David Wallace - Infinite jest

Lenz speculates openly on how there are purportaged to be whole packs and herds of feral animals operating in locust-like fashion in the rhythmic lushness of parts of the Great Concavity to the due northeast, descended reputedly from domestic pets and abandoned during the relocational transition to an O.N.A.N.ite map, and how teams of pro researchers and amateur explorers and intrepid hearts and cultists have ventured northeast of Checkpoints along the Lucited ATHSCMulated walls and never returned, vanishing in toto from the short-wave E.M. bands, as in like dropping off the radar.

Green turns out to have no conceptions or views on the issues of fauna of the Concavity at all. He literally says he’s never given it one thought one way or the other.

Whole NNE cults and stelliform subcults Lenz reports as existing around belief systems about the metaphysics of the Concavity and annular fusion and B.S.-1950s-B-cartridge-type-radiation-affected fauna and overfertiliza-tion and verdant forests with periodic oasises of purportaged desert and whatever east of the former Montpelier VT area of where the annulated Shawshine River feeds the Charles and tints it the exact same tint of blue as the blue on boxes of Hefty SteelSaks and the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity, allegedly, and the idea of infants the size of prehistoric beasts roaming the overfertilized east Concavity quadrants, leaving enormous scat-piles and keening for the abortive parents who’d left or lost them in the general geopolitical shuffle of mass migration and really fast packing, or, as some of your more Limbaugh-era-type cultists sharingly believe, originating from abortions hastily disposed of in barrels in ditches that got breached and mixed ghastly contents with other barrels that reanimated the abortive fed and brought them to a kind of repelsive oversized B-cartridge life thundering around due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled through the urban grid. Of one local underground stelliform offshoot from the Bob Hope-worshipping Rastafarians who smoked enormous doobsters and wove their negroid hair into clusters of wet cigars like the Rastafarians but instead of Rastafarians these post-Rastas worshipped the Infant and every New Year donned tie-dyed parkas and cardboard snowshoes and ventured northward, trailing smoke, past the walls and fans of Checkpoint Pongo into the former areas of VT and NH, seeking The Infant they called it, as if there were only One, and toting paraphernalia for performing a cultish ritual referred to in oblique tones only as Propitiating The Infant, whole posses of these stelliform pot-head reggae-swaying Infant-cultists disappearing forever off the human race’s radar every winter, never heard or smelled again, regarded by fellow cultists as martyrs and/or lambs, possibly too addled by blimp-sized doobsters to find their way back out of the Concavity and freezing to death, or en-swarmed by herds of feral pets, or shot by property-value-conscious insects, or … (face plum-colored, finally breathing) worse.

Lenz shudders just at the thought of the raging Powerlessness he’d feel, he shares, lost and disorientated, wandering in circles in blinding white frozen points due north of all domesticated men, forget the time not even knowing what fucking date it was, his breath an ice-beard, with just his tinder and wits and character to live by, armed just with a Browning blade.

Green opines that if Boston AA is a cult that like brainwashes you, he guesses he’d got himself to the point where his brain needed a good brisk washing, which Lenz knows is not an original view, being exactly what big blockheaded Don Gately repeats about once a diem.

SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL–INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN

STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY

HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER the BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S AA MTNG. UP TO ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I don’t know why all this shit about wanting to hear about the football all the time. And I’m not going to make my goddamn muscle. It’s stupid.’

‘Okey-doke.’

‘It’s inappropriate, since you like words like that.’

‘But this Sharing and Caring Commitment guy, the Chair, the Sudbury Half-Measures Avail Us Nothing Group, he had a power about him. The Chair, he said he used to be a nuclear auditor. For the Defense industry. This man who was very quiet and broken-seeming and fatherly and strange. There was this kind of broken authority about him.’

‘I know what you mean. I can I.D.’

‘… that seemed fatherly somehow.’

‘The sponsor type. My sponsor’s like that, Joelle, in White Flag.’

‘Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Oh. Oh. My mother’s dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy’s still sucking air, though. That’s how he puts it — still sucking air. In Kentucky.’

‘…’

‘My mother’s a worm-farmer from way back, though.’

‘But so what about this Half Measures guy hit you so hard?’

‘Harrd. Harrrrrd. Sound it out.’

‘Real funny.’

‘Don well it started out as that he spoke about himself like he used to be somebody else. Like a whole different person. He said he used to wear a four-piece suit and the fourth piece was him.’

‘An Allston Group guy says that all the time, that joke.’

‘He had on a real nice white thick-weave cotton shirt opened at the throat and wheat-colored pants and loafers without socks, which I’m up here ten years Don and I still can’t follow this thing up here about y’all all wearing nice shoes and then wrecking them by wearing them without socks.’

‘Joelle, you’re maybe about the last person to be taking somebody’s inventory about weird ways they dress, under there, maybe.’

‘Kiss my rosy red ass, maybe.’

‘Remind me to Log how it’s real positive to see you coming out of this shell of yours.’

‘Well and I got reservations on this Don but Diehl and Ken are telling me to come in to you with this issue of what’s like occurring out there which Erdedy says it’s a Staff-type issue and duh-duh duh-duh.’

‘Had a little coffee tonight have we Foss?’

‘Well Don and like you know and duh-duh.’

‘Take a second. Inhale and blow out. I’m not going anywheres.’

‘Well Don I hate a cheese-nibbler much as the next man but Geoff D. and Nell G. are out in the living room going around to all the new people asking them to think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that’s too heavy for him to lift. They’re doing it to everybody that’s new. And that skittery kid Dingley —’

‘Tingley. The new kid.’

‘Well Don he’s sitting in the linen closet with his legs sticking out of the linen closet with his eyes bugging out with like smoke coming out his ears and duh-duh duh-duh going like He Can but He Can’t but He Can, respecting the suitcase and duh-duh, and Diehl says it’s a matter for Staff, it’s a negative thing Day’s doing and Erdedy says I’m Senior Res. and to go to Staff with it and eat cheese.’

‘Shit.’

‘Diehl said a case this negative and duh-duh, no way it’s like ratting.’

‘No, I appreciate. It ain’t ratting.’

‘Plus I brought in this really good like tollhouse-butterscotch cookie thing Hanley made a plate of, which Erdedy said it’s not like kissing ass so much as commonplace decency.’

‘Erdedy’s a community pillar. I got to stay in here with the phone. Maybe you could tell Geoff and Nell to like waltz on in if they can take time out from torturing the new people.’