David Wallace - Infinite jest

The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurg-ery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The man’s fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man’s life enough meaning for him to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.

The couple had gotten Kate Gompert’s mother’s address and had sent Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn’t know whether Mr. Ernest Feaster’s limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

Ms. Ruth van Cleve’s first day off new residents’ three-day House Restriction. Allowed now to hit meetings outside Enfield if accompanied by some more senior resident the Staff judges safe. Ruth van Cleve in spike heels walking alongside a psychotically depressed Kate Gompert on Prospect just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little after 2200h., yammering nonstop.

Ruth van Cleve is shaping up to be excruciating for Kate Gompert to be around. Ruth van Cleve hails from Braintree on the South Shore, is many kilos underweight, wears brass-colored lipstick, and has dry hair teased out in the big-hair fashion of decades past. Her face has the late-stage Ice [284]-addict’s concave long-jawed insectile look. Her hair is a dry tangled cloud, with tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak underneath. Joelle v.D.’d said it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve’s hair grew her head instead of the other way around. Kate Gompert’s hair is butcher-block cut and has recognizable color, at least.

Kate Gompert hasn’t slept in four nights, and her slumped progress up the Prospect sidewalk resembles the lazy tack of a boat in no rush. Ruth van Cleve talks nonstop into her right ear. It’s around 22OOh. on Saturday and the sodium streetlights keep going off and then on again with a stuttered hum, some connection in them loose somewhere. Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman Square also crowd the sidewalk’s edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads. In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in wheelchairs with creative receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered invitations to help them.

An oral narrative begins to emerge. Ms. Ruth v.C. has been remanded to Ennet House by D.S.S. and Family Court after her newborn baby was discovered in a Braintree MA alley swaddled in WalMart advertising circulars whose Harvest Moon Value Specials had expired 11/01, a Sunday. Ruth van Cleve had rather unshrewdly left the hospital I.D. bracelet with its D.O.B. and her own name and Health Card # on the discarded infant’s wrist. The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine [285]it received for in-utero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can only speculate about. [286]The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.

What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she’s moving forward, her whole self, when all she’s capable of concentrating on is one foot and then the other foot. Heads glide by in the darkened windows. Some of the Latino males in the vicinity do a kind of sexual checking-out as they pass — even though underweight and dry-haired and kind of haggish, Ruth van Cleve’s manner and attire and big hair broadcast that she’s all about sexuality and sex.

A negative thing about opting for recovery in NA instead of AA is availability and location of meetings. In other words fewer NA meetings. On a Saturday night you could stand on the roof of Ennet House in Enfield and be hard-pressed to spit in any direction without hitting some AA venue nearby. Whereas the closest Saturday-P.M. NA meeting is N. Cambridge’s Clean and Serene Group, infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing, and the thing’s Beginner’s Mtng. goes from 2000 to 2l00h. and the regular from 2100 to 2200h., purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so many drug addicts suffer weekly, Saturday still being the week’s special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24/7/365. But from Inman Square back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike — hoof up Prospect to Central Sq. and take the Red Line all the way to Park Street station and then the maddening Green Line B Train forever west on Comm. Ave. — and it’s now after 22l5h., meaning Kate Gompert has 75 minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer beside her back for Curfew. Ruth van Cleve’s chatter is as listener-interest-independent as anything Kate Gom-pert’s heard since Randy Lenz got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left, which was who knows how many days or weeks ago.

The two move in and out of cones of epileptic light from fluttering street-lamps. Kate Gompert is trying not to shudder as Ruth van Cleve asks her if she knows someplace you can pick up a good toothbrush cheap. Kate Gom-pert’s entire spiritual energy and attention are focused on first her left foot and then her right foot. One of the heads she does not see, floating in the windows with her own unrecognizable head and Ruth van Cleve’s cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause, who’s several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course step for step, eyeing string purses he imagines contain more than just train-fare and NA Newcomers’ keychains.

The vaporizer chugs and seethes and makes the room’s windows weep as Jim Troeltsch inserts a pro-wrestling cartridge in the little TP’s viewer and dons his tackiest sportcoat and wet-combs his hair down smooth so it looks toupeeish and settles back on his bunk, surrounded by Seldane-bottles and two-ply facial tissue, preparing to call the action. His roommates have long since seen what was coming, and screwed.

Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B’s curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped to diamond-shaped, being careful not to let it fall.

Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound.