Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn’t know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother’s presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim’s presence that the silences were excruciating. Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each other only because the boy had been too damaged and arrested even to speak to until he was six, so that both he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual silence, though Mario did have an interest in lenses and film that had nothing to do with fathers or needs to please, so that the interest was something truly to share, the two of them; and even when Mario was allowed to work crew on some of Jim’s later Work it was without any of the sort of pressures to interact or bond via film that there’d been with Orin and Hal and tennis, at which Jim (Orin informed her) had been a late-blooming junior but a top collegian.

  Jim referred to the Work’s various films as ‘entertainments.’ He did this ironically about half the time.

  In the cab (that Jim had hailed for them), on the way back home from Legal Seafood, Orin had beaten his fine forehead against the plastic partition and wept that he couldn’t seem to communicate with Himself without his mother’s presence and mediation. It wasn’t clear how the Moms mediated or facilitated communication between different family-members, he said. But she did. He didn’t have one fucking clue how Himself felt about his abandoning a decade’s tennis for punting, Orin wept. Or about Orin’s being truly great at it, at something, finally. Was he proud, or jealously threatened, or judgmental that Orin had quit tennis, or what?

  The 5-Woman’s room’s mattresses were too skinny for their frames, and the rims of the frames between the slats were appallingly clotted with dust, with female hair entwined and involved in the dust, so that it took one Kleenex just to wet the stuff down, several dry ones to wipe the muck out. Charlotte Treat had been too sick to shower for days, and her frame and slats were hard to be near.

