David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Rare tactical lapse for Incandenza, following the serve in when he’s just finally started establishing control from the baseline.

‘Have a look at Incandenza standing there waiting for Ortho Stice to finish futzing with his socks so he can serve. The resemblance to statues of Augustus of Rome. The regal bearing, the set of the head, the face impassive and emanating command. The chilly blue eyes.

‘The chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim.

‘The Halster’s been having some trouble controlling his volleys.

‘Personally, Jim, I think he’d be better off with his old midsized graphite stick than that large head the creepy Dunlop guy got him to switch to.

‘Stice being the younger player out there, he’s grown up with the extra-large head. A large head is all The Darkness knows.

‘You could say Stice was born with a large head, and that Incandenza’s a man who’s adapted his game to a large head.

‘Hal’s career dating back to before your polycarbonate resins changed the whole power-matrix of the junior game, too, Jim.

‘And what a day for tennis.

‘What a day for family fun of all kinds.

This Bud’s for the Whole Family. It’s the Bud Match of the Week. Brought to you.

‘Incandenza even reported to have modified his grip, all to accommodate the large head.

‘And by the Multiphasix family of fine graphite-reinforced polycarbonate resins, Ray.

‘Jim, Ortho Stice — impossible to even visualize Stice without his trusty large head.

‘It’s all they know, these kids.’

DeLint hiked back onto an elbow on the tier above and told James Troeltsch to regulate the volume or he was going to take a personal interest in seeing Troeltsch suffer.

Hal bounced the ball three times, tossed, rocked farther back on the toss, and absolutely crunched the serve, spinless and wickedly angled out wide, Stice grotesquely off-balance, lunging too far and hitting the backhand cramped, down the line and shallow. Hal moved in to the service line for it, hunched and with his stick cocked up behind him, looking somehow insec-tile. Stice stood in the middle of the baseline awaiting pace and was helpless when Hal shortened the stroke and dribbled it at an angle cross-court, barely clearing the net and distorted with backspin and falling into the half-meter of fair space the acuteness of the angle allowed.

‘Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,’ Poutrincourt said in English.

Hal aced Stice down the center to go up either 2–1 or 3–2 in the third.

‘The thing you want to know about Hal, babe, is he’s got a complete game,’ deLint said as the boys changed ends of the court, Stice holding two balls out before him on the face of his racquet. Hal went to the towel again. The children along the bottom tier were leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The apparition with the lens and metal pole was gone, overhead.

‘What you want to know, watching juniors at this level,’ deLint says, still back on an elbow so his upper body was out of sight and he was just legs and a voice in Steeply’s cold ear. ‘They all have different strengths, areas of the game they’re better at, and you can drown in profiling a match or a player in terms of the different strengths and the number of individual strengths.’

‘I am not here to profile the boy,’ Steeply said, but in French again.

DeLint ignored him. ‘It’s not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It’s do they come together to make a game. How complete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those kids at lunch you got to meet.’

‘But not speak to.’

‘The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike’s got great, great volleys, he’s a natural at net, great, great hand-eye. Mike’s other strength is he’s got the best lob in East Coast juniors bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you’re looking at out here right now can beat the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis’s strengths don’t give him a complete game. Volleys’re an offensive shot. A lob’s a baseliner’s weapon, counterpuncher. You can’t lob from the net or volley from the baseline.’

‘He says Michael Pemulis’s abilities cancel each other out,’ [275]Poutrin-court said in the other ear.

DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. ‘Pemulis’s strengths cancel each other out. Now Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid with the bandage on his nose from the soap-and-shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite’s also got a great lob, and while Pemulis’d take him right now on pure age and power Possalthwaite’s the technically superior player with the better future, because Todd’s built a complete game out of his lob.’

‘This deLint is wrong,’ Poutrincourt said in Québecois, smiling rictally across Steeply at deLint.

‘Because Possalthwaite won’t come in to net. Possalthwaite hangs back at any cost, and unlike Pemulis he works to develop the groundstrokes to let him stay back and draw the other guy in and use that venomous lob.’

‘Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, and if he grows strong and wishes to attack he will never be able,’ Poutrincourt said.

DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply wondered if he had some French on the sly, and made a private ideogram to this effect. ‘Possalthwaite’s a pure defensive strategist. He’s got a gestalt. The term we use here for a complete game is either gestalt or complete game.’

Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck in an intersticial diamond in the chain-link fencing, and Hal had to put his stick down and use both hands to force the thing out.

‘Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter’s brother — Hal can’t lob half as good as even Possalthwaite, and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play’s pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal’s strengths have started to fit together. He’s got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great groundstrokes, with great control and great touch, great command of touch and spin; and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control, and he can take an attacking player and use the guy’s own pace against him.’

Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more surprised than Hal did. The punter’s brother’s face registered nothing as he stood at the ad corner, adjusting something on his strings.

‘But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you have given your life to be. Not merely very good but the best. The good philosophy of here and Schtitt — I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than American, so you may see I have prejudice — is that you must have also — so, leave to one side for a moment the talent and work to become best — that you are doomed [276]if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend the success of the best, if you get to there.’

Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo-Georgian cube of the Community and Administration Building, several small boys carrying and dragging white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the parking lot’s rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves and casting anxious looks across the grounds at the crowd behind the Show Court.

‘Then,’ Poutrincourt said, ‘and for the ones who do become the étoiles, the lucky who become profiled and photographed for readers and in the U.S.A. religion make it, they must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or they are doomed. We see this in experience. One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years. This task of us at the Enfield is more delicate still, with the étoiles. For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, [277]so, then, one of two things we see will happen.’