Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  I may have been dozing. Some more heads came and awaited response and left. I may have dozed. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to eat if I was not hungry. This presented itself as almost a revelation. I hadn’t been hungry in over a week. I could remember when I was always hungry, constantly hungry.

  Then at some point Pemulis’s head appeared in the doorway, his strange twin-towered A.M. cowlick bobbing as he looked back over each shoulder out into the hall. His right eye was either twitchy or swollen from sleep; something was wrong with it.

  ‘Mmyellow,’ he said.

  I pretended to shade my eyes. ‘Howdy there stranger.’

  It is not Pemulis’s way to apologize or explain or worry that you might think ill of him. In this he reminded me of Mario. This almost regal lack of insecurity is hard to put together with his crippling neurasthenia on-court.

  ‘’s up?’ he said, not moving from the doorway.

  I could see my asking him where he’d been all week leading to so many different possible responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating I could barely get out that I’d just been lying here on the floor.

  ‘Lying here is all,’ I told him.

  ‘So I just got told,’ he said. ‘The Petropulator mentioned hysterics.’

  It was almost impossible to shrug lying supine on thick shag. ‘See for yourself,’ I said.

  Pemulis came all the way in. He became the only thing in the room that understood itself as basically vertical. He didn’t look very good; his color wasn’t good. He had not shaved, and a dozen little black bristles jutted from the ball of his chin. He gave the impression of chewing gum even though he was not chewing gum.

  He said ‘Thinking?’

  ‘The opposite. Thought-prophylaxis.’

  ‘Feeling a little punk?’

  ‘Can’t complain.’ I rolled my eyes up at him.

  He made a sharp glottal stop. He moved toward the periphery of my vision and fit himself into the seam of two walls behind me; I heard him sliding down to assume the back-supported squat he sometimes liked.

  The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn. I was thinking of the final film-lecture in Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms … and then of C.T.’s misadventure at Himself’s funeral. The Moms had had Himself interred in her family’s traditional plot in L’Islet Province. I heard a whoop and two crashes directly overhead. My rib cage contracted and expanded.

  ‘Incster?’ Pemulis said after a time.

  A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave seems airy and risen and plump, like dough.

  ‘Hal?’ Pemulis said.

  ‘Javol.’

  ‘We’ve got some really important interfacing to do, brother.’

  I didn’t say anything. There were too many potential responses, both witty ones and earnest ones. I could hear Pemulis’s cowlicks brush each wall as he looked to either side, and the slight sound of a small zipper being played with.

  ‘I’m thinking we could go someplace discreet and really interface.’

  ‘I’m a highly tuned horizontal antenna tuned in to you lying right here.’

  ‘I was meaning could we go somewheres.’

  ‘So this urgency all of a sudden?’ I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish, that melodic dip-rise-dip. ‘All week: not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this about urgency?’

  ‘Seen your Mums around lately?’

  ‘Haven’t seen her all week. Doubtless she’s over helping C.T. arrange a weather-venue.’ I paused. ‘I haven’t seen him all week either, come to think,’ I said.

  ‘The Eschaton’s a no-go,’ Pemulis said. ‘The map’s a mess out there.’

  ‘We’re going to get an announcement about the Québec kids very soon, I can feel it,’ I said. ‘I’m that highly tuned in this position.’

  ‘What say let’s skip the sausage-analog and whip down to Steak ’N Sundae and eat.’

  There was an extended pause as I ran a response-tree. Pemulis was zipping and unzipping something with a short zipper. I couldn’t decide. I finally had to choose almost at random. ‘I’m trying to cut down on patronizing places with “’N” in their name.’

  ‘Listen.’ I heard his knees creak as he leaned in toward the top of my head. ‘About the tu-savez-quoi —’

  ‘The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That’s definitely off, Mike. Talk about the map being a mess.’

  ‘That’s part of what we need to interface about, if you’d get off your literally your ass here.’

  I spent a minute watching the NASA glass fall and rise. ‘Don’t even start, M.M.’

  ‘What start?’

  ‘We’re on hiatus, remember? We’re living like Shi’ite Moslems for the thirty days you miraculously blarneyed the guy into giving us.’

  ‘Blarney wasn’t why we got it, Inc, is the thing.’

  ‘And now, what, twenty days to go. We’re going to produce urine like a mullah’s babe, we agreed.’

  ‘This isn’t —’ Pemulis started.

  I farted, but it didn’t produce a noise. I was bored. I couldn’t remember a time when Pemulis had bored me. ‘And I do not need you launching temptation-rhetoric my way,’ I said.

  Keith Freer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his bare arms crossed. He was still wearing the weird unitard he slept in, which made him look like someone who tore phone books in half at a sideshow.

  ‘Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?’ he said.

  ‘We’re convers ing here,’ Pemulis told him.

  I half sat up. ‘Flesh?’

  Freer looked down at me. ‘This is nothing to laugh at I don’t think Hal. There’s I swear to fucking God a human strip of forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window, and what looks like two eyebrows, and bits of nose. And now Tall Paul says down in the lobby Stice was seen coming out of the infirmary wearing something out of Zorro.’

  Pemulis was completely vertical, standing again; I could hear his knees as he rose. ‘It’s like a tête-à-tête in here, brother. We’re in here bunkered, mano a—’

  ‘Stice got stuck to the window,’ I explained, lying all the way back down. ‘Kenkle and Brandt were going to detach him with warm water from a janitorial bucket.’

  Pemulis said ‘How do you get stuck to a window?’

  ‘Well from the looks it looks like they detached half his face from his head,’ Freer said, feeling at his own forehead and shuddering a little.

  Kieran McKenna’s little porcine snout appeared in a gap under Freer’s arm. He still wore his stupid full-head gauze wrap for his supposed bruised skull. ‘Did you guys get to see The Darkness? Gopnik said he looks like a piece of cheese pizza where somebody tore the cheese off. Gopnik said Troeltsch is charging two bucks a look.’ He ran off toward the stairwell without waiting for a reply, his pocket jingling madly. Freer looked at Pemulis and opened his mouth, then apparently reconsidered and followed off down the hall. We could hear a couple of sarcastic whistles at Freer’s unitard.

  Pemulis reappeared at the top of my vision; his right eye was definitely twitching. ‘This is what I meant about going someplace discreet. When have I ever urgently asked you to dialogue before, Inc?’

  ‘Certainly not within the last few days, Mike, that’s for sure.’

  There was an extended pause. I raised my hands over my face and looked at their shapes against the indirect lights.

  Pemulis finally said ‘Well, I’m going to go make sure I eat before I have to see Stice without a fucking forehead.’

  ‘Have an analog for me,’ I said. ‘Let me know if there’s word on the meet. I’ll eat if I’m going to have to play.’

  Pemulis licked his palm and tried to get his cowlicks to behave. From my vantage he was high overhead and upside-down. ‘So are you going to get up and go up and get dressed and stand on one foot with that opera thing on at some point? Because
I could eat and then come up. We can tell Mario we need to mano-à-tête.’

  Now I was making a cage of my hands and watching the light through its shape as I rotated it. ‘Will you do me a favor? Get Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency out for me. It’s about a dozen cartridges in from the right on the third shelf down in the entertainment-case. Cue it up to about 2300, 2350 maybe? The last five minutes or so.’

  ‘The third shelf down,’ I said as he scanned, tapping a foot. ‘They’ve got all Himself’s stuff together on the third shelf.’

  He scanned. ‘Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators? Fun with Teeth? Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend? I haven’t even heard of half your Dad’s shit that’s here.’

  ‘It’s Friend, not Fiend. Either it’s mislabeled or the label’s peeling. And they’re supposed to be alphabetized. It ought to be right next to Flux in a Box.’

  ‘And me using the poor guy’s lab,’ Pemulis said. He loaded the player and turned on the viewer, his knees popping again as he squatted to set the cue to 2350. The huge screen hummed in a low pitch that ascended as it began to warm up, the screen taking on a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird. Pemulis’s feet were bare and I looked at the calluses on his heels. He tossed the cartridge’s case carelessly on a couch or chair behind me and looked down. ‘What the fuck’s Fun with Teeth supposed to be about?’

  I tried to shrug against the friction of the carpet. ‘Pretty much what it says it’s about.’ The funeral had been held on 5 or 6 April in St. Adalbert, a small town built around spud-storage facilities fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity. We’d all had to fly up by way of Newfoundland because of the volume of waste-displacement launches that spring. And commercial airlines hadn’t yet had data on high-altitude Dioxin levels over the Concavity. Cloud-cover prevented our seeing much of the New Brunswick coast, which I’m told was a mercy. What happened at the funeral service itself was simply that a circling gull scored a direct white hit on the shoulder of C.T.’s blue blazer, and that when he opened his mouth in shock at the direct hit, a large blue-bodied fly flew right into his mouth and was hard to extract. Several persons laughed. It was no huge or dramatic thing. The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone.

