David Wallace - Infinite jest

DeLint’s laugh sounded to Steeply’s keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less fit man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer to know who he was. ‘Don’t kid yourself, babe,’ de Lint got out. The Vaught twins on the bleacher below looked up and around and pretended to shush him, the left mouth grinning, deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal Incandenza bounced the ball three times and went into his own service motion.

Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel twenty-six meters below the Show Courts.

Steeply’s face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for a motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal Incandenza’s serve. At the start a violinist maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand with the ball at the racket’s throat like a bow. The down-together-up-together of the downswing and toss could be a child making angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and eyes at the sky. But Hal’s face was pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The service motion’s middle might be a man at a precipice, falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own weight, and the serve’s terminus and impact a hammering man, the driven nail just within range at the top of his tiptoed reach. But all these were only parts, and made the motion seem segmented, when the smaller crew-cutted jowly boy was the one with the stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis only a couple times, with his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The punter’s discourses on the game had been lengthy but not much use. It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment.

Hal ïncandenza’s first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put the ball away on the next shot, up at net. Hal’s serve seemed to set in motion a much more involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive. His first serve hadn’t Stice’s pace, but it had depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved with an arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made the serve curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box and hop up high, so that Stice couldn’t do more than send back a deep backhand chip from shoulder-height, and then couldn’t come in behind a return that’d been robbed of all pace. Stice moved to the baseline’s center as the chip floated back to Hal. Hal’s pivot moved him right so he could take it on the forehand, [268]another looper dripping with top, right back in the same corner he’d served to, so that Stice had to stop and sprint back the same way he’d come. Stice drove this backhand hard down the line to Hal’s forehand, a blazing thing that made the audience inhale, but as the samizdat’s director’s other son glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had a whole open court to hit cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he’d backpedalled a bit off the shot and was now scrambling to get back out of the deuce corner, arid Hal hit the flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so, and the diagonal of the ball kept it travelling out wide after it hit Stice’s ad sideline, carrying it away from the boy in black’s outstretched racquet, and for a second it looked as if Stice at a dead run might get his strings on the ball, but the ball stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-court diagonal, and it passed Slice’s racquet half a meter past its rim, and Slice’s momentum carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice slowed to a jog to go retrieve the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot on the ad side, waiting for Stice to get back and let him serve again. DeLint, whose peripheral vision’s acuity and disguise was an E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second and then put down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for pretty, shaking her fuchsia cap.

‘Wasn’t that pretty,’ he said blandly.

Steeply rooted for a hankie. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Hal’s in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight-out killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne,’ deLint said. ‘This is why you don’t stay back or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep you trying, running. He yanks you around. Always two or three shots ahead. He won that point on the deep forehand after the serve — the second he had Stice wrong-footed you could see the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in advance, and without the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn’t need pace, we’ve helped him find.’

‘When might I get a chance to talk to him?’

‘Incandenza took a lot of bringing along. He didn’t used to quite have the complete game to be able to do this. Slice the court up into sections and chinks, then all of a sudden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he’s been setting up the angle since the start of the point. It makes you think of chess.’

The journalist blew her red nose. ‘ “Chess on the run.”

‘Nice term.’

Hal went into his service motion to the ad court.

‘Do the students play chess here?’

A mirthless chuckle. ‘No time.’

‘Do you play chess?’

Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal’s second serve; mild applause.

‘I don’t have time to play anything,’ deLint said, filling in a square.

You could tell by the sound that the other boy’s racquet was strung tighter than Hal’s.

‘When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do.’

The journalist’s rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. ‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s not my decision. My guess is you don’t. Dr. Tavis didn’t already tell you?’

T really couldn’t tell what he was telling me.’

‘We’ve never had a kid here interviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds, versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in.’

‘I’m here for background only, for your alumnus, the punter.’

DeLint was making his lips look like he was whistling even though no whistling-sound was emerging. ‘We’ve never let somebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while he’s still in training and inculcation.’

‘Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why? What if the boy wants to chat with me about his brother’s transition from tennis to football?’

DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a way that was supposed to let you know you had very little of his attention. ‘Talk to Tavis about it.’

‘I was in there for over two hours.’

‘You pick up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into a Yes-No corner where you can finally say I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty minutes if you’re sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people. The answer’s not for me to officially say, but I’m guessing a No. The Boston press guys come around after a big event, they get match results and physical stats and hometowns and nothing more.’

‘Moment is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some sportswriter with a cigar and a deadline.’

‘It’s a command-decision, babe. I’m not in command. I know they teach us to teach that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.’