David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘That we could get bids from, you’re saying,’ Axford says. Hal squeezes a ball, silently looking at the hat.

Pemulis turns the tablet over. ‘Or certain very progressive and hip-type nursing homes I know guys that know of. Or down at Back Bay at that yogurt place with that picture of those historical guys Inc was saying at breakfast was up on the wall.’

‘Ram Das. William Burroughs.’

‘Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting.’

Axford’s pretending to punch Hal’s arm in excitement.

Pemulis says ‘Or of course I’m thinking I could just go the sheer-entertainment route and toss them in the Gatorade barrels at the meet with Port Washington Tuesday, or down at the WhataBurger — watch everybody run around clutching their heads or whatever. I’d be way into watching Wayne play with distorted senses.’

Hal puts one foot up on Pemulis’s little frustum-shaped bedside stool and leans farther in. ‘Would it be prying to ask how you finally managed to get hold of these?’

‘It wouldn’t be prying at all,’ Pemulis says, removing from the yachting cap’s lining every piece of contraband he’s got and spreading it out on the bed, sort of the way older people will array all their valuables in quiet moments. He has a small quantity of personal-consumption Lamb’s Breath cannabis (bought back from Hal out of a 20-g. he’d sold Hal) in a dusty baggie, a little Saran-Wrapped cardboard rectangle with four black stars spaced evenly across it, the odd ‘drine, and it looks like a baker’s dozen of the incredibly potent DMZ, Sweet Tart-sized tablets of no particular color with a tiny mod hipster in each center wishing the viewer peace. ‘We don’t even know how many hits this is,’ he muses quietly. There’s sun on the wall with the hanging viewer and poster of the paranoid king and an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket. In one of the three big mullioned west windows — the Academy is nothing if not well-fenestrated — there’s an oval flaw that’s casting a bubble of ale-colored autumn sunlight from the window’s left side to elongate onto Pemulis’s tightly made bed, [73]and he moves everything his hat’s got into the brighter bubble, going down on one knee to study a tablet between his forceps (Pemulis owns stuff like philatelic forceps, a loupe, a pharmaceutical scale, a postal scale, a personal-size Bun-sen burner) with the calm precision of a jeweler. ‘The literature’s mute on the titration. Do you take one tablet?’ He looks up on one side and then back around on the other at the boys’ faces leaning in above. ‘Is like half a tab a regulation hit?’

‘Two or even three tablets, maybe?’ Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself.

‘The accessible data’s vague,’ Pemulis says, his profile contorted around the loupe in his socket. ‘The literature on muscimole-lysergic blends is spotty and vague and hard to read except to say how massively powerful the supposed yields are.’

Hal looks at the top of Pemulis’s head. ‘Did you hit a medical library?’

‘I got on MED.COM off Lateral Alice’s WATS line and went back and forth and up and down through MED.COM. Plenty on lysergícs, plenty on methoxy-class hybrids. Vague and almost gossip-columny shit on fitviavi-compounds. To get anything you got to cross-key Ergotics with the phrase muscimole or muscimolated. Only a couple things ring the bell when you key in DMZ. Then they’re all potent this, sinister that. Nothing with any specifics. And jumbly polysyllables out the ass. Whole thing gave me a migraine. ‘

‘Yes but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real med-library?’ Hal’s his mother Avril’s child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc. Axford now really does punch him once in the shoulder, albeit the right one. Pemulis is scratching absently at the little hair-hurricane at the center of his hair. It’s close to!43Oh., and the flawed bubble of light on the bed is getting to be the slightly sad color of early winter P.M. There are still no sounds from the West Courts outside, but there’s high song of much volume through the wall’s water-pipes — a lot of the guys who are drilled past caring in the A.M. don’t get it up to shower until after lunch, then sit through P.M. classes with wet hair and different clothes than their A.M. classes.

Pemulis rises to stand between them and looks around the empty three-bedded room again, with neat stacks of three players’ clothes and bright gear on shelves and three wicker laundry hampers bulging slightly. There is the rich scent of athletic laundry, but other than that the room looks almost professionally clean. Pemulis and Schacht’s room makes Hal and Mario’s room look like an insane asylum, Hal thinks. Axford drew one of only two single upperclass rooms in last spring’s lottery, the other having gone to the Vaught twins, who get counted as one entry in Room Draw.

Pemulis still has his cheek screwed up to keep the loupe in as he looks around. ‘One monograph had this toss-off about DMZ where the guy invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid.’ ‘Holy crow.’

‘One article out of fucking Moment of all sources talks about how this one Army convict at Leavenworth got allegedly injected with some massive unspecified dose of early DMZ as part of some Army experiment in Christ only knows what and about how this convict’s family sued over how the guy reportedly lost his mind.’ He directs the loupe dramatically at first Hal and then Axford. ‘I mean literally lost his mind, like the massive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where.’

‘I think we get the picture, Mike.’

‘Allegedly Moment says how the guy’s found later in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice.’

Axford says maybe Pemulis stumbled on a possible explanation for poor old Lyle and his lotus position down in the weight room, gesturing with the bad right hand in the direction of Comm.-Ad.

Again Pemulis with the thing with the head. The slackening of a cheek lets the loupe fall out and bounce off the drum-tight bed, and Pemulis gets it to rebound into his palm without even looking. ‘I think we can err on the side of not dickying the Gatorade barrels, anyway. This soldier’s story’s moral was proceed with caution, big time. The guy’s mind’s still allegedly AWOL. An old soldier, now, still belting out Broadway medleys in some secretive institution someplace. Blood-relatives try to sue on the guy’s behalf, Army apparently came up with enough arguments to give the jury reasonable doubt about if the guy can even be said to legally exist enough to bring suit, anymore, since the dose misplaced his mind.’

Axford feels absently at his elbow. ‘So you’re saying let’s proceed with care why don’t we.’

Hal kneels to prod one of the tablets up against the dusty baggie’s side. His finger looks dark in the elongated bubble of light. Tm thinking these look like two tablets are possibly a hit. A kind of Motrinish look to them.’

‘Visual guesswork isn’t going to do it. This is not Bob Hope, Inc.’

‘We could even designate it “Ethel,” for on the phone,’ Axford suggests.

Pemulis watches Hal arranging the tablets into the same general cardioid-shape as E.T.A. itself. ‘What I’m saying. This is not a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show-tune soldier like left the planet.’

‘Well, so long as he waves every so often.’

‘The sense I got is the only thing he waves at is his food.’