Infinite jest

VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U

Hal Incandenza had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth, where his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around squeezing a ball and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and scared. Everything in there loosened by a great oral rot that the nightmare’s Teddy Schacht wouldn’t even look at, saying he was late for his next appointment, everyone Hal saw seeing Hal’s crumbling teeth and looking at their watch and making vague excuses, a general atmosphere of the splintering teeth being a symptom of something way more dire and distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about. He was pricing dentures when he woke. It was about an hour before dawn drills. His keys were on the floor by the bed with his College Board prep books. Mario’s great iron bed was empty and made up tight, all five pillows neatly stacked. Mario’d been spending the last few nights over at HmH, sleeping on an air mattress in the living room in front of Tavis’s Tatsuoka receiver, listening to WYYY-109 into the wee hours, weirdly agitated about Madame Psychosis’s unannounced sabbatical from the ‘60 Minutes +/-’ midnight thing where she’d been an unvarying M-F presence for several years, it seemed like. WYYY had been evasive and unforthcoming about the whole thing. For two days some alto grad student had tried to fill in, billing herself as Miss Diagnosis, reading Horkheimer and Adorno against a background of Partridge Family slowed down to a narcotized slur. At no time had anyone of managerial pitch or timbre mentioned Madame Psychosis or what her story was or her date of expected return. Hal’d told Mario that the silence was a positive sign, that if she’d left the air for good the station would have had to say something. Hal, Coach Schtitt, and the Moms had all remarked Mario’s odd mood. Mario was usually next to impossible to agitate.[180]

Now WYYY was back to running ‘Sixty Minutes More or Less’ without anybody at all at the helm. For the past several nights Mario has lain there in a sarcophagally tapered sleeping bag of GoreTex and fiberfill and listened to them run the weird static ambient musics Madame Psychosis uses for background, but now without any spoken voice as foreground; and the static, momentumless music as subject instead of environment is somehow terribly disturbing: Hal listened to a few minutes of the stuff and told his brother it sounded like somebody’s mind coming apart right before your ears.