David Wallace - Infinite jest

Up this close, Gately doesn’t even need his Staffer’s eerie seventh sense to sense that Lenz is clearly wired on either ‘drines or Bing. That Lenz has been visited by the Sergeant at Arms. Lenz’s right eyeball is wobbling around in its socket and his mouth writhing in that way and he has that Nietzschean supercharged aura of a wired individual, and all the time he’s throwing on slacks and topcoat and incognitoizing wig and getting almost pitched headfirst down the stairs by Gately he’s telling this insane breathless whopper about his finger once getting cut off and then spontaneously regentrifying itself back on, and his mouth is writhing in that fish-on-a-gaff way distinctive of a sustained L-Dopa surge, and Gately wants to pull an immediate urine, immediate, but meanwhile the cars’ herd’s edges are just starting to widen in that way that precedes distraction and dispersal, and they’re angry not at Lenz for straggling but at Gately for even bothering with him, and Lenz pantomimes the akido Serene But Deadly Crane stance at Ken Erdedy, and it’s 0004h. and Gately can see tow trucks aprowl way down on Comm. Ave., coming this way, and he jangles his keys and unlocks all three curfew-locks on the front door and gets everybody out in the scrotum-tightening November cold and out down the walk to the line of their cars in the little street and stands there on the porch watching in just orange shirtsleeves, making sure Lenz doesn’t bolt before he can pull a spot-urine and extract an admission and Discharge him officially, feeling a twinge of conscience at so looking forward to giving Lenz the administrative shoe, and Lenz jabbers nonstop to whoever’s closest all the way to his Duster, and everybody goes to their car, and the backwash around Gately from the open House door is hot and people in the living room provide loud feedback on the draft from the open door, the sky overhead immense and dimensional and the night so clear you can see stars hanging in a kind of lacteal goo, and out on the streetlet a couple car doors are squeaking and slamming and some people are conversing and delaying just to make Staff have to stand there in shirtsleeves on the cold porch, a small nightly sideways ball-busting rebellious gesture, when Gately’s eye falls on Doony R. Glynn’s specialty-disembowelled old dusty-black VW Bug parked with the other cars on the now-illicit street-side, its rear-mount engine’s guts on full glittered display under the little street’s lights, and Glynn’s upstairs in bed tonight legitimately prostrate with diverticulitis, which for insurance reasons means Gately has to go back in and ask some resident with a driver’s license to come move Glynn’s VW across the street, which is humiliating because it means admitting publicly to these specimens that he, Gately, doesn’t have a valid license, and the sudden heat of the living room confuses his goose-pimples, and nobody in the living room will admit to have a driver’s license, and it turns out the only licensed resident who’s still vertical and downstairs is Bruce Green, who’s in the kitchen expressionlessly stirring a huge amount of sugar into a cup of coffee with his bare blunt finger, and Gately finds himself having to ask for managerial assistance from a kid he likes and has just bitched out and extracted urine from, which Green minimizes the humiliation of the whole thing by volunteering to help the second he hears the words Glynn and fucking car, and goes to the living room closet to get out his cheap leather jacket and fingerless gloves, and but Gately now has to leave the residents outside still unsupervised for a second to go clomping upstairs and verify that it’s kosher with Glynn for Bruce Green to move his car. [251]The 2-Man seniorest males’ bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT, and the answer to Gately’s knock is a moan, and Glynn’s little naked-lady bedside lamp he brought in with him is on, he’s in his rack curled on his side clutching his abdomen like a kicked man. McDade is illicitly sitting on Foss’s rack reading one of Foss’s motorcycle magazines and drinking Glynn’s Millennial Fizzy with stereo headphones on, and he hurriedly puts out his cigarette when Gately enters and closes the little drawer in the bedside table where Foss keeps his ashtray just like everybody else. [252]The street outside sounds like Daytona — a drug addict is like physically unable to start a car without gunning the engine. Gately looks quickly out the west window over Glynn’s rack to verify that all the unsupervised headlights going down the little street are Uing and coming back the right way to repark. Gately’s forehead is wet and he feels the start of a greasy headache, from managerial stress. Glynn’s crossed eyes are glassy and feverish and he’s softly singing the lyrics to a Choosy Mothers song to a tune that isn’t the song’s tune.

‘Doon,’ Gately whispers.

One of the cars is coming back down the street a little fast for Gately’s taste. Anything involving residents that happens on the grounds after curfew is his responsibility, the House Manager’s made clear.

‘Doon.’

