David Wallace - Infinite jest

Lateral Alice Moore is printing out WhataBurger RSVPs. The Intel 972 is cutting-edge, but she clings to a hideous old dot-matrix printer she refuses to replace as long as Dave Harde can keep it going. It’s the same with the intercom system and its antiquated iron stand-up mike that Troeltsch says is an affront to the whole broadcasting profession. Lateral Alice has queer eccentric pockets of intransigence and Ludditism, due possibly to her helicopter-crash and neurologic deficits. The printer’s needly sound fills the waiting room. Hal finds he can be confident of his face’s symmetry and saliva only when he sits there with his right hand over his left cheek. Each line of Alice’s printed response sounds like some sort of supposedly unrippa-ble fabric getting ripped, over and over, a dental and life-denying sound.

For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around people and tries to hide it by being very open and expansive and wordy and bluff, and that it’s excruciating to be around. Mario’s way of looking at it is that Tavis is very open and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of protective shield that it betrays a frightened vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. Either way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he’s possibly the openest man of all time. Orin and Marlon Bain’s view was always that C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person. Even the Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she’d taken the child C.T. or been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she’d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in some lull in the group’s conversation, something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I’m just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that’s all right, just so you know,’ and so on.

But so the point is that Tavis is an odd and delicate specimen, both ineffectual and in certain ways fearsome as a Headmaster, and being a relative guarantees no special predictive insight or quarter, unless certain maternal connections are exploited, the thought of doing which literally does not occur to Hal. This odd blankness about his family might be one way to manage a life where domestic and vocational authorities sort of bleed into each other. Hal squeezes his tennis ball like a madman, sitting there in the needly printout-noise, right palm against his left cheek and elbow hiding his mouth, wanting very much to go first to the Pump Room and then to brush vigorously with his portable collapsible Oral-B. A quick chew of Kodiak is out of the question for several reasons.

The only other time this year that Hal was officially summoned to the Headmaster’s waiting room had been in late August, right before Convocation and during Orientation period, when Y.D.A.U.’s new kids were coming in and wandering around clueless and terrified, etc., and Tavis had wanted Hal to take temporary charge of a nine-year-old kid coming in from somewhere called Philo IL, who was allegedly blind, the kid, and apparently had cranium-issues, from having originally been one of the infantile natives of Ticonderoga NNY evacuated too late, and had several eyes in various stages of evolutionary development in his head but was legally blind, but still an extremely solid player, which is all kind of a long tale in itself, given that his skull was apparently the consistency of a Chesapeake crabshell but the head itself so huge it made Booboo look microcephalic, and the kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo-shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head; but anyway Tex Watson and Thorp had broken C.T. down over the kid’s admission and tuition-waver, and C.T, now figured the kid would need to say the least some extra help getting oriented (literally), and he wanted Hal to be the one to take him in hand (again literally). It turned out a couple days later that the kid had some kind of either family or cerebro-spinal-fluid crisis at home in rural IL and wasn’t matriculating now till the Spring term. But back in August Hal had sat in the very chair Trevor Axford is now nodding off in, very late in the day, like dusk, having had an informal exhibition match with a visiting Latvian Satellite pro go an encouraging three sets that P.M. so that he’d missed Mrs. C.’s stuffed peppers at supper, his stomach making those where’s-the-food noises from around the transverse colon, alone in the blue room, waiting, the chair bobbing reflexively, with Lateral Alice Moore gone home to her long apartment with rooms only 2 m. wide in Newton and an opaque plastic dust-thing wrapped tight over her Intel processor and intercom-console and the little red danger-light on her DANGER: THIRD RAIL plaque unlit, and the only lights besides the weak dusk outside were the hot 105W of his chairback’s creepy blue-shaded magazine-lamp, plus the multiple lamps on in Charles Tavis’s office (Tavis has a phobic thing about overhead lighting) as Tavis was doing a late-day Intake interview on impossibly tiny little Tina Echt, who just matriculated this fall at age seven. His doors were open because it was a brutal August and F. D. V. Harde had somehow rigged Lateral Alice’s air-conditioner vent in the waiting room so it really put out. Tavis’s office’s outer door opened out while the inner door opened in, which gave his little inter-door vestibule kind of a jaw-like quality, when exposed.

August Y.D.A.U. had been when Hal’s chronic left ankle had been almost the worst it’s ever been, after an erumpent but grueling summer tour of getting to at least the Quarters of just about everything, mostly on hard asphalt, [217]and he could feel his pulse in the vessels in the raw ligaments of the ankle as he sat flipping the shiny pages of a new World Tennis and watching the little ad-cards fall out and flutter; but he also couldn’t help exploiting the open-jawed view of a substantial section of Charles Tavis at his office desk, looking as usual oddly foreshortened and small and with his hands together on the massive desktop across from a partial-profile view of a girl who looked like she couldn’t be much more than five or six, preparing to receive Intake papers as she listened to Tavis. There’d been no Echt parents or guardians anywhere in view. Some kids just get dropped off. Sometimes the parents’ cars barely even stop, just slow down, throw gravel as they accelerate away. Tavis’s desk drawers have squeaky casters. Jim Struck’s folks’ Lincoln hadn’t even much slowed. Struck had been helped to his feet and taken immediately to the locker room to shower the gravel out of his hair. Hal had been in charge of his Orientation, too, when Struck transferred, booted out of Palmer Academy after his pet tarantula (named Simone — another long story) escaped and wouldn’t even have dreamed of biting the Headmaster’s wife if she hadn’t screamed and passed out and fallen right on it, Struck explained as Hal helped pick up suitcases tumbled all over the drive.

Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal’s mother’s adoptive brother Charles Tavis is physically small in a way that seems less endocrine than perspectival. His smallness resembles the smallness of something that’s farther away from you than it wants to be, plus is receding. [218]This weird appearance of recessive drift, together with the compulsive hand-movements that followed his quitting smoking some years back, helped contribute to the quality of perpetual frenzy about the man, a kind of locational panic that it’s easy to see explains not only Tavis’s compulsive energy — he and Avril, pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion, between them, sleep, in their second-floor rooms in the Headmaster’s House — separate rooms — tend to sleep, between them, about as much as any one normal insomniac — but maybe also contributes to the pathological openness of his manner, the way he thinks out loud about thinking out loud, a manner Ortho Stice can imitate so eerily that he’s been prohibited by the male 18’s from doing his Tavis-impression in front of the younger players, for fear that the littler kids will find it impossible to take the real Tavis seriously at the times he needs to be taken seriously.