David Wallace - Infinite jest

He winces at the pain of moving his left arm to put a hand on her wrist to get her attention. Her wrist is thin across the top but oddly deep, thick-seeming. Gately gets her to look at him and takes the hand off her wrist and uses it to mime writing awkwardly in the air, his eyes rolling a bit from the pain of it. This is his idea. He points at her and then out the window and circles his hand back to her. He refuses to grunt or moo to emphasize anything. His forefinger is twice the size of her thumb as he again mimes holding an implement and writing on the air. He makes such a big slow obvious show of it because he can’t see her eyes to be sure she gets what he’s after.

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he’s going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happily still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing modified for Gately’s mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Papa,’ knowing they’ll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possibly live without the other, is how bonded they’ve got through the years.

The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle (‘M.P.’) van Dyne keeps foundering on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle’s veil in moonlight on their honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something. [350]So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can’t help envisioning the old X, with Joelle well-veiled and crying out And Lo! in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm — the closest Gately’d ever come to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging loft, who’d borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second’s wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.’s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod-type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it’s so cowardly. And even contemplating a romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful. In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called I3th-Stepping [351]and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It’s predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance. To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance’s betrayal, and grieving it. Plus let’s not even mention the mirror-and-vulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA’s stronger suggestions is that newcomers avoid all romantic relationships for at least a year. So somebody with some sober time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer is almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus. Not that it isn’t done. But the ones that do it never have the kind of sobriety anybody else respects or wants for themselves. A I3th-Stepper is still running from the mirror himself.

Not to mention that a Staffer seducing a new resident he’s supposed to be there to help would be dicking over Pat Montesian and Ennet House on a grand scale.

Gately sees it’s probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head’s real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in like Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He’s still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his various cages. It’s the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there.

I went down the hall to take out the tobacco and brush my teeth and rinse out the Spiru-Tein can, which had gotten an unpleasant crust along the sides. The subdorm halls were curved and had no corners as such, but you can see at most three doors and the jamb of the fourth from any point in the hall before the curve extrudes into your line of sight. I wondered briefly whether it was true that small children believed their parents could see them even around corners and curves.

The high wind’s moan and doors’ rattle were worse in the uncarpeted hall. I could hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms beyond my line of sight. Lots of the top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale and well-wrapped for the rest of the day.

The walls of the subdorms’ hallways are dinner-mint blue. The walls of the rooms themselves are cream. All the woodwork is dark and varnished, as is the guilloche that runs below all E.T.A. ceilings; and the dominant odor in the hallways is always a mixture of varnish and tincture of benzoin.

Someone had left a window open by the sinks in the boys’ room, and a hump of snow lay on the sill, and on the floor beneath the window by the sink on the end, whose hot-water pipe shrieks, was a parabolic dusting of snow, already melting at the apex. I turned on the lights and the exhaust fan kicked on with them; for some reason I could barely stand its sound. When I put my head out the window the wind came from nowhere and everywhere, the snow swirling in funnels and eddies, and there were little grains of ice in the snow. It was brutally cold. Across the East Courts, the paths were obscured, and the pine’s branches were near horizontal under their snow’s weight. Schtitt’s transom and observation tower looked menacing; it was still dark and snow-free on the lee side facing Comm.-Ad. The sight of distant ATHSCME fans displacing great volumes of snowy air northward is one of the better winter views from our hilltop, but visibility was now too poor to make out the fans, and the liquid hiss of the snow was too total to make out whether the fans were even on. The Headmaster’s House wasn’t much more than a humped shape off by the north tree-line, but I could picture poor C.T. at the living room window in leather slippers and Scotch-plaid robe, seeming to pace even when standing still, raising and lowering the antenna of the phone in his hand, with several calls out already to Logan, M.I.A.-Dorval, WeatherNet-9OOO’s recorded update, heavy-browed figures in Quebec’s O.N.A.N.T.A. office, C.T.’s forehead a washboard and lips moving soundless as he brainstormed his way toward a state of Total Worry.