Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘How was your own day, I want to hear.’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘I determined years ago that my position needs to be that I trust my children, and I’d never traffic in third-party hearsay when the lines of communication with my children are as open and judgment-free as I’m fortunate they are.’

  ‘That seems like a really good position. Hey Moms?’

  ‘So I have no problem waiting to hear about Eschaton, teeth, and urine from your brother, who’ll come to me the moment it’s appropriate for him to come to me.’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘I’m right here, Love-o.’

  Tycoon is the term her commanding way of sitting suggests, grasping her chair, a pen clamped in her teeth like a businessman’s cigar. There were other carpet-prints in the heavy shag.

  ‘Moms?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I ask you a thing?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘This is off,’ again indicating the silent apparatus on his head. ‘Is this a confidential thing, then?’

  ‘There isn’t any secret. My day was I was wondering about something. In my mind.’

  ‘I’m right here for you anytime day or night, Mario, as you are for me, as I am for Hal and we all are for each other.’ She gestures in a hard-to-describe way. ‘Right here.’

  ‘Moms?’

  ‘I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.’

  ‘How can you tell if somebody’s sad?’

  A quick smile. ‘You mean whether someone’s sad.’

  A smile back, but still earnest: ‘That improves it a lot. Whether someone’s sad, how can you tell so you’re sure?’

  Her teeth are not discolored; she gets them cleaned at the dentist all the time for the smoking, a habit she despises. Hal inherited the dental problems from Himself; Himself had horrible dental problems; half his teeth were bridges.

  ‘You’re not exactly insensitive when it comes to people, Love-o,’ she says.

  ‘What if you, like, only suspect somebody’s sad. How do you reinforce the suspicion?’

  ‘Confirm the suspicion?’

  ‘In your mind.’ Some of the prints in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are different, almost like knuckles. His lordotic posture makes him acute and observant about things like carpet-prints.

  ‘How would I, for my part, confirm a suspicion of sadness in someone, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Good. All right.’

  ‘Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or rend his or her garments.’

  Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. ‘But say in a case where they don’t weep or rend. But you still have a suspicion which they’re sad.’

  She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine cigar. ‘He or she might alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile halfheartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at the floor more than is appropriate.’

  ‘But what if they don’t?’

  ‘Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous interests. The person may present with what appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to engage you. Torpor.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally “low.” ’

  Mario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression the sort of mangled one that expresses puzzlement, an attempt to reason out something hard. Pemulis called it Mario’s Data-Search Face, which Mario liked.

  ‘What if sometime they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions are in your mind.’

  She’s about the same height sitting as Mario upright and leaning forward. Now neither of them is quite looking at the other, both just a couple degrees off. Avril taps the pen against her front teeth. Her phone light is blinking, but there’s no ringing. The thing’s handset’s antenna still points at Mario. Her hands are not her age. She hoists the executive chair back slightly to cross her legs.

  ‘Would you feel comfortable telling me whether we’re discussing a particular person?’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘Is there someone specific in whom you’re intuiting sadness?’

  ‘Moms?’

  ‘Is this about Hal? Is Hal sad and for some reason not yet able to speak about it?’

  ‘I’m just saying how to be generally sure.’

  ‘And you have no idea where he is or whether he left the grounds this evening sad?’

  Lunch today was the exact same as lunch yesterday: pasta with tuna and garlic, and thick wheaty bread, and required salad, and milk or juice, and pears in juice in a dish. Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off because when she came in this morning Pemulis at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there’d been brooms on the wall in an X of brooms, out of nowhere, on the wall, when she’d come in very early to fire up the Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowing how the brooms were there or why or who glued them on had upset Mrs. Clarke’s nerves, who’d been with the Incandenzas since long before E.T.A., and had nerves.

  ‘I didn’t see Hal since lunchtime. He had an apple he cut into chunks and put peanut butter on, instead of pears in juice.’

  Avril nods with vigor.

  ‘LaMont didn’t know either. Mr. Schtitt is asleep in his chair in his room. Hey Moms?’

  Avril Incandenza can switch a Bic from one side of her mouth to the other without using her hand; she never knows she’s doing it when she’s doing it. ‘Whether or not we’re discussing anyone in particular, then.’

  Mario smiles at her.

  ‘Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’

  ‘I don’t know disassociation.’

  ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’

  ‘Engulf means obliterate.’

  ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’

  She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her.

  She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could hims
elf tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’

  She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk. A couple odd long crinkly paper strips of bright red hung over the side of the wastebasket, which was normally totally empty and clean.

  Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn’t ever quite world-class, shiny-magazine-class beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other beautiful women age too and get less beautiful. She’s 56 years old, and Mario gets pleasure out of just getting to look at her face, still. She doesn’t think she’s pretty, he knows. Orin and Hal both have parts of her prettiness in different ways. Mario likes to look at Hal and at their mother and try to see just what slendering and spacing of different features makes a woman’s face different from a man’s, in attractive people. A male face versus a face you can just tell is female. Avril thinks she’s much too tall to be pretty. She’d seemed much less tall when compared to Himself, who was seriously tall. Mario wears small special shoes, almost perfectly square, with weights at the heel and Velcro straps instead of laces, and a pair of the corduroys Orin Incandenza had worn in elementary school, which Mario still favors and wears instead of brand-new pants he’s given, and a warm crewneck sweater that’s striped like a flea.

  ‘My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o. It’s sometimes called “suppression,” ’ with the fingers out to the sides again. ‘Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful. For the hypothetical person in question. There may be sad people right here at the Academy who are like this, Mario, and perhaps you’re sensitive to it. You are not exactly insensitive when it comes to people.’

  Mario scratches his lip again.

  She says ‘What I’ll do’ — leaning forward to write something on a Post-It note with a different pen than the one she has in her mouth — ‘is to write down for you the terms disassociation, engulfment, and suppression, which I’ll put next to another word, repression, with an underlined unequal sign between them, because they denote entirely different things and should not be regarded as synonyms.’

  Mario shifts slightly forward. ‘Sometimes I get afraid when you forget you have to talk more simply to me.’

  ‘Well then I’m both sorry for that and grateful that you can tell me about it. I do forget things. Particularly when I’m tired. I forget and just get going.’ Lining the edges up and folding the little sticky note in half and then half again and dropping it into the wastebasket without having to look for where the wastebasket is. Her chair is a fine executive leather swivelling chair but it shrieks a little when she leans back or forward. Mario can tell she’s making herself not look at her watch, which is all right.

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  ‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’

  ‘Moms, I think I get it.’

  ‘Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?’

  She’s risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot.

  So her back is almost to him as she stands there at the little sideboard. An old folded pair of U.S.A. football pants and a helmet are on top of one of the file cabinets by the flag. Her one memento of Orin, who won’t talk to them or contact them in any way. She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high field of wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD. A blue blazer with an O.N.A.N.T.A. insignia is hung very neatly and straight on a wooden hanger from the metal tree of the coatrack in the corner. She’s always had her coffee out of the OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston. The Moms hangs up stuff like shirts and blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive. The mug has a hair-thin brown crack down one side, but it’s not dirty or stained, and she never gets lipstick on the rim the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups’ rims.

  Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens. His father and later Hal had changed him for years, never once judging or wrinkling their face or acting upset or sad.

  ‘But except hey Moms?’

  ‘I’m still right here.’

  Avril couldn’t change diapers. She’d come to him in tears, he’d been seven, and explained, and apologized. She just couldn’t handle diapers. She just couldn’t deal with them. She’d sobbed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood it didn’t mean she didn’t love him to death or find him repellent.

  ‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’

  She especially likes to hold the coffee’s mug in both hands. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’

  One thing that’s happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she doesn’t follow you. Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same little line, and she’s twenty-eight. ‘I don’t follow you. How can someone be too much himself?’

  ‘I think I wanted to ask you that.’

  ‘Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?’

  ‘Hey Moms?’

  She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. ‘Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether I’ve been sensing that you yourself are sad?’

  Mario’s gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the Bolex’s foot-treadle with his hands, if necessary. The Center Courts’ towering lights cast an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin high clouds whose movement’s pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the faint reflections of the lit room, and up, the tennis lights’ odd small lumes like criss-crossing spots.

  ‘Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume you’d simply come and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.’

  And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’ headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its
spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.

  The dark had a distanceless shape. The room’s ceiling might as well have been clouds.

  ‘Skkkkk.’

  ‘Booboo?’

  ‘Skk-kkk.’

  ‘Mario.’

  ‘Hal!’

  ‘Were you asleep there, Boo?’

  ‘I don’t think I was.’

  ‘Cause I don’t want to wake you up if you were.’

  ‘Is it dark or is it me?’

  ‘The sun won’t be up for a while, I don’t think.’

  ‘So it’s dark then.’

  ‘Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’

  ‘You were saying “Thank you Sir may I have another” several times.’

  ‘Sorry Boo.’

  ‘Numerous times.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I think I slept right through it.’

  ‘Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores’ vibrations in your midsection.’

  ‘I slept right through it. I didn’t hear you even come in.’

  ‘Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in his rack again.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I hope you didn’t move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’

  ‘I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don’t know to borrow tapes, if we’re both devoted.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dryrotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’