Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  Hal’s chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This is one of those men’s-issues-Men’s-Movement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle’s stepdad went to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick’s grip poke out between his legs and yelling ‘Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!’

  Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear’s head and saying it didn’t look like his Inner Infant would ever get its wish. The gooey music’s cello sounds like some sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it’s in the middle of.

  Sure enough, the round man, whose hand’s left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor old Kevin Bain to honor and name his I.I.’s wounded wish anyway, to say ‘Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love and hold me,’ out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain goes ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good old adult mortified embarrassment to it, along with the racking sobs. A couple of the other men in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the arms of their teddy bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt County hydroponic marijuana that Pemulis occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile counterpart at the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so big and plump with high-Delta-9 resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The moist sounds right behind him turn out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Hal keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O. booklet the girl had given him. He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumbprints on several of the pages, and that two pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal fears is an ancient dried booger, and now that the booklet’s cover is dated January in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past, and that it’s not impossible that the blandly hostile toothless girl at The Ennet facility had kertwanged him by giving him a dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide.

  Kevin Bain keeps repeating ‘Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me’ in a kind of monotone of pathos. The gradually intensifying lisp in Please is apparently a performative invocation of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other fluids flow and roll. The warm round leader Harv’s own eyes are a moist glassy blue. The CD scanner’s cello is now into some sort of semi-jazzy pizzicato stuff that seems oxymoronic against the room’s mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell that signifies somebody nearby has some athlete’s-foot issues to confront, under his socks. Plus it’s mystifying that 32A has no windows, given all the smoky-brown fenestration Hal’d seen from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt’s beard is one of those small rectangular ones that’s easy to keep clear of the cup’s rim. The back and side of Kevin Bain’s hair has separated into spiky sweat-soaked strands, from the room’s heat and the Infant’s emotions.

  All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told K. Bain’s Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn’t automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn’t exactly sounded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn’t consider himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.

  The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks Kevin Bain if it feels to his Inner Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to appear cribside to meet his needs.

  ‘No,’ Kevin says very quietly. ‘No, it doesn’t, Harv.’

  The leader is idly arranging his bear’s splayed arms in different positions, so it looks like the bear’s either waving or surrendering. ‘Do you suppose you would be able to ask someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?’

  The back of Kevin Bain’s head doesn’t move. Hal’s whole digestive tract spasms at the prospect of watching two bearded adult males in sweaters and socks engage in surrogate Infant-hugging. He begins asking himself why he doesn’t just fake a hideous coughing fit and flee Q.R.S.-32A with his fist over his face.

  Harv’s now waggling the bear’s arms back and forth and making his voice high and cartoon-characterish and pretending to have his bear ask Kevin Bain’s bear if it would maybe point to the man in the group Kevin Bain would most like to have hold and nurture and love him in loco parentis. Hal’s spitting quietly down the side of his glass and brooding wretchedly at the fact that he’s driven fifty supperless clicks to listen to a globular man in plaid socks pretend his teddy bear’s speaking Latin when he looks up from the glass and is chilled to see that Kevin Bain has wiggled his Indian-style way around in his chair and is holding his bear way up by its underarms, just the way a father holds a toddler up for a public spect-op or parade, turning the throttled-looking bear this way and that, scanning the room — as Hal covers part of his face with a hand, pretending to scratch an eyebrow, praying not to be recognized — and finally manipulating the bear’s arm so the plump brown fuzzy fingerless hand of the bear’s pointing right in Hal’s direction. Hal doubles over in a coughing spasm only half-faked, running decision-trees on various ruses for flight.

  Just like his younger brother Marlon Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with a dark swart face. He looks sort of like an overdeveloped troll. And he has the same capacity for constant incredible sweating that always made Marlon Bain look to Hal, both on-court and off-, like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade. Except Kevin Bain’s little glittery Bain eyes are also red and swollen with public weeping, and he’s balding back from the temples in a way that gives him a widow’s peak like nobody’s business, and doesn’t seem to recognize a post-pubescent Hal, and is pointing his bear’s blunt hand Hal realizes finally after almost swallowing his plug of Kodiak not at Hal but at the mild-faced square-bearded older guy behind him, who’s holding a spoon of vividly pink yogurt in front of his bear’s open mouth, just touching its protruding tongue’s red corduroy, pretending to be feeding the bear. Hal very casually puts the NASA glass between his legs and gets both hands under his chair-seat and hops the chair bit by bit over and out of the lines of sight and transit between Kevin Bain and the yogurt man. Harv, up front, is making a complex hand-signal to the yogurt man not to speak or move from his back-row orange chair no matter what; and then, as Kevin Bain wriggles cross-legged back around to face front again, Harv smoothly turns the hand-signal into a motion like he’s smoothing his hair. The motion then becomes sincere and ruminative as the leader breathes deeply a couple of times. The music’s settled back into its original nodding narcosis.

