David Wallace - Infinite jest

The transparent phone sounded from somewhere under the hill of bedding [82]as Hal was on the edge of the bed with one leg up and his chin on its knee, clipping his nails into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room. It took four rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out.

‘Mmmyellow.’

‘Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we’ve had enough shit out of you.’

‘Hello Orin.’

‘How hangs it, kid.’

‘God, please no, please O., not more Separatism questions.’

‘Relax. Never crossed my mind. Social call. Shoot the breeze.’

‘Interesting you should call just now. Because I’m clipping my toenails into a wastebasket several meters away.’

‘Jesus, you know how I hate the sound of nail clippers.’

‘Except I’m shooting seventy-plus percent. The little fragments of clipping. It’s uncanny. I keep wanting to go out in the hall and get somebody in here to see it. But I don’t want to break the spell.’

‘The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can’t miss.’

‘It’s definitely one of those can’t-miss intervals. It’s just like that magical feeling on those rare days out there playing. Playing out of your head, de-Lint calls it. Loach calls it The Zone. Being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated.’

‘Coordinated as God.’

‘Some groove in the shape of the air of the day guides everything down and in.’

‘When you feel like you couldn’t miss if you tried to.’

‘I’m so far away the wastebasket’s mouth looks more like a slot than a circle. And yet in they go, ka-chíng ka-ching. There went another one. Even the misses are near-misses, caroms off the rim.’

‘I’m sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist’s ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom’s redwood-panelled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight’s the color of the bronze.’

‘But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart’s in your throat every time you change sides of the court.’

‘You start to get like a superstitious native. What’s the word propitiate the divine spell.’

T suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and apotropaic barn-signs. I’m actually frightened to switch feet right now. I’m clipping off the tiniest aerodynamically viable clippings possible, to prolong the time on this foot, in case the magic’s a function of the foot. This isn’t even the good foot.’

‘These can’t-miss intervals make superstitious natives out of us all, Hal-lie. The professional football player’s maybe the worst superstitious native of all the sports. That’s why all the high-tech padding and garish Lycra and complex play-terminology. The like self-reassuring display of high-tech. Because the bug-eyed native’s lurking just under the surface, we know. The bug-eyed spear-rattling grass-skirted primitive, feeding virgins to Pop-ogatapec and afraid of planes.’

‘The new Discursive O.E.D. says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins’ throats and pour the blood very carefully into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors.’

‘I can hear those clippers. Quit with the clippers a second.’

‘The phone’s no longer wedged under my jaw. I can even do it one-handed, holding the phone in one hand. But it’s still the same foot.’

‘You don’t know from true bug-eyed athletic superstition till you hit the pro ranks, Hallie. When you hit the Show is when you’ll understand primitive. Winning streaks bring the native bubbling up to the surface. Jock straps unwashed game after game until they stand up by themselves in the overhead luggage compartments of planes. Bizarrely ritualized dressing, eating, peeing.’

‘Micturation.’

‘Picture a 200-kilo interior lineman insisting on sitting down to pee. Don’t even ask what wives and girlfriends have to suffer during a can’t-miss winning streak.’

‘I don’t want to hear sexual stuff.’

‘Then there are the players who write down exactly what they say to everybody before a game, so if it’s a magical can’t-miss-type game they can say exactly the same things to the same people in the same exact order before the next game.’

‘Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors’ bodies completely with virgin-blood to preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being quote “The sated ghost cannot see secret things.” The Discursive O.E.D. postulates that this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.’ ‘Hey Hallie?’

‘After a burial, rural Papineau-region Québecers purportedly drill a small hole down from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul, if it wants out.’

‘Hey Hallie? I think I’m being followed.’

‘This is the big moment. I’ve totally exhausted the left foot finally and am switching to the right foot. This’ll be the real test of the fragility of the spell.’ ‘I said I think I’m being followed.’ ‘Some men are born to lead, O.’ ‘I’m serious. And here’s the weird part.’

‘Here’s the part that explains why you’re sharing this with your estranged little brother instead of with anybody whose credulity you’d actually value.’

‘The weird part is I think I’m being followed by … by handicapped people.’

‘Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury’s still out.’ ‘Quit with the clipping a second. I’m not kidding. Take the other day. I strike up a conversation with a certain Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in a wheelchair behind us. No big deal. Are you listening?’ ‘What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.’

‘But so the conversation goes well and hits it off, Seduction Strategies 12 and 16 are employed, which I’ll tell you about sometime at length. The point is the Subject and I walk out together hitting it off and there’s another guy in a wheelchair whittling in the shade of a shop-awning just down the street. OK. Still not necessarily any kind of deal. But now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park —’

‘Phoenix has trailer parks? Not those silverish metal trailers.’

‘So but we get out of the car, and across the park’s lot here’s yet another wheelchaired guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel and not making a very good job of it.’

‘Doesn’t Arizona have more than its share of the old and infirm?’

‘But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for guys in wheelchairs. And three in an hour’s kind of stretching it, I was thinking.’

‘I always picture you having your little trysts in more domestic suburban settings. Or else tall motels with exotically shaped beds. Do women in metal trailers even have small children?’

‘This one had very sweet little twin girls who played very quietly with blocks without supervision the whole time.’