David Wallace - Infinite jest

A hand raised by the violently cross-eyed Carl Whale, age thirteen. Acknowledgment from Struck.

‘Say you have to fart.’

‘You’re serious, Mobes, aren’t you.’

‘Jim sir, say you’re playing out there, and suddenly you have to fart. It feels like one of those real hot nasty pressurized ones.’

‘I get the picture.’

Now some empathic murmurs, exchanged looks. Josh Gopnik is nodding very intensely. Struck stands very straight to the right of the viewer, hands behind his back like an Oxford don.

‘I mean the kind that’s real urgent.’ Whale looks briefly around him. ‘But that it’s not impossible it’s actually a need to go to the bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart.’

Now five heads are nodding, pained, urgent: clearly a vexing sub-14 issue. Struck examines a cuticle.

‘Meaning defecate is what you mean, then, Mobes. Go to the bathroom.’

Gopnik looks up. ‘Carl’s saying the kind where you don’t know what to do. What if you think you have to fart but it’s really that you have to shit?’

‘As in it’s a competitive situation, it’s not a situation where you can go bearing down and forcing and see what happens.’

‘So out of caution you don’t,’ Gopnik says.

‘—fart,’ Philip Traub says.

‘But then you’ve denied yourself an urgent fart, and you’re running around trying to compete with a terrible hot nasty uncomfortable fart riding around the court inside you.’

Two levels down, Ortho Stice and his brood: the little libraryish circle of soft chairs and lamps in the warm foyer off the front door to subdorm C:

‘And what he says he says it’s about more than tennis, mein kinder. Mein kinder, well it sort of means my family. He eyeballs me right square in the eye and says it’s about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn’t know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give. You’ll hear him ask it if you’re privileged to ever get an interface. The call could come at anytime: the man wants a mano-to-mano interface. You’ll hear him say it over and over. What have you got to give. What are you willing to part with. I see you’re looking a little pale there, Wagen-knecht. Is this scary you bet your little pink personal asses it’s scary. It’s the big time. He’ll tell you straight the fuck out. It’s about discipline and sacrifice and honor to something way bigger than your personal ass. He’ll mention America. He’ll talk patriotism and don’t think he won’t. He’ll talk about it’s patriotic play that’s the high road to the thing. He’s not American but I tell you straight out right here he makes me proud to be American. Mein kinder. He’ll say it’s how to learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn’t good its own self.’

There’s a long pause. The front door is newer than the wood around it.

‘I’d chew fiberglass for that old man.’

The only reason the Buddies in V.R.8 can hear the little burst of applause from the foyer is because Struck won’t hesitate to pause and consider silently as long as he has to. To the kids the pauses spell dignity and integrity and the still-water depth of a guy with nine years in at three different academies, and who has to shave daily. He exhales a slow breath through rounded lips, looking off up at the ceiling’s guilloche border.

‘Mobes, if it’s me: I let it ride.’

‘You let it out come what may?’

‘A la contraire. I let it ride around inside all day if I have to. I make an iron rule: nothing escapes my bottom during play. Not a toot or a whistle. If I play hunched over I play hunched over. I take the discomfort in the name of dignified caution, and when it’s especially bad I look up at sky between points and I say to the sky Thank You Sir may I have another. Thank You Sir may I have another.’

Gopnik and Tallat-Kelpsa are writing this down.

Struck says, ‘That’s if I want to hang for the long haul.’

‘One side of the gingival mound, then up over the apex and down over the other side of the gingival mound, using you should cultivate a certain amount of touch with the string.’

‘Now the big question of character is do we let a fluke of a probably one-in-a-hundred lapse in concentration make us throw up our faggy hands and go dragging characterlessly back to our dens to lick the whimpering wounds, or do we narrow our eyes and put out the chin and say Pemulis we say we say Pemulis, Double or Nothing, when the odds remain so almost crazily stacked in our favor today.’

‘So they do it on purpose?’ Beak is asking. ‘Try to make us hate them?’

Limits and rituals. It’s almost time for communal dinner. Sometimes Mrs. Clarke in the kitchen lets Mario ring a triangle with a steel ladle while she rolls back the dining-room doors. They make the servers wear hairnets and little Ob/Gynish gloves. Hal could take out the plug and nip down into the tunnels, maybe not even all the way down into the Pump Room. Be only twenty minutes late. He’s thinking in an abstract absent way about limits and rituals, listening to Blott give Beak his aperçu. Like as in is there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire. He has to sit up to spit in the wastebasket. There is a twinge in a tooth on his mouth’s left side.

