David Wallace - Infinite jest

Exec. Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three people, 2F and 1M, who better be showing up soon, and Gately will answer the door when they don’t know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He’ll get them aside and tip them off to be sure to pet Pat M.’s dogs during the interview. They’ll be sprawled all over the front office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He’ll tell them it’s a proved fact that if Pat’s dogs like you, you’re in. Pat M. has directed Gately to tell appliers this, and then if the appliers do actually pet the dogs — two hideous white golden retrievers with suppurating scabs and skin afflictions, plus one has Grand Mall epilepsy — it’ll betray a level of desperate willingness that Pat says is just about all she goes by, deciding.

A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch. Animals here come and go. Alumni adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend to remain. Gately’s intestines moan. Boston’s dawn coming back on the Green Line this morning was chemically pink, trails of industrial exhaust blowing due north. The nail-parings in the ashtray on the floor are, he realizes now, too big to be from fingernails. These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. He swallows hard. He’d tell Geoffrey Day how, even if they are just cliches, cliches are (a) soothing, and (b) remind you of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out silence; and (4) silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you’ve got the Disease. Gene M. says you can spell the Disease DIS-EASE, which sums the basic situation up nicely. Pat has a meeting at the Division of Substance Abuse Services in Government Center at noon she needs to be reminded about. She can’t read her own handwriting, which the stroke affected her handwriting. Gately envisions going around having to find out who’s biting their fucking toenails in the living room and putting the disgusting toenail-bits in the ashtray at like 0500. Plus House regs prohibit bare feet anyplace downstairs. There’s a pale-brown water stain on the ceiling over Day and Treat the almost exact shape of Florida. Randy Lenz has issues with Geoffrey Day because Day is glib and a teacher at a Scholarly Journal’s helm. This threatens the self-concept of a Randy Lenz that thinks of himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-intellectual. Small-time dealers never conceptualize themselves as just small-time dealers, kind of like whores never do. For Occupation on his Intake form Lenz had put free lance script writer. And he makes a show of that he reads. For the first week here in July he’d held the books upside-down in the northeast corner of whatever room. He had a gigantic Medical Dictionary he’d haul down and smoke and read until Annie Parrot the Asst. Manager had to tell him not to bring it down anymore because it was fucking with Morris Hanley’s mind. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just sat there and read. Geoffrey D. has issues with Randy L., also, you can tell: there’s a certain way they don’t quite look at each other. And so now of course they’re mashed together in the 3-Man together, since three guys in one night missed curfew and came in without one normal-sized pupil between them and refused Urines and got bounced on the spot, and so Day gets moved up in his first week from the 5-Man room to the 3-Man. Seniority comes quick around here. Past Minty, down at the dining-room table’s end, Burt F.S.’s still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple, and Nell G. is behind him pounding him on the back so that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray, and he’s waving one stump vaguely over his shoulder to try and signal her to quit. Lenz and Day: a beef may be brewing: Day’ll try to goad Lenz into a beef that’ll be public enough so he doesn’t get hurt but does get bounced, and then he can leave treatment and go back to Chianti and ‘Ludes and getting assaulted by sidewalks and make out like the relapse is Ennet House’s fault and never have to confront himself or his Disease. To Gately, Day is like a wide-open interactive textbook on the Disease. One of Gately’s jobs is to keep an eye on what’s possibly brewing among residents and let Pat or the Manager know and try to smooth things down in advance if possible. The ceiling’s color could be called dun, if forced. Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen; here everybody has to make their little comment.

Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here. Gately changes the angle of one sneaker, puts the other arm behind his head. His head has real weight and pressure. Randy Lenz’s obsessive compulsions include the need to be north, a fear of disks, a tendency to constantly take his own pulse, a fear of all forms of timepieces, and a need to always know the time with great precision.

‘Day man you got the time maybe real quick?’ Lenz. For the third time in half an hour. Patience, tolerance, compassion, self-discipline, restraint.

Gately remembers his first six months here straight: he’d felt the sharp edge of every second that went by. And the freakshow dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s you’d ever heard about. A reason for a night-shift Staffer in the front office is so somebody’s there for the residents to talk at when — not if, when — when the freakshow dreams ratchet them out of bed at like 0300. Nightmares about relapsing and getting high, not getting high but having everybody think you’re high, getting high with your alcoholic mom and then killing her with a baseball bat. Whipping the old Unit out for a spot-Urine and starting up and flames coming shooting out. Getting high and bursting into flames. Having a waterspout shaped like an enormous Talwin suck you up inside. A vehicle explodes in an enhanced bloom of sooty flame on the D.E.C. viewer, its hood up like an old pop-tab.

Day’s making a broad gesture out of checking his watch. ‘Right around 0830, fella.’

Randy L.’s fine nostrils flare and whiten. He stares straight ahead, eyes narrowed, fingers on his wrist. Day purses his lips, leg joggling. Gately hangs his head over the arm of the sofa and regards Lenz upside-down.

‘That look on your map there mean something there, Randy? Are you like communicating something with that look?’

‘Does anybody maybe know the time a little more exactly is what I’m wondering, Don, since Day doesn’t.’

Gately checks his own cheap digital, head still hung over the sofa’s arm. ‘I got 0832:14, 15, 16, Randy.’

“ks a lot, D.G. man.’

So and now Day has that same flared narrow look for Lenz. ‘We’ve been over this, friend. Amigo. Sport. You do this all the time with me. Again I’ll say it — I don’t have a digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of far better days. It’s not a digital watch. It’s not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest. It’s not a sodding stopwatch for life. Lenz, get a watch. Am I right? Why don’t you just get a watch, Lenz. Three people I happen to know of for a fact have offered to get you a watch and you can pay them back whenever you feel comfortable about poking your nose out and investigating the work-a-world. Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital, incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer, and it treats time like pi.’