalthwaite’s the technically superior player with the better future, because Todd’s built a complete game out of his lob.’

  ‘This deLint is wrong,’ Poutrincourt said in Québecois, smiling rictally across Steeply at deLint.

  ‘Because Possalthwaite won’t come in to net. Possalthwaite hangs back at any cost, and unlike Pemulis he works to develop the groundstrokes to let him stay back and draw the other guy in and use that venomous lob.’

  ‘Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, and if he grows strong and wishes to attack he will never be able,’ Poutrincourt said.

  DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply wondered if he had some French on the sly, and made a private ideogram to this effect. ‘Possalthwaite’s a pure defensive strategist. He’s got a gestalt. The term we use here for a complete game is either gestalt or complete game.’

  Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck in an intersticial diamond in the chain-link fencing, and Hal had to put his stick down and use both hands to force the thing out.

  ‘Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter’s brother — Hal can’t lob half as good as even Possalthwaite, and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play’s pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal’s strengths have started to fit together. He’s got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great groundstrokes, with great control and great touch, great command of touch and spin; and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control, and he can take an attacking player and use the guy’s own pace against him.’

  Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more surprised than Hal did. The punter’s brother’s face registered nothing as he stood at the ad corner, adjusting something on his strings.

  ‘But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you have given your life to be. Not merely very good but the best. The good philosophy of here and Schtitt — I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than American, so you may see I have prejudice — is that you must have also — so, leave to one side for a moment the talent and work to become best — that you are doomed 276 if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend the success of the best, if you get to there.’

  Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo-Georgian cube of the Community and Administration Building, several small boys carrying and dragging white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the parking lot’s rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves and casting anxious looks across the grounds at the crowd behind the Show Court.

  ‘Then,’ Poutrincourt said, ‘and for the ones who do become the étoiles, the lucky who become profiled and photographed for readers and in the U.S.A. religion make it, they must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or they are doomed. We see this in experience. One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years. This task of us at the Enfield is more delicate still, with the étoiles. For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, 277 so, then, one of two things we see will happen.’

  Steeply had to keep breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed.

  ‘One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “OK ” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga of Eric Clipperton.’

  ‘With two p’s?’

  ‘Just so. Or the other possibility of doom, for the étoiles who attain. They attain the goal, thus, and put as much equal passion into celebrating their attainment as they had put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here the Syndrome of the Endless Party. The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and substances. The glitter. They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.’

  ‘Our best boy is better than Hal, you’ll see him play tomorrow if you want, John Wayne. No relation to the real John Wayne. A fellow compatriot of Terry here.’ Aubrey deLint was sitting back up beside them, the cold giving his pitted cheeks a second flush, two feverish harlequin ovals. ‘John Wayne’s got a gestalt because Wayne’s simply got everything, and everything with him’s got the sort of pace that a touch-artist and thinker like Hal just can’t handle.’

  ‘This was the Founder’s philosophy, too, of doom, the punter Incandenza’s father, who also I am being told dabbled in filming?’ Steeply asked the Canadian.

  Poutrincourt’s shrug could have meant too many things to note. ‘I came after. M. Schtitt, his different goal for the étoiles is to walk between these.’ Nor did Steeply quite notice the woman’s shifts between dialects. ‘To map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of the success.’

  DeLint leaned in. ‘Wayne’s got everything. Hal’s strength has become knowing he doesn’t have everything, and constructing a game as much out of what’s missing as what’s there.’

  Steeply pretended
to arrange the cap but was really adjusting the wig. ‘It all sounds awfully abstract for something so physical.’

  Poutrincourt’s shrug pushed her glasses slightly up. ‘It is contradictory. Two selves, one not there. M. Schtitt, when the Academy Founder died…’

  ‘The punter’s father, who dabbled in films.’ Steeply’s raglan sweater had been his wife’s.

  Again nodding blandly, Poutrincourt: ‘This academic Founder, M. Schtitt tells that this Founder was a student of types of sight.’

