David Wallace - Infinite jest

Shirtless in the summer — and pale, with a blond man’s dislike for the sun — the M.P. would sit in the little kitchen, at the kitchen table, feet flat on the wood-grain tiling, with a patriotic-themed bandanna wrapped around his head, recording Heinekens in his little notebook. A previous tenant had thrown something heavy through the kitchen window once, and the window’s screen was fucked up and not quite flush, and houseflies came and went more or less at will. Gately, when small, would be in there in the kitchen with the M.P. sometimes; the tile was better for his little cars’ suspensions than nubbly carpet. What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen. He used no swatter or rolled cone of Herald. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white and fast. He’d whack them as they lit on the kitchen table. The flies. But in a controlled way. Not hard enough to kill them. He was very controlled and intent about it. He’d whack them just hard enough to disable them. Then he’d pick them up real precisely and remove either a wing or like a leg, something important to the fly. He’d take the wing or leg over to the beige kitchen waste-basket and very deliberately hike the lid with the foot-pedal and deposit the tiny wing or leg in the wastebasket, bending at the waist. The memory is unbidden and very clear. The M.P.’d wash his hands at the kitchen sink, using green generic dishwashing liquid. The maimed fly itself he’d ignore and allow to scuttle in crazed circles on the table until it got stuck in a sticky spot or fell off the edge onto the kitchen floor. The conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences in minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens, explaining that maiming a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies. A fly was stuck in a sticky spot of dried Heineken and agitating its wing as the M.P. explained that a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear. Human beings couldn’t hear a maimed fly’s screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass other flies could, and the screams of their maimed colleagues helped keep them away. By the time the M.P. would put his head on his big pale arms and grab a little shut-eye among the Heineken bottles on the sun-heated table there’d often be several flies trapped in goo or scuttling in circles on the table, sometimes giving odd little hops, trying to fly with one wing or no wings. Possibly in Denial, these flies, as to their like condition. The ones that fell to the floor Gately would hunch directly over on hands and knees, getting one big red ear down just as close to the fly as possible, listening, his big pink forehead wrinkled. What makes Gately most uncomfortable now as he starts to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true hospital morning is that he can’t remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery, ever, after the M.P. passed out, can’t mentally see himself stepping on them or wrapping them in paper towels and flushing them down the toilet or something, but he feels like he must have; it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing something more than just hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer-cars and trying to see if he could hear tiny agonized screams, listening very intently. But he can’t for the life of him remember doing more than trying to hear, and the sheer cerebral stress of trying to force a more noble memory should have awakened him, on top of the dextral hurt; but he doesn’t come all the way awake in the big crib until the memory’s realistic dream bleeds into a nasty fictional dream where he’s wearing Lenz’s worsted topcoat and leaning very precisely and carefully over the prone figure of the Hawaiian-dressed Nuck whose head he’s whacked repeatedly against the hood’s windshield, he’s supporting his inclined weight on his good left hand against the warm throbbing hood, bent in real close to the maimed head, his ear to the bleeding face, listening very intently. The head opens its red mouth.

The wet start Gately finally wakes with jars his shoulder and side and sends a yellow sheet of pain over him that makes him almost scream into the window’s light. For about a year once at age twenty in Maiden he’d slept most nights in a home-built loft in the dorm of a certain graduate R.N.-nursing program in Maiden, with a ragingly addicted R.N.-nursing student, in the loft, which you needed a five-rung ladder to get up into this loft and the thing was only a couple of feet under the ceiling, and every A.M. Gately’d awake out of some bad dream and sit up with a jolt and thwack his head against the ceiling, until after some time there was a permanent concavity in the ceiling and a flattish spot in the curve of the top of his forehead he can still feel, lying here blinking and holding his head with his good left hand. For a second, blinking and red with A.M. fever, he thinks he sees Ferocious Francis G. in the bedside chair, chin freshly shaved and dotted with bits of Kleenex, posture stolid, his old man’s saggy little tits rising slowly under a clean white T-, smiling grimly around blue tubes and an unlit cigar between his teeth and saying ‘Well kid at least you’re still on this side of the fuckin’ sod, I guess there’s something to be said for that there. And are you as yet sober, then?’ the Crocodile says coolly, disappearing and then not reappearing after several blinks.

The forms and sound in the room is really only three White Flaggers Gately’s never known or connected with that well, but are apparently here stopping in on their way to work, to show empathy and support, Bud O. and Glenn K. and Jack J. Glenn K. in daytime wears the gray jumpsuit and complex utility-belt of a refrigeration technician.

‘And who’s the fellow in the hat outside?’ he’s asking.

Gately grunts in a frantic way that suggests the phoneme ü.

‘Tall, well-dressed, grumpy, cocky-looking, piggy-eyed, wearing a hat. Civil-Service-looking. Black socks and brown shoes,’ Glenn K. says, pointing out toward the door where there’s sometimes been the ominous shadow of a hat.

Gately’s teeth taste long-unbrushed.

‘Looking settled in for a stay, surrounded with sports pages and the takeout foods of many cultures, Laddie,’ says Bud O., who the story from before Gately’s time goes once hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In he broke her nose and bent it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired, as a daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek — Bud O.’d tagged her with a left cross — until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which eventually nurtured and supported Mrs. O. into eventually telling Bud O. to take a flying fuck to the moon and getting her nose realigned back out front and leaving him for a male Al-Anon in Birkenstock sandals. Gately’s bowels have gone watery with dread: he has all-too-clear memories of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A.’s brown shoes, piggy eyes, Stetson w/ feather, and penchant for Third World takeout. He keeps grunting pathetically.

Unsure how to be supportive, for a while the Flaggers try to cheer Gately up by telling him CPR jokes. ‘CPR’ is their term for Al-Anon, which is known to Boston AAs as the ‘Church of Perpetual Revenge.’

‘What’s an Al-Anon Relapse?’ asks Glenn K.

‘It is a twinge of compassion,’ says Jack J., who has a kind of a facial tic.

‘But what is an Al-Anon Salute?’ Jack J. asks back.

The three all pause, and then Jack J. puts the back of his hand to his brow and flutters his lashes martyrishly at the drop-ceiling. They all three of them laugh. They have no clue that if Gately actually laughs he’ll tear his shoulder’s sutures. One side of Jack J.’s face goes in and out of a tortured grimace that doesn’t affect the other side of his face one bit, something that’s always given Gately the fantods. Bud O. is waggling his finger disapprovingly at Glenn K., to signify an Al-Anon Handshake. Glenn K. gives a lengthy impression of an Al-Anon mom watching her alcoholic kid marching in some parade and getting more and more outraged at how everybody’s out of step except her kid. Gately closes his eyes and moves his chest up and down a few times in a dumbshow of polite laughter, so they’ll think they’ve cheered him up and screw. The little thoracic movements make his dextral regions make him want to bite the side of his hand in pain. It’s like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface of sleep and then spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again.