Infinite jest

30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Marathe did not quite sleep. They had remained on the shelf for some hours. He thought it a bit of much that Steeply refused even for a brief time to sit down upon the ground. If his persona’s skirt rode up above his weapon, what was the difference? Were grotesque and humiliating undergarments also involved? Marathe’s wife had been in an irreversible coma for fourteen months. Marathe was able to refresh himself without quite sleeping. It was not a state of fugue or neural relaxation, but a type of detachment. He had learned this in the months after losing his legs to a U.S.A. train. Part of Marathe floated off and hovered somewhere just above him, crossing its legs, nibbling at his consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn.

At some times on the outcropping Steeply went farther than crossing his arms, almost embracing himself, chilled but unwilling to comment on the chill. Marathe noted that the gesture of self-embrace appeared convincingly feminine and unconscious. Steeply’s preparations for his returning field-assignment had been disciplined and effective. The feature of complete un-swallowability about M. Steeply as a U.S.A. female journalist — even a massive and unfortunate-looking U.S.A. female journalist — was his feet. These were broad and yellow-nailed, hairy and trollesque, the ugliest feet Marathe had observed anywhere south of 60° N, and the ugliest supposedly female feet of his experience.

Both men were strangely reluctant, somehow, to broach the subject of plans for getting down off the shelf in the utter dark. Steeply didn’t even waste time wondering how Marathe could have gotten up (or down) there in the first place, short of some sort of helicopter drop, which capricious winds and the proximity of the mountainside made unlikely. The dogma around Unspecified Services was that if Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had one Achilles’ heel it was their penchant for showing off, making a spectacle of denying any kind of physical limitation, etc. Steeply had field-interfaced with Rémy Marathe once on a rickety-feeling Louisiana oil platform 50-plus clicks out of Caillou Bay, covered the whole time by armed Cajun sympathizers. Marathe always disguised the boggling size of his arms under a long-sleeved windbreaker. His eyelids were half-closed whenever Steeply turned to look. If he (Marathe) were a cat he would be purring. One hand stayed below the blanket at all times, Steeply noted. Steeply himself had a small and unregistered Taurus PT9 taped to his shaved inner thigh, which was the main reason he was reluctant to sit down on the outcrop-ping’s stone; the weapon was unsafetied.

In the faint lume- and starlight Marathe found the four-limbed American’s high-heeled feet compellingly grotesque, like loaves of soft processed U.S.A. bread being slowly squeezed and mangled by the footwear’s straps. The meaty compression of the toes at the shoes’ open tips, the leather faintly creaking as he bobbed up and down, hugging himself chillily in the sleeveless summer dress, his fleshy bare arms webbed redly with mottle in the chill, one arm luridly scratched. The received wisdom among Québecois anti-O.N.A.N. cells was that there was something latent and sadistic in the Bureau des Services sans Spécificité’s assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives — casting men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals, heterosexual men as homosexual men, Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and Dominicans, healthy males as degenerative-nerve-disease-sufferers, healthy women operatives as hydro-cephalic boys or epileptic public-relations executives, nondeformed U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual deformity, all for the realism of their field-personae. Steeply, silent, rose and fell absently on the toes of these feet. The feet were also visibly unused to high U.S.A. women’s heels, for they were mangled-looking, deprived of flowing blood and abundantly blistered, and the smallest toes’ nails were blackening and preparing, Marathe noted, in the future to fall off.

But Marathe knew also that something within the real M. Hugh Steeply did need the humiliations of his absurd field-personae, that the more grotesque or unconvincing he seemed likely to be as a disguised persona the more nourished and actualized his deep parts felt in the course of preparation for the humiliating attempt to portray; he (Steeply) used the mortification he felt as a huge woman or pale Negro or palsied twit of a degenerative musician as fuel for the assignments’ performance; Steeply welcomed the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very role that offended his dignity of self … the psychomechanics became too confusing for Marathe, who had not the capacity for abstractions of his A.F.R. superiors Fortier and Broullîme. But he knew this was why Steeply was one of Services sans Spéci-ficité’s finest field-operatives, once spending the better part of a year in magenta robes, sleeping three hours nightly and allowing his large head to be shaved and teeth removed, shaking a tambourine in airports and selling plastic flowers on median strips to infiltrate a cult-fronted 3-amino-8-hydroxytetralin^[169]-import ring in the U.S.A. city Seattle.

Steeply said ‘Because this is the thing about the A.F.R. that really gives them the fantods, if you’re talking about fear and what to fear.’ He spoke either quietly or not, that Marathe could determine. The empty expanse they both faced off the shelf sucked all resonance, causing every sound to sound self-enclosed and every utterance to seem flatly soft and somehow overintimate, almost post-coital. The sounds of things said beneath blankets, winter beating at the log walls. Steeply himself appeared frightened, perhaps, or confused. He continued: ‘This disinterest, by you guys, it seems, in anything but the harm itself. Just getting the Entertainment out there to hurt us.’

The naked aggression by us.’

Muscles beneath the nylons of the calves bulged and receded as Steeply bobbed. ‘The boys in Behavioral Science say they can’t see any sort of positive political goal the A.F.R. even wants. Anything DuPlessis was having your Fortier work toward.’

‘The U.S.A. fantods are meaning fear, confusion, standing hair.’

The F.L.Q. and Montcalmists — shit, even the most whacked out of Alberta’s ultra-rightists —’

M. DuPlessis had once studied beneath radical Edmonton Jesuits, Marathe reflected.

‘— them we can begin to understand, as political bodies. Them we can more or less get a feel for dealing with.’

Their aggression is clothed in agenda, the Bureau of you perceives.’

Steeply’s was a thinking face now, in apparent puzzlement. They at least have aims. Real desires.’

‘For themselves.’

Steeply appeared convincingly to ruminate. ‘It’s like there’s a context for the whole game, then, with them. We know where where we stand differs from where they stand. There’s a sort of playing field of context.’

Causing the chair to squeak, Marathe again rotated two fingers of a hand in the air, which for Québecers signifies impatience. ‘Rules of play. Rules of engagement.’ The other hand was with the Sterling UL machine pistol beneath the blanket.

‘Even historically — the 60s bomb-tossers, the Spic Separatists, the Ragheads —’

‘Very charming. These are attractive terms.’

‘Ragheads, Colombians, Brazilians — they had positive objectives.’

‘Desires for self which you could understand.’

‘Even if the objectives were nothing more than things we could file, pin to the board under “STATED OBJECTIVES” — the pathetic Spies. They wanted certain things. There was a context. A compass for maneuvers against them.’

‘Your guardians of National Security could understand these positive desires of self-interest. Look at them and “relate” as one says, at least. Knowing where you stand on the field of play.’

Steeply slowly nodded, as if to only himself. ‘There wasn’t just pure malice. There was never the sense that here were some people who had just all of a sudden let the air out of your tires for no reason.’

‘You allege we disperse our resources deflating automobile tires?’

‘A figure of speech. Or for example a serial killer. A sadist. Somebody who wants you down just for the deviant sake of wanting you down. A deviant.’

Far south, a blinking system of tri-colored lights described a spiral over the airport’s tower’s pulsing tip — this was a landing aircraft.

