Infinite Jest (6 page)

ass
instead of
butt
. He’d be so rude and unpleasant to her that the memory of his lack of basic decency
and of her tight offended face would be a further disincentive ever, in the future,
to risk calling her and repeating the course of action he had now committed himself
to.

He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see. He
remembered clearly the last woman he’d involved in his trying just one more vacation
with dope and drawn blinds. The last woman had been something called an appropriation
artist, which seemed to mean that she copied and embellished other art and then sold
it through a prestigious Marlborough Street gallery. She had an artistic manifesto
that involved radical feminist themes. He’d let her give him one of her smaller paintings,
which covered half the wall over his bed and was of a famous film actress whose name
he always had a hard time recalling and a less famous film actor, the two of them
entwined in a scene from a well-known old film, a romantic scene, an embrace, copied
from a film history textbook and much enlarged and made stilted, and with obscenities
scrawled all over it in bright red letters. The last woman had been sexy but not pretty,
as the woman he now didn’t want to see but was waiting anxiously for was pretty in
a faded withered Cambridge way that made her seem pretty but not sexy. The appropriation
artist had been led to believe that he was a former speed addict, intravenous addiction
to methamphetamine hydrochloride
¹
is what he remembered telling that one, he had even described the awful taste of
hydrochloride in the addict’s mouth immediately after injection, he had researched
the subject carefully. She had been further led to believe that marijuana kept him
from using the drug with which he really had a problem, and so that if he seemed anxious
to get some once she’d offered to get him some it was only because he was heroically
holding out against much darker deeper more addictive urges and he needed her to help
him. He couldn’t quite remember when or how she’d been given all these impressions.
He had not sat down and outright bold-faced lied to her, it had been more of an impression
he’d conveyed and nurtured and allowed to gather its own life and force. The insect
was now entirely visible. It was on the shelf that held his digital equalizer. The
insect might never actually have retreated all the way back into the hole in the shelf’s
girder. What looked like its reemergence might just have been a change in his attention
or the two windows’ light or the visual context of his surroundings. The girder protruded
from the wall and was a triangle of dull steel with holes for shelves to fit into.
The metal shelves that held his audio equipment were painted a dark industrial green
and were originally made for holding canned goods. They were designed to be extra
kitchen shelves. The insect sat inside its dark shiny case with an immobility that
seemed like the gathering of a force, it sat like the hull of a vehicle from which
the engine had been for the moment removed. It was dark and had a shiny case and antennae
that protruded but did not move. He had to use the bathroom. His last piece of contact
from the appropriation artist, with whom he had had intercourse, and who during intercourse
had sprayed some sort of perfume up into the air from a mister she held in her left
hand as she lay beneath him making a wide variety of sounds and spraying perfume up
into the air, so that he felt the cold mist of it settling on his back and shoulders
and was chilled and repelled, his last piece of contact after he’d gone into hiding
with the marijuana she’d gotten for him had been a card she’d mailed that was a pastiche
photo of a doormat of coarse green plastic grass with
WELCOME
on it and next to it a flattering publicity photo of the appropriation artist from
her Back Bay gallery, and between them an unequal sign, which was an equal sign with
a diagonal slash across it, and also an obscenity he had assumed was directed at him
magisculed in red grease pencil along the bottom, with multiple exclamation points.
She had been offended because he had seen her every day for ten days, then when she’d
finally obtained 50 grams of genetically enhanced hydroponic marijuana for him he
had said that she’d saved his life and he was grateful and the friends for whom he’d
promised to get some were grateful and she had to go right now because he had an appointment
and had to take off, but that he would doubtless be calling her later that day, and
they had shared a moist kiss, and she had said she could feel his heart pounding right
through his suit coat, and she had driven away in her rusty unmuffled car, and he
had gone and moved his own car to an underground garage several blocks away, and had
run back and drawn the clean blinds and curtains, and changed the audio message on
his answering device to one that described an emergency departure from town, and had
drawn and locked his bedroom blinds, and had taken the new rose-colored bong out of
its Bogart’s bag, and was not seen for three days, and ignored over two dozen audio
messages and protocols and e-notes expressing concern over his message’s emergency,
and had never contacted her again. He had hoped she would assume he had succumbed
again to methamphetamine hydrochloride and was sparing her the agony of his descent
back into the hell of chemical dependence. What it really was was that he had again
decided those 50 grams of resin-soaked dope, which had been so potent that on the
second day it had given him an anxiety attack so paralyzing that he had gone to the
bathroom in a Tufts University commemorative ceramic stein to avoid leaving his bedroom,
represented his very last debauch ever with dope, and that he had to cut himself off
from all possible future sources of temptation and supply, and this surely included
the appropriation artist, who had come with the stuff at precisely the time she’d
promised, he recalled. From the street outside came the sound of a dumpster being
emptied into an E.W.D. land barge. His shame at what she might on the other hand perceive
as his slimy phallocentric conduct toward her made it easier for him to avoid her,
as well. Though not shame, really. More like being uncomfortable at the thought of
it. He had had to launder his bedding twice to get the smell of the perfume out. He
