David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘Who’s this you’re talking to you can’t call back?’ Pemulis says loudly, pacing back and forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering like mad.

Hal lowers the phone but doesn’t cover it. ‘It’s Orin, wanting to know why Quebec and the F.L.Q. and so on haven’t tried bargaining with the Canadian administration, offering Quebec’s cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation.’ Hal cocks his head slightly. ‘This could be Poutrincourt’s so-called Separation and return’s real meaning, it occurs to me.’

‘Orin as in your brother, with the leg?’

‘He’s all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.’

Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. ‘Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart! Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a dozen D-bases off of the Net! Tell him you’re pretty sure he can afford it!’ Pemulis’s hands are slender and red-knuckled and his fingers long and sort of falcate. ‘Tell him you can hear the truck getting impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we ever get our friends get ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat on schedule up here or we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly access D-bases and run our asses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don’t just stand there and swing one leg up and down over and over for seven-plus figures.’

‘Tell Penisless to go sit on something sharp,’ Orin says.

‘O., he’s right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You said I could think and call you back. I’ll use your pager if you like.’

Pemulis has used one foot to clear a path through laundry and diskettes and books and gear to the west window, where he’s making broad involved gestures with a person or persons outside down on the grounds whom the window’s big sill keeps Hal from being able to see. Hal’s underwear is at a diagonal across his pelvis. Orin on the phone is saying:

‘Picture this and see what you think. Imagine this. The F.L.Q. and other various Separatist cells all suddenly divert their terror’s energies away from Canada and suddenly start mounting an insurgent campaign of U.S. and Mexican harassment. But the thing is they make a big deal of terroristically insurging against O.N.A.N. on the behalf of all of Canada. They even find a way to bring the Albertan ultra-rightists in on it, plus other provincial fringes, so it looks to O.N.A.N. like maybe all of Canada as a whole is in on the insurging.’

‘I don’t have to picture it. It’s what’s going on. The C.P.C.P. 1makes incursions against Montana like clockwork. There was that horrific jamming of InterLace pulses and substitution of porn-films for children’s programming around Duluth in June traced to that psycho quintet in southwest Ontario. The Interstates north of Saratoga are still supposed to be undrivable after sunset.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So some point for me to ponder needs to emerge really fast, here, Orin.’

‘The point is I was rhetorically invited by the Subject to entertain the picture of it all really being the Nucks. The pan-Canadian thing being a dodge. The Separatists all somehow united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question becomes to imagine this and ask: Why would they do this?’

‘We’re wearing a groove in the same track again, O. It’s because the Concavity impacts mainly Quebec.’

‘No, I mean she meant why would they make such a noise about insurging on behalf of all of Canada and go to such lengths to orchestrate the appearance of pan-Canadian anti-O.N.A.N.ism.’

‘And then judging by precedent the Subject gave a hypothetical answer to her own question. Have you gotten to get a word in edgewise throughout this series of interviews, O.?’

‘What if it’s that the Nuck Separatists know totally well that if the O.N.A.N. administration sees Canada as a big enough roach in the ointment, Gentle and Unspecified Services’ boys in white can get together with Mexico’s Vichified puppet-state and make things like really unpleasant indeed for Ottawa. They could make Canada the sort of black scapegoat of all of O.N.A.N. There’s little you can picture that might be worse than being the one country in a three-country continental Anschluss that the other two countries are ganging up on and making things unpleasant for.’

‘Vichified Anschluss? This doesn’t sound like any Orin I know. These are rabidly political catchwords. What kind of heartbreaking Rubensian Moment-type fluff-journalist is this you’re so determined to —?’

‘The unpleasantness is pretty easy to imagine a picture of. The E.W.D. vectors could easily be recalibrated further north, Gentle could tell them. Our waste-resources are extensive. At the mildest, he could say, good-sized chunks of Canada could be Concav-itized.’

‘I have to go. Pemulis is slumped back against the wall with his hands over his stomach and is slumping all the way down the wall looking wobbly and pale.’

‘Ponder the picture of the parliament’s nails bitten all the way down to the ragged pink pulpy stuff as the Nucks orchestrate the terrorism so it looks more and more like Canada versus O.N.A.N.’

Hal’s in slacks and one street-sock and one athletic sock and picking different shirts up off the floor, trying to smell a clean one. ‘But this is all —’

‘Kyaaaa!’ Pemulis vaults a corner of Hal’s bed and tries to claw at the transparent phone’s antenna like he’s going to break it off. Hal turns to protect the phone with a shoulder, whipping at Pemulis with a sweatshirt.

Orin is saying ‘What I’m asking is for you to ponder could it maybe end up that Quebec, after wreaking various mayhi down here and making it look like it’s all of Canada, the P.Q.s or somebody respectable gets wigged up and go to Ottawa and offers this deal: Parliament gets the P.M. and the government to get the other provinces to let Quebec go, Separate, aller, partir — and in return Québec’ll step up the anti-O.N.A.N. harassment and insurgency while dropping the pretense of other provinces being involved and all of Canada insurging and make it publicly clear that it’s Quebec and Quebec alone that’s O.N.A.N.’s real nemesis. They tell Ottawa they’ll offer the contiguousness of the Concavity as their reason and send absolutely everything they’ve got in terms of terrorism at O.N.A.N. and Gentle, taking full credit each time. Offering themselves as the culprit and de-Reconfiguration as the objective.’

‘So your multilevelled journalist’s hypothesizing a kind of meta-extortion.’ Hal can hear Pemulis’s whistle-lipped breathing. ‘Separation is still the Québecer insurgents’ real goal, and their anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency is not what it appears.’ Hal’s in the dark under the desk that the fold-out TP and drives and phone console and modem are stacked on one corner of, surrounded by nests of wires, trying to find his other street-shoe. ‘It’s supposedly just been a ruse to arouse O.N.A.N.’s ire at Canada so the Québecers can use the U.S. and Mexico as levers on Ottawa.’

‘Trying to engineer it so that Canada’ll be more than happy to disassociate from them,’

Orin says. ‘And Fm saying I don’t have the background or lobes to even know whether she might be putting me on, testing my depth.’

‘You’ve always had a special dread of depth-testing.’

‘How about why don’t you just toss me the Bob and Axhandle and me’ll go down and get things ready and wait for you,’ Pemulis stage-whispers to Hal’s slacks’ bottom, which is pretty much all that’s visible from under the desk. Hal’s hand comes up out of the leg-space under the desk and raises one finger and shakes it a little for emphasis. Pemulis is standing next to the small TP viewer — which is propped up like a large photo with a buttressy thing that folds out of its back — and the TP’s disk- and cartridge-drive, which takes up less than a quarter of the desktop and has the phone’s console and power unit bolted into a receptacle on the drive’s side.