Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  It’d been Orin who introduced her to his father’s films. The Work was then so obscure not even local students of serious film knew the name. The reason Jim kept forming his own distribution companies was to ensure distribution. He didn’t become notorious until after Joelle’d met him. By then she was closer to Jim than Orin had ever been, part of which caused part of the strains that kept the brownstone co-op so terribly clean.

  She’d barely thought consciously of any Incandenzas for four years before Don Gately, who for some reason kept bringing them bubbling up to mind. They were the second-saddest family Joelle’d ever seen. Orin felt Jim disliked him to the precise extent that Jim was even aware of him. Orin had spoken about his family at length, usually at night. On how no amount of punting success could erase the psychic stain of basic fatherly dislike, failure to be seen or acknowledged. Orin’d had no idea how banal and average his same-sex-parent-issues were; he’d felt they were some hideous exceptional thing. Joelle’d known her mother didn’t much like her from the first time her own personal Daddy’d told her he’d rather take Pokie to the pictures alone. Much of the stuff Orin said about his family was dull, gone stale from years of never daring to say it. He credited Joelle with some strange generosity for not screaming and fleeing the room when he revealed the banal stuff. Pokie had been Joelle’s family nickname, though her mother’d never called her anything but Joelle. The Orin she knew first felt his mother was the family’s pulse and center, a ray of light incarnate, with enough depth of love and open maternal concern to almost make up for a father who barely existed, parentally. Jim’s internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father’s face any room’s fifth wall. Joelle had struggled to stay awake and attentive, listening, letting Orin get the stale stuff out. Orin had no idea what his father thought or felt about anything. He thought Jim wore the opaque blank facial expression his mother in French sometimes jokingly called Le Masque. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said he’d come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic. Jim opened himself only to the mother. They all did, he said. She was there for them all, psychically. She was the family’s light and pulse and the center that held tight. Joelle could yawn in bed without looking like she was yawning. The children’s name for their mother was ‘the Moms.’ As if there were more than one of her. His younger brother was a hopeless retard, Orin had said. Orin recalled the Moms used to tell him she loved him about a hundred times a day. It nearly made up for Himself’s blank stare. Orin’s basic childhood memory of Jim had been of an expressionless stare from a great height. His mother had been really tall, too, for a girl. He’d said he’d found it secretly odd that none of the brothers were taller. His retarded brother was stunted to about the size of a fire hydrant, Orin reported. Joelle cleaned behind the filthy room’s radiator as far as she could reach, being careful not to touch the radiator. Orin described his childhood’s mother as his emotional sun. Joelle remembered her own personal Daddy’s Uncle T.S. talking about how her own personal Daddy’d thought his own Momma ‘Hung the God Damn Moon,’ he’d said. The radiators on Ennet House’s female side stayed on at all times, 24/7/365. At first Joelle had thought Mrs. Avril Incandenza’s high-watt maternal love had maybe damaged Orin by bringing into sharper relief Jim’s remote self-absorption, which would have looked, by comparison, like neglect or dislike. That it had maybe made Orin too emotionally dependent on his mother — why else would he have been so traumatized when a younger brother had suddenly appeared, specially challenged from birth and in need of even more maternal attention than Orin? Orin, late one night on the co-op’s futon, recalled to Joelle his skulking in and dragging a wastebasket over and inverting it next to his infant brother’s special crib, holding a heavy box of Quaker Oats high above his head, preparing to brain the needy infant. Joelle had gotten an A- in Developmental Psych. the semester before. And also dependent psychologically, Orin, it seemed, or even metaphysically — Orin said he’d grown up, first in a regular house in Weston and then at the Academy in Enfield, grown up dividing the human world into those who were open, readable, trustworthy, v. those so closed and hidden that you had no clue what they thought of you but could pretty damn well imagine it couldn’t be anything all that marvelous or else why hide it? Orin had recounted that he’d started to see himself getting closed and blank and hidden like that, as a tennis player, toward the end of his junior career, despite all the Moms’s frantic attempts to keep him from hiddenness. Joelle had thought of B.U.’s Nickerson Field’s 30,000 voices’ openly roared endorsement, the sound rising with the punt to a kind of amniotic pulse of pure positive noise. Versus tennis’s staid and reserved applause. It had all been so easy to figure and see, then, listening, loving Orin and feeling for him, poor little rich and prodigious boy — all this was before she came to know Jim and the Work.

  Joelle scrubbed at the discolored square of fingerprints around the light-switch until the wet Kleenex disintegrated into greebles.

  Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience.

  Greebles had been her own mother’s word for the little bits of sleepy goo you got in your eyes’ corners. Her own personal Daddy called them ‘eyeboogers’ and used to get them out for her with the twisted corner of his hankie.

  Though it’s not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their children either.