  At Joelle’s first interface with the whole sad family unit — Thanksgiving, Headmaster’s House, E.T.A., straight up Comm. Ave. in Enfield — Orin’s Moms Mrs. Incandenza (‘Please do call me Avril, Joelle’) had been gracious and warm and attentive without obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication, and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering — and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle’s body pucker and distend. It wasn’t that Avril Incandenza was one of the tallest women Joelle had ever seen, and definitely the tallest pretty older woman with immaculate posture (Dr. Incandenza slumped something awful) she’d ever met. It wasn’t that her syntax was so artless and fluid and imposing. Nor the near-sterile cleanliness of the home’s downstairs (the bathroom’s toilet seemed not only scrubbed but waxed to a high shine). And it wasn’t that Avril’s graciousness was in any conventional way fake. It took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods about Orin’s mother. The dinner itself — no turkey; some politico-familial in-joke about no turkey on Thanksgiving — was delicious without being grandiose. They didn’t even sit down to eat until 2300h. Avril drank champagne out of a little fluted glass whose level somehow never went down. Dr. Incandenza (no invitation to call him Jim, she noticed) drank at a tri-faceted tumbler of something that made the air above it shimmer slightly. Avril put everyone at ease. Orin did credible impressions of famous figures. He and little Hal made dry fun of Avril’s Canadian pronunciation of certain diphthongs. Avril and Dr. Incandenza took turns cutting up Mario’s salmon. Joelle had a weird half-vision of Avril hiking her knife up hilt-first and plunging it into Joelle’s breast. Hal Incandenza and two other lopsidedly muscular boys from the tennis school ate like refugees and were regarded with gentle amusement. Avril dabbed her mouth in a patrician way after every bite. Joelle wore girl-clothes, her dress’s neckline very high. Hal and Orin looked vaguely alike. Avril directed every fourth comment to Joelle, to include her. Orin’s brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed. There was a spotless doggie-dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever made of a dog. Joelle noticed Avril also directed every fourth comment to Orin, Hal, and Mario, like a cycle of even inclusion. There was New York white and Albertan champagne. Dr. Incandenza drank his drink instead of wine, and got up several times to freshen his drink in the kitchen. A massive hanging garden behind Avril’s and Hal’s captains’ chairs cut complex shadows into the UV light that made the table’s candles’ glow a weird bright blue. The director was so tall he seemed to rise forever, when he rose with his tumbler. Joelle had the queerest indefensible feeling that Avril wished her ill; she kept feeling different areas of hair stand up. Everybody Please-and-Thank-You’d in a way that was sheer Yankee WASP. After his second trip to the kitchen, Dr. Incandenza molded his twice-baked potatoes into an intricate futuristic cityscape and suddenly started to discourse animatedly on the 1946 breakup of Hollywood’s monolithic Studio system and the subsequent rise of the Method actors Brando, Dean, Clift et al., arguing for a causal connection. His voice was mid-range and mild and devoid of accent. Orin’s Moms had to be over two meters tall, way taller than Joelle’s own personal Daddy. Joelle could somehow tell Avril was the sort of female who’d been ungainly as a girl and then blossomed and but who’d only become really beautiful later in life, like thirty-five. She’d decided Dr. Incandenza looked like an ecologically poisoned crane, she told him later. Mrs. Incandenza put everyone at ease. Joelle imagined her with a conductor’s baton. She never did tell Jim that Orin called him The Mad or Sad Stork. The whole Thanksgiving table inclined very subtly toward Avril, very slightly and subtly, like heliotropes. Joelle found herself doing it too, the inclining. Dr. Incandenza kept shading his eyes from the UV plant-light in a gesture that resembled a salute. Avril referred to her plants as her Green Babies. At some point out of nowhere, little Hal Incandenza, maybe ten, announced that the basic unit of luminous intensity is the Candela, which he defined for no one in particular as the luminous intensity of 1/600,000 of a square meter of a cavity at the freezing-temperature of platinum. All the table’s males wore coats and ties. The larger of Hal’s two tennis partners passed out dental stimulators, and no one made fun of him. Mario’s grin seemed both obscene and sincere. Hal, whom Joelle wasn’t crazy about, kept asking wasn’t anybody going to ask him the freezing-temperature of platinum. Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves in a small conversation about Bazin, a film-theorist Himself detested, making a tormented face at the name. Joelle intrigued the optical scientist and director by explaining Bazin’s disparagement of self-conscious directorial expression as historically connected to the neo-Thomist Realism of the ‘Personalistes,’ an aesthetic school of great influence over French Catholic intellectuals circa 1930–1940 — many of Bazin’s teachers had been eminent Personalistes. Avril encouraged Joelle to describe rural Kentucky. Orin did a long impression of late pop-astronomer Carl Sagan expressing televisual awe at the cosmos’ scale. ‘Billions and billions,’ he said. One of the tennis friends burped just awfully, and no one reacted to the sound in any way. Orin said ‘Billions and billions and billions’ in the voice of Sagan. Avril and Hal had a brief good-natured argument about whether the term circa could modify an interval or only a specific year. Then Hal asked for several examples of something called Haplology. Joelle kept fighting urges to slap the sleek little show-offy kid upside the head so hard his bow-tie would spin. ‘The universe:’ — Orin continued long after the wit had worn thin — ‘cold, immense, incredibly universal.’ The subjects of tennis, baton-twirling, and punting never came up: organized sports were never once mentioned. Joelle noticed that nobody seemed to look directly at Dr. Incandenza except her. A curious flabby white mammarial dome covered part of the Academy’s grounds outside the dining room’s window. Mario plunged his special fork into Dr. Incandenza’s potato-cityscape, to general applause and certain grating puns on the term deconstruction from the insufferable Ha
l kid. Everyone’s teeth were dazzling in the candlelight and UV. Hal wiped Mario’s snout, which seemed to run continuously. Avril invited Joelle by all means to make a Thanksgiving call home to her family in rural Kentucky if she wished. Orin said the Moms was herself originally from rural Québec. Joelle was on her seventh glass of wine. Orin’s fingering his half-Windsor kept looking more and more like a signal to somebody. Avril urged Dr. Incandenza to find a way to include Joelle in a production, since she was both a film student and a now a heartily welcome honorary addition to the family. Mario, reaching for the salad, fell out of his chair, and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity. Mario’s deformities seemed wide-ranging and hard to name. Joelle decided he looked like a cross between a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg’s old special-effects orgies about reptiles. Hal and Avril hashed out whether misspoke was a bona fide word. Dr. Incandenza’s tall narrow head kept inclining toward his plate and then slowly rising back up in a way that was either meditative or tipsy. Deformed Mario’s broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners of it. In a fake Southern-belle accent that was clearly no jab at Joelle, more like a Scarlett O’Hara accent, Avril said she did declare that Albertan champagne always gave her ‘the vapors.’ Joelle noticed that pretty much everybody at the table was smiling, broadly and constantly, eyes shiny in the plants’ odd light. She was doing it herself, too, she noticed; her cheek muscles were starting to ache. Hal’s larger friend kept pausing to use his dental stimulator. Nobody else was using their dental stimulator, but everyone held one politely, as if getting ready to use it. Hal and the two friends made odd spasmic one-handed squeezing motions, periodically. No one seemed to notice. Not once in Orin’s presence did anyone mention the word tennis. He had been up half the previous night vomiting with anxiety. Now he challenged Hal to name the freezing-point of platinum. Joelle couldn’t for the life of her remember either of the names of poor old Spielberg’s old computer-enhanced celluloid dinosaur things, though her own Daddy’d personally taken her to each one. At some point Orin’s father got up to go freshen his drink and never returned.