Steeply lit another cigarette off the butt of his previous and then tossed the butt, peering over the shelf’s edge to watch its spiralled fall. Marathe was looking up and right. Steeply said:

‘Because politics are one thing. Even way-out-far-in-the-distance fringe politics are one thing. Your Fortier doesn’t seem to care much about Reconfiguration, territory, redemisement, cartography, tariffs, Finlandization, O.N.A.N.ite Anschluss or toxic-waste displacement.’

‘Experialism.’

Steeply said ‘Or so-called Experialism. Even Separatism. None of the other cells’ agendas seem to drive you people. Most of the Office sees it as just sheer malice with you. No agenda or story.’

‘And for you there is something appalling.’

Steeply pursed his lips, as if trying to blow something off them. ‘But when there are delineatable strategic political goals and objectives. When there’s some set of ends we can make sense of the malice with. Then it’s just business.’

‘Nothing of persons.’ Marathe was looking up. Some of the stars seemed to flutter, others to burn with more steadiness.

‘We know which end is up when it’s business. We’ve got a field and a compass.’ He regarded Marathe directly in a way that was not accusing. ‘This seems personal,’ he said.

Marathe could not think of descriptions for the way Steeply regarded him. Neither was it sad nor inquisitive nor quite ruminative. There were small flickers and shadows of movements around the flickers of the celebratory fire down far away on the floor of the desert. Marathe could not determine whether Steeply was truly revealing emotions about himself. The flickers continually went out. Small shreds of young laughter drifted up to them in the vacuous silence. There were also sometimes rustles in the hillside’s scrub, of gravel or small living nightly things. Or whether perhaps Steeply was trying to give him something, let him know something and determine whether it went back to M. Fortier. Marathe’s arrangement with the Office of Unspecified Services seemed most often to consist in submitting himself to numerous tests and games of truth and betrayal. He felt often with U.S.O.U.S. like a caged rodent being regarded blandly by bland men in white coats.

Marathe shrugged. ‘U.S.A. has previously been hated. Richly so. Shining Path and your Maxwell House company. The trans-Latin cocaine cartels and the poor late M. Kemp with his exploding home. Did not both Iraq and Iran call U.S.A. the Very Large Satan? As you hatefully say they have Heads of Rags?’

Steeply exhumed smoke quickly to reply. ‘Yes but there were still contexts and ends. Revenue, religion, spheres of influence, Israel, petroleum, neo-Marxism, post-Cold-War power-jockeying. There was always a third thing.’

‘Some desire.’

‘Some piece of business. Some third thing between them and us — it wasn’t just us — it was something they wanted from us, or wanted us out of.’ Steeply seemed earnestly to say it. The third thing, the goal or desire — it mediated the ill will, abstracted it somehow.’

‘For this is how one who is sane proceeds,’ Marathe said, paying great concentration to aligning the blanket’s hems against his chest and wheels; ‘some desire of self, and efforts expending to meet that desire.’

‘Not just wanting negatives,’ Steeply said, shaking the lurid head. ‘Not just wanting some other’s harm for no purpose.’

Marathe again found himself pretending to sniff with the congestion. ‘And a U.S.A. purpose, desires?’ This he asked quietly; its sound was strange against stone.

Steeply was pinching yet a next particle of tobacco from his lipstick. He said This you can’t generalize on with most of us, since our whole system is founded on your individual’s freedom to pursue his own individual desires.’ His mascara had now cooled in the formations of its past running. Marathe kept silent and fussed with the blanket as Steeply sometimes regarded him. A whole minute passed this way. Finally Steeply said:

‘Me, for me personally, as an American, Rémy, if you’re really serious, I think it’s probably your standard old basic American dreams and ideals. Freedom from tyranny, from excessive want, fear, censorship of speech and thought.’ He was looking with seriousness, even in this wig. ‘The old ones, tested by time. Relative plenty, meaningful work, adequate leisure-time. The ones you might call corny.’ His smiling revealed to Marathe lipstick upon one incisor. ‘We want choice. A sense of efficaciousness and choice. To be loved by someone. To freely love who you happen to love. To be loved irregardless of whether you can tell them Classified stuff about your job. To have them just trust you and trust that you know what you’re doing. To feel valued. Not to be agendalessly despised. To have good neighborly relations. Cheap and abundant energy. Pride in your work and family, and home.’ The lipstick had been smeared onto the tooth when the finger had removed the grain of tobacco. He was ‘faisait monter la pression’:^[170] ‘The little things. Access to transport. Good digestion. Work-saving appliances. A wife who doesn’t mistake your job’s requirements for your own fetishes. Reliable waste-removal and disposal. Sunsets over the Pacific. Shoes that don’t cut off circulation. Frozen yogurt. A tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing.’

Marathe’s face, it showed nothing. ‘The loyalty of a domestic pet.’

Steeply pointed the cigarette. ‘There you go, friend.’

‘High-quality entertainment. High value for the dollar of leisure and spectation.’

Steeply laughed agreeably, exhaling a shaped sausage of smoke. In response to this, Marathe smiled. There was some silence for thinking until Marathe finally said, looking up and off to think: ‘This U.S.A. type of person and desires appears to me like almost the classic, how do you say, uti-litaire.’

‘A French appliance?’

‘Comme on dit,’ Marathe said, ‘utilitarienne. Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: result: what is good. This is the U.S.A. of you.’

Steeply pronounced the U.S.A. English word for Marathe, then. Then a sustained pause. Steeply rose and fell upon his toes. A bonfire of young persons was burning some k. down away on the desert floor, the flames burning in a seeming ring instead of a sphere.

Marathe said ‘But yes, but precisely whose pleasure and whose pain, in this personality type’s equation of what is good?’

When Steeply removed a particle of the cigarette from the lip he would then roll it absently between his first finger and thumb; this did not appear womanly. ‘Come again?’

Mara the scratched inside the wind breaker. ‘I am wondering, me, in the equations of this U.S.A. type: the best good is each individual U.S.A. person’s maximum pleasure? or it is the maximum pleasure for all the people?’

Steeply nodded in a way that indicated willing patience with someone whose wits were not too speedy. ‘But there you go, but this question itself shows how our different types of national character part ways from each other, Rémy. The American genius, our good fortune is that someplace along the line back there in American history them realizing that each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results together in maximizing everyone’s good.’

‘Ah.’

‘We learn this as early as grade school, as kids.’

‘I am seeing.’

‘This is what lets us steer free of oppression and tyranny. Even your Greekly democratic howling-mob-type tyranny. The United States: a community of sacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice. The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. Defended with teeth and bared claws all through our history.’

‘Bien sûr.’

Steeply for the first time seemed to be feeling with his hand his wig’s disorder. He was attempting to straightly reposition it without removing the wig. Marathe tried not to envision what his B.S.S. had done to the natural brown male hair of Steeply, to accommodate the complex wig. Steeply said: ‘It might be hard for you to quite understand what’s so precious about this for us, from across this chasm of different values that separates our peoples.’

Marathe flexed his hand. ‘Perhaps because it is so general and abstracted. In practice, however, you may force me to understand.’

‘We don’t force. It’s exactly about not-forcing, our history’s genius. You are entitled to your values of maximum pleasure. So long as you don’t fuck with mine. Are you seeing?’

‘Perhaps help me see by practical evidence. An instance. Suppose you are able at one moment to increase your own pleasure, but the cost of this is the displeasuring pain of another? Another sacred individual’s displeasing pain.’