  The cheap glass shade over the ceiling’s light was black with interior grime and dead bugs. Some of the bugs looked like they might have been from long-extinct species. The loose grime alone filled half an empty Carefree box. The more stubborn crud would take a scouring pad and ammonia. Joelle put the shade aside for until she’d shot down to the kitchen to toss out different boxes of crud and wet Kleenex and grab some serious Chore-type supplies from under the sink.

  Orin had said she was the third-neatnikest person he knew after his Moms and a former player he’d played with with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a dual diagnosis with which the U.H.I.D. membership was rife. But at the time the import had missed her. At that time it had never occurred to her that Orin’s pull toward her could have had anything either pro or con to do with his mother. Her biggest worry was that Orin was pulled only by what she looked like, which her personal Daddy’d warned her the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out.

  Orin hadn’t been anything like her own personal Daddy. When Orin was out of the room it had never seemed like a relief. When she was home, her own Daddy never seemed to be out of the room for more than a few seconds. Her mother said she hardly even tried to talk to him when his Pokie was home. He kind of trailed her around from room to room, kind of pathetically, talking batons and low-pH chemistry. It was like when she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa. He was all through the house. He was real present at all times. His presence penetrated a room and outlasted him there. Orin’s absence, whether for class or practice, emptied the co-op out. The place seemed vacuumed and buffed sterile before the cleaning even started, when he went. She didn’t feel lonely in the place without him, but she did feel alone, what alone was going to feel like, and she, no one’s fool, 305 was erecting fortifications real early into it.

  It was Orin, of course, who’d introduced them. He’d had this stubborn idea that Himself would want to use her. In the Work. She was too pretty for somebody not to want to arrange, capture. Better Himself than some weak-chinned academic. Joelle’d protested the whole idea. She had a brainy girl’s discomfort about her own beauty and its effect on folks, a caution intensified by the repeated warnings of her personal Daddy. Even more to the immediate point, her filmic interests lay behind the lens. She’d do the capturing thank you very much. She wanted to make things, not appear in them. She had a student filmmaker
’s vague disdain for actors. Worst, Orin’s idea’s real project was developmentally obvious: he thought he could somehow get to his father through her. That he pictured himself having weighty, steeple-fingered conversations with the man, Joelle’s appearance and performance the subjects. A three-way bond. It made her real uneasy. She theorized that Orin unconsciously wished her to mediate between himself and ‘Himself,’ just as it sounded like his mother had. She was uneasy about the excited way Orin predicted that his father wouldn’t be able to ‘resist using’ her. She was extra uneasy about how Orin referred to his father as ‘Himself.’ It seemed painfully blatant, developmental-arrest-wise. Plus she felt — only a little less than she made it sound, on the futon at night, protesting — she’d felt uneasy at the prospect of any sort of connection with the man who had hurt Orin so, a man so monstrously tall and cold and remotely hidden. Joelle heard a howl and a crash from the kitchen, followed by McDade’s tubercular laugh. Twice Charlotte Treat sat up in sleep, glistening with fever, and said in a flat dead voice something that sounded for all the world like ‘Trances in which she did not breathe,’ and then fell back, out. Joelle was trying to pin down a queer rancid-cinnamon smell that came from the back of a closet stuffed with luggage. It was especially hard to clean when you weren’t supposed to be allowed to touch any other resident’s stuff.

  She might have known from the Work. The man’s Work was amateurish, she’d seen, when Orin had had his brother — the unretarded one — lend them some of The Mad Stork’s Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness — no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones, the upperclassman Molly Notkin had said of Incandenza’s early oeuvre. Joelle thought them more like a very smart person conversing with himself. She thought of the significance of the moniker ‘Himself.’ Cold. Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell — mordant, sophisticated, campy, hip, cynical, technically mind-bending; but cold, amateurish, hidden: no risk of empathy with the Job-like protagonist, whom she felt like the audience was induced to regard like somebody sitting atop a dunk-tank. The lampoons of ‘inverted’ genres: archly funny and sometimes insightful but with something provisional about them, like the finger-exercises of someone promising who refused to really sit down and play something to test that promise. Even as an undergrad Joelle’d been convinced that parodists were no better than camp-followers in ironic masks, satires usually the work of people with nothing new themselves to say. 306 ‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque’ — cold, allusive, inbent, hostile: the only feeling for the audience one of contempt, the meta-audience in the film’s theater presented as objects long before they turn to blind stone.

