David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘So tired it’s like I’m almost high.’

‘But not pleasantly high,’ Troeltsch says.

‘It’d be a pleasanter tiredness-high if I didn’t have to wait till fucking 1900 to start all this studyin’,’ Stice says.

‘You’d think Schtitt could at least not turn up the juice the week before midterms.’

‘You’d think that the coaches and the teachers could try and get together on their scheduling.’

‘It’d be like a pleasant fatigue if I could just go up after dinner and hunker on down with the mind in neutral and watch something uncomplex.’

‘Not have to worry about prescriptive forms or acutance.’

‘Kick back.’

‘Watch something with chase scenes and lots of stuff blowing up all over the place.’

‘Relax, do bongs, kick back, look at lingerie catalogues, eat granola with a great big wooden spoon,’ Struck says wistfully.

‘Get laid.’

‘Just get one night off to like R and R.’

‘Slip on the old environmental suit and listen to some atonal jazz.’

‘Have sex. Get laid.’

‘Bump uglies. Do the nasty. Haul ashes.’

‘Find me one of them Northeast Oklahoma drive-in burger-stand waitresses with the great big huge titties.’

‘Those enormous pink-white French-painting tits that sort of like tumble out.’

‘One of those wooden spoons so big you can barely get your mouth around it.’

‘Just one night to relax and indulge.’

Pemulis belts out two quick verses of Johnny Mathis’s ‘Chances Are,’ left over from the shower, then subsides to examine something on his left thigh. Shaw has a spit-bubble going, growing to such exceptional size for just spit that half the room watches until it finally goes at the same moment Pemulis breaks off.

Evan Ingersoll says ‘We get off Saturday for Interdependence Day Eve, though, the board said.’

Several upperclass heads are cocked up at Ingersoll. Pemulis makes a bulge in his cheek with his tongue and moves it around.

‘Flubbaflubba’: Stice makes his jowls fly around.

‘We get off classes is all. Drills and challenges go merrily on, deLint says,’ Freer points out.

‘But no drills Sunday, before the Gala.’

‘But still matches.’

Every jr. player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continen-tally, except Pemulis, Yardley and Blott.

There’d be clear evidence that T. Schacht’s still in one of the toilet stalls off the showers even if Hal couldn’t see the tip of one of Schacht’s enormous purple shower thongs under the door of the stall right by where the shower-area entryway cuts into his line of sight. Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors. The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious. Luther’s shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther’s 16th-century shoes, awaiting epiphany. The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station Johns, heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush. Women’s slippers, centurions’ dusty sandals, dock-workers’ hobnailed boots, Popes’ slippers. All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping. Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched just past the firelight’s circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting. Schacht suffered from Crohn’s Disease, [43]a bequest from his ulcerative-colitic dad, and had to take carminative medication with every meal, and took a lot of guff about his digestive troubles, and had developed of all things arthritic gout, too, somehow, because of the Crohn’s Disease, which had settled in his right knee and caused him terrible pain on the court.

Freer’s and Tall Paul Shaw’s racquets fall off the bench with a clatter, and Beak and Blott move fast to pick them up and stack them back on the bench, Beak one-handed because the other hand is keeping his towel fastened.

‘Because so that was let’s see,’ Struck says.

Pemulis loves to sing around tile.

Struck’s hitting his palm with a finger for either emphasis or ordinal counting. ‘Close to let’s call it an hour run for the A-squads, an hour-fifteen drills, two matches back to back.’

‘I only played one,’ Troeltsch injects. ‘Had a measurable fever in the A.M.,deLint said to throttle down today.’

‘Folks that went three sets only played one match, Spodek and Kent for an instance,’ Stice says.

‘Funny how Troeltsch how his health always seems to rally when A.M. drills get out,’ Freer says.

‘— like conservatively two hours for the matches. Conservatively. Then half an hour on the machines under fucking Loach’s beady browns, sitting there with the clipboard. That’s let’s call it five hours of vigorous nonstop straight-out motion.’

‘Sustained and strenuous exertion.’

‘Schtitt’s determinated this year we ain’t singing no silly songs at Port Washington.’

John Wayne hasn’t said one word this whole time. The contents of his locker are neat and organized. He always buttons his shirt all the way up to the top button as if he were going to put on a tie, which he doesn’t even own. IngersolPs also getting dressed out of his underclassman’s small square locker.

Stice says ‘Except they seem to forget we’re still in our puberty.’

Ingersoll is a kid seemingly wholly devoid of eyebrows, as far as Hal can see.

‘Speak for yourself, Darkness.’

‘I’m saying how stressing the pubertyizing skeleton like this, it’s real short-sighted.’ Stice’s voice rises.’ ‘m I supposed to do when I’m twenty and in the Show playing nonstop and I’m skeletally stressed and injury-proned?’

‘Dark’s right.’

A curled bit of cloudy old Pledge-husk and a green thread from a strip of GauzeTex wrap are complexly entwined in the blue fibers of the carpet near Hal’s left ankle, which ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue tinge. He keeps flexing the ankle whenever it occurs to him to. Struck and Troeltsch spar briefly with open hands, feinting and bobbing their heads, both still seated on the floor. Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck, Rader, and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per Academy mandate. Struck’s shoulders and neck have furious purple inflammations; Hal had also noticed a boil on the inside of Schacht’s thigh, when Ted’d sat down. Hal’s face’s reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical twang in the next tile. That post-shower community feeling is dissipating. Even Evan Ingersoll looks quickly at his watch and clears his throat. Wayne and Shaw have dressed and left; Freer, a major Pledge-devotee, is at his hair in the mirror, Pemulis also rising now to get away from Freer’s feet and legs. Freer’s eyes have a protrusive wideness to them that the Axhandle says makes Freer always look like he’s getting shocked or throttled.

And time in the P.M. locker room seems of limitless depth; they’ve all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows.

T’m thinking it’s Tavis,’ Freer says to them all in the mirror. ‘Where there’s excess work and suffering can fucking Tavis be far behind.’

‘No, it’s Schtitt,’ Hal says.

‘Schtitt was short a few wickets out of the old croquet set long before he got hold of us, men,’ Pemulis says.

‘Peemster and Hal.’

‘Halation and Pemurama.’

Freer purses his little lips and expels air like he’s blowing out a match, blowing some tiny grooming-remnant off the big mirror’s glass. ‘Schtitt just does what he’s told like a good Nazi.’