Infinite jest

3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Rm. 204, Subdormitory B: Jim Troeltsch, age seventeen, hometown Nar-berth PA, current Enfield Tennis Academy rank in Boys’ 18’s #8, which puts him at #2 Singles on the 18’s B-team, has been taken ill. Again. It came on as he was suiting up warmly for the B-squad’s O745h. drills. A cartridge of a round-of-16 match from September’s U.S. Open had been on the small room viewer with the sound all the way down as usual and Troeltsch’d been straightening the straps on his jock, idly calling the match’s action into his fist, when it came on. The illness. It came out of nowhere. His breathing all of a sudden started hurting the back of his throat. Then that overfull heat in various cranial meatus. Then he sneezed and the stuff he sneezed out was thick and doughy. It came on ultra-fast and out of the pre-drill blue. He’s back in bed now, supine, watching the match’s fourth set but not calling the action. The viewer’s right under Pemulis’s poster of the paranoid king^[21] that you can’t escape looking at if you want to look at the viewer. Clotted Kleenex litter the floor around his bed’s wastebasket. The bedside table is littered with both OTC and prescription expectorants and pertussives and analgesics and Vitamin-C megaspansules and one bottle of Benadryl and one of Seldane,^[22] only the Seldane bottle actually contains several Tenuate 75-mg. capsules Troeltsch has incrementally promoted from Pemulis’s part of the room and has, rather ingeniously he thinks, stashed in bold plain sight in a bedside pill bottle where the Peemster would never think to check. Troeltsch is the sort that can feel his own forehead and detect fever. It’s definitely a rhinovirus, the sudden severe kind. He speculated on if yesterday when Graham Rader pretended to sneeze on J. Troeltsch’s lunch-tray at the milk-dispenser at lunch if Rader might have really sneezed and only pretended to pretend, transferring virulent rhinoviri to Troeltsch’s delicate mu-cosa. He feverishly mentally calls down various cosmic retributions on Rader. Neither of Troeltsch’s roommates is here. Ted Schacht is getting the knee’s first of several whirlpools for the day. Pemulis has geared up and left for 0745 drills. Troeltsch offered Pemulis rights to his breakfast to fill up his vaporizer for him and call the first-shift nurse for ‘yet more’ Seldane nuclear-grade antihistamine and a dextromethorphan nebulizer and a written excuse from A.M. drills. He lies there sweating freely, watching digitally recorded professional tennis, too worried about his throat to feel loquacious enough to call the action. Seldane is not supposed to make you drowsy but he feels weak and unpleasantly drowsy. He can barely make a fist. He’s sweaty. Nausea/vomiting like not an impossibility by any means. He cannot believe how fast it came on, the illness. The vaporizer seethes and burps, and all four of the room’s windows weep against the outside cold. There are the sad tiny distant-champagne-cork sounds of scores of balls being hit down at the East Courts. Troeltsch drifts at a level just above sleep. Enormous ATHSCME displacement fans far up north at the wall and border’s distant roar and the outdoor voices and pock of cold balls create a kind of sound-carpet below the digestive sounds of the vaporizer and the squeak of Troeltsch’s bedsprings as he thrashes and twitches in a moist half-sleep. He has heavy German eyebrows and big-knuckled hands. It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

It’s literally ‘daydreaming,’ sick, the kind of incomplete fugue you awaken from with a sort of psychic clunk, struggling up to sit upright, convinced there’s someone unauthorized in the dorm room with you. Falling back sick on his circle-stained pillow, staring straight up into the prolix folds of the Turkish blanketish thing Pemulis and Schacht had Krazy-Glued to the ceiling’s corners, which billows, hanging, so its folds form a terrain, like with valleys and shadows.

I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams’ form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been … overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning your head to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time… Your first nightmare away from home and folks, your first night at the Academy, it was there all along: The dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that there is a distillation of total evil in this dark strange subdorm room with you, that evil’s essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone. None of the other little boys in the room are awake; the bunk above yours sags dead, motionless; no one moves; no one else in the room feels the presence of something radically evil; none thrash or sit damply up; no one else cries out: whatever it is is not evil for them. The flashlight your mother name-tagged with masking tape and packed for you special pans around the institutional room: the drop-ceiling, the gray striped mattress and bulged grid of bunksprings above you, the two other bunkbeds another matte gray that won’t return light, the piles of books and compact disks and tapes and tennis gear; your disk of white light trembling like the moon on water as it plays over the identical bureaus, the recessions of closet and room’s front door, door’s frame’s bolections; the cone of light pans over fixtures, the lumpy jumbles of sleeping boys’ shadows on the snuff-white walls, the two rag throw-rugs’ ovals on the hardwood floor, black lines of baseboards’ reglets, the cracks in the Venetian blinds that ooze the violet nonlight of a night with snow and just a hook of moon; the flashlight with your name in maternal cursive plays over every cm. of the walls, the rheostats, CD, Inter-Lace poster of Tawni Kondo, phone console, desks’ TPs, the face in the floor, posters of pros, the onionskin yellow of the desklamps’ shades, the ceiling-panels’ patterns of pinholes, the grid of upper bunk’s springs, recession of closet and door, boys wrapped in blankets, slight crack like a creek’s course in the eastward ceiling discernible now, maple reglet border at seam of ceiling and walls north and south no floor has a face your flashlight showed but didn’t no never did see its eyes’ pupils set sideways and tapered like a cat’s its eyebrows’ \ / and horrid toothy smile leering right at your light all the time you’ve been scanning oh mother a face in the floor mother oh and your flashlight’s beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it overcorrects then centers on what you’d felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you’d so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you until you knew just as you felt it didn’t belong and was evil: Evil.

And then its mouth opens at your light.

And then you wake like that, quivering like a struck drum, lying there awake and quivering, summoning courage and spit, roll to the right just as in the dream for the nametagged flashlight on the floor by the bed just in case, lie there on your shank and side, shining the light all over, just as in the dream. Lie there panning, looking, all ribs and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty clothes, blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny in the windows’ snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in the floor, awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated, playing beam over floor again and again, not sure all night forever unsure you’re not missing something that’s right there: you lie there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.