David Wallace - Infinite jest

I may have been dozing. Some more heads came and awaited response and left. I may have dozed. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to eat if I was not hungry. This presented itself as almost a revelation. I hadn’t been hungry in over a week. I could remember when I was always hungry, constantly hungry.

Then at some point Pemulis’s head appeared in the doorway, his strange twin-towered A.M. cowlick bobbing as he looked back over each shoulder out into the hall. His right eye was either twitchy or swollen from sleep; something was wrong with it.

‘Mmyellow,’ he said.

I pretended to shade my eyes. ‘Howdy there stranger.’

It is not Pemulis’s way to apologize or explain or worry that you might think ill of him. In this he reminded me of Mario. This almost regal lack of insecurity is hard to put together with his crippling neurasthenia on-court.

“s up?’ he said, not moving from the doorway.

I could see my asking him where he’d been all week leading to so many different possible responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating I could barely get out that I’d just been lying here on the floor.

‘Lying here is all,’ I told him.

‘So I just got told,’ he said. ‘The Petropulator mentioned hysterics.’

It was almost impossible to shrug lying supine on thick shag. ‘See for yourself,’ I said.

Pemulis came all the way in. He became the only thing in the room that understood itself as basically vertical. He didn’t look very good; his color wasn’t good. He had not shaved, and a dozen little black bristles jutted from the ball of his chin. He gave the impression of chewing gum even though he was not chewing gum.

He said ‘Thinking?’

‘The opposite. Thought-prophylaxis.’

‘Feeling a little punk?’

‘Can’t complain.’ I rolled my eyes up at him.

He made a sharp glottal stop. He moved toward the periphery of my vision and fit himself into the seam of two walls behind me; I heard him sliding down to assume the back-supported squat he sometimes liked.

The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn. I was thinking of the final film-lecture in Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms … and then of C.T.’s misadventure at Himself’s funeral. The Moms had had Himself interred in her family’s traditional plot in L’Islet Province. I heard a whoop and two crashes directly overhead. My rib cage contracted and expanded.

‘Incster?’ Pemulis said after a time.

A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave seems airy and risen and plump, like dough.

‘Hal?’ Pemulis said.

‘Javol.’

‘We’ve got some really important interfacing to do, brother.’

I didn’t say anything. There were too many potential responses, both witty ones and earnest ones. I could hear Pemulis’s cowlicks brush each wall as he looked to either side, and the slight sound of a small zipper being played with.

‘I’m thinking we could go someplace discreet and really interface.’

‘I’m a highly tuned horizontal antenna tuned in to you lying right here.’

‘I was meaning could we go somewheres.’

‘So this urgency all of a sudden?’ I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish, that melodic dip-rise-dip. ‘All week: not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this about urgency?’

‘Seen your Mums around lately?’

‘Haven’t seen her all week. Doubtless she’s over helping C.T. arrange a weather-venue.’ I paused. ‘I haven’t seen him all week either, come to think,’ I said.

‘The Eschaton’s a no-go,’ Pemulis said. ‘The map’s a mess out there.’

‘We’re going to get an announcement about the Quebec kids very soon, I can feel it,’ I said. Tm that highly tuned in this position.’

‘What say let’s skip the sausage-analog and whip down to Steak ‘N Sundae and eat.’

There was an extended pause as I ran a response-tree. Pemulis was zipping and unzipping something with a short zipper. I couldn’t decide. I finally had to choose almost at random. ‘I’m trying to cut down on patronizing places with ‘“N” in their name.’

‘Listen.’ I heard his knees creak as he leaned in toward the top of my head. ‘About the tu-savez-quoi —’

‘The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That’s definitely off, Mike. Talk about the map being a mess.’

‘That’s part of what we need to interface about, if you’d get off your literally your ass here.’

I spent a minute watching the NASA glass fall and rise. ‘Don’t even start, M.M.’

‘What start?’

‘We’re on hiatus, remember? We’re living like Shi’ite Moslems for the thirty days you miraculously blarneyed the guy into giving us.’

‘Blarney wasn’t why we got it, Inc, is the thing.’

‘And now, what, twenty days to go. We’re going to produce urine like a mullah’s babe, we agreed.’

‘This isn’t—’ Pemulis started.

I farted, but it didn’t produce a noise. I was bored. I couldn’t remember a time when Pemulis had bored me. ‘And I do not need you launching temptation-rhetoric my way,’ I said.

Keith Freer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his bare arms crossed. He was still wearing the weird unitard he slept in, which made him look like someone who tore phone books in half at a sideshow.

‘Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?’ he said.

‘We’re conversing here,’ Pemulís told him.

I half sat up. ‘Flesh?’

Freer looked down at me. ‘This is nothing to laugh at I don’t think Hal. There’s I swear to fucking God a human strip of forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window, and what looks like two eyebrows, and bits of nose. And now Tall Paul says down in the lobby Stice was seen coming out of the infirmary wearing something out of Zorro.’

Pemulis was completely vertical, standing again; I could hear his knees as he rose. ‘It’s like a tête-à-tête in here, brother. We’re in here bunkered, mano a—’

‘Stice got stuck to the window,’ I explained, lying all the way back down. ‘Kenkle and Brandt were going to detach him with warm water from a janitorial bucket.’

Pemulis said ‘How do you get stuck to a window?’

‘Well from the looks it looks like they detached half his face from his head,’ Freer said, feeling at his own forehead and shuddering a little.

Kieran McKenna’s little porcine snout appeared in a gap under Freer’s arm. He still wore his stupid full-head gauze wrap for his supposed bruised skull. ‘Did you guys get to see The Darkness? Gopnik said he looks like a piece of cheese pizza where somebody tore the cheese off. Gopnik said Troeltsch is charging two bucks a look.’ He ran off toward the stairwell without waiting for a reply, his pocket jingling madly. Freer looked at Pemulis and opened his mouth, then apparently reconsidered and followed off down the hall. We could hear a couple of sarcastic whistles at Freer’s unitard.

Pemulis reappeared at the top of my vision; his right eye was definitely twitching. ‘This is what I meant about going someplace discreet. When have I ever urgently asked you to dialogue before, Inc?’

‘Certainly not within the last few days, Mike, that’s for sure.’

There was an extended pause. I raised my hands over my face and looked at their shapes against the indirect lights.

Pemulis finally said ‘Well, I’m going to go make sure I eat before I have to see Stice without a fucking forehead.’

‘Have an analog for me,’ I said. ‘Let me know if there’s word on the meet. I’ll eat if I’m going to have to play.’

Pemulis licked his palm and tried to get his cowlicks to behave. From my vantage he was high overhead and upside-down. ‘So are you going to get up and go up and get dressed and stand on one foot with that opera thing on at some point? Because I could eat and then come up. We can tell Mario we need to mano-à-tête.’