David Wallace - Infinite jest

Plus Thrust says Bruce Green hasn’t shared word one to Staff about his feelings about anything to do with Lenz or Gately’s embryoglio; that he just sits around waiting for somebody to read his mind; that his roommates have complained that he thrashes and shouts about nuts and cigars in his sleep.

Calvin Thrust, four years sober, straddling the backwards chair, keeps inclining himself ever more forward in the posture of a man who’s at any moment going to push up off out of the chair and leave. He reports how something deep in the previously hopelessly arrogant-seeming ‘Tiny’ Ewell seems like it’s broken and melted, spiritually speaking: the guy shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, was heard weeping in the 5-Man head, and was observed by Johnette taking out the kitchen trash in secret even though his Chore this week was Office Windows. Thrust had discovered fine dining in sobriety, and has the beginning of chins. His hair is slicked back with odorless stuff at all times, and he has a more or less permanent sore on his upper lip. Gately for some reason keeps imagining Joelle van Dyne dressed as Madame Psychosis sitting in a plain chair in the 3-Woman room eating a peach and looking out the open window at the crucifix atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s prolix roof. The crucifix isn’t big, but it’s up so high it’s visible from most anywhere in Enfield-Brighton. Sees Joelle delicately pulling the veil out to get the peach up under it. Thrust says Charlotte Treat’s T-cell count is down. She’s needlepointing Gately some kind of GET BETTER A DAY AT A TIME ASSUMING THAT’S GOD’S WILL doily, but it’s been slow going, because Treat’s developed some kind of goopy Virus-related eye infection that’s got her bumping into walls, and her counselor Maureen N. at the Staff Meeting wanted Pat to consider having her transferred to an HIV halfway house up in Everett that’s got some recovering addicts in there. Morris Hanley, speaking of T-cells, has baked some cream-cheese brownies for Gately as a nurturing gesture, but then the twats at the Trauma Wing’s nurses’ station, like, impounded them from Thrust when he came up, but he’d had a couple on the way over in the bloodstained ‘Vette and he could assure Don that Hanley’s brownies were worth killing a loved one for and everything like that. Gately feels a sudden rush of anxiety over the issue of who’s cooking the House supper in his absence, like will they know to put corn flakes in the meat loaf, for texture. He finds Thrust insufferable and wishes he’d just fucking go already, but has to admit he’s less conscious of the horrific pain when somebody’s there, but that that’s mostly because the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody’s saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. Thrust puts his unlit gasper behind his ear where Gately predicts hair-tonic will render it unsmokable, looks conspiratorially around back over each shoulder, leans in so his face is visible between two bars of the bed’s side-railing, and bathes Gately’s face in old eggs and smoke as he leans in and quietly says that Gately’ll be psyched to hear that all the residents that were at the embryoglio — except Lenz and Thrale and the ones that aren’t in a legal position to step forward and like that, he says — he says they’ve most of them all come forward and filed depositions, that the BPD’s Finest, plus some rather weirder Federal guys with goofy-looking archaic crew cuts, probably involved because of the like inter-O.N.A.N. element of the Nucks — here Gately’s big heart skips and sinks — have come around and been voluntarily admitted inside, on Pat’s written OK, and they took depositions, which is like testifying on paper, and the depositions look to be basically 110 % behind Don Gately and support a justifiable señorio of either self-defense or Lenz-defense. Several testimonies indicate the Nucks gave the impression of being under the influence of aggressive-type Substances. The single biggest problem right now, Thrust says Pat says, is the missing alleged Item. As in the.44 Item Gately was plugged with’s whereabouts are missing, Thrust says. The last resident to depose to seeing it was Green, who says he took it away from the Nuck the nigger girls stomped, whereupon he, Green, says he dropped it on the lawn. Whereupon it liked vanished from legal view. Thrust says that in his legal view the Item’s the thing that makes the difference between a señorio of ironshod self-defense and one of just maybe a huge fucking beef in which Gately got mysteriously plugged at some indefinite point while rearranging a couple Canadian maps with his huge bare hands. Gately’s heart is now somewhere around his bare hairy shins, at the mention of Federal crewcuts. His attempted plea for Thrust to come out and say did he actually kill anybody did he sounds like that crushed kitten again. The pain of the terror is past standing, and it helps him surrender and quit trying, and he relaxes his legs and decides Thrust gets to not say whatever he wants, that the reality right this second is that he’s mute and powerless over Thrust. Thrust leans in and hugs the back of the chair and says Clenette Henderson and Yolanda Willis are on Full House Restriction in their room to keep them from coming down and maybe fucking themselves over legally in a deposition. Because the Nuck with the plaid hat with the ear-flaps and the missing alleged Item had expired on the spot from a spike heel through the right eye, as he was getting the shit stomped out of him as only female niggers can stomp, and everything like that, and Yolanda Willis had very shrewdly left the shoe and spike heel right there protruding from the guy’s map with her toe-prints all over its insides — meaning presumably the shoe’s — so producing the Item was going to be in her strong legal interests too, as well, as Thrust analyzes the legal landscape. Thrust says Pat’s limped around and appealed to every single resident personally, and everybody’s submitted more or less voluntarily to a room- and property-search and everything like that, and still no large-caliber Item has turned up, though Nell Gunther’s hidden Oriental-knife collection sure made an impression. Thrust predicts it’ll be strongly in Gately’s lego-judicial interest and everything like that to ransack his brain and mind for where and with who he last saw the alleged gun. The sun was starting to go down over the West Newton hills through the double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight against the far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater vents kept making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to get dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that.

Sometime later, at night, backlit by the light of the hall, is the figure of resident Geoffrey Day, sitting where Thrust had sat but with the chair turned around the right way and with his legs primly crossed, eating a cream-cheese brownie he reports they’re passing out free to people down at the nurses’ station. Day says Johnette F. is certainly no Don Gately in the culinary arena. She seems to enjoy some sort of collusive kickback-type relationship with the manufacturers of Spam, Day says, is his theory. It might be a whole different night. The nighttime ceiling no longer bulges convexly with Gately’s own shallow breaths, and the improved sounds he can now make have evolved from feline to more like bovine. But his right side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It’s gone from a fiery pain to cold dead deep tight pain with a queer flavor of emotional loss to it. From deep inside he can hear the pain laughing at the 90 mg. of Toradol-IM they’ve got in the I.V. drip. As with Ewell, when Gately comes up out of sleep there’s no way to tell how long Day’s been there, or quite why. Day is plowing through a long story it seems about his relationship growing up with his younger brother. Gately has a hard time imagining Day being blood-related to anybody. Day says his brother was developmentally challenged in some way. He had enormous red wet loose lips and wore eyeglasses so thick his eyes had looked like an ant’s eyes, growing up. Part of his challenge was that Day’s brother had had a crippling phobic fear of leaves, apparently. As in ordinary leaves, from trees. Day’s been sucker-punched by an emergent sober memory of how he used to emotionally abuse his little brother simply by threatening to touch him with a leaf. Day has this way of holding his cheek and jaw when he talks like cutout photos of the late J. Benny. It’s not at all evident why Day’s choosing to share this stuff with a mute and feverishly semiconscious Gately. It seems like Don G.’s gotten way more popular as somebody to talk to since he’s become effectively paralyzed and mute. The ceiling’s behaving itself, but in the room’s gray Gately could still make out a tallly insubstantial ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision’s periphery. There was some creepy relationship between the figure’s postures and the passing nurses’ noiseless glide. This figure pretty definitely seemed to prefer night to day, though by this point Gately could well have been asleep again, as Day began to describe different species of hand-held leaves.