Infinite jest

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Steeply said ‘Choosing Boston as your Ops center, after all, which to us signifies: the place of the supposed Entertainment’s origin.’

Marathe made a gesture of being willing to take time and play along, if Steeply wished it. ‘But also the city Boston U.S.A. has logic. Your closest city to the Convexity. Closest therefore to Quebec. Within as you say the distance of spit.’ His wheelchair squeaked very slightly whenever he moved. An automobile horn somewhere between the city and themselves blew a sustained blast. It grew always colder down on the desert floor; they could feel this. He felt gratitude for his windbreaker.

Steeply flicked some ashes from his cigarette with a coarse thumb-gesture that was not yet feminine. ‘But we’re not any more sure that they actually do have copies. Also, does this quote “anti”-Entertainment the film’s director supposedly made to counter the lethality: does it really also exist; this really could be some sort of game for you and the F.L.Q.,^[47] to hold out the promise of the anti-Entertainment as a chip for concessions. As some kind of remedy or antidote.’

‘Of this anti-film that antidotes the seduction of the Entertainment we have no evidence except craziness of rumors.’

Steeply used a technical interviewer’s device of pretending to occupy himself with small physical chores of preening and hygiene, delaying, to have Marathe elaborate himself more fully. The lights of the city Tucson with their movements and twinkling made a globe of light such as on ceilings at les salles de danser in Val d’Or, Quebec. Marathe’s wife was dying slowly of ventricular restenosis.^[48] He thought: die twice.

Marathe said: ‘And also why do they never send you into the field as yourself, Steeply? This is to say in appearance. The last time you were — what is it I hope to say — a Negro, for almost one year, no?’

U.S.A. persons’ shrugs are always as if trying to lift a heavy thing. ‘Haitian,’ Steeply said. ‘I was Haitian. Some negroid tendencies in the persona, maybe.’ Marathe listened to Steeply be silent. A U.S.A. coyote sounds more like a high-strung dog. The automobile’s horn continued, sounding to the men forlorn and somehow nautical out below in the dark. The feminine manner to examine the fingernails was to raise the whole hand’s back into view instead of malely curling the nails in over the upturned palm; Marathe recalled knowing this from a very young age. Steeply would pick at the corners of his lip, then for an interval change to examining the fingernails. His silences seemed always comfortable and contained. He was a competent operative. More cold air came, odd eddied breezes up in over the shelf from the desert’s floor, puffs of sudden air as if from the turning of a volume’s pages. His bare arms had the plucked-chicken look of chilled and bare skin in his grotesque sleeveless dress. Marathe had not been aware of when during the falling of night Steeply had removed the absurd sunglasses, but decided the exact moment of this did not matter for reporting every word and gesture back to M. Fortier. Again the coyote, and also another farther off, perhaps to answer. The sounds were like that of a domestic dog being given low voltage. Les Assassins’ M. Fortier and M. Broullîme and some others of his comrades-on-wheels believed Rémy Marathe to be eidetic, near-perfect in recall and detail. Marathe, who could remember several incidents of crucial observations he had failed to later recall, knew this was not true.