  DeLint said ‘Wayne’s only possible limits being also his strength, the tungsten-steel will and resolve, the insistence on imposing his game and his will on his man, totally unwilling to change the pace of his game if he’s not doing good. Wayne’s got the touch and the lobs to hang back on an off-day, but he won’t — if he’s down or things aren’t going his way, he just hits harder. His pace is so overwhelming he can get away with being uncompromising about attack against North American juniors. But in the Show, which Wayne’ll go pro maybe as soon as next year, in the Show flexibility is more important, he’ll find. What do you call, a humility.’

  Poutrincourt was looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed. ‘The studying was not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees. He translated this numerously across different fields, M. Schtitt tells.’

  ‘The son described his father as quote “genre-dysphoric.”’

  Poutrincourt cocked her head. ‘This does not sound like Hal Incandenza.’

  DeLint sniffed meatily. ‘But Wayne’s gestalt’s chief edge over Hal is the head. Wayne is pure force. He doesn’t feel fear, pity, remorse — when a point’s over, it might as well have never happened. For Wayne. Hal actually has finer groundstrokes than Wayne, and he could have Wayne’s pace if he wanted. But the reason Wayne is Three continentally and Hal’s Six is the head. Hal looks just as perfectly dead out there, but he’s more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends in a match. Wayne doesn’t. Hal’s susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long lapses in concentration. Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.’

  The Troeltsch person said ‘Holy crow.’

  ‘So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,’ Thierry Poutrincourt said quietly, in nearly accentless English, as if to herself.

  ‘This emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female thing. Schtitt and I think it’s a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here. We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin. We don’t see this forgetful will in the Vaughts, or in Spodek, who you can watch if you want.’

  The Troeltsch person said ‘Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?’

  Steeply was looking at the side of Poutrincourt’s face as deLint on the other side was saying ‘But the one we see this most in is Hal.’

  14 NOVEMBER

  YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

  The Man o’ War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. A waiter brought his soup. The waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible reason wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He’d been the neat eater in the family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three.

  The Man o’ War Grille is on Prospect Street in Cambridge and its front windows overlook the heavy foot traffic between Inman and Central Squares. As Matty waited for his soup he’d seen across the restaurant and out the front’s glass a bag-lady-type older female in several clothing-layers lift her skirts and lower herself to the pavement and move her scaggly old bowels right there in full view of passersby and diners both, then gather all her plastic shopping bags together and walk stolidly out of view. The pile of bowel movement sat there on the pavement, steaming slightly. Matty’d heard the college kids at the next table say they didn’t know whether to be totally illed or totally awed.

  A big rangy kid, with a big sharp face and tight short hair and a smile and a shave-twice jaw since he was fourteen. Now balding smoothly back from a high clear forehead. A permanent smile that always seemed like he was trying not to but just couldn’t help it. His Da always formerly saying to Wipe it off.

  Inman Square: Little Lisbon. The soup has bits of calamari that make the muscles in his face flex, chewing.

  Now two Brazilians in bellbottoms and tall shoes along the sidewalk across the window over the diners’ heads, what might be a brewing street-fight, one walking forward and one walking backward, facing off as they move, each missing the dollop of bowel-movement on the walk, speaking high-volume street-Portuguese muffled by windows and hot clatter, but each looking around and then pointing at his own chest like: ‘You saying this shit to me?’ Then the forward man’s sudden charge carrying them both past the window’s right frame.

  Matty’s Da’d come over on a boat from Louth in Lenster in 1989. Matty’d been three or four. Da’d worked on the Southie docks, coiling lengths of rope as big around as phone poles into tall cones, and had died when Matty was seventeen, of pancreatic complaints.

  Matty looked up from the roll he was dipping in the soup and saw two underweight interracial girls moving across the window, one a nigger, neither even looking at the shit everyone’s stepping around; and then a few seconds behind them Poor Tony Krause, who because of the trousers and cap Matty didn’t even recognize as Poor Tony Krause until he’d looked back down and then up again: Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: sucked-out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face’s skin the greenish white of extreme-depth marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat’s hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always reminded him of black-and-white-era starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome given Krause’s spectral mien, passing across the Grille’s window, his eyes either on or looking right through the two skinny girls plodding ahead of him, following them out of the window’s right-hand side.

  His Da’d begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A fook in t’boom. Matty had complete recall of the whole thing. He’d seen sometimes where persons that had unpleasant things happen to them as children blocked the unpleasantness out in their mentality as adults and forgot it. Not so with Matty Pemulis. He remembered every inch and pimple of every single time. His father outside the little room Matt and Micky slept in, late at night, the cat’s-eye sliver of lit hallway through the crack in the door Da’d opened, the door on well-oiled hinges opening with the implacable slowness of a rising moon, Da’s shadow lengthening across the floor and then the man his very self weaving in behind it, crossing the moonlit floor in darned socks and that smell about him that later Matty’d know was malt liquor but at that age he and Mickey called something else, when they smelled it. Matty lay and pretended to sleep; he didn’t know why tonight he pretended not to know the man was there; he was afraid. Even the first time. Micky just five. All the times were the same. Da drunk. Tacking across the bedroom floor. A certain stealth. Managing somehow never to break his neck on the toy trucks and tiny cars scattered on the floor, left there that first time by accident. Sitting on the edge of the bed so his weight changed the bed’s angle. A big man smelling of tobacco and something else, his breath always audible when drunk. Sitting on the edge of the bed. Shaking Matty ‘awake’ to the point where Matty’d have to pretend to wake up. Asking if he’d been asleep, sleeping, there, was he. Tenderness, caresses that were somehow just over the line from true ethnic-Irish fatherly affection, the emotional largesse of a man without a Green Card who daily broke his back fo
r his family’s food. Caresses that were in some vague way just over the line from that and from the emotional largesse of something else, drunk, when all the rules of mood were suspended and you never knew from minute to minute whether you were to be kissed or hit — impossible to say how or even know how they were just over those lines. But they were, the caresses. Tenderness, caresses, low soft oversweet hot bad breath, soft apologies for some flash of savagery or discipline from the day. A way of cupping the pillow-warm cheek and jaw in the hollow of the hand, the huge pinkie finger tracing the hollow between throat and jaw. Matty’d shrink away: shy are we sone scared are we? Matty’d shrink away even after he knew the shrinking fear was part of what brought it on, for Da’d get angry: who are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to be scared so of our own Da? As if the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more than a. Can’t a Da show his son some love without being taken for a. As if Matty could lie here with his food inside him under bedding he’d paid for and think his Da were no better than a. Is it a fookin you’re scared of, then. You think a Da what comes in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da has nought on his mind but a fook? As if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the docks? As if the Da were a. Is that what you take me for. Is that what you take me for then. Matty shrinking back into a flattening pillow the Da’d paid for, the springs of the convertible bed singing with his fear; he shook. Why then so then I’ve a mind to give you just what you’re thinking t’fear. Take me for. Matty knew early on that his being afraid fueled the thing somehow, made his Da want to. He was unable not to be afraid. He tried and tried, cursed himself for a coward and deserving, all but calling his father a. It was years before he snapped to the fact that his Da’d have fooked him in t’boom no matter what he’d done. That the event was laid out before the first slim line of doorlight broadened, and whatever Matty’d felt or betrayed made no difference. An advantage to not blocking it out is you can snap to things later, with maturer perspective; you can come to see no sone on the planet could in any way ask for that, regardless. At a certain later age he started lying there when his Da shook him and pretended to sleep on, even when the shakes got to where his teeth clacked together in a mouth that wore the slight smile Matty’d decided truly sleeping people’s faces always wore. The harder his father shook him, the tighter Matty’d shut his eyes and the more set the slight smile and the louder the rasps of the cartoon snores he alternated with exhaled whistles. Mickey over in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb, on his side, face to the wall and hidden. Never a word between them about anything more than the chances of being kissed v. hit. Finally Da’d grab both his shoulders and flip him over with a sound of disgust and frustration. Matty thought just the smell of the fear was maybe enough to deserve it, until (later on) he got some maturer perspective. He remembered the oval sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum jelly, that special stone-in-pond plop of a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in an era of Child-Proof caps), hearing his Da muttering as he applied it to himself, feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him as his Da smeared the stuff roughly around Matty’s rosebud, his dark star.