Infinite Jest
Page 121
— No, that Madame Psychosis’s guilt over the Auteur’s felo de self had nothing to do with the purportedly lethal Infinite Jest (V) or (VI), which as far as Madame Psychosis had determined from the filming itself was little more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty. That, no, rather the consuming guilt had been over the condition that the Auteur suspend the ingestion of spirits, which it turned out, M.P. had claimed in deluded hindsight, had been all that was keeping the man’s tether ravelled, the ingestion, such that without it he was unable to withstand the psychic pressures that pushed him over the edge into what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes referred to as quote ‘self-erasure.’
— That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur’s body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse’s widow-to-be — who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willing to give up spirits quote ‘for her’ but had apparently been willing to give them up quote ‘for’ Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus.
— That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her (Madame Psychosis) hideously and improbably deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed’s 13-Step self-help organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse.
— That the intolerable stresses leading to the Auteur’s self-erasure had probably way less to do with film or digital art — this Auteur’s anti-confluential approach to the medium having always struck Molly Notkin as being rather aloof and cerebrally technical, to say nothing of naïvely post-Marxist in its self-congratulatory combination of anamorphic fragmentation and anti-Picaresque 331 narrative stasis — or with having allegedly spawned some angelic monster of audience-gratification — anyone with a nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment was pretty low on the late filmmaker’s list of priorities — but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur’s son and Madame’s craven lover, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time.
— That thus — with the Promethean-guilt angle on the Auteur’s suicide cast into serious doubt — there was little question in A.B.D.-Dr. Notkin’s mind that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-Liebestod myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze’s posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment, which she’d be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp’s white fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly against the lamp’s conic metal shade, if they’d promise to return it and not mark it up.
— That — in response to respectful but pointed requests to keep the responses on some sort of factual track and spare them all the eggheaded abstractions — Madame Psychosis’s deforming trauma, in its combination of coincidence and malefic intention, had been like something right out of the Auteur’s most ghastly and unresolvable proto-incestuous disaster films, e.g. The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, and The Unfortunate Case of Me. That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been extremely and heart-warmingly close to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit, who’d apparently had an extremely close only-child and watching-movies-together-based relationship with his own mother and seemed to reenact the closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her to movies on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid-South for various junior baton-twirling competitions while his wife, Madame Psychosis’s mother, a devoutly religious but wounded and neurasthenic woman with a fear of public spaces, stayed home on the family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the administration of the farm, etc. But that things had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered puberty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis’s toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis’s father interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified.
— That — to cut to a chase which the interviewers’ hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp’s bulb with a much higher wattage signified they’d very much like to see cut to — as is often the case, it wasn’t until Madame Psychosis got to college and gradually acquired some psychic distance and matter for emotional comparison that she even began to see how creepy her reagent-Daddy’s regression had been, and not until a certain major-sport-star son’s autograph on a punctured football inspired more e-mailed suspicion and sarcasm than gratitude from home in KY that she began even to suspect that her lack of social life throughout puberty might have had as much to do with her Daddy’s intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing pubescent charms. That — pausing briefly to spell actaeonizing — the shit had hit the intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis brought the Auteur’s little rotter of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy’s infantilizing conduct of her and her mother’s wordless compulsive canning and cooking, not to mention the terrific tension that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of the stuffed animals out of her room to make room for the Auteur’s son, in short experiencing her home and Daddy through the comparative filter of enmeshment with the Auteur’s son brought Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable; and that it had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when the low-pH Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis’s plate’s turkey for her but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative eyebrows of the Auteur’s son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question of why, with her now of legal age and living with a male and retired from childhood’s twirling and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the film-camera, did her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin’s secondhand take on the emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels she can state w/ confidence that it’s plausibly a case of any kind of system that’s been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure’s such that it’s almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH Daddy’s enormous str
ess had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his grown daughter’s white meat between his tines, in the confession that he’d been secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her, wouldn’t, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he’d escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and disguisability of his pure love hadn’t been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had been juvenile and sexless, but that at the onset of puberty and nubility the pressure’d become so great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an age of incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his denial of her maturation must have seemed — even though neither the daughter nor mother, even now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial and creepiness, although the man’s beloved pointers were given to whimper and scratch at the door when the denial had gotten especially creepy (animals being way more sensitive than humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin’s experience) — had raised his internal limbic system’s pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and that he’d been hanging on for dear life for the past nigh on now a decade, but that now that he’d had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. from her ballerina-wallpapered room to make space for a nonrelated mature male whose physical vigor through the peephole the Daddy’d exerted every gram of trembling will he’d possessed trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above the mirror over the sink whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame Psychosis’s room’s bed sing and clunk, and through which, late at night — claiming to Mother a case of skitters from all the holiday nibbles — hunched atop the sink, every night since Madame Psychosis and the Auteur’s son had first arrived to sleep together in the unstuffed-animaled bed of a childhood through which he’d been all but tortured by the purity of his impossible love for the —
— That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis’s mother’s fork and then whole plate had clattered to the floor, and that amid the sounds of the pointers under the table fighting over that plate the mother’s own denial-system’s pressure blew, and she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that she’d known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated her suspicions and placed them under great pressure in the bell-jar of her own denial, because, she admits — admits is probably less accurate than something like keens or shrieks or jabbers — that her own father — an itinerant camp-meeting preacher — had molested her and her sister all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she’d married at just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she’d married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his daughter.
— That she’d said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before God and man.
— That whereupon she’d reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down to the Daddy’s acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid.
— That the Daddy’d kept a world-class collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks on wooden shelves down in the cellar.
— That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid.
— That Madame Psychosis’s name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy’s name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.
— That, despite the little rotter’s professions of self-recrimination for allowing the deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis increasingly untenable, it didn’t take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to figure out why the fellow’d given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the traumatic deformity, now did it.
— That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone’s failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home’s kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal — first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm. 332
The most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting listed in the little white Metro-Boston Recovery Options 333 booklet the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as ‘Q.R.S.–32A.’ Hal, who had no last class period, rushed through P.M.’s, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.’s were even warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight’s lemon chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn’t sure why, since it didn’t seem to be any kind of slobbering inability to abstain that was the problem — he hadn’t had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The issue’s the horrific way his head’s felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope. 334 It wasn’t just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal’s eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You’re UP I’ve Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn’t let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7’s of feeling wretched and bereft.
Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill and took the tow truck up Comm. Ave. to the C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond, the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit Boylston St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St. became shunpike Rte. 9, the major west-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal I–90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27.
Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the sky’s combustionish orange had deepened to the hellish crimson of a fire’s last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after, and Hal’s spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics Anonymous Meeting thing out.
Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps were set so senselessly high on the truck’s grille.
The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and not returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then cancelled a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown. NPR had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects — George Will’s lary
ngectomy-prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He ate two of three $4.00 bran muffins he’d whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet bakery, grimacing as he swallowed because he’d forgotten a tonic to wash them down, then put in a mammoth plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA glass, which fit neatly in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and passed the last fifteen minutes of the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word Anonymous, all the way he supposed from the Æolic öνγa through Thynne’s B.S. 1580s reference to ‘anonymall Chronicals’; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English on-áne, which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf’s eventual standard inversion to the classic anon, maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. ’35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there’d been such a lengthy entry in the Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn’t had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over. Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he’d ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn’t (so far) compromised, the withdrawal’s effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.