It’s the bottom eye, grotesquely, that rolls up at Gately. ‘Don.’

‘Doon.’

‘Don Doon the witch is dead.’

‘Doon, I need to let Green move your car.’

‘Vehicle’s black, Don.’

‘Brucie Green needs your keys so’s we can switch your car over, brother, it’s midnight.’

‘My Black Bug. My baby. The Roachmobile. The Doonulater’s wheels. His mobility. His exposed baby. His slice of the American Pie. Simonize my baby when I’m gone, Don Doon.’

‘Keys, Doony.’

‘Take them. Take it. Want you to have it. One true friend. Brought me Ritz crackers and a Fizz. Treat it like a roachlady. Shiny, black, hard, mobile. Needs Premium and a weekly wax.’

‘Doon. You got to show me where’s the keys, brother.’

‘And the bowel. Gotta weekly shine the pipes in the bowel. Exposed to view. With a soft cloth. The mobile roach. The bowelmobile.’

The heat coming off Glynn is face-tightening.

‘You feel like you got a fever, Doon?’ At one point elements of Staff thought Glynn might be playing sick to get out of looking for a job after losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire. All Gately knows about diverticulitis is that Pat said it’s intestinal and alcoholics can get it in recovery from impurities in bottom-shelf blends that the body’s trying to expel. Glynn’s had physical complaints all through his residency, but nothing like this here. His face is gray and waxy with pain and there’s a yellowish crust on his lips. Glynn’s got a real severe adtorsion, and the bottom eye is rolled up at Gately with a terrible delirious glitter, the top eye rolling around like a cow’s eye. Gately still cannot bring himself to feel another man’s forehead. He settles for punching Glynn very lightly on the shoulder.

‘You think we need to take you over to St. E.’s to get your intestine looked at, Doon, do you think?’

‘Hoits, Don.’

‘You think you —?’

Because he’s worrying about what if a resident comas or dies on his shift, and then feeling shame that this is his worry, the squeal of brakes and raised voices’ noises down out front hasn’t registered on Gately right away, but Hester Thrale’s unmistakable high-B# scream does — i.e. register — and now serious feet running up the stairs:

Green’s face in the doorway, red in round patches high on his cheeks: ‘Come out.’

‘The fuck’s the problem out —’

Green: ‘Come now Gately.’

Glynn sotto: ‘Mother.’

Gately doesn’t get to even ask Green what the fuck again on the stairs because Green is down ahead out the door so fast; the damn front door’s been open all this time. A watercolor of a retrieverish dog cants and then falls from the wall on the staircase from the vibrations of Gately taking two stairs down at a time. He doesn’t take time to grab his coat off Pat’s couch. All he’s got on is a donated orange bowling shirt with the name Moose cursive-stitched on the breast and SHUCO-MIST M.P.S. in ghastly aqua blocks across the back, [253]and he feels every follicle on his body hump up again as the cold encases him on the front porch and the wheelchair-ramp down to the little walkway. The night is cold and glycerine-clear and quite still. Very distant sounds of car horns and raised voices down on Comm. Green’s receding at a run off up the little streetlet into a glare of highbeams that diffracts in the clouds of Gately’s breath, so even as Gately walks briskly [254]in Green’s leather-smelling backwash toward a rising hubbub of curses and Lenz’s high-speed voice and Thrale’s glass-shattering cries and Henderson and Willis talking shit angrily to somebody and the sound of Joelle v.D.’s veiled head in an upstairs window that isn’t the 5-Women room’s shouting something down to Gately as he appears in the street, even as he closes in it takes a while for the scene to decoct out of the fog of his breath and its shifting spears of color against the headlights. He passes Glynn’s disembowelled and illegally parked Bug. Several of the residents’ cars are idling at haphazard angles of mid-U-turn in the middle of the street, and in front of them is a modified dark Montego with highbeams and jacked rear wheels and a turbo’s carnivorous idle. Two almost Gately-sized bearded guys in loose like bowling-wear shirts with flowers or suns on them and what look like big faggy necklaces of flowers around what would be their necks if they had necks turn out to be chasing Randy Lenz around this Montego car. Yet another guy with a necklace and a plaid Donegal is holding the rest of the residents at bay on the lawn of #4 with a nasty-looking Item [255]expertly held. Everything now slightly slows down; at the sight of an Item held on his residents there’s almost a kind of mechanistic click as Gately’s mind shifts into a different kind of drive. He gets very cool and clear and his headache recedes and his breathing slows. It’s not so much that things slow as break into frames.