David Wallace - Infinite jest

It occurs to Gately that right now’s just like when he was a toddler and his Mom and her companion were both passed out or worse: no matter how frightened or scared he might become he now again cannot get anybody to come or to hear or even know about it; the discredited tube to prevent vicious or inspired bleeding in his suspicious Trachea has left him completely Alone, worse off than a toddler that could at least bellow and yowl, rattling the bars of its playpen in terror that nobody tall was in any shape to hear him. Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the time, was the time when the sad and nerdily dressed wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming that was yesterday. Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky Coke and theories of post-mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without aid of speech or gesture or Bic, was why even out of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he’d kind of liked it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said Gately’s best thoughts were really communiques from the patient and Abiding dead. Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not now maybe dead and dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communique. He felt slightly better. The room’s ceiling was not breathing. It lay flat as a stucco sheet, rippling only slightly with the petroleum-fumes of fever and Gately’s own smell. Then bubbling up out of nowhere again he suddenly confronts deep-focus memories of Gene Fackelmann’s final demise and Gately and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s involvement in Fackelmann’s demise.

Gately, for several months before he did his State assault-bit, was disastrously involved with one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, his first girl ever with a hyphen, a sort of upscale but directionless and not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers girl that worked in Purchasing for a hospital-supply co. in Swampscott and was pretty definitely an alcoholic and drank bright drinks with umbrellas in Rte. 1 clubs in the late P.M. until she swooned and passed out with a loud clunk. That’s what she called it — ‘swooned.’ The swooning and passing out with a loud clunk as her head hit the table was more or less a nightly thing, and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep fell automatically in love with any man she termed ‘chivalrous’ [374]enough to carry her out to the parking lot and drive her home without raping her, which rape of an unconscious head-lolling girl she termed ‘Taking Advantage. ‘ Gately got introduced to her by Fackelmann, who one time as he came up through a sports bar called the Pourhouse’s parking lot to dialogue with a Sorkin-debtor Gately saw Fackelmann staggering along carrying this unconscious girl to his ride, one big hand quite a bit farther up her prom-looking taffeta gown than it really needed to be to carry her, and Fackelmann told Gately if Don’d give this gash a ride home he’d stay and do the collection, which Gately’s heart wasn’t in collections anymore and he jumped at the trade, as long as Fackelmann could promise him she could hold her various fluids in the 4x4 he was driving. So it was Fackelmann who told him, as he put the tiny and limp but still continent body in his arms in the parking lot of the Pourhouse, to watch his personal six, Gately, and be sure and violate her a little, because this gash here was like one of those South Sea-culture gashes in that if Gately took her home and she woke up nonviolated she’d be Gately’s for life. But Gately obviously had no intention of raping an unconscious person, much less even putting his hand up the gown of a girl that might lose her fluids any second, and this locked him into the involvement. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep called Gately her ‘Night-Errand’ and fell passively in love with his refusal to Take Advantage. Gene Fackelmann, she confided, was not the gentleman Gately was.

What helped make the involvement disastrous was that Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was always either so leglessly drunk or so passively hungover all the time that any sort of sex any time at all with her would have classified as Taking Advantage.

This girl was the single passivest person Gately ever met. He never once saw P.H.-J. actually get from one spot to another under her own power. She needed somebody chivalrous to pick her up and carry her and lay her back down 24/7/365, it seemed like. She was a sort of sexual papoose. She spent most of her life passed out and sleeping. She was a beautiful sleeper, kittenish and serene, never drooling. She made passivity and unconsciousness look kind of beautiful. Fackelmann called her Death’s Poster-Child. Even at work, at the hospital supply co., Gately imagined her horizontal, curled fetal on something soft, with all the hot slack facial intensity of a sleeping baby. He imagined her bosses and coworkers all tiptoeing around Purchasing whispering to each other to not wake her up. She never once rode in the actual front seat of any vehicle he drove her home in. But she also never threw up or pissed herself or even complained, just smiled and yawned an infant’s little milky yawn and snuggled deeper into whatever Gately had swaddled her in. Gately started doing that thing about yelling they’d been robbed when he carried her into whatever stripped luxury apt. they were crewing in. P.H.-J. wasn’t what you’d call great-looking, but she was incredibly sexy, Gately felt, because she always managed to look like you’d just X’d her into a state of total unmuscled swoon, lying there unconscious. Trent Kite told Fackelmann he thought Gately was out of his fucking mind. Fax observed that Kite himself was not exactly a W. T. Sherman with the ladies, even with coke-whores and strung-out nursing students and dipsoid lounge-hags whose painted faces swung loose from their heads. Fackelmann claimed to have started a Log just to keep track of Kite’s attempted pickup lines — surefire lines like e.g. ‘You’re the second most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, the first most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen being former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,’ and ‘If you came home with me I’m unusually confident that I could achieve an erection,’ and said that if Kite wasn’t still cherry at twenty-three and a half it was proof of some kind of divine-type grace.

Sometimes Gately would come out of a Demerol-nod and look at pale passive Pamela lying there sleeping beautifully and undergo a time-lapse clairvoyant thing where he could almost visibly watch her losing her looks through her twenties and her face starting to slide over off her skull onto the pillow she held like a stuffed toy, becoming a lounge-hag right before his eyes. The vision aroused more compassion than horror, which Gately never even considered might qualify him as a decent person.

Gately’s two favorite things about Pamela Hoffman-Jeep were: the way she would come out of her stupor and hold her cheek and laugh hysterically each time Gately carried her across the threshold of some stripped apartment and bellow that they’d been ripped off; and the way she always wore the long white linen gloves and bare-shoulder taffeta that made her seem like some upscale North Shore debutante who’s had like one too many dippers of country-club punch and is just begging to be Taken Advantage of by some low-rent guy with a tattoo — she’d make a sort of languid very-slow-motion bullwhip-gesture with her hand in the long white glove as she lay wherever Gately had deposited her and simper out with an upscale inflection ‘Don Honey, bring Mommy a highball’ (she called a drink a highball), which it turned out was a deadly impression of her own Mom, who it turned out this lady made Gately’s own Mom look like Carry Nation by comparison, lush-wise: the only four times Gately ever met Mrs. H.-J. were all at E.R.s and sanitaria.