Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Yours let you keep your teeth?’

  ‘Only the ones for gnawing. See?’

  ‘Sheesh.’

  ‘Just the ones for gnawing.’

  Rémy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room evening of this Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, the last demi-maison on his portion of the list for this day. The hills of upper Enfield, they were de l’infere of difficulty, but the demi-maison itself had a ramp. A person with authority was conducting interviews to fill some vacancies of recent time in the place’s Office, of which its locked door was visible from this sitting. Marathe and others were invited to sit in the living room with a cup of unpleasant coffee. Urged to smoke if he liked. Everyone else was smoking. The living room smelled like an ashtray, and its ceiling was yellow like the fingers of long smokers. Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud. There were demi-maison patients viewing a cartridge of martial arts conflict, former patients and persons of the upper Enfield area cohabiting on the furniture, conversing. A damaged woman, also in a fauteuil de rollent like Marathe, slumped inutile next to the cartridge’s viewer, while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the kicks and thrusts of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the woman to twitch or cry out. Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway. Other persons, presumably addicted, waiting in the room to seek admittance to the Recovery House. The room was loud and hot. Marathe could hear a person who will seek admittance vomiting in the shrubberies just outside the window. Marathe’s chair was locked down next to a divan’s arm and directly before a window. The window, one could wish it was open more than a crack, he felt. Upon the dull-colored carpet a tormented-appearing man scuttling like the crab while two hooligans in leather played a cruel game of jumping over him. Persons reading cartoon books and painting the nails of their extremities. A tall-haired woman brought her foot to her mouth to blow upon her toes. Another young girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. No other in the room wore the veil of the Entertainment’s performer’s organization U.H.I.D. The smell of the U.S.A. cigarettes permeated his veil and made Marathe’s eyes water, and he thought of vomiting also. Two additional windows were open, but the room lacked all air.

  During the time of his sitting, several persons approached Marathe, but they would say to him only the whispers ‘Pet the dogs’ or ‘Make sure and pet the dogs.’ This idiomatic expression was not in Marathe’s knowledge of U.S.A. idiom.

  Also one person approached of a face whose skin seemed that it was rotting away from him in some way and asked him if he, Marathe, was court-ordered.

  Marathe was one of few persons not smoking. He noted that none of the room’s persons appeared to regard the cheesecloth veil he wore over his face as unusual or curious or to be questioned. The old sportcoat he wore over a turtleneck sweater of Desjardin’s made Marathe more formally dressed than other of the applicants for treatment. Two of the Ennet House demi-maison current patients wore neckties, however. Marathe kept pretending to sniff; he did not know why. He sat up next to a divan of false velour at whose end beside him two women who had sought previous treatment of addiction in religious cults were meeting and speaking together of their unenjoyable existences when in cults.

  To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M. Fortier quickly had developed: ‘Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately.’ Persons’ responses to his introductory lines were difficult to interpret. One of the older two men in neckties who had approached, he had clapped a hand to his soft face’s cheek and responded ‘How extraordinarily nice for you,’ in which Marathe could detect sarcasm. The two women of cult experience were inclined closely toward each other upon the divan. They touched each other’s arms several times in a kind of excitement as they conversed. When they laughed in delight they seemed to chew at the air. One’s laughter involved also a snorting noise. A clatter and two shrieks: these came from one end of the dining room, in the demi-maison’s floor plans a large kitchen. The sounds were then followed by a roiling cloud of steam, with repeated obscenities from unseen persons. A bald large black man in a white cotton undershirt’s laughing became coughing that would not cease. The two patients in neckties and the girl whose eye could be removed spoke together intensively and also audibly at the end of one other divan.

  ‘But consider this quality of portability with respect to, say, a car. Is a car portable? With respect to a car it’s more as though I’m portable.’

  ‘They’re portable when they’re on one of them semis where they got new cars stacked on with prices in the windows like a good couple dozen on them semis that swing all to fuck all over I-93 and make you think the cars are going to start falling out all over the road when you’re wanting to try and pass.’

  The plump one who had been ironic toward Marathe, he was nodding: ‘Or, say, too, with respect to a tow truck or wrecker, if you suffer a breakdown. One might be in a position to say that a deactivated car can be quote portable, but that with respect to a functional car it is I who am portable.’

  The girl’s nod caused the particular eye to wheel queasily in the socket of it. ‘I’ll buy that, Day.’

  ‘If we’re jot-and-tittling with all possible precision regarding portable, that is.’

  The other man continually rubbed at his shine of the shoes with a facial tissue, causing his necktie to touch the floor.

  These conversers formed this triad on an unevenly sloped divan of leather-colored plastic across the room, which was now more airless yet from the roiling steam from the kitchen, infiltrating. Directly facing Marathe in a yellow chair against the wall by these conversers’ divan most directly across the living room from Marathe was an addicted man waiting for seeking treatment by admission. This one, he appeared to have several cigarettes burning at one time. He held a metal ashtray in his lap and jiggled the boot of his crossed leg with vigor. For Marathe, it was not difficult to ignore the fact that the addicted man was glaring at him. He noted it, and did not understand because of what the man glared, but he was unconcerned. Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions. U.S.A.’s B.S.S.’s M. Steeply had verified that U.S.A.s did not comprehend this or appreciate it; it was foreign to them. The veil allowed Marathe the liberty of staring calmly back at the addicted man without the man’s knowledge, which Marathe found he enjoyed. Marathe felt sick to his body, from the smoky room’s smoke. Marathe had once, as a child, with legs, bent himself over and overturned a decaying log in the forests of the Lac de Deux Montaignes region of his four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train. 304 The pallor of the things which had writhed and scuttled beneath the wet log was the pallor of this addicted man, who wore a square of the facial hair between lower lip and chin and had also a needle run through the flesh of the top of an ear, which the needle, it glistened and did not glisten rapidly in succession as it vibrated with the jiggle of the jiggling boot. Marathe gazed at him calmly through the veil while rehearsing his prepared lines within his head. The more idiomatic would be that the needle jiggled sympathetically with the jiggle of the boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did.

  The addicted man rose slowly and carried the burning ashtray with him nearer to Marathe, trying to kneel. His Blue Jeans of Levi #501 were strangely torn in spots with tattered white strings which showed the pallor of the knees; the torn holes had the size and perimeter-damage of holes that Marathe recognized had been made by shotgun-blasts of the high gauge. Marathe was mentally memorizing every detail of all things, for both his reports. The addicted man kneeling before him, he leaned in closer, trying to remove something he believed was on his lip. Close in, the expression that through the veil had a
ppeared as glaring corrected itself: the expression was more truly that the man’s eyes had the vacant intensity of those who have violently died.

  The man whispered: ‘You real?’ Marathe looked through the veil at his facial square. ‘Are you real?’ again the man whispered. All the time leaning more and more in, slowly.

  ‘You’re real I can tell ain’t you,’ the man whispered. Quickly he looked behind him at the uproaring room before leaning once more in. ‘Listen then.’

  Marathe kept his hands calmly in his lap, his machine pistol holstered securely to his right stump beneath the blanket. The whispering man’s searching fingers were leaving small bits of filth on the lip.

  ‘’s these poor fuckers’ — the man gestured slightly with indicating the room — ‘most of them ain’t real. So watch your six. Most of these fuckers are —: metal people.’

  ‘I am Swiss,” Marathe experimentally said. It was the second of his lines of introduction.

  ‘Walking around, make you think they’re alive.’ The addicted man had the way with subtleness of looking all around himself which Marathe associated with intelligence professionals. One of his eyes had an exploded vein within it. ‘But that’s just the layer,’ he said. He leaned in so far Marathe could see pores through the veil. ‘There’s a micro-thin layer of skin. But underneath, it’s metal. Heads full of parts. Under a organic layer that’s micro-thin.’ The eyes of men violently dead were also the eye of a fish in a vendor’s crushed ice, studying nothing. The man’s smell suggested livestock on a hot day, a goatish, even through the smoke of the room. Trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid was a material, M. Broullîme had lectured to pass times in long surveillances, a chemical material in the sweat of grave mental illness. Marathe, he had no trouble timing his breath so his exhalation matched the addicted man’s, who leaned more in.