  ‘Kevin,’ Harv says, ‘since this is a group exercise in passivity and Inner-Infant needs, and since you’ve selected Jim as the member of the group you need something from, we need you to ask Jim out loud to meet your needs. Ask him to come up and hold you and love you, since your parents aren’t ever coming. Not ever, Kevin.’

  Kevin Bain makes a mortified sound and reclamps a hand over his big swart face.

  ‘Go for it, Kev,’ somebody over near the Bly poster calls out.

  ‘We affirm and support you,’ says the guy by the filing cabinet.

  Hal now starts scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places he’d rather be right now. He’s not even up to Addis Ababa when Kevin Bain acquiesces and begins very softly and hesitantly asking the mild-faced Jim, who’s put aside his yogurt but not the bear, to please come up and love him and hold him. By the time Hal’s envisioned himself tumbling over American Falls at the Concavity’s southwest rim in a rusty old noxious-waste-displacement drum, Kevin Bain has asked Jim eleven progressively louder times to come nurture and hold him, to no avail. The older guy just sits there, clutching his yogurt-tongued bear, his expression somewhere between mild and blank.

  Hal has never actually seen projectil
e-weeping before. Bain’s tears are actually exiting his eyes and projecting outward several cm. before starting to fall. His facial expression is the scrunched spread one of a small child’s total woe, his neck-cords standing out and face darkening so that it looks like some sort of huge catcher’s mitt. A bright cape of mucus hangs from his upper lip, and his lower lip seems to be having some kind of epileptic fit. Hal finds the tantrum’s expression on an adult face sort of compelling. At a certain point hysterical grief becomes facially indistinguishable from hysterical mirth, it appears. Hal imagines watching Bain weep on a white beach through binoculars from the balcony of a cool dim Aruban hotel room.

  ‘He’s not coming!’ Kevin Bain finally keens to the leader.

  Harv the leader nods, scratching an eyebrow, and confirms that that seems to be the case. He pretends to stroke his imperial in puzzlement and asks rhetorically what might be the problem, why mild-faced Jim isn’t automatically coming when called.

  Kevin Bain’s just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration. He seems deeply into his Infant persona now, and Hal rather hopes these guys have procedures for getting Bain at least back to sixteen before he has to try to drive home. At some point a timpani has gotten involved in the CD’s music, and a rather saucy cornet, and the music’s finally started moving a little, toward what’s either a climax or the end of the disk.

  By now various men in the group have started crying out to Kevin Bain that his Inner Infant wasn’t getting its needs met, that sitting there passively asking for nurture to get up and come to him wasn’t getting the needs met, that Kevin owed it to his Inner Infant to come up with some sort of active way to meet the Infant’s needs. Somebody shouted out ‘Honor that Infant!’ Somebody else called ‘Meet those needs!’ Hal is mentally strolling down the Appian Way in bright Eurosunlight, eating a cannoli, twirling his Dunlop racquets by the throats like six-shooters, enjoying the sunshine and cranial silence and a normal salivary flow.

  Pretty soon the men’s supportive exhortations have distilled into everybody in the room except Harv, Jim and Hal chanting ‘Meet Those Needs! Meet Those Needs!’ in the same male-crowd-exhortative meter as ‘Hold That Line!’ or ‘Block That Kick!’

  Kevin Bain wipes his nose on his sleeve and asks humongous Harv the leader what he’s supposed to do to get his Infant’s needs met if the person he’s chosen to meet those needs won’t come.

  The leader has folded his hands over his belly and sat back, by this time, smiling, cross-legged, holding his tongue. His bear sits atop the protrusion of belly with its little blunt legs straight out, the way you’ll see a bear sitting on a shelf. It seems to Hal that the O2 in 32A is now getting used up at a ferocious clip. Not at all like the cool, sheep-scented breezes of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The men in the room are still chanting ‘Meet Those Needs!’

  ‘What you’re saying is I need to actively go over to Jim myself and ask him to hold me,’ Kevin Bain says, grinding at his eyes with his knuckles.

  The leader smiles blandly.

  ‘Instead of you’re saying passively trying to get Jim to come to me,’ says Kevin Bain, whose tears have largely stopped, and whose sweat has taken on the clammy shine of true fear-sweat.