  Just before dessert — which was on fire — Orin’s Moms had asked whether they could perhaps all join hands secularly for a moment and simply be grateful for all being together. She made a special point of asking Joelle to include her hands in the hand-holding. Joelle held Orin’s hand and Hal’s smaller friend’s hand, which was so callused up it felt like some sort of rind. Dessert was Cherries Jubilee with gourmet New Brunswick ice cream. Dr. Incandenza’s absence from the table went unmentioned, almost unnoticed, it seemed. Both Hal and his nonstimulating friend pleaded for Kahlua, and Mario flapped pathetically at the tabletop in imitation. Avril made a show of gazing at Orin in mock-horror as he produced a cigar and clipper. There was also a blancmange. The coffee was decaf with chickory. When Joelle looked over again, Orin had put his cigar away without lighting it.

  The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill.

  Joelle’d felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady’s grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts’ pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle’s pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.

  On the way back home, in a cab whose company’s phone-number Hal had summoned from memory, Orin hung his leg over Joelle’s crossed legs and said that if anybody could have been counted on to see that the Stork needed to use Joelle somehow, it was the Moms. He asked Joelle twice how she’d liked her. Joelle’s cheek muscles ached something awful. When they got back to the brownstone co-op on that last pre-Subsidized Thanksgiving was the first historical time Joelle intentionally did lines of cocaine to keep from sleeping. Orin couldn’t ingest anything during the season even if he wanted to: B.U.’s major-sport teams Tested randomly. So Joelle was awake at 0400, cleaning back behind the refrigerator for the second time, when Orin cried out in the nightmare she’d somehow felt should have been hers.

  Shaking to the confidence of his judgment of these persons, the one Marathe had believed a desperate addict was revealed as the woman in authority for the demi-maison of Ennet. The clipboarded woman was a mere subaltern. Marathe very seldom misjudged persons or their roles.

  The woman in authority was negative on the telephone. ‘No, no. No,’ she said into the telephone. ‘No.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ she spoke to Marathe over the telephone’s speaker without placing the hand of privacy over the speaker. ‘This won’t take a second. No she can’t, Mars. Promises don’t matter. She’s promised before. How many times. No. Mars, because it’ll end up hurting us again and just enabling her.’ The other side’s man’s voice came loudly, and the authority stopped a sobbing with the back of her wrist, then stiffened. Marathe watched expressionlessly. He had the great fatigue, a time at which English was straining. There were dogs upon the floor. ‘I know, but no. For today, no. Next time she calls, ask her to call me here. Yes.’

  She deactivated this transmission and stared at her top of the desk for a moment. Two dogs lay on the floor between her chair and Marathe’s fauteuil, one dog of which was licking its private organs. Marathe stifled a shudder and pulled up his blanket slightly, hunching to minimalize the musculature of health of his upper torso, also.

  ‘Good night…,’ Marathe began. ‘Well, don’t go,’ the woman of authority ejaculated from coming out of her reverie of sadness, giving her seat the rotation to face him. She tried to smile in the professional manner of U.S.A. ‘After you waited all that time out there. I saw you sharing with Selwyn. Selwyn tends to show up whenever we’re doing group intakes.’

  ‘Me, I think he suffers with mental illness.’ Marathe noticed one leg of the woman was thinner by far of her other leg. He was being driven distracted also by this habit to pretend to sniff. The false sniffs came from nowhere.

  She crossed these legs. Two autos’ horns mightily blew upon the avenue far beyond the concave window of her desk.

  ‘This Selwyn, he advised me to stroke your animals, which I have regret but I will not.’

  This woman quietly laughed and leaned forward above the crossed legs. In addition, one of the dogs had flatulence. ‘You listed your citizenship as Swiss.’

  ‘I am a residing alien addicted to smack, to scag, and to H, seeking desperately the residential treatment.’

  ‘But legally residing? With a Green Card? An O.I.N.S. 311 Residency Code?’

  Marathe from his sportcoat produced the documents M. DuPlessis had arranged with foresight in the long past.

  ‘Disabled, also. Also deformed,’ Marathe said, shrugging stoically, inclining his veil at the dark carpet.

  The woman was examining his O.I.N.S. documents with the pursed mouth and face for poker of O.N.A.N. authorities in all places. One of her hands was twisted in the manner of a claw. ‘We all come in with issues, Henry,’ she said.

  ‘Henri. Pardon. Henri.’

  Some woman just outside the door near the demi-maison’s front door, she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon. Wet sounds were audible from beneath the rear leg of the dog with private organs, of which the head hid beneath the raised leg. The woman of authority had to support the body by placing the hands on the desk to rise and unlock and lift the door of a black metal cabinet over her TP and console of her desk. The door of old black metal lifted outward. Marathe committed to memory the model numbers of this teleputer, which was Indonesian and of cheap cost.

  ‘Well Henri, Ennet House, in the years I’ve been on Staff here, we’ve had aliens, resident aliens, E.S.L.’s whose English was worse than yours by a long shot.’ She stood on the thicker leg to reach into this cabinet deeply for some item. Marathe took the opportunity of her inattention to commit to his memory the office’s facts. The office’s door had a decoration of a triangle within a circle, and
no bolt of death for locking, but merely a sadly cheap recess-lock in the knob. Nowhere the small nozzle of standard 10.525 GHz microwave alarming. The large windows had no small ends of wires about their frames. This left the possibility only of a magnet-contact alarm, which if so was difficult to jumper but also possible. Marathe felt himself missing his wife intensely, which always signalled his deep fatigue. Twice he sniffed.

  The woman was speaking into the cabinet to him: ‘… get you to sign some releases for me so we can make copies of your O.I.N.S. proofs and get an Outtake faxed from your detox, which was in…?’

  ‘The Chit Chat Farms Rehabilitation of Pennsylvania State. Last month.’ The A.F.R.’s data liaison in Montreal had promised to arrange all records without some delay.

  ‘In, what, Wernersdale, something?’

  Marathe cocked his veiled head ever so slightly. ‘Wernersberg of Pennsylvania.’

  ‘Well we know Chit Chat, we’ve had some Chit Chat graduates come through the House. Highest… respect.’ Her head was inside the cabinet, with an arm. It appeared difficult for her to rummage inside the cabinet and keep at the same time her balance. Deciding the bay windows were the optimal office’s entry if required, Marathe looked at the woman’s attempt to balance and the old cabinet. Then he blinked slowly. In this cabinet visibly, in twin stacks near the front of the open cabinet, were many cartridges of TP entertainment.

  The woman said ‘And we’ve been Disabled-Accessible since the beginning. One of only a handful of Houses in the metro area that are fully equipped to take disabled clients, I assume they told you down at Chit Chat.’ The wall banged with the impact of boisterousness in the outside room, and somebody either laughed or was in pain. Marathe sniffed. The woman was continuing to speak: ‘… why I got to come here in the first place. Which I came in in a chair, too, originally, by the way.’ She teetered back out from the cabinet with a folder of Manila. ‘At the time I declared up and down I was too disabled to kneel and pray, to give you an idea of where I was at.’ She laughed gaily. She was attractive.