Steeply said: ‘Well now this is precisely what gives us the fantods about the A.F.R., why it’s so important I think to remember how we come from different cultures and value systems, Rémy. Because in our U.S. value system, anybody who derives an increase in pleasure from somebody else’s pain is a deviant, a sadistic sicko, and is thereby excluded from the community of everybody’s right to pursue their own best pleasure-to-pain ratio.

Sickos deserve compassion and the best treatment feasible. But they’re not part of the big picture.’

Marathe willed himself not to rise on his stumps again. ‘No, but not another’s pain as a pleasurable end in itself. I did not mean where my pleasure is in your pain. How to say better. Imagine there arises a situation in which your deprivation or pain is merely the consequence, the price, of my own pleasure.’

‘You mean you’re talking a tough-choices, limited-resources-type situation.’

‘But in the simplest of examples. The most child-like case.’ Marathe’s eyes momentarily gleamed with enthusiasm. ‘Suppose that you and I, we both wish to enjoy a hot bowl of the Habitant soupe aux pois.’

Steeply said ‘You mean…’

‘But yes. French-Canadian-type pea soup. Produit du Montreal. Saveur Maison. Prête a Servir.’¹⁷¹[171]

‘What is it with you people and this stuff?’

‘In this case imagining both you and I are in the worst way craving for Habitant Soup. But there is one can only, of the small and well-known Single-Serving Size.’

‘An American invention, by the way, the 3-S, let’s insert.’

The part of Marathe’s mind that hovered above and watched coldly, it could not know whether Steeply was being deliberately parodically dense and annoying, to arouse Marathe to some revealing passion. Marathe made his rotary gesture of impatience, slowly. ‘But OK,’ he said neutrally. ‘It is simple here. We both want the soup. So me, my pleasure from eating the Habitant soupe aux pois has the price of your pain at not eating soup when you badly crave it.’ Marathe was patting his pockets for something. ‘And the reverse, if you are who eats this serving. By the U.S.A. genius of for each “pursuivre le bonheur,”^[172]then, who can decide who may receive this soup?’

Steeply stood with weight on one leg. ‘Example’s a bit oversimplified. We bid on the soup, maybe. We negotiate. Maybe we divide the soup.’

‘No, for the ingenious Single-Serving Size of serving is notoriously for only one, and we are both large and vigorous U.S.A. individuals who have spent the afternoon watching huge men in pads and helmets hurl themselves at one another in the High Definition of InterLace, and we are both ravenous for the satiation of a complete hot bowl’s serving. Half the bowl would only torment this craving I have.’

The fast shadow of pain across the face of Steeply showed Marathe’s choice of example was witty: the divorced U.S.A. man has much experience with the small size of Single-Serving products. Marathe said:

‘OK. OK, yes, why should I, as the sacred individual, give you half of my soup? My own pleasure over torment is what is good, for I am a loyal U.S.A., a genius of this individual desire.’

The bonfire slowly was filling out. Another cross of colored lights circled the airport area of Tucson. Steeply’s movements of smoothing the wig and twisting fingers through the snarls of hair became perhaps more abrupt and frustrated. Steeply said ‘Well whose soup is it legally? Who actually bought the soup?’

Marathe shrugged. ‘Not relevant for my question. Suppose a third party, now unfortunately deceased. He appears at our flat with a can oísoupe aux pots to eat while watching recorded U.S.A. sporting and suddenly is clutching his heart and falls to the carpeting deceased, holding the soup we are now both so wishing.’

‘Then we bid on the soup. Whoever’s got the most desire for the soup and is willing to fork over the higher price buys out the other’s half, then the other just jogs on down — jogs or rolls on down to Safeway and buys himself some more soup. Whoever’s willing to put his money where his hunger is gets the dead guy’s soup.’

Marathe shook his head without any heat. ‘The Safeway store and bidding, these are also not relevant to my question I hope the example of pea soup to raise. Which perhaps this is a dull-witted question.’

Steeply was at the wig with both hands, for repair. Former perspiration had mashed its form inward on one side, as well as small clots and small burrs from the falls of his descent to the outcropping. Presumably there was no comb or brushes in his small evening’s-wear purse. The rear of his dress was dirty. The straps of his prostheses’ brassiere dug cruelly into the meat of his back and shoulders. Again there was for Marathe the picture of something soft being slowly throttled.

Steeply was responding ‘No, I know what you want to raise all right. You want to talk politics. Scarcity and allocating and tough choices. All right. Politics we can understand. All right. Politics we can discuss. I bet I know where you’re — you want to raise the question of what prevents 310 million individual American happiness-pursuers from all going around bonking each other over the head and taking each other’s soup. A state of nature. My own pleasure and to hell with all the rest.’

Marathe had his handkerchief out. ‘What does this wish to mean, this bonking?’

‘Because this simplistic example shows just how far apart across the chasm our people’s values are, friend.’ Steeply was saying this. ‘Because a certain basic amount of respect for the wishes of other people is required, is in my interest, in order to preserve a community where my own wishes and interests are respected. OK? My total and overall happiness is maximized by respecting your individual sanctity and not simply kicking you in the knee and running off with the soup.’ Steeply watched Marathe blow one nostril into the handkerchief. Marathe was one of the rare types who did not examine the hankie after he blew. Steeply said:

‘And but then I can anticipate somebody on your side of the chasm retorting with something like, quote, Yes my very good ami, but what if your rival for the pleasurable soup is some individual outside your community, for example, you’ll say, let’s just make the example that it a hapless Canadian, foreign, “MM autre,” separated from me by a chasm of history and language and value and deep respect for individual freedom — then in this wholly random instance there would be no community-minded constraints on my natural impulse to bonk your head and commandeer the desired soup, since the poor Canadian is outside the equation of “pursuivre le bonheur” of each individual, since he is not a part of the community whose environment of mutual respect I depend on for pursuing my interest of maximal pleasure-to-pain.’

Marathe, during this time, was smiling up and to the left, north, rolling his head like a blind person. His favorite personal place of off-duty in the U.S.A.’s city Boston was in the Public Garden of summer, a broad and treeless declivity leading down to the mare des canards, the duck pond, a grassy wedge facing south and west so that the grass of the slope turns pale green and then gold as the sun circles over the head, the pond’s water cool and muddy green and overhung with impressionist willows, persons beneath the willows, also pigeons, and ducks with tight emerald heads gliding in circles, their eyes round stones, moving as if without effort, gliding upon the water as if legless below. Like films’ idylls in cities the moment before the nuclear blast, in old films of U.S.A. death and horror. He was missing this time in U.S.A. Boston MA of refilling the pond for the ducks’ return, the willows greening, the winelight of a northern sunset curving gently in to land without explosion. Children flew taut kites and adults lay supine on the slope absorbing the suntan, eyes closed as if in concentration. He was giving out a small and desolate smile, as of fatigue. His wrist’s watch was unilluminated. Steeply threw a butt without turning away from Marathe to watch it fall.

‘And you’ll accuse me of you’ll say I won’t only poke him in the eye and commandeer the whole serving of soup for myself,’ Steeply said, ‘but will, after eating it, I’ll give him the dirty bowl and spoon and maybe even the no-deposit Habitant can to have to deal with, saddle him with my greed’s waste, all under some sham-arrangement of quote Interdependence that’s really just a crude nationalist scheme to indulge my own U.S. individual pleasure-lust without the complications or annoyance of considering some neighbor’s own desires and interests.’

