David Wallace - Infinite jest

The thunder’s died down to a mutter, and the window’s spatter’s gone random and post-storm sad.

An E.T.A. female (female students wear two different towels, coming in), a breastless senior who can barely perspire at all, is troubled, whenever she has lunch with her fiance, by the persistent whine of a mosquito that she can’t see and no one else can hear. Summer and winter, indoors or alfresco. But only at lunch, and only with her fiance. Remarks or advice are not always the point. Sometimes suffering’s point is almost crying out in a high-pitched whine to be heard. As fitness gurus go, Lyle is results-oriented and can-do. [153]Ten-year-old Kent Blott, whose parents are Seventh-Day Adventists, isn’t yet old enough to masturbate, but he hears quite a lot about it, not surprisingly, from his adolescent peers, in rather lush detail, masturbation, and is worried about what sorts of homemade-type potentially wicked and soul-sapping pornographic cartridges will run through his psychic projector as he masturbates, when he eventually can masturbate, and worries about whether different sorts of fantasy scenes and combinations herald different sorts of psychic dysfunction or turpitude, and wants to get a good jump on worrying about it. The sounds of the dining hall’s gala are more frequent and convulsive without the sound of rain. Lyle tells Blott not to let the weight he would pull to himself exceed his own personal weight. Up to the left the storm’s clouds’ stragglers run like ink in water between the window and the risen moon. Mario Incandenza’s presidential puppet is just about to inaugurate Subsidized Time. 16-B’s Anton Doucette’s been driven to Lyle he says by an increasing self-consciousness about the big round dark raised mole on his upper-upper lip, just under his left nostril. It’s only a mole but looks pretty dire, nasally. People who first meet him are always pulling him off to the side and handing him a Kleenex. Doucette lately wishes either the mole were gone or he were gone. Even if people don’t stare at the mole it’s like they’re intentionally not staring at it. Doucette pounds himself in the chest and thigh, supposedly in frustration. He just cannot come to terms with how it must look. It’s getting worse as puberty intensifies, the anxiety. Then in a vicious cycle the anxiety prompts the nervous tic on his face’s right side. He’s starting to suspect that some upperclassmen are referring to him behind his back as Anton (‘Booger’) Doucette. It’s like he’s frozen on this anxiety, unable to move on to more advanced anxieties. He can’t see any way past this. The pounding is more a sign of intense unconscious self-hatred, though, Lyle knows. Doucette grimaces and says he’s starting to want to play tennis with his hand over his nose and upper lip. But he has a two-handed backhand and it’s too late to switch and there’s no way they’re going to let him switch to one hand just for aesthetic reasons. Lyle sends Anton Doucette packing off with directions to come on back with Mario Incandenza the minute the I.-Day gala lets out. Mario gets a fair number of aesthetic-self-consciousness referrals from Lyle. No type or rank of guru is above delegating. It’s like a law. Doucette says it’s like he’s stuck. It’s becoming all he thinks about. This is on his way out. His back’s additional moles form no outline or shape. Lyle pops the tab to a C.F.D.C. Mario tends to bring down most evenings around suppertime. In between door-dickyings and visits Lyle does little isometric neck-stretches, for the tension.

Between Gerhardt Schtitt’s pipe and Avril Incandenza’s Benson & Hedges and certain cheeks full of chewing tobacco — plus the maddening cooking-smells of honey and chocolate and real high-lipid walnuts from the kitchen vents, plus over 150 very fit bodies only some of which have been showered on this day off — the dining hall is warm and close and multi-odored. Mario as auteur opts for his late father’s parodic device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and historical headers from the last few great daily papers, all for a sort of time-lapse exposition of certain developments leading up to Interdependence and Subsidized Time and cartographic Reconfiguration and the renewal of a tight and considerably tidier Experialist U.S. of A., under Gentle:

UKRAINE, TWO MORE BALTIC STATES APPLY FOR NATO INCLUSION— 16-point bold Header;

SO THEN WHY A NATO? — Editorial Header;

E.E.C. SIDES WITH PACIFIC RIM, UPS TARIFFS IN RESPONSE TO U.S. QUOTAS — Header;

GENTLE ON WASTE STORAGE FROM DISMANTLED NATO THERMS: ‘NOT IN MY NATION, BABE’ — 12-point Subheader;

