David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Do you ever think of viewing it?’

Marathe did not reply. It was not impossible that the young persons carrying the torches were dancing.

‘Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary,’ Steeply said quietly; ‘still, you guys have a Read-Only copy, at least one, you’ve told us, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody has this mysterious Master, but we’ve all got Read-Only’s — all the anti-O.N.A.N. cells have at least one Read-Only, we’re pretty sure.’

Marathe said, ‘M. Brullîme, he tells Fortier he thinks the CPCP of Alberta do not have any copy.’

‘Fuck the Albertans,’ Steeply said. ‘Who’s worried about the Albertans? The Albertans’ idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is they blow up rangeland in Montana. They’re wackos.’

‘I have not been tempted,’ Marathe said.

Steeply’s sound appeared as if he did not hear. ‘We have more than one. Copies. Sure we can assume your boys know this.’

Marathe dryly laughed. ‘Confiscated from razzles of Berkeley, Boston. But who can know what is on them? Who can study the Entertainment while detached?’

Steeply’s scratch on the arm had become overnight puffed, and there were cross-hatches of his scratching. ‘But just between us two, though. Tête to tête. You’ve never been even slightly tempted? I mean personally. You the person. Wife’s condition be damned. Kids be damned. Just for a second, slip into wherever you guys keep it and load it and have a quick look? To see what’s all the fuss, the irresistible pull of the thing?’ He pivoted on one heel and looked, and cocked his head in a way of cynicism that seemed to Marathe consummately U.S.A.

Marathe coughed softly into his fist. His own dead father’s Kenbeck pacemaker, it had been damaged accidentally by a videophonic pulse of waves. This from a telephone call from the telephone company, a video call, advertising the videophony. M. Marathe had picked up the ringing telephone; the videophonic pulse, it had come; M. Marathe had fallen, still holding a telephone Rémy had never been instructed to answer first, to check. The advertisement, which was recorded, played its audible portion out upon the floor beside his father’s ear, audible between Marathe’s mother’s cries.

Steeply raised and lowered himself on his shoes’ toes. ‘Us, Rod the God Tine’s got Tom Flatto’s I/O boys running tests around the clock. 24-dash-7.’

‘Flatto, Thomas M., B.S.S. director of Input/Output testing, resident of Falls Church’s community, a widower with three children, one child with cystic fibrosis.’

‘Funny as an impacted follicle, Rémy. And no doubt the insurgent cells are all each doing work of your own, you guys with your own Dr. Brullent or whomever, trying to find out what the Entertainment’s appeal could be without sacrificing any of your own.’ Steeply again turned; he did this for emphasis. ‘Or maybe you’re willingly sacrificing your own. Yes? Willing volunteers in chairs. Sacrificing self for the Greater and all that. By adult choice and all that. Just for the sake of causing us harm. Wouldn’t even want to think about how the A.F.R.’s conducting tests of the thing.’

‘C’est ça.’

‘But not so much for content,’ Steeply said. ‘Input/Output’s exhaustive testing. Flatto’s got them working on conditions and environments for possible nonlethal viewing. Certain departments in Virginia, the developing theory is that it’s holography.’

‘The samizdat.’

‘The filmmaker’d been a cutting-edge optics man. Holography, diffraction. He’d used holography a couple times before, and in the context of a kind of filmed assault on the viewer. He was of the Hostile School or some such shit.’

‘Also a maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important Annulateur, also, and amasser of the capital from opticals, before hostility and film,’ Marathe said.

Steeply embraced himself. ‘Tom Flatto’s personal theory is the appeal’s got something to do with density. The visual compulsion. Theory’s that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you’d get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer-screen. That the density plus the realism might be too much to take. Dick Desai in Data Production wants to go in with ALGOL and see if there are Fourier Equations in the root code’s ALGOL, which would signify holo-grammatical activity going on.’

‘M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant.’

Steeply cocked his head sometimes in a way that was both feminine and birdlike. He did this most often during silences. Also he again removed something small from his painted lip. Also he spoke with more feminine inflection. Marathe committed all this to his memories.

I remember [208]I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and hadn’t yet removed the television makeup that gave his real face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and finished and rinsed my dishes in the sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were both in there. The master bedroom’s valance curtains and the heavy lightproof curtain behind them were all slid back and the Venetian blinds up, and the daylight was very bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder-blue.

My father was bent over my parents’ large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the way down to the mattress protector. He was bent over, pushing down on the bed’s mattress with the heels of his hands. The bed’s sheets and pillows and powder-blue coverlet were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his tumbler of tomato juice to hold for him and got all the way on top of the bed and knelt on it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress, then let up and pivoted slightly on his knees and bore down with equal vigor on a different area of the mattress. He did this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on the mattress on his knees to get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember thinking the bearing-down action looked very much like emergency compression of a heart patient’s chest. I remember my father’s tomato juice had grains of pepperish material floating on the surface. My mother was standing at the bedroom window, smoking a long cigarette and looking at the lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch. The uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight.

‘Eureka,’ my father said, pressing down several times on one particular spot.

I asked whether I could ask what was going on.

‘Goddamn bed squeaks,’ he said. He stayed on his knees over the one particular spot, bearing down on it repeatedly. There was now a squeaking sound from the mattress when he bore down on the spot. My father looked up and over at my mother next to the bedroom window. ‘Do you or do you not hear that?’ he said, bearing down and letting up. My mother tapped her long cigarette into a shallow ashtray she held in her other hand. She watched my father press down on the squeaking spot.

Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father’s face from under his rigid white professional wig. My father served for two years as the Man from Glad, representing what was then the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio, via a California-based advertising agency. The tunic, tight trousers, and boots the agency made him wear were also white.