David Wallace - Infinite jest

A.F.R.’s U.S.A. cell’s leader, Fortier, the son of a Glen Almond glass-blower, had allowed none of the mirrors to be broken or dismantled. In all other respects, the search had been methodical and thorough. It was a neat search and also orderly, with time taken. Because the viewer of the shop was visually dysfunctional, a consumer TP had been purchased and set up for volunteer viewing in the room of storage off the shop’s back room. Each cartridge of the shop’s exhaustive shelves was sampled by a volunteer, then discarded in one of the huge metal coffre d’amas in the alley outside the shop’s rear door. A detail had been assigned to roll the extinguished Antitoi brothers in construction-plastic and place them in a room of storage off the back room. This was for hygienic purposes. A detail also had procured an oilskin windowshade for the front door’s glass, also some printed signs which read CLOSED, ROPAS, and RELACHE. No person had knocked at the door after the first hours, thus.

Quickly, on the first day, in a liquor box which was damp and smelled, they had found an example of the rival F.L.Q.’s tactical street-display cartridges, with its crudely stamped smiling face and the ‘IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR’ embossed upon it. And young Tassigny, with characteristic valor, volunteered to be rolled into the room of storage and strapped in, in order to verify this, and Fortier allowed this. All had drunk the gesture of a toast to Tassigny and promised to look after his aged father and fur-traps, and M. Fortier had embraced the young volunteer and kissed both his face’s cheeks as he was rolled in and fitted by M. Broullîme with EEG wires and strapped in before the viewer placed in the room of storage.

Then the cartridge of the street-display turned out to be blank, void. Then another from this box, also wet: also blank. Two blanks. Done. D’accord. Fortier, philosophical, counselled against disappointment or damage from a frustration — he and Marathe had counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired man were probably the hoax, instilling of terror only. The fact of the displays which featured wheelchairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R. — this was ignored. A.F.R. wanted only to repossess this copy of the Entertainment. As well, chiefly, now to determine: could this copy of DuPlessis itself be copied? This was the real objective: a Master cartridge. [301]Unlike the F.L.Q., les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had no interest in blackmail or cartographic extortings for the Convexity’s return. Not in re-Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. or even its charter’s dissolution. The A.F.R. were interested only in dealing the sort of testicular frappe to the underbelly of U.S.A. self-interests that would render Canada itself unwilling to face the U.S.A. retaliation for this — if A.F.R. could secure, copy, and disseminate the Entertainment, Quebec would be not so much allowed as required by Ottawa to secede, to face on its own the wrath of a neighbor struck down by its own inability to say ‘Now’ to fatal pleasures.[302]

Fortier bid the A.F.R. methodically to continue the search. Younger volunteers were rolled into the room of storage on a rotating basis to sample each set of cartridges. Aside from some bickering over the Portuguese pornography, the rotation proceeded with valor and care. The plastic-wrapped cadavers began to swell, but the plastic maintained hygienic conditions adequately for viewing samples of the many cartridges in the room of storage. The search and inventory proceeded in a painstaking and slow fashion.

M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search’s middle, to help facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy. There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans’ field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor.

The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak substitute for respect. As if he were a sickly child, Fortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps flanked steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those standing upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose interior circuitry was responsive to large-bundle neural stimuli from his stumps, which with metal crutches whose bracelets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling parody of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional ‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ of the ‘equal access’; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose. Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice.

After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety. A few days before the debacle in which Don Gately got hurt, Joelle had begun to worry obsessively about her teeth. Smoking ‘base cocaine eats teeth, corrodes teeth, attacks the enamel directly. Chandler Foss had explained all this to her at supper, showing her his corroded stumps. In her Latin cloth purse now she carried a traveller’s brush and expensive toothpaste with alleged enamel-revitalizers and anti-corrosives. Several of the Ennet House residents who’d hit bottom with the glass pipe had no teeth or blackened and disintegrating teeth; the sight of Wade McDade’s or Chandler Foss’s teeth gave Joelle the fantods like nothing at meetings could. The toothpaste was only recently available over the counter and was a whole level of power and expense above standard smoker’s polish.

As she lies on her side beside Kate Gompert’s empty bunk, her veil’s selvage tucked secure between pillow and jaw, and Charlotte Treat also asleep across the lit room, Joelle dreams that Don Gately, unhurt and mid-South-accented, is ministering to her teeth. He is bibbed in dental white, humming softly to himself, his big hands deft as he plucks instruments from the gleaming chair-side tray. Her chair is dental and canted back, yielding her face up to him, her legs shut tight and stretching up and out before her. Dr. Don’s eyes are abstractly kind, concerned for her teeth; and his thick fingers, as he inserts things to hold her open, are gloveless and taste warm and clean. Even the light seems sterilely clean. There is no assistant; the dentist is solo, leaning in above her, humming absent chords as he probes. His head is massive and vaguely square. In the dream she is concerned for her teeth and feels Gately shares her concern. She feels good that he makes no chitchat and probably doesn’t know her name. There’s very little eye-contact. He is completely intent on her teeth. He is there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor’s message. His bib hangs by a necklace of tiny steel balls and could not be whiter, his head haloed with a strap and a polished metal disk attached to the strap just above his eyes, a tiny mirror of stainless steel, clean as the instruments’ tray; and the dream’s yielding and trustful quality of calm is undercut only by the view of her face in the halo’s mirror, the disk like a third eye in Gately’s broad clean forehead: because she can see her face, convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, her face all bug-eyes and sunken cheeks, lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes; and as the dentist’s warm thick fingers gently draw her lips back she looks up into his head’s mirror at long rows of all canine teeth, tapered and sharp, with then more rows of canines behind them, in reserve. The countless rows of the teeth are all sharp and strong and unblackened but tinged at the tips with an odd kind of red, as of old blood, the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat. These are teeth that have been up to things she hasn’t known about, she tries to say around the fingers. The dentist hums, probing. In the dream Joelle looks up into Don Gately’s forehead’s dental mirror’s disk and is seized with a fear of her teeth, a terror, and as her spread mouth spreads farther to cry out in fear all she can see in the little round mirror are endless red-stained rows of teeth leading back and away down a pitch-black pipe, and the image of all these rows of teeth in the disk blots out the big dentist’s good face as he probes with a hook and says he assures her that these can be saved.