David Wallace - Infinite jest

Uninitiated adults who might be parked in a nearby mint-green advertorial Ford sedan or might stroll casually past E.T.A.’s four easternmost tennis courts and see an atavistic global-nuclear-conflict game played by tanned and energetic little kids and so this might naturally expect to see fuzzless green warheads getting whacked indiscriminately skyward all over the place as everybody gets blackly drunk with thanatoptic fury in the crisp November air — these adults would more likely find an actual game of Es-chaton strangely subdued, almost narcotized-looking. Your standard round of Eschaton moves at about the pace of chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, almost parodically adult — staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities — responsibilities to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living and the unborn — not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this day — this dark day the leaders’ve prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent — not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people’s way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously, so earnest and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance. A couple gulls fly overhead. A mint-green Ford sedan has passed through the gate’s raised portcullis and is trying to parallel park between two dumpsters in the circular drive behind West House, which is behind and to the neck-straining left of the Gatorade pavilion. There’s an autumnal tang to the air and a brittle gray shell of cloud-cover, plus the constant faraway hum of Sunstrand Plaza’s ATHSCME fan-line.

Strategic acumen and feel for realism vary from kid to kid, of course. When IRLIBSYR’s Evan Ingersoll starts lobbing warheads at SOVWAR’s belt of Third-Wave reserve silos in the Kazakh, and it becomes pretty clear that AMNAT has won IRLIBSYR to its side by making sinister promises about the ultimate disposition of Israel, Israel, even though nobody’s Israel out there today, seems in a fit of pique to have somehow persuaded SOUTHAF, who today is Brooklyn NY’s little hard-ass Josh Gopnik — the same Josh Gopnik who by the way subscribes to Commentary — to expend all sixteen of its green fuzzy warheads in a debilitating enfilade against AMNAT dams, bridges, and bases from Florida to Baja. Everybody involved orders total displacement of MAMA populations. Then, without any calculation whatever, INDPAK, who today is J. J. Penn — a high-ranked thirteen-year-old but not exactly the brightest log on the Yuletide fire — dumps three poorly tied jockstraps’ worth of MIRVs on Israel, landing most of the megatonnage in sub-Beersheba desert areas that didn’t look much different before the blasts. When roundly kibitzed from the shelter of the Gatorade pavilion under Schtitt’s tower by Troeltsch, Axford, and Incandenza, Penn shrilly reminds them that Pakistan is a Muslim state and sworn foe to all infidelic enemies of Islam, but can do little but fiddle with the strings of his launcher when Pemulis cheerfully reminds him that nobody’s Israel today and there isn’t so much as a Combatant’s sock on that part of the courts. It is not a matter of the principle of thing, ever, in Es-chaton.

Except for the SOUTHAF flurry and INDPAK boner, 11/8’s game proceeds with much probity and cold deliberation, with even more pauses and hushed, chin-stroking conferences today than tend to be the norm. The only harried-looking person on the 1300-m. 2map is Otis P. Lord, who has to keep legging it from one continent to another, pushing a rolling double-shelf stainless steel food cart purloined from St. John of God Hospital with a blinking Yushityu portable on one shelf and a 256-capacity diskette case about two-thirds full on the other, the shelves’ sides hung with clattering clipboards, Lord having to dramatize manually the effortless dictates of real logic and necessity, verifying that command decisions are allowable functions of situation and capacity (he’d shrugged his shoulders in a neutral Whatever at SOUTHAF and INDPAK), locating necessary data for subterranean premiers and dictators and airsick presidents, removing vaporized articles of clothing from sites of devastating hits and just woppsing them up or folding them over at the sites of near-hits and fizzle yields, triangulating EM-pulse estimates from confirmed hits to authorize or deny communication-capacity, it’s a nerve-racking job, he’s more or less having to play God, tallying kill-ratios and radiation-levels and parameters of fallout, strontium-90 and iodine levels and the likelihood of conflagrations v. firestorms in MAMAs with different Mean-Value skyscraper-heights and combustible-capital indices. Despite chapped hands and a badly running nose, Lord’s response-time to requests for data is impressive, thanks mainly to the sly D.E.C. hookup and the detailed decision-algorithm files Pemulis had authored three years back. Otis P. Lord informs SOVWAR and AM-NAT that Peoria IL’s topographic flatness ups the effective kill-radius for SOVWAR’s 5-megaton direct hit to 10.1 clicks, meaning half of this MAMA-POP burns to death in evacuatory traffic jams out on Interstate 74. An AMNAT Minuteman can hold an absolute maximum of eight MIRVs irregardless of whether the titanic jockstrap little LaMont Chu promoted out of the sedated Teddy Schacht’s gear bag on the bus Friday night can hold thirteen dead tennis balls. Given standard climatic conditions, the fire area from an air-burst will be 2ir times larger than the blast area. Toronto has enough sub-code skyscrapers within its total area to guarantee a firestorm off a minimum of two strikes within

__________ 2n __________

(1 / total Toronto area in m. 2)

of target center. Five megatons of heavy-hydrogen fusion yields at least 1,400,000 curies worth of strontium-^o, meaning microcephalic kids in Montreal for roughly twenty-two generations, and yes wiseacre McKenna of AMNAT the world will probably notice the difference. Struck and Trevor Axford hoot loudly from under the green GATORADE THIRST AID awning of the open-air pavilion outside the fence along the south side of the East Courts, where (the pavilion) they and Michael Pemulis and Jim Troeltsch and Hal Incandenza are splayed on reticulate-mesh patio chairs in street clothes and with their street-sneakers up on reticulate-mesh footstools, Struck and Axford with suspiciously bracing Gatorades and what looks like a hand-rolled psychochemical cigarette of some sort being passed between them. 11/8 is an E.T.A. day of mandatory total R&R, though the public intoxicants are a bit much. Pemulis has a bag of red-skinned peanuts he hasn’t eaten much of. Trevor Axford has overinhaled from the cigarette and is hunched coughing, his forehead purple. Hal Incandenza is squeezing a tennis ball and leaning out far to starboard to spit into a NASA glass on the ground and struggling with a strong desire to get high again for the second time since breakfast v. a strong distaste about smoking dope with/in front of all these others, especially out in the open in front of Little Buddies, which seems to him to violate some sort of issue of taste that he struggles to articulate satisfactorily to himself. A tooth way back on the upper left is twinging electrically in the cold air. Pemulis, though from his twitchy right eye he’s clearly had recent recourse to some Tenuate (which helps explain the uneaten nuts), is currently abstaining and sitting on his hands for warmth, peanuts on the floor well away from Hal’s NASA glass. The pavilion is open on all sides and compliments of Stokely-van Camp Corp. and little more than like a big fancy tent with a green felt cover over the expanse’s real grass and white-iron patio furniture with reticulate plastic mesh; it’s mostly used for civilians’ spectation during exhibition matches on the East Show Courts 7, 8, 9; sometimes E.T.A.s cluster under it during drill-breaks in the summer in the heat of the day. The green awning gets taken down when they go into the Lung for the winter. Eschaton traditionally commandeers Courts 6–9, the really nice East Courts, unless there’s legit tennis going on. All the upperclass spectators except Jim Struck are former Eschaton devotees, though Hal and Troeltsch were both marginal. Troeltsch, who’s also pretty clearly had some Tenuate, is left-eye-nystagmic and is calling the action into a disconnected broadcast-headset, but Eschaton’s tough to enliven, verbally, even for the stimulated. Being generally too slow and cerebral.