Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘Troeltsch says she all she wants to do is soften Orin’s profile.’

  ‘The hideous thing is how brightly it’d come out, if I flunk a urine. E.T.A.’ll be publicly hurt. Hence Himself’s memory, hence Himself.’

  ‘…’

  ‘And it’d kill the Moms, Mario. It’d be a terrible kertwang on the Moms. Not so much the Hope. The secrecy of it. That I hid it from her. That she’ll feel I had to hide it from her.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘Something terrible will happen if she finds out I hid it from her.’

  ‘Thirty days is one calendar month of Calli tea and juice, you’re saying.’

  ‘Of tea and vinegar and total abstinence. Of no substances whatsoever. Of abrupt and total withdrawal while I try to justify my seed at the WhataBurger and maybe get offered up to Wayne at the Fundraiser. And then your birthday in two weeks.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘Jesus and then the SAT’s in December, I’ll have to finish prepping for the Boards and then take the Boards while still in abrupt withdrawal.’

  ‘You’ll get a perfect score. Everybody’s betting you get a perfect score. I’ve heard them.’

  ‘Marvelous. That’s just exactly what I need to hear.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘And of course you’re hurt, Boo, that I’ve tried to hide all of it from you.’

  ‘I’m zero percent hurt, Hal.’

  ‘And of course you’re wondering why I didn’t just tell you when of course you knew anyway, knew something, the times hanging upside-down in the weight room with a forehead Lyle didn’t even want to get near. You sitting there letting me say I was just really really tired and nightmare-ridden.’

  ‘I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it’s right to.’

  ‘Marvelous.’

  ‘I feel like you’re the only one who knows when it’s right to tell. I can’t know for you, so why should I be hurt.’

  ‘Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.’

  ‘I wasn’t hurt. I don’t want you to be sad.’

  ‘You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It’s called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn’t mean they’ll go away. You don’t have to put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One liar’s enough.’

  ‘You’re scared your pee might still flunk after one calendar month.’

  ‘Jesus it’s like talking to a big poster of some smily-faced guy. Are you in there?’

  ‘And you can’t use a Visine bottle of pee because the man will be right there looking at your penis, and Trevor and Pemulis’s penises.’

  ‘. …’

  ‘The sun’s thinking about coming up in the window. You can see it.’

  ‘It’s been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I’m bats inside and I can’t sleep without more of the horror-show dreams. I feel like I’m stuck halfway down a chimney.’

  ‘You beat Ortho, and your toothache’s gone.’

  ‘Pemulis and Axhandle say a month’ll be tit. Pemulis’s only concern is is this DMZ he got for the WhataBurger detectable. He goes to the library and pores. He’s fully alert and functional. 321 It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.’

  ‘So what do you think you should do?’

  ‘And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I’ll fly apart in midair. I’ll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I’m different. Whom I’ve lied to, and liked it. It’ll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘And it’ll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, Booboo, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Hey Hal? What are you going to do?’

  ‘…’

  ‘Hal?’

  ‘Booboo, I’m up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I should do.’

  ‘Me tell you?’

  ‘I’m just two big aprick ears right here, Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what to do.’

  ‘Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a fucking?’

  ‘I trust you. You’re smart, Boo.’

  ‘Then Hal?’

  ‘Tell me what I should do.’

  ‘I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Do you see what I mean?’

  17 NOVEMBER

  YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

  In Don Gately’s medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts on Dream Duty and was in the front office just after 0830 writing up the previous night in the Log, trying to think of synonyms for boredom and periodically dipping a finger in her scalding coffee to stay awake, plus listening to distant toilets flush and showers hiss and residents clunking sleepily around in the kitchen and dining room and everything like that, when somebody all of a sudden starts knocking at the House’s front door, which meant that the person was like a newcomer or stranger, since people in the Ennet House recovery community know that the front door’s unlocked at 0800 and always completely open to all but the Law as of 0801.

  The residents these days all know not to answer any knocks at the door themselves.

