David Wallace - Infinite jest

Joelle: ‘Erdedy — deal with him.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s the drunk,’ Gately gets out.

Joelle’s looking up at presumably Ken E. ‘Go over and look high-income and respectable at him. Verbalize at him. Distract him while we get him inside before the real ones come.’

‘How am I supposed to explain all these prone figures draped over cars?’

‘For Christ’s sake Ken he’s not a mental titan — distract him with something shiny or something. Get your thumb out of your ass and move.’

Gately’s smile has reached his eyes. ‘You’re Madame on the FM, is how I knew you.’

Erdedy’s squeaky shoe and the obese guy’s radio and keys. ‘Who hold it? As in desist?’

‘ Se cyotty I said halt!’

Green and Lenz bending in, white breath all over and Green’s dripping nose the same copper smell as Lenz.

‘I knew I knew you,’ Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable.

‘If I could ask you to specify halt from what.’

‘Get his back up here first,’ Green tells Lenz.

‘Not crazy about all this blood,’ Lenz is saying.

Many hands slide under his back; the shoulder blooms with colorless fire. The sky looks so 3-D you could like dive in. The stars distend and sprout spikes. Joelle’s warm legs shift with her weight to keep pressure on the pad. The squishing sound Gately knows means the robe’s soaked through. He wants somebody to congratulate him for not having thrown up. You can tell some of the stars are nearer and some far, down there. What Gately’s always thought of as the Big Question Mark is really the Big Dipper.

‘I’m oddering desist until who’s in change that I can repot the si chation.’ The Security guy’s hammered, his name’s Sidney or Stanley and he wears his Security-hat and baton shopping in the Purity Supreme and always asks Gately how it’s hanging. His shoes’ uppers are blasted along the feet’s in-sides the way fat men that have to walk a lot’s are; his ex-ballplayer’s col-lops and big hanging gut are one of Gately’s great motivators for nightly situps. Gately turns his head to throw up a little on both Green and Joelle, who both ignore it.

‘Oh sorry. Oh shit I hate that.’

Joelle v.D. runs a hand down Gately’s wet arm that leaves a warm wake, the hand, and then gently squeezes as much of the wrist as she can get her hand around. ‘And Lo,’ she says softly.

‘Jesus his leg’s all bloody too.’

‘Boy do I know guys loved that show you did.’ A tiny bit more throwing up.

‘Now we’re going to lift him very gently and get the feet under.’

‘Here Green man get over here on the south why don’t you.’

‘I’m oddering the whole sitchation halt it right thaah whey aah.’

Lenz and Green’s shoes coming together and moving apart at either side of Gately, faces coming down in a fish-eye lens, lifting:

‘Ready?’

InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink 2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so hígh-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50 % of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorb-able at home on couches. Ms. Tawni Kondo’s immensely popular exercise program spontaneously disseminated daily in all three O.N.A.N. time zones at 0700h., a combination of low-impact aerobics, Canadian Air Force calisthenics, and what might be termed ‘cosmetic psychology’ — upwards of 60 million North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a mass choreography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai chi slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China — except that the Chinese assemble publicly together. One-third of those 50 % of metro Bostonians who still leave home to work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94 % of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home: pulses, storage cartridges, digital displays, domestic decor — an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes.

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice.

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers’ Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splat-ting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see. Hence the apotheosis and intricate pecking-order of Boston street musicians, the best of whom now commute to work in foreign autos. The nightly chance to crank back the drapes and face out into the streets at 0000h., when all street-parked vehicles have to switch sides and everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching. Street fights, supermarket-checkout confrontations, tax-auctions, speeders stopped for ticketing, coprolaliac Touretters on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. The fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way. Q.v. the crowd-control headaches at crime-scenes, fires, demonstrations, rallies, marches, displays of Canadian insurgency; crowds brought together now so quickly, too quickly even to see them, a kind of visual inversion of watching something melt, the crowds collect and are held tight by an almost seemingly nucleic force, watching together. Almost anything can do it. Street vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted figures in wheelchairs with hand-lettered signs outlining entitlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, charismatic preachers with portable PAs. Hardcore panhandlers stem like they’re selling nostrums to small crowds; the best panhandling now verges on stand-up comedy, and is rewarded by watching crowds. Cultists in saffron with much percussion and laser-jet leaflets. Even some old-style Eurobeggars, black-browed persons in striped leggings, mute and aloof. Even local candidates, activists, advocates and grass-roots aides have returned full-circle to the public stump — the bunting-hung platform, the dumpster-lid, vehicles’ roofs, awnings, anything overhead, anything raised to a crowd-collecting public view: people climb and declaim, drawing crowds.

One top Back Bay public spect-op every November is watching expressionless men in federal white and municipal cadet-blue drain and scrub the Public Gardens’ man-made duck pond for the upcoming winter. They drain it sometime in November every year. It’s publicly unannounced; there’s no fixed schedule; long shiny trucks just all of a sudden appear in a ring at pond’s rim; it’s always a weekday c. mid-November; it’s also always somehow a gray raw sad windy Boston day, gulls cartwheeling in a sky the color of dirty glass, people mufflered and with new gloves on. Not your ideal sylvan-type day for conventional lounging or public spectation. But a massive crowd always collects and thickens in a dense ring along the banks of the Public Gardens’ pond. The pond has ducks. The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by the wind, geometrically round and banked with lawn-quality grass and shrubbery in even-spaced clumps, with park-type benches between the shrubs overhung by white-barked willows who’ve now wept their yellow autumn grit onto the green benches and grass banks where an arc of crowd now forms and thickens, watching duly designated authorities commence to drain the pond. Some of the pond’s flightier ducks have already decamped for points south, and more leave on some phylogenic cue just as the shiny trucks pull up, but the main herd remains. Two private planes fly in lazy ellipses just under the cloud-cover overhead, banners strung out behind them advertising four different levels of comfort and protection from Depend. The wind keeps blowing the banners sideways, möbiusizing them and then straightening them back out with the loud pop of flags unfurling. From the ground the engines and banners’ pops are too faint to hear above the crowd-noise and ducks and wind’s mean whistle. The swirling groundwind’s so bad that U.S. Chief of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine, standing with his hands at the small of his back at a window on the eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking southwest and down at the concentric rings of pond and crowd and trucks, can see wind-driven leaves and street-grit swirling right outside and pecking at this very window he stands before, massaging his coccyx.