  The TP’s tracker chugged and clicked, and the viewer bloomed. Pemulis had been wearing parachute pants and a tam-o’-shanter and lensless spectacles, but no shoes. The cartridge started close to what I’d wanted to review, the protagonist’s climactic lecture. Paul Anthony Heaven, all 50 kilos of him, gripping the lectern with both hands so you could see that he was missing his thumbs, the sad dyed strands combed over his bald spot visible because he had his head down, reading the lecture in the deadening academic monotone that Himself so loved. The monotone was the reason why Himself used Paul Anthony Heaven, a nonprofessional, by trade a data-entry drone for Ocean Spray, in anything that required a deadening institutional presence — Paul Anthony Heaven had also played the threatening supervisor in Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat, the Massachusetts State Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety in Safe Boating Is No Accident, and a Parkinsonian corporate auditor in Low-Temperature Civics.

  ‘Thus the Flood’s real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of hydrophobia on a pandemic scale,’ the protagonist was reading aloud. Peterson’s The Cage was running on a large screen behind the lectern. A number of shots of undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity, established that the climactic lecture wasn’t coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. ‘We thus become, in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God,’ the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern’s text. The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘auteur’ pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough — these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitaliadoodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit 366 — ‘For while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead’ — in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave — and yet all the time weeping, Paul Anthony Heaven, as an upward hall full of kids all scan their mail, the film-teacher not sobbing or wiping his nose on his tweed sleeve but silently weeping, very steadily, so that tears run down Heaven’s gaunt face and gather on his underslung chin and fall from view, glistening slightly, below the lectern’s frame of sight. Then this too began to seem familiar.

  He hadn’t in the beginning burgled, Gately, as a full-time drug addict, though he did sometimes promote small valuables from the apartments of the strung-out nurses he X’d and copped samples from. After the bailout from school, Gately worked full-time for a time for a North Shore bookmaker, a guy that also owned several titty clubs down Rte. 1 in Saugus, Whitey Sorkin, that had sort of casually befriended him when Gately was still playing high-profile ball. His professional association with Whitey Sorkin continued part-time even after Gately discovered his real B&E vocation, though he tended more and more toward less taxing nonviolent crime.

  But from age like eighteen to twenty-three, Gately and the prenominate Gene Fackelmann — a towering, slope-shouldered, wide-hipped, prematurely potbellied, oddly priapistic, and congenitally high-strung Dilaudid addict with a walrusy mustache that seemed to have a nervous life of its own — these two served as like Whitey Sorkin’s operatives in the field, taking bets and phoning them in to Saugus, delivering winnings, and collecting debts. It was never clear to Gately why Whitey Sorkin was called Whitey, because he spent a huge amount of time under ultraviolet lamps as part of an esoteric cluster-headache-treatment regimen and so was the constant shiny color of a sort of like dark soap, with almost the same color and coin-of-the-realm classic profile as the cheery young Pakistani M.D. who’d told Gately at Our Lady of Solace Hospital in Beverly how Teddibly Soddy he was that Mrs. G.’s cirrhosis and cirrhotic stroke had left her at roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout and then given him public-transportation directions to the Point Shirley L.T.I.

  Eugene (‘Fax’) Fackelmann, who’d dropped out of the Lynn MA educational system at like ten, had met Whitey Sorkin through the same eczematic, gamble-happy pharmacist’s assistant Gately had first met Sorkin through. Gately was now no longer called Bimmy or Doshka. He was Don now, nicknameless. Sometimes Donny. Sorkin referred to Gately and Fackelmann as his Twin Towers. They were more or less Sorkin’s paid muscle. Except not in any sort of way important crime figures’ paid muscle is portrayed in popular entertainment. They didn’t stand impassively flanking Sorkin at crime-figure meetings or light his cigar or call him ‘Boss’ or anything. They weren’t his bodyguards. In fact they weren’t physically around him that much; they usually dealt with Sorkin and his Saugus office and secretary via beepers and cellular phones. 367