Marathe said ‘You will notice that I do not with sarcasm say “And herrrrrrrrrre we go off together once more,” which you enjoy saying.’

Steeply’s use of the body to shelter the lighting match for his smoking was not feminine, either. His parody of Marathe’s accent sounded guttural and U.S.A.-Cajun with the cigarette in the mouth. He looked up past the flame. ‘But no? Am I off-base?’

Marathe had an almost Buddhist way of studying the blanket on his lap.

For some seconds he behaved as if almost asleep, nodding very smally with the rise and fall of his lungs. The ponderous rectangles of moving light within Tucson’s nightly spread were ‘Barges of Land’ ministering to nests of dump-sters in the deep part of night. Part of Marathe always felt almost a desire to shoot persons who anticipated his responses and inserted words and said they were from Marathe, not letting him speak. Marathe suspected Steeply of knowing this, sensing this in Marathe. All two of Marathe’s older brothers from childhood had engaged in this, arguing every side and silencing Rémy by inserting his words. Both had kissed trains head-on before reaching marriageable age;^[173] Marathe had been part of the audience for the death of the better one. Some of the Barges of Land’s waste would be vectored into the Sonora region of Mexico, but much would be shipped north for displacement-launch into the Convexity. Steeply was regarding him.

‘No, Rémy? Am I off-base in terms of what you’d say?’

The smile around Marathe’s mouth cost him all his training in restraint. ‘The cans containing Habitant, they say boldly “Veuillez Recycler Ce Conte-nant.” You are not false, maybe. But I think I am asking less for nations’ arguing and more for the example of you and me only, we two, if we pretend we are both of your U.S.A. type, each separate, both sacred, both desiring soupe aux pots. I am asking how is community and your respect part of my happiness in this moment, with the soup, if I am a U.S.A. person?’

Steeply worked a finger under one strap of the brassiere to relieve the throttling pressure. T don’t get you.’

‘Well. We both crave badly the entire recyclable Single-Serving can of this Habitant.’ Marathe sniffed. Tn my mind I know it is true that I must not simply make a bonking of your head and take away the soup, because my overall happiness of pleasure of the long term needs a community of “rien de bonk.”^[174]But this is the long term, Steeply. This is down the road of my happiness, this respecting of you. How do I calculate this distant road of long term into my action of this moment, now, with our dead comrade clutching the soup and both of us with spittle on our chins as we regard the soup? My question is trying to say: if the most pleasure right now, en ce moment, is in the whole serving of Habitant, how is my self able to put aside this moment’s desire to make bonk on you and take this soup? How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my road?’

Tn other words delayed gratification.’

‘Good. This is well. Delayed gratification. How is my U.S.A. type able in my mind to calculate my long-term overall pleasure, then decide to sacrifice this intense soup-craving of this moment to the long term and overall?’

Steeply sent out two hard tusks of smoke from the nostrils of his nose. His expression was one of patience together with polite impatience. T think it’s called simply being a mature and adult American instead of a childish and immature American. A term we might use might be “enlightened self-interest.”

‘D’éclaisant.’

Steeply, he did not smile back. ‘Enlightened. For example your example from before. The little kid who’ll eat candy all day because it’s what tastes best at each individual moment.’

‘Even if he knows inside his mind that it will hurt his stomach and rot his little fangs.’

‘Teeth,’ Steeply corrected. ‘But see that here it can’t be a Fascist matter of screaming at the kid or giving him electric shocks each time he overindulges in candy. You can’t induce a moral sensibility the same way you’d train a rat. The kid has to learn by his own experience how to learn to balance the short- and long-term pursuit of what he wants.’

‘He must be freely enlightened to self.’

‘This is the crux of the educational system you find so appalling. Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free. To teach how to make knowledgeable choices about pleasure and delay and the kid’s overall down-the-road maximal interests.’

Marathe farted mildly into his cushion, nodding as if with thought.

‘And I know what you’ll say,’ Steeply said, ‘and no, the system isn’t perfect. There is greed, there is crime, there are drugs and cruelty and ruin and infidelity and divorce and suicide. Murder.’

‘To bonk the head.’

Steeply again dug at this strap. He would snap open the purse and then pause to move the brassiere’s tight strap and then dig into the purse, which sounded femininely full and cluttered. He said ‘But this is just the price. This is the price of the free pursuit. Not everybody learns it in childhood, how to balance his interests.’

Marathe tried to envision thin men with horn-rim spectacles and natural-shoulder sportcoats or white coats of the laboratory, carefully packing with clutter the purse of a field-operative to create the female effect. Now Steeply had his pack of Flanderfumes cigarettes and his finger of pinkie in the pack’s hole, evidently trying to gauge how many were left. Venus was low in the northeast rim. When Marathe’s wife was born as an infant without a skull, there had been at first suspicion that the cause was that her parents smoked cigarettes as a habit. The light of the stars and moon had become sullen. The moon had not yet set. It seemed as if sometimes the bonfire of youthful mafficking was there and then when the eyes were averted in the next moment it was not there. Time was passing in a silence. Steeply was using a nail to extract slowly one of the cigarettes. Marathe, as a small child and with legs, had always disliked persons who made comments about how much others smoked. Steeply now had learned here just how he must stand to keep the match alive. Some wind had died down, but there were scattered chill gusts that it seemed came from nowhere. Marathe sniffed so deeply that it became a sigh. The struck match sounded loud; there was no echo.

Marathe sniffed again and said:

‘But of these types of your persons — the different types, the mature who see down the road, the puerile type that eats the candy and soup in the moment only. Entre nous, here on this shelf, Hugh Steeply: which do you think describes the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N. and the Great Convexity, this U.S.A. you feel pain that others might wish to harm?’ Hands which shake out matches act always as if they are burned, this motion of snapping. Marathe sniffed. ‘Are you understanding? I am asking between only us. How could it be that A.F.R. malice could hurt all of the U.S.A. culture by making available something as momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment? You know there can be no forcing to watch a thing. If we disseminate the samizdat, the choice will be free, no? Free from force, no? Yes? Freely chosen?’

M. Hugh Steeply of B.S.S. was standing then with his weight on one hip and looked his most female when he smoked, with his elbow in his arm and the hand to his mouth and the back of this hand to Marathe, a type of fussy ennui that reminded Marathe of women in hats and padded shoulders in black-and-white films, smoking. Marathe said:

‘You believe we are underestimating to see all you as selfish, decadent. But the question has been raised: are we cells of Canada alone in this view? Aren’t you afraid, you of your government and gendarmes? If not, your B.S.S., why work so hard to prevent dissemination? Why make a simple Entertainment, no matter how seducing its pleasures, a samizdat and forbidden in the first place, if you do not fear so many U.S.A.s cannot make the enlightened choices?’

This now was the closest large Steeply had come, to stand over Marathe to look down, looming. The rising astral body Venus lit his left side of the face to the color of pallid cheese. ‘Get real. The Entertainment isn’t candy or beer. Look at Boston just now. You can’t compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases of sugar and soup.’

