David Wallace - Infinite jest

Stice and The Darkness called ‘The Bride’ — while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she’d feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as ‘The Brood’) and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride’s own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclass-men with them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out. Troeltsch and Pemulis are arguing about whether E.T.A.’s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them powdered milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing, very intent. Hal’s making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the table at all times and utensils in his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis always listens to Stice’s tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his head in admiration.

‘I’m just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that’s gone down the disposal.’ Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines. ‘Just look at it. Who could eat with something like that.’

‘The old man is a son of a bitch that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,’ Stice says, leaning in to bite and chew. The tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree and unless it’s a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra carbs. It’s like Pemulis can’t really taste his food unless he mashes it against his palate. The Academy’s wheat bread is bicycled in by guys in Birkenstock sandals from Bread & Circus Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it’s got to be not only sugarless but low in glutens, which Tavis and Schtitt believe promote torpor and excess mucus. Axford, who lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow goes down to #5-A, stares stonily into space, his motions less like somebody eating than like somebody miming eating. Hal’s made an intricate fortification-structure of his food, complete with turrets and archer-slits, and even though he’s not much eating or drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his structure. As the eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give Hal and Ax-ford tiny sideways looks, the players’ different CPUs humming through Decision Trees on whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much-rumored showdown with Dr. Tavis and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho Stice, might not have shaken Inc and Axhandle along some psychic competitive fault-line, different guys with different rankings calculating the permuted advantages to themselves of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though Michael Pemulis, the other rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford’s expression and Hal’s excessive swallowing altogether, though possibly studiously ignoring them, staring meditatively at the squeegees [259]taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the tabletop with the other.

Pemulis shakes his head very seriously at Troeltsch. ‘Not a chance, brother.’

‘I’m telling you man this milk is powdered.’ Troeltsch peering down into the tumbler, probing the milk’s surface with a thick finger. ‘Me I can tell from powdered. I have growing-up domestic confirmed traumas around powdered. The day Mother announced milk was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, with Father’s OK. Father knuckling under like Roosevelt at Yalta. My big sister ran away from home, and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to powdered, which is unmistakable if you know what to look for.’

Freer makes a snoring noise.

‘And do I ever know what to look for, to verify.’ Troeltsch is hoarse, and one of these people who speaks to more than one person at once by looking from one person to one person to one person; he’s not a born public speaker. ‘Namely your telltale residues along the sides of the glass, when swished.’ W/ great flourished swishings of the milk.

‘Except Troeltsch you can turn around and see them fucking loading the bags into the dispenser every twenty minutes. Bags of milk. That say MILK on them, the bags. Liquid, sloshy, hard to handle. It’s milk.’

‘You see bags, you see the word MILK. They’re counting on the packaging. Image management. Sensory management.’ Responding to Pemulis but looking at Struck. ‘Part of some larger overall kertwang. Possible punishment for the Eschaton thing.’ Eyes going briefly to Hal. ‘Covert vitamins possibly next. Let’s not even mention saltpeter. Put aside deductions from bags a second. I’m sticking to facts. Fact: this is verifiably powdered milk.’

‘You’re saying they mix powdered milk and then try and pour it into milk-bags, all to allay?’

Schacht clears his mouth and swallows mightily. ‘Tavis can’t even regrout tile in the locker room without calling a Community Meeting or appointing a committee. The Regrouting Committee’s been dragging along since May. Suddenly they’re pulling secret 03 00 milk-switches? It doesn’t ring true, Jim.’

‘And Troeltsch has a cold, he said,’ Freer observes, indicating the little bottle of Seldane next to Troeltsch’s squeezing-ball, by his plate. ‘You can’t even taste, Troeltsch, if you got a real cold.’

‘Trevor should have the cold, Axhandle, no?’ Schacht says, tapping carminative capsules onto his palm from his own amber bottle.

With supper they can choose milk or else cranberry juice, that most carbcaloric of juices, which froths redly in its own clear dispenser by the salad bar. The milk dispenser stands alone against the west wall, a big huge 24-liter three-bagger, the milk inserted in ovaloid mammarial bags into its refrigerated cabinet of brushed steel, with three receptacles for tumblers and three levers for controlled dispensing. There’s two levers for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every new E.T.A. tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into it. There’s a sign in a kitchen-staffer’s crude black block caps taped to the dispenser’s facade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue dot by a fairly obvious person. [260]The line for seconds on entrees now stretches out past the milk dispenser. The best thing about satiation and slowing down on the eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis start in on what you ate and tending to your teeth while you gaze around the airy room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing behaviors and pathologies with a clear and sated head. The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow of the ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against their seatmates’ shoulders. People protecting their plates. The blurred sexuality and indecisive postures of puberty. Two marginal male 16’s have their heads directly in the bowls in the salad bar, and some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different kids are illustrating points with different gestures. John Wayne and Keith Freer stroll purposefully through the serpentine crowd and up to the front of the Seconds line and insert themselves in front of a little boy who’s tearing at a held bagel with great violent movements of head and neck. The 18-A’s get free buttinskis: R.H.I, literal P., at E.T.A. Jim Struck spears one of the cherry tomatoes out of Hal’s salad bowl with a savage fork-gesture; Hal makes no comment.