David Wallace - Infinite jest

— That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis’s mother’s fork and then whole plate had clattered to the floor, and that amid the sounds of the pointers under the table fighting over that plate the mother’s own denial-system’s pressure blew, and she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that she’d known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated her suspicions and placed them under great pressure in the bell-jar of her own denial, because, she admits — admits is probably less accurate than something like keens or shrieks or jabbers — that her own father — an itinerant camp-meeting preacher — had molested her and her sister all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she’d married at just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she’d married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his daughter.

— That she’d said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before God and man.

— That whereupon she’d reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down to the Daddy’s acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid.

— That the Daddy’d kept a world-class collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks on wooden shelves down in the cellar.

— That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid.

— That Madame Psychosis’s name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy’s name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.

— That, despite the little rotter’s professions of self-recrimination for allowing the deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis increasingly untenable, it didn’t take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to figure out why the fellow’d given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the traumatic deformity, now did it.

— That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone’s failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home’s kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal — first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.[332]

The most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting listed in the little white Metro-Boston Recovery Options [333]booklet the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as ‘Q.R.S.-32A.’ Hal, who had no last class period, rushed through P.M.’S, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.’s were even warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight’s lemon chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn’t sure why, since it didn’t seem to be any kind of slobbering inability to abstain that was the problem — he hadn’t had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The issue’s the horrific way his head’s felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope. [334]It wasn’t just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal’s eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You’re UP I’ve Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn’t let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7’s of feeling wretched and bereft.

Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill and took the tow truck up Comm. Ave. to the C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond, the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit Boylston St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St. became shunpike Rte. 9, the major west-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal 1-90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27.

Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the sky’s combustionish orange had deepened to the hellish crimson of a fire’s last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after, and Hal’s spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics Anonymous Meeting thing out.

Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps were set so senselessly high on the truck’s grille.

The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and not returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then cancelled a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown. NPR had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects — George Will’s laryngectomy-prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He ate two of three $4.00 bran muffins he’d whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet bakery, grimacing as he swallowed because he’d forgotten a tonic to wash them down, then put in a mammoth plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA glass, which fit neatly in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and passed the last fifteen minutes of the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word Anonymous, all the way he supposed from the Æolic övuya through Thynne’s B.S. 1580s reference to ‘anonymall Chronicals’; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English on-áne, which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf’s eventual standard inversion to the classic anon, maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. ‘35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there’d been such a lengthy entry in the Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn’t had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over. Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he’d ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn’t (so far) compromised, the withdrawal’s effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.