David Wallace - Infinite jest

Hal could hear the phone console ringing as he dropped his gear bag and took the room key from around his neck. The phone itself had been Orin’s and its plastic case was transparent and you could see the phone’s guts.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘Why do I always get the feeling I’m interrupting you in the middle of some like vigorous self-abuse session?’ It was Orin’s voice. ‘It’s always multiple rings. Then you’re always a little breathless when you do.’

‘Do what.’

‘A certain sweaty urgency to your voice. Are you one of the 99 % of adolescent males, Hallie?’

Hal never liked talking on the phone after he’d gotten high in secret down in the Pump Room. Even if there was water or liquid handy to keep the cotton at bay. He didn’t know why this was so. It just made him uneasy.

‘You’re sounding hale and fit, O.’

‘You can tell me, you know. No shame in it. Let me tell you, boy, I did myself raw for years on end on that hill.’

Hal estimated over 60 % of what he told Orin on the phone since Orin had abruptly started calling again this spring was a lie. He had no idea why he liked lying to Orin on the phone so much. He looked at the clock. ‘Where are you?’

‘Home. Snug and toasty. It’s 90+ out.’

‘That would be Fahrenheit I’m assuming.’

‘This city is made of all glass and light. The windows are like high-beams coming at you. The air has that spilled-fuel shimmer to it.’

‘So to what do we owe.’

‘Sometimes I wear sunglasses even in the house. Sometimes at the stadium I hold my hand up and look at it and I swear I can see right through it. Like that thing with the flashlight and your hand.’

‘Hands seem to be sort of a theme to this call, thus far.’

‘On the way in from the lot off the street here I saw a pedestrian in a pith helmet stagger and like claw at the air and pitch forward onto his face. Another Phoenician felled by the heat I think to myself.’

It occurred to Hal that although he lied about meaningless details to Orin on the phone it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin was ever doing the same thing. This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led quickly, again, to Hal’s questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent. ‘SATs are six weeks away and Pemulis is less and less helpful on the math, if you want to know what I’m doing all day.’

‘The man’s face made a sizzling noise when it hit the pavement. Like bacon-caliber sizzling. He’s still lying there, I see out the window. He’s not moving anymore. Everyone’s avoiding him, going around him. He looks too hot to touch. A little Hispanic kid made off with his hat. Have y’all had snow yet? Describe snow for me again, Hallie, I’m begging you.’

‘So you go around with this image of me sitting around during the day masturbating, is what you’re saying.’

‘I’ve actually been thinking of maneuvering for the whole Kleenex concession at E.T.A., as a venture.’

‘That of course would mean actually contacting C.T. and the Moms.’

‘Me and this forward-looking reserve QB have been making inquiries.

Putting out feelers. Volume discounts, preferred-vendor status. Maybe a sideline in unscented lubricants. Any thoughts?’

‘O.?’

‘I’m sitting here actually missing New Orleans, kid. It’d be just coming up on Advent I think. The Quarter always gets really quaint and demure during Advent. It almost never rains down there during Advent for some reason. People remark on it, the phenomena.’

‘You sound somehow a little off to me, O.’

Tm heat-crazed. I might be dehydrated. What’s that word? Everything’s looked all beige and powdery all day. Trash bags have been swelling up and spontaneously combusting out in the dumpsters. These sudden rains of coffee grounds and orange peels. The Displacement guys in the barges have to wear asbestos gloves. Also I met somebody. Hallie, a possibly very special somebody.’

‘Uh oh. Dinnertime. Triangle’s a-clangín’ over in West.’

‘Hey Halíie though? Hang on. Kidding aside for a second. What all do you know about Separatism?’

Hal stopped for a moment. ‘You mean in Canada?’

‘Is there any other kind?’

Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [49]was founded in the Year of the Whopper by a nail-tough old chronic drug addict and alcoholic who had spent the bulk of his adult life under the supervision of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections before discovering the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at M.D.C.-Walpole and undergoing a sudden experience of total self-surrender and spiritual awakening in the shower during his fourth month of continuous AA sobriety. This recovered addict/ alcoholic — who in his new humility so valued AA’s tradition of anonymity that he refused even to use his first name, and was known in Boston AA simply as the Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name — opened Ennet House within a year of his parole, determined to pass on to other chronic drug addicts and alcoholics what had been so freely given to him in the E-Tier shower.

Ennet House leases a former physicians’ dormitory in the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, managed by the United States Veterans Administration. Ennet House is equipped to provide 22 male and female clients a nine-month period of closely supervised residency and treatment.

Ennet House was not only founded but originally renovated, furnished, and decorated by the nameless local AA ex-con, who — since sobriety doesn’t exactly mean instant sainthood — used to lead select teams of early-recovery dope fiends on after-hours boosting expeditions at area furniture and housewares establishments.

This legendary anonymous founder was an extremely tough old Boston AA galoot who believed passionately that everyone, no matter how broad the trail of slime they dragged in behind them, deserved the same chance at sobriety through utterly total surrender he’d been granted. It’s a kind of extremely tough love found almost exclusively in tough old Boston galoots. [50]He sometimes, the founder, in the House’s early days, required incoming residents to attempt to eat rocks — as in like rocks from the ground — to demonstrate their willingness to go to any lengths for the gift of sobriety. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Division of Substance Abuse Services eventually requested that this practice be discontinued.

Ennet was not any part of the nameless Ennet House founder’s name, by the way.

The rock thing — which has become a grim bit of mythopoeia now trotted out to illustrate how cushy the present Ennet residents have it — was probably not as whacko as it seemed to Division of S.A.S., since many of the things veteran AA’s ask newcomers to do and believe seem not much less whacko than trying to chew feldspar. E.g. be so strung out you can feel your pulse in your eyeballs, have the shakes so badly you make a spatter-painting on the wall every time somebody hands you a cup of coffee, have the life-forms out of the corner of your eye be your only distraction from the chainsaw-racing chatter in your head, sitting there, and have some old lady with cat-hair on her nylons come at you to hug you and tell you to make a list of all the things you’re grateful for today: you’ll wish you had some feldspar handy, too.

In the Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile, [51]the nameless founder’s death of a cerebral hemorrhage at age sixty-eight went unremarked outside the Boston AA community.

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