  And while they did collect debts for Sorkin, including bad debts (especially Gately), it’s not like Gately went around breaking debtors’ kneecaps. Even the threat of coercive violence was pretty rare. Partly, Gately and Fackelmann’s sheer size was enough to keep delinquencies from getting out of hand. And partly it was that everybody involved usually knew each other — Sorkin, his bettors and debtors, Gately
and Fackelmann, other drug addicts (who sometimes bet, or more often dealt with Gately and Fackelmann for guys that did), even the North Shore Finest’s Vice guys, many of whom also sometimes bet with Sorkin because he gave the Finest special civil-servant reductions on vigorish. It was all like this community. Usually Gately’s job on bad debts or delinquent vig was to go around to the debtor at whatever bar the guy watched satellite sports at and just inform him that the debt was threatening to get out of hand — making the debt itself seem like the delinquent party — and that Whitey was concerned about it, and work out some arrangement or payment-plan with the guy. Then the young Gately’d go into the bar’s head and cell-phone Sorkin and get his OK on whatever arrangement they’d worked out. Gately was laid-back and affable and never had a hard word for anybody, hardly. Nor did Whitey Sorkin: a lot of his bettors were old and steady customers, and lines of credit went with the territory. Most of the rare debt-trouble that called for size and coercion involved guys with a gambling problem, kind of pathetic furtive guys addicted to the rush of the bet, who got themselves in a hole and then tried suicidally to bet their way out of the hole, and who’d bet with several bookies at once, and who’d lie and agree to payment-arrangements they had no intention of sticking to, suicidally betting they could keep all their debts in the air until they could square themselves with the major long-shot score they were always sure was around the corner. These types were painful, because usually Gately knew the debtors and they’d exploit his knowing them and beg and weep and tug at both Gately’s and Whitey Sorkin’s heartstrings with tales of loved ones and wasting illnesses. They’d sit there and look into Gately’s eyes and lie and believe their own lies, and Gately would have to call in the debtors’ lies and sob-stories and get Sorkin’s explicit decision on if to believe them and what to do. These types were Gately’s first exposure to the concept of real addiction and what it can turn someone into; he hadn’t yet connected the concept to drugs really, except coke-heads and hardcore needle-jockeys, who at that point all seemed to him just as furtive and pathetic as the gambling-addicts, in their own way. These sob-story-, one-more-chance-types were also the types that put Whitey Sorkin through hell in terms of emotionally, causing Whitey cluster headaches and terrible cranio-facial neuralgia, and at a certain point Sorkin used to start adding (to the delinquent skeet, the vig, and the interest) extra charges for his own required intake of Cafergot 368 spansules and UV light and visits to Enfield MA’s National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation. The use of Gately and Fackelmann’s rump-roast-sized fists in actual hands-on coercion got called for only when a compulsive debtor’s lies and hole got serious enough that Sorkin became willing to forgo the guy’s patronage in the future. At this sort of point, Whitey Sorkin’s business-objective became to somehow induce the addicted debtor to cover his debts to Sorkin before the debtor covered his debts to any of the other books he was into, which meant for Sorkin that he had to vividly demonstrate to the debtor that Sorkin’s was the least pleasant hole to be in and the most important one to get out of. Enter the Twin Towers. The violence was to be tightly controlled and gradually progressive in like stages. The first round of incentivizing hose-work — a light beating, maybe a broken digit or two — usually fell to Gene Fackelmann, not only because he was the naturally crueler of the Twin Towers and rather liked putting a digit in a car door, but also because he had a controlled restraint Gately lacked: Sorkin found that once Gately got started in physically on somebody it was like something ferocious and uncontrolled on a slope inside the big kid got dislodged and started to roll on its own, and sometimes Gately wouldn’t be able to stop himself before the debtor was reduced to a condition where he wasn’t even going to be able to raise his head, much less funds, at which point not only did Sorkin have to write off the debt but the big kid Donny’d get so guilty and remorseful he’d triple his drug-intake and be no use to fucking nobody for a week. Sorkin learned how to use his Towers to maximize their strengths. Fackelmann got the first-round light work for coercive collections, but Gately was better than Fax at negotiating arrangements with guys so it never had to come to violence. And there were certain harder cases, cases that laid Sorkin out in bed with cranio-facial stress for days at a time because they were hard-case addicts that were either so far gone or so deep in so many holes that Fackelmann’s light cruelty didn’t resolve the situation. At an extreme point with some of these cases Sorkin got to a point where he was willing to forgo not only the debtor’s future patronage but also the remittance due; at a certain point the goal was to minimize future other hard cases by making it clear that W. Sorkin was one book you couldn’t just flagrantly stay in the hole with and lie to for month after month without having your map seriously fucking reconfigured. Here again, in this-type case Gately’s internal out-of-control slope of ferocity was superior to Fackelmann’s easy but ultimately shallow sadism. 369