Marathe smiled bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of this round and hairless U.S.A. face. ‘Perhaps the facts are true, after the first watching: that then there seems to be no choice. But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still a choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?’

During that last pre-Subsidized year, after each tournament’s perfunctory final, at the little post-final award-presentations and dance, Eric Clipperton would attend unarmed and eat maybe a little shaved turkey from the buffet and mutter out of the side of his slot-like mouth to Mario Incandenza, and would stand there expressionless and receive his outsized first-place trophy amid witheringly slight and scattered applause, and would melt into the crowd soon after and dematerialize back to wherever he lived and trained and target-practiced. Clipperton by this time must have had a whole mantel plus bookcase’s worth of tall U.S.T.A. trophies, each U.S.T.A. trophy a marbled plastic base with a tall metal boy on top arched in mid-serve, looking rather like a wedding-cake groom with a very good outside slider. Clipper-ton must have been just broke out in brass and plastic, but he had no official ranking whatsoever: since his Clock 9 mm. and public intentions were instantly legendary, he was regarded by the U.S.T.A. as never having had a legitimate victory, or even a legit match, in sanctioned play. People on the jr. tour sometimes asked tiny Mario if that’s why Eric Clipperton always seemed so terrifically glum and withdrawn and made such a big deal out of materializing and dematerializing at tournaments, that the very tactic that let him win in the first place kept the wins, and in a way Clipperton himself, from being treated as real.

All this until the erection of O.N.A.N. and the inception, in Clipperton’s eighteenth summer, of Subsidized Time, the adverted Year of the Whopper, when the U.S.T.A. became the O.N.A.N.T.A, and some Mexican systems analyst — who barely spoke English and had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data — this guy stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and ranking center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn’t know enough not to treat Clipperton’s string of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanctioned and real. And when the first biweekly issue of the trilingual North American Junior Tennis that’s replaced American Junior Tennis comes out, there’s one E. R. Clipperton, Home Town ‘Ind.,’ ranked #1 in Boys’ Continental 18-and-Unders; and competitive eyebrows ascend at all latitudes; and but everyone at E.T.A., from Schtitt on down, is highly amused, and some of them wonder whether maybe now Eric Clipperton will put down his psychic cuirass and take his unarmed competitive chances with the rest of them, now that he’s got what he’s surely been burning over and holding himself hostage for all along, a real and sanctioned #1; and the Continental Jr. Clay-Courts are coming up the following week, in Indianapolis IN, and little Michael Pemulis of Allston takes his PowerBook and odds-software and makes a killing on vig in the frenzy of locker-room wagering over whether Clipperton’ll even bother to materialize at Indy now that he’s extorted himself to the sanctioned top he must have craved so terribly, or whether he’ll retire from the tour now and lie around masturbating over the Clock in one hand and the latest issue of NAJT in the other.^[175] And so everyone’s taken aback when Eric Clipperton of all people suddenly appears at the E.T.A. front gate’s portcullis on a rainy warm late A.M. two days before the Clays, wearing a flap-frayed trench-type coat and toe-abraded sneakers and a five-day growth of armpitty adolescent beard, but without any sticks or anything in the way of competitive gear, not even his Clock 17’s custom-made wooden case, and he makes the cold-eyed part-time portcullis attendant from the halfway place down the hill just about lean on the intercom-buzzer, pleading for entry and counsel — he’s in a terrible way, is the portcullis attendant’s intercom diagnosis — and rules about nonenrolled jr. players being on academies’ grounds are strict and complex, and but little Mario Incandenza sways down the steep path to the portcullis in the warm rain and interfaces with Clipperton through the bars and has the attendant hold the intercom-button down for him and personally requests that Clipperton be admitted under a special nonplay codicil to the regulations, saying the kid is truly in desperate psychic straits, Mario speaking first to Lateral Alice Moore and then to this prorector Cantrell and then to the Headmaster himself as Clipperton stares wordlessly up at the little wrought-iron racquet-heads that serve as spikes at the top of the portcullis and fencing around E.T.A., his expression so blackly haunted that even the hard-boiled attendant told some of the people back at the halfway place later that the spectral trench-coated figure had given him sobriety’s worst fantods, so far; and J. O. Incandenza finally lets Clipperton in over CantrelPs and then Schtitt’s vehement objections when it’s established that Clipperton wants only a few private minutes to obtain the counsel of Incandenza Sr. himself — of whom I think we can presume Mario’s spoken glowingly to Clipperton — and Incandenza, while not quite strictly sober, is lucid, and has a very low melting-point of compassion for traumas connected with early success; and so up goes the portcullis, and the Clipperton and the two Incandenzas go at high noon up to an unused top-floor room in Subdorm C of East House, the structure nearest the front gate, for some sort of psycho-existential CPR-session or something — Mario has never spoken of what he got to sit in on, not even at night to Hal when Hal’s trying to go to sleep. But it’s a matter of record that at some point first E.T.A. counselor Dolores Rusk was beeped by Himself at her Winchester home and then her beep was canceled and Lateral Alice Moore was beeped and asked with due speed to get Lyle up from the weight room/sauna and over to East House ASAP, and that at some point while Lyle was delotusing from the dispenser and making his way with sideways Lateral Alice to this emergency-type huddle, at some point in this interval — in front of Dr. James O. Incandenza and a Mario whose tiny borrowed head-clamped Bolex H128 Incandenza required Clipperton to consent to having digitally record the whole crisis-conversation, to protect E.T.A. from the O.N.A.N.T.A.’s Kafkaesque rules on unregistered recipients of any sort of counsel at U.S. academies — at some point, w/ Lyle in transit, Clipperton pulls out of various pockets in his wet complicated coat an elaborately altered copy of NAJT’s biweekly ranking report, a sepia’d snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern couple’s wedding, and the hideous blunt-barreled Clock 179 mm. semiautomatic, which even as both Incandenzas reach for the sky Clipperton places to his right — not left — temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some; and there’s just an ungodly subsequent mess in there, and the Incandenzas respectively stagger and totter from the room all green-gilled and red-mist-stained, and — because reports of Lyle’s appearance outside the weight room upright and walking across the grounds have spread and caused enormous excitement and student-snapshots — it’s because it was just as Lyle and L. A. Moore hit the upstairs hallway that they reeled out of the room in a miasma of cordite and ghastly mist that they’re preserved in various snapshots as resembling miners of some sort of really grisly coal.

