David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Could I get some lights over here on this you guys?’

‘Because did somebody go ahead and cut one in this little unventilated space?’

‘Chu, it’s a room fridge, that’s all.’

‘But it’s bigger than the room fridges.’

‘But it’s not as big as a real fridge.’

‘It’s in-between.’

‘I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.’

‘There is a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.’

‘Otherwise it’s a smell.’

‘Don’t try to describe it.’

‘Sleeps, that’s no human fart I’ve ever smelled.’

‘It’s too powerful for a fart.’

‘Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attack and staggered down here just to cut one.’

Peterson trains his light on the midsized brown fridge. ‘You don’t possibly think Chu says ‘No way. No way.’

‘What?’Blott says.

‘Don’t even think it,’ Chu says.

‘I don’t even think any kind of mammal could fart that bad, Chu.’

Peterson’s looking at Chu, both of their faces pale in the mercuric light. ‘No way somebody’d graduate and leave and put their fridge down here without taking the food out.’

Blott goes ‘Is that the smell?’

‘Was this Pearson’s fridge last year?’

Sleepy T.P. turns around. ‘Who smells a, like, a like decay-element?’

Lights on the tunnel ceiling from upraised hands.

‘Quorum on decay-type odor.’

‘Should we check?’ Chu says. ‘Blott’s hamster might be in there.’

‘Gnawing on something unspeakable, maybe.’

‘You mean open it?’

‘Pearson had a bigger than usual fridge.’

“Open it?’

Chu scratches behind his ear. ‘Me and Gop’11 light it up, Peterson opens it.’

‘Why me?’

‘You’re closest, Sleeps. Hold your breath.’

‘Jesus. Well back off up here so I can jump way back if anything like flies out.’

‘Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’

‘Happy to back way, way off,’ says Carl Whale, his light receding.

‘Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’

‘This could explain rodent-attraction and then some.’

‘Now look out … ready? … hummph.’

‘Ow! Get off!’

‘Put the light ov— oh my God.’ ‘Eeeeeeeyu.’ ‘Hhhhwwwww.’ ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Bllaaaaarrr.’

‘Such a smell I’m smelling!’

‘There’s mayonnaise! He left mayonnaise in there.’ ‘Why the bulge in the top of the lid?’ ‘The ballooning carton of orange juice!’ ‘Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.’ ‘So why’s that sandwich-meat moving?’ ‘Maggots?’ ‘Maggots!’

‘Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!’

‘This right here is exactly as close as I’m ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’

‘The smell’s expanding!’

‘I can smell it from here!’: Whale’s tiny distant voice.

‘I’m not enjoying this at all.’

‘This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’

‘What’re maggots?’

‘Should we just run really fast the other way?’

‘Second that.’

‘This is probably what the rat or hamster smelled,’ Blott ventures.

‘Run!’

High receding voices, bobbing lights, Whale’s light way out front.

After Stice and Incandenza split the first two sets and Hal dashed into the locker room at the break to put Collyrium-brand eyewash in eyes that were bothering him and deLint made warped crashing sounds on the tiers as he walked down the bleachers and over to have a word with Stice, who was squatting against the net-post holding his left arm up like a scrubbed surgeon and applying a towel to the arm, deLint’s place up next to Helen Steeply was taken by female prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, freshly showered, long-faced, a non-U.S. citizen, a tall Québecer former Satellite pro in rimless specs and a violetish ski cap just enough of a shade away from the journalist’s hat to make the people behind them pretend to shield their eyes from the clash. The putative newshound introduced herself and asked Poutrincourt who the heavy-browed kid was at the end of the top bleacher behind them, hunched over and gesturing and speaking into his empty fist.

‘James Troeltsch of Philadelphia is better to leave alone to play the broadcaster to himself. He is a strange and unhappy,’ Poutrincourt said, her face long and cavern-cheeked and not terribly happy-looking itself. Her slight shrugs and way of looking elsewhere while speaking were not unlike Rémy Marathe’s. ‘When we hear you are the journalist for shiny perfumed magazines of fad and trend we are told be unfriendly, but me, I think I am friendly.’ Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth. ‘My family’s loved ones also are large of size. It is difficult to be large.’

Steeply’s pre-assignment decision was to let all size-references pass as if there was some ability to screen out any reference to size or girth, originating possibly in adolescence. ‘Your Mr. deLint certainly held himself aloof.’

‘DeLint, when we prorectors are suggested to do a thing, he asks to himself only: how can I perfectly do this thing so the superiors will smile with pleasure at deLint.’ Poutrincourt’s right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white sneakers and a Donnay warmup of a deep glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously with both their caps. The circles beneath her eyes were also blue.

‘Why the instructions to be unfriendly?’

Poutrincourt always nodded for a while before she replied to anything, as if things had to go through various translation-circuits. She nodded and scratched at her long jaw, thinking. ‘You are here to make publicity a child player, one of our étoiles, [273]and Dr. Tavis, he is how you say quantified — ‘

‘Quarantined. Suspicious. Guarded.’

‘No…’

‘Confused. Torn. In a quandary.’

‘Quandary is how. Because this is a good place, and Hal is good, better since before the present, perhaps now he is étoile.’ A shrug, long arms akimbo. Hal reemerged from Comm.-Ad. and, ankle-brace or no, displayed a slow loose thoroughbred trot past the pavilion and bleachers and to the gate in #i2.’s southern fence, acting as if unwatched by people in bleachers, and tapped two of his big-headed tennis racquets together to listen for the strings’ pitch, exchanging some neutral words with deLint, who was standing with Stice at the edge of the transom’s shadow, Stice breaking into a half-laugh at something, twirling his racquet and walking back to serve as Hal retrieved a ball along the north fence. Both players’ racquets had large heads and thick frames. Thierry Poutrincourt said ‘And by nature who does not wish the shiny attention, that the magazines with cologne on their pages say this is étoile, Enfield Tennis Academy it is good?’

‘I’m here to do a soft inoffensive profile on his brother, with Hal mentioned only as part of an American family exceptional in several respects. I don’t see what’s quandariacal for Dr. Tavis about this.’ The tiny plump officious man who seemed to have a phone tucked under his chin at all times, the kind of frenzied over-cooperation that’s a technical interviewer’s worst nightmare for an interrogation; the little man’s monologue had done to Steeply’s brain kind of what a flashbulb does to your eyes, and if he’d explicitly denied him access to the brother then the denial had been slipped in after he’d worn Steeply down.

There was the slight shaken-saw wobble of bleachers as deLint walked back up, stacked charts against his chest like a schoolgirl’s books, his smile at the Québecois player in his seat as if he’d never met her before, settling in heavily on Steeply’s other side, glancing down at where the profiler’d bracketed notes on the possible sounds a string-hit ball sounds like in cold air: cut, king, ping, pons, pock, cop, thwa, thwat.