  Harv emerges as one of these people who can heft one eyebrow and not the other. ‘It would take real courage and love and commitment to your Inner Infant to take the risk and go actively over to somebody that might give you what your Infant needs,’ he says quietly. The CD player has at some point shifted into an all-cello instrumental of ‘I Don’t Know (How to Love Him)’ from an old opera Lyle sometimes borrowed people’s players and listened to at night in the weight room. Lyle and Marlon Bain had been particularly tight, Hal recalls.

  The trimeter of the men’s chant has reduced to a one-foot low-volume ‘Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs’ as Kevin Bain slowly and hesitantly uncrosses his legs and rises from his orange chair, turning to face Hal and the motionless guy behind him, this Jim. Bain begins to move slowly toward them with the tortured steps of a mime miming walking against a tornadic gale. Hal’s picturing himself doing a lazy backstroke in the Azores, spouting glassy water up out of his mouth in a cytological plume. He’s leaning almost out of his chair, as far as possible out of Kevin Bain’s line of transit, studying the brown suspension in the bottom of his glass. His prayer not to be recognized by a regressive Kevin Bain is the first really desperate and sincere prayer Hal can remember offering since he’d stopped wearing pajamas with feet in them.

  ‘Kevin?’ Harv calls softly from the front of the room. ‘Is it you moving actively toward Jim, or should it be the Infant inside you, the one with the needs?’

  ‘Needs, Needs, Needs,’ the bearded men are chanting, some rhythmically raising their manicured fists in the air.

  Bain’s looking back and forth between Harv and Jim, chewing his finger indecisively.

  ‘Is this how an Infant moves towards its needs, Kevin?’ Harv says.

  ‘Go for it, Kevin!’ a full-bearded man calls out.

  ‘Let the Infant out!’

  ‘Let your Infant do the walking, Kev.’

  So Hal’s most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother’s doubles partner’s older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain’s knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.

  The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The place was affordable because it had a big ragged hole in the roof. Origin of hole unknown. Gately’s outsized crib had been in the beach house’s little living room, right under the hole. The guy that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick clear polyurethane sheeting across the room’s ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the hole. The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it. He couldn’t feel the right side of his upper body. He couldn’t move in any real sense of the word. The hospital room had that misty quality rooms in fevers have. Gately lay on his back. Ghostish figures materialized at the peripheries of his vision and hung around and then de-materialized. The ceiling bulged and receded. Gately’s own breath hurt his throat. His throat felt somehow raped. The blurred figure in the next bed sat up very still in bed in a sitting position and seemed to have a box on its head. Gately kept having a terrible repetitious ethnocentric dream that he was robbing the house of an Oriental and had the guy tied to a chair and was trying to blindfold him with quality mailing twine from the drawer under the Oriental’s kitchen phone. The Oriental kept being able to see around the twine and kept looking steadily at Gately and blinking inscrutably. Plus the Oriental had no nose or mouth, just a smooth expanse of lower-facial skin, and wore a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs.

  What Gately perceived as light-cycles and events all out of normal sequence was really Gately going in and out of consciousness. Gately did not perceive this. It seemed to him more like he kept coming up for air and then being pushed below the surface of something. Once when Gately came up for air he found that resident Tiny Ewell was seated in a chair right up next to the bed. Tiny’s little slim hand was on the bed’s crib-type rail
ing, and his chin rested on the hand, so his face was right up close. The ceiling bulged and receded. The room’s only light was what spilled in from the nighttime hall. Nurses glided down the hall and past the door in subsonic footwear. A tall and slumped ghostish figure appeared to Gately’s left, off past the blurred seated square-head boy’s bed, slumped and fluttering, appearing to rest its tailbone on the sill of the dark window. The ceiling rounded on down and then settled back flat. Gately rolled his eyes up at Ewell. Ewell had shaved off his blunt white goatee. His hair was so completely clean and white it took a faint pink cast from the pink of his scalp below. Ewell had been discoursing to him for an unknown length of time. It was Gately’s first full night in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. He didn’t know what night of the week it was. His circadian rhythm was the least of the personal rhythms that had been scrambled. His right side felt encased in a kind of hot cement. Also a sick throb in what he assumed was a toe. He wondered dimly about going to the bathroom, if and when. Ewell was right in the middle of speaking. Gately couldn’t tell if Ewell was whispering. Nurses glided across the doorway’s light. Their sneakers were so noiseless the nurses seemed to be on wheels. A stolid shadow of somebody in a hat was cast obliquely across the hall’s tile floor just outside the room, as if a stolid figure were seated just outside the door, against the wall, in a hat.