People in the competitive jr. tennis community somehow regarded it as healthy that Mario Incandenza’s perfectly even smile never faltered even through tears at Clipperton’s funeral. The funeral was poorly attended. It turned out Eric Clipperton had hailed from Crawfordsville, Indiana, where his Ma was a late-stage Valium addict and his ex-soybean-farmer Pa, blinded in the infamous hailstorms of B.S. ‘94, now spent all day every day playing with one of those little wooden paddles with a red rubber ball attached by elastic string, paddle-ball, with an understandable lack of success; and the tranquilized and sightless Clippertons had had no clue about where Eric had even disappeared off to most weekends, and bought his explanation that all the tall trophies came from an after-school job as a freelance tennis-trophy designer, the parents apparently being not exactly the two brightest bulbs in the great U.S. parental light-show. They held the interment under a threat of rain in Veedersburg IN, where there’s a budget cemetery, and Himself skipped Indianapolis and took Mario to the first of his life’s two funerals so far; and it was probably moving that Incandenza acceded to Mario’s request that nothing get filmed or documented, at the funeral, for Himself’s jr.-tennis documentary. Mario probably told Lyle all about everything, back down in the weight room, but he sure never told Hal or the Moms; and Himself was already in and out of rehabs and hardly a credible source on much of anything by this point. But Incandenza did let Mario insist that no one else get to clean up the scene in Subdorm C after Enfield’s Finest had come and peered around and drawn a chalk ectoplasm around Clipperton’s sprawled form and written things down in little spiral notebooks which they kept checking against one another with maddening care, and then EMTs had zipped Clipperton up in a huge rubber bag and taken him down and out on a wheeled stretcher with retractable legs they had to retract on all the stairs. Lyle was long gone by this time. It took the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room with his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the 18’s girls in the rooms on either side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and again; and the finally spotless room in question had been locked ever since, with its tasteless sign — except G. Schtitt holds a special key, and when an E.T.A. jr. whinges too loudly about some tennis-connected vicissitude or hardship or something, he’s invited to go chill for a bit in the Clip-perton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with.

It was Ennet House’s Assistant Director Annie P. who coined the phrase that Don Gately ‘sunlights on the side.’ Five A.M.S a week, whether he’s just getting off all-night Staff duty or not, he has to be on the Inbound Green Line by 0430h. to then catch two more trains to his other job at the Shat-tuck Shelter For Homeless Males down in bombed-out Jamaica Plain. Gately has become, in sobriety, a janitor. He mops down broad cot-strewn floors with anti-fungal delousing solvents. Likewise the walls. He scrubs toilets. The relative cleanliness of the Shattuck’s toilets might seem surprising until you head into the shower area, with your equipment and face-mask. Half the guys in the Shattuck are always incontinent. There’s human waste in the showers on a daily fucking basis. Stavros lets him attach an industrial hose to a nozzle and spray the worst of the shit away from a distance before Gately has to go in there with his mop and brushes and solvents, and his mask.

Cleaning the Shattuck only takes three hours, since he and his partner got the routine down tight. Gately’s partner is also the guy that owns the company that contracts with the Commonwealth for the Shattuck’s maintenance, a guy like forty or fifty, Stavros Lobokulas, a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection of women’s-shoes catalogues he keeps piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4x4.

So at like 0800 usually they’re done and by vendor’s contract still get to bill for eight hours (Stavros L. only pays Gately for three, but it’s sub-table), and Gately heads back to Government Center to take the westbound Greenie back up Commonwealth to Ennet House to put on his black eye-patch mask thing and sleep till!2OOh. and the afternoon shift. Stavros L. himself gets a couple hours off to footwear-browse (Gately very much needs to assume that’s all he does with the catalogues, is browse), then has to head over to Pine Street Inn, the biggest and foulest homeless shelter in all of Boston, where Stavros and two other broke and desperate yutzes from another of the halfway houses Stavros cruises for cheap labor will spend four hours cleaning and then bill the state for six.

The inmates at the Shattuck suffer from every kind of physical and psychological and addictive and spiritual difficulty you could ever think of, specializing in ones that are repulsive. There are colostomy bags and projectile vomiting and cirrhotic discharges and missing limbs and misshapen heads and incontinence and Kaposi’s Sarcoma and suppurating sores and all different levels of enfeeblement and impulse-control-deficit and damage. Schizophrenia is like the norm. Guys in D.T.s treat the heaters like TVs and leave broad spatter-paintings of coffee over the walls of the barrackses. There are industrial buckets for A.M. puking that they seem to treat like golfers treat the pin on like a golf course, aiming in its vague direction from a distance. There’s one sort of blocked off and more hidden corner, over near the bank of little lockers for valuables, that’s always got sperm moving slowly down the walls. And way too much sperm for just one or two guys, either. The whole place smells like death no matter what the fuck you do. Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch. He screens input with a fucking vengeance the whole time. The barrackses’s cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable. The state employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk and are all around Gately’s size and build, and he’s been approached to maybe work there himself, nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks Anyway, and always screws right out of there at O8Olh. and rides the Greenie back up the hill with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged.

Janitoring the Shattuck for Stavros Lobokulas was the menial job Gately had landed with only three days to go on his month’s deadline to find some honest job, as a resident, and he’s kept it ever since.

The males in the Shattuck are supposed to be up and out by O5OOh. regardless of weather or D.T.s, to let Gately and Stavros L. clean. But some never screw out of there on time — and these’re always the worst guys, the ones you don’t want anyplace near you, these ones that won’t leave. They’ll clump behind Gately and watch him jet feces off the shower-tiling, treating it like a sport and yelling encouragement and advice. They’ll cringe and ass-kiss when the supervisor heaves himself on by to tell them to get out and then when he leaves not get out. A couple have those little shaved patches on their arms. They’ll lie in the cots and hallucinate and thrash and scream in the cots and knock army blankets off onto the floors Gately’s trying to mop. They’ll skulk back over to the little dark spermy corner the minute Gately’s got done scrubbing the night’s sperm off and has backed away and started again to inhale.

Maybe the worst is that there’s almost always one or two guys in the Shattuck who Gately knows personally, from his days of addiction and B&E, from before he got to the no-choice point and surrendered his will to staying straight at any cost. These guys are always 25–30 and look 45–60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with. Gately’ll slip them a finski or a pack of Kools and maybe sometimes try and talk a little AA to them, if they seem like maybe they’re ready to give up. With everybody else in the Shattuck Gately adopts this expression where he lets them know he’s ignoring them totally as long as they keep their distance, but it’s a look that says Street and Jail and not to fuck with him. If they get in his way, Gately will stare hard at a point just behind their heads until they move off. The protective face-mask helps.

Stavros Lobokulas’s great ambition — which he goes on about regularly to Gately when they’re cleaning the same barracks — Stavros’s dream is to utilize his unique combination of entrepreneurial drives and janitorial savvy and flairs for creative billing and finding desperate recovering halfway-house guys who’ll scrub shit for next to nothing, to pile up enough $ to open a women’s shoe store in some mobilely upward part of Boston where the women are healthy and upscale and have good feet and can afford to take care of their feet. Gately spends a lot of the time around Stavros nodding and not saying really much of anything. Because what is there to really say about ambitious career-dreams involving feet? But Gately’ll be paying court-scheduled restitution well into his thirties if he stays straight, and needs the work. Foot-thing or no foot-thing. Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, but Gately has his private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved. E.g. like Stavros gets easily aggravated at the Shattuck guys that can’t get up and out like they’re supposed to and clear out, and almost daily he’ll make a production of throwing down his mop in the middle of the floor and throwing his head back to scream: “Why don’t you sorry motherfucks just go home?” which so far for over thirteen months he hasn’t quit finding hilarious, his own witticism, Stavros.

