David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘So what’s the puzzle. Put yourself in Quebec’s shoes. Once again they get the gooey end of the Canadian dipstick. It’s mostly now western Québecer kids the size of Volkswagens shlumpfing around with no skulls. It’s Québecers with cloracne and tremors and olfactory hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead. It’s eastern Quebec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant-depredations and the corrosive fogs.’

‘Although people aren’t exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either. And the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over Fundy, and supposedly the lobsters out there are like monsters in old Japanese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia glows, at night, in satellite photos.’

‘Still and all, O., tell her proportionally speaking it’s Quebec that’s borne the brunt of what Canada had to take. The brunt again, to their way of thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There’s got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the whole thing.’

The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael Pemulis has pretended to kick it in. ‘Good Lard preserve us he’s nekkid,’ he says, coming in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a second.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered patch of Hal’s half of the floor and makes a show of looking at his wrist as if there were a watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin is saying. ‘The issue she raises is is there really any sort of realistic hope of Quebec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge the waste as fundamentally American waste.’

‘Well probably of course not.’ Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into a claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is compulsively going around zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes. ‘But now she’s got you falling back into demanding realistic and consistent logic from fringe mentalities again.’

‘But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn’t oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn’t. Ottawa’s so far in now they wouldn’t say shit if they had three times the mouthful they already have. Of shit I mean.’

Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry Vlll-like rending and chewing motions. His eyes, under the waning influence of P.M. stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed.

They just get tiny and lightless and even closer together in his narrow face, like a second set of nostrils. The right eye’s little wobble is out of sync with the pulse of his earring.

There’s the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. ‘So then I’ll ask you what she seemed like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists’ and fringe cells’ pathetic little anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?’

‘Does fish-shit drift slowly bottomward, O.? How could she see it as anything but, if she’s as savvy as you say?’ Hal removes his pruned white foot from the janitor-bucket and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis’s Dock-sider. Pemulis picks the briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them to Hal with a pretend-shudder.

‘So simply largely symbolic at best, then?’

Hal’s lying back trying to get his legs into the briefs with one hand. ‘Tell her after much chin-stroking simply yes, O. O., Pemulis is standing here already in his hat pretending to clang a dinner bell. He’s got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.’ Pemulis is actually making a complex system of motions indicating both the procedures for rolling a duBois and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and Pemulis and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping out to the little hidden clearing behind West House’s parking lot’s dumpsters and sharing an obscene cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, while Schacht and sometimes Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the green glow of the truck’s instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling go-on-ahead-on-down motion to Pemulis.

‘But you have the … Mr. Hope,’ Pemulis stage-whispers.

‘One moment please.’ Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and hand with two pillows and some bedding, and stage-whispers ‘Where’s your part of the Mr. H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of my part of the Hope I bought retail from you not three days ago?’

The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. ‘Extenuations. We can get it all sorted out right later. Nobody’s going to like exploit you.’

And then it’s hard to extract the hand and phone. ‘O., I’m going to have to book out of here in just about one second.’

‘Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you can call me back. This was the Subject’s crux-type proposal. You can call collect if you want.’

‘I don’t have to respond,’ Hal says.

‘Correct.’

‘I just listen and then break the connection.’

‘Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day’s full-toll.’

‘I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation’s over and we can go.’ Hal’s directing all this more at Pemulis, who’s pacing and holding the Constantine bust in his hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head.

‘All set? This is it. Are you set?’

‘So go already.’

‘Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists’ big object has always been to independently secede, and if they’ve got about a snowball’s chance of ever really getting O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle and the transfer of the Concavity and the whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially the Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity in theirs, that the maps now say it’s Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant that all this is obviously right; then why don’t the Separatists in Quebec use the fact of the odiousness of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and go to Ottawa to parliament and say to the rest of Canada like: Look, let us secede, and we’ll take the Concavity with us when we secede, it’ll be our problem not yours, it’ll go on the maps as Québecois and not Canadian, it’ll be our blot and our bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada’s pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa’s parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.’s map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don’t they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why the Nucks don’t see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada’s persuadability into letting Quebec go. She hit me with Why wouldn’t your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?’