David Wallace - Infinite jest

My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom door.

I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles and replied that I was becoming almost fright-eningly quick and perceptive. He went around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, ‘I want to let’s just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us some room to maneuver.’

‘Right,’ I said.

My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents’ bed. My father rubbed his hands together and bent and worked his hands between the mattress and box spring and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind the rising mattress, and his side rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded 90°, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress’s overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I spread my arms and took the impact of the mattress with my chest and face, supporting the angled mattress with my chest, outspread arms, and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector.

The mattress, a Simmons Beauty Rest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and the bed’s box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My legs were trembling under the mattress’s canted weight. My father exhorted me to hold and support the mattress. The respectively sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against them.

My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress back up until it stood up at 90° again. We edged carefully apart and each took one end of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door into the uncarpeted hallway.

This was a King-Size Simmons Beauty Rest mattress. It was massive but had very little structural integrity. It kept curving and curling and wobbling. My father exhorted both me and the mattress. It was flaccid and floppy as we tried to jockey it. My father had an especially hard time with his half of the mattress’s upright weight because of an old competitive-tennis injury.

While we were jockeying it on its side off the bed, part of the mattress on my father’s end slipped and flopped over and down onto a pair of steel reading lamps, adjustable cubes of brushed steel attached by toggle bolts to the white wall over the head of the bed. The lamps took a solid hit from the mattress, and one cube was rotated all the way around on its toggle so that its open side and bulb now pointed at the ceiling. The joint and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around upward. This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the daylit room, because a faint square of direct lamplight, its four sides rendered slightly concave by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the skewed cube. But the lamps didn’t fall off. They remained attached to the wall.

‘God damn it to hell,’ my father said as he regained control of his end of the mattress.

My father also said, ‘Fucking son of a …’ when the mattress’s thickness made it difficult for him to squeeze through the doorway still holding his end.

In time we were able to get my parents’ giant mattress out in the narrow hallway that ran between the master bedroom and the kitchen. I could hear another terrible squeak from the bedroom as my mother tried to realign the reading lamp whose cube had been inverted. Drops of sweat were falling from my father’s face onto his side of the mattress, darkening part of the protector’s fabric. My father and I tried to lean the mattress at a slight supporting angle against one wall of the hallway, but because the floor of the hallway was uncarpeted and didn’t provide sufficient resistance, the mattress wouldn’t stay upright. Its bottom edge slid out from the wall all the way across the width of the hallway until it met the baseboard of the opposite wall, and the upright mattress’s top edge slid down the wall until the whole mattress sagged at an extremely concave slumped angle, a dry section of the woodland floral mattress protector stretched drum-tight over the slumped crease and the springs possibly damaged by the deforming concavity.

My father looked at the canted concave mattress sagging across the width of the hall and moved one end of it a little with the toe of his boot and looked at me and said, ‘Fuck it.’

My bow tie was rumpled and at an angle.

My father had to walk unsteadily across the mattress in his white boots to get back to my side of the mattress and the bedroom behind me. On his way across he stopped and felt speculatively at his jaw, his boots sunk deep in woodland floral cotton. He said ‘Fuck it’ again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring to. Then my father turned and started unsteadily back the way he had come across the mattress, one hand against the wall for support. He instructed me to wait right there in the hallway for one moment while he darted into the kitchen at the other end of the hall on a very brief errand. His steadying hand left four faint smeared prints on the wall’s white paint.

My parents’ bed’s box spring, though also King-Size and heavy, had just below its synthetic covering a wooden frame that gave the box spring structural integrity, and it didn’t flop or alter its shape, and after another bit of difficulty for my father — who was too thick through the middle, even with the professional girdle beneath his Glad costume — after another bit of difficulty for my father squeezing with his end of the box spring through the bedroom doorway, we were able to get it into the hall and lean it vertically at something just over 70° against the wall, where it stayed upright with no problem.

‘That’s the way she wants doing, Jim,’ my father said, clapping me on the back in exactly the ebullient way that had prompted me to have my mother buy an elastic athletic cranial strap for my glasses. I had told my mother I needed the strap for tennis purposes, and she had not asked any questions.

My father’s hand was still on my back as we returned to the master bedroom. ‘Right, then!’ my father said. His mood was now elevated. There was a brief second of confusion at the doorway as each of us tried to step back to let the other through first.

There was now nothing but the suspect frame left where the bed had been. There was something exoskeletal and frail-looking about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle of black steel. At each corner of the rectangle was a caster. The casters’ wheels had sunk into the pile carpet under the weight of the bed and my parents and were almost completely submerged in the carpet’s fibers. Each of the frame’s sides had a narrow steel shelf welded at 90° to its interior’s base, so that a single rectangular narrow shelf perpendicular to the frame’s rectangle ran all around the frame’s interior. This shelf was obviously there to support the bed’s occupants and King-Size box spring and mattress.

My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. There seemed to be a long silent interval of my father looking closely at the exposed frame. The interval had the silence and stillness of dusty rooms immersed in sunlight. I briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the bedroom covered with sheets and the room unoccupied for years as the sun rose and crossed and fell outside the window, the room’s daylight becoming staler and staler. I could hear two power lawnmowers of slightly different pitch from somewhere down our subdivision’s street. The direct light through the master bedroom’s window swam with rotating columns of raised dust. I remember it seemed the ideal moment for a sneeze.