Infinite Jest

  ‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine. Moms asked me where’s Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up.’

  ‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’

  ‘She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you’re too trustworthy to worry about or check up on.’

  ‘Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are for somebody else’s teeth, not my teeth, and I can’t seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they’re not for my teeth.’

  ‘I promised LaMont Chu I’d tell him whatever information you told me, he was so concerned.’

  ‘The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’

  ‘LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.’

  ‘Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?’

  ‘S. Johnson used to be the Moms’s dog. That passed away.’

  ‘And you remember how he died, then.’

  ‘Hey Hal, you remember a period in time back in Weston when we were little that the Moms wouldn’t go anywhere without S. Johnson? She took him with her to work, and had that unique car seat for him when she had the Volvo, before Himself had the accident in the Volvo. The seat was from the Fisher-Price Company. We went to Himself’s opening of Kinds of Light at the Hayden 320 that wouldn’t let in cigarettes or dogs and the Moms brought S. Johnson in a blind dog’s harness-collar that went all the way around his chest with the square bar on the leash thing and the Moms wore those sunglasses and looked up and to the right the whole time so it looked like she was legally blind so they’d let S.J. into the Hayden with us, because he had to be there. And how Himself just thought it was a good one on the Hayden, he said.’

  ‘I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about S. Johnson’s map getting eliminated.’

  ‘She was sad.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking compulsively about Orin ever since C.T. called us all in. When you think about Orin what do you think, Boo?’

  ‘The best was remember when she had to fly and wouldn’t put him in a cagey box and they wouldn’t even let a blind dog on the plane, so she’d leave S. Johnson and leave him out tied to the Volvo and she’d make Orin put a phone out there with its antenna up during the day out by where S. Johnson was tied to the Volvo and she’d call on the phone and let it ring next to S. Johnson because she said how S. Johnson knew her unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he was thought about and cared about from afar, she said?’

  ‘She was unbent where that dog was concerned, I remember. She bought some kind of esoteric food for it. Remember how often she bathed it?

  ‘…’

  ‘What was it with her and that dog, Boo?’

  ‘And the day we were out rolling balls in the driveway and Orin and Marlon were there and S. Johnson was there lying there on the driveway tied to the bumper with the phone right there and it rang and rang and Orin picked it up and barked into it like a dog and hung it up and turned it off?’

  ‘…’

  ‘So she’d think it was S. Johnson? The joke that Orin thought was such a good one?’

  ‘Jesus, Boo, I don’t remember any of that.’

  ‘And he said we’d get Indian Rub-Burns down both arms if we didn’t pretend how we didn’t know what she was talking about if and when she asked us about the bark on the phone when she got home?

  ‘The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well.’

  ‘We were supposed to shrug and look at her like she was minus cards from her deck, or else?’

  ‘Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I’ve been remembering.’

  ‘He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I miss him or not.’

  ‘I miss Family Trivia. Do you remember four times he let us sit in on when they played Family Trivia?’

  ‘You’ve got a phenomenal memory for this stuff, Boo.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You probably think I’m wondering why you don’t ask me about the thing with C.T. and Pemulis and the impromptu urine, after the Eschaton debacle, where the urologist took us right down to the administrative loo and was going to watch personally while we filled his cups, like watch it go in, the urine, to make sure it came from us personally.’

  ‘I think I especially have a phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked.’

  ‘You can ask, if you like.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn’t actually extract urine samples from us. We got to hold on to our urine, as the Moms no doubt knows quite well, don’t kid yourself, from C.T.’

  ‘I have a phenomenal memory for things that make me laugh is what I think it is.’

  ‘That Pemulis, without self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got the guy to give us thirty days — the Fundraiser, the WhataBurger, Thanksgiving Break, then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized receptacles he wants, is the arrangement we made.’

  ‘I can hear Schacht, you’re right. Also the fans.’

  ‘Boo?’

  ‘I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.’

  ‘Pemulis — the alleged weak-stomached clutch-artist — Pemulis showed some serious brass under pressure, standing there over that urinal. He played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument. I found myself feeling almost proud for him.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You might think I’m wondering why you aren’t asking me why thirty days, why it was so important to extract thirty days from the blue-blazered guy before a G.C./M.S. scan. As in what is there to be afraid of, you might ask.’

  ‘Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal.’

  ‘Jesus, it’s just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘Except with you I can feel you mean it.’

  ‘You’re up on your elbow. You’re on your side, facing my way. I can see your shadow.’

  ‘How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you’re ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?’

  ‘You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.’

  ‘Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.’

  ‘Hey Hal?’

  ‘And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You know, for me, Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they’re lying. Another type
becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a windowscreen.’

  ‘Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn’t think he was.’

  ‘Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.’

  ‘Maybe if we call him he’ll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him if you want to if you ask, maybe.’

  ‘Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.’

  ‘The merciful type of lie.’

  ‘Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that’s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal.’

  ‘Rococo’s a pretty word.’

  ‘So now I’ve established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I’ve established that as a sort of subtype.’

  ‘You sound like you can always tell.’

  ‘Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed he had that kind of performance in him.’

  ‘Psychosis live on the radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: “The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation,” quote.’

  ‘The truth is nobody can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.’

  ‘I can’t ever tell. You wanted to know. You’re right. It never crosses my mind.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I’m the type that’d buy land, I think.’

  ‘You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?’

  ‘Boy do I ever.’

  ‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’

  ‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’

  ‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’

  ‘Golly Ned.’

  ‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’

  ‘Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?’

  ‘Thing?’

