David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘It’s DeLint!’

‘A quiet chat!’

‘Geronzai!’

Van Vleck looks up at Wayne, who’s now turned away with his hands against the door frame, shoving, one leg back, stretching the right calf. ‘This is your advice, Mr. Wayne sir? This isn’t Chu palming himself off as you again?’

They all want to know how Wayne does it, #2 continentally in 18’s at just seventeen, and very likely #1 after the WhataBurger and already getting calls from ProServ agents Tavis has Lateral Alice Moore screen. Wayne’s the most sought-after Big Buddy at E.T.A. You have to apply for Wayne as Buddy by random drawing.

LaMont Chu and T. P. Peterson are sending van Vleck optical daggers as Wayne turns around to stretch a hip-flexor and says he’s said pretty much all he has to say.

‘Todder, I admire your savvy, I admire a kid’s certain worldly skepticism, no matter how misplaced it is here. So even though it fucks me on the odds, so there’s now like practically no way I can come out square,’ M. Pemulis says in V.R.2, subdorm C, sitting on the very edge of the divan with a few feet of beige shag between him and his four kids, all cross-legged on cushions; he says, Til reward your worldly skepticism this once by letting you try it with only two, so like I’ve got just two cards here, and I hold them up, one in each hand…’ He stops abruptly, knocks his temple with the heel of a hand that holds a Jack. ‘Whoa, what am I thinking. We all gotta put in our fiveski here first.’

Otis P. Lord clears his throat: ‘The ante.’

‘Or it’s called the pot,’ says Todd Possalthwaite, laying a five on the little pile.

‘Jaysus I’m thinking, sweet Jaysus what am I getting into with these kids that speak the lingo like veteran Jersey-shore croupiers. I got to be missing a widget or something, ‘t the fuck, though, you know what I’m saying? So Todd man you choose just one of the cards, we got the clubby Jack and the spade Queen here, and you choose … and so down they go both of them face-down, and I like swirl them around on the floor a little, not shuffle but swirl so they’re in plain view the whole time, and you follllllowwwwwwww the card you chose, around and around, which like with three cards maybe I’ve got some chance you lose track but with two? With just two?’

Ted Schacht in V.R.3 at his giant plasticene oral demonstrator, the huge dental mock-up, white planks of teeth and obscene pink gums, twine-size floss anchored around both wrists:

‘The vital thing here gentlemen being not the force or how often you rotate to particulate-free floss but the motion, see, a soft sawing motion, gently up and down both ancipitals of the enamel’ — demonstrating down the side of a bicuspid big as the kids’ heads, the plasticene gum-stuff yielding with sick sucking sounds, Schacht’s five kids all either glazed-looking or glued to their watch’s second-hand — ‘and then here’s the key, here’s the thing so few people understand: down below the ostensible gumline into the basal recessions at either side of the gingival mound that obtrudes between the teeth, down below, where your most pernicious particulates hide and breed.’

Troeltsch holds court in his, Pemulis and Schacht’s room in Subdorm C, supinely upright against both of his and one of Schacht’s pillows, the vaporizer chugging, one of his kids holding Kleenex at the ready.

‘Boys, what it is is I’ll tell you it’s repetition. First last always. It’s hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut. It’s making the same pivots and lunges and strokes over and over and over again, at you boys’s age it’s reps for their own sake, putting results on the back burner, why they never give anybody the boot for insufficient progress under fourteen, it’s repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe and sweat. It’s no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. At like fourteen, give and take, they figure here. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don’t need for the mechanics anymore, after they’ve sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball. The ball starts being something that you just know ought to be in the air, spinning. This is when they start getting on you about concentration. Right now of course you have to concentrate, there’s no choice, it’s not wired down into the language yet, you have to think about it every time you do it. But wait till fourteen or fifteen. Then they see you as being at one of the like crucial plateaus. Fifteen, tops. Then the concentration and character shit starts. Then they really come after you. This is the crucial plateau where character starts to matter. Focus, self-consciousness, the chattering head, the cackling voices, the choking-issue, fear versus whatever isn’t fear, self-image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped cold-footed men inside your mind, cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor. Now these start to matter. Thirteen at the earliest. Staff looks at a range of thirteen to fifteen. Also the age of manhood-rituals in various cultures. Think about it. Until then, repetition. Until then you might as well be machines, here, is their view. You’re just going through the motions. Think about the phrase: Going Through The Motions. Wiring them into the motherboard. You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it right now.’

James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. of Orinda CA prefers one long Q&A-type interface, with V.R.8’s viewer playing ambient stuff against relaxation-vistas of surf, shimmering ponds, fields of nodding wheat.

‘Time for about maybe two more, me droogies.’

‘Say it’s close and the guy starts kertwanging you. Balls are way in and he’s calling them out. You can’t believe the flagrancy of it.’

‘Implicit this is a no-linesman situation, Traub, you’re saying.’

Creepily-blue-eyed Audern Tallat-Kelpsa chimes in: ‘This is early rounds. The kind they give you only two balls. Honor systems. All of a sudden there he is kertwanging on you. It happens.’

‘I know it happens.’

Traub says, ‘Whether he’s outright kertwanging or just head-fucking you. Do you start kertwanging back? Tit for tat? What do you do?’

‘Do we assume there’s a crowd.’

‘Early round. Remote court. No witnesses. You’re on your own out there. Do you kertwang back.’

‘You do not kertwang back. You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling. If you still win, you’ll have grown inside as a person.’

‘If you lose?’

‘If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his next round.’

A couple of the kids have notebooks and studious nods. Struck is a prized tactician, very formal in B.B. group-sessions, something scholarly and detached about him his charges often revere.

‘We can discuss private water-jug unpleasantness on Friday,’ Struck says, looking at his watch.