David Wallace - Infinite jest

I brought my head back in when I could no longer feel my face. I made my little ablutions. I hadn’t had to go to the bathroom in a serious way in three days.

The digital display up next to the ceiling’s intercom read 11-18-ESTO456.

When the whap-whap of the bathroom door subsided I heard a quiet voice with an odd tone farther up around the curve of the hallway. It turned out that good old Ortho Stice was sitting in a bedroom-chair in front of a hall window. He was facing the window. The window was closed, and he had his forehead up against the glass, either talking or chanting to himself very quietly. The whole lower part of the window was fogged with his breath. I came up behind him, listening. The back of his head was that shark-belly gray-white of crew cuts so short the scalp shows through. I was more or less right behind his chair. I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to himself or chanting something. He didn’t turn around even when I rattled my toothbrush in the NASA glass. He had on his classic Darknesswear: black sweatshirt, black sweatpants on which he’d had a red and gray E.T.A. silkscreened down both legs. His feet were bare on the cold floor. I was standing right beside the chair, and he still didn’t look up.

‘Who’s that now?’ he said, staring straight ahead through the window.

‘Hi Orth.’

‘Hal. You’re up kind of early.’

I rattled my toothbrush a little to indicate a shrug. ‘You know. Up and about.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Your voice. Shoot, are you crying? What’s the matter?’

My voice had been neutral and a bit puzzled. ‘I’m not crying, Orth.’

‘Well then.’ Stice breathed onto the window. He reached up without moving his head and scratched the back of his crew cut. ‘Up and around. We going to play some furriners out there today or what?’

For the past ten days I’d always felt worst in the early A.M., before dawn. There’s something elementally horrific about waking before dawn. The window was unobscured above The Darkness’s breath-line. The snow wasn’t swirling or pummelling the window as much on the building’s east side, but the lee side’s absence of wind showed just how hard new snow was coming down. It was like a white curtain endlessly descending. The sky was lightening here on the east side, a paler gray-white, not unlike Stice’s crew-cut. I realized that from his position he could see only condensed breath on the window, no reflections. I made a few grotesque, distended, pop-eyed faces at him behind his back. They made me feel worse.

I rattled the brush. ‘Well, if we do, it’s not going to be out there. It’s drifting about up to the tape on the west nets. They’ll have to try to get us indoors somewhere.’

Stice breathed. ‘There’s no indoor place’s got thirty-six courts, Inc. Winchester Club’s got twelve is maybe the most. Fucking Mount Auburn’s only got eight.’

‘They’ll have to move us around to different sites. It’s a pain in the ass, but Schtitt’s done it before. I think the real variable’11 be whether the Quebec kids got into Logan last night before whenever it was this hit.’

‘Logan’ll be shut down you’re saying.’

‘But I think we’d have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper, Mario said.’

‘Boys are looking to get X’d by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or what?’

‘My guess is they’re stuck up at Dorval. I’ll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get some sort of announcement at breakfast, probably.’

This was a clear opening for The Darkness to do a quick C.T. impression, wondering aloud over the phone to the Québecois coach whether he, C.T., should press for them to charter ground transport from Montreal or else rather urge them not to risk travel through the Concavity in a storm in such a generous but disappointed gesture the Québecois would think busing the 400 clicks to Boston in a blizzard was his own generous idea, C.T. wholly open, opening all different psych-strategies to the coach’s inspection, with the frantic ruffling sound of the coach’s French-English dictionary loud in the phone’s background. But Stice just sat there with his forehead against the glass. His bare feet were tapping some sort of rhythm on the floor. The hallway was freezing, and his toes had a faint blue tinge. He blew air out of his lips in a tight sigh, making his fat cheeks flap a little; we called this his horse-sound.

‘Were you talking to yourself out here, or chanting, or what?’

A silence ensued.

‘Heard this one joke,’ Stice said finally.

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘You want to hear it?’

‘I could use a quality laugh right now, Dark,’ I said.

‘You too?’

Another silence ensued. Two different people were weeping at different pitches behind closed doors. A toilet flushed on the second floor. One of the weepers was nearly skirling, an inhuman keening sound. There was no way to tell which E.T.A. male it was, which door back down past the walls’ curve.

The Darkness scratched the back of his head again without moving his head. His hands looked almost luminous against the black sleeves.

‘There’s these three statisticians gone duck hunting,’ he said. He paused. ‘They’re like statisticians by trade.’

‘I’m with you so far.’

‘And they gone off hunting duck, and they’re hunkered down in the muck of a duck blind, for hunting, in waders and hats and all, your top-of-the-line Winchester double-aughts, so on. And they’re quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always quack into.’

‘Duck-calls,’ I said.

‘There you go.’ Stice tried to nod against the window. ‘Well and here comes this one duck come flying on by overhead.’

‘Their quarry. The object of their being out there.’

‘Damn straight, their raisin-debt and what have you, and they’re getting set to blast the son of a whore into feathers and goo,’ Stice said. ‘And the first statistician, he brings up his Winnie and lets go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass kersplat in the muck, and but he’s missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second statistician he up and fires then, and back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies got a fucker of a recoil on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from firing, and they see his shot goes just high.’

‘Misses the duck as well.’

‘Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping and jumping up and down to beat the band, hollering “We got him, boys, we done got him!’’

Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I wasn’t even pretending to laugh. Stice didn’t seem to expect me to. He shrugged without moving his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass.

I stood next to him in silence and held my NASA glass with the toothbrush and looked out over the top of Stice’s head through the window’s upper half. The snowfall was intense and looked silky. The East Courts’ pavilion’s green canvas roof bowed ominously down, its white GATOR-ADE logo obscured. A figure was out there, not under the shelter of the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting there. It was impossible to tell the person’s age or sex. Church spires off in Brookline were darkening as the sky lightened behind them. The beginning of dawn looked like moonlight through the snow. Several people were at their vehicles’ windshields with scrapers down along Commonwealth Avenue. Their images were tiny and dark and fluttered; the Avenue’s line of buried parked cars looked like igloo after igloo, some sort of Eskimo tract-housing thing. It had never before snowed like this in mid-November. A snow-covered B train labored uphill like a white slug. It seemed clear that the T would be suspending routes before long. The snow and cold sunrise gave everything a confected quality. The portcullis between the driveway and the parking lot was half up, probably to keep it from being frozen closed. I couldn’t see who was in the portcullis’s security booth. The attendants always came and went, most of them from the Ennet House place, trying to ‘recover.’ The flagpole’s two flags were frozen and stuck right out straight, turning stiffly from side to side in the wind, like someone in a neck-brace, instead of flapping. The E.T.A. physical-post mailbox just inside the portcullis had a mo-hawk of snow. The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it. Slice’s fogged breath kept me from seeing anything closer than the mailbox and East Courts. The light was starting to diffract into colors at the perimeter of Slice’s breath-fog on the window.