David Wallace - Infinite jest

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that off the record she’d always felt he had the longest lushest prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents, three if you counted Australia. Mario thanked her kindly, calling her Ma’am and trying to fake a Southern accent.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent said she wasn’t sure what were her old footprints from finding the thicket with the tripod and what were their more recent footprints from trying to find the old footprints, and that she was worried because it was starting to get dark and they might not be able to find it and then Mario wouldn’t believe she’d seen something as batshit-sounding as a gleaming silvery tripod all set up for no reason in the middle of nowheresville.

Mario said he was pretty sure that Australia was a continent. Walking, he came up to around the bottom of U.S.S. Millicent’s ribcage.

Mario heard crackling and thrashing from some other thicket nearby but was certain it wasn’t Hal, since Hal very rarely made a lot of motion-noise either outside or in-.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that though she was an admittedly great player, w/ an overwhelming haul-ass-up-to-the-net-and-loom-over-it-like-a-titan game in the Betty Stove/Venus Williams power-game tradition, and headed for an almost limitless future in the Show, she’d confide in him in private out here that she’d never really loved competitive tennis, that her real love and passion was modern interpretive dance, at which she admittedly had less unconsciously native gifts and talents to bring to bear, but which she loved, and had spent just about all her off-court time as a little girl practicing in a leotard in front of a double-width mirror in her room at home in suburban Montclair NJ, but that tennis was what she had limitless talent at and got emotional strokes and tuition-waiver boarding-school offers in, and that she’d been desperate to get into a boarding school. Mario asked if she could recall if the Husky-VI tripod had been the TL one with waffle-gridded rubber tips on the legs and a 360° pan head or the SL one with unwaffled tips and only a 180° pan head that swiveled in an arc instead of a full circle. The U.S.S. Millicent revealed that she’d accepted a scholarship to E.T.A. at age nine for the sole reason of getting away from her father. She referred to her father as her Old Man, which you can just tell she capitalizes. Her mother had left home when the U.S.S. Millicent was only five, running off very abruptly with a man sent by what had then been called Con-Edison to do a free home-energy-efficiency assessment. It had been six years since she’d laid an eyeball on her Old Man, but to the best of her recall he was almost three meters tall and morbidly obese, which had been why every mirror and bathtub in the house had been double-width. One older sister who’d been deeply involved in synchronized swimming had got pregnant and married in high school soon after her mother’s departure.

All this time there’s been more crackling and crashing off up the hillside. Mario has trouble on any kind of declined grade. Some sort of bird’s sitting in the top branch of a little tree and looking at them without saying anything. Mario thinks suddenly of a joke he remembers hearing Michael Pemulis tell:

‘If two people get married in West Virginia and then pull up stakes and move to Massachusetts and then if they decide they want to get a divorce, what’s the biggest problem getting a divorce?’

The U.S.S.M.K. says her other older sister had at just fifteen joined the Ice Capades of all things, and was in the back-up-like chorus where the biggest artistic challenge was not bumping into people and either falling or making them fall.

‘Getting a divorce from your sister, because in West Virginia Pemulis said a lot of people who get married are brother and sister.’

‘Hold my hand.’

‘He was only joking, though.’

By now the light was about the same color as the ash and clinkers in the bottom of a Weber Grill. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was leading them in a set of slightly diminishing circles. Then, she said, at age eight she came home early from after-school drills at the U.S.T.A. Jr. Facility in Passaic NJ looking forward to slipping into the old leotard and getting in some modern interpretive dancing up in her room, only to come home suddenly and find her father wearing her leotard. Which needless to say didn’t fit very well. And with the small front portion of his huge bare feet squeezed into a pair of strapless pumps Mrs. Kent had left behind in her haste. In the dining room he’d moved all the furniture over to the side of, in front of the really wide mirror, in a grotesquely tiny and bulging violet leotard, capering. Mario says violet’s really the U.S.S. Millicent’s color. She says that was the exact creepy word for it: capering. Pirouetting and rondelling. Simpering, as well. The crotch of her leotard looked like a slingshot, it was so deformed. He hadn’t heard her come in. U.S.S. Millicent asked Mario if he’d ever seen a girl’s yin-yang before. Obscene mottled hirsute flesh had pooched and spilled out over every centimeter of the leotard’s perimeter, she recalled. She’d had a voluptuous figure even at eight, she told Mario, but the Old Man was in a whole different-sized ballpark altogether. Mario kept saying Golly Ned, all he could think of to say. His flesh jiggled and bounced as he capered. It was repellent, she said. There was no sign of a Husky VI or any other model of tripod in any of the thickets and boscages. Her literal term for it was ‘yin-yang.’ But her Old Man wasn’t just a cross-dressing transves-tite, she said; it turned out they always had to be a relative’s female clothes. She said she always used to wonder why her sisters’ one-pieces and figure-skating skirts always looked so askewly baggy and elastic-shot, since the sisters didn’t exactly wear tiny little malnourished sizes themselves. The Old Man didn’t hear her come in and he capered and jetéed for several more minutes until she happened to catch his simpering eye in the mirror, she said. That’s when she knew she had to get away, she said. And Mario’s own old man’s Admissions lady had called out of the blue that very evening, she said. Like it had been fate. Serendipity. Kismet.