  So Johnette F. at first thought it might be some more of those kind of police 322 that wore suits and ties, come to depose more residents as witnesses on the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian fuck-up and everything like that; and Johnette got out the clipboard with the names of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed to be put upstairs out of sight before any police were let on the premises. A couple of the residents on the list were in the dining room in full view, eating cereal and smoking. Johnette carried the clipboard as a kind of emblem of authority as she went to the window by the front door to check out the knocking party and everything like that.

  And but the kid at the door there was no way he was police or court-personnel, and Johnette opened the unlocked door and let him in, not bothering to explain that nobody had to knock. It was an upscale kid about Johnette’s own age or slightly less, coughing against the foyer’s pall of A.M. smoke, saying he wanted to speak in comparative private to someone in whatever passed here for authority, he said. This kid he had the sort of cool aluminum sheen of an upscale kid, a kid with either a weird tan or a weird windburn on top of a tan, and just the whitest Nike hightops Johnette had ever seen, and ironed jeans, as in with like a crease down the front, and a weird woolly-white jacket with A.T.E. in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other, and slicked-back dark hair that was wet, as in showered and not oil, and had half frozen, the hair, in the early outside cold and was standing up straight and frozen in front, making his dark face look small. His ears looked inflamed from the cold. Johnette appraised him coolly, digging at her ear with a pinkie. She watched the boy’s face as David Krone came scuttling over like a crab and blinked at the boy upside-down a few times and scuttled around and up the stairs, his forehead clunking against each stair. It was pretty obvious the boy wasn’t any resident’s like homey or boyfriend come to give somebody a ride to work or like that. The way the boy looked and stood and talked and everything like that radiated high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody carried weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from the planet of Johnette Marie Foltz of South Chelsea and then the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility for Demonstrably Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton; and in Pat’s office, with the door only half shut, Johnette gave her face the blandly hostile expression she wore around upscale boys with no tatts and all their teeth that outside of NA wouldn’t have interest in her or might view her lack of front teeth and nose-pin as evidence of they were like better than her and like that, somehow. It emerged this kid did
n’t seem like he had enough emotional juice to be interested in judging anybody or even noticing them, however. His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all too wicked well, the quality of somebody who’d just lately put down the pipe and/or bong. The kid’s hair was starting to melt in the heat of Pat’s office and drip and settle on his head like a slashed tire, causing that his face got bigger. He looked a little like what the fourth Mrs. Foltz had called green around the gills. The boy stood there very straight with his hands behind his back and said he lived nearby and had for some time been interested in sort of an idle, largely speculative way in considering maybe dropping in on some sort of Substance Anonymous meeting and everything like that, basically as just something to do, the exact same roundabout Denial shit as persons without teeth, and said but he didn’t know where any were, any Meetings, or when, and but knew The Ennet House 323 was nearby, that dealt directly with Anonymous organizations of this sort, and was wondering whether he maybe could have — or borrow and Xerox and promptly return by either eor fax or First-Class mail, whichever they might prefer — some sort of relevant meeting schedule. He apologized for intruding and said but he didn’t know whom else to call. The sort of guy like Ewell and Day and snotty look-right-through-you-if-you-weren’t-a-fucking-covergirl Ken E. that knew how to long-divide and say whom but didn’t even know how to look up shit in the Yellow Pages.

  Much later, in subsequent events’ light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy’s frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing. 324

  Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. (‘the G.’) Tine 325 really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview’s subject, whose homburg and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request. And it was this, the harsh light on her fully exposed post-Marxist face, more than any kind of tough noir -informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer, that prompted M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in the Sidney Peterson–shaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op’s darkened and lock-dickied living room, to spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell everything she believed she knew: 326

  — Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza’s lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn’t make too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding a knife during this monologue, and the film’s big technical hook (the Auteur’s films always involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very unusual kind of single lens on the Bolex H32’s turret, 327 and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant, because the real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had seen her naked, 328 and you can always tell if a woman’s ever carried anything past the first trimester if you look at her naked. 329

  — Molly Notkin tells them that Madame Psychosis’s own mother had killed herself in a truly ghastly way with an ordinary kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of Thanksgiving Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before the film’s Auteur himself had killed himself, also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly, which she says though any Lincoln-Kennedy-type connections between the two suicides will have to be ferreted out by the interviewers on their own, since as far as Molly Notkin knew the two different parents didn’t even know of each other’s existence.

