David Wallace - Infinite jest

[234] TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENTS FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX

CARDINAL PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE WRITER

HELEN STEEPLY — NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I’m not going to talk about why I don’t talk to the Moms anymore.’ ‘Q.’ ‘Or The Mad Stork’s adventures in the mental-health community, either.’

‘Q.’

‘We’re not off to a good start here, ma’am, no matter how lovely you’re looking in that pantsuit.’

‘Q.’

‘Because the question doesn’t mean anything is why. Insane is just like a catch-term, it doesn’t describe anything, it isn’t a reason for anything. The Stork was a full-blown demented alcoholic for the last three years of his life, and he put his head in the microwave, and I think just in terms of unpleasantness you’d have to be sort of insane to kill yourself in such a painful way. So but was he insane. In the last five years of his life he put together a tennis academy and got together a national-caliber coaching staff and U.S.T.A. accreditation and sanction and multi-Grid funding and set up the start of an endowment for E.T.A., and also came up with that new kind of window glass that doesn’t fog or smudge from people touching it or breathing on it and drawing little finger-oil faces on it, then sold it to Mitsubishi, and also managed the revenues from all his previous patents, plus of course drank himself blind on a daily basis and then needed at least two hours to sit there naked under a scratchy blanket and shake, and went around impersonating various kinds of health-care professionals during the periods he believed he was a health-care professional, from when he had the delirium-tremen-type career delusions, and in his spare time made in-depth documentaries and a dozen art-films that people are still writing doctoral theses on. So was he insane? It’s true, the New Yorker guy, the film guy who replaced the guy who replaced Rafferty, what was his name, it’s true he kept saying the films were like the planet’s most psychotic psyche working out its shit right there on the screen and asking you to pay to watch him. But you have to remember that that guy got third-degree burned by the whole Found Drama scam. That guy was one of the high-caliber critics who said in print that here Incandenza had put drama ahead three or four leaps in one visionary leap, and after The Stork finally couldn’t keep a straight face anymore and spilled the beans on NPR radio during a ‘Fresh Air’ dramaturgy-panel the New Yorker guy dropped from critical sight for like a year and then when he came back he had it in for Himself in a very big way, which is understandable.’

‘Q.’

‘What I started to say is if quote unquote sources you cannot name say the reason I’m not in contact is I claim the Moms is insane, well, what is insane supposed to mean. Do I trust her I do not. Do I want to be in association with her in any way — that is a neg. Do I think she’s irretrievably bats? One of her best friends is the E.T.A. counselor, Rusk, with doctorates in both Gender and Deviance. Does she think the Moms is bats?’

‘Q.’

‘The criteria I was analogizing to The Stork is does the Moms function. And the Moms functions and then some. The Moms careers through the day turboed and in fifth gear. You’ve got the assorted Deaning at E.T.A. You’ve got the full teaching load there. You’ve got accreditation reports and structuring both quadrivium and trivium three years ahead of time at the start of every year. You’ve got writing prescriptive linguistics books that come out every thirty-six months so you could set your watch by them. You’ve got grammatical conferences and conventions, which she doesn’t leave the grounds ever anymore but she’s there videophonically rain or shine for them all. You’ve got the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, which she co-founded with a couple quote cherished academic friends, also bats, where the M.G.M.s for instance go around to Mass, supermarkets and dun the manager if the Express Checkout sign says 10 ITEMS OR LESS instead of OR FEWER and so on. The year before The Mad Stork’s death the Orange Crush people had an ad on billboards and little magazine-fall-out cards that said CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THAT’S ALL IT’S O WN, with like a possessive /T¾ and I swear the M.G.M. squad lost their minds; the Moms spent five weeks going back and forth to NNY City, organized two different rallies on Madison Avenue that got very ugly, acted as her own attorney in the suit the Crush people brought, never slept, never once slept, lived on cigarettes and salad, huge salads always consumed very late at night, the Moms has a thing about never eating until it’s late.’

