David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Hey Moms?’

‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’

‘Moms, I think I get it.’

‘Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?’

She’s risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot. So her back is almost to him as she stands there at the little sideboard. An old folded pair of U.S.A. football pants and a helmet are on top of one of the file cabinets by the flag. Her one memento of Orin, who won’t talk to them or contact them in any way. She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high field of wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD. A blue blazer with an O.N.A.N.T.A. insignia is hung very neatly and straight on a wooden hanger from the metal tree of the coatrack in the corner. She’s always had her coffee out of the OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston. The Moms hangs up stuff like shirts and blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive. The mug has a hair-thin brown crack down one side, but it’s not dirty or stained, and she never gets lipstick on the rim the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups’ rims.

Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens. His father and later Hal had changed him for years, never once judging or wrinkling their face or acting upset or sad.

‘But except hey Moms?’

‘I’m still right here.’

Avril couldn’t change diapers. She’d come to him in tears, he’d been seven, and explained, and apologized. She just couldn’t handle diapers. She just couldn’t deal with them. She’d sobbed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood it didn’t mean she didn’t love him to death or find him repellent.

‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’

She especially likes to hold the coffee’s mug in both hands. ‘Pardon me?’

‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’

One thing that’s happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she doesn’t follow you. Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same little line, and she’s twenty-eight. T don’t follow you. How can someone be too much himself?’

‘I think I wanted to ask you that.’

‘Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?’

‘Hey Moms?’

She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. ‘Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether I’ve been sensing that you yourself are sad?’

Mario’s gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the Bolex’s foot-treadle with his hands, if necessary. The Center Courts’ towering lights cast an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin high clouds whose movement’s pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the faint reflections of the lit room, and up, the tennis lights’ odd small lumes like criss-crossing spots.

‘Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume you’d simply come and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.’

And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’ headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.

The dark had a distanceless shape. The room’s ceiling might as well have been clouds.

‘Skkkkk.’

‘Booboo?’

‘Skk-kkk.’

‘Mario.’

‘Hal!’

‘Were you asleep there, Boo?’

‘I don’t think I was.’

‘Cause I don’t want to wake you up if you were.’

‘Is it dark or is it me?’

‘The sun won’t be up for a while, I don’t think.’

‘So it’s dark then.’

‘Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’

‘You were saying “Thank you Sir may I have another” several times.’

‘Sorry Boo.’

‘Numerous times.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I think I slept right through it.’

‘Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores’ vibrations in your midsection.’

‘I slept right through it. I didn’t hear you even come in.’

‘Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in his rack again.’

‘…’

‘I hope you didn’t move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’

‘I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don’t know to borrow tapes, if we’re both devoted.’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’

‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine. Moms asked me where’s Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up.’

‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’

‘She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you’re too trustworthy to worry about or check up on.’

‘Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are for somebody else’s teeth, not my teeth, and I can’t seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they’re not for my teeth.’

‘I promised LaMont Chu I’d tell him whatever information you told me, he was so concerned.’

‘The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’

‘LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.’

‘Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?’

‘S. Johnson used to be the Moms’s dog. That passed away.’

‘And you remember how he died, then.’