‘Amid smiles and two-handed handshakes that belied the high tensions here, the leaders of twelve out of fifteen NATO nations today signed an accord effectively dismantling the Western Bloc’s fifty-five-year-old defensive alliance.’ — News-Summary Cartridge Voiceover;

U.S., CANADIAN SUPPORT CUTS DOOMED NATO SUMMIT FROM START, ICELANDIC POL DECLARES — Header;

SO THEN WHY NOT A CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE, NOW, MAYBE? — Editorial Header;

MEXICO SIGNS ON FOR ‘ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE; BUT QUEBEC SEPARATISTS RALLY AGAINST ‘FINLANDIZATION’ OF ‘O.N.A.N.’ ALLIANCE; BUT GENTLE TO CANADA: UNLESS ‘O.N.A.N.’ TREATY SIGNED, NAFTA NULL, MANITOBAN THERMS STAY PUT, INTRACONTINENTAL POLLUTION AND WASTE DISPOSAL EACH NATION’S ‘INTERESTS TO PURSUE TO THE BEST THEY SEE FIT’ — Header from Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Head-liner Finally Demoted after Repeated Warnings about Taking up Too Much Space;

FED WORKERS PROTEST RANDOM FINGERNAIL-HYGIENE SCREENS — 12-point Header;

GENTLE PROPOSES NATIONALIZATION OF INTERLACE TELENT — Header; SAYS GOVT IN LINE FOR ‘PIECE OF THE ACTION’ ON VIDEO, CARTRIDGE, DISK RENTALS — 8-point subheader;

BURGER KING’S PILLSBURY AWARDED RIGHTS TO NEW YEAR — Header; PIZZA HUT’S PEPSICO FILES BID-RIGGING COMPLAINT WITH IRS — 12-point Subheader; CALENDAR AND PREPRINTED CHECK INDUSTRIES STOCKS SOAR — 8-point subheader;

Three blue-jawed convicts in antiquated stripes dicky their cell’s lock and run, backed by sirens and searchlights’ crisscrossed play, not for the wall but straight to the Warden’s empty nighttime office, where they sit rapt before his old dual-modem Macintosh, slapping their knees and pointing to the monitor and elbowing each other in the ribs, nibbling at inexplicably-appeared boxes of popcorn, with a Voiceover: ‘Cartridges by Modem! Just Insert a Blank Diskette! Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!’ — Some more of Ms. Heath’s classes’ puppets in a B-film parody of the InterLace TelEntertainment ads that the cable networks seemed so mysteriously suicidally to run all the time that last year of Unsubsidized Time;

O.N.A.N. PACT PENNED — 24-point Superheader;

CANADA ‘NUCK’LES UNDER — Tabloidish NY Daily’s 24-point Superheader;

ACID RAIN, LANDFILLS, BARGES, FUSION-TECH, MANITOBAN THERMS WERE ‘BIG STICKS,’ CHRETIEN ADMITS—16-point Header;

SHORT-HAIRED MEN IN SHINY TRUCKS ARE NOT DISMANTLING MANITOBAN THERMS BUT INSTEAD MOVING THEM JUST OVER BORDER INTO TURTLE MTN. INDIAN RESERVATION, HORRIFIED N.D. GOV CHARGES — 12-point Subheader from Demoted Headliner Already in Dutch Down in the Subheader Dept., Now, Too;

EXCLUSIVE COLOR PHOTOS SHOW BRAVE DOCS FUTILELY FIGHTING TIME TO REMOVE RAILROAD SPIKE FROM CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER’S RIGHT EYE — Tabloidish NY Daily’s 16-point Header;

PRESIDENT’S OFFICE IS ‘A ANALLY RETENTIVE HORROR SHOW SAYS THIS JUST RETIRED WHITE HOUSE CUSTODIAN — Tabloid Header with Photo of Old Guy with Basically One Eyebrow Running All

the Way across His Forehead Holding up a Mammoth Plastic Barrel He Claims Held Just One Day’s Haul of Dental Stimulators, Alcohol-Soaked Cotton Puffs, GI–X-Ray-Grade Colonic Purgative Bottles, Epidermal Ash, Surgical Masks and Gloves, Q-Tïps, Kleenex, and Homeopathic Pruritis-Cream Containers;