Infinite Jest

  The Community-Administration stairwells are narrow and no-nonsense. Red railings of cold iron whose red is one coat of primer. Steps and walls of raw-colored rough cement. The sort of sandy echo in there that makes you take stairs as fast as possible. The salve makes a sucking sound. The upper halls are empty. Low voices and lights from under the doors on the second floor. 2100 is still mandatory Study Period. There won’t be serious movement till 2200, when the girls will drift from room to room, congregating, doing whatever packs of girls in robes and furry slippers do late at night, until deLint kills all the dormitory lights at the dorms’ main breaker around 2300. Isolated movement: a door down the hall opens and shuts, the Vaught twins are heading down the hall to the bathroom at the far end, wearing only an enormous towel, one of their heads in curlers. One of the falls in Mr. Schtitt’s room had been on the burnt hip, and squunched salve from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at that side of the pelvis, though there is zero pain. Three tense voices behind Carol Spodek and Shoshana Abram’s door, lists of degrees and focal lengths, a study group for Mr. Ogilvie’s ‘Reflections on Refraction’ exam tomorrow. A girl’s voice from he can’t tell which room says ‘Steep hot beach sea’ twice very distinctly and then is still. Mario is leaning back against a wall in the hallway, panning idly. Felicity Zweig emerges from her door by the stairwell carrying a soap-dish and wearing a towel tied at that breast-level, as if there were breasts, moving toward Mario on her way to the head. She puts her hand out straight at his head’s camera, a kind of distant stiff-arm as she passes:

  ‘I’m wearing a towel.’

  ‘I understand,’ Mario says, using his arms to turn himself around and pointing the lens at the bare wall.

  ‘I’m wearing a towel.’

  Brisk controlled sounds of retching from behind Diane Prins’s door. Mario gets a couple seconds of Zweig hurrying away in the towel, tiny little bird steps, looking terribly fragile.

  The stairwells smell like the cement they’re made of.

  Behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn’s door, is the faint rubbery squeak of somebody moving around on crutches. Someone in 311 is yelling ‘Boner check! Boner check!’ A lot of the third floor is for boys under fourteen. The hall carpet up here is ectoplasmically stained, the expanses of wall between doors hung with posters of professional players endorsing gear. Someone has drawn a goatee and fangs on an old Donnay poster of Mats Wilander, and the poster of Gilbert Treffert is defaced with anti-Canadian slurs. Otis Lord’s door has Infirmary next to his name on the door’s name-card. Penn’s room’s door’s card’s name also had Infirmary. Sounds of someone talking low to someone who’s sobbing from Beak, Whale, and Virgilio’s room, and Mario resists an impulse to knock. LaMont Chu’s door next door is completely covered with magazines’ action-shots of matches. Mario is leaning back to get footage of the door when LaMont Chu exits the bathroom at this end in a terry robe and thongs and wet hair, literally whistling ‘Dixie.’

  ‘Mario!’

  Mario gets him bearing down, his calves hairless and muscular, hair-water dripping onto his robe’s shoulders with each step. ‘LaMont Chu!’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Nothing’s happening!’

  Chu stands there just within conversation-range. He’s only slightly taller than Mario. A door down the hall opens and a head sticks out and scans and then withdraws.

  ‘Well.’ Chu squares his shoulders and looks into the camera atop Mario’s head. ‘You want me to say something for posterity?’

  ‘Sure!’

  ‘What should I say?’

  ‘You can say anything you want!’

  Chu draws himself way up and looks penetrating. Mario checks the meter on his belt and uses the treadle to shorten the focal length and adjust the angle of the camera’s lens slightly downward, right at Chu, and there are tiny grinding adjustment-sounds from the Bolex.

  Chu’s still just standing there. ‘I can’t think what to say.’

  ‘That happens to me all the time.’

  ‘The minute your invitation became official my mind went blank.’

  ‘That can happen.’

  ‘There’s just this staticky blank field in there now.’

  ‘I know just what you mean.’

  They stand there silent, the camera’s mechanism emitting a tiny whir.

  Mario says ‘You just got out of the shower, I can tell.’

  ‘I was talking with good old Lyle downstairs.’

  ‘Lyle’s terrific!’

  ‘I was going to just whip right over into the showers, but the locker room’s got this, like, odor.’

  ‘It’s always great to talk with good old Lyle.’

  ‘So I came up here.’

  ‘Everything you’re saying is very good.’

  LaMont Chu stands there a moment looking at Mario, who’s smiling and Chu can tell wants to nod furiously, but can’t, because he needs to keep the Bolex steady. ‘What I was doing, I was filling Lyle in on the Eschaton debacle, telling him about the lack of hard info, the conflicted rumors that are going around, about how Kittenplan and some of the Big Buds are going to get blamed. About disciplinary action for the Buds.’

  ‘Lyle’s just an outstanding person to go to with concerns,’ Mario says, fighting not to nod furiously.

  ‘Lord’s head and Penn’s leg, the Postman’s broken nose. What’s going to happen to the Incster?’

  ‘You’re acting perfectly natural. This is very good.’

  ‘I’m asking if you’ve heard from Hal what they’re going to do, if he’s in on the blame from Tavis. Pemulis and Kittenplan I can see, but I’m having trouble with the idea of Struck or your brother taking discipline for what happened out there. They were strictly from spectation for the whole thing. Kittenplan’s Bud is Spodek, and she wasn’t even out there.’

  ‘I’m getting all this, you’ll be glad to know.’

  Chu is now looking at Mario, which for Mario is weird because he’s looking through the viewfinder, a lens-eye view, which means when Chu looks down from the lens to look at Mario it looks to Mario like he’s looking down south somewhere along Mario’s thorax.

  ‘Mario, I’m asking if Hal’s told you what they’re going to do to anybody.’

  ‘Is this what you’re saying, or are you asking me?’

  ‘Asking.’

  Chu’s face looks slightly oval and convex through the lens’s fish-eye, a jutting aspect. ‘So what if I want to use this that you’re saying for the documentary I’ve been asked to make?’

  ‘Jesus, Mario, use whatever you want. I’m just saying I have conscience-trouble with the idea of Hal and Troeltsch. And Struck didn’t even seem like he was conscious for the debacle itself.’

  ‘I should tell you I feel like we’re getting the totally real LaMont Chu here.’

  ‘Mario, camera to one side, I’m standing here dripping asking you for Hal’s impressions of when Tavis called them in, as in did he give you impressions. Van Vleck at lunch said he yesterday saw Pemulis and Hal coming out of Tavis’s office with the Association urine-guy holding them both by the ear. Van Vleck said Hal’s face was the color of Kaopectate.’

  Mario directs the lens at Chu’s shower-thongs so he can look over the viewfinder at Chu. ‘Are you saying this, or is this what happened?’

  ‘That’s what I’m asking you, Mario, if Hal told you what happened.’

  ‘I follow what you’re saying.’

  ‘So you asked whether I was asking, and I’m asking you about it.’ Mario zooms in very tight: Chu’s complexion is a kind of creamy green, with not one follicle in view. ‘LaMont, I’m going to find you and tell you whatever Hal tells me, this is so good.’

  ‘So then you haven’t talked to Hal?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Jesus, Mario, it’s like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.’

  ‘This is going very well!’

  Someone gargling. Guglielmo Redondo’s voice going through the rosary, it sou
nds like, just inside his and Esteban Reynes’s door. The Clipperton Suite in East House had had a bright-yellow strip of B.P.D. plastic for over a month, he remembers. The Boys Room door a different kind of wood than the room doors. The Clipperton Suite had a glued picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton’s ring at the net. The roar of a toilet and a stall door’s squeak. The Academy’s plumbing is high-pressure. It takes Mario longer to walk down a set of stairs than to walk up. Red primer stains his hand, he has to hold the railing so tight.

  The special hush of lobby carpet, and smells of Benson & Hedges brand cigarettes in the reception area off the lobby. The little hall doors that are always closed and never locked. The rubber sheaths on the knobs. Benson & Hedges cost $5.60 O.N.A.N. a pack at Father & Son grocery down the hill. Lateral Alice Moore’s desk’s plaque’s DANGER: THIRD RAIL light is unilluminated, and her word-processing setup wears its cover of frosted plastic. The blue chairs have the faint imprints of people’s bottoms. The waiting room is empty and dim. Some light from the lit courts outside. From under double doors is lamplight, much attenuated by double doors, from the Headmaster’s office, which Mario doesn’t explore; Tavis is unnerved into such gregarity around Mario it’s awkward for all parties. 316 If you asked Mario whether he got on with his Uncle C.T. he’d say: Sure. The Bolex’s light-meter is in the No Way range. Most of the waiting area’s available light comes from the doorless Dean of Females’s office. Meaning the Moms is: In.

  Heavy shag carpet is especially treacherous for Mario when he’s top-heavy with equipment. Avril Incandenza, a fiend for light, has the whole bank of overheads going, two torchères and some desk lamps, and a B&H cigarette on fire in the big clay ashtray Mario’d made her at Rindge and Latin School. She is swivelled around in her swivel-chair, facing out the big window behind her desk, listening to someone on the phone, holding the transmitter violin-style under her chin and holding up a stapler, checking its load. Her desk has what looks like a skyline of stacks of file folders and books in neat cross-hatched stacks; nothing teeters. The open book on top facing Mario is Dowty, Wall and Peters’s seminal Introduction to Montague Semantics, 317 which has very fascinating illustrations that Mario doesn’t look at this time, trying to film the cock of the Moms’s head and the phone’s extended antenna against the cumulus of her hair from behind, capturing her back unawares.

  But the sound of Mario entering even a shag-carpeted room is unmistakable, plus she can see his reflection in the window.

  ‘Mario!’ Her arms go up in a V, stapler open in one hand, facing the window.

  ‘The Moms!’ It’s a good ten meters past the seminar table and viewer and portable blackboard to the far part of the office where the desk is, and each step on the deep shag is precarious, Mario resembling a very old brittle-boned man or someone carrying a load of breakables down a slick hill.

  ‘Hello!’ She’s addressing his reflection in the quartered window, watching him put the treadle down carefully on the desk and struggle with the pack on his back. ‘Not you,’ she tells the phone. She points the stapler at the image of the Bolex on the image of his head. ‘Are we On-Air?’

  Mario laughs. ‘Would you like to be?’

  She tells the phone she’s still here, that Mario’s come in.

  ‘I don’t want to intercept your call.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’ She talks past the phone at the window. She rotates her swivel-chair to face Mario, the receiver’s antenna describing a half moon and now pointing up at the window behind her. There are two blue chairs like the reception-area chairs in front of her desk; she doesn’t indicate to Mario to sit. Mario’s most comfortable standing and leaning into the support of the police lock he’s trying to detach from his canvas plastron and lower, shucking the pack off his back at the same time. Avril looks at him like the sort of stellar mother where just looking at her kid gives her joy. She doesn’t offer to help him get the lock’s lead brace out of the pack because she knows he’d feel completely comfortable asking for her help if he needed it. It’s like she feels these two sons are the people in her life with whom so little important needs to be said that she loves it. The Bolex and support-yoke and viewfinder over his forehead and eyes give Mario an underwater look. His movements, setting and bracing his police lock, are at once graceless and deft. The lit Center Courts, now empty, are visible out the left side of Avril’s window, if you lean far forward and look. Someone has forgotten a gear bag and pile of sticks out by the net-post of Court 17.

  Silences between them are totally comfortable. Mario can’t tell if the person on the phone is still talking or if Avril just hasn’t put the dead phone down. She still holds the black stapler. Its jaws are open and it looks alligatorish in her hand.

  ‘Is this you passing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am I a subject, tonight?’

  ‘You can be a subject, Moms.’ He moves the big head around in a weary circle. ‘I get tired from wearing this.’

  ‘It gets heavy. I’ve held it.’

  ‘It’s good.’

  ‘I remember his making that. He took such care making that. It’s the last time I believe he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly.’

  ‘It’s terrific!’

  ‘He took weeks putting everything together.’

  He likes to look at her, too, leaning in and letting her know he likes looking. They are the two least embarrassable people either of them knows. She’s rarely here this late; she has a big study at the HmH. The only thing that ever shows she’s tired is that her hair gets a sort of huge white cowlick, like a rolling ocean comber of hair, and just on one side, the side with the phone, sticking up and touching the antenna. Her hair has been pure white since Mario can first remember seeing her looking down at him through the incubator’s glass. Pictures of her own father’s hair were like that. It goes down the middle of her back against the chair and down both arms, hanging off the arms near the elbow. Its part shows her pink scalp. She keeps the hair very clean and well-combed. She has one of Mr. deLint’s big whistles around her neck. The big cowlick casts a bent shadow on the sill of the window. There’s a maple-leaf flag and a 50-star U.S.A. flag hanging limp off brass poles on either side of the window; in an extreme corner are fleur-delis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks. C.T.’s office has an O.N.A.N. flag and a 49-star U.S.A. flag. 318

  ‘I had quality interface dialogue with LaMont Chu upstairs. But I made the girl Felicity, the really thin one — she got upset. She said only a towel.’

  ‘Felicity will be just fine. So you’re just strolling. Peripatetic footage.’ She refuses to adjust syntax, to speak in any way down to him, it’d be beneath him, though he seems not to mind when most people do it, speak down.

  Nor will she ask about the burn on his pelvis unless he brings it up. She’s careful to keep her oar out of Mario’s health stuff unless he brings things up, out of concern that it might be taken as intrusive or smothering.

  ‘I saw your lights. Why is the Moms here, still, I thought to myself.’ She made as if to clutch her head. ‘Don’t ask. I’ll starting whingeing. Tomorrow’s going to be hellishly busy.’ Mario didn’t hear her say goodbye to the man as she put down the phone so the antenna now points at Mario’s chest. She’s putting out the nub of the Benson & Hedge against the rooster-comb holder he’d squeezed and karate-chopped and put down the bowl’s center, when he made it, after she’d said she wanted it to be an ashtray. ‘You give me such pleasure standing there, all outfitted for work,’ she said. ‘Aprowl.’ She ground individual sparks out in the bowl. She had the idea that her smoking around Mario made him worry, though he’d never said anything about it one way or the other. ‘I have a breakfast engagement at 07, which means I have to do final swotting and whacking for morning classes now, so I just lurched back over here to do it instead of carrying everything back and forth.’

  ‘Are you tired?’

  She just smiled at him.

  ‘This is off.’ Pointing at his head. ‘
I turned it off.’

  To look at them, you’d never guess these two persons were related, one sitting and one standing canted forward.

  ‘Will you eat with us? I hadn’t even thought of dinner until I saw you. I don’t even know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders. 319 Turkey cartilage. Your bag is by the radio. Will you stay again? Charles is still in conference, I believe, he said.’

  ‘About the debracle with the Eschaton and the Postman’s nose?’

  ‘A person from a magazine has come to do a piece of reportage on your brother. Charles is speaking to her in lieu of any of the students. You may speak to her about Orin if you like.’

  ‘She’s been aprowl for Hal, Ortho said.’

  Avril has a certain way of cocking her fine head at him. ‘Your poor Uncle Charles has been with Thierry and this magazine person since this afternoon.’

  ‘Have you talked to him?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to buttonhole your brother. He’s not in your room. The Pemulis person was seen by Mary Esther taking their truck before Study Period. Is Hal with him, Mario?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Hal since lunchtime. He said he’d had a tooth thing.’

  ‘I didn’t even find out he’d been to see Zeggarelli until today.’

  ‘He asked about how the burn on my pelvis is.’

  ‘Which I won’t ask about unless you’d care to discuss how it’s coming along.’

  ‘It’s fine. Plus Hal said he wishes I’d come back and sleep there.’

  ‘I left two messages asking him to let me know how the tooth was. Love-o, I feel bad I wasn’t there for him. Hal and his teeth.’

  ‘Did C.T. tell what happened? Was he upset? Was that C.T. on the phone you were with?’ Mario can’t see why the Moms would call C.T. on the phone when he was in there right across the hall behind his doors. When she didn’t smoke a lot of the time she held a pen in her mouth; Mario didn’t know why. Her college mug has about a hundred blue pens in it, on the desk. She likes to square herself in her chair, sitting up extra straight and grasping the chair’s arms in a commanding posture. She looks like something Mario can’t place when she does this. He keeps thinking the word typhoon. He knows she’s not trying to consciously be commanding with him.