David Wallace - Infinite jest

Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his head thrown back and arms hanging, hands treed with arteries you can see his slow pulse in. His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way Schtitt always has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open and a dead pipe hangs at an alarming angle from its corner. Mario records him sleeping for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit. What’s on and making the window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little bullet-headed lines down the glass is a duet that keeps climbing in pitch and emotion: a German second tenor and a German soprano are either very happy or very unhappy or both. Mario’s ears are extremely sensitive. Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly loud European opera. He’s shared with Mario several different tales of grim childhood experiences at a BMW-sponsored ‘Quality-Control-Orientated’ Austrian Akademie to account for his REM-peculiarities. The soprano leaves the baritone and goes up to a high D and just hangs there, either shattered or ecstatic. Schtitt doesn’t stir, not even when Mario falls twice, loudly, trying to get to the door with his hands over his ears.

The Community-Administration stairwells are narrow and no-nonsense. Red railings of cold iron whose red is one coat of primer. Steps and walls of raw-colored rough cement. The sort of sandy echo in there that makes you take stairs as fast as possible. The salve makes a sucking sound. The upper halls are empty. Low voices and lights from under the doors on the second floor. 2100 is still mandatory Study Period. There won’t be serious movement till 2200, when the girls will drift from room to room, congregating, doing whatever packs of girls in robes and furry slippers do late at night, until deLint kills all the dormitory lights at the dorms’ main breaker around 2300. Isolated movement: a door down the hall opens and shuts, the Vaught twins are heading down the hall to the bathroom at the far end, wearing only an enormous towel, one of their heads in curlers. One of the falls in Mr. Schtitt’s room had been on the burnt hip, and squunched salve from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at that side of the pelvis, though there is zero pain. Three tense voices behind Carol Spodek and Shoshana Abram’s door, lists of degrees and focal lengths, a study group for Mr. Ogilvie’s ‘Reflections on Refraction’ exam tomorrow. A girl’s voice from he can’t tell which room says ‘Steep hot beach sea’ twice very distinctly and then is still. Mario is leaning back against a wall in the hallway, panning idly. Felicity Zweig emerges from her door by the stairwell carrying a soap-dish and wearing a towel tied at that breast-level, as if there were breasts, moving toward Mario on her way to the head. She puts her hand out straight at his head’s camera, a kind of distant stiff-arm as she passes:

‘I’m wearing a towel.’

‘I understand,’ Mario says, using his arms to turn himself around and pointing the lens at the bare wall.

‘I’m wearing a towel.’

Brisk controlled sounds of retching from behind Diane Prins’s door. Mario gets a couple seconds of Zweig hurrying away in the towel, tiny little bird steps, looking terribly fragile.

The stairwells smell like the cement they’re made of.

Behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn’s door, is the faint rubbery squeak of somebody moving around on crutches. Someone in 311 is yelling ‘Boner check! Boner check!’ A lot of the third floor is for boys under fourteen. The hall carpet up here is ectoplasmically stained, the expanses of wall between doors hung with posters of professional players endorsing gear. Someone has drawn a goatee and fangs on an old Donnay poster of Mats Wilander, and the poster of Gilbert Treffert is defaced with anti-Canadian slurs. Otis Lord’s door has Infirmary next to his name on the door’s name-card. Penn’s room’s door’s card’s name also had Infirmary. Sounds of someone talking low to someone who’s sobbing from Beak, Whale, and Virgilio’s room, and Mario resists an impulse to knock. LaMont Chu’s door next door is completely covered with magazines’ action-shots of matches. Mario is leaning back to get footage of the door when LaMont Chu exits the bathroom at this end in a terry robe and thongs and wet hair, literally whistling ‘Dixie.’

‘Mario!’

Mario gets him bearing down, his calves hairless and muscular, hair-water dripping onto his robe’s shoulders with each step. ‘LaMont Chu!’

‘What’s happening?’

‘Nothing’s happening!’

Chu stands there just within conversation-range. He’s only slightly taller than Mario. A door down the hall opens and a head sticks out and scans and then withdraws.

‘Well.’ Chu squares his shoulders and looks into the camera atop Mario’s head. ‘You want me to say something for posterity?’

‘Sure!’

‘What should I say?’

‘You can say anything you want!’

Chu draws himself way up and looks penetrating. Mario checks the meter on his belt and uses the treadle to shorten the focal length and adjust the angle of the camera’s lens slightly downward, right at Chu, and there are tiny grinding adjustment-sounds from the Bolex.

Chu’s still just standing there. ‘I can’t think what to say.’

‘That happens to me all the time.’

‘The minute your invitation became official my mind went blank.’

‘That can happen.’

‘There’s just this staticky blank field in there now.’

‘I know just what you mean.’

They stand there silent, the camera’s mechanism emitting a tiny whir.

Mario says ‘You just got out of the shower, I can tell.’

‘I was talking with good old Lyle downstairs.’

‘Lyle’s terrific!’

‘I was going to just whip right over into the showers, but the locker room’s got this, like, odor.’

‘It’s always great to talk with good old Lyle.’

‘So I came up here.’

‘Everything you’re saying is very good.’

LaMont Chu stands there a moment looking at Mario, who’s smiling and Chu can tell wants to nod furiously, but can’t, because he needs to keep the Bolex steady. ‘What I was doing, I was filling Lyle in on the Eschaton debacle, telling him about the lack of hard info, the conflicted rumors that are going around, about how Kittenplan and some of the Big Buds are going to get blamed. About disciplinary action for the Buds.’

‘Lyle’s just an outstanding person to go to with concerns,’ Mario says, fighting not to nod furiously.

‘Lord’s head and Penn’s leg, the Postman’s broken nose. What’s going to happen to the Incster?’

‘You’re acting perfectly natural. This is very good.’

‘I’m asking if you’ve heard from Hal what they’re going to do, if he’s in on the blame from Tavis. Pemulis and Kittenplan I can see, but I’m having trouble with the idea of Struck or your brother taking discipline for what happened out there. They were strictly from spectation for the whole thing. Kittenplan’s Bud is Spodek, and she wasn’t even out there.’

‘I’m getting all this, you’ll be glad to know.’

Chu is now looking at Mario, which for Mario is weird because he’s looking through the viewfinder, a lens-eye view, which means when Chu looks down from the lens to look at Mario it looks to Mario like he’s looking down south somewhere along Mario’s thorax.

‘Mario, I’m asking if Hal’s told you what they’re going to do to anybody.’

‘Is this what you’re saying, or are you asking me?’

‘Asking.’

Chu’s face looks slightly oval and convex through the lens’s fish-eye, a jutting aspect. ‘So what if I want to use this that you’re saying for the documentary I’ve been asked to make?’