Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurgery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The man’s fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man’s life enough meaning for him to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.

  The couple had gotten Kate Gompert’s mother’s address and had sent Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn’t know whether Mr. Ernest Feaster’s limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

  14 NOVEMBER

  YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

  Ms. Ruth van Cleve’s first day off new residents’ three-day House Restriction. Allowed now to hit meetings outside Enfield if accompanied by some more senior resident the Staff judges safe. Ruth van Cleve in spike heels walking alongside a psychotically depressed Kate Gompert on Prospect just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little after 2200h., yammering nonstop.

  Ruth van Cleve is shaping up to be excruciating for Kate Gompert to be around. Ruth van Cleve hails from Braintree on the South Shore, is many kilos underweight, wears brass-colored lipstick, and has dry hair teased out in the big-hair fashion of decades past. Her face has the late-stage Ice 284- addict’s concave long-jawed insectile look. Her hair is a dry tangled cloud, with tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak underneath. Joelle v.D.’d said it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve’s hair grew her head instead of the other way around. Kate Gompert’s hair is butcher-block cut and has recognizable color, at least.

  Kate Gompert hasn’t slept in four nights, and her slumped progress up the Prospect sidewalk resembles the lazy tack of a boat in no rush. Ruth van Cleve talks nonstop into her right ear. It’s around 2200h. on Saturday and the sodium streetlights keep going off and then on again with a stuttered hum, some connection in them loose somewhere. Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman Square also crowd the sidewalk’s edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads. In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in wheelchairs with creative receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered invitations to help them.

  An oral narrative begins to emerge. Ms. Ruth v.C. has been remanded to Ennet House by D.S.S. and Family Court after her newborn baby was discovered in a Braintree MA alley swaddled in WalMart advertising circulars whose Harvest Moon Value Specials had expired 11/01, a Sunday. Ruth van Cleve had rather unshrewdly left the hospital I.D. bracelet with its D.O.B. and her own name and Health Card # on the discarded infant’s wrist. The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine 285 it received for inutero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can only speculate about. 286 The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.

  What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she’s moving forward, her whole self, when all she’s capable of concentrating on is one foot and then the other foot. Heads glide by in the darkened windows. Some of the Latino males in the vicinity do a kind of sexual checking-out as they pass — even though underweight and dry-haired and kind of haggish, Ruth van Cleve’s manner and attire and big hair broadcast that she’s all about sexuality and sex.

  A negative thing about opting for recovery in NA instead of AA is availability and location of meetings. In other words fewer NA meetings. On a Saturday night you could stand on the roof of Ennet House in Enfield and be hard-pressed to spit in any direction without hitting some AA venue nearby. Whereas the closest Saturday-P.M. NA meeting is N. Cambridge’s Clean and Serene Group, infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing, and the thing’s Beginner’s Mtng. goes from 2000 to 2100h. and the regular from 2100 to 2200h., purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so many drug addicts suffer weekly, Saturday still being the week’s special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24/7/365. But from Inman Square back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike — hoof up Prospect to Central Sq. and take the Red Line all the way to Park Street station and then the maddening Green Line B Train forever west on Comm. Ave. — and it’s now after 2215h., meaning Kate Gompert has 75 minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer beside her back for Curfew. Ruth van Cleve’s chatter is as listener-interest-independent as anything Kate Gompert’s heard since Randy Lenz got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left, which was who knows how many days or weeks ago.

  The two move in and out of cones of epileptic light from fluttering street-lamps. Kate Gompert is trying not to shudder as Ruth van Cleve asks her if she knows someplace you can pick up a good toothbrush cheap. Kate Gompert’s entire spiritual energy and attention are focused on first her left foot and then her right foot. One of the heads she does not see, floating in the windows with her own unrecognizable head and Ruth van Cleve’s cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause, who’s several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course step for step, eyeing string purses he imagines contain more than just train-fare and NA Newcomers’ keychains.

  The vaporizer chugs and seethes and makes the room’s windows weep as Jim Troeltsch inserts a pro-wrestling cartridge in the little TP’s viewer and dons his tackiest sportcoat and wet-combs his hair down smooth so it looks toupeeish and settles back on his bunk, surrounded by Seldane-bottles and two-ply facial tissue, preparing to call the action. His roommates have long since seen what was coming, and screwed.

  Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B’s curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped to diamond-shaped, being careful not to let it fall.

  Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound.

  Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on W. Commonwealth on Schtitt’s old BMW, bound for Evangeline’s Low-Temperature Confections in Newton Center, right at the bottom of what usually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced and leaning forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario’s face, in the sidecar, as Mario too leans way forward into their downhill flight, preparing to whoop when they bottom out.

  Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business address on East Tucson AZ’s Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console’s ke
ys.

  ‘AIYEE!’ cries the man, rushing at the nun, wielding a power tool.

  The tough-looking nun yells ‘AIYEE!’ right back as she kicks at him expertly, her habit’s skirts whipping complexly around her. The combatants circle each other warily in the abandoned warehouse, both growling. The nun’s wimple is askew and soiled; the back of her hand, held out in a bladish martial-art fist, displays part of a faded tattoo, some wicked-clawed bird of prey. The cartridge opens like this, in violent medias res, then freezes in the middle of the nun’s leaping kick, and its title, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, gets matte-dissolved in and bleeds lurid blood-colored light down into the performance credits rolling across the screen’s bottom. Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin have come in uninvited and joined Hal in V.R. 6 and are curled up against the arms of the room’s other recumbency, their feet touching at the soles, Boone eating unauthorized frozen yogurt from a cylindrical carton. Hal’s turned the rheostat down low, and the film’s title and credits make their faces glow redly. Bridget Boone extends the confection-carton over in Hal’s direction in an inviting way, and by way of declining Hal points to the lump of Kodiak in his cheek and makes a display of leaning out to spit. He appears to be studying the scrolling credits very closely.

  ‘So what is this?’ Fran Unwin says.

  Hal looks over at her very slowly, then even more slowly raises his right arm and points around the tennis ball he’s squeezing at the monitor, where the cartridge’s 50-point title is still trickling redly over the credits and frozen scene.

  Bridget Boone gives him a look. ‘What’s up your particular butt?’

  ‘I’m isolating. I came in here to be by myself.’

  She has this way that gets to Hal of digging the chocolate yogurt out with the spoon and then inverting the spoon, turning the spoon over, so that it always enters her mouth upside-down and her tongue gets to contact the confection immediately, without the mediation of cold spoon, and for some reason this has always gotten under Hal’s skin.

  ‘So then you should’ve locked the door.’

  ‘Except there aren’t locks on the V.R. doors, 287 as you quite well know.’

  Round-faced Frannie Unwin says ‘Sshhh.’

  Then too sometimes Boone plays with the laden spoon, makes it fly around in front of her face like a child’s plane before inverting it and sticking it in. ‘Maybe this is partly because this is a public room, for everybody, that your thinking person probably wouldn’t choose to isolate in.’

  Hal leans over to spit and lets the spit hang for a while before he lets it go, so it hangs there slowly distending.

  Boone withdraws the clean spoon just as slowly. ‘No matter how sullen and pouty that person is over that person’s play or near-loss in full view of a whole crowd that day, I hear.’

  ‘Bridget, I forgot to tell you I saw that Rite Aid’s having an enormous clearance on emetics. If I were you I’d scoot right over.’

  ‘You are vile.’

  Bernadette Longley sticks her long boxy head in the door and sees Bridget Boone and says ‘I thought I heard you in here’ and comes in uninvited with Jennie Bash in tow.

  Hal whimpers.

  Jennie Bash looks at the large screen. The cartridge’s theme-music is female-choral and very heavy and ironic on the descants. Bernadette Longley looks at Hal. ‘You know there’s a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a very determined expression.’

  Boone banks the spoon back and forth absently. ‘He’s isolating. He won’t respond and is spitting extra repulsively to get across the point.’

  Jennie Bash says ‘Haven’t you got a huge paper due for Thierry tomorrow? There was moaning coming from Struck and Shaw’s room.’

  Hal packs chew down with his tongue. ‘Done.’

  ‘Figures,’ Bridget Boone says.

  ‘Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled.’

  ‘Proofed to within its life,’ Boone says, barrel-rolling the spoon. Hal can tell she’s done a couple one-hitters. He’s looking straight at the wall’s screen, squeezing the ball so hard his forearm keeps swelling to twice its size.

  ‘Plus I hear your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today,’ Longley says.

  ‘She means Pemulis,’ Fran Unwin tells Hal.

  Bridget Boone makes dive-bomber sounds and swoops the spoon around. ‘Sounds like too good a story not to save and let my craving for it build and build until finally it’s like I have to hear it or die right on the spot.’