went into the bathroom to use the bathroom, making it a point to look neither at the
insect visible on the shelf to his left nor at the telephone console on its lacquer
workstation to the right. He was committed to touching neither. Where was the woman
who had said she’d come. The new bong in the Bogart’s bag was orange, meaning he might
have misremembered the bong before it as orange. It was a rich autumnal orange that
lightened to more of a citrus orange when its plastic cylinder was held up to the
late-afternoon light of the window over the kitchen sink. The metal of its stem and
bowl was rough stainless steel, the kind with a grain, unpretty and all business.
The bong was half a meter tall and had a weighted base covered in soft false suede.
Its orange plastic was thick and the carb on the side opposite the stem had been raggedly
cut so that rough shards of plastic protruded from the little hole and might well
hurt his thumb when he smoked, which he decided to consider just part of the penance
he would undertake after the woman had come and gone. He left the door to the bathroom
open so that he would be sure to hear the telephone when it sounded or the buzzer
to the front doors of his condominium complex when it sounded. In the bathroom his
throat suddenly closed and he wept hard for two or three seconds before the weeping
stopped abruptly and he could not get it to start again. It was now over four hours
since the time the woman had casually committed to come. Was he in the bathroom or
in his chair near the window and near his telephone console and the insect and the
window that had admitted a straight rectangular bar of light when he began to wait.
The light through this window was coming at an angle more and more oblique. Its shadow
had become a parallelogram. The light through the southwest window was straight and
reddening. He had thought he needed to use the bathroom but was unable to. He tried
putting a whole stack of film cartridges into the dock of the disc-drive and then
turning on the huge teleputer in his bedroom. He could see the piece of appropriation
art in the mirror above the TP. He lowered the volume all the way and pointed the
remote device at the TP like some sort of weapon. He sat on the edge of his bed with
his elbows on his knees and scanned the stack of cartridges. Each cartridge in the
dock dropped on command and began to engage the drive with an insectile click and
whir, and he scanned it. But he was unable to distract himself with the TP because
he was unable to stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds.
The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious
feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he
was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy
all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic
over missing something made no sense. The viewer hung on the wall, half again as large
as the piece of feminist art. He scanned cartridges for some time. The telephone console
sounded during this interval of anxious scanning. He was up and moving back out toward
it before the first ring was completed, flooded with either excitement or relief,
the TP’s remote device still in his hand, but it was only a friend and colleague calling,
and when he heard the voice that was not the woman who had promised to bring what
he’d committed the next several days to banishing from his life forever he was almost
sick with disappointment, with a great deal of mistaken adrenaline now shining and
ringing in his system, and he got off the line with the colleague to clear the line
and keep it available for the woman so fast that he was sure his colleague perceived
him as either angry with him or just plain rude. He was further upset at the thought
that his answering the telephone this late in the day did not jibe with the emergency
message about being unreachable that would be on his answering device if the colleague
called back after the woman had come and gone and he’d shut the whole system of his
life down, and he was standing over the telephone console trying to decide whether
the risk of the colleague or someone else from the agency calling back was sufficient
to justify changing the audio message on the answering device to describe an emergency
departure this evening instead of this afternoon, but he decided he felt that since
the woman had definitely committed to coming, his leaving the message unchanged would
be a gesture of fidelity to her commitment, and might somehow in some oblique way
strengthen that commitment. The E.W.D. land barge was emptying dumpsters all up and
down the street. He returned to his chair near the window. The disk drive and TP viewer
were still on in his bedroom and he could see through the angle of the bedroom’s doorway
the lights from the high-definition screen blink and shift from one primary color
to another in the dim room, and for a while he killed time casually by trying to imagine
what entertaining scenes on the unwatched viewer the changing colors and intensities
might signify. The chair faced the room instead of the window. Reading while waiting
for marijuana was out of the question. He considered masturbating but did not. He
didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He
thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought
of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and
felt on some level that this had something to do with him and his circumstances and
what, if this grueling final debauch he’d committed himself to didn’t somehow resolve
the problem, would surely have to be called his problem, but he could not even begin
to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either
him or the insect, which had retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because
at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door’s buzzer both
sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked
through a very small hole into the great balloon of colored silence he sat in, waiting,
and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module,
then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward
both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something’s
been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.

‘All I know is my dad said to come here.’

‘Come right in. You’ll see a chair to your immediate left.’

‘So I’m here.’

‘That’s just fine. Seven-Up? Maybe some lemon soda?’