  ‘There’s one way to tell,’ he said. ‘Get right up close. Like right up flush next to: you can hear a whir. Micro-faint. This whirring. It’s the processors’ gears. It’s their flaw. Machines always whir. They’re good. They can quiet down the whir.’

  ‘I have no six.’

  ‘But they can’t — can not — eliminate it.’

  ‘I am Swiss, seeking residential treatment with desperation.’

  ‘Not under no micro-thin tissue-layer they can’t.’ If the gaze were not vacant the gaze would be grim, frightened. Marathe distantly remembered the emotion fear.

  ‘Did you hear what she said?’ the ironic man on the divan laughed. ‘Potable means drinkable. It’s not even the same root. Did you hear what she said?’

  The man’s breath, it smelled of trans-3-methyl acid as well. ‘I’m clueing y’in,’ he whispered. ‘They’re there to fool you. The real ones of us’re getting fooled. Nine-nine-plus per cent of the time.’ The flesh of the knees through the holes in the Blue Jeans was the white of long death. ‘But you, I could tell you were real.’ He indicated the veil. ‘No micro-thin layer. The metal ones — have faces.’ The smoke of his cigarette in the ashtray rose in a motion of corkscrewing. ‘Which this is why’ — feeling the lip — ‘why the ones on the T or in the street — they won’t let you right up close. Try it. They’ll never let you right up close. It’s programming. They know to look scared and — like — offended and back away and move to another seat. The real advanced ones, they’ll give you change, even, to let ’em back off. Try it. Get right — up — like this — close.’ Marathe sat calmly behind the veil, feeling the veil move with the man’s breath, waiting patiently to inhale. The women with experiences in cults had smelled the odor of the man’s trans-3 odor and relocated farther away upon the divan. The man’s face smiled with one knowing side only of his mouth, acknowledging their movement away. He was so close that the nose of him touched the veil when Marathe finally inhaled. Marathe was prepared for death in all forms. The smells were trans-3-methyl-2 and of digested cheese and the under of an arm, from the facial skin. Marathe ignored impulses to impale the eyesockets with one two-finger motion. The man had his hand to his ear in a mime of to listen closely. His smile disclosed what might have once been teeth. ‘Nothing,’ he smiled. ‘I knew. Not a sound.’

  ‘The Swiss, we are a quiet people, and reserved. In addition, I am deformed.’

  The man waved his cigarette with impatience. ‘Listen up. This is why. You’re how come I was here. I only thought it was the habit. They can fool you.’ He scrubbed at the lip of his mouth. ‘I’m here to tell you. Listen. You ain’t here.’

  ‘I have emigrated from my native Swiss.’

  Still whispering: ‘You ain’t here. These fuckers are metal. Us — us that are real — there’s not many — they’re fooling us. We’re all in one room. The real ones. One room all the time. Everything’s pro — jected. They can do it with machines. They pro — ject. To fool us. The pictures on the walls change so’s we think we’re going places. Here and there, this and that. That’s just they change the pro — jections. It’s all the same place all the time. They fool your mind with machines to think you’re moving, eating, cooking up, doing this and that.’

  ‘I have come desperately here.’

  ‘The real world’s one room. These so-called people, so-called’ — with again the flourish — ‘they’re everybody you know. You’ve met ’em before, hunnerts times, with different faces. There’s only 26 total. They play different characters, that you think you know. They wear different faces with different pictures they pro — ject on the wall. You get me?’

  ‘This Recovery House was recommended highly.’

