David Wallace - Infinite jest

The leader’s nod is slow and meditative. ‘And can you share your needs with the group right now, Kevin?’

‘Please share, Kevin,’ says a slim guy over by a black filing cabinet who sits like he’s a veteran at sitting Indian-style in hard plastic chairs.

The music’s still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.

‘The work we’re here to do,’ the leader says over the music, one hand now pressed pensively to the side of his big face, ‘is to work on our dysfunctional passivity and tendency to wait silently for our Inner Infant’s needs to be magically met. The energy I feel in the group now is that the group is supportively asking Kevin to nurture his Inner Infant by naming and sharing his needs out loud with the group. And I’m feeling how aware we all are how risky and vulnerable need-naming-out-loud must feel for Kevin right now.’

Everybody looks deadly serious. A couple guys are rubbing their bears’ bellies pregnantly. The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside him is the inguinal gurgle of two heavy bran muffins swallowed at high speeds w/o liquid. The string of mucus from Kevin’s nose trembles and swings. The slender guy who’d asked Kevin please to share is now waggling the arms of his teddy bear in an infantile way. Hal feels a wave of nausea flood his mouth with fresh saliva.

‘We’re asking you to name what your Inner Infant wants right now more than anything in the world,’ the leader’s saying to Kevin.

‘To be loved and held!’ Kevin keens, sobbing harder. His lachrymucus is now a thin silver string joining his nose and the fuzzy top of his bear’s head. The bear’s expression is seeming creepier to Hal by the second. Hal wonders what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody’s Infantile revelation of need. Meanwhile Kevin is saying that his Inner Infant inside him had always hoped that some day his Mom and Dad would be there for him, to hold him and love him. He says but right from the start they’d never been there for him, leaving him and his brother with Hispanic nannies while they devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of psychotherapy and support groups. This takes a while to say, given all the snuffles and wracked spasms. Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone altogether, dead, smooshed by a dysfunc-tionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica Way on the way to Couples Counselling.

At this Hal’s slumped head jerks up, his mouth oval with horror. He’s all of a sudden realized that this guy who’s seated at such an angle that Hal’s been able to see only the obliquest portion of his profile is in fact Kevin Bain, his brother Orin’s old E.T.A. doubles and chemical-mischief partner Marlon Bain’s older brother, Kevin Bain, of Dedham MA, who the last Hal had heard had gotten his M.B.A. at Wharton and cleaned up with a string of Simulated Reality arcades all up and down the South Shore, back during the pre-Subsidized-Time Simulated Reality craze, before InterLace viewers and digital cartridges let you do your own customized Simulating right at home and the novelty wore off. [335]The Kevin Bain whose childhood hobby was memorizing IRS capital-depreciation schedules and whose adult idea of a wild time [336]had been putting extra marshmallows in his nightly cocoa, and who wouldn’t have known a recreational drug if it walked up and poked him in the eye. Hal begins to scan for possible exits. The only door was the one he’d come in, which is in full view of most of the room. There are no windows at all.

Hal’s chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This is one of those men’s-issues-Men’s-Movement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle’s stepdad went to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick’s grip poke out between his legs and yelling ‘Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!’

Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear’s head and saying it didn’t look like his Inner Infant would ever get its wish. The gooey music’s cello sounds like some sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it’s in the middle of.

Sure enough, the round man, whose hand’s left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor old Kevin Bain to honor and name his I.I.’s wounded wish anyway, to say ‘Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love and hold me,’ out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain goes ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good old adult mortified embarrassment to it, along with the racking sobs. A couple of the other men in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the arms of their teddy bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt County hydroponic marijuana that Pemulis occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile counterpart at the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so big and plump with high-Delta-9 resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The moist sounds right behind him turn out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Hal keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O. booklet the girl had given him. He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumb-prints on several of the pages, and that two pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal fears is an ancient dried booger, and now that the booklet’s cover is dated January in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past, and that it’s not impossible that the blandly hostile toothless girl at The Ennet facility had kertwanged him by giving him a dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide.

Kevin Bain keeps repeating ‘Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me’ in a kind of monotone of pathos. The gradually intensifying lisp in Please is apparently a performative invocation of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other fluids flow and roll. The warm round leader Harv’s own eyes are a moist glassy blue. The CD scanner’s cello is now into some sort of semi-jazzy pizzicato stuff that seems oxymoronic against the room’s mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell that signifies somebody nearby has some athlete’s-foot issues to confront, under his socks. Plus it’s mystifying that 32A has no windows, given all the smoky-brown fenestra-tion Hal’d seen from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt’s beard is one of those small rectangular ones that’s easy to keep clear of the cup’s rim. The back and side of Kevin Bain’s hair has separated into spiky sweat-soaked strands, from the room’s heat and the Infant’s emotions.

All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told K. Bain’s Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn’t automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn’t exactly sounded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn’t consider himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.

The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks Kevin Bain if it feels to his Inner Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to appear cribside to meet his needs.

‘No,’ Kevin says very quietly. ‘No, it doesn’t, Harv.’

The leader is idly arranging his bear’s splayed arms in different positions, so it looks like the bear’s either waving or surrendering. ‘Do you suppose you would be able to ask someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?’