  ‘What is up his butt?’ Jennie Bash asks Fran Unwin. Fran Unwin’s a sort of hanuman-faced girl with a torso and trunk about twice as long as her legs, and a scuttly, vaguely simian style of play. Bernadette Longley wears knee-length candy-cane trousers and a sweatshirt with the fleecy inside out. All the girls are now in socks. Hal notes that girls always seem to slip out of their shoes when they assume any kind of spectatorial posture. Eight empty white sneakers now sit mute and weird at various points, slightly sunk in carpet pile. No two of the shoes face quite the same exact direction. Male players, on the other hand, tend to leave the footwear on when they come in and sit down somewhere. Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home. Males, when they come in somewhere and sit down, project an air of transience. Remain suited up and mobile. It’s the same whenever Hal comes in and sits down someplace where people are already gathered. He’s aware that they sense he’s somehow there only in a very technical sense, that he’s got an air of moment’s-notice readiness to leave about him. Boone extends her carton of TCBY 288 toward Longley in an inviting way, even tilting it invitingly back and forth. Longley puffs her cheeks and blows air out with a fatigued sound. At least three different smells of cologne and skin-cream struggle for primacy in here. Bridget Boone’s free LA Gear shoes are both on their sides from the force of having been almost kicked off her feet. Hal’s spit makes a sound against the bottom of the wastebasket. Jennie Bash has bigger arms than Hal. The Viewing Room is redly dim. Bash asks Unwin what they’re watching.

  Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, one of Himself’s few commercial successes, wouldn’t have made near the money it made if it hadn’t come out just as InterLace was starting to purchase first-run features for its rental menus and hyping the cartridges with one-time Spontaneous Disseminations. It was the sort of sleazy-looking shocksploitation film that would have had a two-week run in multiplex theaters 8 and above and then gone right to the featureless brown boxes of magnetic-video limbo. Hal’s critical take on the film is that Himself, at certain dark points when abstract theory-issues seemed to provide an escape from the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges, had made films in certain commercial-type genre modes that so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies on the genres: ‘sub/inversions of the genres,’ cognoscenti taken in were wont to call them. The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof and over-clever, to Hal’s way of thinking, and he’s not comfortable with the way Himself always seemed to get seduced by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert, especially the seductive formulae of violent payback, i.e. the cathartic bloodbath, i.e. the hero trying with every will-fiber to eschew the generic world of the stick and fist and but driven by unjust circumstance back to the violence again, to the cathartic final bloodbath the audience is brought to applaud instead of mourn. Himself’s best in this vein was The Night Wears a Sombrero, a Langesque meta Western but also a really good Western, with chintzy homemade interior sets but breathtaking exteriors shot outside Tucson AZ, an ambivalent-but-finally-avenging-son story played out against dust-colored skies and big angles of flesh-colored mountain, plus with minimal splatter, shot men clutching their chests and falling deliciously sideways, all hats staying on at all times. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun was a supposedly ironic lampoon of the avenging-cleric splatter-films of the late B.S. ’90s. Nor did Himself make any friends on either sid
e of the Concavity, trying to shoot the thing in Canada.

  Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at an osteoporotic angle over digital editing equipment for hours on end, deleting and inserting code, arranging Blood Sister: One Tough Nun into subversive/inversion, and can’t summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing’s metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on. 289

  Jennie Bash has left V.R. 6’s door agape, and Idris Arslanian and Todd (‘Postal Weight’) Possalthwaite and Kent Blott all drift in and sit Indian-style in a loose hemisphere on the thick carpet between the girls’ recumbency and Hal’s recumbency, and are more or less considerately quiet. They all keep their sneakers on. Postal Weight’s nose is a massive proboscoid bandaged thing. Kent Blott wears a sportfisherman’s cap with an extremely long bill. That queer faint smell of hot dogs that seems to follow Idris Arslanian around begins to insinuate itself into the room’s colognes. He isn’t wearing the rayon handkerchief as a blindfold but does have it tied around his neck; no one asks him about it. All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked immediately into Blood Sister’s unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic cue from the little boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal’s the only person in the room who isn’t 100% absorbed.

  The entertainment’s uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets of Toronto is found O.D.’d, beaten up, molested, and robbed of her leather jacket outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended, spiritually guided, and converted — ‘saved’ is the weak entendre made much of in the first act’s dialogue — by a tough-looking older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the tough older nun), had herself been hauled up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing and -addiction by an even tougher even older nun, a nun who had herself been saved by a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The latest saved biker-chick becomes a tough and street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets as Blood Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets.