David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘What, metaphysical angst at thirteen?’ Pemulis directs the question to the quote-Viking’s reflection’s eye in the mirror. Freer’s back is tapered and uncolloped and for a tennis player’s back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated applications and defoliations of Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because he is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning. He still has his jeans and loafers on, Pemulis sees. Pemulis keeps waiting for the distinctive attitudinal upswing of two pre-match Tenuate spansules. dPemulis’s locker is both full and very precisely ordered, practically alphabetized, like the trunk of an experienced seaman. Disassemblable scale and armamentarium and mood-altering substances used to be concealed in several factory-concealed niches in the special system of niche-riddled portable shelving Pemulis had installed at age 15. Plus small cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the always-remotely-possible sniffer-dog, when he was a callow youth. This was before the discovery of the ultimate entrepot above the false ceiling in Subdorm B’s male hallway.

‘Just a disappointed dinkle.’ Freer’s chuckle tends to be mirthless. ‘What I could get out of him before the waterworks, Postal Weight’s old man promised him so-and-so if the kid accomplishes thus-and-such.’ His speech was distorted because he was ballooning his cheek with his tongue and applying flesh-tinted cream to a possible pimple there. ‘And the Postmaster here feels like he’s held up his side of the accomplishment, and now I get the drift Daddy’s backing out.’

Possalthwaite’s shoulders continued to tremble as he cried into his hands.

‘In other words welching you’re saying the Dad is,’ Pemulis said to Freer.

‘I gather now the Dad’s trying to restructure the original deal all of a sudden.’

Pemulis undid his belt. ‘The dangled carrot’s snatched away, the brass ring plays hard to get, to coin a maxim.’

‘Something about Disney World, before the wa-wa started.’

Pemulis removed his nonplay sneakers by scraping downward at one heel with the other sneaker’s toe, looking down into the tender little whorl in the center of Possalth-waite’s hair. He’d never be so ephebic as to verbally ask Freer if he had plans to suit up so they could get out there; he’d never let Freer think he was renting Freer space in his head before the match started. ‘Postman, is this because of the Eschaton incident? Is it because of the nose? Because I can get on the horn and tell old Postal Weight Sr. they’re blaming nobody under 17, it turns out, you should tell him, Todder. There’s whole land-barges of shit, but none of it’s spraying in you guys’s direction, you should take comfort.’

‘Nothing’s true,” Possalthwaite keened, not looking up, muffled, ílat-nippled, fatless in the young gut, feet spectral below his legs’ brown, rocking, shaking his head, looking terribly young and innocently vulnerable, sort of pre-moral. Little white strips of bandage protuded from his palms’ outer edges, from I.-Day’s apocalypse.

‘Well, not much is fair, anyway,’ Pemulis conceded. The Viking made a noise at himself.

Pemulis calls Postal Weight’s father up on-screen. Minneapolis-area developer. Malls, corporate parks, bustling places at the edges of roaring beltways. Late forties, slim, an overmanaged tan, a little oversharp in the dress dept., with a motivational-seminar-type hard-sell charm. A dagger of a Dad, with a pencil mustache and blinding shoe-leather. He tried to conjure an image of this paternal figure hitting Keith Freer on the noggin with a rolling pin and a bald cartoon lump rising from Freer’s skull. (Pemulis calculates a win or even three-setter w/ Freer would mean a place on the WhataBurger plane, is why he’s willing to violate a kind of personal honor-code and take pre-match Tenuate, which even with the 36-hour-elimination curve is kind of cavalier, given that he and Inc’d escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that he’d tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John Wayne, and Avril is kind of a coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-be-fucked-with administrative figure, and along with C. [‘Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Cow’] Tavis isn’t exactly a fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation incident. The ‘drines didn’t seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of stomachless competitive verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a kind of enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he’s facing into a warm wind.) Pemulis had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T-shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms.

‘Nothing’s fair because nothing’s true,’ Possalthwaite wept into his palms. His little flannel shoulders shook.

Something old in one of the shower drains sighed and gurgled, a nauseous sound.

‘Buck up.’ Pemulis was removing all necessary match-articles and refolding them and placing them in his noncomplimentary Dunlop gear-bag with military precision. He put a foot on the bench and looked briefly to either side. ‘Because if that’s your burr then rest in my assurance, Postalcode: certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true.’

Freer had made a pincer of his fingers and was at the other cheek. ‘Let him cry. Let baby have his dinkle. Piss and moan. Thirteen for Christ’s sake. A kid thirteen hasn’t even been in the same room with real disappointment yet. Hasn’t even locked eyes across a room with real disillusion and and frustration and pain. Thirteen: pain’s a rumor. What’s the word. Angst. Baby wouldn’t know genuine-article angst if it walked up and got him in a headlock.’

‘Not like real true real possible-little-cheek-pimple angst, Vike, hey?’

‘Flip it over and squat, Pemulis,’ without bothering to look. Both Pemulis and Freer had pronounced a hard g in angst, Hal would have observed. The Viking contorted his mouth and raised his big chin to check the flesh of his jaw, turning slightly to use the side-mirrors as well.

Pemulis smiled broadly, trying to envision Keith Freer sitting in a canvas restraint-wrap in full lotus, staring blankly, hitting all the high notes in ‘No Business Like Show Business’ as orderlies in boiled whites and prim nurses in bent hats stand around snapping their fingers, clean white cheap institutional-care sneakers tapping noiselessly through all eternity. He was down to chinos and bare light-brown feet. He considered a blue T-shirt with a black wolf-spider on it v. a coincidentally red-on-gray T-shirt that had ‘Vodka is the Enemy of Production’ in presumably Russian. His good four Dunlop sticks were stacked on the bench to Possalthwaite’s left. He picked up two and tested the strings’ tension by hitting the side of one stick’s head against the the strung face of the other and listening to the strings and then switching sticks and repeating the process. The exact right tension has a certain pitch. Midsized Dunlop Enqvist TL Composites. $304.95 U.S. retail. Real catgut strings have a kind of a dentalish sweet stink. The dot-and-circumflex logo. He didn’t much look at Possalthwaite. He chose the Cyrillic shirt with the bottle-glyph. He rolled it up and put his head through the head-hole first, his late great Da’s old-fashioned way. The upscaler kids here all did the arm-holes first. Then they did the head. You can also tell the scholarship kids because for some reason they put on a sock and a shoe and then a sock and a shoe. See for instance Wayne, who’d been in their room right after lunch when Pemulis had made the decision to come up for some pre-match Tenuate. Wayne’s room was right nearby and he was standing there over Troeltsch’s pharmacopic bedside table with no shirt and wet hair, rheumy-eyed and shiny-nostriled from moisturizer on his Kleenex-chafed nostrils. The Viking was squeezing a damp tennis ball with his left hand while he scanned his forehead by mostly feel. Pemulis’s psychic counter-strategy was not to appear in any hurry to dress and stretch and get out there either. Pemulis — who feared and hated unauthorized people being in his room, and who was constantly on Schacht’s back about forgetting to lock up when he left, and who wasn’t intimidated by Wayne’s talent and success and affectless reserve, but was cautious around him, John Wayne, sort of the way a formidable predator will be unintimidated but cautious around another formidable predator, particularly since the virtuosic but tense performance in a certain administrative office a week ago, which had been mentioned by neither man — had coolly asked Wayne if he could help him, and Wayne had just as coolly not looked up from rattling through sickly Jim Troeltsch’s bedside table’s stuff and said he’d come in for some of Troeltsch’s Seldane 6, which Pemulis had indeed heard Troeltsch at breakfast describing to a nose-blowing Wayne as the battlefield-nuke of anti-histamines that didn’t make you too drowsy to function at an incredibly high level of function. Pemulis adjusted his jock’s rear straps, trying to remember this Wayne-memory’s point. Wayne had wanted a clear head and high pulmonary function because he was down to play the Syrian Satelliter in an informal exhibition at I5l5h. Wayne hadn’t offered this explanation; Pemulis got it off the e-board. One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne’s unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn’t impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis’s hand in the Olde-English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TPs’ communal e-board for 11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times. The point was that the half-dressed Wayne had been standing there with one foot bare and one in a sock and shoe. Pemulis shook his head slightly and looked down at Possalthwaite and tried to gather spit.