David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Survey,’ the man said, nothing else, joggling the clipboard a little like an infant, presenting it as evidence.

Orin imagined the terrified Subject lying there hidden and trying to hear, and despite a sort of mild disappointment he felt touched at whatever this shy ruse of an excuse for proximity to his leg and autograph might be. He felt for the Subject the sort of clinical contempt you feel for an insect you’ve looked down and seen and know you’re going to torture for a while. From the way she smoked and performed certain other manual operations, Orin’d noted she was left-handed.

He said to the man in the wheelchair, ‘Goody.’

‘Plus or minus three percent sample.’

‘Eager to cooperate in any way.’

The man cocked his head in that way people in wheelchairs do. ‘Scholarly academic study.’

‘Pisser.’ Leaning against the jamb with arms crossed, watching the man try to process the dissimilarity in the size of his limbs. No shins or extremities, however withery, extended below the wheelchair’s blanket’s hem. The guy was like totally legless. Orin’s rising heart went out.

‘Chamber of Commerce survey. Concerned veterans’ group systematic inquiry. Consumer advocacy polling operation. Three percentage points error on either of two sides of the issue.’

‘Bully.’

‘Consumer-advocacy group opinion sweep. Very little time involved. Government study. Ad council demographic assessment. Sweeps. Random anonymity. Minimum in terms of time or trouble.’

‘I’m clearing my mind to be of maximum help.’

When the man had taken out his pen with a flourish and looked down at his board Orin got a look at the yarmulke of skin in the center of the seated man’s hair. There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man.

‘What do you miss, please?’

Orin smiled coolly. ‘Very little, I like to think.’

‘Backtrack. U.S.A. citizen?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have how many years?’

‘Age?’

‘You have which age?’

‘Age is twenty-six.’

‘Over twenty-five?’

‘That’d follow.’ Orin was waiting for the ruse involving the pen that’d get him to sign something so the very shy fan club’d get their autograph. He tried to remember from Mario’s childhood how long under blankets before it got unbearably hot and you started to smother and thrash.

The man pretended to notate. ‘Employed, self-employed, unemployed?’

Orin smiled. ‘The first.’

‘Please list what you miss.’

The whisper of the vent, hush of the wine-colored hallway, vaguest whisper of rustling sheets behind, imagining the growing bubble of CO 2under the sheets.

‘Please list lifestyle elements of your U.S.A. lifetime you recall, and/or at present lack, and miss.’

Tm not sure I follow.’

The man flipped a page over to check. ‘Pine, yearn, winsome, nostalgia. Lump of throat.’ Flipping one more sheet. ‘Wistful, as well.’

‘You mean childhood memories. You mean like cocoa with half-melted marshmallows floating on top in a checker-tiled kitchen warmed by an enamel gas range, that sort of thing. Or omnissent doors at airports and Star Markets that somehow knew you were there and slid open. Before they disappeared. Where did those doors go?’

‘Enamel is with the e?’

‘And then some.’

Orin’s gaze now was up at the ceiling’s acoustic tile, the little blinking disk of the hall’s smoke detector, as if memories were always lighter than air. The seated man stared blandly up at the throb of Orin’s internal jugular vein. Orin’s face changed a little. Behind him, under the blankets, the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the portable O z-mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol.

‘I miss TV,’ Orin said, looking back down. He no longer smiled coolly.

‘The former television of commercial broadcast.’

‘I do.’

‘Reason in several words or less, please, for the box after REASON,’ displaying the board.

‘Oh, man.’ Orin looked back up and away at what seemed to be nothing, feeling at his jaw around the retromandibular’s much tinier and more vulnerable throb. ‘Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases “Order before midnight tonight” and “Save up to fifty percent and more.” I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss “Sermonette” and “Evensong” and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’

‘Vapid ditty,’ pretending to notate.

‘I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’

‘Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure.’

‘You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’

There were two muffled sneezes from the bed behind him that the handicapped man didn’t even acknowledge, pretending to write, brushing his string tie’s dangle away again and again as he wrote. Orin tried not to imagine the topography of the sheets the Subject’d sneezed into. He no longer cared about the ruse. He did feel tender, somehow, toward him.

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.’

‘Inflicted.’

‘I don’t think I exactly know,’ Orin said, suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside. The terrible sense as in dreams of something vital you’ve forgotten to do. The inclined head’s bald spot was freckled and tan. ‘Is there a next item?’

‘Things to tell me you do not miss.’

‘For symmetry.’

‘Balance of opinion.’

Orin smiled. ‘Plus or minus.’

‘Just so,’ the man said.

Orin resisted an urge to lay his hand tenderly over the arc of the disabled man’s skull. ‘Well how much time do we have here?’

The skyscraper-gawking aspect was only when the man’s gaze went higher than Orin’s neck. They were not shy or indirect or even the eyes of someone in any way disabled, was what struck Orin later as odd — besides the Swiss accent, the absence of a signature-ruse, the Subject’s patience with the wait and the absence of gasping when O. pulled the covers abruptly back, later. The man had looked up at Orin and flicked his eyes slightly past him, at the room behind with pantyless floor and humped covers. Orin was meant to see the glance past him. ‘Can return at later time which we specify. You are, comme on dit, engaged?’

Orin’s smile wasn’t as cool as he thought as he told the seated figure that that was a matter of opinion.