  ‘You know. Don’t play dumb and embarrass me.’

  ‘A wheelchair is a thing which: you prefer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. Difference. You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m drinking. There’s all these people in the House they’re always worried they’re going to drink. I’m in there for drugs. I’ve never had more than a beer ever in my life. I only came in here to throw up from getting mugged. Some street guy was offering to be a witness and he would not leave me alone. I didn’t even have any money. I came in here to vomit.’

  ‘I know what it is you are meaning.’

  ‘What’s your name one more time?’

  ‘I call myself Rémy.’

  ‘This is a beautiful thing as Hester would say. I don’t feel horrid anymore. Ramy I feel better than I feel, felt in ever so I don’t know how long. This is like novocaine of the soul. I’m like: why was I spending all that time doing one-hitters when this is really what I call feeling better.’

  ‘Us, I do not take any drugs. I drink infrequently.’

  ‘Well you’re making up for lost time I have to say.’

  ‘When I drink I have many drinks. This is how it is for my people.’

  ‘My mom won’t even have it in the house. She said it’s what made her father drive into concrete and wipe out his entire family. Which like I’m so tired of hearing it. I came in here — what is this place?’

  ‘This, it is Ryle’s Inman Square Club of Jazz. My wife is dying at home in my native province.’

  ‘There’s this thing in the Big Book they make us every Sunday we have to drag ourselves out of bed at the absolute crack of dawn and sit in a circle and read out of it and half the people can barely even read and it’s excruciating to listen to!’

  ‘You should make your voice lower, for in the hours of no jazz they enjoy low voices, coming in for quiet.’

  ‘And there’s a thing about a car salesman trying to quit drinking, it’s about the they call it the insanity of the first one, drink — he comes in a bar for a sandwich and a glass of milk — are you hungry?’

  ‘Non.’

  ‘What am I saying I don’t have any money. I don’t even have my purse. This stuff makes you stupid but it makes you feel quite a bit improved. He wasn’t thinking of a drink and then all of a sudden he thinks of a drink. This guy.’

  ‘Out of a blue place, in one flashing instant.’

  ‘Exactly. But the insanity is after all this time in hospitals and losing his business and his wife because of drinking he suddenly gets it into his head that one drink won’t hurt him if he puts it in a glass of milk.’

  ‘Crazy in his head.’

  ‘So when this absolutely reptilian character you saved me from by sitting down, rolling over, whatever. Sor -ry. When he says can he buy me a drink the book flashes in my mind and for sort of as it felt like a joke I ordered Kahlua and milk.’

  ‘Me, I come in for nights I am tired, after the music has packed away, for the quiet. I use the telephone here as well, sometimes.’

  ‘I mean even before the mugging I was walking along soberly deciding how to kill myself, so it seems a little silly to worry about drinking.’

  ‘You have a certain expression of resemblance of my wife.’

  ‘Your wife is dying. Jesus I’m sitting here laughing and your wife is dying. I think it’s that I haven’t felt decent in so freaking long, do you know what I’m saying? I’m not talking like good, I’m not talking like pleasure, I wouldn’t want to go overboard with this thing, but at least at like zero, even, what do they call it Feeling No Pain.’

  ‘I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife. I think: Rémy, it is time for many drinks.’

  ‘Well I think you’re nice. I think you just about saved my life. I’ve spent like nine weeks feeling so bad I wanted to just about kill myself, both getting high and not. Dr. Garton never mentioned this. He talked plenty about shock but he never even freaking mentioned Kahlua and milk.’

  ‘Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know you but we are drunk together now, and will you hear this story?’

  ‘It’s not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender, is it?’

  ‘My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, they were lost in the teenage years being struck by a train.’

  ‘T
hat must have smarted.’

  ‘I would have temptation to say you have no idea. But I am sensing you have an idea of hurting.’

  ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘I am in early twenty years, without the legs. Many of my friends also: without legs.’

  ‘Must have been an awful train crash.’

  ‘Also my own father: dead when his Kenbeck pacemaker came within range of a misdialed number of a cellular phone far away in Trois Rivières, in a freakish occurrence of tragedy.’

  ‘My dad emotionally abandoned us and moved to Portland, which is in Oregon, with his therapist.’

  ‘Also in this time, my Swiss nation, we are a strong people but not strong as a nation, surrounded by strong nations. There is much hatred of our neighbors, and unfairness.’

  ‘It all started when my mom found a picture of his therapist in his wallet and goes “What’s that doing in here?” ’

  ‘It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. One feels grotesque to people; one’s freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for jobs in the mines of Switzerland.’

  ‘The Swiss have gold mines.’

  ‘As you say. And much beautiful territory, which the stronger nations at the time of losing my legs committed paper atrocities to my nation’s land.’

  ‘Frucking bastards.’

  ‘It is a long story to the side of this story, but my part of the Swiss nation is in my time of no legs invaded and despoiled by stronger and evil hated and neighboring nations, who claim as in the Anschluss of Hitler that they are friends and are not invading the Swiss but conferring on us gifts of alliance.’

  ‘Total dicks.’

  ‘It is to the side, but for my Swiss friends and myself without legs it is a dark period of injustice and dishonor, and of terrible pain. Some of my friends roll themselves off to fight against the invasion of paper, but me, I am too painful to care enough to fight. To me, the fight seems without point: our own Swiss leaders have been subverted to pretend the invasion is alliance; we very few legless young cannot repel an invasion; we cannot even make our government admit that there is an invasion. I am weak and, in pain, see all is pointless: I do not see the meaning of choosing to fight.’