In mid-October Y.D.A.U., Hal had invited Mario for a post-prandial stroll, and they were strolling the E.T.A. grounds between the West Courts and the hillside’s tree-line, Hal with his gear bag. Mario could sense that Hal wanted to be able to go off by himself briefly, so he contrived (Mario did) to be very interested in some sort of leaf-and-twig ensemble off the path, and let Hal sort of melt away down the path. The whole area running along the tree-line and the thickets of like shrubbery and stickery bushes and heaven knew what all was covered with fallen leaves that were dry but had not yet quite all the way lost their color. The leaves were underfoot. Mario kind of tottered from tree to tree, pausing at each tree to rest. It was @ 1900h., not yet true twilight, but the only thing left of the sunset was a snout just over Newton, and the places under long shadows were cold, and a certain kind of melancholy sadness was insinuating itself into the grounds’ light. The staggered lamps by the paths hadn’t come on yet, however.

A lovely scent of illegally burned leaves wafting up from East Newton mixed with the foody smells from the ventilator turbines out of the back of the dining hall. Two gulls were in one place in the air over the dumpsters over by the rear parking lot. Leaves crackled underfoot. The sound of Mario walking in dry leaves was like: crackle crackle crackle stop; crackle crackle crackle stop.

An Empire Waste Displacement displacement vehicle whistled past overhead, rising in the start of its arc, its one blue alert-light atwinkle.

He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts’ fencing. From deeper inside the thickets on the lip of the hillside came a tremendous crackling and thrashing of underbrush and trailing willow-branches, and who should heave into unexpected view but the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, a sixteen-year-old out of Montclair NJ, #1 Singles on the Girls 16’s-A squad and two hundred kilos if she was a kilo. Southpaw, one-hander off the backhand side, a serve Donnie Stott likes to clock with radar, and chart. Mario’s filmed the U.S.S. Millicent Kent for staff-analysis on several occasions. They exchange hearty Hi’s. One of only a couple female E.T.A.s with visible veins in her forearms, object of a fiercely-wagered-on bench-press challenge against Schacht, Freer, and Pe-tropolis Kahn that M. Pemulis had organized last spring, in which she’d topped Kahn and Freer refused to show and Schacht finally beat her but doffed his cap. Out for a staff-ordered weight-management post-dinner stroll, squeezing Penn 5’s in both hands, in E.T.A. sweat pants and with an enormous violet bow either Scotch-taped or glued to the blunt rounded top of her hair. She told Mario she’d just seen the strangest thing farther back deeper in the thickets off the lip. Her hair was tall and rounded off in the shape of a kind of pill, not unlike a papal hat or a British constable’s tall hat. Mario said the bow looked terrific, and what a surprise to come face to face like this out here in the chill dusk. Bridget Boone had said the U.S.S. Milli-cent Kent’s coiffure looked like a missile protruding from its silo in preparation for launch. The last of the sun’s snout was setting just over the tip of the U.S.S. Millicent’s hair, which was almost osseously hard-looking, composed of dense woven nests of reticulate fibers like a dry loofa sponge, which she said over the summer a home-perm had misfired and left her hair a system of reticulate nests, and was only now loosening up enough even to attach a bow to. Mario said that well the bow set her off to a T, was all he had to say on the matter. (He hadn’t literally said ‘chill dusk.’) The U.S.S.M.K. said she’d been amusing herself beating her way through one of the brambly thickets Mrs. Incandenza had — when she’d still spent time outdoors at all — planted to discourage part-time employees from short-cutting up the hillside to E.T.A., and had come upon a Husky Vl-brand telescoping tripod, new and dully silvery-looking and set up on its three legs, right in the middle of the thicket. For no visible reason and with no footprints or visible evidence of path-beating anywhere around except the U.S.S. Millicent’s own. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent stowed a tennis ball in each hip pocket and took Mario’s claw and said here to walk this way and she’d show him real quick, and get his like feedback on the issue, and plus have a witness when they got back and she told people about it. Mario said the Husky VI came with its own pan head and cable release. With the girl supporting him with one hand and beating an easement through the brush with the other they proceeded deeper into the thicket on the lip. The outdoor light was now the same hue as U.S.S.M.K.’s hairbow. She said she swore to God it was around here someplace. Mario said his late dad had used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky back in his early days of making art-films, when he also used a homemade dolly and sandbags and halogen spots instead of kliegs. Several different species and types of birds were twittering.