  ‘You follow? Count. Coincidence? There’s 26 here, counting the one without feet on the stairs. Coincidence? Chance? This here’s every machine that’s played everbody you ever met. Are you hearin’ me? They fool us. They take the machines in the back room and they — like —’

  The visible door of the locked Office opened and an addicted patient emerged with a person in authority holding a clipboard. The addicted patient limped and leaned far to a side, though was attractive in the blond stereotype of the U.S.A. image-culture.

  ‘— change them. The thin organic layers. All the different people you know. So-called. They’re the same machines.’

  ‘Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!’ the authority called with the clipboard.

  ‘I am being indicated,’ Marathe said, bending to release the clamps on his fauteuil’s wheels.

  ‘— why I’m in this pro — jection, to clue you. So that now you know.’ Marathe manipulated the fauteuil to the right with its trusty left wheel. ‘I must be excused to plead for treatment.’

  ‘Get right up close.’

  ‘Good night,’ over his left shoulder. The inutile woman seemed to twitch slightly in her heavy fauteuil as he passed.

  ‘You only think you’re goin’ someplace!’ the addicted man called, still one-half kneeling.

  Marathe rolled up to the person in authority as slowly as possible, hunched deep into the sportcoat and pathetically tacking. With significance, the large and clipboarded woman seemed without faze at the veil of U.H.I.D. Marathe extended a large hand in greeting which he made tremble. ‘Good night.’

  The insane-smelling man on the carpet called out after: ‘Make sure and pet the dogs!’

  Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean. She dusted the top of the fiberboard dresser she and Nell Gunther shared. She dusted the oval top of the dresser’s mirror’s frame and cleaned off the mirror as best she could. She was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate Gompert’s bed. She felt oddly averse to putting on socks and clogs and going down to the kitchen for real cleaning supplies. She could hear the noise of all the post-meeting nighttime residents and visitors and applicants down there. She could feel their voices in the floor. When the dental nightmare tore her upright awake her mouth was open to scream out, but the scream was Nell G. down in the living room, whose laugh always sounds like she’s being eviscerated. Nell preem
pted Joelle’s own scream. Then Joelle cleaned. Cleaning is maybe a form of meditation for addicts too new in recovery to sit still. The 5-Woman’s scarred wood floor had so much grit all over she could sweep a pile of grit together with just an unappliquéd bumper sticker she’d won at B.Y.P. Then she could use damp Kleenex to get up most of the pile. She had only Kate G.’s little bedside lamp on, and she wasn’t listening to any YYY tapes, out of consideration for Charlotte Treat, who was unwell and missed her Saturday Night Lively Mtng. on Pat’s OK and was now asleep, wearing a sleep mask but not her foam earplugs. Expandable foam earplugs were issued to every new Ennet resident, for reasons the Staff said would clarify for them real quick, but Joelle hated to wear them — they shut out exterior noise, but they made your head’s pulse audible, and your breath sounded like someone in a space suit — and Charlotte Treat, Kate Gompert, April Cortelyu, and the former Amy Johnson had all felt the same way. April said the foam plugs made her brain itch.

  It had started with Orin Incandenza, the cleaning. When relations were strained, or she was seized with anxiety at the seriousness and possible impermanence of the thing in the Back Bay’s co-op, the getting high and cleaning became an important exercise, like creative visualization, a preview of the discipline and order with which she could survive alone if it came to that. She would get high and visualize herself solo in a dazzlingly clean space, every surface twinkling, every possession in place. She saw herself being able to pick, say, dropped popcorn up off the rug and ingest it with total confidence. An aura of steely independence surrounded her when she cleaned the co-op, even with the little whimpers and anxious moans that exited her writhing mouth when she cleaned high. The place had been provided nearly gratis by Jim, who said so little to Joelle on their first several meetings that Orin kept having to reassure her that it wasn’t disapproval — Himself was missing the part of the human brain that allowed for being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them, Orin had said — or dislike. It was just how The Mad Stork was. Orin had referred to Jim as ‘Himself’ or ‘The Mad Stork’ — family nicknames, both of which gave Joelle the creeps even then.