  — That the lethal cartridge’s digital Bolex H32 camera — already a Rube-Goldbergesque amalgam of various improvements and digital adaptations to the already modification-heavy classic Bolex H16 Rex 5 — a Canadian line, by the way, favored throughout his whole career by the Auteur because its turret could accept three different C-mount lenses and adapters — that Infinite Jest (V) or (VI)’s had been fitted with an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens, and lay during filming on either the floor or like a cot or bed, the camera, with Madame Psychosis as the Death-Mother figure inclined over it, parturient and nude, talking down to it — in both senses of the word, which from a critical perspective would introduce into the film a kind of synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the subjective camera — explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

  — Molly Notkin tells them she could be far more helpful and forth-comingly detailed if only they’d switch that beastly lamp off or train it someplace else, which is a brass-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays right on Molly Notkin’s glabrous unhappy face.

  — That Madame Psychosis and the film’s Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, and for reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur’s belief in a finite world-total of available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden. That in fact Madame Psychosis had loved and been sexually enmeshed only with the Auteur’s son, who, though Molly Notkin never encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis had taken care never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little rotter as one would find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, emotional chicanery, and rot.

  — That Madame Psychosis had been present neither at the Auteur’s suicide nor at his funeral. That she’d missed the funeral because her passport had expired. That nor had Madame Psychosis been present at the reading of the late Auteur’s will, despite the fact that she was one of the beneficiaries. That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned the fate or present disposition of the unreleased cartridge entitled either Infinite Jest (V) or Infinite Jest (VI), and had described it only from the perspective of the experience of performing in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even entertaining, let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether — the Auteur having apparently been extremely close to his own mother, in childhood — and had no doubt been recognized as such by the Auteur — who though not exactly the psychic sea’s steadiest keel had been in many respects an acute reader and critic of film, and would have been able to distinguish the real filmic McCoy from pathetic cries veiled as film no matter how wildly his nautical compass was spinning around, on its tether, and would in all probability have destroyed the Master Print of the failed piece of art, the same way he’d reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed attempts at the same piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser mystique and allure.

  — That the Auteur’s funeral had purportedly taken place in the L’Islet Province of Nouveau Québec, the birth-province of the Auteur’s widow, featuring an interrment and not a cremation.

  — That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business, but why not simply go
to J.O.I.’s widow and verify directly the existence and location of the purported cartridge?

  —…

  — That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur’s widow had any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin’s heard the woman didn’t have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually neurotic agendas, even though she came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and solicitous. That Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow struck her as very possibly Death incarnate — her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic figure — and that it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine instantiations of Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot, the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty even in her late forties.

  — That the Auteur had stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psychosis’s personal condition for consenting to appear in what she knew to be her but did not know to be the J.O.I.’s final film-cartridge, and that the Auteur had, apparently, incredibly, 330 kept his side of the bargain — possibly because he’d been so deeply moved at M.P.’s consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son’s despicable abandonment of the relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being sexually enmeshed with their — here Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say his — father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for the whole next three-and-a-half months, from Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the date of his suicide.

  — That the completely secret and hidden substance-abuse problem, the one that had now landed Madame Psychosis in an elite private dependency-treatment facility so elite that not even M.P.’s closest friends knew where it was beyond knowing only that it was someplace far, very far away, that the abuse-problem could have been nothing but a consequence of the terrible guilt Madame Psychosis felt over the Auteur’s suicide, and constituted a clear unconscious compulsion to punish herself with the same sort of substance-abuse activity she had coerced the Auteur into stopping, merely substituting narcotics for Wild Turkey, which Molly Notkin could attest was some very gnarly-tasting liquor indeed.