But the whole Clipperton saga highlights the way there are certain very talented jr. players who just cannot keep the lip stiff and fires stoked if they ever finally do achieve a top ranking or win some important event. Next to Clipperton, the most historically ghastly instance of this syndrome involved a kid from Fresno, in Central CA, also an unaffiliated kid (his dad, an architect or draftsman or something, functioned as his coach; his dad had played for UC-Davís or — Irvine or one of those; all the E.T.A. staff really emphasize is that again here was a kid w/o academy-support and — perspective), who, after upsetting two top seeds and winning the Pacific Coast Hardcourt Boys 18’s and getting toasted wildly at the post-tourney ceremony and ball and carried off on the shoulders of his dad and Fresno teammates, came home late that night and drank a big glass of Nestlé’s Quik laced with the sodium cyanide his Dad kept around for ink for drafting, drinks cyanitic Quik in his family’s home’s redecorated kitchen, and keels over dead, blue-faced and still with a ghastly mouthful of lethal Quik, and apparently his dad hears the thump of the kid keeling over and rushes into the kitchen in his bathrobe and leather slippers and tries to give the kid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and but gets the odd bit of NaCN-laced Quik in his own mouth, from the kid, and also keels over and turns bright blue, and dies, and then the mom rushes in in a mud-mask and fluffy slippers and sees them both lying there bright blue and stiffening, and she tries giving the architect dad mouth-to-mouth and is of course in short order also lying there keeled over and blue, wherever she’s not mud-colored, from the mask, and but anyway dead as a rivet. And since the family has six more various-aged kids who as the night wears on come in from dates or patter down the stairs in little pajamas with adorable little pajama-feet attached to them, drawn by the noise of all the cumulative keeling over, plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound, and but since all six kids had gone through a four-hour Rotary-sponsored CPR course at Fresno’s YMCA, by the end of the night the whole family’s lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouths; and in sum this whole instance of unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma is unbelievably gruesome and sad, and it’s one historical reason why all accredited tennis academies have to have a Ph.D.-level counselor on full-time staff, to screen student athletes for their possibly lethal reactions to ever actually reaching the level they’ve been pointed at for years. E.T.A.’s staff counselor is the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Dolores Rusk, M.S., Ph.D., and she’s regarded by the kids as whatever’s just slightly worse than useless. You go in there with an Issue and all she’ll do is make a cage of her hands and look abstractly over the cage at you and take the last dependent clause of whatever you say and repeat it back to you with an interrogative lilt — ‘Possible homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?’ ‘Whole sense of yourself as a purposive male athlete messed with?’ ‘Uncontrolled boner during semis at Cleveland?’ ‘Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?’ ‘Having trouble keeping from twisting my twittery head off like a game-hen’s?’ — all with an expression she probably thinks looks blandly deep but which really looks exactly the way a girl’s face looks when she’s dancing with you but would really rather be dancing with just about anyone else in the room. Only the very newest E.T.A. players ever go to Rusk, and then not for long, and she spends her massive blocks of free time in her Comm.-Ad. office doing involved acrostics and working on some sort of pop-psych manuscript the first four pages of which Axford and Shaw dick-ied her lock and had a look at and counted 29 appearances of the prefix self-. Lyle, a dewimpled Carmelite who works the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario Incandenza, and many times Avril herself take up most of the psychic slack, for practical purposes, among E.T.A.s in the know.

It’s possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem to be just grim machines a la John Wayne. Wayne’s sitting low on his spine in the dining hall with the other Canadian kids, watching the screen and squeezing a ball without any readable expression. Hal’s eyes are fevered and rolling around in his head. And actually by this time a lot of the eyes in the I.-Day audience have lost a bit of that festive sparkle. Though there’s a certain chortle-momentum left over from the film’s self-felonious Gentle/Clipperton comparisons, the Rodney-Tine-Luria-P.-love-rumor-and-Tine-as-Benedict-Arnold thing seems brow-clutchingly slow and digressive.^[176] Plus there’s some retroactive puzzlement, because the advent of Subsidized Time is historically known to have been a revenue-response to the heady costs of the U.S.’s Reconfigurative giveaway, which means it must have come after formal Interdependence, and indeed in the film it does come after, but then the chronology of some of the end makes it seem like Tine sold Johnny Gentle on his whole Sino-temporal-endorsement revenue scheme sometime in Orin Incandenza’s first major-sport year at Boston U., which ended in the Year of the Whopper, pretty obviously a Subsidized year. By this time the E.T.A.s are eating more slowly, playing in that idle post-prandial way with the orts on their plates, and people’s hats are making some people’s heads itch, and plus everybody’s sugar-crashing a bit; and one of the really small E.T.A. kids crawling around with a bottle of adhesive under the tables has whacked his head on the sharp edge of an institutional chair and is in Avril I.’s lap crying with a desolate late-day hysteria that makes everybody feel jagged.

GENTLE AT LARGE! — Superheader; TOURS NEW ‘NEW-NEW’ ENGLAND BORDER AMID TIGHT SECURITY — Header; WHACKS CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES AGAINST MASSIVE LUCITE WALLS SOUTH OF WHAT USED TO BE SYRACUSE, CONCORD NH, SALEM MA. — 10-point Subheader;

GENTLE MORE OR LESS AT LARGE: WATCHES FROM OXYGENATED PORTABUBBLE AS CLEMSON DOWNS BOSTON U IN LAS VEGAS’S FORSYTHIA BOWL — Header from That Guy Who’s Now Reduced to Laying out Headlines for the Rantoul IL Eagle;

CRANIALLY CHALLENGED, ACROMEGALIC INFANTS LOST IN EXPERIALIST SHUFFLE? — Editorial Header in Ithaca NY’s Daily

Odyssean;

GENTLE CABINET TO DRAFT BUDGET OVERHAUL IN LIGHT OF WALL STREET ANGST OVER COSTS OF TERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATION’— Header; ADMINISTRATION HEADS PUT TOGETHER ON MISSILE INVERSION EXPENDITURES, RELOCATION COSTS, LOSS OF REVENUE FROM BETTER PART OF FOUR STATES — Subheader.

GENTLE [substantially muffled by both Fukoama microfiltration mask and oxygenated Lucite portabubble]: Boys.

ALL SECS EXCEPT SEC. MEX. & SEC. CAN. [the Cabinet’s Motown-girl puppets, decked out for climactic camp, are all in wicked three-piecers with slicked-back-straight hair and enormous robber-baron steer-horn mustaches, which mustaches could be straighter but are on the whole pretty impressive mustaches, for female puppets]: Chief.

SEC. DEF.: So then how was the big game, Mr. President?

GENTLE: Ouster, boys: seminal, visionary. An outstanding experience. I now say things like outstanding instead of boss. But also seminal. Ollie, men, I saw something outstandingly visional and seminary yesterday. I do not refer to the football game. I normally don’t much get into football. All that grunting. Mud everywhere. Not my scene ordinarily. The most diverting single thing of the game was one of the two teams’ punters. This one slim cat with an outsized leg and slightly less outsized arm. Never saw punts I could hear before. Whoom. Blam. I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air. People stood around conferring and making a racket and going to the restroom and coming back and eating concessions, all while this one cat’s punts were still in the air. What was that cat’s name again, R.T.?

SEC. INT.: May I respectfully ask whether this is to be a lunch meeting, Mr. President? Is that why these Chinese-calendar-zodiac-Year-of-the-Tiger-and-like-Rat Szechuan-restaurant paper placemats are at all our places next to our water-pitchers? Are we going to get to tuck into some Chinese takeout, Chief?

[Mario’s aural background becomes something with a brisk cornet, and there’s some glove-muffled finger-snapping from J.G.F.C., who’s lapsed into a visionary reverie.]

