David Wallace - Infinite jest

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one’s life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning. I kept thinking of the Film and Cartridge Studies professor’s final soliloquy in Himself’s unfinished Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, the sour parody of academia that the Moms had taken as an odd personal slap. I kept thinking I really should go up and check on The Darkness. There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.

I was on the floor. I felt the Nile-green carpet with the back of each hand. I was completely horizontal. I was comfortable lying perfectly still and staring at the ceiling. I was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality. Charles Tavis is probably not related to the Moms by actual blood. Her extremely tall French-Canadian mother died when the Moms was eight. Her father left their potato farm on ‘business’ a few months later and was gone for several weeks. He did this sort of thing with some frequency. A binge-drinker. Eventually there would be a telephone call from some distant province or U.S. state, and one of the hired men would go off to bail him out. From this disappearance, though, he returned with a new bride the Moms had known nothing about, an American widow named Elizabeth Tavis, who in the stilted Vermont wedding photo seems almost certainly to have been a dwarf — the huge square head, the relative length of the trunk compared to the legs, the sunken nasal bridge and protruding eyes, the stunted phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon’s right thigh, one khaki-colored cheek pressed affectionately against his belt-buckle. C.T. was the infant son she’d brought to the new union, his father a ne’er-do-well killed in a freak accident playing competitive darts in a Brattleboro tavern just as they were trying to adjust the obstetric stirrups for the achondroplas-tic Mrs. Tavis’s labor and delivery. Her smile in the wedding photo is homo-dontic. According to Orin, though, C.T. and the Moms claim Mrs. T. was not a true homodont the way — for instance — Mario is a true homodont. Every single one of Mario’s teeth is a second bicuspid. So it was all rather up in the air. The account of the disappearance, darts-accident, and dental incongruity comes from Orin, who claimed to have decocted it all out of an extended one-sided conversation he had with a distraught C.T. in the waiting room of Brigham and Women’s OB/GYN while the Moms was prematurely delivering Mario. Orin had been seven years old; Himself had been in the delivery room, where apparently Mario’s birth was quite a touch-and-go thing. The fact that Orin was our one and only source for data shrouded the whole thing in further ambiguity, as far as I was concerned. Pinpoint accuracy had never been Orin’s forte. The wedding photo was available for inspection, of course, and confirmed Mrs. Tavis as huge-headed and wildly short. Neither Mario nor I had ever approached the Moms on the issue, possibly out of fear of reopening psychic wounds from a childhood that had always sounded unhappy. All I knew for sure was that I had never approached her about it.

For their part, the Moms and C.T. have never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close.

The attack of panic and prophylactic focus’s last spasm now suddenly almost overwhelmed me with the intense horizontality that was all around me in the Viewing Room — the ceiling, floor, carpet, table-tops, the chairs’ seats and the shelves at their backs’ tops. And much more — the shimmering horizontal lines in the Kevlon wall-fabric, the very long top of the viewer, the top and bottom borders of the door, the spectation pillows, the viewer’s bottom, the squat black cartridge-drive’s top and bottom and the little push-down controls that protruded like stunted tongues. The seemingly endless horizontality of the couch’s and chairs’ and recumbency’s seats, the wall of shelves’ every line, the varied horizontal shelving of the ovoid case, two of every cartridge-case’s four sides, on and on. I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich. I felt awakened to a basic dimension I’d neglected during years of upright movement, of standing and running and stopping and jumping, of walking endlessly upright from one side of the court to the other. I had understood myself for years as basically vertical, an odd forked stalk of stuff and blood. I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

Gately’s cognomen growing up and moving through public grades had been Bim or Bimmy, or The Simulator, etc., from the acronymic B.I.M., ‘Big Indestructible Moron.’ This was on Boston’s North Shore, mostly Beverly and Salem. His head had been huge, even as a kid. By the time he hit puberty at twelve the head seemed a yard wide. A regulation football helmet was like a beanie on him. His coaches had to order special helmets. Gately was worth the cost. Every coach past 6th grade told him he was a lock for a Division 1 college team if he bore down and kept his eye on the prize. Memories of half a dozen different neckless, buzz-cut, and pre-infarcted coaches all condense around a raspy emphasis on bearing down and predictions of a limitless future for Don G., Bimmy G., right up until he dropped out in high school’s junior year.

Gately went both ways — fullback on offense, outside linebacker on D. He was big enough for the line, but his speed would have been wasted there. Already carrying 230 pounds and bench-pressing well over that, Gately clocked a 4.4 40 in 7th grade, and the legend is that the Beverly Middle School coach ran even faster than that into the locker room to jack off over the stopwatch. And his biggest asset was his outsized head. Gately’s. The head was indestructible. When they needed yards, they’d shift to isolate Gately on one defender and get him the ball and he’d lower his head and charge, eyes on the turf. The top of his special helmet was like a train’s cowcatcher coming at you. Defenders, pads, helmets, and cleats bounced off the head, often in different directions. And the head was fearless. It was like it had no nerve endings or pain receptors or whatever. Gately amused teammates by letting them open and close elevator doors on the head. He let people break things over the head — lunchboxes, cafeteria trays, bespectacled wienies’ violin cases, lacrosse sticks. By age thirteen he never had to buy beers: he’d bet some kid a six he could take a shot with this or that object to the head. His left ear is permanently kind of gnarled from elevator-door impacts, and Gately favors a kind of long-sided Prince Valiantish bowl-cut to help cover the misshapen ear. One cheekbone still has a dented violet cast from 10th grade when a North Reading kid at a party bet him a twelve-pack on a shot with a sock full of nickels and then clocked him under the eye with it instead of the skull. It took Beverly’s whole offensive line to pull Gately off what was left of the kid. The juvenile line on Gately was that he was totally jolly and laid-back and easygoing up to a certain point but that if you crossed that point with him you better be able to beat a 4.4 40.