‘Q-’

‘Apparently it’s the noise, she can’t take urban noise, she says, is why Hallie says she hasn’t set glass-slipper-one off the Grounds in — you’d have to ask Hallie. The Volvo was already up on blocks when I was at college downtown. But I know she went to The Stork’s funeral, which was off the grounds. Now she’s got a tri-modem and videophony out the bazoo, though she’d never use a Tableau, I know.’

‘Q.’

‘Well it’s been pretty obvious since early on out in Weston the Moms has O.C.D. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The only reason she’s never been diagnosed or treated for it is that in her the Disorder doesn’t prevent her from functioning. It all seems to come back to functioning. Traversion is character, according to Schtitt. One guy I was close to at E.T.A. for years developed the kind of impairing O.C.D. where you need treatment — Bain wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of washing, cleaning, checking things, walking, had to have a T-square on the court to make sure all the strings on his stick were intersecting at 90°, could only go through a doorway if he’d felt all around the frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame for God knows what, and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to recheck the doorway he’d just checked. We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker room, before tournaments. Actually we’ve been close all our lives, notwithstanding that Marlon Bain is the single sweatiest human being you’d ever want to get within a click of. I think the O.C.D. might have started as a result of the compulsive sweat, which the sweat itself started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident, Bain’s. Unless the strain of the constant rituals and fussing itself exaculates the perspiring. The Stork used Marlon in Death in Scarsdale, if you want to see way more than you want to know about perspiration. But the E.T.A. staff indulged Bain’s pathology about doorways because Schtitt’s own mentor had been pathologically devoted to this idea that you are what you walk between. It’s so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it’s easier. Jesus I’m thinking usage again. This is why I avoid the topic of the Moms. The whole topic starts to infect me. It takes me days to clean myself out of it. Traversion being character according to Schtitt. It takes a certain type of woman to look that good in a pantsuit, I think. I’ve always —’

‘Q.’

‘I think the point being that with actual clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I had to watch much of my ex-doubles partner’s life grind to a halt because it’d take him three hours to shower and then another two to get out through the shower door. He was in this sort of paralysis of compulsive motions that didn’t serve any kind of function. The Moms, on the other hand, can function with the compulsions because she’s also compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions. Whether this makes her more insane than Marlon Bain or less insane than Marlon Bain, who can like say. As an instance the Moms solved a lot of her threshold-problems by having no real doors or doorways built on the first floor of HmH so the rooms are all split off by angles and partitions and plants. The Moms kept to a Prussian bathroom-schedule so she couldn’t spend hours in there washing her hands until the skin fell off the way Bain’s did, he had to wear cotton gloves the whole summer right before he left E.T.A. The Moms for a while had video cameras installed so she could obsessively check whether Mrs. Clarke’d left the oven on or check her plants’ arrangement or whether all the bathroom towels are lined up with their fringes flush without physically checking; she had a little wall of monitors in her study at HmH; The Stork put up with the cameras but the sense I get is that Tavis isn’t going to be keen on being photorecorded in the bathroom or anyplace else, so maybe she’s had to have other recourse. 3You can check that yourself out there. What I’m trying to say is she’s compulsively efficient even about her obsessions and compulsions. Of course there are doors upstairs, lockable doors, but that’s in service of other compulsions. The Moms’s. You can go ahead and ask her what I mean. She’s so compulsive she’s got the compulsions themselves arranged so efficiently that she can get everything done and still have plenty of time left over for her children. These are a constant drain on her batteries. She’s got to keep Hal’s skull lashed tight to hers without being so overt about it that Hallie has any idea what’s going on, to keep him from trying to pull his skull away. The kid’s still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands. He’s still performing for her, syntax- and vocabulary-wise, at seventeen, the same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something’s wrong. Plus the Moms has to obsess over Mario and Mario’s various challenges and tribulations and little patheticnesses and worship Mario and think Mario’s some kind of secular martyr to the mess she’d made of her adult life, all the while having to keep up a front of laissez-faire laid-back management where she pretends to let Mario go his own way and do his own thing.’