SEC. TRANSP.: Always been partial to the General Tsu’s Chicken, if we’re —

RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, UNITED STATES OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: President Gentle’s asked us all here this morning to put our collective expertise together on an issue about which we in Unspecified Services believe he’s been hit with a truly seminal set of creative insights.

GENTLE: Gentlemen, we’re both pleased and concerned to report that our seminal experiment in the Territorial Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N.^[177] has been a thoroughgoing logistical coup. More or less. Delaware’s looking a bit crowded, and one or two curvy-horned animals apparently got by the tactical squads, and there’s rather less overall good sportsmanship in downstate New New York than we’d like to see, but overall I think ‘thoroughgoing coup’ would not be out of line as a term to describe this sort of success.

TINE: Now it’s time to think about how to pay for it.

ALL SECS.: [Stiff turns to look at each other, tie- and mustache-straightenings, gulping sounds.]

GENTLE: Rod informs me Marty’s got the preliminary figures on gross costs, while Chef’s boys have provided us with some projections on gross revenue-losses from the Reconfiguration of taxable territories and households and businesses and that there.

SEC. TRANSP. & SEC. TREAS.: [Pass around thick bound folders, each emblazoned with the yawning red skull that emblazons all bad-news memos in the Gentle administration. Folders opened and scanned by ALL SECS. Sounds of jaws hitting the tabletop. A couple mustaches fall off altogether. One SEC. heard to ask whether there’s even a name for a figure with this many zeroes. GENTLE’S portabubble on-screen is hit right over his plastic-wrapped corsage by a half-chewed Raisinette, to half-hearted audience cheers. Another cross-dressed Motown puppet is throwing a tiny string noose over a beam at the back of the velvet-lined Cabinet Room.]

GENTLE: Boys. Men. Before anybody needs oxygen here [holding a placa-tive hand up against the bubble’s glass], let Rod here explain that despite a quantitative downer-type quality to these figures, all we merely have here is just what Rod might call an exaggerated example of a quadrennial problem any administration with vision is going to have to face eventually anyway. By the way, the unfamiliar but welcome face on my left here is Mr. P. Tom Veals, of Veals Associates Advertising, Boston, USA, N.A.

ALL SECS.: [Not terribly placated-sounding mutterings of salutation to Veals.]

MR. P. TOM VEALS [A tiny little caucasoid Tootsie-Pop-stick-puppet body and enormous face that’s mostly front teeth and spectacles]: Yo.

TINE: And to Tom’s own left may I also present the charming and delightful Ms. Luría P-----[indicating with pointer a puppet simply beyond pulchritudinous belief; the Cabinet Room’s conference table seems to ascend ever so slightly as Luria P-----cocks a well-pencilled eyebrow].

STILL TINE: Gentlemen, what the president is articulating is that what we face here is a microsmic exemplar of the infamous Democratic Triple Bind faced by visionarians from FDR and JFK on down. The American electorate, as is its every right, on one hand demands the sort of millennial statesmanship and vision — decisive action, tough choices, lots of programs and services — see for instance the Territorial Reconfiguration for example — that will lead a renewed community into a whole new era of interdependent choice and freedom.

GENTLE: The rhetorical chapeau’s off to you, babe.

TINE [Rising, eyes now two glittery red points in his round face’s felt, the eyes two tiny smoke-detector bulbs run off a single AAA cell taped to the back of the puppet’s surgical gown]: Now, speaking in the very most general terms, if the president’s vision dictates the tough choice of cutting certain programs and services, our statistical people predict with reasonable inductive certainty that the American electorate will whinge.

VEALS: Whinge?

LURIA P-----[TO TINE]: This is a Canadian idiom, cheri.

VEALS: And who is this chick?

TINE [Looking momentarily blank]: Sorry Tom. Canadian idiom. Whinge. Complain. Petition for redress. Assemble. March in those five-abreast demonstrating lines. Shake upraised fists in unison. Whinge [indicating photos on easels behind him of various historical pressure- and advocacy groups whingeing].

SEC. TREAS.: And we already have an all-too-good idea of what will happen if we attempt any sort of conventional revenue enhancements.

SEC. STATE: Tax revolt.

SEC. H.E.W.: A whingeathon, Chief.

SEC. DEF.: Tea-party.

GENTLE: Bullseye. Whingeville. Political whingeocide. A serious drag-caliber lapse in mandate. We’ve already promised no new enhancements. I told them on Inauguration Day. I said look into my eyes: no new enhancements. I pointed at my eyes up there and said that was one tough choice that was not going to rain on anybody’s program. Rod and Tom and I had that three-planked platform-exhibit. One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame.

TINE: So then a double bind, so far, with potential whingeing on both flanks.

SEC. TREAS.: And yet the financial communities demand a balanced federal budget. The Reserve Board all but insists on a balanced budget. Our balance of trade with the handful of nations we’re still trading with requires a stable buck and so a balanced budget.

TINE: The third flank, Chet, of the Triple Bind. Outflows required, inflows restricted, balance demanded.

GENTLE: The classic executive-branch Cerberus-horned dilemma. The thorn in the Achilles’ tendon of democratic process. Does anybody here by the way hear a sort of high pitch?

ALL SECS.: [Blank glances at one another.]

VEALS: [Blows nose at high volume.]

GENTLE [Knocking experimentally on interior surfaces of portabubble]: Sometimes I hear a pitch at a high range beyond most people’s hearing, admittedly, but this seems like a different type of high pitch.

ALL SECS. [Necktie-knot-adjusting, polished-tabletop-studying.]

GENTLE: That would be a no on the pitch, then.

VEALS: Could this all be moved along up to at least a canter, guys?

TINE: Perhaps it’s the distinctive high pitch that sometimes precedes your getting ready to announce some seminal, visionary insight you’ve achieved into the previously intractable Triple Bind, sir.

GENTLE: Babe, Rod, again a direct hit. Gentlemen: have a gander at these restaurant exhibits of the Sino-epithetic calendrical scheme.

TINE: Meaning of course these placemats right here, bearing directly on the president’s revenue vision.

GENTLE: Gentlemen, as you all know I’ve just returned, at extremely high speeds, burping up the taste of wieners I’m pretty sure were just crawling with every sort of microbe that makes publicly vended concessions a scourge and menace that —

TlNE: flxnayish hand-signal]

GENTLE: But so gentlemen I’m fresh back from a goodwill appearance at a post-collegiate bowl game. At which I ingested the pre-mentioned franks. But the real point is: do any of you guys happen to know the name of that collegiate bowl game?

SEC. H.U.D.: We thought you’d said it was the Forsythia Bowl, Chief.

GENTLE: That, Mr. Sivnik, is because that’s what I was thinking its name in fact was, en route, when we’d all interfaced on the old scrambler. That’s what the name was when I did the anthem there in ‘91.

LURIA P-----[Holding up zodiacalized placemat with a slight grease-corona’d spot of Hot and Sour Soup in the upper left corner]: Perhaps you would care now to tell your cabinet what ze contest of football calls itself, M. President.

GENTLE [With a showmanlike look at VEALS, who’s probing the gap between his mammoth incisors with the business cards of the CEOs of Pillsbury and Pepsico]: Boys, I heard punts, burped redhots, smelled beer-foam and recoiled from public urinals at the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl.