David Wallace - Infinite jest

Troeltsch has run his thick finger around the inside of the tumbler and is holding the digit out at different guys around the table. ‘Note a certain bluish cast to it. Traces and remains. Suspicious foam. Minute grains of not quite altogether dissolved particulate powdered stuff. Powdered always leaves its telltale signs.’

‘Your fucking head is a minute grain, Troeltsch.’

‘Put that finger away.’

‘Tryna eat here.’

‘Paranoia,’ Pemulis says, scooping up stray peas with the flat of his knife.

‘Base tuition of 21,700 scooters, not counting,’ Troeltsch says, moving the finger back and forth in the air — the stuff drying on the finger does not, admittedly, exactly look appetite-whetting — ‘and yet let’s note how the Lung’s not up in spite of rampant weather and Achilles’-complaints, and today’s lunch a total déjà vu of yesterday’s lunch, and the bread and bagels they’ve started getting us Day-Old with the yellow stickers on the bags, and there’s dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall and Stice’s bed moves around, and there’s a ball machine in the girls’ lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—’

Stice’s head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. ‘Who says my bed moves? How’s it you know anything about any beds moving?’

But it’s true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario’s near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning. Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms’ drop ceilings, inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods and resulted in Eggplant Parmesan for two suppers in a row, which sent shock waves. Yesterday A.M. there’d been a cannonesque ball machine — no small feat to move around anywhere or get through doors — in the Females’ Sauna, which machine some of the upperclass girls had found and screamed at when they went in for the dawn saunas that help alleviate some vague female-type problem that none of the guys quite fathom. And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees on the dining hall’s north wall, several meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, placed there by parties unknown. F. D. V. Harde’s A.M. groundsmen reportedly took the things down, and now they’re leaning by the fireplace. The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they’re not funny. To varying degrees they’ve given everyone the fantods. Mrs. Clarke had taken the morning off again, was why the repeat-lunch. Stice’s eyes are back on his plate, which is nearly clean. Unmentioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw at lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said they found the squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of attachment. The whole thing’s been studiously not talked about, adding to everybody’s discomfort at Troeltsch’s hoarse complaints about tuition, which vary in specifics but are otherwise routine.

‘And then now the ultimate dietary cluster-fuck: attempted powdered milk.’

‘Trying to foist it you’re saying.’

‘I’m saying and look at us and what do we do?’

‘Fake a cold and stay in bed playing sportscaster with the TP, in protest?’ says Pemulis.

Troeltsch uses the bottle of Seldane to point for emphasis. ‘We don’t want to hear about it. We look the other way with our heads in the sand.’

‘Sounds fucking painful.’

‘Go find some fucking synonyms for beat.’

Slice swallows hugely: ‘Never open your eyes underground: my old man’s dictum.’

‘And so we distract ourselves,’ Troeltsch says; ‘we yuck it up.’

Pemulis makes a k-sound. ‘Here’s the real question: how dumb is Troeltsch?’

‘Troeltsch’s so dumb he thinks a manila folder’s a Filipino contortionist.’

‘Troeltsch, who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’

Kyle Coyle says surely they’ve all heard the one about what do Canadian girls put behind their ears to attract boys. John Wayne gives him not a look. Wayne’s peering inside his own tumbler, where there does seem to be some sort of residue. There are fragments of lettuce in his eyelashes. Ortho Stice’s cheeks are ballooned with food, his eyes on his own salad’s remains, expression abstract and furrowed. A terrible kind of community energy in the whole dining hall, a kind of anxious sound-carpet under the surf of voices and the tinkle of flatware, and The Darkness is at some vague center of this energy, somehow, you can feel. Neither Wayne nor Hal’s been approachable all fall, on-court. Kids at other tables say low-toned things to their seatmates, and then the seatmate looks covertly over at Stice’s table. Forehead purply crumpled, Slice stares hard at his salad and tries to block input from his phenomenal peripheral vision. Two 14’s are contending over toast. Petropolis Kahn is preparing to catapult a chickpea at somebody. Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent returning for what Struck counts as Fourths, and Stice blocks the sight out. The sad pretty sunset out over the hilltops of Newton cannot be seen because the room’s big windows face east, out over the hillside and the Enfield Marine complex that the Academy has bathed in shadow, so E.M.’s porch lights are already on, and tall cubist bits of the old metropolis beyond that, east, with shadows encroaching. The afternoon just past was a glory, scrubbed and cool and windless, cloud-free, the sun a disk, the sky a dome, soaked in light, even the northern horizons bell-clear against a faint green-yellow cast. Schacht has about eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn’s Disease, and a whole ritual of administration. A couple of the black girls who work kitchen and custodial day-shifts can be seen against the shadowy tree-line, making their way down the steep hillside’s unauthorized path back down to the halfway-house thing for wretched people who come up here to work short-time. The girls’ bright cheap jackets are vivid in the shadow and trees’ tangle. The girls are having to hold hands against the grade, walking sideways and digging heavily in at each step. The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in as she left C.T.’s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage, [261]her arms strung way out between the other black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in sideways with each step, the hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers.

A girl with bangs rises and tings her tumbler with a spoon to make an announcement; nobody pays any attention.

Now Kahn’s by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post-prandially.

Wayne and Stice both shiver at the same time as the overhead lighting suddenly becomes the big room’s primary light.

There’s a brief and sort of ignorant discussion on why girls who hit backhands one-handed seem prone to having different-sized breasts. Hal recalls his brother’s late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl. This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross between a chart and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read. This was back when his brother Orin needed only to have sexual intercourse with them instead of getting them to fall so terribly in love with him they’d never be able to want anyone else. He’d taken obscure massage and psych courses and read tantric books whose illustrations seemed about as sexy to Hal as Twister.