  But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself made the leap to narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had). But even in the early Work — flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive. She noticed them only when alone, watching, without Orin and his rheostat’s dimmer, the living room’s lights up high like she liked them, liked to see herself and everything else in the room with the viewer — Orin liked to sit in the dark and enter what he watched, his jaw slackening, a child raised on multi-channel cable TV. But Joelle began — on repeated viewing whose original purpose was to study how the man had blocked out scenes, for an Advanced Storyboard course she went the extra click in — she began to see little flashes of something. The M v. O.’s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous combatants’ faces, twisted past recognition with some kind of torment. Each cut to a flash of pained face had followed the crash of a petrified spectator toppling over in her chair. Three split-seconds, no more, of glimpses of facial pain. And not pain at wounds — they never touched each other, whirling with mirrors and blades; the defenses of both were impenetrable. More like as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive, up there on stage, the flashes seemed to suggest. But just three flashes, each almost subliminally quick. Accidents? But not one shot or cut in the whole queer cold film was accidental — the thing was clearly s-boarded frame by frame. Must have taken hundreds of hours. Astounding technical anality. Joelle kept trying to Pause the cartridge on the flashes of facial torment, but these were the early days of InterLace cartridges, and the Pause still distorted the screen just enough to keep her from seeing what she wanted to study. Plus she got the creepy feeling the man had upped the film-speed in these few-frame human flashes, to thwart just such study. It was like he couldn’t help putting human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow.

  Orin Incandenza had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a male-female way. 307 The first had been shiny-chinned and half blind on Everclear punch, an All-Kentucky lineman for the Shiny Prize Biting Shoats team back in Shiny Prize KY, at a cookout to which the Boosters had invited the Pep and Baton girls; and the lineman had looked like a little shy boy as he confessed, by way of apologizing for almost splashing her when he threw up, that she was just too Goddamn-all petrifyingly pretty to approach any other way but liquored up past all horror. The lineman’d confessed the whole team’s paralyzing horror of the prettiness of varsity Pep’s top twirler, Joelle. Orin confessed to his private name for her. The memory of that H.S. afternoon remained real strong. She could smell the mesquite smoke and the blue pines and the YardGuard spray, hear the squeals of the stock they butchered and cleaned in symbolic prep for the opener against the N. Paducah Technical H.S. Rivermen. She could still see the swooning line-man, wet-lipped and confessing, keeping himself upright against an immature blue pine until the blue pine’s trunk finally gave with a snap and crash.

  Until that cookout and confession she’d somehow thought it was her own personal Daddy, somehow, discouraging dates and male-female approaches. The whole thing had been queer, and lonely, until she’d been approached by Orin, who made no secret of the fact that he had balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were concerned.

  But it wasn’t even the subjective identification she felt, watching, she felt, somehow, for the flashes and seeming non-seqs that betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction. Like e.g. the 240-second motionless low-angle shot of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa,’ which — yes — ground Pre-Nuptial…’s dramatic movement to an annoying halt and added nothing that a 15- or 30-second still shot wouldn’t have added just as well; but on the fifth or sixth reviewing Joelle started to see the four-minute motionless shot as important for what was absent: the whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman’s POV, 308 and the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman — or rather his head — was on-screen every moment, even when split-screened against the titanic celestial marathon seven-card-stud-with-Tarot-cards game — his rolling eyes and temples’ dents and rosary of upper-lip sweat was imposed nonstop on the screen and viewer… except for the four narrative minutes the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio’s Bernini room, and the climactic statue filled the screen and pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence of the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his tiresome ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe wasn’t just a heavy-art gesture or audience-hostile herring. Freedom from one’s own head, one’s inescapable P.O.V. — Joelle started to see here, oblique to the point of being hidden, an emotional thrust, since the mediated transcendence of self was just what the apparently deca
dent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as subject. Here then, after studious (and admittedly kind of boring) review, was an unironic, almost moral thesis to the campy abstract mordant cartridge: the film’s climactic statue’s stasis presented the theoretical subject as the emotional effect — self-forgetting as the Grail — and — in a covert gesture almost moralistic, Joelle thought as she glanced at the room-lit screen, very high, mouth writhing as she cleaned — presented the self-forgetting of alcohol as inferior to that of religion/art (since the consumption of bourbon made the salesman’s head progressively swell, horrendously, until by the film’s end its dimensions exceeded the frame, and he had a nasty and humiliating time squeezing it through the front door of the Vittorio).

  It didn’t much matter once she’d met the whole family anyhow, though. The Work and reviewings were just an inkling — usually felt on the small manageable bits of coke that helped her see deeper, harder, and so maybe not even objectively accessible in the Work itself — a lower-belly intuition that the punter’s hurt take on his father was limited and arrested and maybe unreal.

  With Joelle makeupless and stone-sober and hair up in a sloppy knot, the introductory supper with Orin and Himself at Legal Seafood up in Brookline 309 betrayed nothing much at all, save that the director seemed more than able to resist ‘using’ Joelle in any capacity — she saw the tall man slump and cringe when Orin told him the P.G.O.A.T. majored in F&C 310 — Jim’d told her later she’d seemed too conventionally, commercially pretty to consider using in any of that period’s Work, part of whose theoretical project was to militate against received U.S. commercial-prettiness-conventions — and that Orin was so tense in ‘Himself’ ’s presence that there wasn’t room for any other real emotion at the table, Orin gradually beginning to fill up silences with more and faster nonstop blather until both Joelle and Jim were embarrassed at the fact that the punter hadn’t touched his steamed grouper or given anyone else space for a word of reply.