David Wallace - Infinite jest

Dust lay thick on the frame and even hung from the frame’s interior support-shelf in little gray beards. It was impossible to see any bolts anywhere on the frame.

My father blotted sweat and wet makeup from his forehead with the back of his sleeve, which was now dark orange with makeup. ‘Jesus will you look at that mess,’ he said. He looked at my mother. ‘Jesus.’

The carpeting in my parents’ bedroom was deep-pile and a darker blue than the pale blue of the rest of the bedroom’s color scheme. I remember the carpet as more a royal blue, with a saturation level somewhere between moderate and strong. The rectangular expanse of royal blue carpet that had been hidden under the bed was itself carpeted with a thick layer of clotted dust. The rectangle of dust was gray-white and thick and unevenly layered, and the only evidence of the room’s carpet below was a faint sick bluish cast to the dust-layer. It looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather had somehow taken root and grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like spoiled food, bad cottage cheese. It was nauseous. Some of the dust-layer’s uneven topography was caused by certain lost- and litter-type objects that had found their way under the bed — a flyswatter, a roughly Variety-sized magazine, some bottletops, three wadded Kleenex, and what was probably a sock — and gotten covered and textured in dust.

There was also a faint odor, sour and fungal, like the smell of an overused bathmat.

‘Jesus, there’s even a smell,’ my father said. He made a show of inhaling through his nose and screwing up his face. ‘There’s even a fucking smell.’ He blotted his forehead and felt his jaw and looked hard at my mother. His mood was no longer elevated. My father’s mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.

‘When was the last time this got cleaned under here?’ my father asked my mother.

My mother didn’t say anything. She looked at my father as he moved the steel frame around a little with his boot, which raised even more dust into the window’s sunlight. The bed frame seemed very lightweight, moving back and forth noiselessly on its casters’ submerged wheels. My father often moved lightweight objects absently around with his foot, rather the way other men doodle or examine their cuticles. Rugs, magazines, telephone and electrical cords, his own removed shoe. It was one of my father’s ways of musing or gathering his thoughts or trying to control his mood.

‘Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I’m standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud,’ my father said.

I looked at my mother to see whether she was going to say anything in reply.

I said to my father, ‘You know, since we’re discussing squeaking beds, my bed squeaks, too.’

My father was trying to squat down to see whether he could locate any bolts on the frame, saying something to himself under his breath. He put his hands on the frame for balance and almost fell forward when the frame rolled under his weight.

‘But I don’t think I even really noticed it until we began to discuss it,’ I said. I looked at my mother. ‘I don’t think it bothers me,’ I said. ‘Actually, I think I kind of like it. I think I’ve gradually gotten so used to it that it’s become almost comforting. At this juncture,’ I said.

My mother looked at me.

‘I’m not complaining about it,’ I said. The discussion just made me think of it.’

‘Oh, we hear your bed, don’t you worry,’ my father said. He was still trying to squat, which drew his corset and the hem of his tunic up and allowed the top of his bottom’s crack to appear above the the waist of his white pants. He shifted slightly to point up at the master bedroom’s ceiling. ‘You so much as turn over in bed up there? We hear it down here.’ He took one steel side of the rectangle and shook the frame vigorously, sending up a shroud of dust. The bed frame seemed to weigh next to nothing under his hands. My mother made a mustache of her finger to hold back a sneeze.

He shook the frame again. ‘But it doesn’t aggravate us the way this ro-dential son of a whore right here does.’

I remarked that I didn’t think I’d ever once heard their bed squeak before, from upstairs. My father twisted his head around to try to look up at me as I stood there behind him. But I said I’d definitely heard and could confirm the presence of a squeak when he’d pressed on the mattress, and could verify that the squeak was no one’s imagination.

My father held a hand up to signal me to please stop talking. He remained in a squat, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, using the rolling frame to keep his balance. The flesh of the top of his bottom and crack-area protruded over the waist of his pants. There were also deep red folds in the back of his neck, below the blunt cut of the wig, because he was looking up and over at my mother, who was resting her tail bone on the sill of the window, still holding her shallow ashtray.

‘Maybe you’d like to go get the vacuum,’ he said. My mother put the ashtray down on the sill and exited the master bedroom, passing between me and the dresser piled with bedding. ‘If you can … if you can remember where it is!’ my father called after her.

I could hear my mother trying to get past the King-Size mattress sagging diagonally across the hall.

My father was rocking more violently on the balls of his feet, and now the rocking had the sort of rolling, side-to-side quality of a ship in high seas. He came very close to losing his balance as he leaned to his right to get a handkerchief from his hip pocket and began using it to reach out and flick dust off something at one corner of the bed frame. After a moment he pointed down next to a caster.

‘Bolt,’ he said, pointing at the side of a caster. ‘Right there’s a bolt.’ I leaned in over him. Drops of my father’s perspiration made small dark coins in the dust of the frame. There was nothing but smooth lightweight black steel surface where he was pointing, but just to the left of where he was pointing I could see what might have been a bolt, a little stalactite of clotted dust hanging from some slight protrusion. My father’s hands were broad and his fingers blunt. Another possible bolt lay several inches to the right of where he pointed. His finger trembled badly, and I believe the trembling might have been from the muscular strain on his bad knees, trying to hold so much new weight in a squat for an extended period. I heard the telephone ring twice. There had been an extended silence, with my father pointing at neither protrusion and me trying to lean in over him.

Then, still squatting on the balls of his feet, my father placed both hands on the side of the frame and leaned out over the side into the rectangle of dust inside the frame and had what at first sounded like a bad coughing fit. His hunched back and rising bottom kept me from watching him. I remember deciding that the reason the frame was not rolling under his hands’ pressure was that my father had so much of his weight on it, and that maybe my father’s nervous system’s response to heavy dust was a cough-signal instead of a sneeze-signal. It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside the rectangle, plus the rising odor, that signified to me that, rather than coughing, my father had been taken ill. The spasms involved made his back rise and fall and his bottom tremble under his white commercial slacks. It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have been taken really ill. To give him some privacy, I went around the frame to the side of the frame closest to the window where there was direct light and less odor and examined another of the frame’s casters. My father was whispering to himself in brief expletive phrases between the spasms of his illness. I squatted easily and rubbed dust from a small area of the frame and wiped the dust on the carpet by my feet. There was a small carriage-head bolt on either side of the plating that attached the caster to the bed frame. I knelt and felt one of the bolts. Its round smooth head made it impossible either to tighten or loosen. Putting my cheek to the carpet and examining the bottom of the little horizontal shelf welded to the frame’s side, I observed that the bolt seemed threaded tightly and completely through its hole, and I decided it was doubtful that any of the casters’ platings’ bolts were producing the sounds that reminded my father of rodents.