‘Yin-yang,’ Mario offered, nodding. The U.S.S. Millicent’s hand was large and hot and at the level of sogginess of a bathmat that’s been used several times in a row in quick succession.

Her second-oldest sister, many years later, had informed the U.S.S.M.K. that the first time anybody’d had any inklings about the Old Man was an episode when the older sister was very small and Mrs. K. had sewed her a special costume complete with gold-lame bow & arrow for playing Cupid in the school Valentine’s Day pageant, and the sister’s school had got out early one day after an asbestos scare and she’d come unexpectedly home and found the Old Man in the basement rumpus room in tiny wings and hideously distended diaper striking a pose from a rather well-known Titian oil in the Met’s High Renaissance Wing, and had struggled with denial and own-perceptions-doubting for quite some time thereafter, until a hysterical episode during rehearsals for an Ice Capades Valentine’s Day number brought all the feelings surging up and broke the denial, and the Ice Capades’ Employee Assistance Office counselling staff helped her start to work it all through.

At which point U.S.S. Míllícent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later turned out to be poison sumac and turned with a strange glint in the one eye that wasn’t in pine-shadow and crushed Mario’s large head to the area just below her breasts and said she needed to confess that Mario’s eyelashes and vest with extendable police lock he used for staying upright in one place had for quite some time now driven her right around the bend with sensual feeling. What Mario perceived as a sudden radical drop in the prevailing temperature was in fact the U.S.S. Millicent Kent’s sexual stimulation sucking tremendous quantities of ambient energy out of the air surrounding them. Mario’s face was so squashed against the U.S.S. Millicent’s thorax that he had to contort his mouth way out to the left to breathe. U.S.S.M.K.’s hairbow became detached and fluttered down through Mario’s sightline like a giant crazed violet moth. U.S.S.M.K. was trying to undo Mario’s corduroys but was frustrated by the complex system of snaps and fasteners at the bottom of his police lock’s Velcro vest, which overlapped his trouser’s own fasteners, and Mario tried to reconfigure his mouth somehow to both breathe and warn the U.S.S.M.K. that he was incredibly ticklish in the area of the bellybutton and directly below. He could now start to hear his brother Hal somewhere to the above and east, calling Mario’s name at a moderate volume. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was saying there was no way Mario could be any more nervous than she was about what was happening between them. It’s true that the sounds of Mario sucking air out of a severely leftward-contorted mouth could have been interpretable as the heavy breathing of sexual stimulation. It was when the U.S.S. Millicent wrapped one arm around his shoulder for leverage and forced her other hand up under the hem of the tight vest and then down inside the trousers and briefs, rooting for a penis, that Mario became so ticklish that he began to double up, clearing his face of U.S.S. Millicent’s front and laughing out loud in such a distinctive high-pitched way that Hal had no trouble beelining right upon them, compromised though his navigational systems were after fifteen or so secret minutes alone in the fragrant pines. Mario later said it was just like when there was a word on the tip of your tongue that try as you might you can’t remember until the exact second you stop trying, and in it pops, right into your head: it was when the three of them were walking together back up the hillside toward the tree-line’s lip, not trying to do anything but get back to Comm.-Ad. by the most direct route in the dark, that they stumbled upon the cinematic tripod, a dully glinting TL waffle-tipped Husky, in the middle of what wasn’t such a very tall or thick thicket at all.