David Wallace - Infinite jest

Joelle runs just like a girl, Erdedy notes. [256]She gets out through the many-angled cars into the street just as Gately decides to lie down.

It’s not like passing out. It’s just a decision Gately makes to like lie back with his knees bent and pointing up into the sky’s depth, which seems to bulge and recede with the pulse in his right shoulder, which has now gone dead cold, which means there will very soon be pain, he predicts.

He waves off concern with the left hand and goes ‘Flesh-wound’ the second Joelle’s bare feet and robe’s hem are in view.

‘Son of a fucking bitch.’

‘Flesh-wound.’

‘Are you ever bleeding.’

‘Thanks for the feedback.’

You can hear Henderson and Willis off in the background still going ‘fu.’

‘I think you can tell them he’s probably subdued,’ Gately pointing off in what he thinks is #4’s lawn’s direction. His lying flat gives him a double-chin, he can feel, and pulls his big face into a smile. His big present fear is throwing up in front of and maybe partly on Joelle v.D., whose calves he’s noted.

Now Lenz’s lizard-skin loafers with grass stains at the toes. ‘Don what can I say.’

Gately struggles to sit back up. ‘You got fucking armed Nucks wanting your ass too?’

Revealing a kind of blackly kimonoish thing under, Joelle has taken off the terry robe and folds the robe into a kind of trapezoidal pad and is kneeling over Gately’s shoulder, straddling his arm, pressing down on the pad with the heels of her hands.

‘Owie.’

‘Lenz he’s really bleeding bad here.’

‘I’m groping to even know what to begin to say, Don.’

‘You owe me urine, Lenz.’

‘I think there’s two of them, like, desisted.’ Wade McD.’s unlaced high-tops, his voice breathy with awe.

‘He’s bleeding really bad I said.’

‘You mean deceased.’

‘There’s one of their shoes in one of them’s fucking eye.’

‘Tell Ken to put his hands down for Christ’s sake.’

‘Oh fucking God.’

Gately can feel his eyes crossing and uncrossing by themselves.

‘He soaking right through it man look at that shit.’

‘This man needs an ambulance.’

Somebody else female says God again and Gately’s hearing warbles a bit as Joelle snaps at her to shut up. She leans down and in, so Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil’s billowing hem. ‘Whom should we call?’ she asks him.

‘Call Pat’s machine and Calvin. You have to dial 9. Tell them to come down.’

‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Airdaddy!’ Minty is shouting at Ken E.

‘Tell her to call Annie and the E.M. office down there and do some like strategic thing.’

‘Where the fuck is Security when it isn’t just innocent recovering cars to get towed?’

‘And call Pat,’ Gately says.

A forest of footwear and bare feet and shins all around him, and heads too high to see. Lenz screaming back to somebody in the House: ‘Call a fucking ambulance already.’

‘Regulate the voice, man.’

‘Fucking call about five ambulances is more like it.’

‘Motha fu cka.’

‘Ssshh.’

‘I just never saw anything like that.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ Gately gasps, trying to rise and deciding he just likes it better lying down. ‘Don’t call one for me.’

‘This is the straight and narrow?’

‘By doze is fide.’

‘He doesn’t want one he said.’

Green’s and Minty’s boots, Treat’s purple plastic shower-thongs. Somebody has on Clearasil, he can smell.

‘Seen some righteous ass-kickings in my past, brother, but —’

Somebody male screams back off to the right.

‘Just don’t try and walk me around,’ Gately grins up.

‘Dipshit.’

‘He can’t go in no E.R. with a gunshot,’ Minty says to Lenz, whose shoes keep moving to get himself north of everybody.

‘Somebody turn off the car will you?’

‘I wouldn’t touch nothing.’

Gately focuses at where the Joelle girl’s eyes would be. Her thighs are forked way wide to straddle his arm, which is numb and doesn’t feel like his. She’s bearing down on him. She smells strange but good. She’s got all her weight on her bathrobe’s pad. She weighs roughly nothing. The first threads of pain are starting to radiate out of the shoulder and down the side and into the neck. Gately hasn’t looked down at the shoulder, on purpose, and he tries to wedge his left hand’s finger under the shoulder to see if anything went through. The night’s so clear the stars shine right through people’s heads.

‘Green.’

Tb dot touchig dothig, dud worry.’

‘Look at his bead.’’

Her kimono’s shoulders are humped and glassy black in the Montego’s light. Gately’s brain keeps wanting to go away inside himself. When you start to feel deeply cold that’s shock and blood-loss. Gately sort of wills himself to stay right here, looks over past Joelle’s hand at Lenz’s fine shoes. ‘Lenz. You and Green. Get me inside.’

‘Green!’

The circle of stars’ heads’ faces above are all faceless from the headlights’ shadows. Some car engines have shut off and some haven’t. One of the cars has a twittering fan-belt. Somebody’s suggesting to call the genuine Finest — Erdedy — which everybody greets with scorn at his naïveté. Gately’s figuring Staff from the Shed or #4 has called them or at least dialed down to Security. By the time he was ten only his pinkie-finger would fit in the dialer’s holes of his mother’s old princess phone; he exerts will to uncross his eyes and stay right here; he in the worst way does not want to be lying here with a gunshot in shock trying to deal with the Finest.

‘I think one of these guys is, like, expired.’

‘No shit Shylock.’

‘Nobody call.’ Gately yells it up and out. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit when they stand him up. ‘Nobody call nobody til you get me in.’ He can smell Green’s leather jacket overhead. Bits of grass and whatnot drifting down onto him from where Lenz is still brushing off his clothes, and coins of blood on the street from Green’s nose. Joelle tells Lenz if he doesn’t cut something out she’s going to hand him his ass. Gately’s whole right side had gone deadly cold. To Joelle he says, ‘I’m Supervised. I’ll go to jail sure.’

‘You got fucking eyewitnesses out the ass behind you Don man,’ either McDade or Glynn says, but it can’t be Glynn, for some reason he tries to bring up inside him. And it seems like Charlotte T.’s voice saying Ewell’s trying to get in Pat’s office to call but Gately locked Pat’s door.

‘Nobody call anyone!’ Joelle shouts up and out. She smells good.

‘They’re calling!’

‘Get him off the phone! Say prank for Christ’s sake! You hear me?’ Her kimono smells good. Her voice has a Staff-like authority. The scene out here has changed: Gately’s down, Madame Psychosis is in charge.

‘We’re going to get him up and we’re going to get him inside,’ she says to the circle. ‘Lenz.’

There’s impending static-crackle and the sound of a serious set of keys.

Her voice is that one Madame lady’s voice on no-subscription radio, from out of nowhere he’s all of a sudden sure, is where he heard that odd empty half-accented voice before.

‘Secyotty! Hold it right thaah.’ It’s at least luckily one of the ex-football E.M. Security guys, that spends half his shift down at the Life and then goes up and down the streetlet all night playing with his service baton and singing sea chanties off-key, that’s just impressively qualified to Come In to AA with them.