David Wallace - Infinite jest

In the faint lume- and starlight Marathe found the four-limbed American’s high-heeled feet compellingly grotesque, like loaves of soft processed U.S.A. bread being slowly squeezed and mangled by the footwear’s straps. The meaty compression of the toes at the shoes’ open tips, the leather faintly creaking as he bobbed up and down, hugging himself chillily in the sleeveless summer dress, his fleshy bare arms webbed redly with mottle in the chill, one arm luridly scratched. The received wisdom among Québecois anti-O.N.A.N. cells was that there was something latent and sadistic in the Bureau des Services sans Spécificité’s assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives — casting men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals, heterosexual men as homosexual men, Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and Dominicans, healthy males as degenerative-nerve-disease-sufferers, healthy women operatives as hydro-cephalic boys or epileptic public-relations executives, nondeformed U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual deformity, all for the realism of their field-personae. Steeply, silent, rose and fell absently on the toes of these feet. The feet were also visibly unused to high U.S.A. women’s heels, for they were mangled-looking, deprived of flowing blood and abundantly blistered, and the smallest toes’ nails were blackening and preparing, Marathe noted, in the future to fall off.

But Marathe knew also that something within the real M. Hugh Steeply did need the humiliations of his absurd field-personae, that the more grotesque or unconvincing he seemed likely to be as a disguised persona the more nourished and actualized his deep parts felt in the course of preparation for the humiliating attempt to portray; he (Steeply) used the mortification he felt as a huge woman or pale Negro or palsied twit of a degenerative musician as fuel for the assignments’ performance; Steeply welcomed the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very role that offended his dignity of self … the psychomechanics became too confusing for Marathe, who had not the capacity for abstractions of his A.F.R. superiors Fortier and Broullîme. But he knew this was why Steeply was one of Services sans Spéci-ficité’s finest field-operatives, once spending the better part of a year in magenta robes, sleeping three hours nightly and allowing his large head to be shaved and teeth removed, shaking a tambourine in airports and selling plastic flowers on median strips to infiltrate a cult-fronted 3-amino-8-hydroxytetralin [169]-import ring in the U.S.A. city Seattle.

Steeply said ‘Because this is the thing about the A.F.R. that really gives them the fantods, if you’re talking about fear and what to fear.’ He spoke either quietly or not, that Marathe could determine. The empty expanse they both faced off the shelf sucked all resonance, causing every sound to sound self-enclosed and every utterance to seem flatly soft and somehow overintimate, almost post-coital. The sounds of things said beneath blankets, winter beating at the log walls. Steeply himself appeared frightened, perhaps, or confused. He continued: ‘This disinterest, by you guys, it seems, in anything but the harm itself. Just getting the Entertainment out there to hurt us.’

The naked aggression by us.’

Muscles beneath the nylons of the calves bulged and receded as Steeply bobbed. ‘The boys in Behavioral Science say they can’t see any sort of positive political goal the A.F.R. even wants. Anything DuPlessis was having your Fortier work toward.’

‘The U.S.A. fantods are meaning fear, confusion, standing hair.’

The F.L.Q. and Montcalmists — shit, even the most whacked out of Alberta’s ultra-rightists —’

M. DuPlessis had once studied beneath radical Edmonton Jesuits, Marathe reflected.

‘— them we can begin to understand, as political bodies. Them we can more or less get a feel for dealing with.’

Their aggression is clothed in agenda, the Bureau of you perceives.’

Steeply’s was a thinking face now, in apparent puzzlement. They at least have aims. Real desires.’

‘For themselves.’

Steeply appeared convincingly to ruminate. ‘It’s like there’s a context for the whole game, then, with them. We know where where we stand differs from where they stand. There’s a sort of playing field of context.’

Causing the chair to squeak, Marathe again rotated two fingers of a hand in the air, which for Québecers signifies impatience. ‘Rules of play. Rules of engagement.’ The other hand was with the Sterling UL machine pistol beneath the blanket.

‘Even historically — the 60s bomb-tossers, the Spic Separatists, the Ragheads —’

‘Very charming. These are attractive terms.’

‘Ragheads, Colombians, Brazilians — they had positive objectives.’

‘Desires for self which you could understand.’

‘Even if the objectives were nothing more than things we could file, pin to the board under “STATED OBJECTIVES” — the pathetic Spies. They wanted certain things. There was a context. A compass for maneuvers against them.’

‘Your guardians of National Security could understand these positive desires of self-interest. Look at them and “relate” as one says, at least. Knowing where you stand on the field of play.’

Steeply slowly nodded, as if to only himself. ‘There wasn’t just pure malice. There was never the sense that here were some people who had just all of a sudden let the air out of your tires for no reason.’

‘You allege we disperse our resources deflating automobile tires?’

‘A figure of speech. Or for example a serial killer. A sadist. Somebody who wants you down just for the deviant sake of wanting you down. A deviant.’

Far south, a blinking system of tri-colored lights described a spiral over the airport’s tower’s pulsing tip — this was a landing aircraft.

Steeply lit another cigarette off the butt of his previous and then tossed the butt, peering over the shelf’s edge to watch its spiralled fall. Marathe was looking up and right. Steeply said:

‘Because politics are one thing. Even way-out-far-in-the-distance fringe politics are one thing. Your Fortier doesn’t seem to care much about Reconfiguration, territory, redemisement, cartography, tariffs, Finlandization, O.N.A.N.ite Anschluss or toxic-waste displacement.’

‘Experialism.’

Steeply said ‘Or so-called Experialism. Even Separatism. None of the other cells’ agendas seem to drive you people. Most of the Office sees it as just sheer malice with you. No agenda or story.’

‘And for you there is something appalling.’

Steeply pursed his lips, as if trying to blow something off them. ‘But when there are delineatable strategic political goals and objectives. When there’s some set of ends we can make sense of the malice with. Then it’s just business.’

‘Nothing of persons.’ Marathe was looking up. Some of the stars seemed to flutter, others to burn with more steadiness.

‘We know which end is up when it’s business. We’ve got a field and a compass.’ He regarded Marathe directly in a way that was not accusing. ‘This seems personal,’ he said.

Marathe could not think of descriptions for the way Steeply regarded him. Neither was it sad nor inquisitive nor quite ruminative. There were small flickers and shadows of movements around the flickers of the celebratory fire down far away on the floor of the desert. Marathe could not determine whether Steeply was truly revealing emotions about himself. The flickers continually went out. Small shreds of young laughter drifted up to them in the vacuous silence. There were also sometimes rustles in the hillside’s scrub, of gravel or small living nightly things. Or whether perhaps Steeply was trying to give him something, let him know something and determine whether it went back to M. Fortier. Marathe’s arrangement with the Office of Unspecified Services seemed most often to consist in submitting himself to numerous tests and games of truth and betrayal. He felt often with U.S.O.U.S. like a caged rodent being regarded blandly by bland men in white coats.